A Very British Murder (26 page)

‘It’s not the crisis, it’s the Christie, that is keeping people awake at night.’

Newspaper advertisement for
Murder is Easy
, by Agatha Christie (1939)

BY THE 1930S,
the murder rate had fallen to the lowest level Britain had ever seen. Those crimes that did take place were usually linked to poverty, alcohol or domestic violence. And yet it seemed that more and more killings, usually in genteel and pleasant surroundings, were taking place in the pages of books. In 1934, about one-eighth of all the books published were crime novels. The decades between the two world wars saw a great explosion of fictional death by the novelists of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction. Their stories were ever more remote from real-life violence and true crime. In them, murders became tidy and domesticated, apparently causing little more upset than a lost cat.

And they wrote a great number of them. Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) is little known today, and primarily as the man who
created King Kong. In his time, though, he was a hugely popular and enormously prolific author who produced no less than 175 novels, including many detective stories. (It was said that if Wallace refused to take a telephone call on the grounds that he was writing a new book, the caller would gaily ask the operator to put him on hold: ‘I’ll wait until he’s finished!’) The size of Wallace’s output was extreme, but many of his colleagues had similar stamina. Some authors produced as many as three books a year. Dorothy L. Sayers did not work that fast – ten novels in twelve years – although she recognized that others had good cause: ‘There are many reasons which may prompt an author to produce books at this rate, ranging from hyper-activity of the thyroid to the grim menace of rates and taxes.’

She certainly read them at an alarming rate, though. In just two years, between June 1933 and August 1935, she reviewed 364 detective novels. Among those she covered for the
Sunday Times
were
Crime at Guildford, Poison in Kensington, Death on the Oxford Road, A Dagger in Fleet Street
and
Death at Broadcasting House
.

What was the cause of this fictional crime wave? The American critic Edmund Wilson, writing in
The New Yorker
in 1944, argued that the detective story had declined in inventiveness and creativity since the days of Dickens. But he noted that reading writers like Agatha Christie made people feel slightly better about living in an ever more dangerous world:

The world during those years was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it
seemed hopeless to try to avert … Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and – relief! – he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain … and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.

It seemed the pleasures of Golden Age detection were just the thing to steady the nerves after the First World War. At the turn of the twentieth century, old hands like Sherlock Holmes were still in business, but only just. His last full-length outing was published in serial form in 1914–15, and his absolute final appearance in a short story came in 1927 in the
Strand Magazine
.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s best work had been done within the constraints of the short-story format forced upon him by publishers such as the
Strand
. With the honourable exception of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1901–2), Sherlock is always sharpest in the short stories rather than the novels. His cases are not necessarily long-drawn-out murder investigations, but snappy little frauds, thefts and blackmails that can be neatly wrapped up in a few thousand words. The
Strand
gave Conan Doyle and Holmes a readership reaching half a million monthly.

Conan Doyle brought Holmes’s career to a halt in 1893 by killing him off after a tussle with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, falling to his death over a waterfall. Holmes’s creator had simply wanted to write something else: ‘I must save my mind for better things’, as he put it. It was commercial pressure from his publisher
that caused Conan Doyle to bring his hero back from the dead in 1901 to solve the case of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. This story, published in serial form in the
Strand Magazine
once again, had readers queuing up at the magazine’s offices to get their hands on the next number as soon as possible.

In the story, Sherlock Holmes lives secretly for several days in a prehistoric stone hut on the moors where a dangerous killer and a ‘supernatural’ hound roam at will, and ends up shooting the latter dead. Holmes had always had a wiry strength, despite his cerebral appearance, and he is very much a man of action as well as thought. His gallantry and heroism in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
belongs to the jolly variety of derring-do also to be seen in the Scottish politician and administrator John Buchan’s adventure stories:
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, set just before the First World War, and
Greenmantle
, set during it. So devoted to their duty are Buchan’s heroes with their stiff upper lips that it comes as no surprise to learn that Buchan also helped to write propaganda for the British war effort in 1914. Conan Doyle was likewise on the side of the British bulldog. Another later excursion of Holmes’s, ‘His Last Bow’, has him unmask a German spy on the very eve of the war. As Holmes puts it: ‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But … a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has passed.’

This combination of valour, patriotism and sportsmanship can also be seen in the exploits of Raffles, the daring gentleman thief
and adventurous hero of the
Strand Magazine
. Raffles was created by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. He’s a criminal, rather than a detective, but he has the physical prowess to represent England at cricket, and eventually volunteers for the Boer War. (In a nod to the importance of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, Raffles attempts to steal from it the items relating to his own career.) These, and other, adventure writers of the 1890s and 1910s seem to express and celebrate something of the blithe fighting spirit that convinced many to sign up for the trenches. As one sapper wrote to John Buchan of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, ‘the story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing’.

But what followed four years of fighting couldn’t have been more different. One could never imagine Hercule Poirot trekking across Dartmoor, sleeping rough or shooting anybody. (‘The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.’) Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and Richard Hannay, Buchan’s all-round action hero, would seem a little too butch for the more sinuous and hedonistic 1920s. The new-style detective novels of this era were deliberately unsensational, a better fit for a nation in mourning, where nearly every house had lost a son.

Even beyond the annual commemoration of Remembrance Day, the lasting effects of the Great War could not be ignored or avoided. Children were left orphaned, the surviving young men left wounded in ways both seen and unseen, young women left without partners. This is the background that should be born in mind when
the Golden Age writers are criticized – as they often are – for being limited or sterile or boring. They were writing not to challenge society or to stir things up. They were using their pens to heal.

By contrast to the bold, grand gestures of Richard Hannay’s or Raffles’s stories, the texture of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
(1926), Agatha Christie’s first success, is like a tightly woven tapestry. The
New York Times
summed up its demure appeal:

There are doubtless many detective stories more exciting and blood-curdling than
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, but this reviewer has recently read very few which provide greater analytical stimulation … the author does not devote her talents to the creation of thrills and shocks, but to the orderly solution of a single murder, conventional at that, instead.

Character, plausibility, violence and romance were not an important part of books like this. Their attraction was chaste and cerebral.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
is all about the plot, the clues and the pay-off: the pleasure and satisfaction felt when an elegant solution to the puzzle is revealed at the end. Christie herself explained that ‘a detective story is complete relaxation, an escape from the realism of everyday life. It has, too, the tonic value of a puzzle – it sharpens your wits’.

Christie’s breakthrough coincided with changes to reading habits and to the publishing industry that saw the short story published in magazines like the
Strand
being replaced by the longer
novel, and very often the novel involving crime. In Britain, the 1920s also saw the development of commercial libraries, such as those run by W. H. Smith or Boots, and publishing imprints such as Victor Gollancz’s ‘Gollancz Crime’ or William Collins’ ‘Crime Club’ met their voracious appetite for new books for circulation. Our archetypal image of a Sherlock Holmes reader is a man reading a magazine on the train on his way to work. By the 1920s, Everyman may well have driven to his place of employment, his opportunity for reading having been lost with the acquisition of a car, while his wife spent the afternoon reading a detective novel by a female author from the library.

While the literary marketplace could be lucrative, it was also crowded. With the exception of Agatha Christie, the writers of these crime novels of the 1920s and 1930s were not, on the whole, made vastly rich by their detectives. Dorothy L. Sayers left a very moderate estate of £36,277 when she died in 1957 and even Conan Doyle left an estate of only £63,491. And these were writers who mainly hailed from a middle-class background. Conan Doyle trained as a doctor; G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a journalist; the very successful Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) was a railway engineer.

One of the most distinctive features of the Golden Age is the fact that its longest lasting and best remembered writers were female. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – the four Queens of Crime – came, at least in retrospect, to dominate our picture of crime-writing in the 1930s. Why did these women come to the fore, and why are they still read
today more often than their brilliantly talented male counterparts Nicholas Blake and G. K. Chesterton? In part, it could have been the subject matter towards which they leaned: the detailed and the domestic, stories with lots of female characters, the layering up of a densely constructed plot through a process rather like knitting. Perhaps a more feminine view of the world was welcome after the violence of the First World War. Then there was the ‘problem’ of what the ‘spare’ women, left widowed or unmarried by the loss of a generation of males, should do with themselves in the absence of potential husbands. This sometimes turned out to be an opportunity to try new professions. Women (at least those over 30) now had the vote. They’d experienced the world of work while contributing to the war effort. They were stepping forward boldly in many areas of public life, and not least into publishing, and they brought their own experience with them. ‘To read the detective novels of these four women,’ P. D. James has written, ‘is to learn more about the England in which they lived and worked than most popular social histories can provide, and in particular about the status of women between the wars.’

What impresses about the four Queens is not so much their work (although I would make the case for Dorothy L. Sayers as one of the great writers of the twentieth century) but the way in which they set about doing it. They were all writing to make a living, of course; Christie herself makes very modest claims, calling herself ‘an industrious craftsman’. But more than that, she and her colleagues were also writing to make themselves heard, to stake a claim, to win an independence and a place in the world. They also all used
their writing, as P. D. James has pointed out, to keep secrets. All four women were in some way scarred by the earlier parts of their lives, and were reinventing themselves, through writing, into the successes that they later were.
^fn1

Ngaio Marsh (1885–1982), for example, born in New Zealand, was a person who moved easily between worlds. The actual year of her birth was in some doubt for many years as her father failed to register it at the time, and Marsh failed to elucidate matters. She studied art before travelling to England and embedding herself into a circle of aristocratic friends. Yet she was only observing, rather than participating, in debutante circles: her real passion was for the theatre. Her experience of country house life would transform itself, when she was nearly 40, into her first published novel,
A Man Lay Dead
(1934). It was one of many to follow featuring Roderick ‘Handsome’ Alleyn (he takes his name from the stage, being called after the Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn), a detective from Scotland Yard who often investigates crime in upper-class circles.