Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  Crime novelists have always written with special care of objects, of possessions. Most crime, after all, is motivated by the desire to possess. Readers recognize such feelings and are anxious to know who gets what, and how. Often there is the question of material clues: these have to be described in some detail. Close attention must be paid to clothing, to furniture, to the layout of rooms, for any or all may prove relevant to the central violent event. In any case, their inclusion in the scene helps to create the realistic, the documentary quality of crime fiction.

  Realism, of course, comes in various vintages. Here is a Wallace, 1924:

  In the gorgeous saloon, with its lapis-lazuli columns, its fireplaces of onyx and silver, its delicately panelled walls and silken hangings, Mr Ezra Maitland sat huddled in a large Louis Quinze chair … There was a gentle knock at the door and a footman came in, a man of powder and calves.

  (The Fellowship of the Frog)

  An Oppenheim, 1920:

  Dominey and Rosamund dined alone, and though the table had been reduced to its smallest proportions, the space between them was yet considerable. As soon as Parkins had gravely put the port upon the table, Rosamund rose to her feet and, instead of leaving the room, pointed for the servant to place a chair for her by Dominey’s side.

  (The Great Impersonation)

  Both seem at first to be Ruritanian in flavour, but they are not fantasy. Wallace’s ‘gorgeous saloon’ is an accurately depicted example of the sort of dwelling favoured by and constructed for the successful speculator of the 1920s. Oppenheim was permitting his readers – his American readers in particular – to glimpse the admittedly odd but authentic habit of eating at vast distances from one another whereby the more formal English aristocrats still kept their servants exercised in the years immediately after the first world war.

  Less concerned to indulge the public’s appetite for revelation of how the wealthy lived, ex-engineer Freeman Wills Crofts was one of the few mystery writers of the period who told their stories in terms of routine police investigation. His Inspector French was a plodder, but an observant one. We learn from him that the household of a small London merchant of limited means consisted of father and daughter, two maids, a cook and a chauffeur, all living in a medium-sized house with furniture that had been good but now (in 1924) was shabby. In an apartment in St John’s Wood, French found heavy, expensive furniture and fittings; good silk dresses; a carpet worth at least £120; and a half-empty box of Corona Coronas. Several well-bound ‘standard works’ were in a bookcase in the smoking room but only for decoration. In the sitting-room were several of ‘the lighter type of novels, together with a number in French and Spanish with extremely lurid and compromising jackets’. The occupants’ income, judged the inspector, would be between two and three thousand a year.

  The mention of the large Coronas is significant. Not even the phlegmatic Wills Crofts could resist dropping this rich-sounding name into an otherwise prosaic report. The cigar was to most people in England – which as a nation had rejected it in favour of cigarettes at between fourpence and sixpence for ten – a symbol of opulent success, not always untinged with villainy. Cartoonists and illustrators of comics had a special cigar-image of their own: black and obese and banded with what looked like a Lonsdale belt. The cigar was the epitome of poshness and self-made Phillips Oppenheim never forgot it:

  Argels himself, wearing the clothes of Savile Row, the boots of the Burlington Arcade, and the linen and cravat of Bond Street, wore a red carnation in his buttonhole, and was smoking an expensive Romeo and Juliet cigar.

  Lynn Brock’s no-nonsense detective, Colonel Gore, could tell a costly cigarette when he saw one but had the self-control to refuse it.

  ‘These look about eighteen bob a hundred.’ ‘A quid’, said Challoner laconically. His guest sighed enviously and replaced the cigarette in the miniature silver trunk from which he had incautiously taken it. ‘In another, better world, perhaps. In this, not for me. I’ll smoke my old dhudeen, if I may.’

  (The Deductions of Colonel Gore)

  Then, as now, the pipe man had certain advantages over the smoker of gaspers. He was more likely to be considered manly, thoughtful, honest and clean-living. Stanley Baldwin probably owed his premiership to that air of calm wisdom and homely reliability which diligent pipe-sucking confers upon the chronically inept. Baldwin’s assiduously cultivated ordinariness, incidentally, included a liking for the books of John Buchan, whom he once declared to be ‘a ruddy miracle’.

  There have been a number of pipe smoking heroes of crime fiction, but most of them are in the adventure-thriller sector where firmness of jaw and good strong teeth are more generally available than in the relatively stuffy, debilitating area of the whodunnit. An exception – a surprising exception in view of his author’s drastic demands on his wind – is the appearance of Simon Templar, alias The Saint, among the cigarette addicts. In The Saint Closes the Case (1930):

  He lighted a fresh cigarette and hitched himself further on to the table, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and the fine, rake-hell, fighting face that they all knew and loved made almost supernaturally beautiful with such a light of debonair dare-devilry as they had never seen before.

  But perhaps The Saint’s preference was rooted in a desire to be distinguished from those he called

  ‘the birds with the fat cigars and the names in -heim and -stein, who juggle the finances of this cockeyed world.’

  Ian Fleming was to echo Charteris with remarkable fidelity a quarter of a century later when he declared of a certain street in Paris:

  too many of the landlords and tenants … have names ending in -esou, -ovitch, -ski and -stein, and these are sometimes not the ending of respectable names.

  His hero, too, eschewed cigars, smoking instead an exclusive brand of hand made cigarettes bearing three gold bands.

  The most famous pipe in fiction is unquestionably that of Sherlock Holmes, but nothing suggests that Conan Doyle hoped that it would emphasize his detective’s masculinity and bourgeois trustworthiness. It was rather late for that, considering that the man had acquired a violin, addiction to cocaine, and the habit of drawing-room pistol practice. More likely was the intention to add to the impression of Holmes’s enigmatic and eccentric nature the extraordinary circumstance of a gentleman electing to smoke black shag, the deadly favourite of coal heavers and lightermen.

  One vice Holmes did not embrace and that was alcoholism. Perhaps his example in this respect inspired his successors. Certainly the boozy detective would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover in British mystery fiction of the last fifty years. There is a simple reason for this. The detective is traditionally a somewhat priestly figure, utterly reliable, incorruptible and socially unsmirched. It is permissible for him to be baffled occasionally, to crack a joke, even to stand a round of drinks, in order to show himself related to humanity. But he has only to be seen drunk once and he forfeits the admiration of some of the most right-minded members of the community – the devotees of the murder story.

  If inebriation is barred, winemanship has long held honourable place in the English detective novel, while minor bottle play may be found even in the more vulgar medium of the thriller. Bulldog Drummond once specified the inclusion in a motoring ‘snack’ of half a dozen Mumm 1913. He also was qualified to expose, in his hearty way, the lack of savoir-faire in a provincial hotel:

  ‘We will consume one more round of this rather peculiar tipple which that sweet girl fondly imagines is a Martini.’

  This kind of cleverness did not reach the same height again in thrillers until Fleming’s James Bond began his round of the world’s bars and restaurants as vintage selector and cocktail tutor in 1953. By that time, the American tradition of equating hard drinking with toughness, particularly in the fields of espionage and private detection, had crossed the Atlantic. Bond’s sixty cigarettes a day were complemented by an average intake of half a bottle of spirits. Even by fairly tolerant medica
l definition, he was a confirmed alcoholic. So was Philip Marlowe, of course, and to a greater degree, but Chandler’s private eye had the excuse of having to cope with the police of Bay City. Compared with them, the operatives of SMERSH were like children on Hallowe’en.

  Meanwhile, back in the pure detection belt, Lord Peter Wimsey was offering his guests Balkan Sobranies and exercising ‘a palate for wine almost unequalled in Europe’.

  ‘I fancy I could place it within a couple of miles, though it is a wine I had hardly looked to find in a French cellar at this time. It is hock … and at that it is Johannisberger. Not the plebeian cousin but the echter Schloss Johannisberger from the castle vineyard itself.’

  Albert Campion, Margery Allingham’s detective, was another eminently winey chap. His importers, Thistledown, Friend and Son, London, E.C., must have valued him highly. On the very eve of war in 1939 he had the forethought to order twelve dozen of port (Taylor, 1927) to be laid down so that it would be ready for drinking in forty years by his godson, Master Brian Desmond Peterhouse-Vaughn. Neither Wimsey nor Campion, we may be sure, would have behaved as did that Inspector Winterbottom whom Miss Sayers reported for ‘emptying his glass rather too rapidly for true connoisseurship’.

  Compared with its American counterpart and with such police novels as are published on the Continent, that proportion of the average English thriller devoted to social niceties has always been remarkably generous. Too much happened too quickly in the world of Dashiell Hammett for anyone to notice whether the right ties had been chosen to go with the suits or the right wines with the dinner courses. In any case, it was always Hammett’s baddies who had the money to spend on fancy eating and dressing, so to hell with them. Raymond Chandler, despite having been educated at Dulwich College, was of much the same opinion as Hammett. ‘Down these mean streets’ was the itinerary he set his detective, because he believed that a hero worth writing about should inhabit reality and react to it with ‘A lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness’. Philip Marlowe would not have swooned with admiration at the sight of a handmade monogrammed cigarette; he would have marked down its smoker as a likely beneficiary of city hall graft. As for that supremely eloquent testimony to indication of social worth, the motor car, Marlowe characteristically referred to his own as ‘the heap’.

  No such diffidence has ever been noticeable in the British thriller writers. Their motorized heroes have been tearing around the countryside and through city streets for well over half a century. But not in just any old car. Holmes had been content to overtake malefactors by public transport. The hansom cab (‘There’s a sovereign for you, my man, if you reach Victoria in eight minutes’) and the railway train (‘Quick, Watson, the four-twenty-three’) never let him down, and readers had sufficient faith in the reliability of institutions in Victorian and Edwardian England not to be sceptical. The motor car aroused new attitudes entirely. It was excitingly unpredictable, very expensive, sometimes frightening, always enviable. Moreover it was a branded, identifiable object; and already by the early 1920s, when there was one car on the road for every 140 people, a motor mythology had been established. Certain makes were especially admired for their splendour, size or speed. They were very much ‘the thing’ and it was with vehicles from this exclusive category that authors anxious to impress equipped their characters.

  Perhaps the thing-iest automobile of them all was the Hispano-Suiza. This extraordinary hybrid, with its vast but superbly engineered power unit beneath a bonnet that could be viewed to the end only on a clear day, was produced in limited numbers but at unlimited expense. Customers were mostly millionaires and monarchs, of whom Spain’s Alphonso – if the assertions of second-hand traders were to be believed – must have changed cars every other week. A few Hispanos could always be seen on the Riviera and at other fashionable European resorts, but a car that needed a hangar rather than a garage (the wheelbase of some models was fourteen feet and the track nearly five) was hardly a practical proposition for the ordinary motorist. For the well-connected fictional motorist, on the other hand, it was eminently suitable, if only by virtue of its resonant double-barrelled name, and riding around in an Hispano-Suiza became for a while a convention of the high life novel.

  Being himself something of a high life aspirant, that hearty clubman Lieutenant-Colonel McNeile, alias ‘Sapper’, overcame whatever patriotic objections he might have had to a car designed in Spain by a Swiss and manufactured in France, and gave one to Bulldog Drummond. Drummond joyfully proclaimed it ‘guaranteed to keep in sight anything in England’ so it possibly was one of the racing Boulogne Hispanos with a top speed of something over 110 miles an hour. In that case, however, it is not easy to understand why ‘Sapper’ described him as driving ‘like a man possessed with ten devils’. Diabolism would have been an altogether superfluous aid to an eight-litre engine developing some 200 brake-horsepower.

  Phillips Oppenheim lived for most of his writing life in real Hispano-Suiza country on the Mediterranean coast. He must have known well the settings used by Michael Arlen in The Green Hat, of which the great car was a sort of heroine. And yet when he wanted to convey a sense of luxury awheel, it was a Rolls-Royce that he specified:

  The Scotchman took his place a little gingerly amongst the magnificent appointments of the limousine. He took notice of its wonderful fittings, the cigar-box and match-boxes rimmed with gold, the cigarettes temptingly displayed in a glass case, the tortoiseshell-backed toilet-set …

  A need for showing the common touch in motoring matters did not find Oppenheim ignorant of the names of cheap, mass-produced models. A financier in Moran Chambers Smiled (1932) wishes to make a small gesture of appreciation to his clerk, who has not been looking too well of late. ‘Buy,’ he instructs him,

  ‘one of these new two-seaters tonight on your way home – a Morris Oxford, or something of that sort. A four-seater if you like, of course – anything you like up to three hundred pounds. Engage a chauffeur for a time, and drive to business in the mornings. Put it down to petty cash.’ ‘You’re very good, sir,’ the man acknowledged gratefully. ‘It will be a great pleasure for me.’

  Edgar Wallace was something of a specialist in the production of intrepid characters. Some were virtually indestructible – as was Captain Dick Gordon – and when it was required that he should drive from London to Gloucester with a reprieve for an innocent man about to mount the scaffold, the choice of a matchingly intrepid car was essential. A Rolls user himself, Wallace saw no reason to look further.

  Through Swindon at breakneck speed, and he was on the Gloucester Road … He was going all out now, but the road was bad, full of windings, and once he was nearly thrown out of the car when he struck a ridge on the road. A tyre burst, and he almost swerved into the hedge, but he got her nose straight again and continued on a flat tyre. It brought her speed down appreciably, and he grew hot and cold as mile after mile of the road flashed by without a sign of the town. And then, with Gloucester Cathedral showing its spires above the hill, a second tyre exploded. He could not stop: he must go on, if he had to run in to Gloucester on the rims …

  Ten minutes later, but not yet quite down to the axles:

  ‘A reprieve, by the King’s own hand,’ said Dick Gordon unsteadily, and handed the stained envelope to the Governor.

  (The Fellowship of the Frog)

  In the decade between 1921 and the eclipse of the firm during the world slump, Britain’s Bentley Motors Limited were producing at prices from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half thousand pounds apiece some of the fastest and most personable cars in the world. Bentley owners constituted an elite only a rung or two down from the clients of Rolls-Royce and Hispano-Suiza. Their machines were not merely testimonials of wealth; they manifested that attribute which in retrospect is hard to define soberly and without sardonic overtones but which, in the 1920s and 1930s, was the most vaunted flower of the British educational system – sportsmanship. For the man-about-town who had won h
is colours, inherited his father’s wealth, and wanted to cut a bit of a dash, the three-litre Bentley open sports car was a sine qua non until 1927 when an even more ostentatious model, the four-and-a-half litre, became available to him.

  Private detectives, secret agents and adventurers in gallant causes were drawn predominantly from the man-about-town class. What alternative was there? An insurance clerk or a steel erector, whatever his personal gifts and propensities, simply could not get time off to shadow a suspect through Wimbledon; or check a week’s purchases of alpenstocks from Harrods. It would be no use – even if he could afford the fare – to rumble down to Folkestone on a slow train when the girl he sought to rescue was in the tonneau of the villain’s J-type Dusenberg, seaport-bound at an hundred miles an hour. The inescapable truth was that heroism, like business expansion, required capital as well as flair. Writers who invested, on their leading character’s behalf, in a Bentley were simply recognizing this fact and hoping for a prestige bonus.

  There were a number of these, including Sydney Horler, in the years when Bentleys either were in production or had not yet acquired second-hand value in a special ‘vintage’ context. Most tended to refer to the cars simply by name, dropping occasional reference to speeds in the eighties or nineties but not rhapsodizing at length. Such control of enthusiasm, one suspected, was often less indicative of familiarity than of almost total ignorance.

  Lord Peter Wimsey, naturally, was a Bentley man – or he was in his younger, more frivolous days. He subsequently switched allegiance to Daimlers, his creator having noticed, perhaps, that Royalty of the time was always conveyed behind that famous fluted radiator.