Military service and rank were a source of great pride in the years between the two world wars. Sayers’ husband insisted on being called Major Fleming, although Sayers confided to her cousin that she thought he was only entitled to the rank of captain. It was a sensitive issue, and she dared not provoke his temper by questioning him about it.
Christopher Bush liked to be known as Major Bush. His real name was Charlie Christmas Bush, and he grew up in Norfolk, one of a family of ten. His father was a radical Methodist and also a poacher. Bush won a scholarship to a grammar school and did some poaching himself to help pay family bills. After taking a degree he married, and worked as a school teacher before and after a spell in the army. Photographed in uniform, he cut a dashing figure, complete with military moustache. In 1920, a teaching colleague called Winifred Chart gave birth to his son, Geoffrey, but Bush never had anything to do with the child. After Winifred’s death Geoffrey wrote to his father, but the letter was returned. This is sad, for Geoffrey Bush, who became a successful musician, also developed a taste for detective fiction. He wrote a Wimsey parody, and co-authored an excellent story, ‘Who Killed Baker?’ with Edmund Crispin, a talented post-war Detection Club member.
Christopher Bush wrote his first novel for a bet, rather like Christie and Douglas Cole. Soon he followed Berkeley and Rhode in writing about serial murders. Inspired by the letters supposedly sent by Jack the Ripper to Scotland Yard, The Perfect Murder Case set the template for whodunits in which a killer plays a game with the police. The Press and New Scotland Yard receive a letter from ‘Marius’ which opens: ‘I am going to commit a murder.’ The fair-play ethos lies behind the announcement: ‘By giving the law its sporting chance I raise the affair from the brutal to the human.’ Marius gives the date when the murder will occur, and says it will take place ‘in a district of London north of the Thames’, and describes his proposed crime as ‘the Perfect Murder’.
This is a superb device for a detective story, imitated countless times. Two more Marius letters follow, giving more clues as to the location of the killing, and causing a popular sensation which Bush captures vividly: ‘Flapperdom arranged murder parties at hotels. The Ragamuffin Club had a special dance gala and a gallows scene painted for it … Medical students organised a gigantic rag. An enormous fortune must have been laid in bets … What Marius had intended to be the sublime was likely to become the gorblimey.’
The authorities prove powerless to prevent the stabbing of wealthy and unscrupulous Harold Richleigh, and are left with a locked room mystery that does seem to amount to a perfect murder. All the likely suspects possess alibis. Much of the unofficial detective work is done by Ludovic Travers, the company’s financial wizard and author of Economics of a Spendthrift, ‘a work not only stupendous in its erudition but for the charm of its style a delight in itself’. Travers is widely regarded as a wealthy dilettante, but a clue he picks up proves crucial to the solving of the case.
The Perfect Murder Case boasted plentiful Golden Age trimmings, a plan of the crime scene, maps showing the prime suspect’s whereabouts, and a coded letter. A key element of the culprit’s plan anticipates the murderous scheme in Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies, published four years later. Travers eventually became a private inquiry agent, and his career in detection continued until the late Sixties. Bush was elected to the Detection Club two years before war broke out again. A publicity photograph taken of him in middle age shows a dapper man in a trilby, resembling a suave private eye.
Milward Kennedy’s bespectacled, serious appearance was misleading. A witty, affable man who served with distinction in the war, he received the Croix de Guerre before becoming the youngest male founder member of the Detection Club. Sayers had Lord Peter Wimsey praise his second novel, The Corpse on the Mat, and in the early Thirties Kennedy seemed destined to become one of the genre’s leading lights.
Kennedy was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and his real name was Milward Rodon Kennedy Burge. He served on the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and in the Egyptian Ministry of Finance before joining the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. The ILO was an agency of the League of Nations, set up following the Treaty of Versailles, which focused on achieving social justice in labour relations, and in 1924 Kennedy became director of the London office. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, shared his radical political sympathies, but the strength of their friendship was severely tested before the end of the Thirties.
His first crime novel, The Bleston Mystery, published under the name of Robert Milward Kennedy and co-written with A. G. Macdonnell, was a romp concerning a treasure hunt for a missing legacy. He was taken on by Gollancz, and adapted his pen name to Milward Kennedy for most of his subsequent work. Murder in Black and White, however, was published under another pseudonym, Evelyn Elder, and contains a ‘challenge to the reader’ in the style of Ellery Queen. An amateur artist takes a holiday in the south of France and becomes involved in a seemingly impossible crime. His sketches are reproduced, so that readers can try to solve the puzzle by studying them. Another Evelyn Elder book, Angel in the Case, included one of the most elaborate maps found in any Golden Age novel. Kennedy’s love affair with maps (and his tendency to complain about books lacking them) prompted John Dickson Carr’s jokey grumble: ‘I don’t see how he can carry his own copy to the newspaper office without a large-scale diagram of Fleet Street. That man could get lost in a telephone-box, and a journey by Underground would kill him.’
In 1931, Kennedy dedicated Death to the Rescue to Berkeley, drawing on conversations they and Sayers had at Detection Club dinners: ‘We have sometimes discussed the future of the Detective Novel. You, I believe, discern a new road – the “inner history” of the murder itself. You and Miss Sayers and others have given us masterly glimpses of that new road. But – will it not lead you away from Detection? … Can Detection in itself be the whole motive of a story? I suggest that you can write a novel which will prove that the answer is “yes”.’ The book offers something unique – if unrepeatable – in the genre. One aspect of it was, however, familiar, as Kennedy drew plot material from a controversial recent case.
On a Saturday evening in June 1929, Annie Oliver left her sixty-year-old husband Alfred, an expert on cigars, alone in their tobacconist’s shop in Reading. After taking her little Pekingese dog out for a walk, she returned to find Alfred lying in a huddle on the floor of the shop. He was holding a handkerchief to his mouth, and it was saturated with blood. Rushing over to him, she asked what had happened. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured, and lapsed into unconsciousness. He had been beaten badly, and died twenty-four hours later. The crime had more than one victim. The tobacconist’s shop was close to the County Theatre, where a creaky melodrama called The Monster was enjoying a brief run. Actor Philip Yale Drew, who played a detective, came under open suspicion from the coroner conducting the inquest. The jury, refusing to accept that anyone’s guilt was proved, returned a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown. Nobody was ever charged with the crime, and the coroner’s abuse of his power provoked a public outcry which led to a change in the law.
With Alfred Oliver’s murder as his starting point, Kennedy fashioned a complex story. Most of it is narrated by Gregory Amor, a rich and conceited middle-aged bachelor with an unhealthy interest in young women. When his new neighbours slight him, he embarks on a lengthy investigation into their past, and chances upon a link with an unsolved killing of an old woman more than two decades earlier. An actor called Garry Boon emerges as a prime suspect during the inquest, but Amor comes up with a succession of increasingly elaborate theories about the case. He hits upon the truth, but is too clever for his own good. A ‘locked room murder’ is committed, and the cleverness of the method defeats the agent of justice, who satisfy themselves that it is a case of suicide. The ending is powerfully ironic.
But in his quest for something fresh and dazzling, Kennedy overreached himself. The publication of Death to the Rescue led, a few ye
ars later, to catastrophe. Philip Yale Drew had not killed Alfred Oliver, but the actor came close to destroying Kennedy’s career as a novelist.
Notes to Chapter 14
Wade seemed, at first glance, a Colonel Mustard lookalike.
My account of Wade’s life and work has drawn on correspondence from Wade in my possession, Charles Shibuk’s ‘Henry Wade: a Tribute’ in The Armchair Detective, vols. 1.4 and 2.1, and an essay about Wade by Curtis Evans, kindly shared with me prior to its publication.
Valentine Williams, a former war correspondent
George Valentine Williams (1883–1946), a journalist who was awarded the Military Cross, reported on major events such as the Versailles Peace Conference and the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb before leaving his job as the Foreign Editor of the Daily Mail to write full-time. Late in his life, he worked for the Special Intelligence Service, vetting potential new recruits ranging from Malcolm Muggeridge to Kim Philby
He was not the first insider to write police stories.
A contender for the title of first professional police officer in Britain to establish a separate career as a detective novelist was Frank Froest (1858–1930), who was Walter Dew’s superior officer in the Crippen case, and who rose to become a Superintendent at Scotland Yard. Froest’s strength earned him the nick-name ‘the man with iron hands’ and he was said to be capable of tearing a pack of cards in half, and snapping a sixpence ‘like a biscuit’. During his retirement, he published several crime novels, notably The Grell Mystery (1913), which was filmed. Some of his books were officially co-authored by a journalist, George Dilnot (1883–1951), and it may be that Froest provided story ideas, and Dilnot wrote them up.
John Rhode’s life too was shaped by military service.
My outline of Rhode’s life and work has drawn on the researches of Tony Medawar and Curtis Evans, including the latter’s Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery.
Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, inspired by the Jack the Ripper killings and filmed by Hitchcock, had emphasised suspense rather than detection.
Even before the dawn of the twentieth century, serial killing was not unknown in crime fiction. John Oxenham’s A Mystery of the Underground, serialised in Jerome K. Jerome’s magazine To-Day, frightened readers with its account of a Tube-travelling serial killer with so much success that passenger numbers slumped. Oxenham was a pseudonym used by William Arthur Dunkerley (1852–1941) and later borrowed by his daughter Elsie, a popular author of children’s fiction.
Christopher Bush liked to be known as Major Bush.
I am indebted to Chris Garrod and Avril McArthur for sharing with me their researches into Bush’s life.
Edmund Crispin, a talented post-war Detection Club member
Crispin’s real name was Bruce Montgomery, and he also composed music for the Carry On films. He created the Oxford academic and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, and dedicated his most famous novel, The Moving Toyshop, to his friend John Dickson Carr. Another influence was Michael Innes, whose novel Hamlet, Revenge! features a character called Gervase Crispin. Crispin published eight novels in the Golden Age tradition before he was 32, but like Carr he was a heavy drinker, and Fen did not return for a quarter of a century. By then, the Golden Age was a distant memory, and Crispin’s touch had deserted him.
in the early Thirties Kennedy seemed destined to become one of the genre’s leading lights
Surprisingly little has been written about Kennedy’s life and work; a thorough study is overdue.
co-written with A. G. Macdonnell
Archibald Gordon Macdonnell (1895–1941), a journalist and playwright, was most celebrated for his humorous novel England, their England (1935). He wrote a handful of detective novels under the pseudonym Neil Gordon, one of which borrowed a notable plot device from John Rhode’s The Murders in Praed Street.’
15
Murder, Transvestism and Suicide during a Trapeze Act
The Detection Club’s initiation ritual appealed to members with a theatrical streak. Many of them loved acting – and pretending to be someone else was a way of guarding their secrets. Sayers, in particular, found herself leading a double life. To the world at large, she was a childless celebrity, an intellectual eccentric. In private, she was the mother of an unacknowledged illegitimate son, and trapped in an increasingly unhappy marriage.
Her performance became increasingly extravagant as she grew into the public persona she had created for herself. During her student days, she once watched five Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in a week while rehearsing for a play in which she took the lead role, and she yearned to become a playwright. Money was an added incentive. In an age when going to the theatre was, for many, as much a social obligation as attending church, a West End smash could earn a fortune for the playwright.
The power of the screen was less clear. Though countless television and cinema adaptations have since shown his concerns to be misplaced, Alfred Hitchcock thought Golden Age novels lacked emotion, and complained that ‘all the interest is concentrated in the ending’.
It is a pity Hitchcock was never invited to one of the Detection Club’s theatrical initiation rituals – he would surely have relished a close encounter with Eric the Skull. Apart from infuriating Berkeley with his mangling of Before the Fact, his closest link was perhaps through Frank Vosper, a playwright and actor whose suave good looks meant he was apt to be cast as an urbane villain. In Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vosper appeared as Ramon, the assassin. Later, he not only adapted Christie’s short story ‘Philomel Cottage’ into a play that was later filmed, Love from a Stranger, but also took the lead role of Bruce Lovell.
Vosper’s interest in criminology matched Anthony Berkeley’s, and he enjoyed attending trials at the Old Bailey. Venturing where Hitchcock feared to tread, he wrote a play based on the case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, both executed in 1923 for the murder of Edith’s husband. People like Us had a brief run at the Strand Theatre, but the daring subject matter was too much for the Lord Chamberlain’s office, a haven for prejudice until the late Sixties, and further performances were banned. People like Us did not resurface until long after Vosper died – a death that posed a real-life Golden Age puzzle.
Berkeley’s own ventures into the theatre achieved only modest success, whereas A. A. Milne had a West End hit with The Fourth Wall as well as several plays not in the crime genre. But the leading dramatist among the Club’s founder members was Clemence Dane, whose flair for visual writing proved ideally suited to film. She received an Academy Award for Vacation from Marriage, released in the UK as Perfect Strangers, the first Detection Club member to win an Oscar.
A book co-written by Dane and another Detection Club member, Helen Simpson, provided the basis for a rare Hitchcock whodunit movie. Dane was not primarily a crime writer, but she and Simpson shared a love of the stage, and this led them to co-write a mystery set in the world of the theatre. The book was called Enter Sir John, but while he was shooting a film version, the Master of Suspense opted for a title needing no explanation: Murder!
Murder! represented a milestone in crime films. Hitchcock’s third talking picture, it demonstrated his daring as a director. Despite his reservations about cinematic whodunits, the theatrical background and melodramatic potential of the storyline led him to experiment. As François Truffaut said in conversation with Hitchcock, Murder! is in essence ‘a thinly disguised story about homosexuality’ – complete with transvestism, and suicide during a trapeze act.
Hitchcock gave Herbert Marshall, playing the amateur detective, a stream-of-consciousness monologue about his role as a juror in a trial which seems destined to result in a beautiful woman being sent to the gallows. Familiar in the theatre, the monologue was a novelty in film, and Hitchcock showed his genius in a scene geared to the techniques of sound. Marshall is shaving while listening to music on his radio set. Since it was impossible to record the music later, Hitchcock had a thirty-piece orchestra
in the studio, behind the bathroom set, playing the Prelude from Tristan und Isolde. The film did well in London, but flopped in the provinces, and suffered a long period of critical neglect. Although some of the acting is hammy by modern standards, this is one of the better movies Hitchcock made before moving to Hollywood. After the Second World War, he filmed Under Capricorn, a costume drama set in nineteenth-century Australia, and based on a book Simpson wrote alone. But by then she was dead.
Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson were the Detection Club’s oddest couple. Dane, whose real name was Winifred Ashton, studied art in London and Dresden, and spent a few years acting under the name Diana Portis. When she turned to writing, she adapted her pseudonym from the name of a church in the Strand, St Clement Danes. Teaching in a girls’ school during the war furnished the background for her novel Regiment of Women. Dane’s book was an inspiration for Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, although, constrained by the mores of the time, Dane settles for a heterosexual ‘happy ending’. When Dane tried her hand as a playwright, A Bill of Divorcement made a topical contribution to the debate in the early Twenties about a legislative proposal to allow women to divorce if their husbands were alcoholics, insane or in prison.
She often wrote for radio, and Emlyn Williams, cast in a play she wrote about Shakespeare, described her as ‘an outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent … in a cascade of black to the floor, with a corsage of big happy flowers which accentuated her size.’
Dane kept any turbulent passions she may have felt hidden beneath her apparently naïve façade. Her friend Noel Coward later based the bumbling medium Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit upon her. She entertained Coward and others in their circle with her regular – and supposedly unintentional – faux-pas; she liked to describe herself as ‘randy’, when meaning to convey her liveliness and energy. On one occasion, this prominent feminist described the different sides to a person’s nature: ‘Yes, every man has three John Thomases – the John Thomas he keeps to himself, the John Thomas he shares with his friends, and the John Thomas he shows to the world.’
The Golden Age of Murder Page 22
