Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  ‘Who was his papa? What was his school?’

  This question is asked, in The Business Minister by Reggie Fortune. Fortune is the doctor-turned-detective created in 1920 by H. C. Bailey. He is a cheerful, rather garrulous character, obviously well-educated. He has a good address and a manservant named Sam. It should be understood that the inquiry he is making is not supposed to be taken seriously. Henry Christopher Bailey was a classical scholar at Corpus Christi, Oxford, cox of his college boat, a correspondent and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. Such a man would not allow his hero dialogue to invite the scorn of the sophisticated people who, even in England, were beginning to make jokes about native heredity, class and schooling. Reggie Fortune is being fatuous with ironic intent.

  ‘What I want is muffins,’ said Reggie – ‘several muffins and a little tea and my domestic hearth. Then I’ll feel safe.’

  Good-natured satirical sideswipes at English class-consciousness, cosiness and love of security are characteristic of Bailey’s detective fiction. He was, perhaps, embarrassed as intellectuals tend to be by traditional attitudes, and purged his embarrassment by a little mild fun-poking, but the Fortune stories were never so disrespectful of the established order as to endanger their author’s relationship with the world represented by the Daily Telegraph.

  Edgar Wallace was a good deal less sophisticated than H. C. Bailey and he employed regular policemen to solve most of his mysteries. They were by no means common policemen, though, and it is difficult to envisage the sort of administrational system that would have been needed to accommodate the eccentricities and extra-legal methods of some of his detectives. Perhaps the least likely, if in some ways the most likable, was ‘that mild and middle-aged man’ Mr J. G. Reeder. Even his official status, Detective to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was mythical – not that his inventor showed himself any more bothered about such minor matters as authenticity than he did about continuity: a nonchalance that resulted in Mr Reeder’s appearance veering from ‘middle-aged’ to ‘elderly-looking’ in the course of the same few pages in which his ‘slither of sandy side-whiskers’ became ‘greyish’ and ‘rather thick’, while he shrank from ‘tall’ to ‘of medium height’. Another characteristic of Mr Reeder, which would seem to have been at odds with British police procedure even fifty years ago, was his habit of travelling with a whole trunk full of ropes, gas mask, extending rods, firearms, a rubber truncheon and a selection of electric torches, pre-dating by nearly forty years the kill-him-yourself kits carried around by Mr James Bond. What really mattered was that he had a sufficient private income to live and be looked after by ‘a man’ in an elegant apartment in Bennett Street, Hyde Park – ‘a place’, Wallace informed his readers ‘where Somebodies live’.

  Socrates Smith was another Wallace hero whose relationship with the Criminal Investigation Department was happily imprecise – again perhaps by virtue of independent means and good address. He occupied (with his ‘man’, naturally) the first and second floors of one of the big houses in the outer circle of Regent’s Park. Life had been too full to allow him the distraction of courtship but in compensation he had seen one woman whom he might have married pass three times through the Divorce Court, a feat that had left her with ‘a London reputation’. Wallace pointed out that in his early days of studying crime, Smith had been probably the only policeman in London who walked his beat by day and spent his leisure hours in one of the most exclusive clubs in Town. Serving an apprenticeship as a uniformed ‘cop’, Wallace explained, was the only way in those days of becoming a detective. For four years had Socrates Smith pursued this humble course. Then, having achieved the rank of Sergeant (‘an amazingly rapid promotion’), he had resigned in order to study foreign police methods and also anthropology.

  When the fingerprint system was installed, he was called in and worked with an official status, and it was usual to consult him in cases where especial difficulties confronted the patient investigators … He was an acknowledged authority upon fingerprints and blood-stains, and was the first man to standardize the spectrum and guaiacum tests for the discovery of blood upon clothing.

  (The Three Oaks Mystery)

  The British police adopted fingerprint identification in 1901, so Socrates Smith – ‘nearing fifty’ in 1927 – could not have been older than twenty-three when he was called in to share with Scotland Yard his expert knowledge of the system. How long before that he had spent as a student of anthropology and of foreign police forces Wallace left unspecified but Smith at the beginning of his career not only must have lied about his birth date in order to get a beat to walk, but must have been a clubman at an age that even Raffles would have deemed tender. Perhaps he looked older than his years on account of that private income of six thousand pounds a year his author once casually mentioned.

  Margery Allingham published her first crime novel in 1929. Her detective, Albert Campion, was to become famous in the course of a dozen of so subsequent mysteries. But who, as Dr Fortune might have asked, was his papa, and what his school?

  ‘Campion – that is your name, I suppose?’ ‘Well – er no,’ said the irrepressible young man. ‘But,’ he added, dropping his voice a tone, ‘my own is rather aristocratic, and I never use it in business… Listen – do you know who my mother is?’ ‘No,’ said Abbershaw, with great curiosity. Mr Campion leaned over the side of the car … and murmured a name, a name so illustrious that Abbershaw started back and stared at him in astonishment.

  The early Campion was an inane giggler. As a guest he was an embarrassment and Colonel Gore would have pronounced him an all-round softie. He could solve a police-baffling mystery, though: specifically, The Crime at Black Dudley. Exactly ten years later, on the eve of the second world war, the giggles had subsided and an altogether more dignified and cerebral detective was suggested by Miss Allingham’s observation of him sitting with ‘long, thin legs crossed and his pale eyes amused behind his horn-rimmed spectacles’. Furthermore, she was able to report that when urgent matters demanded his attention he would put aside The Times ‘with regret’ – a clear sign of his having outgrown the silly exuberance of youth. This Campion of 1939 lived in Bottle Street, Piccadilly, kept a manservant and was a member of the Junior Greys. One notes the matter-of-factness of the last piece of information; Miss Allingham had learned how much more effective is cool name-dropping than the girlish enthusiasm of ten years before which had set Campion

  striding jauntily down the street until, to Abbershaw’s amazement, he disappeared through the portals of one of the most famous and exclusive clubs in the world.

  The change in style suggested confidence that readers could safely be credited with knowing the difference between a London resort of officers and gentlemen and a brand of cigarettes.

  To the very end of the Campion saga Miss Allingham’s hero remained essentially a patron rather than a practitioner of criminology, even though no more was made of the business of being the son of a mother too distinguished to be named. The pattern had been set and Miss Allingham stuck to it, although there is evidence that as she developed her intelligent and experimental attitude to the writing of fiction she became impatient sometimes with the social scene to which Campion had been committed. The following passage, written in Mr Campion and Others (1939), has the ring not of admiration but of satire:

  Petronella was not easy to find. She was neither dancing at the Berkeley nor dining at Claridge’s. He looked in at the ballet and did not see her, and it was not until he remembered the Duchess of Monewden’s Charity Ball at the Fitzrupert Hotel that he found her …

  Another writer who obeyed the convention of having an aristocratic detective – or at least one who was supposedly at home with wealthy and distinguished people – and then felt uncomfortable about it afterwards was Anthony Berkeley Cox. It was in 1925 that Cox, writing as Anthony Berkeley, introduced Roger Sheringham in The Layton Court Mystery. ‘An offensive person’ was how Cox once frankly described his hero. Sheringham was cert
ainly a little on the loud side, and he associated with characters who made up in volubility what they so patently lacked in social usefulness. But by 1934, when Panic Party was published, Sheringham had acquired a more self-effacing manner and a skill – perhaps associated with his success as a bestselling novelist – in provoking his companions to let down their guard of class attitudinizing and reveal human fears and weaknesses. It was only to be expected from an author of considerable insight (Anthony Berkeley Cox was also ‘Francis Iles’) that he would hasten to produce the kind of detective story which in the words of his dedication to Milward Kennedy, ‘breaks every rule of the austere Club to which we both belong’. He had written in 1930 that the detective story was in the process of developing into the novel with a crime theme, ‘holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties’. Perhaps it was, but public approval of the change did not show for several more years. Cox’s pioneering, his rejection of the stock pasteboard figures of detective fiction in favour of real characters, carefully observed, was not what the commercial whodunnit purveyors wanted to sponsor. A leading popular magazine rejected a slightly shortened version of Panic Party on the grounds that it was ‘lacking sufficient human interest’. ‘Life,’ commented Cox patiently, ‘is very, very difficult’ and he went on to write more crime novels that bore a disconcerting resemblance to literature.

  “WHAT PROFESSION WERE YOU THINKING OF FOR THE BOY?”

  “WELL, WE WANTED TO MAKE HIM AN INTERNATIONAL CROOK.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Smart but not arty

  A great deal of crime fiction in the inter-war years was set in London. London and its society fascinated a public which was much more static and more conscious of its provincialism than it is today. In relation to the rest of the country, it was a capital of greater liveliness, more ostentatious wealth and aggressive decadence than the ‘swinging’ city of thirty years later. Ngaio Marsh came to it from her native New Zealand in 1928 and found the East End streets looking ‘drab, broad and bald’ on the bright summer morning of her arrival. But Piccadilly smelled of hot bread, coffee, freshly watered pavements, hairdressing parlours and roses. She was surprised by the waist-to-ankle aprons of junior waiters in the restaurants and by an upper-class patois that described people and things as ‘shy-making’ or ‘too delicious, actually’ or ‘Heaven’. London, alone of the cities of Britain, had all-night entertainment in clubs and restaurants patronized by famous and notorious people. Miss Marsh, in her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, recalls how a plump Richard Tauber would go into a reflex rendering of ‘You are My Heart’s Delight’ whenever the band leader at the Hungaria ‘flourished up to his table and with an ineffable and excruciating leer, wafted a note or two in the tenor’s ear’, and how ‘an old, old man with a flower in his coat’ who sat alone and ‘at intervals raised his glass in a frog’s hand and touched his lips with it’ proved to be Lord Alfred Douglas, once Bosie, the fatefully beautiful young friend of Oscar Wilde.

  Ngaio Marsh wrote her first crime story in a pile of penny exercise books after spending a rainy Sunday reading a detective novel – possibly an Agatha Christie, she thought – borrowed from a little library in Pimlico. She named her police inspector after the Elizabethan actor Alleyn, founder of Dulwich College, whose picture gallery she had visited the day before starting the book. Seventeen years later, on a visit to England as a well established author, she was interviewed, broadcast and televised in a country where she was surprised to find ‘detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinions one valued’. In New Zealand, apparently, the form was still suspect in 1950.

  Even before Miss Marsh was shown Lord Alfred Douglas sitting in desiccated loneliness at his table near the door of the Hungaria, and heard the black cabaret artist Leslie Hutchinson (‘too too, darling, my dear’) singing to fashionable women at the night club known as ‘Uncle’s’, the writers of crime fiction were creating their own special image of the capital that would give readers a sense of venturing among the wealthy, the daring, the witty and the wicked. That image was to remain almost unchanged for two decades, although some of its constituents – the Bright Young Things, for instance, and the Jazz Age that had produced ‘flappers’ and flat chests – were already looking pretty passé by the early 1930s.

  Especially faithful to the conception of London as a city where the only life that mattered was nocturnal, confined to the West End, and led exclusively by men and women of impeccable dress sense and a perpetually facetious line in conversation, was the novelist Peter Cheyney. The second world war had already begun when Cheyney published Another Little Drink, a thriller of which typical chapter openings were:

  Bellamy got up at twelve o’clock. He walked over to the window and looked out on to Half Moon Street. It was a bleak, dull-looking sort of a day…

  Bellamy went into the Malayan Club at a quarter past nine. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He looked immaculate and happy.

  It was a quarter to eight when Vanning went into the Buttery at the Berkeley Restaurant…

  It was eleven o’clock when the maid awakened Bellamy. He sat up in bed, drank his tea and looked at the front page of the newspaper … He got up, wandered over to the window and looked out on to Half Moon Street.

  A character in the same book orders the waiter to bring him a bunch of violets, which he then wraps in four five-pound notes and hands to his female companion with ‘That will take care of the new frock’. The girl has been telling him how she attached herself to a suspect. ‘I was very sweet and very feminine and very comforting … in point of fact I was a little too successful because Harcourt got very boyish and peculiar all suddenly and tried to vamp me terribly intimately.’ The frock had been ruined when a half-pint of beer, intended by some third party for the troublesome Harcourt, missed its target.

  Being hit by flying beverages was not the only risk one ran in the nights spots of London’s West End. There was always a chance that a place would prove that evening’s selection by the police for a raid in search of evidence of drug-peddling, illicit gaming or simply contravention of the licensing laws. Bruce Graeme, author of the Blackshirt adventure stories, contrives in Blackshirt Strikes Back (1940) just such a raid upon the Green Heart Club, which he describes with quite unCheyneylike disapproval as being occupied by a ‘bored looking crowd of sleek men and daringly dressed women’ who hug each other closely as they dance on the diminutive dance floor to the music of the ‘inevitable’ dance band or watch the ‘usual cabaret turns, more indecent than entertaining’.

  Commotion followed the waiter’s shout of alarm and the sudden blacking out. Women shrieked, men shouted. Tables and chairs were overturned: the smashing of crockery drowned even the hammering from the street. Diners, dancers, musicians and waiters stampeded in all directions, cannoning into one another, or against the walls, or falling over upturned tables and chairs. Panic spread causing worse confusion.

  The account is remarkably similar to a report by the queen of night-club proprietors, Mrs Katie Meyrick. ‘I once had the instructive experience,’ she wrote in Secrets of the 43 (1933), ‘of being a visitor at an inferior sort of club at the moment of its receiving a visit from the police, and I have never forgotten the state of frenzy that prevailed. The members of the band vaulted their “fence” and dived through a trap-door to a cellar below … The women shrieked, the young men blustered, tables and chairs were upset, glasses were smashed wholesale. It was a perfect babel. When the police came marching in, a number of the women went off in a dead faint and one or two young men followed suit, while the rest rushed aimlessly to and fro and babbled hysterically …’

  Mrs Meyrick, who underwent five spells of imprisonment during her chequered and much publicized career, added with commendable loyalty: ‘How different was the picture at any of our clubs when we were so unlucky as to suffer a raid! Most of our male members being officers of distinguished regiments, members of the Peerage, experienced men
about Town or rich young City magnates, there was never the slightest sign of panic.’ It was one of the distinguished military men – a Guards officer – who tried to throw out the ‘dirty little Jew’ Michael Arlen when he stumbled against the officer’s table in a club run by Mrs Meyrick in Golden Square. An experienced man about Town – the sportsman Major Jack Coats – was long remembered in the ‘43 Club’ for his trick of filling a peer’s top hat with champagne; the peer, naturally, had ‘joined wholeheartedly in the shouts of laughter at his expense’. Also at the ‘43’ had been made the reputation of that rich young City magnate in whose ‘moments of overwhelming exuberance’ he would call for champagne and large quantities of glasses, each of which he would proceed to drain, throw on the floor and pound to fragments with an empty bottle, ending up the evening with a large pile of ground glass beside him.

  Compton Mackenzie recalls in his autobiography that university students in 1929 amused themselves with a game called ‘Beaver’. It was played in the street. The contestants, walking in a group, were alert for the sight of anyone wearing a beard. The first to spot such a person and loudly cry out ‘Beaver!’ scored a point.

  The fact that facial hair was a subject for derisive merriment is not simply a reflection on the intellect and manners of some undergraduates in the late 1920s. Beards had associations, real or fancied, that rendered them no less provocative than long hair styles were to prove forty years later. For one thing, they were the badges of vagrancy. Post-war restlessness and economic decline had made the tramp a familiar figure on the highways of Britain. The respectable regarded him and his whiskers as sinister and unsavoury, and he was readily blamed – as many crime fiction plots of the time indicate – for whatever felonies happened to have been committed in his vicinity. For more than a decade it had been a convention of the silent film comedy to identify the knockabout, expendable villain as ‘the one with the beard’. Political cartoonists, too, were grateful for a symbol that was so easy to draw; the classic Bolshevik of the period, carrying his precisely spherical bomb with a fuse a-splutter, was as hirsute as a hearth-rug.