Making a Killing: A Review of Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making, by John Curran

In this second volume of extracts from Agatha Christie's notebooks and personal papers, author John Curran offers further illumination into the working life of Agatha Christie and how Christie became the world's most successful mystery writer.  In contrast with his first such foray, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, Curran this time adopts a chronological approach to his material, which I think works quite well.  Christie fans and fans of Golden Age mystery more generally will surely not want to miss this fascinating volume.

John Curran

Curran structures Murder in the Making by decade (1920s-1970s), so that we read about The Secret of Chimneys, say, on pages 95-109 and Passenger to Frankfurt on pages 375-382.  This is a more cohesive and coherent approach then was used in the first book, in my view, and it enhances the newer book significantly.

Additionally, there are interesting scraps tossed in the pot here and there: a trial section deleted from Christie's first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Christie's manuscript version of her article "How I Created Hercule Poirot"; a different--and superior--version of a Miss Marple short story; Christie's copious references to poisons in her notebooks; Christie's booklists and unused ideas (did you know she considered writing a detective novel based on the famous mystery game Cluedo/Clue--I didn't!).

almost became a character
in a Christie novel

Curran's opening chapter, however, is an assessment of how much Christie adhered to the detective fiction tropes established by Edgar Allan Poe and the rules for writing detective fiction promulgated by Ronald Knox and S. S. Van Dine.  Curran supports the view that Christie "mischievously"  and "gleefully" and "joyously" tweaked, bent, "broke" and "shattered" the rules set down by Van Dine and Knox.

What rule could this woman
be mischievously tweaking now?!

This makes for interesting reading (and Curran obviously knows the Christie books like the back of his hand--better than the back of his hand probably!), though I think Van Dine's and Knox's rules can be overemphasized.  There was no requirement that, like Jews and Christians with the Ten Commandments, Golden Age mystery novelists devoutly follow the "Rules" in detail (as Curran notes, Van Dine's injunctions are especially fussy and fiddly).  Even "Humdrum" detective fiction writers like Freeman Wills Crofts and John Street broke the rules on occasion (one of Street's books even anticipates by a quarter century a rules-bending trick used by Christie).  Heck, even Van Dine broke his own rules!

I tend to agree with Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote Golden Age mysteries under the pen name J. J. Connington, that there was "only one reasonable convention" in detective fiction, that of the very basic principle of fair play: "The reader should always know exactly as much as the detective is supposed to know, and certainly not less than this."

Alfred Walter Stewart (J. J. Connington)
urged that basic fair play is what matters--
the reader must get all the information
that the detective gets

I believe Christie adhered to the fair play convention (though she certainly pushed boundaries). Whatever critics like Van Dine and Raymond Chandler may have said, there is nothing unfair about the solutions of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express.

"Only a halfwit could guess it," complained Chandler of the solution to Orient Express.  Guess who didn't guess it.

I have this feeling that certain very intelligent people (like, oh, S. S. Van Dine and Raymond Chandler) did not like being fooled by this unprepossessing, everyday English gentlewoman named Agatha Christie. But fooled they were--and fairly fooled too.

Raymond Chandler:
sour grapes or stern truth telling?

I think the majority of Golden Age critics and readers were with me on this one.  Curran is too knowledgeable to repeat the popular canard that Christie was threatened with expulsion from the Detection Club over her solution to Roger Ackroyd (the Club did not exist when Roger Ackroyd was published), but he does write that the "civilised outrage that followed the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926 showed what a serious breach of the rules its solution was considered at the time."  I would like to see some evidence of the extent of this "outrage."  I have seen contemporary reviews praising the book in glowing terms.

This carping of mine aside, Murder in the Making is filled with notable insights, a good many of which I will list:

Curran points out that despite the fact that country house and village whodunits "have become synonymous with the name of Agatha Christie," in fact only a minority of her books--about one-third--actually take place in such settings.

We learn from Curran that Christie adapted her perennially popular mystery thriller The Secret of Chimneys into a play.  Curran deems both novel and play entertaining but "littered with loose ends, unlikely motivations and unconvincing characters" (though clearly a huge fan of Christie, Curran does not hold back from occasional negative criticism).  He is right when he asserts that the thrillers The Man in the Brown Suit and The Seven Dials Mystery "are, if not more credible, at least far less incredible" than Chimneys (and I think as a result they are superior).

The Seven Dials Mystery--
far less incredible than   
The Secret of Chimneys?

When in her eighties Christie listed And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, A Murder is Announced, Murder on the Orient Express, The Thirteen Problems, Towards Zero, Endless Night, Crooked House, Ordeal by Innocence and The Moving Finger as her favorite books among her immense output.  Curran speculates that "most fans would probably also select most of the same titles," except perhaps for The Moving Finger and The Thirteen Problems.  Perhaps, perhaps not.  For my part, I would choose And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, A Murder is Announced, Towards Zero, The Murder at the Vicarage, Death on the Nile, The A.B.C. Murders, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Five Little Pigs and Curtain.  At least at this moment!

Curran is right to stress the great popular appeal of Christie's miraculous combination of ingenuity and simplicity (the plot of Lord Edgware Dies is "audaciously simple and simply audacious," he writes). Accomplished detective novelists like R. Austin Freeman and John Street often are ingenious, but their rigorously applied scientific methodology can seem trying and "heavy" to some modern readers, no doubt.  The same is true, one might argue, of many of Dorothy L. Sayers' clever plots.

"audaciously simple and simply audacious"

Curran notes the sophisticated milieus of both Lord Edgware Dies and Three Act Tragedy.  It may surprise condescending Christie critics today, but many critics and fans in the 1930s considered Christie a witty and sophisticated writer, just like Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

Curran discusses the discrepancy between the motives given for the killer in the American and English editions of Three Act Tragedy (something I noted last year in an article), but unfortunately the reason for this discrepancy is one mystery the notebooks do not solve!

"The Mystery of the Altered Motive"

Curran notes Christie's deepened interest in character development in many of the 1940s tales, like Sad Cypress, Five Little Pigs and The Hollow, a point that cannot be made often enough as far as I am concerned.  Christie's condescending journalistic critics have missed this point completely, though academics have been aware of it for some time now.  I think you can see this trend beginning in the late 1930s with Death on the Nile, however (it has far more interesting characters than, say, the earlier Murder on the Orient Express).

Curran accurately notes the darkness at the heart of The Body in the Library, a book recently rather mocked by P. D. James for its alleged artificiality and supposed lack of forensic credibility.

dark heart

Curran provides a brilliant analysis of Hercule Poirot's under-appreciated swan-song, Curtain, the best such I have read.  Curran shows the idea for Curtain percolated several years in Christie's brain before it was written (probably in 1940). Fascinating stuff here!

brilliant analysis

Curran shows Christie considered including the egregiously jolly Tommy and Tuppence in They Came to Baghdad.  Blessedly, she had second thoughts.  She also thought of including Ariadne Oliver and her brother (?!).  Now this would have been interesting.  Curran notes that Christie took over 100 pages of notes for Baghdad and that the lightweight thriller gave her more trouble with plotting than many of her much more complex whodunits.

Curran praises Cat Among the Pigeons, despite what he terms its "abundance of femininity."  Well, it is set at a girl's school!  Interestingly, there is a Freeman Wills Crofts detective novel, Mystery on Southampton Water, that has not a single female character in it.  Maybe the two books should be read concurrently, as gender antidotes to one another!

Cat Among the Pigeons--
an "abundance of femininity"

Curran contends that Christie "used poison as a murder method more often than any of her contemporaries."  I would like to test this assertion against Christie's contemporary John Street. Though John Street was the Golden Age Master of Murder Means and could design practically any way humanly (or inhumanly) conceivable to kill a person he, like Christie, loved poison and used it a great deal in his books.  He wrote over 140 mysteries.

Christie and poison: a match made in...

Curran contends that Christie wrote only two "pure whodunits" in the 1960s: The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side and A Caribbean Mystery.    He deems her best novels from this period The Pale Horse and Endless Night, a judgment with which many Christie fans (including this one) would agree, I think. Yet I think that he is a tad hard on The Clocks*("an inexplicably disappointing offering" he calls it) and I believe At Bertram's Hotel has its appeal, even if the plot is a bit dodgy.  Curran reveals that as she aged Christie increasingly relied on a Dictaphone, to the detriment of her work (the same thing happened with John Street).

(*note to John on The Clocks--could "Florence Elks" be the American woman mystery writer Craig Rice?)

Curran shows that the notebooks reflect Christie's slackening grip on plotting in the 1960s and 1970s. There is the narrative shakiness of Third Girl, for example, the novel which Curran deems the weakest of Christie's 1960s mysteries.  "This [narrative] uncertainty [in Third Girl] is mirrored in [Christie's] notes," writes Curran.  Similarly, By the Pricking of My Thumbs has notes "more unfocused than usual."  There are good ideas, to be sure, but they are shakily developed.

Curran is equally forthright about the weaknesses of Christie's 1970s books. Nemesis "is more impressive in its emotional power than its plotting....rambling and repetitive"; "there is little in the way of plot at all in Passenger to Frankfurt....the only reason that [it] was even published is that it had the magic name of 'Agatha Christie' on the title page"; "Postern of Fate is the poorest book of [Christie's] career...one which, in retrospect, should never have been published" [very true--and yet it's still in print and is still being read--the name "Agatha Christie" indeed is talismanic!].

"should never have been published"
 (let alone endlessly reprinted)

Despite the weakness of the 1970s novels and the confusion in the later notebooks, Curran notes that Christie started up with a new plot idea in late 1973, right after the publication of the dreadful Postern of Fate.  He thinks the idea a quite intriguing one that would have marked a "radical departure" for the aged Queen of Crime (it is rather psychological in approach).  But, unfortunately, Christie, who had just over two more years to live and whose health was rapidly declining, was unable to carry her bright idea beyond its initial jottings.

There is additional interesting material in Murder in the Making besides the notebooks and Curran's analysis of them.

From Christie's booklists we learn that the Queen of Crime read John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, Leo Bruce, Ngaio Marsh, Andrew Garve, Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, Hilary Waugh, Mignon Eberhart, E. R. Punshon, Dorothy L. Sayers, Clayton Rawson, Elizabeth Ferrars and Georges Simenon.

From Christie's 1938 essay on Poirot (written in 1937) we learn that Christie, sounding rather like her esteemed sister in crime Dorothy L. Sayers, is taking "more interest in my characters" and seeing "them more as real people and less as pawns in the game."

Especially interesting is the Miss Marple short story "The Case of the Caretaker's Wife," appearing in this version for the very first time in Murder in the Making.  Curran is right that this version of the tale is vastly superior to the earlier published version, "The Case of the Caretaker."  Indeed, it is now one of the best Miss Marple short stories, with a much better-grounded village setting.  Yet the basic problem remains that Christie cannibalized the story for one of her most admired novels, Endless Night. Probably most people still will prefer the novel to the story.

As I come to the close of this long review, I will just express my hope that I conveyed some of the interest Murder in the Making has for the Christie fan.  No true fan of the Queen of Crime would want to miss it.  Moreover, all admirers of Golden Age mystery fiction in general should give it a look as well.

Eminent Victorian Sensationalists: Short Works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Benjamin Farjeon

For this piece I read three succinct “sensationalist” works by a trio of popular Victorian authors: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “The Mystery at Fernwood”(1862), Wilkie Collins’ “Who Killed Zebedee?” (1881) and Benjamin Leopold Farjeon's short novel Devlin the Barber (1888).

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Wilkie Collins

Braddon and Collins of course are very well-known writers today.  Benjamin Farjeon, like one of his sons, the Golden Age mystery writer Jefferson Farjeon (see my previous blog posts), has been largely--and undeservedly--forgotten.

Benjamin Farjeon

All three of these works offer believable characters and intriguing and emotionally compelling situations, although they offer more "mystery" than fair play detection as the Golden Age understood it.

“The Mystery at Fernwood” and “Who Killed Zebedee?” are longer short stories (about forty and twenty-five pages, respectively; the latter is also known, more prosaically, as "Mr. Policeman and the Cook").

Grandmother of Gothic fiction

In “Fernwood” Mary Elizabeth Braddon effectively mines the Gothic tradition that had first been struck in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and that perhaps produced it richest early lode of ore with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In some of Braddon’s triple-decker sensation novels, appealing mystery elements in my view are too much submerged in love stories, but that is not so with the lean and spare Fernwood.

In this tale, a young woman finds not only mystery but grave menace when she visits Fernwood, the decaying Yorkshire country estate of her fiancee.

Just the right spot for a murder....

“No, Isabel, I do not consider that Lady Adela seconded her son’s invitation at all warmly,” fatefully announces the heroine’s aunt in the first line of the story.

“Fernwood” is a rattlingly suspenseful tale (even if you pierce the veil of the mystery quickly, as you probably will) and a fine example of the grand and hallowed Gothic tradition that has extended right up to this day in such mystery genre works as Barbara Vine’s The Minotaur (2005).

With its title and its setting (a lodging house full of eccentric characters), Wilkie Collins' "Who Killed Zebedee?" at first seems to have popped straight out of the pages of a 1920s or 1930s Golden Age short story collection, yet amazingly it was published in 1881.

In the opening pages of the tale, a frantic cook bursts into a police station, armed with a doleful tale of murder at the lodging house in which she is employed. The victim is one John Zebedee, who was stabbed to death in his bed.

Suspicion immediately falls on Zebedee’s wife, a somnambulist. People fearing a repetition of another Wilkie Collins tale that shall remain nameless will be pleased to see other suspects emerge among the company of lodgers, most obviously the dandified Mr. Deluc. Desirous of helping the law is the nosy elderly spinster Miss Mybus, an interesting early incarnation of a mystery genre character type most strongly associated today with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

In "Who Killed Zebedee?" nosy, elderly Miss Mybus
anticipates Miss Marple by nearly half a century

The attention to police procedure and the thumbnail character sketches in “Zebedee” are strikingly  good, making one wish that the tale had been expanded into a full-length novel. As it stands,”Zebedee” is a disappointment as a tale of detection, with the solution coming essentially fortuitously.

To be blunt, “Zebedee” is more luckstone than Moonstone. Collins is more interested here in exploring character, however, and he does this very well indeed, even providing a surprisingly ambivalent ending in the modern fashion.

The only novel among these three works is Devlin the Barber, a potent admixture of mystery and horror elements authored by the prolific novelist Benjamin Farjeon (also father of, in addition to Jefferson, Eleanor Farjeon, the beloved children’s book writer).

Luridly advertised on London billboards with an illustration of a young woman bloodily stabbed by a seeming maniac, the book appeared the same year as the Jack the Ripper serial killings horrified England (what are considered to be the "canonical" Ripper murders took place in 1888 between the dates of August 31 and November 9; Farjeon’s work appeared in serial and book form later that year). Devlin the Barber seems quite obviously to draw on the Ripper killings, as well as the gruesome folk legend of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber.

Sweeney Todd: like Jack the Ripper
a clear influence on Devlin the Barber

Devlin the Barber was called a “disagreeable but certainly ingenious tale” when it first appeared and since then has customarily been deemed the best of Farjeon’s many fictional works (only a small number of which were of sensationalist nature). Three years before the appearance of Devlin, Farjeon had written Great Porter Square (1885), the first of several praised mystery novels. The man clearly had a talent for crime writing, even though Devlin surely to an extent has to be seen as an opportunistic effort (if an inspired one).

Despite its obvious linkage with Jack the Ripper, Devlin opens with only one slaying, that of a proper, middle class young woman who for some reason was keeping a secret late-night assignation. After she is found fatally stabbed, it is learned that her twin sister has disappeared (twins were quite popular in crime books before the stricter rules-making Golden Age frowned on them).

The young ladies’ wealthy uncle, lately returned from Australia, for no particularly compelling reason offers the narrator of the tale, an out-of-work, middle-class friend of the family, a grand sum to solve the case (naturally he has no faith in the police being able to do it).

The narrator soon finds that the murdered woman had a gentleman friend, but he seems like a winning young man (he is even wealthy and has a responsible guardian). The most striking event occurs, however, when the narrator is called upon for help by his former nursemaid, Mrs. Lemon (could this have been the mother of Hercule Poirot’s future secretary?!). It seems Mrs. Lemon has a very odd lodger indeed, a barber named Mr. Devlin….

Could the mother of Hercule Poirot's secretary
have encountered Devlin the Barber?

Mrs. Lemon’s tale of her frightening lodger, which takes up over a fourth of the book (fifty of the Arno Press edition’s 190 pages), is a tour de force of horror narration. It is almost a disappointment when we come back to the mystery investigation. But now we have a new investigator of the heinous murder: Mr. Devlin himself! If you thought this novel was going to take the same turn of events as Marie Belloc Lowndes’ fine Ripper tale, The Lodger (1913), think again.

More could be said about this fascinating novel, but I will leave the reader to seek out the book for herself. I will simply add that, in contrast with some lesser Victorian tales of sensation, the narrative throughout Devlin the Barber is smooth and idiomatic, a reader’s delight. Even the cry of the murdered woman’s beloved is not nearly so melodramatic as the contrived speeches one often finds, for example, in the works of the noted American mystery writer Anna Katharine Green: 

"Neither will I rest till I discover the murderer of my darling girl! And when I discover him, when he stands before me, as there is a living God, I will kill him with my own hands!”

As the plaint of a grieving young Victorian-era man it rings true to me.

The long section of narrative that Farjeon gives to Mrs. Lemon is especially impressive. Like the better-known Braddon and Collins, Farjeon was an effective spinner of tales; and he very much deserves at least a modest revival.

Anyone wanting a good murder story from the Victorian era is advised to seek out these works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Benjamin Farjeon. They may be old, but they still speak to us today. During the last decade “The Mystery at Fernwood” and “Who Killed Zebedee?” have been reprinted in attractive editions by Hesperus Press, an admirable publisher of shorter literary classics. Devlin the Barber merits inclusion in this eminent company of Victorian writers.

Did you catch his name?...

A Late Christmas Number: Mystery in White (1937), by Jefferson Farjeon

No, it's not the Orient Express....

"It snowed all day and all night.  On the 22nd it was still snowing.  Snowballs flew, snowmen grew.  Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended.  In the evening the voice of the announcer, traveling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming....

More snow came.  It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher.  Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop.  People wondered whether it ever would stop."

--Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White (1937)

A classic English mystery setting

People stranded in a country house cut off from the outside world by snow, with murderous events afoot.  It's a classic and beloved Golden Age murder mystery scenario and it's one Jefferson Farjeon used in his 1937 thriller Mystery in White.  To top it all off, the tale takes place over Christmas eve and Christmas day.

As the splendid dust jacket reveals, a train is involved too, albeit briefly.  Like Agatha Christie's Orient Express, this train gets stalled by snow.  Five passengers--a clerk, a chorus girl, an elderly paranormal investigator and a genteel brother and sister--make their way off the train with their luggage to find a connection at a nearby station. 

The wayfarers get lost in the snow, of course, but providentially they come upon a large country house, front door unlocked.  No one seems to be in the house (though what was that noise in the attic?!), but fires are set and the table is properly laid for tea (though what's that bread knife doing on the floor?!).

Was the bread knife used on something
besides bread?!

In short, we, the readers, are encountering a favorite Jefferson Farjeon thriller scenario: stranded people encountering mystery and murder in an isolated building (this pattern goes all the way back to the author's 1920s mystery play No. 17, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock; see also such novels as Sinister Inn and The Windmill Mystery). Queer noises occur, strangers--some perhaps malevolent--wander in and out, mysterious circumstances pile up like the snow drifts outside the house.  By adding Christmas to the mix, Farjeon has made a cozily creepy crime confection for our delectation. It's not over-taxing for the brain, but it's quite enjoyable nonetheless.

Dorothy L. Sayers
 declared Jefferson Farjeon
"quite unsurpassed for creepy skill
 in mysterious adventures"

"Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures," Dorothy L. Sayers once proclaimed of one of her favorite mystery writers, gifting Farjeon's publishers on both sides of the Atlantic with a pleasing blurb for years to come.  Other critics who shared Sayers' esteem for Farjeon were the American author and playwright Paul Wilstach ("Jefferson Farjeon writes corkers....He inevitably gives delight") and the American critic and scholar William Lyon Phelps ("Jefferson Farjeon is one of my favorite providers of murder.  He knows how to give distinction...by an excellent literary style").

English thriller tales from the 1920s and 1930s generally have a bad reputation today, frequently being condemned for their exhibitions of racism and xenophobia.  Certainly this is true of much of the work of the egregious Sydney Horler, say, or the more talented but still sometimes admittedly quite objectionable H. C. McNeile ("Sapper").

Some Golden Age crime thrillers by Sapper
have a rather unpleasant edge

H. C. McNeile ("Sapper")
creator of Bulldog Drummond

Yet Jefferson Farjeon's thrillers tend to be more gentle and whimsical (even as the body count rises).  Farjeon himself by all accounts was a mild and kindhearted man, a brother of children's author Eleanor Farjeon and a son of Benjamin Farjeon (1838-1903)--a popular Victorian author who venerated Charles Dickens--and himself a vegetarian and pacifist (his Cold War apocalyptic sci-fi novel, Death of a World, is a passionate protest against the post-WW2 arms race).  Surely not unexpectedly, his thrillers reflect his family background and personality.

Jefferson Farjeon
a kindler, gentler English thriller writer

In Mystery in White, Farjeon presents his chorus girl and clerk with empathy (in one chapter a Walter Mitty-like fantasy sequence representing the fever-dream of the clerk is quite amusingly done), though in this one the genteel brother and sister play more active roles.  Events get quite tangled, but all finally is revealed (though not really deduced).  The dilatory police eventually do show up near the end of the novel, but in another resemblance to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None England's finest don't get things quite right. 

Mystery in White (1937) shares a certain affinity
with The Mousetrap (1952)

In addition to And Then There Were None, Mystery in White also somewhat resembles the celebrated Christie play The Mousetrap, though it must be admitted that it's neither as clever nor as sinister.  But Christie fans (and all "cozy" English mystery fans) should enjoy this representative Farjeon tale.  It's not his best, but it makes a nice holiday Golden Age mystery treat.

For more on Jefferson Farjeon, see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-pass-by-jefferson-farjeon-1883.html and http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/11/passing-tramp.html

My ex-library copy of Mystery in White
(obviously nearly read to death)

Lord Ernest William Hamilton (1858-1939), Mystery Writer

Lord Ernest William Hamilton (1858-1939) certainly came from one of the more elite backgrounds among British mystery writers.  His father was James Hamilton, first Duke of Abercorn (earlier he had been merely Marquess of Abercorn--and before that there had been nine Earls of Abercorn, going back to 1606).  During the reign of Queen Victoria, the Duke served in the Privy Council and was twice Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.

James Hamilton,
1st Duke of Abercorn, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
and, last but surely not least, father of a mystery writer

Ernest Hamilton was the youngest of fourteen children of the Duke of Abercorn and his wife, Louisa, daughter of John Russell, the sixth Duke of Bedford.  Like four of his brothers, he served for a time as a Conservative member of parliament, but he was also known in his day as an accomplished man of letters, publishing several volumes of memoirs, as well as theological studies and novels.

John Russell,
6th Duke of Bedford,
Lord Ernest Hamilton's maternal grandfather

Among Lord Ernest's novels, which include several works of historical fiction (such as The Outlaws of the March, 1897 and The Mawkin of the Flow, 1898) are at least two books that clearly fall with the mystery genre: a thriller, The Perils of Josephine (1899), and a much later detective novel, published when Lord Ernest was seventy years old, The Four Tragedies of Memworth (1928).

Both Perils of Josephine and Tragedies of Memworth (particularly the former tale) bear resemblance to the Victorian triple-decker sensation novel associated with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others.  A contemporary review of Perils of Josephine, in which rather bored reference is made to Lord Ernest leading the title character, Josephine ("that unhappy young person"), "through a series of experiences with bolting horses, sliding panels, crazed cousins, wicked priests, and burning houses," gives some idea of the style in which it was written (yes, it even draws on traditional English anti-Catholicism).

Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Queen of the Victorian Sensation Novel

Wilkie Collins
King of the Victorian Sensation Novel

The admittedly jaded reviewer went on to dismiss, in rather amusing fashion, the whole sensation or Gothic fiction genre as hopelessly outmoded and old-fashioned at the dawning of a new century (the twentieth):

"A strong impression remains with the [modern] readers that 'these things are not done.'  In our well-policed days, the most malevolent of wicked uncles whom our father's will is keeping out of his rights is hardly the cloaked and sinister figure that he was.  Our rival in love is not so likely to drop poison into our tea as to pity us for our unfortunate taste in collars.  Our athletic young women, with their inches and their biceps, cannot be counted upon to swoon when the panel slides back, but would probably make things unpleasant for the slider."

The athletic, bicycling young women of the 1890s
could not be expected to swoon at the sight of a sliding panel

When, nearly three decades later, Lord Ernest published The Four Tragedies of Memworth, it was at the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction, with its rules (one of the most famous sets propounded by Ronald Knox) designed to mark a clear aesthetic boundary between the detective novel and the thriller (or shocker, as it was sometimes called).  The novel was grabbed by the up and coming firm of Victor Gollancz, who also would publish such prominent Golden Age names in the English mystery writing field as Dorothy L. Sayers, E. R. Punshon and J. J. Connington.

Gollancz was one of the prestige publishers of Golden Age English detective fiction

For his part, Lord Ernest dutifully attempted in Tragedies of Memworth to move away from the tad lurid style of Perils of Josephine toward the more purely cerebral pleasures of the modern, 1920s detective novel; yet some affinity with the sensation style clearly remains.  As I indicated in Part One of this review essay, there is in the novel, for example, the lurking presence of a certain Asian gentleman with a vengeful agenda.  Yet Ronald Knox proclaimed Memworth an honorable exception to his anti-Chinaman, anti-thriller rule for the writing of detective fiction.  In Part Three of this review essay, I will assess just how successful a detective novel The Four Tragedies of Memworth really is.

Though it may have fallen out of critical fashion after 1900,
Victorian melodrama lived on in England--
in the 1930s, for example, in the films of Tod Slaughter--
and full scale critical revival lurked just around the (dark) corner!

Note: I do not have a photo of the actual Lord Ernest Hamilton.  If anyone finds or has one I would love to add it to the blog.  And for more on Lord Ernest Hamilton, see
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/12/ronald-knox-his-detective-fiction.html

Ronald Knox, his Detective Fiction Decalogue and "The Four Tragedies of Memworth" (1928), by Lord Ernest Hamilton

Father Ronald Knox: Best known in mystery genre history
for the ten rules (the "decalogue") that he laid down
for the writing of detective fiction

In Father Ronald Knox's celebrated Golden Age detective fiction "decalogue" the Catholic priest and author of mystery tales propounded ten rules for writing in the genre.  One of the more famous (or infamous) of his rules is number five:

"No Chinaman must figure in the story.  Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming  that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals.  I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of 'the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo', you had best put it down at once; it is bad.  The only exception which occurs to my mind--there are probably others--is Lord Ernest Hamilton's 'Four Tragedies of Memworth.' "

Ronald Knox's droll humor is not always appreciated by his critics

Father Knox has been rapped over the knuckles, figuratively speaking, for formulating this rule, by critics who have failed to understand that Knox in his droll fashion was attempting to make a serious point: that the mystery thriller or shocker tale and the detective novel were two very different things. Knox himself distinguished between the two mystery forms earlier in his decalogue:

"A detective story must have as its main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.

And here, for my own part, I would draw a very clear line of demarcation between detective stories and 'shockers.'  Shockers are not in the true sense mystery stories at all; they do not arouse a human instinct of curiosity....

We know at once that the woman is an adventuress, probably a quite innocent adventuress who is being compelled by a threat of blackmail to subserve the purposes of villains; that there is a gang of international crooks at work, determined to put an end to the peace of Europe by giving away English state secrets to an unknown foreign power.  We are certain beforehand that the motives of the villains will be entirely inhuman, the actions of the hero and heroine rash to the verge of idiocy; that the complications to which we are introduced at the beginning will not be explained at the end, because by that time the reader will have forgotten all about them, and probably the author as well.  All this is not a detective story."

In advocating banishing the "Chinaman" from the true detective novel, Ronald Knox had in mind the silly and offensive racist caricatures most prominently associated with the novels of Sax Rohmer (creator of the "fiendish Oriental mastermind," Dr. Fu Manchu), but also figuring in numerous other English and American mystery thrillers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including some by thriller king Edgar Wallace, the bestselling novelist in England in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Fright film star Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu,
in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932),
one of the most notorious thriller genre films of the 1930s

Though most associated with the Fu Manchu novels
of Sax Rohmer, the sinister "Chinaman" figured in
numerous other Golden Age thrillers as well

Father Knox's Chinaman rule has been much discussed over the decades, but, interestingly, little or perhaps even no mention has been made of Knox's clearly stated exception to the Chinaman rule: Lord Ernest Hamilton's 1928 mystery novel, The Four Tragedies of Memworth.  What is this novel and why is its prominent Asian character an acceptable violation of Knox's rule?  All will be revealed by the Passing Tramp in Parts Two and Three of this review essay! (for more on Ronald Knox, see ronaldknoxsociety.com/index.html )

Special note from the Passing Tramp: It's been a month now with this blog and it has had nearly 4000 visits, from around the world.  Thanks very much for those visits.  I hope my posts have been of interest and I will try to keep it that way.

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French and Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus (Then and Now, #1)

In Part One of what will be an ongoing series on this blog--in which I compare modern British crime writers with ostensibly irrelevant "Humdrum" detective novelists from the Golden Age of British detective fiction--I look at Freeman Wills Crofts' series police detective, Inspector French, and that of mega-selling Ian Rankin, Inspector Rebus.  Perhaps the two men aren't quite as different as you might think!

In his Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007) Barry Forshaw has a chapter, “Cops,” with 31 novel entries.  Merely two of the novels listed were published before the 1980s: Ed McBain’s The Empty Hours (1962) and Georges Simenon’s The Madman of Bergerac (1932).  

Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector John Rebus and currently the most popular crime fiction author in Britain, gets one entry, for The Falls (2001), as well as a page devoted to his works in general.  Freeman Wills Crofts, creator of Inspector Joseph French, the greatest police detective of the Golden Age of detective fiction (roughly 1920-1940), gets no mention in the “Cops” chapter, or anywhere else in Forshaw’s Guide for that matter.

Ian Rankin, feet up

This omission is an injustice to Freeman Wills Crofts.  No doubt this author is out of fashion these days, but in his own way he is as important to the history of the crime fiction genre as Ian Rankin is.  To be sure, Ian Rankin, the leading figure in the so-called “Tartan Noir” movement, has been a powerful force in moving British detective fiction away from its cozy, genteel, village and country house gentry stereotype, but in his own day Crofts did much the same thing, albeit more gently.

Freeman Wills Crofts, feet down

While Crofts’ most famous creation, Inspector French, is a much more conventionally “nice” individual than Rankin’s John Rebus, Crofts’ tales of French’s criminal investigations give readers a different picture of the Golden Age British detective novel than that which has been derived from the better-known works of the British Crime Queens (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh). 

By exploring Freeman Wills Crofts’ Mystery in the Channel (1931) and Ian Rankin’s Hide and Seek (1990), I want to highlight not only the differences between Crofts and Rankin and their fictional detectives, but—what may be surprising to many—the similarities.

Freeman Wills Crofts created Inspector Joseph French as a series character (he appeared in a long series of novels published between 1924 and 1957, the year of Crofts’ death) in order to get away from the eccentric amateur detective figure so strongly associated with British mystery.  French won immediate popularity around the globe, becoming one of the best-known fictional crime investigators of the British Golden Age.

A plain, no-nonsense, middle class cop, Inspector French stands in stark contrast with such glamorous aristocratic sleuths  as Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Allingham’s Albert Campion and Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn (though Alleyn himself is a cop, he is rather a twee one), as well as Christie’s eccentric Belgian, Hercule Poirot, and her nosy village spinster, Miss Jane Marple.  

An aristocratic detective--
complete with monocle

In 1936, Crofts’ American publisher, Dodd, Mead, informed potential Crofts readers that the author had deliberately built up Inspector French “as a foil to the theatrical and eccentric fictional sleuth” and that the police detective therefore was “a model of thoroughness, persistence and hardwork”—an ideal embodiment of the bourgeois virtues.

Stolid Inspector French thinking his way through another tough case

Mystery in the Channel, the seventh Inspector French novel, shows both the detective and the author at the height of their powers, in a typical case involving not misdoings in a baronial mansion or a quaint Edwardian village, but modern corporate corruption and crime involving two countries.

In the effective opening of Mystery in the Channel, the corpses of two men are discovered on a yacht adrift in the English Channel.  Both men were felled by gun shots.  It is soon discovered that the slain pair were officers in Moxon’s General Securities (“You’ve heard of it, of course; one of the biggest financial houses in the country”).  Could these deaths be related to the rumors in the City that Moxon’s was headed for a complete crash?  It certainly seems so, when it is discovered that a million and a half pounds has been looted from the firm’s coffers.

Scotland Yard’s investigation involves delving into matters both financial and logistical.  What were the two murdered businessmen doing on the yacht and who could have gotten on the yacht to murder them?  To some this may sound dry, but Crofts manages to keep the reader in doubt and suspense until a dramatic climax is reached, when the dauntless French nabs the guilty.

In Mystery in the Channel, Crofts, a retired railway engineer who, admittedly, knew more about trains than he did the workings of Scotland Yard, makes some effort to portray the Yard as the great investigative  machine that it was.  Besides French, other officials seen working on the Channel case are:

Sir Mortimer Ellison, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, French’s boss throughout the series.

Police Sergeant Carter, French’s chief underling throughout much of the series.

Inspectors Tanner and Willis.  These men both featured in earlier, pre-French Crofts’ novels investigating cases of their own, Tanner in The Ponson Case (1921) and Willis in The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922).  Tanner, we learn, is Inspector French’s “greatest friend.”

Mr. Honeyford, “finance expert from the home office.”

Inspector Barnes, “the Yard’s nautical expert.”

French also has to deal with local law enforcement officials in both England and France.

Admittedly, Crofts’ treatment of the police often is naïve, but his books certainly mark a departure from the Golden Age stereotype of amateur detective and country houses/villages.  

The police take center stage as crime investigators 
in the detective novels of Freeman Wills Crofts

How does Crofts compare with Rankin, a hugely popular author widely deemed the modern master of the British police procedural? 

Hide and Seek, the second Ian Rankin novel about Inspector John Rebus, appeared in 1990.  In this tale, Rebus investigates the death of a young male drug addict found expired, surrounded by Satanic symbols, in a squalid Edinburgh “squat” (abandoned building).  Everyone but Rebus writes the death off as an accidental overdose, but the tenacious and stubborn detective eventually discovers darker truths, namely that the young man was murdered and that a malign conspiracy involving very prominent people is afoot in Edinburgh.

It begins with sin...
and ends with corruption.

On the surface Inspectors French and Rebus are very different sorts—one might call them British crime fiction’s good cop and bad cop.   French has an ideally blissful marriage with his wife, Emily, or Em; and he has a daughter, Eliza (to be sure, there is tragedy in French’s life in that his son was killed in the Great War, but Crofts later forgot that he had given Joseph and Emily children, so perhaps this loss does not matter so much).  Although in a couple novels Em has what she calls a “notion” and contributes an insight that helps  French solve his case, essentially she is a firmly domesticated woman placidly devoted to her husband’s welfare and what the author terms her “mysterious household employments.”

Mrs. French is a great one for knitting--
during which she occasionally has a helpful "notion"

Conversely, in Hide and Seek we learn that John Rebus’ wife has left him and his household behind, taking their daughter, Samantha (Sammy), with her.  Rebus leads a much lonelier, angst-filled existence than French, and he has no one to tidily arrange his domestic life.  Instead, he goes through a series of girlfriends, drinks too much and smokes too much--all patterns of behavior alien to the the abstemious and upright Joseph French (it is rather shocking when a frustrated French at one point in Mystery in the Channel declares, “Curse it...I could do with a bottle of beer”).  Like French, Rebus seems to have some religious inclinations, but, unlike French, Rebus is unable to sustain them. 

Rebus

Rebus also has pricklier relationships with his superiors than does French, although Rankin’s old-fashioned and courtly Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas “The Farmer” Watson bears considerable resemblance to Crofts’ Sir Mortimer Ellison (over the course of the Rebus novels the times continue to change, however: Watson retires in 2001’s The Falls and is replaced by a woman--awkwardly for Rebus one of his former sexual partners).

Nevertheless, French as well as Rebus sometimes bucks the system.  In Hide and Seek, Rebus finally exposes the criminals by a not-by-the-book stratagem that is like something Bulldog Drummond and his jolly amateur crime fighting pals might have tried in an outrageous Sapper thriller from the 1920s.  

For his part, French for the sake of expediency on occasion employs skeleton keys to conduct warrantless searches and sometimes “bluffs” recalcitrant witnesses (misleadingly threatens them with arrest) to get the information he wants.  At times one is tempted to wonder whether the mild Inspector French might well be sublimating burglarious urges.

One of Inspector French's 
essential crimefighting tools

Not surprisingly, given the tenor of modern times, Rebus’ cases tend to involve much racier subject matters—bad stuff--than those of Inspector French.  In Hide and Seek, for example, Rebus confronts a case involving such unsettling matters as Satanism, drug abuse and (male) prostitution.  Certainly no such things crop up in Crofts’ Mystery in the Channel!  

Satanism rears its head 
in Hide and Seek

Yet in a key respect the subject matters of the books are strikingly similar.  In both Hide and Seek and Mystery in the Channel, the specter of business corruption and criminality looms large indeed.  Both Rankin and Crofts take quite condemnatory views of the corporate world.  Here is Sir Mortimer Ellison on the men of Moxon’s General Securities:

“[W]hen I think of all the innocent people who are going to suffer through these dirty scoundrels, I’d give a big part of my salary to know they were safe in Dartmoor....I tell you, French, it’ll not be the fault of this department if those fellows have any more happiness in this world.”

The author himself chimes in with a similar note, informing us of Sir Mortimer that “for the wealthy thief who stole by the manipulation of stocks and shares and other less creditable methods known to high finance, whether actually within or without the limits of the law, he had only the most profound enmity and contempt.”

In his influential survey of detective and crime fiction, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons declares that “Golden Age writers would not have held it against [E. C. Bentley's Trent’s Last Case character Sigsbee] Manderson that he became rich by speculation.”  By making such an assertion, Symons reveals he did not sufficiently comprehend the work of Freeman Wills Crofts.  When writing Mystery in the Channel Crofts clearly was influenced by the deplorable state of the world since 1929, after the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great Depression (events that also have resonance today).

Financial ruination and attendant suicides 
after the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 
made a great impression 
on Freeman Wills Crofts 
(see http://www.worststockmarketcrashes.com/ )

In Hide and Seek Rankin makes his distaste with Big Business as manifest as Crofts had sixty years earlier.  Mark the words Rankin puts into the mouth of one of his businessmen villains, who arrogantly attempts to bribe Rebus:

“There’s a lot of new money in Edinburgh, John.  Money for all.  Would you like money?  Would you like a sharper edge to your life?  Don’t tell me you’re happy in your little flat, with your music and your books and your bottles of wine.”

In their novels both Crofts and Rankin 
are intensely preoccupied with the theme 
of business corruption, 
giving the tales added resonance today, 
in the Madoff Era

But John Rebus, like Joseph French, proves sterling and incorruptible (even though the forces of corruption are stronger in Rebus' world).  In the end, Rebus and French share this defining quality with each other and, indeed, with Wimsey, Campion, Alleyn, Poirot, Marple and the rest of the crime and mystery genre’s Great Detectives: a determination to find answers and establish truth, in an attempt, perhaps vain, to restore some semblance of order to a world of chaos and confusion.