A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  Today we recognize that sensation of satisfaction that good detective fiction produces. When Susan Hopley came out, however, the Detective Branch had yet to be established, ‘detective fever’ had yet to infect the public in the wake of the Road Hill House case and the ‘sensation’ novel had still to open up the home and all its minute and everyday details as the site of drama.

  So why, then, has this groundbreaking author and her character, warmly admired by Mary Elizabeth Bradden among others, been forgotten? The answer lies partly in the fate of her creator, Catherine Crowe, whose reputation dimmed quickly after she produced a much derided work on spiritualism and quack science. She eventually fell into neglect and remains so today, to the extent that her detective fails even to appear in The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011).

  Crowe was curious and mysterious. Quite a figure on the literary scene in Edinburgh, she and a friend were observed inhaling ether, or laughing-gas, at a dinner party held in 1847 for Hans Christian Andersen, which gave another guest ‘the feeling of being with two mad people’. She was interested in phrenology, was described as ‘a very clever, eccentric person’ and believed that one day the supernatural world would find itself ‘within the bounds of science’.

  She became deeply involved with seances and spiritualism until she suffered some sort of mental breakdown in 1854. Charles Dickens, who heard about it, thought she had gone:

  stark mad – and stark naked – on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and, I fear, hopelessly insane.

  This picture, however, was so false that Catherine Crowe had to write to the newspapers defending herself. She had experienced, she protested, only a brief ‘state of unconsciousness’ and hallucination, but the prejudice against female writers and spiritualists translated this into crazed nakedness on the Edinburgh streets.

  And so Crowe and her work fell into obscurity, and the crown for producing the first female detective is generally awarded to two men: Andrew Forrester, marginally the winner, and W. S. Hayward in close pursuit. To be fair, their two books, The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective, both feature professionals, heroines who, unlike Susan Hopley, are employed purely – and paid accordingly – to solve crimes.

  Kathryn Johnson, curator of the British Library exhibition ‘Murder in the Library: An A to Z of Detective Fiction’ (2013), points out that Andrew Forrester most likely decided to try a female lead as a logical next step in a lengthy writing career. He’d started out, and had great success, producing fictionalized ‘memoirs’ of various real-life Bow Street Runners. These works were so realistic and convincing that the genuine Runners had to write to the papers, pointing out that what were apparently their memoirs had actually been made up. Forrester also wrote on the murder at Road Hill House, in both non-fiction and fictional form. There was obviously a market for crime, and a female detective could be seen as an exciting and original angle.

  Forrester and Hayward’s female detective novels were published in a new and specialized form called the yellowback. These small, flimsy and semi-disposable novels took their name from their glossy covers with bright yellow borders. Costing 6d. (when a hardback novel would cost 10s.) they were sold mostly on the railway stations that had by now sprouted up all across 1860s Britain. Promising a soothing interval of cheap entertainment, a yellowback from the bookstall seemed the perfect purchase for a traveller about to start, say, the ten-hour journey to Edinburgh.

  Because they were made from such thin and cheap paper, very few have survived in good condition, but the British Library does have a copy of Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective, with its rather racy cover still intact. It could be that the author never selected or even saw the cover art, and, on the basis that ‘sex sells’, it shows a lady rather more racy than the detective herself featured in its pages. A nattily dressed lady is smoking, a very fast habit, and she’s also lifting up her skirts to reveal her ankles. The image bears a close resemblance to the Victorian ‘Haymarket Princess’, the ladies of the night who worked around the theatres of London’s Haymarket, the revelation of the ankle beneath the skirt being the age-old indication of a prostitute.

  This salacious image was obviously intended to tempt readers into buying a saucy tale, and it is true that the female detective of the story does some rather unladylike things. At one point, while chasing a villain, she finds it necessary to drop down through a hatch into a cellar. Her crinoline won’t fit through the hole, so she simply takes it off and abandons it. It’s a wonderful moment of female emancipation: freed from the ‘obnoxious garment’, as she calls it, she is able to get on with her work. She also carries a silver Colt revolver.

  This is strikingly modern behaviour, and both the Lady Detective, Mrs Paschal, and the Female Detective, Mrs Gladden, are forceful, impressive characters. Mrs Paschal possesses great skill and knows it: verging upon forty years old, she has found a life-long calling in detection. She tells us that her brain is ‘vigorous and subtle’, and that she concentrates all her energies on her work. ‘I was well born and educated,’ she says, and

  for the parts I had to play, it was necessary to have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited [and] numerous other qualities of which actors are totalling ignorant. They strut, and talk, and give expression to the thoughts of others, but it is such as I who create the incidents upon which their dialogue is based and grounded.

  The Female Detective is varyingly either Mrs or Miss Gladden – perhaps another editorial lapse or perhaps a deliberate part of her shadowy, elusive identity – and elucidates for us the advantages that women possess in detecting crime. Like Mrs Paschal, she possesses the ability to pass invisibly through life. ‘The woman detective,’ says Mrs Gladden, ‘has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching, and of keeping her eye upon matters near where a man could not conveniently play the eavesdropper.’ Both heroines illustrate this point in rather melodramatic terms, one of them taking the job of a servant in order to penetrate the household of ‘The Mysterious Countess’, the other dressing up as a nun in order to infiltrate a convent. But here an important new strand of detective fiction is being spun: the crime-solver who blends into the background, like G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, or, ultimately, Miss Marple.

  And yet these two impressive women of the 1860s did not set a lasting trend. After them, female detective characters faded away until the 1890s. The reason for this is that they were just a little too advanced for the taste of the times. Both characters have to justify taking on such dirty, unwomanly work. Mrs Paschal tells us: ‘It is hardly necessary to refer to the circumstances which led me to embark in a career at once strange, exciting and mysterious, but I may say that my husband died suddenly, leaving me badly off.’

  Mrs Gladden, meanwhile, defends her actions by saying that when a women turns to criminality, she’s much worse than a man, and it takes a woman to catch her.

  And yet, women would not be employed as police officers until just after the First World War. This was not a sudden decision, but a slow change in attitudes triggered by the war itself. During it, of course, women had proved their capacity for driving and making munitions and other work formerly left to men. In 1916 Scotland Yard was forced, by a shortage of male staff, to employ female typists for the first time. Neither were there enough fathers and brothers left in Britain to chaperone wives and sisters on the streets to pre-war standards. In London’s public spaces, voluntary groups of special female police auxiliaries were formed for the protection of other women.

  The experiment caused some concern, but was ultimately a success. In 1918, women over 30 were allowed for the first time to vote in elections. On 22 November of the same year, an order was written for 110 permanent female police officers to
be appointed, albeit with fewer powers than male constables. The nascent female force was the victim of financial cutbacks in 1922, but in 1923 they were back for good. Fifty females were sworn in, and this time it was with the power of making arrests. Lillian Wyles (1885–1975), one of the first female sergeants from 1919, was by 1923 working on murder cases, and would end up as a Chief Inspector.

  It’s much harder to find evidence that women in real life worked as paid detectives in a private capacity, but they do re-emerge, triumphantly, in post-war fiction, not least in the ‘cattery’ of old ladies employed by Lord Peter Wimsey. It was the beginning of a Golden Age.

  Part Three

  The Golden Age

  19

  The Women Between the Wars

  ‘It’s not the crisis, it’s the Christie, that is keeping people awake at night.’

  Newspaper advertisement for Murder is Easy, by Agatha Christie (1939)

  BY THE 1930S, the murder rate had fallen to the lowest level Britain had ever seen. Those crimes that did take place were usually linked to poverty, alcohol or domestic violence. And yet it seemed that more and more killings, usually in genteel and pleasant surroundings, were taking place in the pages of books. In 1934, about one-eighth of all the books published were crime novels. The decades between the two world wars saw a great explosion of fictional death by the novelists of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction. Their stories were ever more remote from real-life violence and true crime. In them, murders became tidy and domesticated, apparently causing little more upset than a lost cat.

  And they wrote a great number of them. Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) is little known today, and primarily as the man who created King Kong. In his time, though, he was a hugely popular and enormously prolific author who produced no less than 175 novels, including many detective stories. (It was said that if Wallace refused to take a telephone call on the grounds that he was writing a new book, the caller would gaily ask the operator to put him on hold: ‘I’ll wait until he’s finished!’) The size of Wallace’s output was extreme, but many of his colleagues had similar stamina. Some authors produced as many as three books a year. Dorothy L. Sayers did not work that fast – ten novels in twelve years – although she recognized that others had good cause: ‘There are many reasons which may prompt an author to produce books at this rate, ranging from hyper-activity of the thyroid to the grim menace of rates and taxes.’

  She certainly read them at an alarming rate, though. In just two years, between June 1933 and August 1935, she reviewed 364 detective novels. Among those she covered for the Sunday Times were Crime at Guildford, Poison in Kensington, Death on the Oxford Road, A Dagger in Fleet Street and Death at Broadcasting House.

  What was the cause of this fictional crime wave? The American critic Edmund Wilson, writing in The New Yorker in 1944, argued that the detective story had declined in inventiveness and creativity since the days of Dickens. But he noted that reading writers like Agatha Christie made people feel slightly better about living in an ever more dangerous world:

  The world during those years was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to avert … Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and – relief! – he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain … and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.

  It seemed the pleasures of Golden Age detection were just the thing to steady the nerves after the First World War. At the turn of the twentieth century, old hands like Sherlock Holmes were still in business, but only just. His last full-length outing was published in serial form in 1914–15, and his absolute final appearance in a short story came in 1927 in the Strand Magazine.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s best work had been done within the constraints of the short-story format forced upon him by publishers such as the Strand. With the honourable exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2), Sherlock is always sharpest in the short stories rather than the novels. His cases are not necessarily long-drawn-out murder investigations, but snappy little frauds, thefts and blackmails that can be neatly wrapped up in a few thousand words. The Strand gave Conan Doyle and Holmes a readership reaching half a million monthly.

  Conan Doyle brought Holmes’s career to a halt in 1893 by killing him off after a tussle with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, falling to his death over a waterfall. Holmes’s creator had simply wanted to write something else: ‘I must save my mind for better things’, as he put it. It was commercial pressure from his publisher that caused Conan Doyle to bring his hero back from the dead in 1901 to solve the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This story, published in serial form in the Strand Magazine once again, had readers queuing up at the magazine’s offices to get their hands on the next number as soon as possible.

  In the story, Sherlock Holmes lives secretly for several days in a prehistoric stone hut on the moors where a dangerous killer and a ‘supernatural’ hound roam at will, and ends up shooting the latter dead. Holmes had always had a wiry strength, despite his cerebral appearance, and he is very much a man of action as well as thought. His gallantry and heroism in The Hound of the Baskervilles belongs to the jolly variety of derring-do also to be seen in the Scottish politician and administrator John Buchan’s adventure stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps, set just before the First World War, and Greenmantle, set during it. So devoted to their duty are Buchan’s heroes with their stiff upper lips that it comes as no surprise to learn that Buchan also helped to write propaganda for the British war effort in 1914. Conan Doyle was likewise on the side of the British bulldog. Another later excursion of Holmes’s, ‘His Last Bow’, has him unmask a German spy on the very eve of the war. As Holmes puts it: ‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But … a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has passed.’

  This combination of valour, patriotism and sportsmanship can also be seen in the exploits of Raffles, the daring gentleman thief and adventurous hero of the Strand Magazine. Raffles was created by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. He’s a criminal, rather than a detective, but he has the physical prowess to represent England at cricket, and eventually volunteers for the Boer War. (In a nod to the importance of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, Raffles attempts to steal from it the items relating to his own career.) These, and other, adventure writers of the 1890s and 1910s seem to express and celebrate something of the blithe fighting spirit that convinced many to sign up for the trenches. As one sapper wrote to John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps, ‘the story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing’.

  But what followed four years of fighting couldn’t have been more different. One could never imagine Hercule Poirot trekking across Dartmoor, sleeping rough or shooting anybody. (‘The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.’) Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and Richard Hannay, Buchan’s all-round action hero, would seem a little too butch for the more sinuous and hedonistic 1920s. The new-style detective novels of this era were deliberately unsensational, a better fit for a nation in mourning, where nearly every house had lost a son.

  Even beyond the annual commemoration of Remembrance Day, the lasting effects of the Great War could not be ignored or avoided. Children were left orphaned, the surviving young men left wounded in ways both seen and unseen, young women left without partners. This is the background that should be born in mind when the Golden Age writers are criticized – as they often are – for being limited or sterile or boring. They were writing not to challenge society or to stir things up. They were using their pens to heal.

  By contra
st to the bold, grand gestures of Richard Hannay’s or Raffles’s stories, the texture of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Agatha Christie’s first success, is like a tightly woven tapestry. The New York Times summed up its demure appeal:

  There are doubtless many detective stories more exciting and blood-curdling than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but this reviewer has recently read very few which provide greater analytical stimulation … the author does not devote her talents to the creation of thrills and shocks, but to the orderly solution of a single murder, conventional at that, instead.

  Character, plausibility, violence and romance were not an important part of books like this. Their attraction was chaste and cerebral. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is all about the plot, the clues and the pay-off: the pleasure and satisfaction felt when an elegant solution to the puzzle is revealed at the end. Christie herself explained that ‘a detective story is complete relaxation, an escape from the realism of everyday life. It has, too, the tonic value of a puzzle – it sharpens your wits’.

  Christie’s breakthrough coincided with changes to reading habits and to the publishing industry that saw the short story published in magazines like the Strand being replaced by the longer novel, and very often the novel involving crime. In Britain, the 1920s also saw the development of commercial libraries, such as those run by W. H. Smith or Boots, and publishing imprints such as Victor Gollancz’s ‘Gollancz Crime’ or William Collins’ ‘Crime Club’ met their voracious appetite for new books for circulation. Our archetypal image of a Sherlock Holmes reader is a man reading a magazine on the train on his way to work. By the 1920s, Everyman may well have driven to his place of employment, his opportunity for reading having been lost with the acquisition of a car, while his wife spent the afternoon reading a detective novel by a female author from the library.