A Very British Murder (33 page)

In another classic Hitchcock trick, the opening scenes use humour to relax the viewer. A man in the crowd spooks the distressed lady by covering his face with his coat and creeping up on her from behind. It’s amusing, but Hitchcock only makes us giggle in order to lull us into a state of relaxation so that the next shock will be more powerful.

The story of
The Lodger
is really the story of the jeopardy into which the hero – played by matinee idol Ivor Novello – is placed by being suspected of the crime, and the catching of a killer and the resolution of wrongs was never Hitchcock’s concern. His authorized biographer, John Russell Taylor, told me that Hitchcock would have believed that ‘messages are for Western Union’, and that his films were not about good and evil, right or wrong. Instead, he simply aimed to extract maximum fear, horror and humour from his audience.

In this, Hitchcock, although he lived and worked at the same time as Agatha Christie, has nothing to do with the Golden Age of detective fiction. Consciously or not, his work looks back to the ‘sensation’ novels of the 1860s. Hitchcock saw the cinema seat, according to John Russell Taylor, as a machine for ministering a series of shocks, laughs, shivers and screams to its occupant. In this, he was following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

And, indeed, while Agatha Christie may come second only to William Shakespeare and the Bible in terms of sales, fiction of the Golden Age does not seem to provide the strongest and most
influential strand of British culture inspired by crime. The ‘sensation’ novel of the 1860s, with its aim of raising the hair and shivering the spine, would eventually give us the younger, stronger, vigorous and still-thriving genre of thrilling horror. The Golden Age knitting-type detective puzzle, for all its great commercial success, turned out to be a dead end.

IN 1946, GEORGE
Orwell published a celebrated essay lamenting ‘The Decline of English Murder’. At the time, he was still better known as a journalist and an essayist. His novel
Animal Farm
, published the previous year, had not yet turned him into one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, and
1984
still lay ahead of him. Orwell’s life, and writing career, was devoted to fighting totalitarianism on both the left and the right, and crime fiction interested him as an indirect expression of contemporary politics. ‘The average man,’ he claimed, ‘is not directly interested in politics and, when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals.’

And he regretted what the new, nihilistic American hardboiled thrillers indicated about the tastes of his contemporaries. In particular, Orwell took against the thriller
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
, by James Hadley Chase, a novel of 1939 which sold more than half a million copies. Although he was English, Chase modelled his style on the American writers of the
Black Mask
. Orwell complained that this novel, a runaway success in the first years of the Second World War, contained:

eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another women with red-hot cigarette ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of-cruelty and much else of the same kind.

He was not alone in his dislike of the book, which displeased many moralists in its depiction of a masochistic gangster who experiences an orgasm in the moment he gets knifed, and the unfortunate kidnap victim, Miss Blandish, who is beaten with a hose-pipe and raped before falling in love with her captor.

Orwell thought this revealed an unhealthy taste for pain and inexplicable brutality that contrasted poorly even with the ‘snobbery and violence’ of the inter-war years. ‘Snobbishness,’ he wrote in another article, ‘like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.’

This is the background to Orwell’s great elegiac essay. In it, he mourns the great murderers of the past in something of the same spirit of sardonic connoisseurship as Thomas De Quincey’s essay nearly 120 years before. Assessing the greatest crimes of the period 1850–1925, Orwell concludes that a ‘good’ murder involved members of the middle class, and usually had a sexual motive.

And certainly it seemed to him that the elegant crimes of the past were being replaced by a more brutal present: ‘the anonymous life of the dance halls and the false values of American film’.

He picked out one particular true-life crime of 1944 known as ‘The Cleft Chin Murder’ as being typical of his own debased
times. A male deserter from the US army and a female, 18-year-old, would-be striptease artist struck up a casual partnership. They killed a cyclist by running her over with a stolen army truck, before murdering a taxi driver (he of the cleft chin) for just eight pounds, which they spent at the dog races the next day. The crime was full of meaningless, wanton, arbitrary violence, and Orwell thought that it could only have occurred in the wartime year of 1944, with its atmosphere of movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, and the ‘brutalising effects of war’. One newspaper’s account of the trial in the Old Bailey was immediately followed up with an article headed ‘British Gangsterism Feared’. It was like a real-life version of
Brighton Rock
.

Thomas De Quincey had praised the artistry and industry of John Williams, the supposed perpetrator of the Radcliffe Highway Killings, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. But George Orwell was rather more serious as he now held up Dr Palmer of Rugeley, or Edith Bywaters and Frederick Thompson, as admirable murderers. For at the very least, he argued, they had committed their crimes out of conviction. He thought that a crime of passion could have ‘dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer’. He regretted the passing of a stable, if unequal society, where people at least agreed that ‘crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them’. For Orwell, the monumental destruction of human life that the twentieth century had seen was eclipsing and erasing the pleasure formerly to be taken in reading about a single crime in suburbia.

What Orwell feared would indeed come to pass. Pitiless, inhuman, random killings would be the flavour of fictional murder to come.

IN THE SPRING
of 2013, a packed audience spent their Friday night at the British Library. They’d come to ask questions of an all-female panel of crime writers. Most exciting of all, people wanted to meet Piv Bernth, producer of the cult, slow-burning Danish TV series
The Killing
, with its investigation into the horrific abduction and murder of a child. It was the same week that the ITV crime drama
Broadchurch
had begun, a kind of home-grown version of
The Killing
, set in Dorset. Both drew huge audiences, and discussion of ‘who did it’ in each case formed the common currency of office, dinner table and classroom chat across Britain in the same way that the details of Maria Marten’s death, or the details of Maria Manning’s guilt, had done more than one hundred years before.

Equally, our interest in the characters and authors of the Victorian age is far from petering out. Sherlock Holmes has yet another new incarnation on the TV screen, so too do the events and players in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case. Even the detective Jack Whicher has become the hero of a television drama series. But our modern depictions of violence have grown even nastier since the early days of the motion picture or even
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
. The first episode of 2012’s
Ripper Street
saw women being stripped naked, violently dismembered, and made to appear in snuff movies. This is fiction in the thriller genre, the meaner, younger brother of the detective story that has dominated since the Second World War. Yet the detective story is not quite dead,
either, even in its cosy, domesticated, Golden Age form. Hercule Poirot is still just about in business on TV, as is the cuddlesome
Foyle’s War
.

While many people might argue that the violence in modern fiction shows that society is sinking fast into depravity, our story has shown that our thirst for blood is in fact at least two hundred years old. But we’ve also seen that it is
not
timeless. ‘Scratch John Bull’, the archetypal red-faced, beer-drinking patriotic Englishman, proclaimed the
Pall Mall Gazette
in 1887, ‘and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dig deep into a murder, and devours the details of a hanging.’ While the ancient Briton might well have been of necessity a violent individual, though, he wasn’t particularly anxious about murder. He, and his descendants for many centuries, lacked the luxury of being able to worry about such a comparatively rare event. Famine, disease or war were far more pressing concerns.

It was only with the turn of the nineteenth century that a new and awful significance became attached to the crime of murder, and that, in consequence, it took up its high position in art and culture. As we have seen, this fascination with murder can be ascribed to the limiting of the death penalty to fewer crimes, to the growth of literacy and to the creativity of writers like Thomas De Quincey. It came about because of city living, and with it the dissolution of the surveillance society of the village. It was due to the marvels of the modern age, such as easily available rat-poison and life-insurance. In other words, our elevation of murder above all other crimes and forms of violence was a consequence of what we like to think of as ‘civilization’.

From 1800 onwards, with the birth of a recognizably modern world, enjoying murder became an increasingly profitable and commercial business. The character of the fictional detective is such a strong strand of modern life that the Victorians seem directly connected to us today in a way that the Georgians don’t, with their cheerfully rapscallion highwaymen, implausible Gothic novels, and policing by elderly volunteers. The Victorians are, indeed, our blood relatives.

All through writing this book I’ve been worried about being too flippant about murder. It’s not all good clean fun. There is horror here, and tragedy, beneath the puppetry and pageantry. But among the gore and horror, we’ve also glanced aside at the history of literature, of education, of women’s place in society and of justice.

Our guilty pleasures reveal a lot about who we really are. As the mystery novelist C. H. B. Kitchin presciently put it in 1939:

If he wishes to study the manners of our age … a historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books and statistics, but to detective stories.