The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books Read online

  Times were changing. In 1912, the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic resulted in the death of one of the most talented American writers of detective fiction, Jacques Futrelle. The tragedy also seemed to herald a transition from confidence to unease and uncertainty. At much the same time, novels such as At the Villa Rose signalled the changing nature of crime fiction. A.E.W. Mason’s book was inspired by a real-life murder case, and so was Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger.

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  The detective short story was giving way to the detective novel. As crime writers struggled with the challenge of maintaining suspense and an air of mystery for the whole length of a novel, they experimented with techniques that their successors would refine. The significance of these developments went far beyond much-increased word counts. The genre was undergoing a metamorphosis that opened up opportunities for a brand new type of crime writing.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

  Sherlock Holmes is so closely associated with Victorian London’s foggy, gas-lit streets in the popular imagination that it is surprising to realise that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote more stories about him in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. Similarly, more of his cases were recorded after his apparent demise at the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final Problem’, in 1893, than before.

  The idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles came from a young journalist (and occasional crime writer) called Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who told Doyle about a legend concerning a gigantic hound which terrorised the people of Dartmoor. The two contemplated co-authorship, but the story needed to be built around a compelling central character. Once Doyle decided that the material suited Sherlock Holmes, it became inevitable that he would write the book alone, although Robinson shared in the proceeds. Holmes experts disagree about the precise date when the story was set, but Doyle was untroubled by the fact that he had killed off the great detective: ‘there was no limit to the number of papers he left behind or the reminiscences in the brain of his biographer’.

  The story opens with a superb tour de force of deduction from the evidence of a walking stick (a ‘Penang lawyer’) left by a caller at 221b Baker Street, Dr James Mortimer. When Mortimer returns, he reads out to Holmes and Watson a story in an old manuscript about the ancient curse of the Baskervilles, and a recent newspaper account of the mysterious death of Mortimer’s friend and patient, Sir Charles Baskerville. No signs of violence were found on Sir Charles’ corpse, but there was ‘an almost incredible facial distortion’. Mortimer reveals that he found footprints close to the body: ‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’

  Sir Henry Baskerville, last of the line, is determined to live in the family home on Dartmoor, but Mortimer fears that ‘every Baskerville who goes there meets with an evil fate’. Are they victims of a diabolical curse, or is there a more rational explanation? Holmes agrees to investigate.

  Atmospheric and gripping, The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best of the four long stories about Holmes, although the structure is unsatisfactory, with Holmes off-stage for too long. Melodramatic elements such as the hereditary curse hark back to the Victorian ‘novel of sensation’, and it is easy to identify the villain. But Conan Doyle was not writing a tightly plotted whodunit of the kind that was to become so popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction. His fascination with the macabre, and his brisk, memorable descriptions of people and places, suited him ideally to writing short stories.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote tales of historical romance, horror and the supernatural, as well as non-fiction, but his fame rests primarily on his creation of the most famous of all detectives. Shortly after The Hound of the Baskervilles was published (it was serialised in the Strand magazine in 1901 before appearing in volume form the following year), the offer of a huge fee persuaded him to bring Holmes back from the dead in ‘The Empty House’ in 1903, and Holmes stories continued to appear until 1927. To this day, the great consulting detective enjoys worldwide popularity, fuelled in part by successful film and television adaptations, and a never-ending flow of pastiche stories by authors who find the appeal of the character, and the chance to write in Watson’s distinctive narrative voice, impossible to resist.

  The Four Just Men

  by Edgar Wallace (1905)

  The Four Just Men launched Edgar Wallace’s career as a popular novelist in a blaze of publicity—and scandal. While working as a journalist for the Daily Mail, Wallace came up with the idea of writing a crime novel with a difference: the public was to be invited to solve the mystery. A man whose reckless self-confidence was matched only by his energy and vivid imagination, he dashed off the novel in a burst of feverish activity, but found it harder to interest a publisher than he had expected.

  Undaunted, he set up his own business, the Tallis Press, and published the story himself, with a massive advertising campaign, including the offer of prizes totalling £500 to readers who deduced the correct solution to the mystery. The book was bound with a detachable competition form at the back, but the interactive publicity stunt proved so successful that it almost ruined Wallace financially. A large number of correct solutions were sent in, and he could not afford the prize money. His delay in announcing the winners led to suggestions that he was a swindler. To avoid bankruptcy, he had to borrow the money from Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail. He sold the copyright in the book cheaply, and failed to profit from later sales.

  The Four Just Men amounted to an innovative example of the ‘challenge to the reader’ which—stripped of cash prizes—became a popular feature of later detective stories. Wallace’s thriller was not only highly topical at the time it first appeared, but also, more than a century later, seems strikingly modern in its concerns—immigration and international terrorism.

  A shadowy group, the ‘Four Just Men’ threaten to kill the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Philip Ramon, if he does not abandon the Aliens Extradition (Political Offences) Bill. The new law will, they claim, ‘hand over to a corrupt and vengeful government men who now in England find an asylum from the persecution of despots and tyrants’. Ramon, cold-blooded but courageous, refuses to bow to intimidation, and the authorities take every precaution to protect him. The tension mounts as Wallace evokes the febrile atmosphere of a London gripped by fear of anarchy and assassinations. When death occurs, it takes place in a locked room, and appears inexplicable.

  The attitudes of the Four Just Men seem, to say the least, morally ambiguous, and when Wallace resurrected them in later books, he aligned them more closely with the forces of law and order. A later move towards respectability has often been made by the genre’s anti-heroes, but it is striking that the leading exception to the rule, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, remains the most memorable and consistently interesting homicidal protagonist.

  The Four Just Men’s ambivalent nature reflected the personality of their creator. Even when Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace became not merely a bestselling author but a high-profile celebrity, he remained a maverick and an outsider, rather than a pillar of the establishment. His gift for capturing a scene or character in a few vivid strokes compensated for the often slapdash nature of much of his work. For all his success, his extravagance meant that he died in debt, while working in Hollywood on the film King Kong. Like the fictional ape, Wallace was larger than life, and doomed to die too soon.

  The Case of Miss Elliott

  by Baroness Orczy (1905)

  In 1901, Baroness Orczy published ‘The Fenchurch Street Mystery’, which introduced an unusual and distinctive detective, the Old Man in the Corner. This was the first of a series of half a dozen magazine stories, ‘Mysteries of London’, which were swiftly followed by seven more stories, each concerning mysteries in major cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Dublin. The stories about the Old Man in the Corner were eventually revised and collected in three volumes, of which The Case of M
iss Elliott was the second in chronological terms, but the first to be published.

  The Old Man sits at the same table in an ABC tea shop (one of a large chain of popular self-service tea shops operated by the Aerated Bread Company) on the corner of Norfolk Street and the Strand. There he drinks milk, eats cheesecake and fidgets incessantly with a piece of string. He acts as an armchair detective, with a ‘Watson’ who is a female journalist, originally unnamed but later called Polly Burton. The focus of the stories is on solving the puzzles rather than on ensuring that the guilty are punished for their crimes. The Old Man is not one of those detectives with a passion for justice, and he is dismissive of the forces of law and order, maintaining that the police ‘always prefer a mystery to any logical conclusion, if it is arrived at by an outsider’.

  The title story is typical of the series as a whole, as Polly and the Old Man discuss the discovery in Maida Vale of the body of a young woman, Miss Elliott, whose throat had been cut. The dead woman was clutching a surgical knife in her clenched hand, and at first it was unclear whether she had committed suicide or had been murdered. Miss Elliott was matron of a convalescent home, and then, as now, the finances of care homes were often in a perilous state. The Old Man has stirred himself to attend the inquest, where he learns enough to deduce the truth about a seemingly perfect alibi.

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  The Old Man is conceited and misanthropic, and even, it appears, capable of committing murder and getting away with it. The story-telling formula, although inherently limited, was neat and original, and the book enjoyed considerable popularity; it was included in the tiny library taken by Sir Ernest Shackleton on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1915. In later years Orczy wrote a further set of stories about the Old Man which were collected in a third volume, Unravelled Knots (1925), but by then his moment had passed.

  Baroness Orczy liked to be called ‘Emmuska’; her full name was Emma Magdolna Rozalia Maria Jozefa B0rbala Orczy di Orci. She was born in Hungary of noble descent, and moved to Britain with her family in 1880. She was a talented artist, but found fame and fortune as a writer, eventually earning enough money to buy an estate in Monte Carlo. Her increasing focus on historical fiction meant that she contributed little of note to the crime genre after the First World War. She became a founder member of the Detection Club, established in 1930, although by that time her main claim to literary fame lay in her stories about Sir Percy Blakeney, alias the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  Tracks in the Snow

  by Godfrey R. Benson (1906)

  Godfrey Benson enjoyed a career of distinction before and after making a solitary venture into crime fiction. Tracks in the Snow: Being the History of a Crime is narrated by Robert Driver, rector of a country parish, and opens crisply: ‘On the morning of the 29th of January, 1896, Eustace Peters was found murdered in his bed…Much mystery attached to the circumstances of his death. It was into my hands that chance threw the clue to this mystery.’

  Peters is a former official with the Consular Service who retired early after years spent in the East, inherited a country house, Grenville Combe, and indulged himself in the leisure pursuits of an Edwardian gentleman. On the last night of his life, his guests were Driver, an Irishman called Callaghan, a German businessman called Thalberg, and the wealthy, enigmatic William Vane-Cartwright. By the time Driver awakes the next morning, snow lies on the ground outside Grenville Combe, and the master of the house has been stabbed to death. Footprints found in the snow appear to implicate the dead man’s gardener, Reuben Trethewy, who had recently expressed a wish to kill his employer. Trethewy is arrested, but it soon becomes clear that the explanation for the crime lies elsewhere.

  The quest for the truth about Peters’ death proceeds at a leisurely pace characteristic of its period. Driver, appointed the dead man’s executor, stumbles across correspondence which points the finger of guilt at one of his fellow supper guests, and despite a number of twists in a tale of jealousy and revenge, the identity of the culprit is easy to spot. Benson was not trying to write a complex whodunit, but simply to tell, as his subtitle indicates, a story about a crime with its roots in the past, and in lands far distant from England.

  More than a year passes before the criminal is brought to justice, but occasional moments of tension occur, as when Driver is accompanied on an evening stroll by someone he believes to be a double murderer: ‘It is not safe to be dealing with a desperate man, but, if you happen not to pity him, it is not a disagreeable sensation.’

  Godfrey Rathbone Benson was educated at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford, and became a lecturer in philosophy at Balliol. A man of many parts, he served as Liberal MP for Woodstock and later as Mayor of Lichfield, and held various public offices. His biography of Abraham Lincoln is to this day admired for its focus on character analysis and political philosophy. After Benson was elevated to the peerage in 1911, editions of Tracks in the Snow appeared under the name of Lord Charnwood. Later it sank into oblivion, but Benson’s thoughtful, well-crafted prose, his insights into human behaviour, and the way in which the story touches on issues such as free will and the ramifications of Britain’s imperial past combine to make his brief venture into the crime genre notable.

  Israel Rank

  by Roy Horniman (1907)

  A polished and distinctive novel, Israel Rank is a black comedy whose cynical and ruthless narrator resorts to multiple murder with a view to inheriting a fortune. The story formed the basis of one of the most admired British films of the twentieth century, so it is surprising that the book has often been overlooked by historians of crime fiction. Subtitled The Autobiography of a Criminal, the book’s ironic and amoral flavour is neatly captured in a preliminary note by the eponymous narrator: ‘I am convinced that many a delightful member of society has found it necessary at some time or other to remove a human obstacle, and has done so undetected and undisturbed by those pangs of conscience which Society, afraid of itself, would have us believe wait upon the sinner.’

  Israel Gascoyne Rank is the son of a woman who has ‘married beneath her’; she is a member of the aristocratic Gascoyne family, and her husband is a Jewish commercial traveller. Israel is a dark and handsome young man who, despite being baptised a Christian, suffers because of anti-Semitism. He becomes obsessed with his remote connection to the Gascoyne peerage, and ascertains that eight lives separate him from the earldom. Of his decision to remove everyone who stands in his way, he explains coolly: ‘I am not conscious of a natural wickedness staining and perverting all my actions. My career has been simply the result of an immense desire to be somebody of importance.’

  Israel’s relentless progress towards his goal makes for a compelling narrative, but in the years after Horniman’s death, Israel Rank faded from the public mind. Graham Greene, working as an editor, included it in the Century Library, a series of reprints of unjustly forgotten books, and in 1949, a year after its reappearance in print, it formed the basis for the Ealing Studios black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. Robert Hamer’s screenplay differed greatly from the novel, with Israel Rank transformed into Louis Mazzini, whose father was an Italian opera singer, and a brand new (and superior) conclusion. The changes may have been influenced by a desire, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to avoid any debate as to whether the portrayal of such a ruthless and egotistic (if charming) murderer was anti-Semitic.

  The novel is edgy and provocative, perhaps reflecting the author’s complex personality. Horniman devoted much of his life to vigorous campaigns for unpopular causes, and overall, it seems fair to regard his book as a condemnation of anti-Semitism, rather than some form of endorsement of it, while there is something quite modern about the book’s flourishes of irony.

  Roy Horniman, the son of a naval paymaster, became an actor and playwright, and was at one time tenant and manager of the Criterion Theatre. A wealthy bachelor and admirer of Oscar Wilde, he was prompted by a distaste for profiteering
by private rail firms to write How to Make the Railway Companies Pay for the War, which ran to three editions. A vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist and crusader against censorship, he was closely associated with several charities, especially in the field of animal welfare. His other books included The Viper (1928), in which a sociopathic confidence trickster resorts to murder in the hope of profiting from an inheritance, but among his varied achievements, Israel Rank remains supreme.

  The Blotting Book

  by E.F. Benson (1908)

  Morris Assheton, who has returned to live with his mother at the comfortable family home in Brighton after four years at Cambridge, is heir to a fortune. He will come in to the money if he marries with his mother’s consent, and in any event when he reaches twenty-five. The two trustees in charge of the funds are solicitors in partnership, the seemingly benevolent and plausible Edward Taynton, and the younger, sharper Godfrey Mills.

  Morris declines Taynton’s suggestion that he should check through the accounts of the trust, which is precisely as Taynton had hoped, since otherwise, as he says to his partner, ‘you and I would find it impossible to live elsewhere than in the Argentine Republic, were we so fortunate as to get there’. The two lawyers have unwisely gambled Morris’ money on a hopeless investment in South African mines, and their attempts to recover their losses have ended in financial disaster.