The Golden Age of Murder Read online

  The New Zealander was spellbound. The Orator cleared her throat and began to speak. She administered a lengthy oath to a burly man in his sixties. This secretive and elitist gathering had elected him to preside over their affairs, and he pledged to honour the rules of the game they played:

  ‘To do and detect all crimes by fair and reasonable means; to conceal no vital clues from the reader; to honour the King’s English … and to observe the oath of secrecy in all matters communicated to me within the brotherhood of the Club.’

  As the ritual approached its end, the Orator lifted her revolver. Giving a faint smile, she fired a single shot. In the enclosed space, the noise was deafening. Her colleagues let out blood-curdling cries and waved their weapons in the air.

  The eyes of the skull lit up the blackness, shining with a fierce red glow.

  Stunned, the New Zealander found herself unable to speak. Her companion, familiar with the eccentric humour of crime writers, laughed like a hyena.

  The visitor from New Zealand was Ngaio Marsh, who became one of her country’s most admired detective novelists, as well as a legendary theatre director. Her escort, Edmund Cork, was her literary agent, and he also represented Agatha Christie. The Orator who led the procession was Dorothy L. Sayers, and the bearer of the skull was another popular detective novelist, John Rhode. The satiric ritual followed a script so elaborate that Sayers, its author, thoughtfully supplied an explanatory diagram. The occasion was the installation of Edmund Clerihew Bentley as second President of the Detection Club.

  Ngaio Marsh remembered that night for the rest of her life. Long after she returned home, she dined out on stories about what she had seen, embellishing details as time passed, and memory played tricks. In one account, she identified the setting for the ritual as Grosvenor House; in her biography, written in old age, she said it was the Dorchester. She also made conflicting claims about whether or not she met Agatha Christie that night. Detective novelists, like their characters, often make suspect witnesses and unreliable narrators.

  Dorothy L. Sayers and John Rhode with Eric the Skull, photographed by Clarice Carr (by permission of Douglas G. Greene).

  The Detection Club annual dinner, presided over by G.K. Chesterton.

  The Detection Club was an elite social network of writers whose work earned a reputation for literary excellence, and exerted a profound long-term influence on storytelling in fiction, film and television. Their impact continues to be felt, not only in Britain but throughout the world, in the twenty-first century. Yet a mere thirty-nine members were elected between the Club’s inception in 1930 and the end of the Second World War. The process of selecting suitable candidates for membership was rigorous, sometimes bizarrely so. The founders wanted to ensure that members had produced work of ‘admitted merit’ – a code for excluding the likes of ‘Sapper’ and Sydney Horler, whose thrillers starring Bulldog Drummond and Tiger Standish earned a huge readership, but were crude and jingoistic.

  Those thirty-nine men and women were as extraordinary an assortment of characters as the cast of Murder on the Orient Express. They included some of the country’s most famous authors of popular fiction: not only the creators of Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, but also authors better known for writing about the Scarlet Pimpernel or Winnie-the-Pooh. Detection Club members came from all walks of life. Several had fought in the First World War and suffered life-changing harm, some played a prominent part in British political life. Members ranged from right-wing Tory to red-blooded Marxist, and everything in between. The aristocracy was represented, along with the middle and working classes, and the Anglican and Catholic clergy.

  The Club’s first President, G. K. Chesterton, is currently regarded as a potential candidate for canonisation by the Pope – even though today he is remembered less for his spirituality than his detective fiction. The lives of his colleagues, for all their surface respectability, were much less saintly. Several were promiscuous, two had unacknowledged children. Long before homosexual acts between men were decriminalized, there were gay and lesbian members, as well as a husband and wife literary duo – one of whom nursed a passion for a young man who eventually became leader of the Labour Party. And one cherished a secret fantasy about murdering a man who stood between him and the woman he adored.

  The movers and shakers in the Detection Club were young writers who at first pretended to write according to a set of light-hearted ‘rules’. This symptomized the ‘play fever’ that swept through Britain after the First World War, when games as different as contract bridge and mah-jongg captured the popular imagination, and crossword puzzles were all the rage. After the loss of millions of lives in combat, and then during the Spanish flu epidemic, games offered escape from the horrors of wartime – as well as from the bleak realities of peace. Economic misery seemed never-ending. The national debt ballooned, and politicians imposed an age of austerity. Industrial output fell, and so did consumer spending. The cost of living soared, and so did unemployment. The threat of slashed wages for miners led to Britain’s one and only General Strike, and the ruling classes had to cling to wealth and power by their fingertips. The sun had not quite set on the British Empire, but this was the twilight of the imperial era. While Bright Young Things partied the night away, millions of ordinary people couldn’t sleep for worrying about how to pay their bills.

  Detective stories offered readers pleasure at a time when they feared for the future. As the Wall Street Crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering end, writers prided themselves on coming up with fresh ways of disguising whodunit or howdunit, but the most gifted novelists itched to do more, to explore human relationships and the complications of psychology. The work of Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan, became influential. The social mores of the Thirties prevented novelists from writing graphic sex scenes, but strong sexual undercurrents are evident in many of the best detective stories of the Thirties, above all in the extraordinary final novels of Anthony Berkeley and Hugh Walpole. Increasingly, Detection Club members relished breaking the so-called ‘rules’ of their game. They experimented with the form of the novel, deploying untrustworthy narrators as well as unexpected culprits. Their books reflected social attitudes and political change, more than they intended, and more than critics have realized.

  Three remarkable people became the Club’s leading lights. In the vanguard was Sayers, brilliant and idiosyncratic as any maverick detective. By her side stood Berkeley, crime fiction’s Jekyll and Hyde – suave and scintillating one minute, sardonic and sinister the next. And then there was Agatha Christie, a quiet, pleasant woman who was easy to read unless you wanted to know what was going on in her mind.

  Christie’s legendary ingenuity with plot was matched by Berkeley’s biting cynicism about conventional justice and his obsession with criminal psychology. Sayers, a woman as forceful as she was erudite, believed the detective story could become something more than mere light entertainment. ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said shortly after its formation, ‘it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’

  Appearances are deceptive. When we look at pictures of Christie and Sayers today, we usually see the women in their later years: respectable, well-upholstered, grandmotherly. The few published photographs of the publicity-hating Berkeley show a dapper fellow, wearing a trim moustache in his younger days, bald and pipe-smoking in later life. How tempting to fall into the trap of dismissing them as strait-laced middle-class English people. Yet in private, they led extraordinary lives and endured disastrous marriages. All three took secrets to the grave.

  Their novels are often sneered at as ‘cosy’, and the claim that their characters were made from cardboard has become a lazy critical cliché. The very idea that detective fiction between the wars represented a ‘G
olden Age’ seems like the misty-eyed nostalgia of an aged romantic hankering after a past that never existed. Many argue that the quality of crime fiction written today matches, or surpasses, that of any other period. But today’s writers often owe something to their predecessors, and the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularized, not by some genteel old lady or retired brigadier, but by John Strachey, a young Marxist who later became Minister of War in the post-war Labour government.

  Strachey recognised that the best detective novels of the Thirties were exhilarating, innovative and unforgettable. They explored miscarriages of justice, forensic pathology and serial killings long before these topics became fashionable (and before the term ‘serial killer’ was invented). Many of the finest books defied stereotypes. The received wisdom is that Golden Age fiction set out to reassure readers by showing order restored to society, and plenty of orthodox novels did just that. But many of the finest bucked the trend, and ended on a note of uncertainty or paradox. In some, people were executed for crimes they did not commit; in others, murderers escaped unpunished. The climax of one of Berkeley’s novels was so shocking that when Alfred Hitchcock came to film it, even the legendary master of suspense, the man who would direct Psycho, lost his nerve. He substituted a final scene that was a feeble cop-out in comparison to Berkeley’s dark and horrific vision.

  Sayers, Berkeley and Christie came to detective fiction young – in their late twenties and early thirties. All three were full of energy and imagination, fizzing with fresh ideas. Each was an obsessive risk-taker. The First World War changed them, as it changed Britain. After the bloodshed of the trenches, writers craved escapism just as much as their readers. Though their stories often seem as artificial as they are ingenious, Sayers, Christie and Berkeley were intent on transforming the genre. Along the way, they fought against personal catastrophes, and suffered spells of deep despair. The lonely nature of their work – no publicity tours, no fan conventions, no glitzy awards ceremonies – contributed to their torments. Thanks to Detection Club meetings, writers found new friends who shared their literary enthusiasms. Not only did members eat, drink and talk together – they wrote and broadcast together, raising money by collaborating on crime stories in unique cross-media initiatives. For Sayers and Christie in particular, the Detection Club became a lifeline.

  Christie’s controversial eleven-day disappearance in 1926 is by far the most high profile of the numerous disasters that befell Club members, affecting their writing as well their lives. Much as they wanted to promote their books, they were determined to keep their personal lives out of the public gaze. Many hid their private agonies in a way impossible in the age of paparazzi and Press intrusion, and of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Beneath the façade of middle class respectability lay human stories as complex and enthralling as any fiction.

  Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were fascinated by murder in real life. True crime stories influenced and inspired them. And they did much more than borrow plot elements from actual cases. There is a long tradition of mystery writers undertaking detective work for themselves – from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, to P. D. James’s re-evaluation of the murder of Julia Wallace, and Patricia Cornwell’s investment of two million dollars in her efforts to establish that Walter Sickert really was Jack the Ripper. Other than Conan Doyle, however, none have investigated real-life mysteries with the zeal of the Detection Club in the Thirties.

  Anyone researching the Club must navigate a labyrinth of blind alleys and wrong turnings. The challenge is to unravel three sets of mysteries – about the books, the real-life murder puzzles, and the dark secrets of the writers’ personal lives. All are woven together in a tangled web.

  The simpler riddles are literary. Who wrote the first serial killer mysteries? What game did Club members play with a superintendent from Scotland Yard? Who pioneered the novel of psychological suspense? How did Anthony Berkeley anticipate Lord of the Flies?

  Trickier questions arise about real-life crimes. Did a young woman’s horrific death trigger Berkeley’s infatuation with a married magistrate? Why was Christie haunted by the drowning of the man who adapted her work for the stage? What convinced Sayers of the innocence of a man convicted of battering his wife to death with a poker? And what did she make of the blood-stained garment that supplied a vital clue in the murder investigated by the legendary Inspector Whicher?

  Detection Club members seldom confessed to writing about themselves, or the increasingly fragile social order to which they belonged. Yet they scattered hints throughout their writing, just as their fictional culprits made mistakes that gave away their clever schemes. We can deduce more from reading between the lines of the books than the authors realized.

  Which novelist wrote a secret diary in an unbreakable code? How did two famous writers conduct a forbidden love affair through hidden messages in their stories? Why did Sayers and Berkeley suddenly abandon detective fiction at the height of their fame? Clues, outlandish as any ever picked up by Poirot, lurk in the unlikeliest settings – an inscribed first edition, a unique form of shorthand, a murderous fantasy transformed into fiction, even the abdication of a king.

  Christie once hinted she was guilty of ‘crimes unsuspected, not detected.’ Sayers found herself confronting a blackmailer. And Berkeley fantasized about murdering the man who stood between him and happiness. Searching for the truth about this gifted trio is as enthralling as any hunt for fictional culprits.

  After a series of economic earthquakes on a scale not seen for generations, uncanny parallels exist between our time and the years between the wars. This is the perfect moment for a cold case review of the Detection Club: to unmask the Golden Age writers and their work, against the backdrop of the extraordinary times in which they lived.

  Notes to Chapter 1

  In one account, she identified the setting for the ritual as Grosvenor House; in her biography, written in old age, she said it was the Dorchester.

  The former version of events, referred to by Joanne Drayton, in Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, seems more reliable than Marsh’s later recollection in Black Beech and Honeydew. The ritual has been held at a variety of prestigious venues in central London over the years. By coincidence, it currently takes place at the Dorchester.

  Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan

  Freud ‘relished in particular Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express’: Paul Roazen, ‘Orwell, Freud and 1984’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1978.

  ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said

  In Christianna Brand’s Introduction to the 1979 edition of Sayers’ The Floating Admiral.

  the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularised … by John Strachey

  The first use of the term seems to be in Strachey’s ‘The Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, The Saturday Review, 7 January 1939. Another Marxist critic, Ernest Mandel, echoed Strachey forty-five years later in Delightful Murder: ‘The inter-war period was the golden age of the detective story.’ Over the years, there has been extensive debate about the distinction between ‘detective stories’, ‘crime novels’, and ‘mysteries’, but precise and satisfactory definitions of the differences between them have remained elusive. For the sake of simplicity, the terms are treated broadly as synonyms in this book.

  2

  A Bitter Sin

  One dark November day in 1923, Dorothy Leigh Sayers sat in her London office, rehearsing a lie until it sounded like the unvarnished truth. She excelled at playing with words, and making things up, whether in advertising copy or detective fiction. Now her imagination faced its sternest challenge. The daughter of a vicar and a devout Christian, she possessed fierce moral principles and an acute sense of sin, but she felt afraid and alone, and saw no alternative to deceiving the people she worked with. She hated what she was doing, but desperation drove her to bury her scruples.

  She had
invented a mysterious illness to justify taking eight weeks off work, hoping none of the men she reported to would enquire too closely into the medical problems of a valued female member of staff. This was the first step in an elaborate charade, designed with the same attention to detail she lavished on her fictional mysteries. Family and friends must be fooled as well.

  Sayers worked for S. H. Benson Ltd, an advertising agency based in Kingsway Hall, close to the newspapers of Fleet Street, and ten minutes from her flat in Great James Street. Her room sat at the top of a steep and slippery spiral staircase made of iron which looked stylish, but was a death-trap for anyone unlucky enough to lose her footing. One day, she would turn that staircase into a fictional murder scene. Benson’s boasted an eclectic roster of clients, and had been quick to adopt fashionable American methods of ‘psychological’ and ‘scientific’ advertising. In her first published piece of copy, which she admitted was ‘a tissue of exaggeration’, Sayers extolled the virtues of ‘Sailor Savouries’. Soon she was rhapsodizing about ‘Lytup’ handbags and Colman’s Starch.

  Innovative and industrious, Sayers was perfectly suited to her job. She liked the way the copywriters were collectively known as the ‘Literary Department’, and the buzz and gossip of office life reminded her of student days in the common rooms of Oxford. Philip Benson and his management team regarded her highly, and some thought Dorothy’s talents might one day take her all the way to the boardroom. Her colleagues regarded her as eccentric but gifted, an outspoken bluestocking with a startlingly earthy sense of humour. None of them knew she was nursing a secret which she dared not allow to leak out.

  Disaster had struck at a time when life brimmed with exciting possibilities. Publishing her first detective novel fulfilled a long-held ambition, and although sales were modest, Benson’s had raised her salary to six pounds ten shillings a week, and promised a bonus. Even her troubled love life had taken a turn for the better. Although a man she adored had deserted her, a new lover turned up to offer the sexual satisfaction she craved. She nicknamed him ‘the Beast’.