The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Old sins cast long shadows, as Preece discovers when he begins a stint as Medical Officer at Medbury Fort. The fort lies on the Thames estuary, one of the chain of forts forming the Thames and Medway defences before improvements to coastal defence artillery rendered it obsolete. Preece and Victor Wape are thrown together with Lepean, and the subaltern soon reveals himself to be an unscrupulous blackmailer who has learned Preece’s darkest secret.

  Preece finds himself driven to contemplate Lepean’s murder, and he devises a plan inspired by Israel Zangwill’s famous locked room story The Big Bow Mystery (1892). When Lepean is duly found dead in almost precisely the circumstances envisaged by Preece, Scotland Yard is called in. It soon emerges that Preece has something to hide, but a sequence of plot twists complicate his investigation. Preece proves not to be the only man present at Medbury Fort with a reason to kill Lepean, and the police are confronted with an unexpectedly testing puzzle of character, means and motive.

  The cast of suspects is small, but Limnelius handles his narrative with aplomb, engaging the reader’s sympathy with both the hunters and the hunted. His no-nonsense treatment of sex and violence is hardly in keeping with the lazily conventional view of Golden Age fiction as ‘cosy’, and the attention he pays to characterisation is equally striking. Why the novel has often been overlooked by historians of the genre is itself a mystery, but its merits were long championed by the late Robert Adey, the leading expert on locked-room mysteries and impossible crime stories.

  The authentic flavour of military life conveyed throughout the novel provides a clue to the author’s real identity; it is evident from the wealth of detail that Limnelius is painting an insider’s picture of the army. His real name was Lewis George Robinson, and during the course of a long and distinguished service career, he rose to the rank of Colonel before retiring due to ill-health. He published a handful of novels, including The Manuscript Murder (1934); as the title of The General Goes Too Far (1935) indicates, he continued to mine his experience of soldiers and their way of life for his fiction, but The Medbury Fort Murder remains his outstanding contribution to the genre.

  Murder of a Lady

  by Anthony Wynne (1931)

  Set in the author’s native Scotland, this intricate story opens in fine dramatic fashion with the Procurator Fiscal calling late one evening on Colonel John MacCullen. He brings news that Mary Gregor has been stabbed to death in nearby Duchlan Castle: ‘I have never seen so terrible a wound.’ The dead woman was found crouching by her bed, but there is no trace of a murder weapon. The door of her room was locked, and so were all the windows.

  A second murder follows, and suspicion shifts around a small cast of suspects. The book’s alternative title, The Silver Scale Mystery, refers to the puzzling presence of herring scales at the crime scenes. Luckily, MacCullen is playing host to Dr Eustace Hailey, who has a knack of solving apparently impossible crimes. The puzzle is cleverly contrived, and the explanation is not—as is often the risk with a locked-room mystery—a let-down.

  Hailey maintains that: ‘Detective work is like looking at a puzzle. The solution is there before one’s eyes, only one can’t see it…because some detail, more aggressive than the others, leads one’s eyes away from the essential detail.’ His focus was on criminal psychology, and in particular ‘the special stresses’ to which the murderer was subject prior to committing the crime.’ Hailey enjoyed a long career as a sleuth, first appearing in short stories in the mid-Twenties, and making his final bow in Death of a Shadow (1950). In an essay published in 1934, Wynne explains Hailey’s preference for working independently of the police: ‘My studies of crime are undertaken only because they interest me…I follow a line of investigation often without knowing exactly why I’m following it—it would be intolerable to have to justify and explain every step.’ Unexpectedly, he adds that: ‘The detection of crime, I think, is an art more than a science, like the practice of medicine.’

  His creator, like Hailey, knew a good deal about the practice of medicine. Wynne’s real name was Robert McNair Wilson, and he was a Glasgow-born physician specialising in cardiology who served as medical correspondent of The Times for almost thirty years. His publications ranged over a variety of scientific, medical and historical subjects. Politics fascinated him, and he twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate. Another abiding interest was economics, discussion of which intrudes into a novel with a teasing impossible crime scenario, Death of a Banker (1934); the first-edition dust-jacket blurb mused that: ‘It is possible that most of us, at one time or another, has contemplated the murder of a Banker…in this novel Mr Wynne shows us how it should be done—provided, of course, that there exists no Dr Eustace Hailey to undertake the solution of the crime!’ In the same year, Wilson published his less racily titled work of non-fiction, Promise to Pay: An Inquiry into the Principles and Practice of the Latter-Day Magic Sometimes Called High Finance.

  The definitive study of this sub-genre, Locked Room Murders by Robert Adey, lists no fewer than twenty-three books and stories written by Wynne which feature impossible-crime elements, typically involving ‘death by invisible agent’. The Hailey mysteries often display considerable ingenuity, but never matched the popularity of John Dickson Carr’s novels featuring Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. Carr’s stories derive much of their appeal from lashings of macabre—and splendidly evoked—atmosphere, and a good deal of humour. By contrast, Wynne’s stories often lacked verve. Murder of a Lady is enjoyable enough to suggest that this was due not to a lack of ability, but to his writing too much—a recurrent failing of Golden Age writers.

  The Hollow Man

  by John Dickson Carr (1935)

  John Dickson Carr wastes no time in telling readers of The Hollow Man (published as The Three Coffins in the US) what lies in store for them. In a dazzling first paragraph, he proclaims that the murder of Professor Grimaud and the equally impossible crime in Caglisotro Street were as baffling and terrifying as any in the casebook of his sleuth Dr Gideon Fell: ‘two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must have been not only invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.’

  The puzzles are skilfully constructed, but what lifts the novel into the highest rank of classic mystery is Carr’s flair for creepy atmospherics. Vivid descriptive writing, coupled with a host of small, deft touches (even names like Grimaud and Cagliostro have a memorable quality), contribute to the overall impression of baffling unreality. The crimes appear miraculous (might a vampire be involved? The book was originally to be called Vampire Tower); yet it is the promise of a rational solution which makes the story so gripping.

  In an extraordinarily bold move, Carr allows Fell in chapter seventeen to address the reader directly, giving a disquisition on the locked-room mystery that has often been reprinted as an essay on the subject: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not…Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuit possible to characters in a book…When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that’s merely prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened.’ Fell proceeds to offer an analysis of different types of locked-room scenarios so impressively detailed that it has never been surpassed.

  Gideon Fell’s vast physique, rumpled appearance and larger-than-life personality were conscious tributes to G.K. Chesterton, whom Carr much admired. Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the most perceptive reviewers of detective fiction, spotted
the parallels: ‘Chestertonian also are the touches of extravagance in character and plot, and the sensitiveness to symbolism, to historical association…to the crazy terror of the incongruous.’

  This is a remarkably assured novel, displaying in addition to its flair and originality the craftsmanship of an author who had already published more than a dozen books to widespread acclaim. Astonishingly, however, John Dickson Carr wrote it before reaching the age of thirty. And this reflects a truth about Golden Age detective fiction that has often been overlooked. Much of the best work of the period was produced by relatively young writers whose boundless energy and zest contributed significantly to the quality of the books—and their daring.

  Carr’s career as a published novelist began impressively with It Walks by Night (1930), which introduced the saturnine French investigator, Henri Bencolin. Many of his books about Sir Henry Merrivale—another detective with a flair for solving impossible crimes—equal the Fell novels in terms of quality; a notable example is The Judas Window (1938). The Merrivale books were generally published as by Carter Dickson; he also wrote as Roger Fairbairn. After the Second World War, he turned increasingly to historical mysteries, and his final book, The Hungry Goblin (1972)—sadly not in the same league as his early masterpieces—features Wilkie Collins as a detective.

  Chapter Six

  Serpents in Eden

  British crime writers have long recognised the potential of their green and apparently pleasant land as a backdrop for crime and mystery. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) makes superbly atmospheric use of a country-house setting as well as an eerie rural locale; the Verinders’ family seat in Yorkshire is close to the mysterious and dangerous Shivering Sands. In Conan Doyle’s ‘The Copper Beeches’, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson: ‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside…Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.’

  The rural idyll exerted a powerful appeal, not least for those who lived in towns and cities, although detectives escaping to the country or seaside in the hope of a little peace and quiet seldom found much respite from murder. In Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Hercule Poirot’s retirement to King’s Abbott to grow vegetable marrows proved short-lived. The story is narrated by the village doctor, as is Carter Dickson’s She Died a Lady (1943), set in wartime Devon, where a scandalous liaison between a married woman and a young actor leads to an apparent suicide pact. Sir Henry Merrivale, conveniently convalescing in the vicinity, is on hand to solve an ingenious mystery.

  Milward Kennedy was a leading exponent of the village mystery. In The Murderer of Sleep (1932), a mysterious stranger rowing along the river experiences a shocking introduction to a seemingly idyllic village, encountering ‘the vicar of Sleep, sitting under a weeping-willow beside his own church-yard, strangled’. In Poison in the Parish (1935), the exhumed corpse of an elderly woman reveals that she was poisoned by arsenic. The book opens with a ‘Prologue or Epilogue’ which reveals the final act in the drama, and both murder motive and final twist are unusual and pleasing.

  Among the deeds of hellish cruelty which became familiar elements in detective stories set in rural Britain was an outbreak of poison-pen letters. The neat plot of The Moving Finger (1942), a Miss Marple story set in a small market town, illustrates Christie’s ability to exploit stereotypes about gender for the purpose of mystification. Poison-pen letters also feature in Carter Dickson’s Night at the Mocking Widow (1950), Edmund Crispin’s The Long Divorce (1951) and Poison in the Pen (1955) by Patricia Wentworth, which all appeared during the Fifties. Yet the three books belong in spirit to the Golden Age, when the faintest whiff of scandal could destroy a cherished reputation and lead to social ostracism.

  The church stood at the heart of rural life, and a curate called Roger Cartwright assists in solving the murder of a village squire’s unpopular wife in The Bolt (1929) by P.R. Shore, which the publisher, Methuen, equipped with an attractive endpapers map of Ringshall village and its neighbourhood. Cartwright’s fellow amateur sleuth is the narrator, Marion Leslie, who is almost a younger version of Miss Marple. Shore was a pseudonym of Helen Madeline Leys, who wrote several books as Eleanor Scott, but only one other detective novel, The Death Film (1932).

  Members of the clergy served as victims, suspects, detectives—and sometimes as detective novelists with a taste for crime in rural settings. James Reginald Spittal wrote three novels as James Quince, including Casual Slaughters (1935), which starts and ends with a meeting of the Parochial Church Council. John Ferguson was a railway clerk who metamorphosed into a clergyman; his ministry took him to Guernsey, the setting for Death Comes to Perigord (1931). Cyril Argentine Alington, a royal chaplain who became Dean of Durham, produced a handful of detective novels, including Crime on the Kennet (1939). Canon Victor L. Whitechurch used a village pageant as a backdrop in Murder at the Pageant (1930), while in Father Ronald Knox’s first detective novel, The Viaduct Murder (1925), a golfing foursome stumble across a body lying close to the fairway.

  Golf and murder coincided regularly in the novels of Herbert Adams. Adams’ titles played relentless variations on his favourite theme: The Body in the Bunker (1935), Death off the Fairway (1936) and The Nineteenth Hole Mystery (1939). Death is No Sportsman (1938) by Cyril Hare is an angling mystery, as are Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice (1935), and Bleeding Hooks (1940) by the less-celebrated Harriet Rutland, a pen-name used by Olive Shinwell for three quietly accomplished detective novels.

  Shooting parties provided rather more obvious opportunities for homicide, and featured in novels such as J.J. Connington’s The Ha-Ha Case (1934), Henry Wade’s The High Sheriff (1937) and John Ferguson’s The Grouse Moor Mystery (1934), a low-key impossible-crime story. Like Ferguson’s novel, Cecil M. Wills’ Defeat of a Detective (1936), in which the identification of firearms is central to the plot, was set in rural Scotland; the book had endpapers decorated with an attractive map of Craigalloch Forest, supposedly drawn by ex-Detective Inspector Boscobell. In Ianthe Jerrold’s Dead Man’s Quarry (1930), a cycling holiday is rudely interrupted by the discovery of Sir Charles Price’s body in a quarry in the Welsh borders. Luckily John Christmas, a rich dilettante with a penchant for solving mysteries, is also vacationing in the area. As was a habit of Golden Age detectives, Christmas loves comparing himself to fellow sleuths, insisting: ‘All great detectives have simple, rural tastes. Sherlock Holmes kept bees. Sergeant Cuff grew roses. I, when I retire, shall cultivate the simple aster.’

  Even the humble walking tour was fraught with danger, as Harriet Vane discovered in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase. While striding around the south-west coast of England, she comes across the body of a murder victim. The book was published in 1932, the same year as the mass trespass at Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. This was arguably one of the most successful instances of civil disobedience in British history, reflecting the anger and impatience of those committed to ‘the right to roam’, and their hostility towards restrictions imposed by landowners.

  Such tensions spill into violence in Death in a Little Town (1935) by R.C. Woodthorpe; in the first chapter, local people take ‘direct action’ to tear down a fence erected by landowner Douglas Bonar, to block a public right of way. Bonar is soon found dead, apparently battered to death with a spade—a suitably bucolic end for a deeply unpleasant character. Ultimately, the culprit escapes the gallows, an outcome that is surprisingly common in Golden Age novels, despite the frequently made claim that the books are devoted to seeing the restoration of order to a society disrupted by murder. Woodthorpe, like Christie, Berkeley and many other writers of the period, was well aware that sometimes the legal system was an inadequate means of delivering true justice.

  Living in rural Britain between the war
s was often stressful. Mass unemployment caused many men without a job to roam the countryside, scavenging to survive; they cropped up in detective stories as ‘passing tramps’, often suspected of crime, but almost invariably proving to be innocent; their main function was to act as red herrings. Woodthorpe, skilled at social comedy, presented an appealing intellectual tramp in The Shadow on the Downs (1935), which again features a murder connected to the disturbance of rural life, this time the construction of a race-track on the Sussex Downs.

  The charm of Golden Age novels prompted W.H. Auden to confess in his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ that he found it ‘very difficult…to read [a detective story] that is not set in rural England’. Auden argued that: ‘Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town …’

  A generation later, Colin Watson, a crime writer rather less in sympathy with Golden Age fiction, coined the term ‘Mayhem Parva’ to convey a typical setting for traditional detective mysteries, a village that had ‘an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detectives, a village institute, a library, and shops—including a chemist’s where weed-killer and hair dye might be conveniently bought…there would be a good bus service for the keeping of suspicious appointments in the nearby town …’ For Watson, Mayhem Parva was ‘a mythical kingdom…It was derived in part from the ways and values of a society that had begun to fade away from the very moment of the shots at Sarajevo.’

  In modern times, writers as diverse as W.J. Burley (Cornwall), Ann Cleeves (Northumberland and Shetland) and Reginald Hill (Yorkshire and Cumbria) among others have made excellent use of rural backgrounds, successfully integrating those settings with their plots. Their work has reached large audiences when adapted for television, while achieving a level of realism seldom found in the Golden Age. In contrast, the body count in ITV’s Midsomer Murders may have reached absurdly high levels over the course of one hundred episodes, but at the time of writing, there is no sign that the public appetite for the series is sated. The appeal of crime fiction set in the British countryside endures.