Death on the Air (2 page)

H
e was born with the rank of Detective-Inspector, CID, on a very wet Saturday afternoon in a basement flat off Sloane Square, in London. The year was 1931.

All day, rain splashed up from the feet of passers-by going to and fro, at eye level, outside my water-streaked windows. It fanned out from under the tyres of cars, cascaded down the steps to my door and flooded the area. ‘Remorseless' was the word for it and its sound was, beyond all expression, dreary. In view of what was about to take place, the setting was, in fact, almost too good to be true.

I read a detective story borrowed from a dim little lending library in a stationer's shop across the way. Either a Christie or a Sayers, I think it was. By four o'clock, when the afternoon was already darkening, I had finished it, and still the rain came down. I remember that I made up the London coal fire of those days and looked down at it, idly wondering if I had it in me to write something in the genre. That was the season, in England, when the Murder Game was popular at weekend parties. Someone was slipped a card saying he or she was the ‘murderer'. He or she then chose a moment to select a ‘victim', and there was a subsequent ‘trial'. I thought it might be an idea for a whodunit – they were already called that – if a real corpse was found instead of a phony one. Luckily for me, as it turned out, I wasn't aware until much later that a French practitioner had been struck with the same notion.

I played about with this idea. I tinkered with the fire and with an emergent character who might have been engendered in its sulky entrails: a solver of crimes.

The room had grown quite dark when I pulled on a mackintosh, took an umbrella, plunged up the basement steps and beat my way through rain-fractured lamplight to the
stationer's shop. It smelt of damp news-print, cheap magazines, and wet people. I bought six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat.

Then with an odd sensation of giving myself some sort of treat, I thought more specifically about the character who already had begun to take shape.

In the crime fiction of that time, the solver was often a person of more or less eccentric habit with a collection of easily identifiable mannerisms. This, of course, was in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie's splendid M Poirot had his moustaches, his passion for orderly arrangements, his frequent references to ‘grey cells'. Dorothy L Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey could be, as I now am inclined to think, excruciatingly facetious. Nice Reggie Fortune said – and author H C Bailey had him say it very often – ‘My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap!' and across the Atlantic there was Philo Vance, who spoke a strange language that his author, S S Van Dine, had the nerve to attribute, in part, to Balliol College, Oxford.

Faced with this assembly of celebrated eccentrics, I decided, on that long-distant wet afternoon, that my best chance lay in comparative normality: in the invention of a man with a background resembling that of the friends I had made in England, and that I had better not tie mannerisms, like labels, round his neck. (I can see now that with my earlier books I did not altogether succeed in this respect.)

I thought that my detective would be a professional policeman but, in some ways, atypical: an attractive, civilized man with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out.

He began to solidify.

From the beginning I discovered that I knew quite a lot about him. Indeed, I rather think that, even if I had not fallen so casually into the practice of crime writing and had taken to a more serious form, he would still have arrived and found himself in an altogether different setting.

He was tall and thin with an accidental elegance about him and fastidious enough to make one wonder at his choice of profession. He was a compassionate man. He had a cockeyed sense of humour, dependent largely upon understatement, but for all his unemphatic, rather apologetic ways, he could be a formidable person of considerable authority. As for his background, that settled itself there and then: he was a younger son of a Buckinghamshire family and had his schooling at Eton. His elder brother, whom he regarded as a bit of an ass, was a diplomatist, and his mother, whom he liked, a lady of character.

I remember how pleased I was, early in his career, when one of the reviews called him ‘that nice chap, Alleyn', because that was how I liked to think of him: a nice chap with more edge to him than met the eye – a good deal more, as I hope it has turned out. The popular press of his early days would refer to him as ‘the handsome inspector', a practice that caused him acute embarrassment.

On this day of his inception I fiddled about with the idea of writing a tale that would explain why he left the Diplomatic Service for the Police Force, but somehow the idea has never jelled.

His age? Here I must digress. His age would defy the investigation of an Einstein, and he is not alone in this respect. Hercule Poirot, I have been told, was, by ordinary reckoning, going on 122 when he died. Truth to tell, fictional investigations move in an exclusive space-time continuum where Mr Bucket in
Bleak House
may be seen going about his police investigations cheek by jowl with the most recent fledglings. It is enough to say that on the afternoon of my detective's arrival, I did not concern myself with his age, and I am still of the same mind in that respect.

His arrival had been unexpected and occurred, you might say, out of nothing. One of the questions writers are most often asked about characters in their books is whether they are based upon people in the workaday world – ‘real people'.
Some of mine certainly are but they have gone through various mutations and in doing so have moved away from their original begetters. But not this one. He, as far as I can tell, had no begetter apart from his author. He came in without introduction and if, for this reason, there is an element of unreality about him, I can only say that for me, at least, he was and is very real indeed.

Dorothy L Sayers has been castigated, with some justification perhaps, for falling in love with her Wimsey. To have done so may have been an error in taste and judgment though her ardent fans would never have admitted as much. I can't say I have ever succumbed in this way to my own investigator but I have grown to like him as an old friend. I even dare to think he has developed third-dimensionally in my company. We have travelled widely: in a night express through the North Island of New Zealand, and among the geysers, boiling mud and snow-clad mountains of that country. We have cruised along English canals and walked through the streets and monuments of Rome. His duties have taken us to an island off the coast of Normandy and to the backstage regions of several theatres. He has sailed with a psychopathic homicide from Tilbury to Cape Town and has made arrests in at least three country houses, one hospital, a church, a canal boat and a pub. Small wonder, perhaps, that we have both broadened our outlook under the pressure of these undertakings, none of which was anticipated on that wet afternoon in London.

At his first appearance he was a bachelor and, although responsive to the opposite sex, did not bounce in and out of irresponsible beds when going about his job. Or, if he did, I knew nothing about it. He was, to all intents and purposes, fancy-free and would remain so until, sailing out of Suva in Fiji, he came across Agatha Troy, painting in oils, on the boat deck of a liner. And that was still some half-dozen books in the future.

There would be consternation shown by editors and publishers when, after another couple of jobs, the lady accepted him. The acceptance would be a
fait accompli
, and from then on I would be dealing with a married investigator, his celebrated wife, and later on, their son.

By a series of coincidences and much against his inclination, it would come about that these two would occasionally get themselves embroiled in his professional duties, but generally speaking he would keep his job out of his family life. He would set about his cases with his regular associate, who is one of his closest friends; Inspector Fox, massive, calm, and plain-thinking, would tramp sedately in. They have been working together for a considerable time, and still allow me to accompany them.

But ‘on the afternoon in question,' all this, as lady crime novelists used to say, ‘lay in the future.' The fire had burnt clear and sent leaping patterns up the walls of my London flat when I turned on the light, opened an exercise book, sharpened my pencil, and began to write. There he was, waiting quietly in the background ready to make his entrance at Chapter IV, page 58, in the first edition.

I had company. It became necessary to give my visitor a name.

Earlier in that week I had visited Dulwich College. This is an English public school, which in any other country would mean a private school. It was founded and very richly endowed by a famous actor in the days of the first Elizabeth. It possesses a splendid picture gallery and a fabulous collection of relics from the Shakespearean-Marlovian theatre: enthralling to me who has a passion for that scene.

My father was an old boy of Dulwich College – an ‘old Alleynian', as it is called, the name of the Elizabethan actor being Alleyn.

Detective-Inspector Alleyn, CID? Yes.

His first name was in doubt for some time, but another visit, this time to friends in the Highlands of Scotland, had
familiarized me with some resoundingly-named characters, among them one Roderick (or Rory) MacDonald.

Roderick Alleyn, Detective-Inspector, CID?

Yes.

The name, by the way, is pronounced ‘Allen'.

T
roy made her entrance with the sixth of the books about Alleyn. In those days, I still painted quite a lot and quite seriously, and was inclined to look upon everything I saw in terms of possible subject matter.

On a voyage out to New Zealand from England, we called at Suva. The day was overcast, still and sultry. The kind of day when sounds have an uncanny clarity, and colour an added sharpness and intensity. The wharf at Suva, as seen from the boat-deck of the
Niagara
, was remarkable in these respects: the acid green of a bale of bananas packed in their own leaves; the tall Fijian with a mop of hair dyed screaming magenta, this colour repeated in the sari of an Indian woman; the slap of bare feet on wet boards and the deep voices that sounded as if they were projected through pipes. All these elements made their impressions, and I felt a great itch for a paint brush between my fingers.

The ship drew away, the wharf receded, and I was left with an unattempted, non-existent picture that is as vivid today as it was then.

I don't think it is overdoing it to say that when I began
Artists in Crime
, it was this feeling of unfulfilment that led me to put another painter on another boat deck making a sketch of the wharf at Suva and that she made a much better job of it than I ever would have done.

This was Troy. It was in this setting that she and Alleyn first met.

I have always tried to keep the settings of my books as far as possible within the confines of my own experience. Having found Troy and decided that Alleyn was to find her, too, the rest of the book developed in the milieu of a painters' community. It was written before capital punishment was
abolished in Great Britain, and Troy shared my own repugnance for that terrible practice: I had talked with a detective-inspector and learnt that there were more men in the force who were for abolition than was commonly supposed. I knew Alleyn would be one of them. He would sense that the shadow of the death penalty lay between himself and Troy. It was not until the end of the next book,
Death in a White Tie
, that they came finally together. In
Death and the Dancing Footman
, they are already married.

My London agent, I remember, was a bit dubious about marrying Alleyn off. There is a school of thought that considers love interest, where the investigating character is involved, should be kept off stage in detective fiction or at least handled in a rather gingerly fashion and got rid of with alacrity. Conan Doyle seems to have taken this view.

‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman', he begins, writing of Irene Adler. But after a couple of sentences expressive of romantic attachment, he knocks that idea sideways by stating that, as far as Holmes was concerned, all emotions (sexual attraction in particular) were ‘abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind'.

So much for Miss Adler.

An exception to the negative attitude appears in Bentley's classic
Trent's Last Case
, where the devotion of Trent for one of the suspects is a basic ingredient of the investigation. Dorothy L Sayers, however, turns the whole thing inside out by herself regrettably falling in love with her own creation and making rather an ass of both of them in the process.

Troy came along at a time when thoroughly nice girls were often called Dulcie, Edith, Cecily, Mona, Madeleine. Even, alas, Gladys. I wanted her to have a plain, rather down-to-earth first name and thought of Agatha – not because of Christie – and a rather odd surname that went well with it, so she became Agatha Troy and always signed her pictures ‘Troy' and was so addressed by everyone.
Death in a White Tie
might have been called
Siege of Troy
.

Her painting is far from academic but not always non-figurative. One of its most distinguished characteristics is a very subtle sense of movement brought about by the interrelationships of form and line. Her greatest regret is that she never painted the portrait of Isabella Sommita, which was commissioned in the book I am at present writing. The diva was to have been portrayed with her mouth wide open, letting fly with her celebrated A above high C. It is questionable whether she would have been pleased with the result. It would have been called
Top Note
.

Troy and Alleyn suit each other. Neither impinges upon the other's work without being asked, with the result that in Troy's case she does ask pretty often, sometimes gets argumentative and uptight over the answer and almost always ends up by following the suggestion. She misses Alleyn very much when they are separated. This is often the case, given the nature of their work, and on such occasions each feels incomplete and they write to each other like lovers.

Perhaps it is advisable, on grounds of credibility, not to make too much of the number of times coincidence mixes Troy up in her husband's cases: a situation that he embraces with mixed feelings. She is a reticent character and as sensitive as a sea urchin, but she learns to assume and even feel a certain detachment.

‘After all,' she has said to herself, ‘I married him and I would be a very boring wife if I spent half my time wincing and showing sensitive.'

I like Troy. When I am writing about her, I can see her with her shortish dark hair, thin face and hands. She's absentminded, shy and funny, and she can paint like nobody's business. I'm always glad when other people like her, too.