A Very British Murder (30 page)

7. The detective himself must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

[Conan Doyle himself said of his second most famous creation: ‘Watson never for one instant as chorus and chronicler transcends his own limitations. Never once does a flash of wit or wisdom come from him.’ This is fundamentally unfair to Watson, and all his sidekick colleagues, though. Of course what he offers is not intellectual intelligence but emotional intelligence. Watsons bring warmth and humanity to their cerebral but cold-hearted superiors. A. A. Milne had a more charitable and fairer definition of a Watson: ‘a little slow, let him be, as so many of us are, but friendly, human, likeable’.]

10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

This idea of detection as a game, played out more often than not in an upper-class, country house setting, would take its final physical
form in the board game Cluedo, which was produced in 1949 by the Leeds-based company Waddingtons. The game’s setting, the Tudor mansion, and its players – Miss Scarlett, Colonel Mustard, Mrs White, Reverend Green, Mrs Peacock and Professor Plum – are instantly recognizable. But Cluedo had its forerunners in the 1930s, a decade which also saw the flourishing of brain-teasers such as crossword puzzles, jigsaws and publications such as
The Baffle Book
.
^fn1

What sort of relationship did the work of the Detection Club have with the real-life crimes of their day? It was certainly not such a close intertwining of fact and fiction as we saw with Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. In fact, the murders that caught the attention of the detective story writers were those which accidentally seemed to embody the spirit of the Ten Commandments, and which presented an intricate puzzle. One of these was the murder of Julia Wallace, in Liverpool, in 1931.

Julia’s husband, William Herbert Wallace, was an agent for an insurance company. One day he received a telephone message calling him to a meeting at a potential client’s house. He spent the evening of 20 January 1931 searching in vain for the address he’d been given, asking directions of various people who could (conveniently) later confirm his presence in the area. He’d been
instructed to go to a house in Menlove Gardens East. Despite the existence of Menlove Gardens West, and Menlove Gardens North, there was no such street. Once Wallace had finally established this, he returned home – only to find his wife, Julia, bludgeoned to death in her own sitting room.

The case against Wallace was highly circumstantial. It depended on persuading the jury that he had constructed the whole Menlove Gardens business as an elaborate alibi to get him clear of his home at the time the deed was done. However, Wallace had the misfortune to dress habitually in black, to look impassive in court, and to have been overheard stating his views that the jurors were all fools. They found against him. In an unprecedented fashion, though, their verdict was overturned by the judge, who thought it quite unacceptable to condemn a man to death on such flimsy evidence.

In the spirit of Thomas De Quincey in the previous century, many novelists praised this particular crime for providing them with entertainment and inspiration. The case caught the interest of the Detection Club because so much of the argument rested on timings and telephone calls and tram rides and the asking of directions – all common ingredients of the classic whodunit. Dorothy L. Sayers even wrote an article setting out all the possible suspects and motives for the killing of Julia Wallace that reads very much like the denouement ‘in the library’ at the end of a detective novel. She pointed out that the evidence in the case could be read in two completely contrasting ways: either William Herbert Wallace was the culprit, or else he was framed: ‘it is like a web of shot silk, looking red from one angle, and green from another’. ‘The Wallace case,’ wrote Raymond Chandler, ‘is the
nonpareil
of all murder
mysteries.’ As a brain-teaser, he thought, it ‘is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable’.

But the final piece of evidence to emerge seems to confirm Wallace’s innocence. He died only a couple of years after his wife. Despite his official discharge, his life had been ruined, and he’d had to move away from his old neighbourhood because of the suspicion with which he was treated by former friends. In a private diary discovered after his death, he had written about how much he missed his wife, and of his belief that the real murderer was still at large.

On his own front porch, Wallace wrote, he expected one day to see a figure ‘crouching and ready to strike’, and ‘it will be that of the man who murdered my wife’.

THE SOCIABLE, WELL-ORGANIZED
and commanding Dorothy L. Sayers seems to have been the prime mover behind the Detection Club, and its order of ceremonies bears her distinctive and ironic tone of voice. The Club possessed several props, including the red robe of the President, black candles and a human skull called Eric, with red bulbs in his eye sockets.

The first President of the Club, and first wearer of the robes, was G. K. Chesterton. At some point in the 1960s the original robe was damaged or lost at a meeting held at the Savoy Hotel, and the hotel itself took responsibility for providing a new one, which still remains in use today. Its generous size is said to have been dictated by the generous measurements of Chesterton himself.

During the ‘Ritual’ for the initiation of new members, ‘Eric the Skull’ would be carried into the darkened clubroom, his glowing
eyes powered by batteries. Ngaio Marsh described one such initiation ceremony, which took place at Grosvenor House in 1937:

A door at the far end opened (as all doors in detective novels open) slowly. In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes lit by a single taper. She mounted the rostrum. Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown she secreted a large automatic revolver … in came the others in solemn procession bearing lighted tapers and lethal instruments. There was the warden of the blunt instrument – a frightful bludgeon, the warden of the sharp instrument – I think it was a dagger – the warden of the deadly phial, & last of all John Rhode
^fn2
with a grinning skull on a cushion.

The meeting then began, as they all did (and still do) with the President calling out, ‘What mean these Lights, these Ceremonies, & this Reminder of our Mortality?’

Candidates wishing to join the Club would have to make certain elaborate vows:

‘Do you promise that your Detectives shall well and truly detect the Crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon nor making use of Divine Revelation,
Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?’

‘I do.’

‘Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a Vital Clue from the Reader?’

‘I do.’

‘Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?’

‘I do.’

On the occasion that Ngaio Marsh attended, high drama ensued. After the new member had sworn the oath:

Without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11 pm on a summer evening Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter. The others uttering primitive cries, waved their instruments, blunt sharp & venomous, & John Rhode, by means of some hidden device, caused his skull to be lit up from within. And to my undying shame my agent laughed like a hyena.

All this was vastly amusing, no doubt, but Sayers in later years grew a little set in her ways, and was said to treat ‘the whole thing with such solemnity as to deprive it of much of its fun’.

After the war, the Detection Club was forced to flow with the spirit of the times, and to accept as members the thriller writers who had been so clearly rejected at the time of its formation. Today, it has about 60 members, and ‘Eric the Skull’ makes his appearance at each meeting (although analysis by a doctor has suggested that ‘Eric’ is in fact female).

Simon Brett, the current President of the Club, told me how members recently held a debate about the ethics of Eric. Was it really right and respectful, they argued, to subject the remains of a dead person to the trauma of being a prop in a ridiculous ceremony, with bulbs in his (or her) eye sockets? The debate was closely fought, Eric’s dignity being pitted against several decades of Detection Club history. But, as the minutes of that particular meeting proclaim, ‘The Eyes Have It’, and Eric remains in use.

The meetings of the Club itself, of course, seemed like something out of a detective story, and not even Agatha Christie could resist the temptation to fictionalize. In number 35 of the exercise books she used for notes she jots down an idea: ‘Detection Club Murder – Mrs Oliver – her two guests – someone killed when the Ritual starts.’

Brett told me about another memorable recent meeting, held at the Garrick Club on a very hot and airless summer evening. A lady fainted, and all the authors present, having checked that she was still alive, collectively reached for their notebooks.

^fn1
Containing 15 detective puzzles, charts, maps and lists of clues,
The Baffle Book
(1930) was basically a set of parlour games for a family to solve together, including vital questions such as ‘Who stole the emerald?’. A series of ‘Crime Dossiers’ took the concept one stage further, and into three-dimensional form, with case files of letters, testimonies, and even evidence (hair, for example, or a piece of bloodstained wallpaper) provided for the players. The solution came in a sealed envelope at the back.
Herewith the Clues
and
Who Killed Robert Prentice?
in the ‘Crime Dossiers’ series were the forerunners of the kinds of boxed multi-player mystery games that can still be bought today.

^fn2
John Rhode was the pen-name of Cecil Street (1884–1965), a Club member and author of novels with a forensic scientist as the detective.

‘In London anybody at any moment might do or become anything, but in a village, no matter what village, they were all immutably themselves, parson, organist, sweep, duke’s son and doctor’s daughter, moving like chessmen upon their allotted squares.’

Dorothy L. Sayers (1937)

IN BRITAIN IN
the 1930s, three million people were unemployed. The Great Depression saw economies brought low, and dictatorships sprouting up, across Europe. Fascists were holding rallies in the East End of London. The trauma of the First World War was barely over before the rumblings of the Second World War began to be heard. These topics were almost completely ignored by members of the Detection Club and writers of Golden Age crime fiction.

In retrospect, the fact that all this is missing from inter-war crime novels seems more than just ignorance. It looks like a deliberate attempt to wish it out of existence. As Julian Symons, historian of the form, writes:

It is safe to say that almost all of the British writers in the twenties and thirties, and most of the Americans, were unquestionably Right-wing. This is not to say that they were openly anti-Semitic or anti-Radical [although many of them were], but that they were overwhelmingly conservative in feeling … the social order in these stories was as fixed and mechanical as that of the Incas.

And there’s no doubt that the fiction of the Golden Age isn’t to everyone’s taste. ‘The reading of detective stories,’ wrote Edmund Wilson in 1945, ‘is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.’

It was the author of 12 crime novels Colin Watson (1920– 1983) who introduced the term ‘Mayhem Parva’ to describe the work of the 1920s and 1930s writers who so often seemed to set their work in cosy English villages like St Mary Mead. Watson’s own contribution to the school of criticism of the detective story was called
Snobbery with Violence
(1971). The phrase was originally coined by Alan Bennett to sum up the less attractive aspects of these books: the stultifying, repetitive, hide-bound and reactionary world whose values were only reinforced by the solution of the crime. In
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, Agatha Christie’s narrator gives us a glimpse of the daily round in Mayhem Parva: