The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards

The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written during this period, most of them inaccurate & quite lazy. The books were just puzzles, with cutout characters reminiscent of the board game Cluedo. Their authors didn't play fair with the reader, including untraceable poisons & mysterious Chinamen in an effort to bamboozle the reader. In reality, the best books of this period have been read & loved by millions of readers. Their plots, far from being cosy, featured serial killers, sadistic murders, plots based on real crimes of the period & the beginnings of the forensic thriller. The names of the greatest authors of the period - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh - are still well-known today. Their books are still read, we listen to audio books & radio productions & watch the many TV adaptations. Martin Edwards tells the story of the Golden Age through the history of The Detection Club & the authors who founded it & were its members. It's the story of a period of history & a group of writers that have always fascinated me.

The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of writers that included Christie, Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote under the names Anthony Berkeley & Francis Iles. The Club was an exclusive one. Members had to be proposed by a current member & approved by the committee. The initiation ritual, complete with members dressed in ceremonial robes & the swearing of an oath to uphold fair play in the plotting of the detective novel taken while holding a skull known as Eric, was all part of the game. The Club met for dinner & conversation several times a year in London & the meetings provided an opportunity for gossip about publishers, agents, sales, the topics that probably feature in the conversation of any group of writers. For some of the members, the Club provided an escape from the disappointments & problems of their private lives. Writing is a solitary occupation & the opportunity to talk shop with colleagues must have been another attraction.

The Golden Age of Murder focuses principally on three writers - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox. Much has been written about Christie & Sayers but I was especially interested to read more about Berkeley. He was an innovative novelist whose brilliant plotting was a feature of his work. Two of his books written under the pseudonym Francis Iles radically changed the conventions of detective fiction. In Malice Aforethought, the reader is in the confidence of the murderer from the beginning & the opening of Before the Fact tells us that Lina Aysgarth was married to a murderer before taking us back to the beginning of their relationship with this knowledge in our minds. Under the name Anthony Berkeley, he wrote a series of novels featuring Roger Sheringham, an amateur detective who usually gets everything wrong before finally coming up with the correct solution. Berkeley felt adrift after his war service & tried various jobs before becoming a writer. He was a contradictory personality, eccentric, obsessive, difficult. His private life was unconventional & this is something he had in common with other members of the Detection Club.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the private lives of the members. A theory I've heard several times about the Golden Age writers is that their interest & facility in writing detective stories came from the need to hide secrets in their private lives. Just last week, I listened to the latest episode of BBC Radio's Great Lives where Val McDermid discussed P D James, who gave a lecture on this theory. Christie famously disappeared for twelve days in 1926, distressed over the end of her first marriage. Even after her happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie, an intensely shy woman, shunned publicity. Sayers had an illegitimate son, whose existence she kept secret from all her closest friends. Her difficult marriage, to an alcoholic who had suffered from his war experiences, was another reason for her love of the Detection Club's dinners & the gusto with which she entered into the spirit of all the rituals & rules.

Edwards also mentions many other writers, some of them famous in their day but unknown now. Interestingly, as consultant to the very successful British Library Crime Classics series, Edwards has been instrumental in bringing some of these authors back into print. Christopher St John Sprigg, J Jefferson Farjeon & Freeman Wills Croft are just three authors mentioned in this book who have been brought back into print through this series. Another cliche of the Golden Age is that it was dominated by women writers, the Queens of Crime. Martin Edwards features many male authors of the period, some of them undeservedly obscure now. His knowledge of the period is exhaustive & obviously the product of many years reading & research. Martin's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name? bears witness to this interest with regular posts on forgotten books & interesting snippets of information from his ongoing research into this fascinating period of literary history.

It's impossible for me to encompass this book in a brief review. I haven't even mentioned the interest in true crime that led to the anthology, The Anatomy of Murder (recently reprinted), or the collaborative novels published by members of the Club (Ask a Policeman, The Floating Admiral) to replenish their funds & pay the rent on their Soho rooms. I enjoyed reading about the group dynamics of these projects, with Dorothy L Sayers bullying & cajoling members into writing their contributions & submitting their copy. The current members of the Detection Club (including Edwards who is the Archivist of the Club) are working on a group novel of their own called The Sinking Admiral in homage to the earlier book. There are also some fascinating photographs in the book, including one of my favourites of Dorothy L Sayers & Helen Simpson drinking beer & Gladys Mitchell in her other job as a PE teacher, instructing her pupils. The research that has gone into the book is phenomenal as can be seen by the rare illustrations & the detail in the footnotes.

I mentioned the British Library Crime Classics above & I've been reading a recent anthology, Capital Crimes, edited by Edwards, which throws light on a discovery in the book that I found really thrilling. Martin Edwards has discovered a connection between Berkeley & one of my favourite authors, E M Delafield, that has been previously unsuspected. I won't go into detail but the clues are there in Delafield's work if you know where to look. Although best-known today for her delightful Diary of a Provincial Lady & its sequels, Delafield had an interest in true crime & wrote a novel, Messalina of the Suburbs, about the Edith Thompson case (which disturbed & fascinated several of the Detection Club members). The story by Delafield in Capital Crimes, They Don't Wear Labels, is a revelation & just one example of the influence her friendship with Berkeley had on her own work.

The success of the British Library Crime Classics as well as the continuing popularity of adaptations of Golden Age novels attest to our love of this period of detective fiction. I'm just as fascinated by the authors as their books so The Golden Age of Murder has been a real treat for me. I think anyone who has read the novels of this period would find much to enjoy in Martin Edwards' book & the recent reprints by several publishers, including Dean Street Press, Langtail Press, Rue Morgue & Felony & Mayhem (featuring Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case this week) mean that if you've read everything Sayers, Christie & Allingham ever wrote, you have many more authors to discover.

The Anatomy of Murder - The Detection Club

I'm not a fan of contemporary true crime, much too gruesome, but I do enjoy reading about historical mysteries. This book, The Anatomy of Murder, is one of a series of books originally published in the 1930s that have been recently reprinted. The authors, all well-known detective novelists in their time, were also members of the Detection Club, an institution still in existence today. The Detection Club's archivist, Martin Edwards, is a distinguished detective novelist & has written the Introduction to this book. Martin has also written a history of the Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder, which is published next month.

The Anatomy of Murder explores seven murder mysteries from the Victorian period to the 1930s. There are well-known stories such as the murder of three year old Francis Saville Kent at Road Hill House (recently the subject of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale) (by John Rhode), the case of Adelaide Bartlett who was accused of poisoning her husband Edwin with chloroform (by Margaret Cole) & the murder of Julia Wallace (by Dorothy L Sayers).Then there's one that solved a bit of a puzzle for me. I'd always wondered who the Landru in the publisher's name Crippen & Landru was. Now I know. He was a Frenchman who, in the early 20th century, murdered at least a dozen women, leaving no trace of their existence. He chose his victims carefully, single women or widows with no family. He met them through the personal ads, looking to buy furniture, took them to his secluded country house & there, murdered them. How he disposed of the bodies isn't definitely known but these women were there one day & gone the next. It's a chilling story of a man with no remorse for what he had done. He never admitted his crimes & stayed calm throughout a lengthy investigation & trial.

The cases aren't confined to Europe. The first story, by Helen Simpson, is set in Australia in 1865. The story of Henry Kinder is a tale of a love triangle. Kinder was a heavy drinker & his death was first thought to be suicide. However, his wife's lover, Louis Bertrand, started making wild statements about the case & was eventually charged with Kinder's murder. Another case, in New Zealand, is the final story in the book. Freeman Wills Croft tells the story of the double murder of a sheep farmer, Samuel Lakey & his wife, Christobel. Christobel was found drowned in the dam on their property but this was obviously no accident. There was a wound on her face as though she had been knocked out & her body was found face down in the water, covered with sacks. The first idea was that Samuel had murdered his wife & fled, as he was nowhere to be found. However, through brilliant detective work & careful forensic examination of the crime scene, it became apparent that Samuel too had been murdered. The murderer's plan was clever but, as is often the case, just a few mistakes set the police on the right path. Proving it was the difficulty when physical evidence of Samuel's death was elusive.

My favourite chapter was on the murder of Julia Wallace, a case that, even today, is a cause of controversy. Just a couple of years ago, P D James came up with a new theory in the case (I haven't been able to read her article as it's behind a paywall but the main points of her theory are here). William Herbert Wallace was tried for the murder of his wife, Julia, in 1931. The case is baffling because, as Sayers writes, every fact can be interpreted in at least two ways. Wallace seemed to have no motive for the killing & his alibi was unusual. He was an insurance salesman & said that he had received a telephone message asking him to go to an address the next evening to meet a man about an insurance policy. The man & the address turned out to be fictitious but while Wallace was roaming around looking for this address, his wife, Julia, was battered to death in their home. Had Wallace himself made the phone call to establish an alibi or, had the murderer made the call to get Wallace out of the way?

Dorothy L Sayers looked at the case as a detective novelist & assessed the facts as if the story were a novel. The business with the phone call & the alibi is very like fiction but it was fact. The dilemma was in interpreting the facts. Wallace's behaviour - calling attention to himself repeatedly on the tram journey to the fictitious address, making sure his neighbours were with him when the body was discovered - could be interpreted as guilty or innocent. Witnesses who could have proved that Julia was alive after Wallace left the house were dismissed as mistaken or unreliable. If this had been a novel, Sayers or James would have been able to come down on one side or the other according to their plan but, in real life, it wasn't so easy. Wallace was acquitted but many people still believe him guilty & if he was innocent, the real murderer got away with his crime.

Frances Iles examines the Rattenbury case of 1935, where an elderly man was murdered by the lover of his much younger wife. Alma Rattenbury's case has been compared with that of Edith Thompson, who was hanged for the murder of her husband in similar circumstances even though she had not actually committed the murder or been aware of her lover's intentions. It was considered that Mrs Thompson was executed for adultery rather than murder & there was considerable sympathy for her at the time so Mrs Rattenbury's case was treated differently. As Iles says,

However, if it was the women of England who hanged Mrs Thompson, against all reason and all justice, then it was equally due to the women of England that Mrs Rattenbury was saved from the gallows; for if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.

Alma Rattenbury's life was ruined by the trial & the publicity & she committed suicide shortly afterwards. Although there was really no mystery about the murder itself, as George Stoner wasn't clever enough to even try to hide his guilt, it was a landmark case in that the personal life of the people involved was excluded from deliberations of the Court. The judge in the Rattenbury trial was determined not to make the same mistakes as his colleague had in the Thompson case. No matter what the judge, lawyers or jury may have thought of the morals of the accused, they didn't allow it to influence their decision.

A new anthology of true crime writing by members of the Crime Writers' Association, Truly Criminal, is about to be published. It includes essays by Catherine Aird, Peter Lovesey & a newly discovered essay on the Wallace case by Margery Allingham. I'm looking forward to reading it.