by Colin Watson
Living beyond one’s means was something that struck terror into the middle-class soul – as well it might, for at the bottom of that slippery slope was the awful pinch-and-save dwelling-place of Those in Reduced Circumstances, perhaps the most pathetic section of British society. Merrivale’s fate had special implications of tragedy that would not be lost upon the reader. Not only had he been impoverished by the most respectable of card games, but he had then cast off his last shred of decency by having recourse to a usurer.
‘He grasped my wrists and tried to draw me towards him in an attempt to kiss me, but I was strong and I freed myself just as his face was nearing my own. Oh! it was horrible … Then I ran from the room and locked myself in my bedroom until cook came back.’ ‘The cad! The mean, despicable cad!’ exclaimed Sinclair, his hands clenched and his lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.
The Victorian ‘worse than death’ fixation persisted despite the moral laxity that was characteristic of the decade after 1918, but it was now to be found mainly in the middle and lower-middle classes. Drug-taking, alcoholism, promiscuity and hooliganism were almost exclusively diversions of the well-born. The above passage may, therefore, appear anachronistic, for it is wealthy people who are being written about. The inconsistency is a small matter compared with the need to confirm and approve the reader’s moral attitude by giving him characters who share it.
Helen, her eyes suspiciously moist and a lump in her throat, arose from her chair and held out a small, slim white hand towards him. Sinclair took it in his own, and for a brief moment their eyes met. Then she hurried from the room …
… That chair over there where she had sat: now it was invested with the gold of romance. A sense of spiritual sanctity pervaded it. For ever in Sinclair’s eyes, it would be hallowed.
Hack sentimentality of this order was a common ingredient of detective novels. Purists objected. Somerset Maugham, in his definition of an ideal detective story, firmly ruled out love interest. But many authors, including Edgar Wallace, persistently admitted it. They possibly were well aware that family reading was generally chosen by women.
Endsleigh Gardens, seldom the scene of any very great amount of activity, were more deserted than ever. Many of the well-built houses had their linen blinds drawn over every window, for few folk who can arrange otherwise ever remain in town over the Christmas holidays, and Endsleigh Gardens is peopled by those who have been well served by the Goddess of Fortune. Many of them preferred to pass the winter on the Riviera … others had ‘little places’ somewhere in Scotland, while those less fortunate had to be content to remain at home.
In the last category of course, were the readers of this kind of book. They seem never to have tired of living vicariously what they were led to believe was the life of those ‘well served by the Goddess of Fortune’. British films and plays of the period, almost without exception, also presented with tediously repetitious doggedness the supposed world of the 1.8% of the adult population who in 1936 owned two-thirds of all private property in the nation.
‘Bless your ’eart, sir! Didn’t I just say that the Missus ’ud do anything for you? I’ll go up and tell ’er now, sir, and I’d like to bet that you’ll be ’aving something in less than ’arf a jiffy.’
Typographical resources must have been severely strained by the demands of detective story-writers anxious to give vocal reality to their characters from the lower orders. It seems a pity that so huge an outlay of apostrophes was wasted on the painful parodies that were the best that Mr Trevor – or Miss Sayers and Mrs Christie for that matter – could produce in imitation of working-class speech. Once again, though, it was an attitude of mind rather than regard for actuality that their writing displayed.
‘Hands up,’ rang out the stern order, and Helen, hearing the familiar voice of Superintendent Nelson, felt herself slipping away against her will into oblivion. The tension had been more than her overwrought nerves could withstand, and Nature, knowing best, had prescribed a natural sedative.
Slipping into oblivion used to be one of the hardest worked devices in crime fiction. It was a convenient method of disposing of unwanted time. Four ways of depriving a character of consciousness were then common: a knock on the head, a doped drink, a chloroformed pad and – for women – swooning with terror or relief. Only the first two are now considered legitimate. One of the biggest mysteries of mystery-writing between 1920 and 1940 was the amount of chloroform assumed to be available to the general run of criminals. The prevalence of fainting among female characters is more easily accounted for. It is clear from the advertising and the magazine correspondence columns of the time that the establishment of electoral equality in 1928 had done singularly little to dissuade men – or their wives, either – from clinging to the notion that every woman lived in constant peril of flaking out, particularly at ‘those worrying times of the month’.
‘Go in and win her,’ said Merrivale, huskily. ‘She’s yours, old man – always has been.’
Compare these clipped sentences with the earlier examples of conversational style. Emotion is here at work, reducing articulacy to a minimum. It is interesting to note that, from ‘Sapper’ onwards, crime novelists were liable to fall back on this curiously military mode of expression whenever deep feelings were supposed to have been aroused. Many, of course, had been through the 1914–18 war themselves. What seems to a later generation to be a slightly comic affectation might well have been a defensive mannerism born of an experience so appalling that it rendered millions emotionally emasculated.
CHAPTER 9
The Orientation of Villainy
Real life is disobliging. People like to think, or feel, in black and white. Having to assess the relative values of all those intermediate greys is tiresome and perplexing. So fiction, if it is to be easily understood and therefore popular, must offer the clearest delineation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. An extreme example of this uncompromising polarity was the stage melodrama of the Victorian Age. Audiences at presentations of The Silver King, Maria Marten and Sweeney Todd had not the slightest difficulty in deciding whom to cheer and whom to boo. Scarcely less specific directions were offered in the novels, novelettes and serials written primarily for money. Even so masterly a writer as Dickens, rich in vocabulary and visual imagination, used only primary colours in his portraiture of character.
Early crime fiction was simply melodrama in print. It embodied all the declamatory phraseology of the barn-stormers, with ‘horrids’ a-plenty and a ‘dreadful’ on every page. This special language of the shilling shocker – and it was common also, we might remember, to newspaper reporting until less than fifty years ago – was doubtless evolved in the first place as a means of gaining attention by frightening people. But so crude a technique cannot long have sustained its effect. Having been told a dozen times that a crime (or ‘deed’ – the preferred word in the terminology of sensation) was ‘horrible’, the simplest-minded reader must have ceased to respond with the intended tremor. Unfortunately, writers of popular fiction tend to be extremely conservative craftsmen. Their pleasant surprise at the success of anything that has worked once hardens overnight into dogmatic reliance. And so, well into the twentieth century crime literature continued to be laden with emotive adjectives and portentous synonyms that long since had ceased to scare anybody.
The Conan Doyle stories contain innumerable examples. Every murder Holmes investigates is dutifully dubbed ‘foul’ or ‘brutal’ or ‘terrible’ – as if to distinguish it from a fair, or elegant killing or from one occasioned by good-natured caprice. A blow is seen to have been ‘frightful’ and its victim ‘unfortunate’. The bicycle in The Adventure of the Priory School is ‘horribly’ smeared with blood, while the agitated secretary has ‘a face with horror in every lineament’. The duke of the same story, his duplicity revealed, turns not white but ‘ghastly’ white. Of course, all this is accepted today as characteristic Watsonian garnish. It is part of the fun that sophisticated readers derive fr
om Doyle; part of the atmosphere cherished by successive generations of devotees. The fact remains that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was as ready as any of his penny-a-line contemporaries to lay hand to the hackneyed phrase in order to labour the obvious. A great entertainer he may have been, but he was a third-rate writer.
Why did the reading public continue to tolerate a heavy-handed style of depicting conflict between good and evil for so long after its counterpart on the stage had become unacceptable? Books were still being written and eagerly bought in the 1920s and 1930s which were only slightly less gauche in tone than East Lynne. Thus Horler, as late as 1939:
… the man in the mask spoke again. ‘Tell me how it happened, Otto,’ he said. The other worked his face into a series of horrible grimaces. ‘It was easy enough,’ he replied. ‘The fool was asleep and I soon settled him.’ For evidence he pulled from a sheath a long knife the blade of which was coated with a thick red smear, and placed it on the desk.
Part of the answer lies in the essential difference between literature and drama, the difference between private and public enjoyment. Apart from the special case of the theatre of the absurd, false or exaggerated emotion on the stage embarrasses and ultimately alienates an audience. The playgoer feels his intelligence and knowledge of life underrated. The confrontation is direct, and public; the many individual members of the audience who really would like to respond to crude emotional appeal (as they unhesitatingly do during a ‘tear-jerking’ film in the dark secrecy of the cinema) are inhibited by it. Those same people have no difficulty, in the sealed-off world of a book, in suspending criticism of style as readily as they suspend disbelief in the plot, so as to escape more completely from the pains and preoccupations of real life.
The villain of the old melodrama was identifiable at his very first appearance. He wore the face of wickedness and spoke in the approved accents of his kind. He was the Devil of the miracle plays with tail and horns concealed by frock-coat and top hat. The costume was significant. In the eyes of Victorian labourers and artisans it was the uniform of the man they believed they had most cause to hate – the man who, by reason of advantages of birth, education or wealth, was able to cheat them. He was generally a lawyer or a landlord. The distinction between him and them was one of calling or of station in life; no political issue was in question. And the cause of conflict had to be immediate and personal – a seduction, a piece of legal sharp practice, a fraud or injustice of some kind. Such matters were either within the experience of the audience or easily appreciable at second hand. In these plays there was nothing explicit for the comfort of a Karl Marx. Despite the inevitable indication of class differences, melodrama expressed no broad popular revolt, only fear and dislike as between individuals, dramatized in a moralistic way. Landlords, lawyers and financiers as such were not pilloried, only ‘bad’ ones. Nevertheless, the theme was repeated too often to allow any doubt of the audience’s deep instinctive distrust of all who seemed to have manipulated their way into power over ordinary folk.
These performances were rather like burnings in effigy. They did members of the audience good by enabling them to discharge resentment of exploitation. The exploiters probably benefited too, if only indirectly. Booing the image of a landlord was preferable, from the landlord’s point of view, to physical assaults upon real ones. But catharsis of a more generalized kind was involved. A pleasant feeling came from ranging oneself on the side of right against wrong, especially when it was easy to recognize which was which. Subtle, complicated or ambiguous wickedness would not serve this purpose. The villain had to be larger than life, and he had to act out in an obvious and familiar way social behaviour of which the audience disapproved.
Much the same convention is discernible in crime fiction from the mid-nineteenth century until the second world war. But because the readers and borrowers of books were predominantly middle-class, portraiture of evil required different models from those that aroused the enthusiastic hostility of poorer people. A civil servant or a bank clerk had too regular a salary and too thrifty a nature to be in much danger of incurring an eviction warrant. The doctor’s wife whose dinner party guests occasionally included a solicitor was unlikely to feel implacable hatred for the legal profession. Nor were middle-class virgins commonly exposed to the attention of feckless young aristocrats: they did not work in ducal kitchens, and even if one had been ‘got into trouble’ by a sprig of the quality, her parents would have been more likely to try and force the acquisition of a titled son-in-law than to turn a daughter from their doors.
Who, then, were candidates for the role of villain in the escapist literature chiefly favoured by the respectable, comfortably-off middle section of society – the crime thriller and the detective story? The answer must tell something about the way such people thought, what they feared and what they despised.
At once a complication arises. The traditional detective story had no villain, only a murderer. And because the murderer’s identity had to remain unrevealed to the very end of the book, it was necessary to hide his true character. The mystery, the puzzle, was what mattered, and in the interests of prolonging that mystery the behaviour of all the people concerned was understood to be potentially a sham. The game of bluff and double-bluff reached its most convoluted, and in a literary sense its most inane form, with the development of the ‘least likely person’ technique. No novel conceived on these lines could present in one character a set of qualities hateful to the reader. That would have given the game away. So the necessary identification of the author’s attitudes with those of his public had to be accomplished in less direct ways. Some writers injected opinions into narrative. Others put them into the mouths of minor participants who did not qualify as suspects. A favourite method was to introduce a character with the sole function of appearing ridiculously or odiously at odds with accepted standards. Perhaps the most regrettable device, employed frequently by Dorothy Sayers, among others, was the description of an idiosyncratic detective ‘humorously’ taking a rise out of someone of another race or of different social loyalties.
No such circuitous means needed to be adopted by writers of thrillers of action, pure and simple. Their books often were published within the general ‘mystery’ category, but in fact there was about as much mystery in their plots as there is novelty in the contents of most packets marked ‘new’. They depended for their appeal, which was much wider than that of detective stories, upon fast-moving events, exciting situations and colourful, not to say preposterous, characterization. Love interest was in order, so long as it did not hold up the action; and a descriptive purple patch or two might be interspersed between the fights and chases to convey exotic atmosphere. There was something boyishly exuberant about these novels and their enormous popularity testified to the readiness of most people, however sophisticated they may have liked to consider themselves, to surrender occasionally to their vestigial instincts of childhood.
Children know a bogeyman when they see one. He is a materialization of their own fears and antipathies. As they grow up in a world hostile to childish fancies, their belief in a personal bogeyman fades but there remains a need to objectify fear. Nothing is more distressing than to be unable to ascribe a cause to life’s annoyances and setbacks. In extreme cases, the sufferer is liable to lose hold of reality altogether and to believe himself the victim of persecution by nameless beings armed with ‘rays’ or by conspirators from another planet, hovering invisible over his house. This sort of delusion is different only in degree from the very common persuasion that all one’s troubles are somehow attributable to the political party in power, teenage indiscipline, immigration, water fluoridization, the Jews, television or Russia.
C. Day Lewis, in his introduction to Murder for Pleasure, by Howard Haycraft, associated the increase in the volume of crime fiction with the decline of religion after the death of Victoria. He suggested that the sacrificial aspect of religion was a continuation of primitive man’s transference of communal guilt to t
he scapegoat, and pointed out that the pattern of the detective novel was as highly formalized as religious ritual. It embodied sin (the crime), its victim, a high priest (the criminal) and resolution by higher power (the detective). The action thriller does not lend itself to quite the same interpretation, for its villain could more truly be said to occupy the role of scapegoat than high priest. It is he – a reincarnation of the child’s bogeyman – in whom the reader is invited to discern the causes of his unease, and with whose ultimate punishment or destruction he may feel those causes to have been removed.
Perhaps the most extravagant invention in the long gallery of crime fiction’s bogeyman-villains is Fu-Manchu, the Oriental devil-doctor created by Sax Rohmer.
Of him it has been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence … He came forward with an indescribable gait, cat-like yet awkward, carrying his high shoulders almost hunched He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams for ever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had only supposed possible in the eye of a cat … I had never supposed, prior to meeting Fu-Manchu, that so intense a force of malignancy could radiate from any human being.
The original Mystery of Doctor Fu-Manchu appeared in 1913 and for the next thirty years sequels continued to be published in response to steady demand. They varied little from the prototype and the only serious problem they would seem to have presented their author was the devising, with every book, of some explanation of how the doctor had managed to escape the end so graphically described in the previous one. Rohmer, however, was sufficiently audacious a melodramatist to be able to make short work of such matters. When he ran out of ingenuity, he unashamedly improvised with a casual reference to ‘certain methods that defy Western science’ or to ‘a secret of which Fu-Manchu alone was the master’.
