Stark Ravers! Murder Gone Mad (1931), by Philip Macdonald

"I'm slaying in the rain...."
1944 Collins Canadian pb ed of
Murder Gone Mad
oddly suggesting it's set in Canada

WHO IS THE BUTCHER?

HOLMDALE PANIC STRICKEN

IS OUR CITY TO BE ANOTHER DUSSELDORF?

"You get along, Pike, and don't forget to show the world how that Dusseldorf business ought to have been handled."

[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, yes, 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.  

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 (assuming he even had one) 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.

society gone mad
Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in the film Cabaret (1972)

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?  (Weimar Germany made M.) 

For it is, indeed, a rather horrific book.  Its minority of detractors from the day condemned the novel as "sensationalistic."  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 of the book  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 better mysteries, Poison in the Garden Suburb.  

Some of the best sections of Murder Gone Mad satirize the small city's smugly complacent satisfaction with itself, like mainstream American Sinclair Lewis had done more famously a decade earlier in his novel Main Street.*  Into this carefully ordered community of Holmdale comes a devouring demon of disorder, and it proves passing hard for people to expel this insatiable destroyer from their midst.  

*(Some enterprising mystery author should rewrite Lewis' classic novel as Murder in Main Street--there are plenty of people in that book whom one might want to murder.)  

In his writing Philip MacDonald admittedly 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's own class of Golden Age British mystery writer, that tend to make bad impressions on modern readers. 

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: 

Philip MacDonald
in his fiction the author himself
evinced a thirty-five year interest in 
the subject of sadism

"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 quite 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 cruelly slit Albert's stomach open from bottom to top, just like they had done before to Lionel, and this splendid specimen of an athlete died young.

A fifth murder follows, then a sixth, this latter the cruelest killing yet.  After this last one 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 in Murder Gone Mad, two in particular, are truly 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 killer's victims is 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 The Butcher's third victim, a server at a movie theater snack counter, rather reminded me of one of Agatha Christie's serial killer victims, 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?  

American first edition
In the United States MacDonald himself was proclaimed the new Edgar Wallace

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.  

Fritz Haarmann and his alleged accomplice 
and lover Hans Grans

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 actually 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.  

To put it blurbably, Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad is Golden Age British crime fiction's frank acknowledgement that in a world of depraved vampires, butchers and cannibals--fiends in human form--murder in truth was not solely committed cozily and rationally with blunt instruments and untraceable poisons in baronets' country house libraries and studies, as if amused players were moving pieces on a tidy Cluedo board.

Beds Are Burning: Death of a Lake (1954) by Arthur Upfield

Out where the river broke

The bloodword and desert oak

Holden wrecks and boiling diesels

Steam in forty-five degrees

--Beds Are Burning (1986), Midnight Oil

What did they expect, or dread or hope from the death of the lake?  

--Death of a Lake (1954), Arthur Upfield

In the 1980s the nation of Australia attained a certain quirky cachet in the United States as the country of Crocodile Dundee, Men at Work and vegemite sandwiches and Outback Steakhouse, with its Bloomin' Onion and its Shrimp on the Barbie.  Outback was a real big thing for a while here.  We still have an Outback about three minutes away from where I live. 

However, in 1986 there popped up in the US  Australian rock band, Midnight Oil, that, while it may have been, to US eyes, quirky, was emphatically not silly, cheesy or, um, vegemitey.  To the contrary, Midnight Oil was very serious indeed--and very angry, with songs, like "Beds Are Burning" and "The Dead Heart," about the abuses committed by British colonials against the smallest continents' indigenous, or aboriginal, people, those who carried in "our hearts the true country,"  as the lyrics of "The Dead Heart" ran.

Midnight Oil had actually been around in Australia for seven years before American radio picked them up in 1986.  "The Dead Heart," the first single from their album Diesel and Dust, charted at only #53 in the US, but the second single, "Beds Are Burning," made it up to #17 and remains their most iconic song, with nearly 300 million views on youtube.  I loved these two songs and I bought the Diesel and Dust CD (I had just gotten a CD player), but I have to admit I only remember one other song on the album, "Put Down That Weapon."  I'm listening to it now on youtube (and yes they just aired an Outback Steakhouse ad between songs) to see if I recall others.  (Okay "Dreamworld," which I'm listening to now, sounds familiar.)  

Immediately memorable about Midnight Oil are the raspy, sometimes menacing vocals of frontman Peter Garrett, the horn parts and the driving percussion of Rob Hirst, who at age seventy died three weeks ago.  BOOM, BOOM, CRASH, BOOM!  On my stereo system these percussive bits sounded literally earth shattering, especially on "Beds Are Burning."  

Australian ephemeral lake

Rob Hirst's death got me thinking again about Australia and that naturally got me thinking about Anglo-Australian crime writer Arthur Upfield (1890-1964), who had a similar interest in indigenous culture and a famed "half-caste" series detective, Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte.  Upfield maintains a following today but lies somewhat in the shadow, in the land of vintage mystery, of American hard-boiled and British classic mystery writers.  He portrayed a world all his own, with a great many (most?) of his Bony tales taking place in the great Australian outback, which comprises most of Australia's' physical space but little of its population (though the smallest continent, Australia is larger than the continental United States).

Although it abounds in isolated locations, Bony's world is not that posh country houses, gentry and quaint villagers, nor of mean urban streets, nightclubs and gangsters. With my long-standing preference, now somewhat discarded, for classic country house and village mysteries I had a somewhat equivocal relationship with Upfield's crime novels.  Their strongest feature, I think it's generally agreed, is their strong settings, but those settings often throw classic detection into the background.  Moreover, for hard-boiled fans, the books may be a bit slow-moving and lacking in such rapid-fire action trappings as beatings and beddings.  Although he was of the generation of Chandler and Hammett, Upfield was not really a hard-boiled writer.  Still one can see affinity to both American and British mystery in his writing.  

Although Upfield commenced the Bony detective series in 1936 the series was not actually published in the United States until 1943; but then he was received there with great fanfare.  Here's Anthony Boucher welcoming Murder Down Under (aka Mr. Jelly's Business), the first Bony book published in the US: "Unusual and timely setting, good puzzle, and unique setting.  Long and slow but richly rewarding."  Three years later, he wrote in a notice of The Devil's Steps that Bony was "one of the greatest figures of modern detection."  

death of a lake

A significant faction of American mystery addicts agreed with Boucher.  In an article published about Upfield in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1954, the year he published his 18th Bony mystery, Death of a Lake, the features writer claimed that while "the average American mystery novel sells 3500 copies, Napoleon Bonaparte sells between 30,000 and 40,000."  This was easily enough to make Upfield one of the most popular crime writers in America.  

What was the great appeal of Bony mysteries for the American mystery reading public?  Again, setting.  As for the author himself, "setting, not the puzzle, was his first concern."  Of Death of a Lake specifically, Upfield declared: "My primary objective was to describe the death of a lake.  I've purposefully soft-pedalled the mystery to emphasize the background."  And with that title the book does sound more like some sort of catastrophizing Rachel Carson-esque environmental tome.  

Upfield divulged that he spent five months writing, then rewriting, a book, after which he would "have a loaf for a couple of months before I get down down to the next one."  Unlike many mystery writers Upfield made enough from his worldwide book sales to make a good living from crime fiction.  

New south Wales map showing the towns of Menindee and Broken Hill,
also mentioned in Death of a Lake, in the northwest

Upfield genuinely knew his settings.  He based Death of a Lake on time he spent in the early Twenties at the Albemarle sheep station on the Darling River above the town of Menindee in western New South Wales.  In the novel he reimagines this station as Porchester Station, a vast area which comprises "sixty thousand sheep in the care of some twenty wage plugs."  Most of the action in the novel takes place specifically at an outstation at Lake Otway, the dying ephemeral lake of the title. From the Lake Otway outstation a lone telephone line spans fifty miles to Porchester Station--how's that for an isolated location?

Lake Otway fills with water only once in a generation and then it stays filled for about only three years.  The novel takes place in January and February at the peak of an Australian summer heatwave, when the temp hits over 100 in the shade; and the lake is sure the evaporate in a mere matter of weeks.  And there's something in the lake which seems particularly to interest seven whites--five men and two women--at the outstation.  (There are two full blooded indigenous Australians as well on the scene for a time, but they do not figure in any real sense in the tale.) 

abandoned Holden vehicle rusting in an unforgiving Australian climate

After laying out the setting (a map would have been nice), Upfield in chapter two lays out a procedural chronology of a possible cold case:

Ray Gillen, a debonair, devil-may-care stockman and Korean War veteran, had a half-share in a winning lottery ticket, netting him 12,500 dollars, or over half a million today (about $400,000 USD).  He left the city of Toowoomba in Queensland on a motorbike, declaring his intent to see Australia (he "never cared a hoot for money"), and arrived on September 3 (1952?) at Lake Otway, where he decided to stay and work for a time.  Nine weeks later on November 7, Gillen, a strong swimmer, went for a late-night swim in Lake Otway and was never seen again; presumably he cramped and drowned in the lake.  

So what happened to the lottery money?  Could Gillen have been murdered for it?  In late January (1954?), fifteen months after Gillen's original arrival at Lake Otway, D. I. Napoleon Bonaparte, having come across the official records of the Gillen affair in the police Case File, comes to the Lake Otway outstation in the guise of a humble horsebreaker to investigate matters. (Many of Bony's cases fall into this pattern of having him appear in disguise to investigate criminous events at remote locales) 

the real life Albemarle sheep station
where the author himself once worked
in the early 1920s, before he began his
life as an author

The majority of Death of a Lake is devoted to Bony sounding out the handful of inhabitants of this remote outstation about past events there.  The local men, headed by Overseer Richard Martyr, are sufficiently but not especially memorably characterized, while the women, a mother and daughter from Broken Hill by the surname of Fowler, are more memorable.  "These two quarreling women gave [the outstation] life."

Like two true daughters of Eve, however, the mother and daughter, while they have come to this homosocial environment and domesticated it with feminine cookery and cleaning, have also infested it with the vipers of sexual provocation and designing womanly wiles.  

Bony knows, we are informed, "that to be a wanton a woman needed no training." Warns a trucker darkly of Lake Otway: "Women! You go careful with the women at Lake Otway!...Ruddy termites, both of 'em.  They eats into a man's dough from the inside out."

a man's world, passing wary of women
workmen at a sheep station

One bitten hand bitterly predicts:

"There's going to be crackers and volcanoes before long.  Them two women are schemers all right.  Proper trollops.  Take a mug's advice and go easy, Bony.  Better spit at 'em than smile."

Another hand tells Bony misogynistically of the distaff side of humanity: 

All they thinks about is what they can get out of a bloke.  Only the blacks get their women in a corner and keeps 'em there....They gives their women a beltin' every Sunday morning regular, and there's never no arguing or ruddy funny business during the week.

Who says Australian whites didn't respect aboriginal culture?  I can see modern readers now proclaiming this novel grievously dated, on account of such sentiments, when it's really nothing of the sort, as we should have learned by now in the Age of MAGA and the manosphere.  So-called "woke" culture didn't extinguish such "dated" beliefs; it merely suppressed them until the advent of social media and its conservative influencers.  

Personally, I've never believed overmuch in the myth of the dated mystery novel.  Usually we just like to imagine they are dated in their sentiments.  Certainly this one I suspect is an accurate enough depiction of many men in rough working environments.  At least the bossman, Martyr, is more sophisticated, even writing poetry, but he is drawn to the women too--what straight man wouldn't be in such a place?

Indeed, though Lake Outway may be dying, the outstation perched above it is positively awash in sexual cross currents.  The men pursue and buy gifts from Sydney and Adelaide for mother or daughter or both as the case may be, while the woman--the girl, Joan, but 21, and her mother, barely past forty--compete with each other for favors from the men.  Ray Gillen himself stayed on at the outstation, it seems, merely to dally with bewitchingly lovely young Joan.  Bony's task for much of the novel is navigate these dangerous crosscurrents and discover just who was plotting what with whom.  

Meanwhile the lake is dying and Upfield's descriptions of the fight for survival as the water supply literally dries up among the local feathered and furred creatures--the various birds, the rabbits (millions evidently), the roos, the foxes, etc.--is gripping.  Eventually the water in the lake will completely evaporate and Gillen's drowned body presumably will thereby be revealed, along with the gold locket which he wore around his neck--and then what?  

Well, I won't spoil that for you of course.  But there is, also near the end of the novel, a deadly house fire and another death.  Finally Bony gets down to brass tacks and conducts a brief though genuine investigation of these events, discovering in the process the sordid truths surrounding Gillen's demise and other later events.  

It's a slow-moving tale yet somehow a compelling one.  Upfield excels at nature writing and the idea of people having to await the "death" of a lake to uncover the body that lies beneath the diminishing water and its secret is an intriguing one.  

It feels rather like some sort of Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway humans in the wilds story, like "Rain" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." For a while the situation with the unforgiving natural elements turns so dire that it starts to resemble what I call a "survival mystery"--that tiny detective fiction subgenre where the characters fight for their very survival as they grapple as well with the nominal murder problem.  

Upfield's scenic writing is superb and while the characters are stock they move the tale along.  At times I was reminded rather of an American hard-boiled novel with its femmes fatales, potentially more deadly than the male.  People may deem to novel anti-woman, but on the other hand it seems of a time and place where women had to use what weapons nature endowed them with, as the purported "weaker sex," in order successfully to manipulate men.  Sisters couldn't quite do it for themselves then, especially in the Australian outback; rather, they often had to work behind a man to accomplish their ends.  Blame not the women, but the male-dominated society which cast the sexes into these performative roles, what MAGA lovingly terms "trad."

All in all, I think Death of a Lake is a fascinating mystery novel of an unusual time and place and it remains, in my view, one of Upfield's finest efforts in the crime vein.  Had Agatha Christie written this book I can see her having riddled the tiny outstation with an ingenious if unlikely welter of obscure motivations and false identities; but Upfield was not Christie and we can live with that surely.  Different knife strokes for different crime folks, say I.  Pick your own poison.  

See also my 2012 review of Upfield's earlier detective novel Venom House (1952), an account of a Bony case which is mentioned in Death of a Lake.  I think that's the author's closest take on a classic English country house mystery.