The essay of some 7500 words that follows below was originally written by me in 2011 and published that same year in CADS 60 (Crime and Detective Stories). It seemed to make a strong impression at the time (see, for example, Martin Edwards, "CADS and Curt Evans"), though perhaps it may strike some today as unnecessarily tendentious on the gender issue. I regret this if so, for, as I hope any reader of my blog will appreciate, I am a great admirer of crime fiction by women authors, including the Golden Age Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.
Consider that six years ago I was trying to place a book, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, about the Golden Age crime writers Freeman Wills Crofts, Cecil John Charles Street (John Street/Miles Burton and Alfred Walter Stewart (JJ Connington), and repeatedly being told that there would be no interest, either popular or academic, about "forgotten" British Golden Age mystery writers who were not "Crime Queens." Oh, how things have changed in six years!
Although I fear this essay has since been greatly overshadowed (perhaps irrevocably) by other books by other people, perhaps it will be of some interest to my blog readers who never saw it in CADS. (You might even notice a reference to a certain John Strachey and "The Golden Age of English Detection.") Happily, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery was published, back in 2012. Now on to our deposed Crime Kings.
In the introduction to a recent academic study of “largely forgotten” nineteenth-century women writers of crime fiction,[1] the prominent British crime novelist Val McDermid noted in passing: “And, of course, whenever the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is mentioned, the names associated with it are female — Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh.” Critic Sarah Weinman illustrated Val McDermid’s contention in the January 29, 2011 “Reputations” column of the Wall Street Journal, in an article about Golden Age detective novelist Margery Allingham, wherein Weinman declared: “Four ‘queens of crime’ dominated the Golden Age of the mystery novel, the years just before and after World War II: Agatha Christie ... Dorothy Sayers ... Ngaio Marsh ... and Margery Allingham.”
Consider that six years ago I was trying to place a book, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, about the Golden Age crime writers Freeman Wills Crofts, Cecil John Charles Street (John Street/Miles Burton and Alfred Walter Stewart (JJ Connington), and repeatedly being told that there would be no interest, either popular or academic, about "forgotten" British Golden Age mystery writers who were not "Crime Queens." Oh, how things have changed in six years!
Although I fear this essay has since been greatly overshadowed (perhaps irrevocably) by other books by other people, perhaps it will be of some interest to my blog readers who never saw it in CADS. (You might even notice a reference to a certain John Strachey and "The Golden Age of English Detection.") Happily, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery was published, back in 2012. Now on to our deposed Crime Kings.
In the introduction to a recent academic study of “largely forgotten” nineteenth-century women writers of crime fiction,[1] the prominent British crime novelist Val McDermid noted in passing: “And, of course, whenever the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is mentioned, the names associated with it are female — Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh.” Critic Sarah Weinman illustrated Val McDermid’s contention in the January 29, 2011 “Reputations” column of the Wall Street Journal, in an article about Golden Age detective novelist Margery Allingham, wherein Weinman declared: “Four ‘queens of crime’ dominated the Golden Age of the mystery novel, the years just before and after World War II: Agatha Christie ... Dorothy Sayers ... Ngaio Marsh ... and Margery Allingham.”
Examples abound of
this insistently gendered approach to mystery genre history, by which the
numerous works produced by a vast multitude of men and women during the Golden
Age of the British detective novel are distilled into the product of four
celebrated “Crime Queens.” One academic authority, for example, asserts that
the Golden Age of British detection is “commonly conceived” as having run from
“the first novel of Agatha Christie (1920) to the last novel by Dorothy L.
Sayers (1937),”[2] while another writes that the Golden Age “is
generally thought of as a period during which detective fiction became
feminized.”[3] A third authority, insisting that the “best-selling
and most critically acclaimed British mystery authors of the 1920s and 1930s
were disproportionately women”, compares British mystery writing to such other
“feminine” occupations of the era as teaching and nursing.[4] Given this emphasis by academics and literary
critics, perhaps we should not be surprised that the widely-reviewed Talking
about Detective Fiction,[5] the short 2009 detective
fiction survey by modern-day British “Crime Queen” P. D. James, allots the
lioness’s share of its discussion of the Golden Age in Britain to those same
four Crime Queens: Christie — you know the drill by now, surely — Sayers,
Allingham and Marsh.
While Golden Age
British detective fiction is seen today as a feminine demesne and treated
accordingly in many critical works, American detective fiction from the period
between World War One and World War Two, on the other hand, tends to be viewed
as masculine, devoted mostly to action-oriented tales of the violent, booze-
and bimbo-filled doings of tough private eyes, where resolutions to mysteries
are reached more through the use of fists than of the little grey cells much
boasted of by Agatha Christie’s famed detective Hercule Poirot.
Just as the Crime
Queens are seen as dominating Britain’s Golden Age, two hardboiled American
detective novelists, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, are seen as
mastering the same span of years in the United States. P.D. James deems the
differences in between-the-wars American and British detective fiction to be
“so profound” that she finds it “stretching a definition to describe both
groups under the same category.”
Yet are critics
really right here? Can we so simply reduce the works of the Golden Age of
detective fiction in Britain to the efforts of four genteel women and the
mysteries of the same era in the United States to the tough tales penned by a
pair of hardened men? In my view the answer is absolutely not. Far from being
illuminating, such a treatment is actually obscuring.
Although the
misrepresentation of American Golden Age mystery needs to be taken on as well,
in this article I deal with the way the gendering of Golden Age detective
fiction has yielded an inaccurate picture of the Golden Age in Britain by
effectively deposing many of the era’s “Crime Kings”.
The term “Golden
Age” in reference to the English detective novel to my knowledge was first
coined in a 1939 Saturday Review of Literature article, “The Golden Age
of English Detection”, by John Strachey. Though Strachey viewed this “Golden
Age” as existing in the present, the term was adopted two years later by Howard
Haycraft in his influential mystery genre survey, Murder for Pleasure
(1941), to cover the years 1918 to 1930. Other bookending years have been
suggested since, but most commonly the term Golden Age has been taken to apply
to the years 1920 to 1939.
Did the four Crime
Queens in fact dominate the two decades of the 1920s and 1930s? Let us look at
the chronology of their writing careers in this period, in comparison with
other British mystery writers of the time.
Agatha
Christie (1890–1976)
Agatha Christie, who admittedly eventually became a
remarkable publishing phenomenon, did indeed publish her first detective novel
in 1920. To credit this novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
with exclusive birthing of the Golden Age goes too far however. Also first
appearing in 1920 was another detective novel, The Cask (written
by Freeman Wills Crofts; see below), that deserves as much or more credit as
Christie’s tale does. Today it seems to be forgotten that as a crime writer
Agatha Christie actually was quite an inconsistent producer in the 1920s.
Christie undeniably had become a Queen of Crime by the 1930s, but in the 1920s
she was more a pretender of uncertain lineage.
Of the nine mystery novels Agatha Christie published
between 1920 and 1929, only five involved her greatest creation, Hercule
Poirot, while the rest were rather loosely plotted thrillers populated by the
evil criminal masterminds and gangs more associated with such hugely popular
(though critically derided) thriller writers of the time as Edgar Wallace (“It
is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace!” shrieked the publisher’s
tag line), “Sapper” (Bulldog Drummond creator H. C. McNeile) and Sax Rohmer
(creator of the diabolical “Oriental” crime fiend, Dr. Fu Manchu). Indeed, even
one of the Poirot novels from the 1920s, The Big Four (1927) — stitched
together as a novel (from earlier published stories) after the scandal of
Christie’s apparent nervous breakdown and disappearance upon her husband’s
revelation of his infidelity and his desire for a divorce — is a thriller, a
farrago of Edgar Wallace, Sapper and Sax Rohmer devices that a shamefaced
Christie herself later referred to as “that rotten book”.
Agatha Christie
achieved her greatest fame in the decade of the twenties not only for her 1926
disappearance, which became a brief newspaper sensation, but also for the
Poirot detective novel she published the same year, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This justly admired murder tale
boasted a notorious solution that was effusively praised as brilliant by some
critics and simultaneously denounced as unfair by others (there is an obviously
apocryphal story that Christie was threatened with expulsion from the Detection
Club — an organization of the finest English detective novelists — and only
saved by the intercession of, naturally, Dorothy L. Sayers; obviously
apocryphal because the Detection Club was not formed until 1930). But even
after the appearance of Roger Ackroyd, Christie was
viewed as something of a one-hit wonder until a glittering succession of
first-grade Poirot detective novels accumulated in the 1930s (such as Peril
at End House, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder
on the Orient Express, Death in the Clouds and The
ABC Murders).
Arguably even as late as the early thirties, more
detective fiction fans might well have named another author besides Agatha
Christie — Dorothy L. Sayers, say, or even that man Freeman Wills Crofts — as
the best detective fiction novelist.
Dorothy
L. Sayers (1893–1957)
Dorothy L. Sayers followed Agatha Christie and Freeman
Wills Crofts into print as a mystery novelist by three years, with the
publication of Whose Body? (1923), a bubbly tale that introduced her
insouciant, aristocratic amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Four Lord Peter
detective novels and a short story collection appeared in the 1920s, and as a
fictional detective Wimsey immediately won attention, pro and con (Dashiell
Hammett seems to have been an early initial detractor, writing rather sourly in
his review of Sayers’s 1928 short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body:
“Readers whom Lord Peter Wimsey amuses will find the book to their taste; most
of the stories are slightly enough plotted to leave him plenty of room for his
flippancies”).[6] However, Sayers’s ascent to the top of the British
crime fiction world really began with a series of incisive and influential
critical essays on the mystery genre that the Oxford graduate penned in the
late 1920s and early 1930s and with her launching in the Lord Peter tales of
the celebrated (and occasionally derided) Harriet Vane saga.
In Strong
Poison (1930), the formerly flippant Lord Peter falls shatteringly
in love with brilliant mystery author (and Sayers ego projection) Harriet Vane,
on trial for her life for the murder of her lover. Peter saves Harriet by
finding the true murderer, but he takes two more novels to successfully woo and
win her (several Sayers detective novels without Harriet also appeared in this
period, including the highly praised church and village tale, The
Nine Tailors). The third novel in the Harriet Vane saga, Gaudy
Night, which in addition to resolving the Peter and Harriet romance
concerns the question of higher education for women, does not even involve a
murder (though there is a mystery). Both Gaudy Night and Sayers’s last
completed detective novel, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937),
approached being mainstream novels and were big sellers on both sides of the
Atlantic. Sayers became a much-discussed name in literary journals, where it was
hotly debated whether the Crime Queen had achieved her goal of transforming the
detective novel into literature and whether such a goal even was a desirable
one. Sayers soon after retired from crime writing at the height of her critical
and financial success as a mystery novelist, in order to devote herself to
writing religious dramas, essays, and a translation of Dante. When she did so
she was unquestionably a Queen of Crime who had voluntarily relinquished her
bloodstained sceptre.
Margery
Allingham (1904–1966)
If Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were not fully
established as Crime Queens until the 1930s, what of Margery Allingham and
Ngaio Marsh? Margery Allingham did not publish her first mystery novel until
1928; her aristocratic series detective, Albert Campion, appeared the next
year, in The Crime at Black Dudley. Despite the appearance of
Campion, thrillers predominated in Allingham’s output until the 1934
publication of Death of a Ghost, a sophisticated tale of murder in the art
world. The main Campion mysteries that followed in the 1930s — Flowers
for the Judge (1936), Dancers in Mourning (1937) and The
Fashion in Shrouds (1938) — dealt with similarly sophisticated
milieus (publishing, musical comedy, fashion design) and met with increasing
praise as crime tales following down Sayers’s “novel of manners” path.
Certainly by the end of the Golden Age Margery Allingham could be said to have
ascended to her throne as a Crime Queen.
Ngaio
Marsh (1895–1982)
Among the four Golden Age Queens of Crime, Ngaio Marsh
had the tardiest coronation. Marsh, a native New Zealander, did not publish her
first crime tale, A Man Lay Dead, until 1934. A
conventional country house tale, this inaugural mystery was deemed a poor thing
by the author herself (“a man laid egg” she later called it). It was not until
the 1938 to 1941 period, with the introduction of sophisticated settings and a
Harriet Vane-like love interest (the brilliant artist Agatha Troy), that Marsh
made a serious claim to the Crime Queen’s royal mantle (in earlier years some
reviewers assumed she was a man). In Artists in Crime and Death
in a White Tie, both from 1938, Marsh’s handsome, impeccably
mannered, well-born detective, Roderick Alleyn, met, wooed and won “Troy”, as
she was called; while in 1941 Marsh produced her most highly-regarded detective
novel (even today), Surfeit of Lampreys, a sparkling
comedy of manners about a charming family living in genteel poverty that has to
confront murder in its midst.
Thus by 1941 it certainly could be fairly said that four
Crime Queens ruled over the world of fictional British murder (even though one
had stepped down from her throne to seek other creative fields to conquer).
Their grip on power was strengthened with the paperback publishing revolution
that began during and accelerated following World War Two. In 1949–50, for
example, paperback giant Penguin reprinted ten works each by Christie,
Allingham and Marsh (who were all still actively writing mysteries), in
editions of 100,000 copies a title — a million total for each author. All four
of the Crime Queens have remained in print in paperback every decade since,
while contrastingly most of their male Golden Age contemporaries languished
after their deaths.
Not surprisingly,
then, the idea of four Crime Queens has cemented and solidified over the last
sixty years. But to some extent this is chronologically ahistorical, as
indicated above. Not until the very tail end of the Golden Age or even just
after, in the period from about 1938–1941, can all four Crime Queens truly have
been said to have risen to dominance over the world of British crime fiction.
Even Christie and Sayers, who appeared earlier on the mystery scene, in 1920
and 1923 respectively, really only began to tower over most of their male
contemporaries in the 1930s, say 1930 to 1935.
So, strictly
speaking, it is not accurate to suggest that the four Crime Queens dominated
the entire Golden Age (normally understood, as stated above, as the years 1920
to 1939 or thereabouts). Perhaps this is why Sarah Weinman, in the Wall
Street Journal article noted above, reimagines the Golden Age as “the years
just before and after World War II.” While this declaration is imprecise, it
suggests to me the years of 1938 to 1946 (interpreted narrowly) or perhaps those
of 1935 to 1949 (interpreted broadly). But even under the more generous
construction, we lose fifteen years of the span traditionally thought of as
constituting the Golden Age. Sarah Weinman thus seems to have taken the logical
final step in the apotheosis of the Crime Queens by reconstructing the Golden
Age entirely around them. In this construction the Crime Queens by definition
dominated the Golden Age, because the Golden Age is now defined as those years
when the Crime Queens dominated British crime fiction.
To say such a
construction is a circular one is to state the obvious. However, this
chronological sleight-of-hand is necessary if one wants to be able to
accurately claim that the Crime Queens dominated the entire Golden Age of
British detection, because the Golden Age, as traditionally defined
(1920–1939), simply was not the murderous matriarchy envisioned by so many
modern-day academics and critics (as well as the readers these academics and
critics have influenced).
Who were the men —
the ousted men — of the Golden Age of the British detective novel? To be sure,
some British male Golden Age detective novelists — E. C. Bentley (forerunner of
the Golden Age with his Trent’s Last Case, 1913, and
author of an additional detective novel, co-written with Warner Allen, Trent’s
Own Case, within it); A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh creator and author
of a single mystery tale); H. C. Bailey (best known as the creator of that
sweets-loving protector and avenger of wronged innocents, Reggie Fortune);
Ronald Knox (more known for his “Rules” for the writing of detective fiction
than for his detective fiction);[7] Philip Macdonald (author of more
sensationalistic detective fiction); Anthony Berkeley/Francis Iles (often seen
as the greatest British progenitor of the psychological crime novel); John
Dickson Carr (the master of the “locked room” mystery, he was actually born in
the United States but is associated with British mystery by reason of his long
residence in England and also because of the English settings of most of his
Golden Age tales); Michael Innes (strongly associated with the “donnish
detection” school); Nicholas Blake (real life poet C. Day Lewis); and Cyril
Hare (a British judge) — have not been quite so forgotten, although they have
received nothing remotely like the attention the Crime Queens have. John
Dickson Carr, for example, was quite popular and admired in his heyday and even
today often is recognized as one of the greatest Golden Age mystery writers,
yet he has languished out of print since the 1990s and has been largely ignored
in academic works, outside of a fine biography by historian Douglas G. Greene.[8]
And even though Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake wrote more in the “novel of
manners” style of the Crime Queens, they too have unaccountably been much
neglected in academic studies compared with the Crime Queens.
Yet these men are
comparatively fortunate (an additional male mystery writer, one who stands
above mere genre history, is the great G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown detective
short stories, many of which appeared during the Golden Age, are still
well-known). Another group of British male detective novelists, notoriously
dubbed the “Humdrums” in the 1970s by crime writer and critic Julian Symons[9]
(this term was again used in regard to these writers by P.D. James in her 2009
survey), truly has been banished from histories of the British Golden Age
detective novel, despite the fact that they all were important, popular figures
in the mystery genre during the Golden Age. Although various authors have been
attributed as belonging to this group, I look here at the six men I believe
have been most strongly associated with it: Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin
Freeman, Cecil John Charles Street (John Rhode/Miles Burton), Alfred Walter
Stewart (J.J. Connington), G. D. H. Cole and Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher
(Henry Wade). Unlike Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, all six of these
writers were active over all (Crofts, Freeman) or most (Street, Connington,
Cole, Wade) of the Golden Age and in 1930 became charter members of the
Detection Club, an association of the finest British detective novelists.
“Humdrum” Golden
Age detective novelists have been disparaged with that word because ostensibly
they cared only about the puzzle in their mystery works and nothing whatsoever
about character, setting or theme. In actuality, this assertion is untrue about
all these authors, particularly so in the case of G.D.H. Cole and Henry Wade.
However, it is true of Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, John Street and
J.J. Connington that their greatest gifts as detective novelists were their
technical skills, which placed them among the most popular British detective
novelists of the Golden Age. Additionally, all these men had individual voices
and made unique contributions to the mystery genre.
Freeman
Wills Crofts (1879–1957)
As mentioned
above, appearing at the inception of the Golden Age (1920) with Agatha
Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles was another
crime novel, Freeman Wills Crofts’s massive murder opus The
Cask, which at the time was considered the more notable
achievement of the two tales, surprising as this fact may seem to many today.
While during his
career as a detective novelist, which extended nearly forty years (from 1920 to
1957), no one who I am aware of ever dubbed Crofts (or any other man) a “Crime
King”, the Anglo-Irish railway engineer turned novelist was from the early
1920s on acknowledged as the king of the “unbreakable alibi” mystery, where the
murderer has an alibi for the crime that seems airtight, but nevertheless is
ultimately punctured by the intrepid detective. The Cask, the first
of Crofts’s unbreakable alibi tales, was remarkable in its day for both the
complexity of its mystery and the clarity with which that mystery is
investigated and explicated. It was also remarkably popular, selling nearly
100,000 copies by 1932 (presumably all hardcover in those days). Additional
tales like The Ponson Case (1921), Sir John Magill’s Last Journey
(1930), Mystery in the Channel (1931) and The Hog’s Back Mystery
(1933) are, like The Cask, locational alibi stories of great ingenuity,
although their mathematical flavour tends to be rather too dry for many in the
modern-day mystery readership. However, Crofts was not a one-trick alibi pony
as has often been suggested. Other clever devices flavour tales like The
Groote Park Murder (1923), Inspector French’s Greatest Case
(1924), Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927), The
Sea Mystery (1928), Death on the Way (1932) and Crime
at Guildford(1935). Additionally, Crofts was a notable exponent of
the inverted mystery (where we see the murderer committing the crime and the
question becomes how — or whether — he will be caught) in such works as The
12:30 from Croydon and Mystery on Southampton Water
(both 1934).
In contrast with
Agatha Christie, whose signature investigator during the Golden Age was the
dapper Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, and her sisters in crime, Sayers,
Allingham and Marsh, who all introduced as investigators charming detectives of
exquisite aristocratic backgrounds, Crofts’s investigators, of whom Inspector
(later Superintendent) French became the most important, were all plain (very
plain) bourgeois coppers and their detailed doings in works like The
Loss of the “Jane Vosper” (1936) arguably have a greater air of
everyday realism, even though Crofts himself had no background in policework.
(Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn was, rather improbably, a policeman too, but he
otherwise bore quite a strong likeness to Sayers’s and Allingham’s oh-so-posh
gents. Moreover, to interview servants below stairs while he hobnobbed with the
smarter sets above, Alleyn fortunately had on hand, like Wimsey with his Bunter
and Campion with his Lugg, an underling, one Sergeant Fox. With rather annoying
preciosity, Alleyn often calls this poor man “Br’er Fox” and “my Foxkin”.)
P.D. James has
speculated that a great part of the appeal of mystery novels by Sayers,
Allingham and Marsh lies in their sophisticated, aristocratic trappings, which
she is sure attracted people living out drab middle class lives in the 1920s
and 1930s (“travelling home to mortgaged metroland,” as she puts it).[10]
No doubt they often did. Yet some readers (like Raymond Chandler, who famously
despised the Crime Queens’ gentleman detectives)[11] preferred
Crofts’s penny plain policemen and the author’s resolutely no-nonsense
concentration on the mystery problem (interestingly, Crofts was one of the few
British detective novelists even modestly praised by Chandler).[12]
An additional notable element of Crofts’s mystery fiction
is the clear influence of the author’s religious value system. A devout
low-church Anglican — he once politely proselytized a patently unenthusiastic
Dorothy L. Sayers on behalf of his latest cause, the evangelical Oxford Group
organization — Crofts increasingly emphasized religious themes in his work
after the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s led him to question the
morality of capitalism. Many of his later novels and stories are explicitly
moralistic. The stories from the collections Murderers Make Mistakes
(1947) and Many a Slip (1955) are parables on the folly of greed and
the pursuit of self-interest, while one specific novel, Antidote to Venom
(1938), deliberately takes the form of a conversion narrative. With keen
insight the Congregationslist minister Erik Routley nearly forty years ago
designated Crofts “the greatest Puritan of them of all” in his interesting but
often overlooked book on the mystery genre, The Puritan Pleasures of the
Detective Story (1972).
Crofts’s early
detective novels did much to create the rage for detective fiction in the first
half of the 1920s. The complexity of the plots made his books especially
appealing to intellectuals, many of whom had previously looked down on the
“mystery thriller” as a rather low form of reading entertainment. Margaret
Cole, wife of the prominent Socialist academic G.D.H. Cole, later recalled that
her husband was drawn to writing his first detective novel, The
Brooklyn Murders (1923), by reading the tales of Freeman Wills
Crofts (Margaret Cole soon herself joined in the fun).[13] “Before
his invention, mine eyes dazzle,” declared one intellectual critic, an Oxford
graduate in the classics no less, of Freeman Wills Crofts.[14] High
culture priest T. S. Eliot, an avid detective fiction reader in the 1920s,
similarly held Freeman Wills Crofts in high esteem, classing him along with his
somewhat similarly named brother in crime, R. Austin Freeman, as the greatest
living detective novelists. Eliot explicitly graded both men above Agatha
Christie (he did not mention Sayers).[15]
R.
Austin Freeman (1862–1943)
Though he is
referenced in some genre surveys for works published before the advent of the
Golden Age, R. Austin Freeman is another major male mystery writer active
during the entire Golden Age who is much underappreciated today. While
Freeman’s first detective novel, The Red Thumb Mark, appeared in
1907, well before the beginning of the Golden Age, Freeman, a contemporary of
Arthur Conan Doyle, continued writing mystery fiction until the year before his
death in 1943. Between 1922 and 1938, Freeman published fifteen detective
novels and three collections of detective short stories, all detailing exploits
of his once famous detective (and the greatest rival of Sherlock Holmes),
medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke (two more Thorndyke novels appeared in 1940
and 1942, outside the proper span of the Golden Age).
R. Austin Freeman’s
Dr. Thorndyke tales brought science and forensic medicine into the detective
fiction genre in a masterful way (compared to Thorndyke, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes is far less credible on scientific matters). P.D. James has pronounced
that Golden Age detective novelists “had very little knowledge and even less apparent
interest in forensic medicine”[16] — a far too sweeping statement,
evidently based mostly on James’s assessments of the Crime Queens, that does a
grave injustice to Freeman, perhaps the single most important progenitor of the
use of forensic medicine in detective fiction. Writing in the mid-1950s of her
admiration for Freeman’s detective novels and stories, novelist Sheila
Kaye-Smith, indeed an avid fan of the man’s work, praised his “extraordinary
lucidity and directness” as well as “the width of his interests, among which
... medicine predominated.”[17]
Though some of
Freeman’s best works, such as The Eye of Osiris (1911) and the
short-story collections John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) and
The
Singing Bone (1912), appeared before the commencement of the Golden
Age, Freeman produced many superb Golden Age works, including the three later
short story collections Dr. Thorndyke’s Casebook (1923), The
Puzzle Lock (1925) and The Magic Casket (1927) and such
novels as The Cat’s Eye (1923), The Shadow of the Wolf (1925), The D’Arblay Mystery (1926), As
a Thief in the Night (1928), Mr. Pottermack Oversight (1930), The
Penrose Mystery (1936) and The Stoneware Monkey (1938).
Freeman’s story collection The Singing Bone has been
credited with creating the inverted mystery and the later novels Wolf
and Oversight are fine examples of that form.
In his day R. Austin Freeman was an influential figure within the genre, referenced with some frequency by younger authors (including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers), and producing two very notable disciples among the individuals who began writing mystery fiction in the 1920s: Cecil John Charles Street (who authored his genre work primarily under the names John Rhode and Miles Burton) and Alfred Walter Stewart (who wrote as J.J. Connington). Several of Street’s detective novels clearly were influenced by Freeman short stories and Connington explicitly pronounced Freeman the greatest living practitioner of the mystery form and the genre writer to whom he owed his greatest artistic debt.[18] Following in the footsteps of Freeman, Street and Connington both became popular and esteemed detective novelists during the Golden Age.
In his day R. Austin Freeman was an influential figure within the genre, referenced with some frequency by younger authors (including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers), and producing two very notable disciples among the individuals who began writing mystery fiction in the 1920s: Cecil John Charles Street (who authored his genre work primarily under the names John Rhode and Miles Burton) and Alfred Walter Stewart (who wrote as J.J. Connington). Several of Street’s detective novels clearly were influenced by Freeman short stories and Connington explicitly pronounced Freeman the greatest living practitioner of the mystery form and the genre writer to whom he owed his greatest artistic debt.[18] Following in the footsteps of Freeman, Street and Connington both became popular and esteemed detective novelists during the Golden Age.
John Street (1884–1964)
Under the punning pseudonym “John
Rhode”, John Street began publishing mysteries in 1924. Forty years old at this
time, Street had already lived an interesting life, with activities including
employment as a stockholder and electrical engineer for an early English power
company, service in World War One as a decorated army artillerist and a
post-war stint as an intelligence officer in Ireland during the notorious Black
and Tan War (he rose to the rank of Major and was often known afterwards as
“Major Street”). In The Paddington Mystery (1925),
Street introduced his most famous series detective, Dr. Lancelot Priestley, an
acerbic, disputatious mathematics professor with a passion for solving problems
and proving authority, be it in the form of rival professors or of the police,
utterly, desperately wrong. With considerable technical ingenuity at his
disposal, Street in his “John Rhode” guise won an admiring readership for
mysteries with complex plots and ingenious murder methods. If Crofts was the
Alibi King, Street was mystery’s Master of Murder Means. One impressed reviewer
memorably dubbed Street “Public Brain Tester No. 1.”[19]
Declared another: “Most serious detective-story connoisseurs would never miss
reading any of his stories.”[20]
Street’s mind for murder
problems was so fecund that to help channel his creativity he introduced two
other pseudonyms, the most important of which was the name “Miles Burton,”
under which Street introduced Desmond Merrion, a somewhat flippant gentleman
amateur detective more in the mold of Lord Peter Wimsey. This series, which
started off with thrillers but soon settled down into classical detection, won
considerable praise throughout the Golden Age as well. Under these two
pseudonyms and another, minor, one, Cecil Waye, the awesomely prolific Street
produced 143 crime novels (mostly tales of detection), over sixty of which
appeared between 1924 and 1939.
So many detective
novels did Street author that it is challenging to list a comparatively small
number of highlights, but certainly notable ones from the Golden Age are: The
Ellerby Case (1927), a thrillerish tale which manages to credibly
employ a purple hedgehog as an instrument of death; an early serial killer
tale, The Murders in Praed Street (1928); The House on Tollard Ridge
and The Davidson Case (both 1929); the witchcraft thriller The
Secret of High Eldersham (1930); The Motor Rally Mystery,
The Claverton Mystery and The Venner Crime
(all from 1933); Poison for One and Shot
at Dawn (both from 1934); The Corpse in the Car (1935) and Mystery
at Olympia (both from 1935); a Crofts-like railway mystery, Death
in the Tunnel (1936); another ingenious serial murderer tale, Death
on the Board (1937); and two locked room mysteries, Invisible
Weapons (1938) and Death Leaves No Card (1939).
Significant Street titles appeared after the end of the Golden Age as well.
In addition to the
ingenuity of their plots, Street’s novels are striking for their informed
depictions of the business world and their often admiring portrayals of
scientifically and technically oriented individuals, whatever their social
class. To some readers, Street’s tales offer a nice break from the
sophisticated, arts-oriented milieus frequently found in works of the Crime
Queens, particularly Sayers, Allingham and Marsh. Street himself came from a
wealthy gentry background on his mother’s side of the family and enjoyed
private means, yet he was fascinated with the capacity of applied science to
improve human life and as a result sought useful employment as the electrical
engineer of the power company in which he had invested. Throughout his life
Street retained great respect for men willing to dirty their hands in
beneficent physical endeavors.
J.J. Connington (1880–1947)
Like John Street, Alfred Walter Stewart had a
professional scientific background. A prominent chemistry professor originally
from Scotland who taught for many years at Queen’s University, Belfast, Stewart
began his career as a novelist with a notable apocalyptic science fiction
thriller, Nordenholt’s Million (1923) — the first of the many books he
would publish under the pseudonym “J.J. Connington.” Three years later, using
the same pen name, Stewart launched what would become an eventual run of two
dozen detective novels, nineteen of which appeared during the Golden Age. In
seventeen of these tales Connington employed as his investigator Chief
Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, a strikingly dry and acerbic detective
reflective of the author’s own mordant world view. Connington tales are
well-constructed works and, while they revolve less consistently around
alibi-busting (Crofts) or clever murder means (Street), they nevertheless often
involve interesting points of science. By 1927, no less a critic than T. S.
Eliot welcomed Connington to “the front rank of detective story writers.”[21]
Indicative of the intellectual respectability of this author within the mystery
field, a 1929 reviewer of Connington’s The Case with Nine Solutions
declared that the author’s “particular strength lies in his respect for the
reader’s intelligence....piece after piece [of the solution to the mystery] is
added till the reader shuts the book with a mind satisfied and replete.”[22]
Besides the much-praised The
Case with Nine Solutions, other notable Connington Golden Age murder
tales that might be mentioned are: Murder in the Maze (1927); The
Sweepstake Murders (1931); The Castleford Conundrum (1932); The
Ha-Ha Case (1934); In Whose Dim Shadow (1935) and A
Minor Operation (1937). Additionally, Connington’s apocalyptic
sci-fi novel, Nordenholt’s Million, offers a remarkably chilling read even
today (arguably more so).
The two remaining men most often classified as “humdrum”
detective novelists, G.D.H. Cole and Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher (Henry
Wade), are so classified without sufficient foundation in my view. G.D.H. Cole
quickly evolved into more of a crime fiction satirist, while Henry Wade
followed down Dorothy L. Sayers’s path by trying to transform the detective
story into a novel of serious purpose, an effort for which he is grievously
underacknowledged.
G.
D. H. Cole (1889–1959)
Though he was less
technically sophisticated a detective novelist than Crofts, Freeman, Street or
Connington, G.D.H. Cole became another prominent British mystery writer in the
1920s. Inspired by the first three detective novels of Crofts, Cole as
mentioned above published his own such tale, The Brooklyn Murders,
essentially a Crofts pastiche, in 1923. Cole was an Oxford professor and one of
England’s most important and active Socialist intellectuals over four decades
(1920s–1950s), and the writing of detective novels became a minor (if fairly
lucrative) pastime for him as well as his wife, the Socialist writer Margaret
Cole.
G.D.H. Cole would write
eighteen detective novels, all but two of which appeared in the traditionally
defined Golden Age period (Margaret Cole herself separately wrote ten tales;
yet even though the two actually composed their mystery novels separately,
after The Brooklyn Murders both their names were signed to each
mystery and the husband and wife today are still referred to as co-authors of
all the books after the first). G.D.H. Cole’s primary contribution to the field
of detective fiction (and that of his wife) was bringing to the detective novel
a satirical touch, often influenced by a leftist world view. In books like The
Death of a Millionaire (1925), The Blatchington Tangle
(1926), Big Business Murder (1935) and Murder at the Munition Works
(1940, which falls just outside the traditionally delineated Golden Age
period), Cole launches squibs at the conservative political and business
establishments, while in other books he pokes fun at country gentry (The
Affair at Aliquid, 1933), batters the bourgeoisie (The
Brothers Sackville, 1936), annoys
academia (Disgrace to the College, 1937) and ridicules the Anglican
Church (Double Blackmail, 1939).
G.D.H. Cole’s most
prominent series detective, the policeman Superintendent Wilson, has been
compared, naturally enough, to Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French, though
it is made clear in the Cole mysteries that Wilson shares his creator’s
Socialist sympathies (indeed, Wilson briefly resigns from the police after he
learns of unrebuked corruption in high places in The Death of a Millionaire).
Reviewers of a rather different ideological stripe from Cole could be offended
by the bluntly satirical tone the writer adopted in his genre tales. In her Sunday
Times review of Cole’s The Affair at Aliquid, for
example, Dorothy L. Sayers complained of the tale that “the mirth is coarse and
commonplace, the satire clumsy and brutal.” Lectured Sayers: “One must both
know and love these bishops, butlers, and noblemen if one’s caricature of their
foibles is to be anything more than an ill-bred grin through a horse-collar.”
Sayers pronounced that “only one man living” — P.G. Wodehouse — could produce
satire of the aristocracy without giving “offence”.[23] Despite such
criticism, however, Cole’s tales often met with high praise in diverse critical
corners. One prominent (and left-wing) mystery reviewer, for example, deemed The
Brothers Sackville “brilliant in many ways, full of amusing
characters and neat situations.”[24]
Henry
Wade (1887–1969)
Most all the
mystery novels of Crofts, Freeman, Street, Connington and Cole were published
in the United States as well as Great Britain, indicating that despite any
perceived Britishness (the methodical detection of the first four men and the
satire of the latter) they were able to find an American audience between the
wars. The one man so far undiscussed, Henry Wade, had a less successful record
of American publication, confounding as he did expectations of what a Golden
Age British mystery writer should be. Even today, Wade continues to confound
those expectations, resulting in a greatly undeserved neglect of his work.
While much praise is heaped on the Crime Queens Sayers, Allingham and Marsh for
helping to transform the detective story into, as P. D. James has put it,
novels of “social realism and serious purpose” and writers of academic
monographs weightily analyze their books for their treatments of issues related
to gender, class and race, Henry Wade, whose own genre novels came to have as
much “social realism and serious purpose” as any of those by the Crime Queens,
bafflingly remains ignored. It may well be the case that Wade’s novels became
too real and too serious for modern readers, schooled to expect from Golden Age
detective stories the lighter novel of manners style of the Crime Queens.
To some extent,
Henry Wade’s true name, Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, and his title, baronet,
have probably hindered any attempt to rehabilitate his literary reputation.
After all, so the thought might run, what could a baronet with a hyphenated handle
have known about “social realism and serious purpose”? Yet in truth Wade was
not some feckless, idle aristocrat, but a man who had served his country with
distinction in World War One, suffering two wounds and receiving the French
Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Order, afterward returning home
and becoming extensively involved in county administration in Buckinghamshire.
Unlike most Golden Age British mystery writers who, however impeccably of
aristocratic lineage their fictional detectives may have been, themselves came
of solidly bourgeois origins, Wade was truly of the gentry and knew county ways
down to the ground. Very few of Wade’s contemporaries wrote with his
authority on country gentry, local politics and the police.
Like his own
favorite detective novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers, Wade in his own writing career
moved away from writing “mere puzzles” toward crime novels in the modern sense,
i.e., novels using murder to illustrate, in a serious way, character, setting
and theme. However, from his very first novel, The Verdict of You All
(1926), the author showed considerable originality in conveying a decidedly
unromantic view of life, one influenced by his experience of the madness of
World War One and the conflict’s unsatisfactory outcome. In his writing Wade
evinces a deeply pessimistic vision of the world, a vision that tends only to
darken over the years (ironically, the modern crime writer Henry Wade most
resembles is P.D. James, who apparently has never read him). Wade is especially
notable for his ability to face without flinching failings in his own class
that were leading irrevocably to a drastic diminishment of its power. While the
Crime Queens, particularly Sayers, Allingham and Marsh, have with some
justification been accused of a tendency to romanticize the landed gentry, Wade
knew his own people too well to do that.
Notable early
books conveying Wade’s ironic, often pessimistic, view of life that are also
good puzzles are The Missing Partners (1928), The Duke of York’s Steps
(1929), The Dying Alderman (1930) and No Friendly Drop
(1931). Over the course of the 1930s, Wade downplayed the puzzle in favor of
treatments of character, setting and theme. Two of his best works from this
decade in the “crime novel” vein are Mist on the Saltings (1933) and The
High Sheriff (1937), both essentially tragedies. Also of the first
order is Heir Presumptive (1935), an inverted tale in Wade’s most
darkly ironic style that depicts an amoral man bumping off the relatives
standing in the way of his attainment of a baronetcy, and Bury Him Darkly
(1936), a pioneering “police procedural” (a tale portraying realistic police
investigation of crime). Wade’s best police procedural (and one of his finest
works), Lonely Magdalen (1940), stands just outside the
traditionally delineated Golden Age period. Wade also wrote some fine short
crime tales, including an interesting series about a common policeman that he
gathered into the collection Here Comes the Copper (1938). His
other story collection, Policeman’s Lot (1933), is more a
mixed bag, but is still worth noting.
People interested in the true, surpassingly rich and
varied, history of the Golden Age (and not merely the stripped-down version
constructed in many modern genre studies), as well as those who just like a
good mystery, are advised to seek out some of Great Britain’s forgotten Kings
of Crime. Copyrights have lapsed on many R. Austin Freeman titles and these are
downloadable on the internet or available through admittedly rather obscure publishers.
Additionally, works by Freeman Wills Crofts are being reprinted by James
Prichard’s nascent concern, Langtail Press (interestingly, Prichard is a
great-grandson of Agatha Christie).[25] Yet the many genre works by
Street, Connington, Cole and Wade remain, quite unjustly, out of print. And
none of these authors are yet available, as are the Crime Queens and the
Hardboiled Boys, in what might be termed prestige editions, which are more
likely to catch the eyes of potential readers, even in the internet age.
While there is
some evidence on the internet of a rekindled interest in the deposed Crime
Kings on the part of small publishing concerns, academic publishers still seem
loath to embrace scholarly studies of these authors, even though these authors
have merit in themselves and also provide us with a much more informed
understanding of mystery genre history. Thus we are faced with an unfortunate
vicious circle, where unjustly neglected British Golden Age detective novelists
(often, though certainly not always, male) must remain unjustly neglected in
the future because they have been unjustly neglected in the past; and where we
will continue to be told that four particular British women — the Crime Queens
— dominated the entire Golden Age of British detective fiction.
Notes
1. Lucy Sussex: Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The
Mothers of the Mystery Genre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), ix.
2. Sally Munt: Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994), page 7.
3 Lee
Horsley: Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), page 38. Reviewed in CADS
49 (April, 2006)
4. Erin
A. Smith: Hard-Boiled:
Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2000), page 39.
5. P.D. James: Talking about Detective
Fiction (Oxford: Bodlean
Library, 2009; US: Knopf, 2009). Reviewed in CADS 57 (December, 2009).
6. Saturday
Review of Literature 6 (May 4, 1929).
7. For more on Knox and his “Rules” see Liz
Gilbey: “The Monsignor and His Ten Commandments” in CADS 54 (July, 2008).
8. Douglas G. Greene: John Dickson Carr, The Man Who Explained Miracles (US: Otto Penzler
Books, 1995).
9. In Bloody
Murder (Faber & Faber, 1972; US: as Mortal Consequences, Harper 1972).
10. Talking about Detective Fiction, page 118.
11. For example “Not long ago I
made an effort to reread Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy
Night. God,what sycophantic drivel. A whole clutch of lady dons at an
Oxford college all in a flutter to know about Lord Peter Wimsey and to
know about the plot of Harriet Vane’s latest mystery story. How silly can you
get?”; or, “I don’t deny the mystery writer the privilege of making his
detective any sort of a person he wants him to be — a poet, philosopher,
student of ceramics or Egyptology, or a master of all the sciences like Dr.
Thorndyke. What I don’t seem to cotton to is the affectation of gentility which
does not belong to the job and which is in effect a subconscious expression of
snobbery, the kind of thing that reached its high-water mark in Dorothy
Sayers.”. In letters to James Sandoe reproduced in Frank MacShane (ed.): Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981; UK: Jonathan Cape, 1981), pages 291
and 297.
12. Chandler describes Crofts as “the soundest
builer of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy” in “The Simple Art of Murder”
first published in The
Atlantic Monthly
(December, 1944).
13. G.D.H. and Margaret Cole: “Meet Superintendent
Wilson” in Meet the Detective (Allen
& Unwin, 1935; US: Telegraph Press, 1935), page 108.
14. Ivor
Brown in the Observer, reprinted in Freeman Wills Crofts: Crime at Guildford (London: Collins, 1935).
15. The
Criterion 8 (September 1928): page 175.
16. P.D. James: Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (Faber &
Faber, 1999), page 33.
17. Sheila Kaye-Smith: All the Books of My Life: A Bibliobiography (London: Cassell, 1956), page 186.
18. From
a letter written by Stewart.
19. E.R.
Punshon in the Manchester Guardian (from a review of Death on the Board), reprinted in John Rhode: Death in the Hopfields (London: Collins, 1937).
20. “Dr.
Watson” in the Manchester Evening
Chronicle (from a review of Death in the Tunnel), reprinted in Miles
Burton: Death at Low Tide (London: Collins, 1938).
21. The
Monthly Criterion, 6 (November
1927), page 568.
22. From an unattributed review in the Times
Literary Supplement reprinted in Connington: The Eye in the Museum
(London: Gollancz, 1929).
23. From the Sunday Times,
17 September 1933.
24. Ralph Partridge in the New Statesman and Nation, 9 January 1936, page 54.
25 Six titles by Crofts are
currently available from Langtail Press; see www.langtailpress.com for details.
