Ernest Brammah Smith started to write while unsuccessfully following in his father’s footsteps as a farmer, and his first published book was English Farming, and Why I Turned it Up (1894). His stories about the itinerant Chinese story-teller Kai Lung achieved a vogue, but it is his detective stories which have stood the test of time. George Orwell, a critic with stern opinions about the genre, said that Carrados’ cases were, together with those of Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, ‘the only detective stories since Poe that are worth rereading’.
Chapter Two
The Birth of the Golden Age
When E.C. Bentley decided to poke fun at the notion of the omniscient fictional detective, by creating a sleuth who proved all too fallible, he could not have imagined the consequences. Not only was the resulting novel, Trent’s Last Case, a runaway bestseller, it also had lasting consequences for the genre. Other writers, as well as readers, were fascinated by the cleverness of the plot, and the story’s lightness of touch. The carnage of the so-called ‘war to end all wars’ between 1914 and 1918 made people increasingly desperate for escapism and entertainment, and they fell on ingenious murder mysteries with delight.
Bentley’s Philip Trent talks about ‘detective sportsmanship’, and the concept of the ‘fair play’ mystery was beginning to catch on. ‘The game is afoot!’ Sherlock Holmes had cried in ‘The Abbey Grange’, borrowing Shakespeare’s phrase, but his was a game where readers were spectators, not fellow players. Holmes’ admirers had no more chance of beating him to the truth of a case than did Dr Watson. Conan Doyle’s stories were supremely atmospheric, frequently macabre and invariably gripping, but they were not elaborate fair-play whodunits. While some cases investigated by Holmes concerned murder, many did not. In a short story, an author did not necessarily need to introduce the ultimate crime in order to keep the reader engaged from start to finish.
Other than Wilkie Collins, relatively few Victorian authors had mastered the challenge of writing an intricate detective novel. Their successors in the first quarter of the twentieth century realised that, as murder was the ultimate crime, it was easier to sustain interest in a murder mystery, than, say, into a detailed investigation of a jewel robbery. In a full-length book, it was possible to introduce more suspects, and more clues and red herrings. High-quality fair-play detective short stories remained relatively uncommon, but novelists with a taste for the complex whodunit began to emerge, many of them influenced by the success of Trent’s Last Case.
A handful of writers made effective use of the potential offered by exploration of criminal psychology (and a larger number soon started paying lip-service to it), while others focused on the detail of police investigation. As a war-weary public demanded escapism, and interesting games to play, a growing number of detective novelists began to invite readers to pit their wits against those of fictional sleuths. This was the genesis of new age of light literary entertainment—still remembered today as a Golden Age.
‘The Golden Age of detective fiction’ is a phrase which seems to have been coined by John Strachey, in an article which appeared in The Saturday Review in 1939. Strachey, a Marxist who later became a minister in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, was a detective-fiction addict, and the term was quickly adopted by fellow enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic. The ‘Golden Age’ is commonly regarded as the period between the two world wars; books by authors who came to prominence during that time continued to be published long after the Second World War ended, and so did books of a similar type, but the inter-war years saw the most innovative and ingenious work in the field of the classic, cerebral detective story.
Trent’s Last Case
by E.C. Bentley (1913)
In writing Trent’s Last Case, Bentley set out ‘to write a detective story of a new sort’. A journalist who had in his youth invented the clerihew verse form, Bentley succeeded in that aim beyond his wildest dreams. Yet he embarked on his project in conventional fashion, drawing up a list of standard ingredients: ‘a millionaire—murdered, of course; a police detective who fails where the gifted amateur succeeds; an apparently perfect alibi…a crew of regulation suspects, to include the victim’s widow, his secretary, his wife’s maid, his butler, and a person who had quarrelled openly with him …’
Bentley’s stroke of genius was to come up with an ironic twist: ‘making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution of the mystery turn out to be completely wrong’. He was poking fun at the infallibility of ‘great detectives’ such as Sherlock Holmes, but what impressed readers was Bentley’s combination of stylish writing and clever surprise solution. The book opens with a scathing denunciation of the ruthless American magnate Sigsbee Manderson. More than a century after the book was published, this passage retains its power, and reminds us that there is nothing new about the unpopularity of financiers:
‘Many a time when he “took hold” to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, [Manderson] sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they…Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.’
Manderson is a striking example of the unpleasant victim, so invaluable to writers of Golden Age fiction. Odious characters like Manderson supplied suspects with plausible motives for murder, and their passing was not so tragic as to distract readers from matching their wits with the detective’s.
Philip Trent is an artist who dabbles in journalism and amateur sleuthing, and even falls in love with Manderson’s widow. When he learns, at the end of the story, that he had misunderstood the dead man’s fate, he is abashed: ‘“I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson affair shall be Philip Trent’s last case. His high-blown pride at length breaks under him.” Trent’s smile suddenly returned. “I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason.”’
Just as Trent was wrong about the killing of Sigsbee Manderson, he was mistaken in saying that he would never again touch a mysterious crime. He reappeared in short stories eventually collected in Trent Intervenes (1938) and in a second novel, Trent’s Own Case (1936). Despite Bentley’s exposure of ‘the impotence of human reason’, Trent’s Last Case paved the way for the ingenious detective puzzles created by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and a host of other writers whose detectives excelled at solving those puzzles through reason.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley succeeded his lifelong friend G.K. Chesterton as President of the Detection Club. His later work even included a story parodying Lord Peter Wimsey, ‘Greedy Night’, but his enduring contribution to the genre remains his debut novel. It has been filmed three times, most notably in 1952, with Orson Welles cast as Manderson. Trent’s Own Case (1936) was co-authored by Bentley and Herbert Warner Allen, a wine buff who had already created a sleuthing wine merchant called, in Bentley’s honour, Mr Clerihew. Mr Clerihew makes a guest appearance in the jointly written novel. Warner Allen’s own detective novels include The Uncounted Hour (1936).
In the Night
by Lord Gorell (1917)
In the Night, oddly neglected by many historians of the genre, is an early example of fair-play detective fiction. Lord Gorell sets out his manifesto in the foreword: ‘Every essential fact is related as it is discovered and readers are, as far as possible, given the eyes of the investigators and equal opportunities with them of arriving at the truth.’
Writing about the history of crime fiction in the preface to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928), Dorothy L. Sayers bracketed Gorell’s novel with Trent’s
Last Case, and with George Pleydell’s The Ware Case (a novel and play published in 1913, and filmed three times) when offering examples of one of the key strategies that detective story writers used to mislead readers. The method is ‘to tell the reader what the detective has observed and deduced—but to make the observations and deductions turn out to be incorrect, thus leading up to a carefully manufactured surprise packet in the last chapter.’
Gorell offers a country-house murder mystery of the kind that became highly popular during the Golden Age. Sir Roger Penterton, owner of Salting Towers, and a wealthy businessman with few friends and many enemies, is found with a head wound, lying dead in the hall. Inspector Emmanuel Humblethorne of Scotland Yard happens to be holidaying in the neighbourhood, and takes a hand in the investigation.
A prodigal son is among the suspects, and it is even possible that the butler did it. Soon Evelyn Temple, a young woman with ‘transparent vivacity and charm’ finds herself indulging in amateur detective work. But she, like Philip Trent, is confounded in the end. As Humblethorne points out, ‘the same facts can often be explained in several different ways.’
To help the reader grasp the detail of the layout of the scene of the crime, Gorell supplied a ground floor plan of Salting Towers. Soon, floor plans and maps became almost as common in whodunits as solutions in which ‘the least likely person’ proved to be the culprit.
The carnage of the First World War does not intrude on the storyline, although it had life-changing consequences for the author in the year the book was published. Ronald Gorell Barnes, the second son of the first baron Gorell, served in the Rifle Brigade, earning the Military Cross. In January 1917, his elder brother was killed in the conflict, and Ronald became the third baron Gorell. He was a man of many accomplishments: a journalist, poet and cricketer, who found time to serve as Under-Secretary of State for Air in the coalition government led by David Lloyd George. Four years later, he defected to the Labour Party, from which he was later expelled, along with Ramsay MacDonald.
He continued to write crime fiction intermittently, boasting that Arthur Conan Doyle said that The Devouring Fire (1928) ‘had him guessing completely’. Evelyn Temple eventually returned in Red Lilac (1935), in which her cousin’s unpleasant husband is murdered. Sayers praised the book, saying: ‘Lord Gorell has a nice ear for dialogue, and a light and pleasant touch with description.’ It has even been suggested that Gorell was a prototype for Lord Peter Wimsey. In the Night remains, however, his most significant contribution to the genre.
The Middle Temple Murder
by J.S. Fletcher (1919)
The Middle Temple Murder would nowadays be described as J.S. Fletcher’s ‘breakthrough’ crime novel. When President Woodrow Wilson read the story while recovering from illness and heaped praise upon it, Fletcher’s American publishers made the most of the encomium. Sales of his fiction surged, and he was for a time regarded in the US as the finest crime writer to have emerged since Arthur Conan Doyle.
Frank Spargo, who works for the Watchman newspaper, is walking home from Fleet Street early on a June morning in 1912 when he learns that a body has been discovered in the entrance to chambers in Middle Temple Lane. The victim, an elderly man, has been battered to death, but is still clutching a piece of paper bearing the name and address of Ronald Breton, a young barrister. Inspector Rathbury proves remarkably accommodating in providing Spargo with inside information about the case, and the journalist pursues his own enquiries with youthful vigour. Spargo discovers that the dead man had recently returned to England from Australia, and was seen in the company of a Member of Parliament called Stephen Aylmore. It emerges that Aylmore was an old acquaintance of the deceased, and his evasiveness arouses suspicion. The police arrest him, but Spargo persists with an investigation which ultimately takes him to the fell country of the north. There he finally discovers the identity of the killer.
Joseph Smith Fletcher was born in Halifax in 1863, and worked as a journalist and sub-editor (like Frank Spargo), sometimes writing under the by-line ‘A Son of the Soil’. He produced novels in the dialect of his native Yorkshire, guidebooks, poetry, biography and historical romances; his regional writing led to him being called ‘the Yorkshire Hardy’. As the twentieth century dawned, he began to concentrate on crime fiction, and The Adventures of Archer Dawe, Sleuth Hound (1909) gathered short stories about a Yorkshire detective; elements from one, ‘The Contents of the Coffin’, were refashioned for The Middle Temple Murder.
Spargo did not appear in any more novels, and although Paul Campenhaye, a ‘specialist in criminology’, appeared in a book of short stories, it was not until late in his career that Fletcher bowed to fashion and created a series detective, the London-based Ronald Camberwell. He died before completing his final novel, Todmanhawe Grange (1937), and the book was finished by Edward Powys Mathers, better known as ‘Torquemada’, a crossword compiler and crime fiction reviewer for the Observer.
Mathers explained in an introductory note that Fletcher ‘left clear notes outlining the third murder, indicating the party guilty of the first and second murders, and even providing the last sentence of the book.’
Fletcher produced considerably in excess of two hundred books in his lifetime; inevitably, the quality of his work fluctuated. He belonged to an older generation of writers than Agatha Christie and other dominant figures of the Golden Age, and his work began to seem dated even during his lifetime. After his death in 1935, his reputation went into steep decline, and has never fully recovered. The Middle Temple Murder remains, however, one of the most enjoyable crime novels of its period. The plot ingredients—false identities and long-ago swindles—often crop up in Fletcher’s work, but the book is skilfully structured. The pace and the plot twists (with the revelation in the closing paragraphs of an unexpected culprit) make for entertainment lively enough to take even a President’s mind off ill-health and the cares of office.
The Skeleton Key
by Bernard Capes (1919)
It is symptomatic of Bernard Capes’ successful yet unlucky life that his solitary, yet substantial, contribution to the crime genre was only published after his death in 1918; he died from heart failure after being struck down by the epidemic of influenza. Introducing The Skeleton Key, G.K. Chesterton highlighted the quality of Capes’ writing: ‘From the first his prose had a strong element of poetry.’ Julian Symons, in his seminal study of the genre, Bloody Murder, described the book as ‘a neglected tour de force’.
The story opens with an extract from a manuscript written by Vivian Bickerdike; further segments are interspersed with a third-person narrative throughout the book. Capes plays with viewpoint in order to heighten suspense and facilitate plot twists, just as Wilkie Collins had done long before in The Moonstone (1868), and as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and countless others (not least Gillian Flynn in the twenty-first-century bestseller Gone Girl) would do in the future.
Capes injected glamour into his story with a scene set in Paris, where Bickerdike meets the Baron Le Sage, an affable adventurer who plays chess for money. A road accident occurs, but its significance only becomes clear at the end of the book. A year later, the pair join a country-house party at Wildshott, the Hampshire seat of Sir Calvin Kennett. Le Sage’s Gascon valet, Louis Cabanis, quickly falls for an attractive under-housemaid, but she rejects his advances. Tension builds during a dinner conversation when Le Sage argues that ‘a successful crime is not a crime which baffles its investigators, but a crime which does not appear as a crime at all’.
Next day, a shooting party takes place. Shooting parties proved an invaluable pastime over many years for writers of country-house mysteries, ranging from the unlikely (Anton Chekhov’s entertaining novel of 1884, The Shooting Party) to the rather more conventional, such as two novels of 1934, John Ferguson’s The Grouse Moor Mystery, and J.J. Connington’s The Ha-Ha Case. The outcome is that a member of Le Sage’s household is shot dead.
Subtle touches of plotting as well as characterisation lift The Skeleton Key out of the ordinary. The story illustrates Chesterton’s claim that: ‘A detective story might well be in a special sense a spiritual tragedy; since it is a story in which even the moral sympathies may be in doubt. A police romance is almost the only romance in which the hero may turn out to be the villain, or the villain to be the hero.’
Bernard Capes worked as a tea broker before studying at the Slade School of Art. He edited a periodical called The Theatre, and later had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a rabbit farmer. He turned to fiction in his forties, novels and short stories pouring from his pen. His ‘strange stories’ were highly accomplished, and Chesterton, a lover of contradictions, pointed out the paradox that Capes ‘was insufficiently appreciated because he did popular things well.’
The Cask
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books Page 4
