A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  More than a dining society but less than a trade union, the Detection Club showed how the output of the Golden Age had coalesced into a genre both recognizable and definable. Its members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Baroness Orczy and A. A. Milne (in addition to creating Winnie the Pooh, Milne wrote an excellent detective novel, The Red House Mystery).

  As Sayers said of the Club: ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation … it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standards that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’

  Monsignor Ronald Knox, another member, conceived the interwar detective story as a kind of game with rules, rather like tennis, which was to be played out between ‘the author of the one part and the reader of the other part’.

  He laid out the regulations of this game in a (tongue-in-cheek) set of Ten Commandments, and advised that they should be followed as strictly as the rules of cricket:

  1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

  [Agatha Christie broke this rule, with tremendous effect, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by making her narrator the perpetrator. But some readers were quite genuinely affronted and aggrieved by what they saw as a betrayal of trust on her part as an author. It’s a reaction that’s difficult to understand without getting back into the mindset that took the Ten Commandments terribly seriously.]

  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

  [Knox added that even one secret passage was on the edges of acceptability: when employing one himself, he was careful to plant a clue, pointing out ‘beforehand that the house had belonged to Catholics in penal times’.]

  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

  5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

  [That’s Maria Marten’s stepmother’s dream ruled out: the old conventions of melodrama were by now completely superseded.]

  7. The detective himself must not himself commit the crime.

  8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

  9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

  [Conan Doyle himself said of his second most famous creation: ‘Watson never for one instant as chorus and chronicler transcends his own limitations. Never once does a flash of wit or wisdom come from him.’ This is fundamentally unfair to Watson, and all his sidekick colleagues, though. Of course what he offers is not intellectual intelligence but emotional intelligence. Watsons bring warmth and humanity to their cerebral but cold-hearted superiors. A. A. Milne had a more charitable and fairer definition of a Watson: ‘a little slow, let him be, as so many of us are, but friendly, human, likeable’.]

  10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

  This idea of detection as a game, played out more often than not in an upper-class, country house setting, would take its final physical form in the board game Cluedo, which was produced in 1949 by the Leeds-based company Waddingtons. The game’s setting, the Tudor mansion, and its players – Miss Scarlett, Colonel Mustard, Mrs White, Reverend Green, Mrs Peacock and Professor Plum – are instantly recognizable. But Cluedo had its forerunners in the 1930s, a decade which also saw the flourishing of brain-teasers such as crossword puzzles, jigsaws and publications such as The Baffle Book.fn1

  What sort of relationship did the work of the Detection Club have with the real-life crimes of their day? It was certainly not such a close intertwining of fact and fiction as we saw with Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. In fact, the murders that caught the attention of the detective story writers were those which accidentally seemed to embody the spirit of the Ten Commandments, and which presented an intricate puzzle. One of these was the murder of Julia Wallace, in Liverpool, in 1931.

  Julia’s husband, William Herbert Wallace, was an agent for an insurance company. One day he received a telephone message calling him to a meeting at a potential client’s house. He spent the evening of 20 January 1931 searching in vain for the address he’d been given, asking directions of various people who could (conveniently) later confirm his presence in the area. He’d been instructed to go to a house in Menlove Gardens East. Despite the existence of Menlove Gardens West, and Menlove Gardens North, there was no such street. Once Wallace had finally established this, he returned home – only to find his wife, Julia, bludgeoned to death in her own sitting room.

  The case against Wallace was highly circumstantial. It depended on persuading the jury that he had constructed the whole Menlove Gardens business as an elaborate alibi to get him clear of his home at the time the deed was done. However, Wallace had the misfortune to dress habitually in black, to look impassive in court, and to have been overheard stating his views that the jurors were all fools. They found against him. In an unprecedented fashion, though, their verdict was overturned by the judge, who thought it quite unacceptable to condemn a man to death on such flimsy evidence.

  In the spirit of Thomas De Quincey in the previous century, many novelists praised this particular crime for providing them with entertainment and inspiration. The case caught the interest of the Detection Club because so much of the argument rested on timings and telephone calls and tram rides and the asking of directions – all common ingredients of the classic whodunit. Dorothy L. Sayers even wrote an article setting out all the possible suspects and motives for the killing of Julia Wallace that reads very much like the denouement ‘in the library’ at the end of a detective novel. She pointed out that the evidence in the case could be read in two completely contrasting ways: either William Herbert Wallace was the culprit, or else he was framed: ‘it is like a web of shot silk, looking red from one angle, and green from another’. ‘The Wallace case,’ wrote Raymond Chandler, ‘is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries.’ As a brain-teaser, he thought, it ‘is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable’.

  But the final piece of evidence to emerge seems to confirm Wallace’s innocence. He died only a couple of years after his wife. Despite his official discharge, his life had been ruined, and he’d had to move away from his old neighbourhood because of the suspicion with which he was treated by former friends. In a private diary discovered after his death, he had written about how much he missed his wife, and of his belief that the real murderer was still at large.

  On his own front porch, Wallace wrote, he expected one day to see a figure ‘crouching and ready to strike’, and ‘it will be that of the man who murdered my wife’.

  THE SOCIABLE, WELL-ORGANIZED and commanding Dorothy L. Sayers seems to have been the prime mover behind the Detection Club, and its order of ceremonies bears her distinctive and ironic tone of voice. The Club possessed several props, including the red robe of the President, black candles and a human skull called Eric, with red bulbs in his eye sockets.

  The first President of the Club, and first wearer of the robes, was G. K. Chesterton. At some point in the 1960s the original robe was damaged or lost at a meeting held at the Savoy Hotel, and the hotel itself took responsibility for providing a new one, which still remains in use today. Its generous size is said to have been dictated by the generous measurements of Chesterton himself.

  During the ‘Ritual’ for the initiation of new members, ‘Eric the Skull’ would be carried into the darkened clubroom, his glowing eyes powered by batteries. Ngai
o Marsh described one such initiation ceremony, which took place at Grosvenor House in 1937:

  A door at the far end opened (as all doors in detective novels open) slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown she secreted a large automatic revolver … in came the others in solemn procession bearing lighted tapers and lethal instruments. There was the warden of the blunt instrument – a frightful bludgeon, the warden of the sharp instrument – I think it was a dagger – the warden of the deadly phial, & last of all John Rhodefn2 with a grinning skull on a cushion.

  The meeting then began, as they all did (and still do) with the President calling out, ‘What mean these Lights, these Ceremonies, & this Reminder of our Mortality?’

  Candidates wishing to join the Club would have to make certain elaborate vows:

  ‘Do you promise that your Detectives shall well and truly detect the Crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a Vital Clue from the Reader?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?’

  ‘I do.’

  On the occasion that Ngaio Marsh attended, high drama ensued. After the new member had sworn the oath:

  Without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11 pm on a summer evening Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter. The others uttering primitive cries, waved their instruments, blunt sharp & venomous, & John Rhode, by means of some hidden device, caused his skull to be lit up from within. And to my undying shame my agent laughed like a hyena.

  All this was vastly amusing, no doubt, but Sayers in later years grew a little set in her ways, and was said to treat ‘the whole thing with such solemnity as to deprive it of much of its fun’.

  After the war, the Detection Club was forced to flow with the spirit of the times, and to accept as members the thriller writers who had been so clearly rejected at the time of its formation. Today, it has about 60 members, and ‘Eric the Skull’ makes his appearance at each meeting (although analysis by a doctor has suggested that ‘Eric’ is in fact female).

  Simon Brett, the current President of the Club, told me how members recently held a debate about the ethics of Eric. Was it really right and respectful, they argued, to subject the remains of a dead person to the trauma of being a prop in a ridiculous ceremony, with bulbs in his (or her) eye sockets? The debate was closely fought, Eric’s dignity being pitted against several decades of Detection Club history. But, as the minutes of that particular meeting proclaim, ‘The Eyes Have It’, and Eric remains in use.

  The meetings of the Club itself, of course, seemed like something out of a detective story, and not even Agatha Christie could resist the temptation to fictionalize. In number 35 of the exercise books she used for notes she jots down an idea: ‘Detection Club Murder – Mrs Oliver – her two guests – someone killed when the Ritual starts.’

  Brett told me about another memorable recent meeting, held at the Garrick Club on a very hot and airless summer evening. A lady fainted, and all the authors present, having checked that she was still alive, collectively reached for their notebooks.

  fn1 Containing 15 detective puzzles, charts, maps and lists of clues, The Baffle Book (1930) was basically a set of parlour games for a family to solve together, including vital questions such as ‘Who stole the emerald?’. A series of ‘Crime Dossiers’ took the concept one stage further, and into three-dimensional form, with case files of letters, testimonies, and even evidence (hair, for example, or a piece of bloodstained wallpaper) provided for the players. The solution came in a sealed envelope at the back. Herewith the Clues and Who Killed Robert Prentice? in the ‘Crime Dossiers’ series were the forerunners of the kinds of boxed multi-player mystery games that can still be bought today.

  fn2 John Rhode was the pen-name of Cecil Street (1884–1965), a Club member and author of novels with a forensic scientist as the detective.

  23

  Snobbery with Violence

  ‘In London anybody at any moment might do or become anything, but in a village, no matter what village, they were all immutably themselves, parson, organist, sweep, duke’s son and doctor’s daughter, moving like chessmen upon their allotted squares.’

  Dorothy L. Sayers (1937)

  IN BRITAIN IN the 1930s, three million people were unemployed. The Great Depression saw economies brought low, and dictatorships sprouting up, across Europe. Fascists were holding rallies in the East End of London. The trauma of the First World War was barely over before the rumblings of the Second World War began to be heard. These topics were almost completely ignored by members of the Detection Club and writers of Golden Age crime fiction.

  In retrospect, the fact that all this is missing from inter-war crime novels seems more than just ignorance. It looks like a deliberate attempt to wish it out of existence. As Julian Symons, historian of the form, writes:

  It is safe to say that almost all of the British writers in the twenties and thirties, and most of the Americans, were unquestionably Right-wing. This is not to say that they were openly anti-Semitic or anti-Radical [although many of them were], but that they were overwhelmingly conservative in feeling … the social order in these stories was as fixed and mechanical as that of the Incas.

  And there’s no doubt that the fiction of the Golden Age isn’t to everyone’s taste. ‘The reading of detective stories,’ wrote Edmund Wilson in 1945, ‘is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.’

  It was the author of 12 crime novels Colin Watson (1920– 1983) who introduced the term ‘Mayhem Parva’ to describe the work of the 1920s and 1930s writers who so often seemed to set their work in cosy English villages like St Mary Mead. Watson’s own contribution to the school of criticism of the detective story was called Snobbery with Violence (1971). The phrase was originally coined by Alan Bennett to sum up the less attractive aspects of these books: the stultifying, repetitive, hide-bound and reactionary world whose values were only reinforced by the solution of the crime. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie’s narrator gives us a glimpse of the daily round in Mayhem Parva:

  I made a few hurried remarks about the new sweet pea. I knew that there was a new sweet pea because the Daily Mail had told me so that morning. Mrs Ackroyd knows nothing about horticulture, but she is the kind of woman who likes to appear well-informed about the topics of the day, and she too reads the Daily Mail. We were able to converse quite intelligently until … Parker announced dinner.

  One reason for the great success of Golden Age detective fiction is that it reflected the values of its readers right back at them – and that image is not always an attractive one.

  As well as Knox’s Ten Commandments, other, unspoken, rules about class and hierarchy governed the genre. Even though the subject was murder, there was very little actual violence or blood in these novels. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie describes the first glimpse of the victim in very low-key terms. ‘Ackroyd was sitting as I’d left him in the armchair before the fire,’ the narrator tells us. ‘Just below the collar of his coat was a shining piece of twisted metalwork.’ This was the dagger that had killed him, but there was no obvious sign of violence, and the weapon itself sounds rather like a piece of jewellery. In Death at Broadcasting House (1934) by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell, a ‘man’s figure unnaturally crumpled’ is found lying in a radio studio, but the next paragraph is all about the studio’s ‘spec
ial acoustic treatment removing all natural echo’, the shaded light, the thick carpet, the padded walls and the excellent air-conditioning. This is quite typical of the Golden Age, where death seems to happen inconspicuously and with hardly any mess.

  Knox’s contemporary Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939) was the creator, under the pen-name S. S. Van Dine, of the American detective Philo Vance. Like Knox, he was a commentator on the detective genre, which had both made his fortune and made a mockery of his earlier ambitions as an art critic. ‘I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now’ was the title of one of his articles. Wright noted perspicaciously a second unwritten rule of the detective genre as it stood in the 1920s: that the killer could not be a servant, because that was ‘too easy’. The culprit ‘must be a decidedly worth-while person’, as he put it. This snobbery about servants permeates the world of the Golden Age: they are either ‘treasures’, or ‘bad ’uns’ who indulge in a little mild theft or blackmail, but lack the class actually to commit a murder.

  On reading 1920s and 1930s detective novels today, it is this attitude that servants are not really human that particularly jars. ‘I believe him to be a perfectly truthful man, as such people go,’ a lady says of her chauffeur in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Margery Allingham’s detective Albert Campion casually refers to his manservant as ‘the Cretin’. In A Question of Proof, Nicholas Blake (pseudonym for Cecil Day Lewis, the future Poet Laureate) very quickly writes off pretty much the whole of the below-stairs department. The policeman investigating the case: ‘interviewed the whole staff of servants at Sudeley Hall. They were practically exempt from suspicion, having been underneath each other’s noses – if not actually tumbling over each other – either in the kitchen or the garden.’

  The ‘well-trained servant’ crops up literally countless times in Agatha Christie’s work, but Captain Hastings does not know how condescending he is when he admires a notable example of the species: ‘Dear old Dorcas! As she stood there, with her honest face upturned to mine, I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’ Captain Hastings was vaguely aware that changes to the labour market would cause domestic servants like Dorcas to become unaffordable for the middle classes, and like Agatha Christie’s readers, he would strongly have deplored the fact.