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| "I'm slaying in the rain...." 1940s Canadian pb ed of the novel oddly suggesting it's set in Canada |
HOLMDALE PANIC STRICKEN
IS OUR CITY TO BE ANOTHER DUSSELDORF?
[I]n his postscript the Dusseldorf policeman admitted that the Holmdale Butcher had made all his prototypical predecessors look like the smallest beer....there seemed, even when the kindly, gay, winter sun shone brightly upon it, a loathley black shadow over Holmdale. Everyone in this pleasantly facdaded little town was living with stretched nerves.
"Oh, hell!" said the Chief Constable. "I never did like that damn Garden City place."
--excerpts from Philip Macdonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931)
Between the spring and summer of 1930-31, newspapers round the world repelled (one hopes) their readers with repulsive accounts of the "Vampire of Dusseldorf," Germany, one Peter Kurten, a sadistic serial killer who tortured and killed at least nine people, mostly women and girls, in some cases attempting to drink his victims' blood (hence the vampire nickname). In May 1931, while Kurten awaited execution for his crimes, German director Fritz Lang's lauded serial killer film, M, featuring, in a star making performance, native Hungarian actor Peter Lorre, was released.
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| German serial murderer Peter Kurten |
The film is said to have been based upon the monstrous exploits of Peter Kurten, although around this time there were so many serial killers atrociously active in Germany--Fritz Haarmann, the "Vampire of Hanover," who killed at least two dozen men and boys between 1918 and 1924; Karl Denke, the "Cannibal of Muensterberg," who killed and cannibalized dozens of easily missable people between 1904 and 1924; Karl Grossman, the "Butcher of Berlin,'" who killed at least twenty women between 1918 to 1921--that one can't really say for sure. Let's face it: they didn't call Weimar Germany decadent for nothing. Come to the cabaret!
Whatever Fritz Lang's specific inspiration for M, British author Philip MacDonald made no bones about the fact that his morbosus inspiratio for his crime novel Murder Gone Mad, which was first published in Britain by the Collins Crime Club in February 1931, was none other than Düsseldorf's very own verminous vampire. The Düsseldorf murders are specifically mentioned several times in Murder Gone Mad and, over three decades after the original publication of the novel in 1931, Macdonald himself stated flatly that Kutner's heinous killings "suggested" the novel to him.
Philip MacDonald published nearly thirty novels, mostly tales of crime, but just a few remained in print for substantial periods of time: his debut detective novel, The Rasp; Warrant for X, aka The Nursemaid Who Disappeared; Rynox; and the serial killer novels Murder Gone Mad, X v. Rex, and The List of Adrian Messenger. Oddly, of these films, only Murder Gone Mad remains unfilmed. Was it deemed too horrific for the silver screen?
For it is, indeed, a rather horrific book. MacDonald later claimed that with the novel he wanted to explore how a clever, motiveless killer might be caught by the police; and, indeed, there is a strong proto police procedural element to the novel--the dullest part in my opinion. To me what really makes Murder Gone Mad interesting, aside from its social realism, are the elements of horror which the author injects into his tale.
Murder Gone Mad is set in Holmdale, a habitation of some 6000 people located "forty miles and forty-five minutes" from London's St. Pancras station and one of those topical planned modern "garden cities" that pop up in novels of the day. (Its name has recently been shortened from Holmdale Garden City.) British detective fiction writer Margaret Cole even unsubtly titled one of her mysteries Poison in the Garden Suburb. Some of the best sections of Murder Gone Mad [MGM] satirize the small city's smug satisfaction with itself, like mainstream American Sinclair Lewis had done more famously a decade earlier in his novel Main Street.* Into the carefully ordered community of Holmdale has come a devouring demon of disorder.
*(Some enterprising mystery author should rewrite Lewis' classic novel as Murder on Main Street--there are plenty of people in that book whom one might want to murder.)
In his writing Philip MacDonald can get patronizing of the middle and lower classes. MacDonald himself was descended from writers and actors and only briefly held a government job before attaining his own success as a writer. He could get somewhat smug toward the middle and lower classes in his writing. For example, he refers, seemingly condescendingly, to "the would-be-smart, artificial-silk-stockinged live-on-your-credit class" and "the cheap ready-made sports suits of the holiday-making clerk"--the type of classist remarks, common to MacDonald class of Golden Age British mystery writer, that tend to make bad impressions on modern readers.
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| Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover |
A certain Mr. Colby, who is returning home from his London work when Murder Gone Mad opens, sounds very much the complacent petit bourgeois as he makes the following observations to Mr. Harvey, a visiting friend:
"You don't find any long-haired artists and such in Holmdale. Not, of course, that we don't have a lot of journalists and authors live here, but if you see what I mean, they're not the cranky sort. People don't walk about in bath gowns and slippers the way I've seen them at Letchworth [Garden City]."
"I don't think anyone would call me snobbish, but I must say that I find it rather extraordinary of the authorities to let this row of labourers' cottages go up here. They ought to have that sort of thing for 'The Other Side.'"
Yet Mr. Colby is an essentially kind man who takes, with his placid, motherly wife, doting pride in his promising eleven-year-old son Lionel: "I must say--although it really isn't for me to say it--that a better, quieter, more loving lad it'd be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Holmdale."
Terribly it is Lionel who at the end of chapter one is found dead, butchered, his stomach "slit open from bottom to top," leaving his parents, naturally, broken and crushed by their grief. Other murders follow, along with taunting letters from the apparent culprit, who signs himself "The Butcher."
After the second and third murder, these of Pamela Richards, a pretty and popular young townswoman, and Amy Adams, the humbler server at the Holmdale Theatre chocolates counter, Scotland Yard's Superintendent Arnold Pike, of the author's Colonel Anthony Gethryn series of detective novels, is sent along to Holmdale to take charge of the murder investigation. Amusingly, he hopes to bring Anthony Gethryn with him on the case, but for once the good Colonel is indisposed and unable insouciantly to butt into an official investigation, as is his wont.
But Pike is unable to prevent a fourth murder, this one of Albert Calvin Rogers, a breakfast cereal factory worker with "magnificent legs" carrying "thirteen stone of well-proportioned bone and muscle" who to his intense delight has just become a "fully fledged and comparatively highly remunerated member of the Woolwich United Association Football Club." Someone slit his stomach open from bottom to top and this splendid athlete died young.
A fifth murder follows, then a sixth, this latter the cruelest one yet. After it a riot against the seemingly incompetent police is only narrowly averted.
In one of Pike's reports to the Yard he perceptively speculates that The Butcher "chooses for his victims young persons of either sex (a) whose deaths come at a time when they are having a run of good fortune, and (b) who leave behind them persons, residents in Holmdale, to whom the deaths are more than usually painful." I've read people complain that there are "no clues" the the identify of The Butcher in Murder Gone Mad, a claim which perplexes me as it seems to me that MacDonald boldly waves the identify of this person before his readers for virtually the entire novel. It's actually rather cleverly done.
I've also seen it claimed by critic S. T. Joshi that in Mad the author gravely errs by failing to probe "the deep psychological malady that a serial killer must have in order to commit to such crimes." Well, duh! MacDonald himself wryly admitted in 1963 that had he written the novel in the Sixties he would have felt compelled by modern practice to "reveal that the whole trouble was caused by the fact that, at an early age, this unfortunate homicidal maniac (like the character in Cold Comfort Farm) had seen something nasty in the woodshed." In his defense the author added that thirty years earlier "[i]t was enough, then, that the murderer was mentally unhinged."
Personally I feel it's enough now. MacDonald actually quite capably suggests this character's sadism and in a chilling final scene, where The Butcher encounters another would-be victim (unfortunately speaking truly egregious, wearisomely phonetic Cockney) he might well be detailing one of the Dusseldorf Vampire's deadly encounters.
The Butcher's murders, two in particular, are wickedly cruel--so much so that, if they were accurately depicted on film today, they likely would provoke complaints from the public. In that respect MacDonald was ahead of his time.
I was interested that one of the killers was named Amy Adams (dreadful name, The Butcher sneers in a letter). Aside from the fact that this is the name of one of our most highly regarded modern actresses today, the alliterative handle of this victim, a server at a movie theater snack counter, rather reminded me of Agatha Christie's serial killer victim, the waitress Betty Barnard, in her serial killer novel, published five years after MacDonald's, The ABC Murders. How much inspiration was MacDonald's novel for Christie?
Less attractively we get condescension from the author toward the novel's conspicuously Jewish character, Mr. Israel Gompertz. "He was, very obviously, a Jew," Macdonald cringingly tells us. He's given the usual lisp British mystery writers of the day liked to assign to their stereotypical Jewish characters. Surprisingly MacDonald's American publisher left this passage unaltered in their edition. However, the character is actually sympathetically represented, notwithstanding the fact that he is carrying on a clandestine affair with a certain "Miss Aarons." MacDonald himself was an adulterer in his first marriage (with his secretary no less), so he could hardly criticize Gompertz on that score.
On a reread of the novel, it seemed to me that Murder Gone Mad, whatever its flaws, deserves its landmark status. True, MacDonald goes "cute" with the ending, blithley eliding all the emotions the novel has raised. I'm not sure that Mad is MacDonald's best crime novel (I've actually come to prefer his short crime fiction--more on this soon), but I do believe the book still stands as a classic of the genre: Golden Age British crime fiction's frank acknowledgement that in a world of depraved German vampires, butchers and cannibals--fiends in human form--murder was not merely committed cozily with blunt instruments and untraceable poisons in baronets' country house libraries and studies, like the pieces on a tidy Cluedo board.
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