by Colin Watson
‘I have just listened to the finest utterance of the English language I think I have ever heard: the address of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Royal couple … His Grace must have been inspired to speak such truly noble and surpassingly beautiful words.’
In general, though, he and his fellows were too busy following up that ‘spot of trouble round the corner’ to act as guides to the restful plateau of high-mindedness. This was a job for a full-time professional and there was no shortage of those in Fleet Street, where proprietors collected James Douglases and Godfrey Winns like Belshazzar collecting soothsayers. Nor did crime writers bother their readers’ heads with any political issue more complicated than the unspecified machinations of this or that ‘foreign’, and therefore malevolent, power. Horler considered pacifist novelists to be wasting their time and their talents. ‘I don’t think a hundred thousand Storm Jamesons are likely to change human nature, and as long as human nature is human nature there will always be the possibility of another war.’
Acceptance of the intractability of ‘human nature’ was one of the favourite refuges of the time. It provided simultaneously shelter from unpleasant facts, defence against troublesome argument and, not least, a philosophical screen to dignify poverty of thought.
Writer of innumerable Thrillers. “I’M NOT REALLY BOTHERED ABOUT ALL THE STUFF YOU’RE TAKING AWAY. WHAT GETS ME DOWN IS THAT IT’S SUCH A ROTTEN STALE PLOT.”
CHAPTER 8
The Golden Age of detective fiction
The years between 1920 and 1939 have been called the ‘Golden Age of the Detective Story’. Quantitatively, the definition is just. Novels of detection flowed from the presses month after month, year after year, in an ever-increasing tide. The appetite for them seemed to be insatiable. Here was no passing fashion; the weekly ration of whodunnits came to be one of the staples of life for thousands of middle-class families. Housewives brought it home in the shopping basket as conscientiously as they remembered to renew the family supplies of bread and sugar.
A surprisingly high proportion of professional people and academics was similarly addicted. Mrs Q. D. Leavis discerned a ‘highbrow cult’ – as well she might, for by 1930 it had become respectable for literary critics and essayists to write about detective fiction, and even for a don or two to turn out thrillers on their own account. Father Ronald Knox was a notable contributor until he deferred to church superiors who were unhappy lest such activity be construed as trespass on diabolical prerogative. Other intellectuals whose liking for the construction of detective stories led to their becoming familiar library names included G. K. Chesterton, inventor of Father Brown; the economist G. D. H. Cole and his wife, Margaret; Cecil Day Lewis, Poet Laureate-to-be; Dr Alington, the Dean of Durham; and an Oxford don, J. I. M. Stewart, alias Michael Innes.
By the end of the period, detective fiction was accounting for one quarter of all new novels published in the English language. It seemed that a literary formula had been perfected of which the public, both in Britain and in America, would never tire. Psychologists and social historians were puzzled then and have remained puzzled by a habit so peculiarly persistent as to appear almost immune from the influences of circumstance and fashion.
The style of the detective story was not greatly different in 1939 from what it had been twenty or thirty years before. The work of old hands such as R. Austin Freeman, J. S. Fletcher and Freeman Wills Crofts, some of which pre-dated the first world war, was still being read avidly on the eve of the second. The popularity of Conan Doyle, enormous by the time his last new story was published in 1927, never flagged thereafter. Nor were the classic originators, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, ever relegated to the status of venerable curiosities: people continued to read them for entertainment, despite their wordy portentousness. Indeed, the passing of time invested the older detective novels with a kind of nostalgic charm that compensated for their loss of capacity to thrill. No one today would marvel at the revelations afforded by Dr John Thorndyke’s microscope, but many might be pleasurably intrigued by the peaceful and predictable world in which Freeman shows him preparing his slides.
Austin Freeman, Fletcher, Crofts, H. C. Bailey, John Rhode, E. C. R. Lorac – all these were typical members of the small army of industrious craftsmen on whom chiefly depended the satisfaction of the demand for detective fiction between the wars. It was a job for full-time writers in whom a capacity for steady output of variations on an accepted theme was more important than liveliness of style or wealth of characterization. Their plots tended to be mechanical, with much emphasis on time-tables and geographical layout. The practice of inserting meticulously drawn ground plans eventually became a joke and had to be abandoned, but some plots were so complicated and their authors so weak on description that pictorial aid was essential. Clues, too, played a considerably greater part in the standard form of detective novel of the period than later readers would have patience to bear with. Lives did literally hang by single hairs (identifiable, of course, as uniquely associated with a breed of rabbit in a part of Dorset lately visited by the murderer) and it was not uncommon for a book’s solution to turn upon such nice points of knowledge as the construction date of Brooklyn Bridge or the size of mesh in a bee keeper’s veil.
While the established professionals were milling out acceptable self-repetitions, the market continued to expand at such a rate that practically anyone capable of knocking together some sort of a plot based on homicide could get the result published. Almost as many people turned to crime-writing as to keeping poultry or starting mushroom farms. Authorship required smaller capital investment, and the public was less fastidious about the freshness of plots than of eggs. Also there was something tremendously attractive in the idea of the independent life that writing was popularly supposed to make possible. One might have to wait a year or two before anchoring one’s yacht alongside those of Mason, Oppenheim and Arnold Bennett, or even equalling John Buchan’s £9,000 a year, but in the meantime there was always that country cottage and the respectful glance of the postman as he handed over the envelope containing one’s monthly (would it be monthly?) royalty cheque.
In no other field of literature was there a comparable influx of hopeful newcomers. Most of them dropped out again after a brief flare of inventiveness and the shock of learning that its reward was a once-and-for-all payment of between twenty and fifty pounds. Others followed and were eclipsed in turn. A small minority persevered and proved to have the productive capacity necessary for success.
While demand matched and even exceeded supply, it was not to be expected that the general standard of detective fiction should be high. Publishers had early adopted the practice of marketing these stories in a form easily recognizable by booksellers, library buyers, and members of the public. Jackets were of a more or less standard character, their common features being crude colour, ill-designed type, and the display, often in defiance of a book’s actual contents, of a sprawled corpse in expensive-looking clothes. The inclusion of a weapon of some kind (not necessarily that mentioned in the story) was another pictorial convention, curiously wrought oriental daggers and great liquorice-coloured automatics being top favourites.
Insistence upon titles unmistakably suggestive of criminality was stock policy, one unsought consequence of which was the occasional suspicion in some readers’ minds that they were being offered the same novel over and over again. And so, in a sense, they were. As time went on with no sign of a slackening in the boom, the trade conception of detective fiction became increasingly that of a mere commodity to be produced with as much haste and as little discrimination as possible.
Book reviewers settled into an attitude of good-natured, if slightly supercilious, tolerance. They, too, had fallen in with the notion of detective stories being in a class quite separate from ‘legitimate’ literature and therefore not subject to the ordinary rules of criticism. Editors provided a segregated hutch for mystery novels, where they could be dealt with, a whole litter of twen
ty or thirty at a time, by means of a sentence apiece. There was evolved for this purpose a special style of reviewmanship. It was (and is) slightly facetious in flavour, crisp and insubstantial, like lettuce. It revealed singularly little about the books and although in most cases this was a blessing for their authors, the rare novel of quality was likely to suffer the injustice of exactly similar treatment simply because it happened to treat of crime.
Librarians unwittingly performed a like disservice to the few writers in the field who believed that if a book of any kind was worth writing it was worth writing well. Assuming that addiction to thrillers, like addiction to drink, impaired its victims’ selective faculties and sense of direction, they put the stuff all together on easily accessible shelves.
Modern Publisher. “I LIKE YOUR BOOK ON WATER-BEETLES; BUT COULDN’T YOU CONTRIVE SOMEHOW TO INTRODUCE A DETECTIVE INTEREST?”
The result of the combination of forced production, amateurism, segregation and suspended criticism during this ‘Golden Age’ was the literary equivalent of the jerry-building of the same period. Nine out of ten detective stories were as shoddy and derivative as the rows of semi-villas that ribboned out to accommodate their readers. Perhaps a dozen or so talented craftsmen – whom over-reverent jobbing critics were fond of terming ‘masters of the genre’ – contributed a steady supply of reasonably well-written and convincingly plotted stories. An even smaller number, novelists or poets in their own right, turned to detective fiction partly for their own amusement and partly to profit from a wider readership. The others – the great majority of detective story writers – were third-class passengers on a very capacious band-wagon. It was they whom Raymond Chandler had in mind when he wrote in The Simple Art of Murder: ‘The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published.’
Chandler had a special entitlement to pronounce judgement on The Golden Age. Although an American, he had been educated in England and understood the temperament, humour and social peculiarities of its people. He had a sound knowledge of English literature and could be objective enough in his Californian remove to see that ‘the English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers’. Only an Englishman, or an American familiar with the wry self-deprecation of the English, could have written that. Chandler himself never produced a dull line, but America between the wars was heavily dependent upon the imported detective novel and when he began to write about crime and criminals with ‘the authentic flavour of life as it is lived’, he was flouting conventions that had equal force on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed it was America that proved to be the more obdurately devoted to the old, unreal formula that had served almost every mystery writer from the days of Doyle, not excluding America’s own S. S. Van Dine, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Earl Derr Biggers. Chandler’s novels entailed the replacement of myth and assumption with fact and perception, of pasteboard figures with live characters, of tritely worked out artificial puzzles with human problems that violence might change but could never solve. Such a challenge to the law according to Doyle, Christie and Sayers might be supposed to have found readier approval in the United States, the location of Bay City, than among the compatriots of Lord Peter Wimsey, yet from the first, Chandler’s books sold much more quickly to the British public than to the American. It would be interesting to know if twenty years’ consumption of middle-class fantasy fiction on the theme ‘God’s in his heaven; all’s well at the Yard’ had left the British, who had had no Al Capone, in greater need of an astringent than the Americans.
Dorothy L. Sayers was, in the opinion of many earnest examiners of the detective story, the most accomplished practitioner in the field. She had a world-wide reputation based on fewer than a dozen carefully written, fairly long novels of considerable complexity. Throughout the 1930s, the Press treated her as the supreme oracle on crime fiction, to which she brought the academic approach of an honours graduate of Somerville College, Oxford.
Here is Chandler on Sayers: ‘Her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people … they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier-maché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.’
If Miss Sayers was guilty as charged, there would be no point in entering a plea on behalf of the hundreds of contemporary authors of lesser reputation who employed exactly the same methods. Chandler was not seriously exaggerating when he declared that ‘the only reality the English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor Regis’. In book after book they appear – the diffident, decent young pipe-smokers; the plucky girls with flower-like complexions; the wooden policemen, slow but reliable; the assorted house-party guests, forever dressing for dinner or hunting missing daggers; the aristocrats concealing their enormous intellects beneath a veneer of asininity; the ubiquitous chauffeurs, butlers, housemaids and the rest of the lower orders, all comic, surly or sinister, but none quite human. The world they inhabit is self-contained and never changing. We are shown the same flats in Half Moon Street, the same Tudor mansions half-an-hour’s Bentley ride from town, with the same libraries and studies, the same french windows opening upon the same lawns. There is no deviation from time-honoured behaviour. All the characters are regular churchgoers, if only to reinforce their alibis. Meal-times are scrupulously observed even when the host lies transfixed or garrotted (no murder is ever committed in a dining-room). The hours of darkness are strictly for sleep or crime, never for sex. Even violence itself, the books’ reason for being, is somehow conformist, limited, unreal. A bullet-hole almost invariably is ‘neat’ (as a putt in golf, perhaps?) while scarcely a knife is on record that has not been embedded tidily between shoulder-blades. Blood is generally a ‘spreading stain’ or a ‘pool’, both fastidious expressions that convey nothing of the terrible glistening mess that is made by human butchery.
The air of tennis-club amateur dramatics which pervades the work of this school of crime writing can only be appreciated by direct sampling. The following extracts are from one of the multitudinous ‘average’ detective novels of the period, The Moorcroft Manor Mystery, by Ralph Trevor.
‘She is rather wonderful,’ Sinclair owned. ‘I have heard her described as one of the most efficient women in the whole of London. She possesses a perfect genius for marshalling the requisite ingredients for a successful house-party.’
The subject is the hostess, a titled society woman. A genuine tribute is intended: hence the bombastic prose of the second sentence, which seems to the author to be proper to the description of a knowledgeable upper class person. No one would really talk like this, but how else would readers be persuaded that they are in the presence of elegance?
A trim maid entered with tea, deliciously fresh-brewed, with toasted scones heaped with half-molten butter.
Further evidence of the Good Life. Buttered scones, without a preliminary of bread, are symptomatic of privilege. The adjective ‘trim’ is significant; it effectively de-humanizes the servant while suggesting her mistress’s selective good taste.
‘Mr Merrivale? I seem to have heard the name before. Do you think I’ve met him in London? Lady Forrester didn’t mention him particularly. I must have overlooked his name in the list of guests.’
‘Merrivale’ is a name exactly in the tradition of tennis-club literature, where no one ever is called Ramsbottom or Golightly or Snagg. The right note, too, is struck by ‘Lady Forrester’ – who, it will be noted, gives parties so often and to so many people that the guests actually have to be catalogued.
In the sudden resuscitation of conversation that followed Lady Forrest
er’s remarks, the matter vanished from his cogitation.
This sort of statement reminds readers that they are in the company of distinguished people, whose extraordinary vocabulary they are flatteringly implied to understand.
It was a short-handled dagger, undoubtedly Spanish in origin and, judging by the perforated fetter-lock on the blade, probably belonged to the sixteenth century. The tapering hilt was exquisitely chased and surmounted by a monogram.
More reader flattery here. It is pleasant to be given credit for recondite knowledge of armoury, when in fact one could not tell a poniard from an ice-pick.
‘Sir John Forrester has many friends at Scotland Yard.’ ‘Sir John Forrester, did you say, sir?’ The sergeant’s tone had undergone a curious change. ‘I’d no idea he was so important, sir. Really, I hadn’t. I hope I haven’t given any offence, sir?’
The idea that people of substance could, and did, treat the police as their personal servants was widespread in England up to the second world war. That there was substance for it is not now denied; but what comes as something of a surprise is the approval of the situation which many crime-writers of the time seem to have assumed in their readers.
It was discovered that Merrivale had for some months previously been living considerably in excess of the allowance due to him under the terms of his father’s will. After his daily legal duties at the Temple were over he sought distraction in a whirlwind of social gaiety. He was then a member of the Three Star Club, which as you know, has a reputation for its high stakes at bridge … Merrivale became involved in the toils of a moneylender.
