A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  In the Golden Age the detective, too, was usually of a specific social class, much more elevated than it had been in the days of Inspectors Field and Whicher, when detection was considered dirty work. ‘It would have been unthinkable,’ says Julian Symons, for these writers ‘to create a Jewish detective, or a working-class one aggressively conscious of his origins, for such figures would have seemed to them quite incongruous’. Agatha Christie cleverly allowed Hercule Poirot to sidestep the issue of class by making him Belgian and therefore, notoriously, hard to categorize. But a great many of his colleagues sprung from the ranks of the aristocracy. Lord Peter Wimsey was the brother of a duke. Margery Allingham’s detective, Albert Campion, ‘well-bred and a trifle absent-minded’, is the younger brother of some high-ranking aristocrat whose identity is kept firmly secret lest Campion’s activities bring a noble house into disrepute. Campion also ends up marrying the annoying ‘Lady’ Amanda Fitton, following their first meeting on a case during which Campion re-establishes her family’s ancient right to a title.

  Ngaio Marsh’s sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, is equally posh, having a mother called ‘Lady Alleyn’ who breeds Alsatians. In Marsh’s most popular book, A Surfeit of Lampreys (1941), there are so many titled characters that the policeman investigating the case simply has to give up on correct form when a marquis dies, thereby passing on his title and, confusingly, changing the names of all his relations. Neither the police, nor the reader, nor even the author, can keep track.

  The attitudes exhibited by these detectives are not always admirable. Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, casually lists the people not worth treating fairly: ‘liars and halfwits and prostitutes and dagoes’. William D. Rubenstein, however, has argued that sinister Jews, a fixture of the 1920s (Agatha Christie’s ‘yellow-faced financiers’) start to disappear from crime novels around 1930. As Nazi anti-Semitism grew more brutal, Jewish characters grew more likely to be sympathetic refugees from persecution.

  In this respect, the ending of the Golden Age was inevitable as society became more liberal. The inter-war period saw a belief in science and rationality as central to the future of mankind. Trust in authority was still high: British justice surely never made mistakes and evil-doers should, of course, be sent to the gallows. As W. H Auden put it, ‘the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin’. In 1945 Agatha Christie described ‘the ethical background’ of the detective story as ‘usually sound. Very, very rarely is the criminal the hero of the book. Society unites to hunt him down, and the reader can have all the fun of the chase without moving from a comfortable armchair.’

  The discovery, during the Second World War, that horrors such as the atom bomb and Auschwitz could exist shook this essential belief in order and hierarchy. As old values and convictions began to crumble away, the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 replaced the punitive ideal of justice with the concept of rehabilitation, or treatment and training intended to coach the criminal out of his ways. When hanging was eventually abolished in 1964, the certainties of the detective story had been replaced by the ambiguities of the spy thriller.

  EVEN AS DUSK was settling over the quiet, pretty but increasingly irrelevant village of Mayhem Parva, a new type of book was beginning to do exactly what the detective story could not: reveal to us the inner workings of the murderer’s mind. Other writers were exploring alternatives to Mayhem Parva that would turn out to be just as readable, and just as profitable for their publishers.

  The rival form to the detective story was the thriller, and by the late 1930s it had the brighter future ahead of it. In the thriller, the character of the villain would be central, and we see inside his or her head. Dorothy L. Sayers summed up the other main difference between the old and the new: ‘The difference between thriller and detective story is mainly one of emphasis. Agitating events occur in both, but in the thriller our cry is “What comes next?” – in the detective story, “What came first?” The one we cannot guess; the other we can, if the author gives us a chance.’

  Right up to the Second World War, though, traditional, mainly British, authors and readers preferred the older, more cerebral ways of crime. They disliked the violence, brashness and uncouthness of the American-led thriller movement. Dorothy L. Sayers found the thriller’s aims ‘trivial’ compared with the nobility of the detective story, and most thriller writers’ works to be full of ‘bad English, cliché, balderdash and boredom’. And many thrillers were just as derivative as the worst Golden Age detective novels. It’s disappointing to learn that even when the death-dealing spy James Bond appeared in 1952, many of his famous gadgets were simply cribbed from the works of Edgar Wallace.

  This conservatism caused Sayers to overlook the earliest works of Graham Greene, but Mike Ripley, for ten years the crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph, argues that she was all too aware of the change in the tide and wisely stopped reviewing crime novels – and, indeed, writing them – just as they passed their peak. Her fellow Golden Age writer Ronald Knox, was also well aware that ‘the game is getting played out’.

  Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), a great crime writer himself but one of the vocal enemies of the traditional English detective story, also believed that Sayers had come to recognize the limits of her medium.

  I think what was really gnawing her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature … Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the ‘problem of logic and deduction’.

  The most striking attack on detective fiction came in The New Yorker in 1944 and 1945, from Edmund Wilson, in two essays ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ and ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ In the first, Wilson criticizes the lifelessness of Agatha Christie’s characters: she ‘has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it … she has to provide herself with puppets’. Once he’d published this essay, Wilson was deluged with letters berating him for his lack of discernment, and imploring him to read other, classier, fiction writers: Dorothy L. Sayers was highly recommended. So he tried The Nine Tailors. His response misses the point almost laughably:

  One of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part of it is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopaedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters: ‘Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background,’ etc.

  One can see what a distinguished New York man of letters may find offensive in this (he also called The Lord of the Rings ‘juvenile trash’), but the bell-ringing and the aspidistras are part of the deepest charm of Dorothy L. Sayers, who makes the mundane seem so eccentric and amusing and, at the same time, so firmly rooted in a particular place and time. P. D. James agrees:

  In the Wimsey saga, the sounds, mood, speech, the very feel of the thirties seems to rise from the page: the resentful war-scarred heroes of the Bellona Club, the gallant or pathetic spinsters of Miss Climpson’s agency, the ordered and hierarchical life of a few villages, now as obsolete as the vast rectories round which it revolved, the desperate gaiety of the bright young things, the fear of unemployment which underlay the cheerful camaraderie of office life in Murder Must Advertise.

  As you’d hope from a literary critic, Wilson does foresee what would replace the detective story. ‘The spy story may perhaps only now be realizing its poetic possibilities, as
the admirers of Graham Greene contend; and the murder story that exploits psychological horror is an entirely different matter.’

  Raymond Chandler put a final nail into the coffin of Mayhem Parva in an essay of 1950 called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. Over 16 million of his fellow Americans had experienced military service in the Second World War, society had changed, but the conventional detective story had not. ‘The murder novel,’ Chandler claimed, ‘has a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.’

  The English, he concludes, ‘may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers’.

  And yet, ultimately, such criticism of Mayhem Parva feels misplaced, revealing a snobbery about popular entertainment – fiction set out primarily to reassure, soothe and amuse – worthy of the middle-class people who wrote off melodrama as laughable or Mary Elizabeth Braddon as immoral. Even Sayers herself, much as she disliked the thriller, was well aware of the limitations of the classic Golden Age detective novel’s form: ‘It does not – and by hypothesis never can – attain the loftiest level of literary achievement. Though it deals with the most desperate effects of rage, jealousy and revenge, it rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.’

  She is saying, in other words, what Jane Austen had said more than a hundred years earlier: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort.’

  You could call this an admirable philosophy for life.

  24

  The Dangerous Edge of Things

  ‘In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.’

  Raymond Chandler

  IN 1941, AS the popularity of the detective story continued to wane, Philip Van Doren Stern, the American author of the story that inspired the film It’s A Wonderful Life, made the case for change. ‘The whole genre needs overhauling, a return to first principles,’ he claimed. ‘Writers need to know more about life and less about death.’ And, indeed, for quite a long time by then, an alternative way of proceeding had been unfolding on his side of the Atlantic.

  By complete contrast to the suave British sleuth, his American counterpart was tough. So-called ‘hard-boiled’ detectives made their first appearance in cheap, ‘pulp’ magazines, known as this because they were made from wood pulp, or recycled paper. They reflected the values of their unregulated, competitive Wild West society. ‘Many people have their little peculiarities,’ says a character called Race Williams, as hard-boiled as they come. ‘Mine was holding a loaded gun in my hand while I slept.’ Race uses his gun fairly frequently, because – as he explains – ‘you can’t make a hamburger without grinding up a little meat’. Usually a private eye rather than a policeman, the hard-boiled detective speaks his own language. ‘Tell your moll to hand over the mazuma’ (money), he might say, or ‘Close your yap, bo, or I squirt metal’. He might call a black person ‘dark meat’, a car a ‘bucket’, or advise you to avoid wearing a ‘Chicago overcoat’ (a coffin).

  The magazine Black Mask, founded in 1920, was the home of many of these characters. Its editor, Joseph T. Shaw, demanded that his writers tell simple, violent stories, without unnecessary description or affectation. And yet the action had to be motivated by character, and the ‘hard-boiled’ detective is flawed and fallible in a way that would be quite out of place in British crime fiction.

  Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), one of the Black Mask writers, and a Marxist, had even worked as a detective himself, for eight years, with America’s famous Pinkerton agency. Another Black Mask writer was Raymond Chandler, who lived in London as a teenager. Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, the best-known ‘hard-boiled’ detective, explained that there were no ‘hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish’ to be found providing arcane means of death in his stories. He thought that stories like his ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse’.

  Chandler, who’d started out in the oil industry before being fired from his job in 1932, described how he came to end up as a writer:

  Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away … this was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect.

  So he decided to try his hand at the genre, producing his classic story, the 18,000-word The Big Sleep, over a five-month period, and selling it for a mere $180. But ‘after that I never looked back,’ he claimed, ‘although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.’

  In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe tells his story in the first person, with the laconic, punchy, cynical language familiar to the ear from noir films:

  I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

  And …

  Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

  And …

  ‘How do you feel?’ It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

  The Big Sleep is such a short novel, with short sharp punchy scenes, that reading it seems like watching a film, and Chandler himself explains that the people trying to write his sort of detective story ‘had the same point of view as film makers’. When he first went to Hollywood, he recalled, ‘a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn’t make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat’.

  Chandler set out to prove him wrong. All but one of his novels ended up as feature films, and some of them were made into several different versions of the same story.

  The simplicity of Chandler’s prose disguises deep, complex questions of life and death, and in Britain the most notable example of the same sort of thing was Brighton Rock (1938). Here again the fate of the soul is the motivating force beneath Graham Greene’s story of the dirty Brighton underworld.

  Greene (1904–91) suffered from bipolar disorder, lived a rootless existence all over the world and described himself as ‘profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life’. So, too, are his characters. Brighton Rock has an anti-hero, a violent gangster who nevertheless believes in God. The detective is a blowsy, immoral but kindly woman called Ida. But it’s not clear that Greene admires her godless kindness more than the gangster Pinkie’s cruel belief. J. M. Coetzee points out Greene’s indebtedness to the movies, noting that Greene was also the Spectator’s film critic, and that his novels were like screenplays in their ‘preference of observation from outside without commentary, tight cutting from scene to scene, equal emphasis for the significant and the non-significant’. Greene himself described how he imagined scenes as he wrote them, recreating in his mind the ‘moving eye of the cine-camera … I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements’.

  As well as seeing the world in this novel way, Greene was far from seeing good and bad as two extremes, as they had been in Mayhem Parva, and was fond of quoting Robert Browning:

  Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things,

  The honest thief, the tender murderer,

  The superstitious atheist …

  Complexity rather than simplicity was the power and the glory of his work.

  WHILE ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899–1980) had little time for the writings o
f Graham Greene, the British films that he made before the Second World War also stand at the antithesis of the Golden Age. Hitchcock had some experience of real-life murder and retribution while growing up in Leytonstone with his strict, Catholic family. A blonde young lady was discovered dead in his neighbourhood; she had been poisoned. Edith Thompson, who would hang for murder in the celebrated Thompson–Bywaters case, was actually a customer at his family’s fruit and veg shop. And one day, the shy, fat young boy was sent with a note by his father to the police station. The letter requested that Alfred Hitchcock be locked up, as a punishment, in the cells for a few minutes. ‘That’s what we do to naughty boys,’ the policeman said. Hitchcock later admitted that this experience affected him powerfully.

  Hitchcock loved reading about true crime in the newspapers, and after moving to Hollywood in 1939 he kept a series of bound volumes of Notable British Trials in the sitting room of his home in Bel Air. His favourite murder of all was the Thompson–Bywaters case, because of his personal connection to it. Edith Thompson was a buyer for a millinery firm, and lived with her husband in Ilford. With a career and income of her own, she felt secure enough to risk an adulterous relationship. At the age of 26, she had started an affair with Freddy Bywaters, an 18-year-old serving in the merchant navy. One night in 1922, Edith and her husband were walking home from the theatre when an assailant jumped out at them. Edith’s husband was attacked and killed. Distraught, Edith accused Freddy Bywaters. But when her illicit relationship with him was exposed, Edith was charged alongside him for murder. It was considered that she had made common purpose with her lover to kill her husband.