When crime was a spanking good read
THE detective story, the historian and biographer Philip Guedalla once commented, tongue only half in his cheek, is the normal recreation of noble minds. He was writing in the 1930s when the murder mystery was at the height of its popularity.
The years between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II have long been acknowledged as the Golden Age of detective fiction. What’s the best way for a modern historian of the crime genre to survey this Golden Age?
In his highly enjoyable new book, Martin Edwards has chosen to view the subject through the prism of the Detection Club — what he describes as ‘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’.
The club had its origins in dinners given for a few friends by the crime writer Anthony Berkeley in the late 1920s, but it soon developed into a semi-formal organisation.
It had rooms in Gerrard Street in Soho (at one point the landlord was a certain ‘J.P. Isaia, Human Hair Merchant, Importer and Exporter’, who himself sounds like a dodgy character from a period detective novel) and a ritual of initiation for new members at which robes were worn and flaming torches brandished.
Candidates for admission to the club were required to solemnly swear ‘never to conceal a vital clue from the reader’ and promise to ‘observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism… and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science’.
Their detectives had to avoid the use of ‘Divine revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God’.
Perhaps, most importantly of all, the candidates had to vow to ‘ honour the King’s English’, an oath some crime writers today ought to be forced to take.
Playing a central role in the ceremony was Eric the Skull, carried by the club’s official Skullbearer on a velvet cushion. It was wired up so that its eyes shone redly in the dark at the climactic moment.
Many pages of The Golden Age Of Murder are given over to three of the most prominent members of the Club. Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Anthony Berkeley were all active in it from the beginning and remained members until they died.
Edwards is clearly a devoted, if not uncritical, admirer of the trio and his
thoughts on the books of these giants of crime fiction are never less than interesting. He also delves into their private lives.
Dorothy L. Sayers had her troubles in the 1920s. While working in an advertising agency near Fleet Street (she was responsible for inventing the Guinness toucan), she began a chastely passionate relationship with another writer named John Cournos.
Cournos wanted it to be sexual. Sayers didn’t and the two split up. on the rebound, she involved herself with a married man she named ‘the Beast’.
Fearing perhaps that she would lose him as she had lost Cournos, she chose to go to bed with him. She became pregnant and the Beast, living up to his nickname, promptly deserted her.
UnABLE to tell the truth to her parents or to her employers, she took an extended holiday from the ad agency and gave birth to a son in secret. The boy was brought up by her much-loved cousin, Ivy, and was an adult before he knew the true circumstances of his birth.
Sayers’s pre- marital affair and illegitimate child were closely kept secrets, undivulged even to her most intimate friends in the Detection Club, and are probably still unknown to many of her admirers today. Reading about the lengths to which she went to preserve her secrets only emphasises how dramatically social mores have changed over 90 years.
Anthony Berkeley’s troubled misogyny, his tangled relationship with E.M. Delafield, author of Diary of A Provincial Lady (they were both married but, sadly for them, not to one another) and his taste for spanking are largely inferred from Edwards’s interpretations of his fiction.
In one tale, the detective-novelist character declares: ‘ What Ena needs is to be married to a great big he-man, who’d give her a sound thrashing now and then. That’s the only way to keep her in order.’
This makes for intriguing if debatable reading.
Berkeley has himself faded from prominence although, under the pen name of Francis Iles, he wrote one of the most influential books in the genre in Malice Aforethought, arguably the first psychologically convincing murder mystery of the Golden Age.
Another now largely forgotten author, John Rhode, was astonishingly prolific, publishing more than 140 books between 1925 and 1961. Renowned among his fellow Detection Club members for the ingenuity with which he despatched his characters, he must hold the record for Most outlandish Murder Method In Crime Fiction.
In his 1927 novel The Ellerby Case, a would-be murderer aimed (but failed) to polish off his victim through the homicidal use of hedgehog spines coated in green poison. one of Rhode’s books, Vegetable Duck, must also be a contender for Least Likely Title For A Murder Mystery — although it would probably lose out to Roger East’s 1935 masterpiece Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors. The Golden Age of Murder is a rewarding, if occasionally frustrating, read. At times, Edwards seems so determined to cram into it every piece of information he possesses about detective fiction between the wars that it’s difficult to discern any structure beneath the detail.
However, it would be churlish to cast too many aspersions on a work which celebrates its subject so generously and which will point all fans of the classic English detective story, those ‘noble minds’ of which Guedalla spoke, in the direction of books and authors they might otherwise miss.