A Very British Murder (31 page)

I made a few hurried remarks about the new sweet pea. I knew that there was a new sweet pea because the
Daily Mail
had told me so that morning. Mrs Ackroyd knows nothing
about horticulture, but she is the kind of woman who likes to appear well-informed about the topics of the day, and she too reads the
Daily Mail
. We were able to converse quite intelligently until … Parker announced dinner.

One reason for the great success of Golden Age detective fiction is that it reflected the values of its readers right back at them – and that image is not always an attractive one.

As well as Knox’s Ten Commandments, other, unspoken, rules about class and hierarchy governed the genre. Even though the subject was murder, there was very little actual violence or blood in these novels. In
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, Christie describes the first glimpse of the victim in very low-key terms. ‘Ackroyd was sitting as I’d left him in the armchair before the fire,’ the narrator tells us. ‘Just below the collar of his coat was a shining piece of twisted metalwork.’ This was the dagger that had killed him, but there was no obvious sign of violence, and the weapon itself sounds rather like a piece of jewellery. In
Death at Broadcasting House
(1934) by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell, a ‘man’s figure unnaturally crumpled’ is found lying in a radio studio, but the next paragraph is all about the studio’s ‘special acoustic treatment removing all natural echo’, the shaded light, the thick carpet, the padded walls and the excellent air-conditioning. This is quite typical of the Golden Age, where death seems to happen inconspicuously and with hardly any mess.

Knox’s contemporary Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939) was the creator, under the pen-name S. S. Van Dine, of the American detective Philo Vance. Like Knox, he was a commentator on the detective genre, which had both made his fortune and
made a mockery of his earlier ambitions as an art critic. ‘I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now’ was the title of one of his articles. Wright noted perspicaciously a second unwritten rule of the detective genre as it stood in the 1920s: that the killer could not be a servant, because that was ‘too easy’. The culprit ‘must be a decidedly worth-while person’, as he put it. This snobbery about servants permeates the world of the Golden Age: they are either ‘treasures’, or ‘bad ’uns’ who indulge in a little mild theft or blackmail, but lack the class actually to commit a murder.

On reading 1920s and 1930s detective novels today, it is this attitude that servants are not really human that particularly jars. ‘I believe him to be a perfectly truthful man, as such people go,’ a lady says of her chauffeur in Dorothy L. Sayers’
The Nine Tailors
. Margery Allingham’s detective Albert Campion casually refers to his manservant as ‘the Cretin’. In
A Question of Proof
, Nicholas Blake (pseudonym for Cecil Day Lewis, the future Poet Laureate) very quickly writes off pretty much the whole of the below-stairs department. The policeman investigating the case: ‘interviewed the whole staff of servants at Sudeley Hall. They were practically exempt from suspicion, having been underneath each other’s noses – if not actually tumbling over each other – either in the kitchen or the garden.’

The ‘well-trained servant’ crops up literally countless times in Agatha Christie’s work, but Captain Hastings does not know how condescending he is when he admires a notable example of the species: ‘Dear old Dorcas! As she stood there, with her honest face upturned to mine, I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’ Captain Hastings was vaguely aware that changes to the labour market would cause
domestic servants like Dorcas to become unaffordable for the middle classes, and like Agatha Christie’s readers, he would strongly have deplored the fact.

In the Golden Age the detective, too, was usually of a specific social class, much more elevated than it had been in the days of Inspectors Field and Whicher, when detection was considered dirty work. ‘It would have been unthinkable,’ says Julian Symons, for these writers ‘to create a Jewish detective, or a working-class one aggressively conscious of his origins, for such figures would have seemed to them quite incongruous’. Agatha Christie cleverly allowed Hercule Poirot to sidestep the issue of class by making him Belgian and therefore, notoriously, hard to categorize. But a great many of his colleagues sprung from the ranks of the aristocracy. Lord Peter Wimsey was the brother of a duke. Margery Allingham’s detective, Albert Campion, ‘well-bred and a trifle absent-minded’, is the younger brother of some high-ranking aristocrat whose identity is kept firmly secret lest Campion’s activities bring a noble house into disrepute. Campion also ends up marrying the annoying ‘Lady’ Amanda Fitton, following their first meeting on a case during which Campion re-establishes her family’s ancient right to a title.

Ngaio Marsh’s sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, is equally posh, having a mother called ‘Lady Alleyn’ who breeds Alsatians. In Marsh’s most popular book,
A Surfeit of Lampreys
(1941), there are so many titled characters that the policeman investigating the case simply has to give up on correct form when a marquis dies, thereby passing on his title and, confusingly, changing the names of all his relations. Neither the police, nor the reader, nor even the author, can keep track.

The attitudes exhibited by these detectives are not always admirable. Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, casually lists the people not worth treating fairly: ‘liars and halfwits and prostitutes and dagoes’. William D. Rubenstein, however, has argued that sinister Jews, a fixture of the 1920s (Agatha Christie’s ‘yellow-faced financiers’) start to disappear from crime novels around 1930. As Nazi anti-Semitism grew more brutal, Jewish characters grew more likely to be sympathetic refugees from persecution.

In this respect, the ending of the Golden Age was inevitable as society became more liberal. The inter-war period saw a belief in science and rationality as central to the future of mankind. Trust in authority was still high: British justice surely never made mistakes and evil-doers should, of course, be sent to the gallows. As W. H Auden put it, ‘the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin’. In 1945 Agatha Christie described ‘the ethical background’ of the detective story as ‘usually sound. Very, very rarely is the criminal the hero of the book. Society unites to hunt him down, and the reader can have all the fun of the chase without moving from a comfortable armchair.’

The discovery, during the Second World War, that horrors such as the atom bomb and Auschwitz could exist shook this essential belief in order and hierarchy. As old values and convictions began to crumble away, the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 replaced the punitive ideal of justice with the concept of rehabilitation, or treatment and training intended to coach the criminal out of his ways. When hanging was eventually abolished in 1964, the certainties of the detective story had been replaced by the ambiguities of the spy thriller.

EVEN AS DUSK
was settling over the quiet, pretty but increasingly irrelevant village of Mayhem Parva, a new type of book was beginning to do exactly what the detective story could not: reveal to us the inner workings of the murderer’s mind. Other writers were exploring alternatives to Mayhem Parva that would turn out to be just as readable, and just as profitable for their publishers.

The rival form to the detective story was the thriller, and by the late 1930s it had the brighter future ahead of it. In the thriller, the character of the villain would be central, and we see inside his or her head. Dorothy L. Sayers summed up the other main difference between the old and the new: ‘The difference between thriller and detective story is mainly one of emphasis. Agitating events occur in both, but in the thriller our cry is “What comes next?” – in the detective story, “What came first?” The one we cannot guess; the other we can, if the author gives us a chance.’

Right up to the Second World War, though, traditional, mainly British, authors and readers preferred the older, more cerebral ways of crime. They disliked the violence, brashness and uncouthness of the American-led thriller movement. Dorothy L. Sayers found the thriller’s aims ‘trivial’ compared with the nobility of the detective story, and most thriller writers’ works to be full of ‘bad English, cliché, balderdash and boredom’. And many thrillers were just as derivative as the worst Golden Age detective novels. It’s disappointing to learn that even when the death-dealing spy James Bond appeared in 1952, many of his famous gadgets were simply cribbed from the works of Edgar Wallace.

This conservatism caused Sayers to overlook the earliest works of Graham Greene, but Mike Ripley, for ten years the crime fiction
critic for the
Daily Telegraph
, argues that she was all too aware of the change in the tide and wisely stopped reviewing crime novels – and, indeed, writing them – just as they passed their peak. Her fellow Golden Age writer Ronald Knox, was also well aware that ‘the game is getting played out’.

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), a great crime writer himself but one of the vocal enemies of the traditional English detective story, also believed that Sayers had come to recognize the limits of her medium.

I think what was really gnawing her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature … Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the ‘problem of logic and deduction’.

The most striking attack on detective fiction came in
The New Yorker
in 1944 and 1945, from Edmund Wilson, in two essays ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ and ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ In the first, Wilson criticizes the lifelessness of Agatha Christie’s characters: she ‘has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it … she has to provide herself with puppets’. Once he’d published this essay, Wilson was deluged with letters
berating him for his lack of discernment, and imploring him to read other, classier, fiction writers: Dorothy L. Sayers was highly recommended. So he tried
The Nine Tailors
. His response misses the point almost laughably:

One of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part of it is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopaedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters: ‘Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background,’ etc.

One can see what a distinguished New York man of letters may find offensive in this (he also called
The Lord of the Rings
‘juvenile trash’), but the bell-ringing and the aspidistras are part of the deepest charm of Dorothy L. Sayers, who makes the mundane seem so eccentric and amusing and, at the same time, so firmly rooted in a particular place and time. P. D. James agrees:

In the Wimsey saga, the sounds, mood, speech, the very feel of the thirties seems to rise from the page: the resentful war-scarred heroes of the Bellona Club, the gallant or pathetic spinsters of Miss Climpson’s agency, the ordered and hierarchical life of a few villages, now as obsolete as the
vast rectories round which it revolved, the desperate gaiety of the bright young things, the fear of unemployment which underlay the cheerful camaraderie of office life in
Murder Must Advertise
.

As you’d hope from a literary critic, Wilson does foresee what would replace the detective story. ‘The spy story may perhaps only now be realizing its poetic possibilities, as the admirers of Graham Greene contend; and the murder story that exploits psychological horror is an entirely different matter.’

Raymond Chandler put a final nail into the coffin of Mayhem Parva in an essay of 1950 called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. Over 16 million of his fellow Americans had experienced military service in the Second World War, society had changed, but the conventional detective story had not. ‘The murder novel,’ Chandler claimed, ‘has a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.’

The English, he concludes, ‘may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers’.

And yet, ultimately, such criticism of Mayhem Parva feels misplaced, revealing a snobbery about popular entertainment – fiction set out primarily to reassure, soothe and amuse – worthy of the middle-class people who wrote off melodrama as laughable or Mary Elizabeth Braddon as immoral. Even Sayers herself, much as she disliked the thriller, was well aware of the limitations
of the classic Golden Age detective novel’s form: ‘It does not – and by hypothesis never can – attain the loftiest level of literary achievement. Though it deals with the most desperate effects of rage, jealousy and revenge, it rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.’