The Land Endureth: John Rhode's Licensed for Murder (1958) and Ruth Rendell's Not in the Flesh (2007) (Then and Now #4)

"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the land endureth forever."

Even the finest longtime prolific mystery and crime writers in their later years may suffer waning inspiration and even capacity.  Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate (1973), the last two novels Agatha Christie wrote, are, in my view, quite dull and meandering (the latter, indeed, approaches incoherence).  When Christie produced these two books, she was in her eighties and had already written over sixty novels (Elephants and Postern were her sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth, respectively).  Christie had been writing mystery novels for over half a century, having produced her first one, The Mysteriousness Affair at Styles, in 1920.

Elephants may remember
but by 1972 Agatha Christie
occasionally forgot

Ruth Rendell, one of the great modern-day British Queens of Crime, will publish her sixty-second and sixty-third crime novels in 2012 (this is the first year since 2008 that she has produced two novels in one year).  Like Christie in the early 1970s, Ruth Rendell is now an octogenarian, having celebrated her eighty-second birthday last month.  She published her first mystery novel, From Doon with Death, nearly fifty years ago, in 1964.

Ruth Rendell (b. 1930)
Modern day Crime Queen

Incredible as this may seem, Cecil John Charles Street, the other mystery writer with whom I am concerned in this piece, published (primarily under two pseudonyms, John Rhode and Miles Burton) more mystery novels than Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell combined: 143 (or 144, depending on how one categorizes The Alarm).  Even more incredible, he produced his 143 mystery novels in a "mere" thirty-eight years, between 1924 and 1961 (making an average of four novels a year, rounding up).  Street probably is the most prolific true detective novelist in the history of the mystery genre (coincidentally, he died, at the age of eighty, the same year Ruth Rendell's first novel was published).

John Street (1884-1964)
Golden Age Crime King

In this two-part piece I look at a pair of novels: Licensed for Murder (1958), by John Rhode (Street's best-known pseudonym) and the more recent Not in the Flesh (2007), by Ruth Rendell.  Though both books come from late in the authors' careers, when both authors were in their seventies (Street 74, Rendell 77), they are, I think, superior to most of Agatha Christie's later efforts.  Moreover, they have surprising elements in common, most strikingly a shared interest in social changes transpiring in rural England (note: I adopt the American spelling for the Rhode novel).

English edition

As "John Rhode" Cecil John Charles Street was a founding member of the Detection Club and one of the most popular English detective novelists in the 1920s and 1930s (after 1926 all his mystery novels were published in the United States as well as Britain, in the former country by Dodd, Mead).  His detective, the acerbic, elderly scientist Dr. Lancelot Priestley, was one of the true Great Detectives of the era, with a positive genius for solving the scientifically and mechanically complex crimes his creator devised in novel after novel.  If Agatha Christie was the era's Mistress of Misdirection, John Rhode was its Master of Murder Means.

American edition (Dodd, Mead)

Licensed for Murder was John Street's seventy-second John Rhode novel (and the sixty-seventh outing for Dr. Priestley).  There would be only five more over the next few years, none of them really recommendable. Yet Licensed for Murder is surprisingly good for this very late date, offering readers a complex plot and a persuasive rural setting.

The noted American mystery critic Anthony Boucher praised Licensed for Murder, writing in the New York Times that the "detection is competent; the murders have novelty and ingenuity to recommend them; and the background details on the management of a village inn are fascinating.  Slow and heavy, but kind of nice."

John Street enjoyed
a stout pipe and a strong pint

Anthony Boucher was discerning in his assessment of Licensed for Murder.  Its murder plot is one of Street's cleverest and the late-1950s declining rural inn setting is done with conviction and authority, reflecting in plain prose the author's over half-century familiarity with public houses and his fascination with geography and landscape (Street had been an artillerist in World War One).

Licensed for Murder opens with the managing director of Hinkley’s Brewery, Mr. Godstow, learning that the elderly tenants of the Knapper’s Arms plan shortly to relinquish the inn's tenancy, which they have held for twenty-nine years.  Godstow fears that finding new tenants will prove a stiff challenge:

The Knapper’s Arms was certainly not an attractive proposition.  A century ago Famford had been a flourishing center of the flint-knapping industry....But the industry had long since...come to an end.  The population of the straggling village had decreased, and now consisted almost entirely of labourers on the surrounding farms....How was a tenant to be found for such a house as the Knapper’s Arms?...[T]he property included six acres of land, enough for a smallholding.  But it wasn’t everybody who would be attracted by the prospect of serving in the bar during opening hours and working on the land for the rest of the day….Electricity had been laid on during the past five years, but water still had to be pumped by hand from a well, and there was no bathroom.  The only available public transport was the bus service along the main road between Maltchester and Whitby.

After nearly thirty years Hinkley's Brewery must find new tenants for the Knapper's Arms
for fascinating information on beer and breweries, see http://beervana.blogspot.com/

Godstow drives to Famford to get a look for himself at the lie of the land, which he finds, as he expected, unpromising:  

From Hall Farm the village of Famford was hidden by an intervening hill.  But when Godstow had driven to the crest of this, the village lay spread out before him: the flint-built church, with its squat tower; the vicarage; a few scattered cottages; and in the centre of all the Knapper’s Arms.  It was large for a village inn and by no means attractive in appearance.  A central block built of brick, with a roof of blue slate.  To this additions had been made from time to time, built of flint or of the local stone.  The whole effect was ugly and without symmetry.  Godstow could imagine a prospective tenant shuddering at first sight of it.

Despite his doubts about the prospects of leasing the Knapper’s Arms, Godstow is able to find an interested couple, the Bilstons.  Surprisingly, the Bilstons are Londoners who want to give up their city jobs and live in the country, confounding Godstow’s prediction that “no Londoner would ever take the Knapper’s Arms.”  After a couple weeks when the Knapper’s Arms is left untenanted, the Bilstons take up occupancy.

Not unexpectedly, however, the locals—such as Mr. Kensal and his wife, the owners of Hall Farm, and the agricultural laborers who work for them--feel the Bilstons don’t quite fit in at Famford.  As Kensal tells his wife after first meeting the Bilstons:

I’m not very greatly taken with him.  He’s got a superior way I don’t like....As for the woman....I can’t believe that her true vocation is to become the landlady of a village pub....If she makes the chaps feel that they are her inferiors, they’ll take to going to the Blue Boar.  They don’t like people who put on airs.

An English village locale reminiscent of fictional Famford

This concern, however, is soon forgotten in the excitement that ensues when Mr. Bilston, taking down sheets of corrugated iron that had been put up over the inn’s great, disused stone fireplace, discovers "a charred and utterly unrecognizable human form."  Cause of death cannot be determined, but murder looks likely and Superintendent James ("Call me Jimmy")Waghorn is called in on the case.  It is assumed that the body was placed in the fireplace and burned during the period between tenancies, but, since the identity of the corpse cannot be definitely established, Jimmy finds his going as rough as the very flint, even after a consultation with his longtime mentor, the by now quite elderly Dr. Priestley.  Only after another death in Famford does truth gradually begin to emerge....

Fancy country houses and posh aristocrats
are absent from Licensed for Murder,
which emphasizes the lives of
workaday farmers and tradespeople

Besides providing a good puzzle, Licensed for Murder offers readers a glimpse of the altered landscape of even traditional English mystery in the 1950s.  Licensed for Murder has no settings of baronets and country houses, only of smallholders and laborers. Even the owners of Hall Farm, the Kensals, are plain, practical people, who concern themselves not with planning house parties for weekending society ladies and men-about-town, but rather with workaday matters like scrubbing eggs and spraying sugar-beets. With Licensed for Murder, then, we are far removed from the glamorous, sophisticated English country house murders of stereotype.

Dr. Priestley on the case!

The rural world of Licensed for Murder is not so different as one might initially think from that of Ruth Rendell's quite interesting 2007 Chief Inspector Wexford novel, Not in the Flesh. To be sure, English society has changed since the 1950s and Rendell does not ignore these changes.  In her novel Rendell demonstrates that she shares John Street's interest in fictionally chronicling social transformation. 


Yet the land endureth, even after the passing of generations. More on Rendell's novel in Part Two! http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/03/land-endureth-part-2-john-rhodes.html

What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part Three

In his biography of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, David Whittle argues, correctly I think, that the last two Edmund Crispin books from the 1944 to 1951 series--Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance (1950) and The Long Divorce (1951)--clearly evince the author's "growing regard for plot."  One reviewer of Frequent Hearses, Whittle notes, lamented his own previous castigation of the flippancies in the earlier Crispin detective novels:

I railed against his undergraduate cleverness, but now that [Crispin] writes a straightforward crime story without the sparkling digressions and slapstick repartee of his earlier books, I am sorry, as it were, that I spoke.

While I love the manic high spirits of some of the earlier Crispin tales, I find that Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance and The Long Divorce have more than adequate compensations, namely strong plots ladled with rich dollops of humor  (if not quite of the madcap sort).  Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance has amusing satire of the film world (with which Montgomery had become familiar though his highly lucrative film score work), but my personal favorite of the two is The Long Divorce.  In my 1988 Mysterious Press edition of the book I wrote in the back, upon completing the book on October 8th, 1995 (that was long enough ago that I was younger than Crispin when he wrote it), "absolutely brilliant!"--which I think perhaps gives a hint that I liked it.  On rereading it in 2011 I still do, very much.

The epigraph to the novel ("the long divorce of steel") comes from Shakespeare's Henry VIII (there's a play you don't see pillaged for quotations every day).  I won't say more about that, but it is quite cleverly worked into the story.  For some reason the epigraph is omitted in the current Felony & Mayhem edition, which otherwise is as attractive and cleverly designed as all their other Crispin editions.

The Long Divorce takes place in 1950, between the dates of Friday, June 2 and Monday, June 5 (at these respective points Gervase Fen is on his way from and on his way to, appropriately enough in a Crispin novel, a train station).  In the guise of "Mr. Datchery" (bonus points if you know this literary reference), Fen is descending on the village of Cotten Abbas to investigate (at local police request) a rash of poison pen letters plaguing the citizenry.  Just this basic set-up should be more than enough to hook the fan of classic English mystery (it certainly hooked me).

One is right to take the bait Crispin offers with The Long Divorce, because the novel is one of the very best of that ever so enticing literary species, the English village poison pen mystery (probably the best known example is Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger, 1942).

More serious-minded in this novel, Crispin at times casts a sharp, discerning eye over Cotten Abbas and he provides some interesting social commentary on post-war English village life:

Cotten Abbas is sixty or seventy miles from London and obscurely conveys the impression of having strayed there out of a film set.  As with most show-villages, you are apt to feel, when confronted with it, that some impalpable process of embalming is at work, some prophylactic against change and decay which while creditable in itself has yet resulted in a certain degree of stagnation....It all had a prosperous look--but its prosperity, Mr. Datchery thought, was less that of a working class village than that of a village which has been settled by the well-to-do: in a population which could scarcely number more than a couple hundred, it was obviously the invading middle classes that ruled, badly weakened by post-war conditions, but still hanging on.

This sort of keen observation can be found in other 1950s English village detective novels as well, like Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced and Miles Burton's Bones in the Brickfield (as well as a number of tales by Elizabeth Ferrars, a key figure in the replacement of the classic "country house" mystery with the more modern "country cottage" mystery); but The Long Divorce offers a particularly fine instance of such.

As in Buried for Pleasure, Fen again ensconces himself at an inn and encounters a number of interesting characters.  There's Mr. Rolt, the local saw mill owner looked down on by the village elite for his rough ways and determination to locate his mill at a local beauty spot; Rolt's teenage daughter, Penelope, who talks of the romance of throwing oneself in front of a train and who has a painful crush on an unresponsive local schoolteacher, Peter Rubi, a highly intellectual young man of Swiss derivation; Mr. Mogridge, the gossipy and unctuous local innkeeeper; Helen Downing, an Oxford educated local doctor, relatively newly arrived in the village; George Sims, the established doctor; Inspector Edward Casby, the man tasked with investigating the rash of poison pen letters; Colonel Babington, the Chief Constable, desperately trying to break his smoking habit (like the author at the time); Babington's demented cat, Lavender, constantly on the alert for a Martian invasion (yes, you read that correctly); Amos Weaver, evangelical preacher and local butcher; and assorted female house servants, increasingly scarce and precious beings in post-war England.

Soon after Fen's arrival, seemingly a poison pen letter induces Helen Downing's wealthy friend, Beatrice Keats-Madderly, to commit suicide.  Following this dire event, a fatal stabbing occurs, of one of the above characters, who seems to have been close to discovering the identity of the author of the poison pen letters.  Much to her distress, Helen Downing becomes a "person of interest" in the investigation, many pieces of evidence seeming to point to her as the source of the village's troubles.

Crispin lavishes attention on the two primary female characters, Helen Downing and Penelope Rolt; and they are treated not flippantly but seriously, with considerable insight and understanding.  Rolt is an attractive and appealing girl, but she is painfully in love and acutely awkward in her feelings.  For her part, Helen Downing is an intelligent and sensitive woman doctor trying to establish herself in a highly traditionalist village (she bears a certain resemblance to Alida Mountwell, a doctor character in Miles Burton's excellent 1943 village mystery, Murder M.D.--though Mountwell is a more confident individual).

Indeed, with the middle section of the book, Crispin completely shifts the narrative focal point of Divorce from Fen to Downing, sweeping the reader up in Downing's plight, as suspicion starts to focus on her.  This section of the book rather reminds one of psychological suspense novels from the 1950s by such authors as Ursula Curtiss and Margaret Millar.  It is quite effectively done.

Narrative focus shifts back to Fen for the last part of the novel, where he provides a brilliant exposition of the crime.  Fen's deductions are all based on clues fairly presented to the reader, yet in this reader's case, anyway, a lot of these clues were culpably missed!  When Fen departs Cotten Abbas, the Great Detective has restored order to the English village, in the classic fashion so admired by W. H. Auden in his widely-cited (perhaps over-cited) essay on detective fiction, "The Guilty Vicarage."

In so highly praising the fair play plotting of The Long Divorce, I do not mean to suggest that Crispin eschews humor in the novel.  To the contrary, there are numerous amusing sections.  Lavender's anti-Martian mania is inspired, for example, and Colonel Babington's efforts to quit smoking are quite funny.  Crispin also gets in some droll satirical jabs at Continental intellectuals, in the form of the Swiss educationalist Peter Rubi:

"It is good for the children," [Rubi] observed benevolently, "to destroy things sometimes.  If they are allowed to do that, they grow up to be saner people."  He looked politely to Mr. Datchery [Gervase Fen] in confirmation of his doubtful thesis.  "Is that not so, sir?"
"No," said Mr. Datchery.

In my view, both Fen and his creator unequivocally triumph in The Long Divorce.  It would be something of a last hurrah for both Crispin and Fen.  In the final part of this series, I will look at David Whittle's trenchant analysis of what killed--or at least gravely wounded--Crispin's creative impulse.

"I wonder what Gervase Fen would do...."