The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Politicians dropped like flies in books such as Murder of an M.P.! (1927) by Robert Gore-Browne, who came from a family with a tradition of political service, The Mystery of the House of Commons (1929) by Fielding Hope (an early pen-name of Graham Montague Jeffries, who went on to enjoy a prolific career writing as Bruce Graeme), in which three members of the Socialist Party meet their end in quick succession, Death of the Home Secretary (1933) by Alan Thomas, and Helen Simpson’s Vantage Striker (1931).

  Simpson’s novel, alternatively and more bluntly titled The Prime Minister is Dead (1931), reflects a keen awareness of the menace of fascism, as did satiric work such as Ronald Knox’s story ‘The Fallen Idol’, R.C. Woodthorpe’s Silence of a Purple Shirt and Punshon’s Dictator’s Way (1938), a flawed yet interesting novel which also swiped at City financiers who funded the bully boys. In Stanley Casson’s Murder by Burial (1938), an eccentric heritage association becomes a front for a crypto-fascist organisation.

  The political attitudes articulated, or hinted at, in classic crime fiction were often unsophisticated, as in Agatha Christie’s light-hearted early thrillers. Similarly, the political elements of Anthony Berkeley’s Death in the House (1939) are unenlightening, and although he supplied an impossible crime committed in Parliament, together with a ‘challenge to the reader’, the puzzle lacked his usual flair. We Shot an Arrow (1939) by George Goodchild and Carl Bechhofer Roberts features a by-election, and the authors are even-handed in killing off both the Conservative and Labour candidates. The characters discuss the Munich Agreement and the looming threat of war, but the story’s main interest lies in the authors’ remarkable decision to present themselves as the central characters in the story, an experiment that, perhaps wisely, they never repeated.

  Anthony Berkeley’s non-fiction polemic, O England! (1934), published as by A.B. Cox, examined ‘the causes of our present discontents, social and political: a book which affects every citizen personally’, and referred to ‘one great nation reverting to hooliganism and medieval Jew-baiting’, but his book received much less attention than G.D.H. Cole’s contributions to the Left Book Club, an imprint of Victor Gollancz. Berkeley’s attitude towards politicians was, in essence, to say ‘a plague on all your houses’, but he was by instinct a conservative, and so were Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Even those authors whose work made clear their political sympathies usually concentrated on writing an entertaining mystery. Any consideration of crime novels that, whenever written, emphasise political didacticism tends to suggest that they were wise to do so.

  The increasingly frightening international situation in the Thirties exerted a greater influence on traditional detective fiction than has been supposed. Crime writers have long been preoccupied with questions about the nature of justice, and an alarming number of Great Detectives, including Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and even Sir Clinton Driffield—a Chief Constable!—showed themselves willing, at one time or another in their long careers, to commit murder themselves if it was the only way to achieve true justice. In the Thirties, the circumstances in which murder could be morally justified were explored regularly by leading lights of the Detection Club, including not only long-forgotten figures such as Milward Kennedy and Helen Simpson, but also Christie, Berkeley, and John Dickson Carr. It was no accident that this upsurge of interest in ‘altruistic crime’ coincided with the rise and rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

  Vantage Striker

  by Helen Simpson (1931)

  When this unusual novel was published in the United States, its title—a term taken from tennis—was changed to The Prime Minister is Dead. Although one of Helen Simpson’s less-renowned books, it earned the admiration of the stringent American critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, who called it: ‘Not strictly detection, but a remarkable and witty story of politics, murder, English life and character. To say more would disclose the original theme—but watch that tennis game, and say whether suspense as now understood comes within miles of the quality generated there.’

  The first chapter is set in Whitechapel, where Dermot Boyne and Lady Sarah Benedict watch a boxing match before Dermot himself becomes involved in a fracas. As Dermot, who works for the International Office, subsequently confides to his friend, a doctor called James Stringfellow, he suffered a head injury in the war which makes him susceptible to outbursts of violent rage. A keen sportsman, he confines himself to lawn tennis: ‘there isn’t that physical contact to set me off’.

  Dermot is sent to deliver an urgent sealed despatch to the newly installed Prime Minister. Albert Edward Aspinall is a nonentity who has been elected in preference to the International Secretary, Julian Brazier, a brilliant but odious maverick. Brazier has made no secret of his hostility towards the new leader, shocking the House of Commons with a speech in which he proclaimed, ‘No great nation wants Peace with Honour; it wants Aggrandisement with Safety.’

  After Aspinall is found dead, apparently as a result of a blow to the head, Dermot’s struggles with anger management make him a convenient scapegoat, even though the evidence is thin. Simpson’s priority is to examine the complexities of human behaviour rather than to fashion a complex whodunit, and it is typical of this unorthodox story that, in the closing paragraphs, Stringfellow says: ‘If you want to find the villains of the piece, look in the Home Office and at Scotland Yard.’

  Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney but relocated to Europe, and studied briefly at Oxford before concentrating on a literary career, publishing verse, short stories, plays and a novel with criminous elements, Acquittal (1925). She married a prominent surgeon, Desmond Browne, who no doubt assisted with the medical elements of the plot of Vantage Striker. In the field of detective fiction she collaborated with Winifred Ashton, who was better known as the playwright and novelist Clemence Dane. Their first book, Enter Sir John (1928), introduced the actor-sleuth Sir John Saumarez, and was highly praised; in the US, Dashiell Hammett noted that the crime was ‘interestingly devised’. The story was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder!. The authors credited their publisher, C.S. Evans, for the plot, but gratitude did not deter them from producing a follow-up novel, Printer’s Devil (1930), in which a publisher is murdered. Sir John was a bit-part player in that book, but returned to centre stage in Re-enter Sir John (1932).

  Both Simpson and Dane became founder members of the Detection Club, but their interests ranged far beyond the crime genre. Simpson earned fame with historical novels such as Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935) and Under Capricorn (1937), which were filmed by Basil Dearden and Alfred Hitchcock respectively. She maintained a strong interest in detective fiction, working with her friend Dorothy L. Sayers on a supposed history of Lord Peter Wimsey’s family. Her enthusiasm for politics was reflected by her adoption as Liberal Party candidate for the Isle of Wight, but campaigning was interrupted by the outbreak of war, and shortly afterwards she succumbed to cancer.

  Silence of a Purple Shirt

  by R.C. Woodthorpe (1934)

  Publication of this novel, known as Death Wears a Purple Shirt in the US, coincided almost precisely with a large rally at Olympia held by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which resulted in a mass brawl between his black-shirted supporters and their left-wing opponents. R.C. Woodthorpe showed that witty detective fiction could highlight the absurd yet menacing nature of fascism more persuasively than chanting slogans or meeting violence with violence.

  Woodthorpe satirised Mosley and his followers in the form of the odious Duke Benedict and his purple-shirted ‘Make Britain Free’ movement. Henry Truscott, one of Benedict’s sidekicks, is bludgeoned to death during the course of a secret mission which takes him to the Dorset coast. The police arrest another fascist, Alan Ford, and Ford’s estranged wife seeks help from her uncle, the novelist Nicholas Slade.

  Politics are integral to the storyline and, in an acerbic tirade, Nicholas Slade tells Ford, ‘… in spite of the best efforts of
you and your fellow harlequins, this is not yet Russia or Germany or Fascist Italy. Let us have no more of this nonsense.’ Slade is ‘not overmuch in love with the established order of things. Indeed, he had satirized it in many of his books.’ But he prefers the status quo to the dismal prospect of a regimented life under the Purple Shirts.

  Slade also dismisses a suggestion that Britain is ‘a law-abiding country’, saying ‘I cannot remember a time, except, perhaps, during the war, when laws were not deliberately flouted in this country.’ He refers to the Nonconformists, with their passive resistance, the Suffragettes and ‘the army officers who mutinied in preference to coercing Ulster’, as well as giving examples (dear to Berkeley’s heart) of motorists who defy the speed limit and those who take part in illegal lotteries. This unconventional approach to the law and justice is reflected at the end of the book, when someone who had committed murder is not only allowed to remain unpunished, but to bask in public admiration.

  Ralph Carter Woodthorpe exploited his experience as a schoolmaster in his first detective story, The Public School Murder (1932), having abandoned teaching for journalism in the Twenties. He spent three years on the staff of the Daily Herald, and wrote a daily humorous column, experience which informed his second detective novel, A Dagger in Fleet Street (1934). More interested in social comedy with a political edge than in plotting and detection, his personal favourite among his novels was the non-criminous London is a Fine Town (1932).

  Nicholas Slade, in some respects a fictionalised version of his creator, started his literary career with a popular novel whose success came to haunt him, as his ‘name was known to everybody, though his works, with one exception, were read by nobody’. Slade enjoys playing the amateur sleuth, while Woodthorpe was keen on solving crossword puzzles. The dust-jacket blurb of the American edition of the book forecast that Slade ‘will inevitably come to occupy a niche in the gallery of immortal detectives of fiction’. Even by the standards of publishing hyperbole, this forecast proved wildly inaccurate. Slade appeared only once more, in The Necessary Corpse (1939), an indifferent thriller featuring American gangsters; as usual in Golden Age fiction, their presence was a clue to the inferiority of the story. Despite being elected to the Detection Club in 1935, Woodthorpe soon abandoned the genre to ‘vegetate in Sussex’, where he returned to teaching, and relaxed by playing in chess tournaments.

  The Nursing Home Murder

  by Ngaio Marsh and Henry Jellett (1935)

  The experience of undergoing major surgery caused Ngaio Marsh to reflect on a patient’s vulnerability. This reality lay at the heart of ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’, a horrific story written by Arthur Conan Doyle more than forty years earlier. Marsh adapted the scenario to the form of the classic whodunit, with the Home Secretary on the operating table, surrounded by people with cause to hate him. Sir Derek O’Callaghan duly succumbs to a lethal dose of hyoscine. But who administered it?

  The novel opens in 10 Downing Street, with a Cabinet meeting at which O’Callaghan sponsors a Bill designed to impose drastic curbs on anarchists determined to bring down the government. Like Sir Philip Ramon in The Four Just Men, he is a target for political assassination, and when he collapses in the House of Commons, suffering from peritonitis, his enemies are presented with their opportunity. Nurse Banks, an unsympathetically portrayed ‘Bolshie’, launches a diatribe against the dead man: ‘He’s directly responsible for every death from under-nourishment that has occurred during the last ten months. He’s the enemy of the proletariat.’

  Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates, and he and his associates attend a late-night meeting at Lenin Hall, Blackfriars, improbably masquerading as communist sympathisers. Tall, handsome and impeccably polite, Alleyn does not escape Nurse Banks’ wrath: ‘I know your type—the gentleman policeman—the latest development of the capitalist system. You’ve got where you are by influence…you’ll go, and all others like you, when the Dawn breaks.’

  Marsh undertook her one and only collaborative novel in partnership with a doctor. While undergoing surgery in her native New Zealand, she had been attended by Henry Jellett, an Irish gynaecologist who became a friend. She started work on the book during her convalescence, with Jellett supplying the necessary technical expertise. The pair adapted the story into a stage play, Exit Sir Derek, for the final act of which the doctor produced ‘a startlingly realistic false abdomen with an incision and retractors’. Marsh later related that the luckless actor playing the patient was actually clamped by mistake, and lay in agony throughout the scene. She, Jellett and other friends also collaborated on a musical, There She Goes, but Jellett made no other contribution to the crime genre.

  The Nursing Home Murder is a crisp, uncluttered mystery with a closed circle of suspects, but despite writing with a light touch, Marsh made it clear that her story took place in troubled times. Nurse Banks and a chemist called Sage see political upheaval as the only solution to society’s ills, while another character is a passionate advocate of eugenics. The book helped to establish Marsh alongside Christie, Sayers and Margery Allingham as one of the new ‘Queens of Crime’ and, according to her biographer Margaret Lewis, it ‘outstripped all her other titles in sales’. The concept of death on the operating table was later brilliantly exploited by Christianna Brand in Green for Danger.

  Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and her lifelong devotion to the theatre is reflected in many of her detective novels; the truth about O’Callaghan’s death strikes Alleyn once he appreciates the parallel between an operating theatre and a theatre for performance in front of an audience. Alleyn, known to the Press as ‘the Handsome Sleuth’, is the author of Principles and Practice of Criminal Investigation, and when he meets New Zealand police officers after becoming involved in a case of murder in a theatrical company in Vintage Murder (1937), the local cops assure him that ‘We’ve all been trained on your book.’ During Artists in Crime (1938), he meets Agatha Troy, a painter, whom he subsequently marries. Despite Nurse Banks’ dire prediction, Alleyn survived to enjoy a career spanning almost half a century. After Marsh’s death, The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries became a popular BBC TV series in the Nineties.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Scientific Enquiries

  Science and technology play a crucial role in the detection of crime, as they do in mystery fiction. As the twenty-first century dawned, the leading forensic entomologist Zakaria Erzinçlioglu argued in Maggots, Murder and Men (2002) that Arthur Conan Doyle ‘was a pioneer forensic scientist…His Sherlock Holmes stories, which emphasised the central importance of physical evidence in criminal investigations, were actually used as instruction manuals by the Chinese and Egyptian police forces for many years, and the French Sûreté named their great forensic laboratory at Lyon after him. He transformed the very way criminal investigators thought about their work.’

  Doyle was a doctor, and he modelled Holmes’ deductive methods on the work of Dr Joseph Bell, whose lectures emphasised the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. L.T. Meade, previously known for her stories set in girls’ schools, began to compete with Conan Doyle by writing ‘medical mysteries’ for the Strand magazine, and many of her best stories benefited from the technical know-how of that perennial collaborator, Robert Eustace. Eustace was another doctor, as were Richard Austin Freeman and John James Pitcairn, who co-authored two books under the name Clifford Ashdown at the start of the twentieth century. When he began to write on his own, Freeman created Dr John Thorndyke, often described as the greatest of scientific detectives.

  The authenticity of the science in Freeman’s work, a major part of the appeal of Thorndyke’s cases, impressed Dorothy L. Sayers but was less influential on Agatha Christie; her focus was not on forensic detail, despite the inventive use she made of the knowledge of poisons acquired while working as a nurse in a dispensary during the First World War. C.E. Bechhofer Roberts sought technical guidance from an expe
rt when creating the scientific genius A.B.C. Hawkes, but the A.B.C. stories emphasise entertainment rather than realism.

  The British public developed an insatiable thirst for information about forensic science after the forensic pathologist Bernard Spilsbury came to public attention through giving evidence for the prosecution in the Crippen trial of 1910, a thirst that has not been quenched to this day. Sayers’ fascination with forensic science is illustrated by the presence of Sir James Lubbock, a Home Office analyst, in both the Wimsey canon and in The Documents in the Case. In one of Sayers’ novels, the presence of Thorndyke stories in the library of a suspect is a clue to guilt. The way in which arsenic poisoning works is central to Strong Poison (1930), while forensic dentistry plays a part in ‘In the Teeth of the Evidence’.

  J.J. Connington, who earned distinction as a chemistry professor long before he tried his hand at detective fiction, admired the Meade-Eustace stories as well as Freeman’s, and his impressively varied expertise is demonstrated time and again in his work, for instance with a pre-Photoshop scheme to fake photographs in The Sweepstake Murders (1931) and love letters in a cipher created by a Braille-writing machine in A Minor Operation (1937). As Connington said in his memoirs, ‘In scientific research, the Inquirer plays the part of the detective in real life.’ Both a scientist and a detective novelist, he said, need to have a logical mind.

  His later books continued to reflect changes in technology, and in The Counsellor (1939), he introduced a new investigator. Mark Brand is a popular radio personality, broadcasting via Radio Ardennes, and operating from a suite of offices in Oxford Street. As ‘the Counsellor’, he answers listeners’ problems (‘social, financial, ethical medical, legal and sporting’) with the help of a multi-talented support staff, including a struck-off solicitor, an expert in racing tips, and even an analytical chemist. In his first recorded case, he investigates the disappearance of a young woman, and uncovers a convoluted criminal conspiracy. As usual with Connington, technical expertise plays a crucial part in the solving of the mystery. At one point, Brand instructs his aides to ‘arrange for the loan of a small epidiascope’; at another he explains how to commit murder by carbon monoxide poisoning. Connington was making a valiant attempt to keep up with the times, but Brand made only one more appearance, in the enjoyably complicated ‘blazing car mystery’ The Four Defences (1940), before Sir Clinton Driffield returned.