The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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of poisonings, and said she had become pregnant by him, but had carried out an abortion herself. All this was probably fantasy rather than fact. Unfortunately for Edith, Bywaters could not bring himself to throw away the letters, and became obsessed by the idea of having her for himself.
Late at night on 4 October 1922, he waited in the darkness for Edith and Percy as they came home from a trip to the Criterion Theatre, and pounced on Percy, stabbing him repeatedly. Panic-stricken, Edith called out, ‘Oh don’t! Oh don’t!’, but her cries made no difference. Bywaters had done something desperate, just as her letters had asked. He fled, and Percy died at the scene. When the police questioned Edith, she became hysterical and insisted that a stranger had attacked her husband. But she was a poor liar. Her affair was soon uncovered, and so were the incriminating letters.
Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were both charged with murder. At the trial, Bywaters said he had only meant to injure Percy, and that Edith was not involved. Against her lawyers’ advice, she gave evidence in her own defence, and her naïve answers when questioned destroyed her credibility. The judge’s summing-up oozed stern Victorian moralism, and the couple were sentenced to death. Their appeals failed, but public opinion, perverse as ever, swung from hatred for Edith to horror at her fate. A woman had not been hanged in Britain for sixteen years, and Bywaters never faltered in his insistence that she was innocent. A petition signed by a million people failed to persuade the Home Secretary to grant a reprieve. Edith and Bywaters were executed in separate prisons, Holloway and Pentonville, on the stroke of nine on 9 January.
Edith Thompson’s final moments tormented her hangman, John Ellis, a former hairdresser and newsagent from Rochdale. Britain’s chief executioner, Ellis hanged Doctor Crippen and Herbert Rowse Armstrong before descending into misery and alcoholism. Eight years after snapping Edith’s neck, he cut his own throat.
The Thompson–Bywaters case marked, in George Orwell’s phrase, the end of an ‘Elizabethan Age’ of English murder. The more talented detective novelists realized that, whilst their fictional mysteries were bound to be very different from real-life cases, they could and should learn from what had happened to people who did kill others in the real world.
Anthony Berkeley was appalled by Edith Thompson’s fate. So was Alfred Hitchcock, who toyed with the idea of filming her life story. Unlike Berkeley, he decided to steer clear, perhaps because of his continuing friendship with Edith’s sister, although some aspects of Stage Fright echo the case.
For Berkeley, the outcome of the trial showed that the British legal system was more fallible than the general public fondly believed. He devoted several of his novels to subversive attacks on conventional justice, yet he was no-one’s idea of a bleeding heart. His sympathy for Edith was driven at least in part by his scorn for the prevailing sexual mores. He had no time for people who condemned adultery.
In Berkeley, wit, charm and flair warred with demons. He loved to confound people’s expectations. The contradictions of his personality infuriated many of his contemporaries. He was the most vociferous advocate of the need for the detective novel to focus on the motivation for murder rather than mere puzzles. Yet the complexities of his own psychological make-up would baffle the most expert profiler.
Unlike almost everyone else, he never felt overawed by Sayers’ intellect and strength of character. He was cheeky enough to put her into one of his most celebrated novels, and tease her about Lord Peter Wimsey. In the long run, his temper tantrums drove Sayers to despair. Yet Agatha Christie wrote about him – not just for publication, but in her private notebook – with unqualified admiration.
Berkeley loved hiding behind the masks he presented to the outside world. One of his literary disguises was so successful that it prompted lengthy – and often wild – speculation in the national press, as well as in two novels by other writers. In later years, the concealment took physical form. Ailing and asthmatic, he would ‘disconcert anybody carrying on a conversation with him by suddenly placing a mask over his face, pumping away at little rubber ball and then taking deep breaths’. Julian Symons, a post-war President of the Detection Club, was one of the disconcerted, believing that Berkeley’s ‘ruddy-faced geniality’ concealed a disturbingly shy and secretive character. He was an obsessive by nature, whose eccentricities (which included a fruitless campaign against King Edward VIII’s marriage to Wallis Simpson) persisted to the end of his life. His will instructed his trustees to make sure that he really was dead. He was terrified of being buried alive.
For all his strange behaviour, Berkeley’s contribution to detective fiction was dazzling. ‘Detection and crime at its wittiest’, Agatha Christie said. ‘All his stories are amusing, intriguing, and he is a master of the final twist.’ His influence can also be detected in the plotting of Christie novels such as Murder on the Orient Express.
His real name was Anthony Berkeley Cox. Born in the same year as Sayers and Edith Thompson, he was the son of a doctor who invented a form of X-ray machine enabling the detection of shrapnel in wounded patients. Sybil Iles, his mother, claimed descent from the seventeenth-century Earl of Monmouth, and from a smuggler called Francis Iles. The family inheritance included two properties in Watford: Monmouth House and The Platts. Sybil was a strong-minded intellectual who studied at Oxford before women’s colleges were formally admitted to the university. A head teacher prior to her marriage, she had published a novel called The School of Life. Berkeley found her powerful and intimidating, and the complexities of their relationship probably explain his schizophrenic attitude towards women – adoring and hurtful by turns.
Berkeley had a younger sister, Cynthia, and a brother, Stephen. An Edwardian photograph shows all three of them posed together in the style of the period. Berkeley seems pensive, with a hint of a suppressed smile, as if enjoying a private joke. He attended Sherborne School before reading Classics at University College, Oxford, and was a contemporary of Sayers, although their paths seem not to have crossed. Yet in a family of high achievers, Berkeley felt overshadowed by his gifted siblings. He took a miserable third-class degree, whereas Stephen won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, and Cynthia achieved a doctorate in music. Stephen became a prominent mathematician, while Cynthia enjoyed success as a musician as well as notoriety because she lived with a man to whom she wasn’t married.
Unlike Sayers, whose letters are now held in hundreds of folders at an American university archive, and Christie, who wrote an (admittedly selective) autobiography, Berkeley cultivated an air of mystery. It appealed to his sense of humour to fob off anyone who sought biographical information, whilst hiding clues to his personal life in plain sight by putting them into his detective stories. His darkest secret was concealed in a book with a title borrowed from the judge’s remarks in Thompson–Bywaters case, but its catastrophic failure marked the end of his career as a novelist.
It is naïve to assume that crime stories routinely reveal secrets about their creators’ personalities. Detective novelists specialize in misdirection. But Berkeley’s mother had fictionalized aspects of her own life in her novel, and he took the same approach to astonishing extremes. For Berkeley, fiction gave a licence to say the unsayable. His skill was such that none of his contemporaries had a clue about how much his novels owed to his private passions.
Alan Littlewood, the hapless protagonist of As for the Woman, is a self-portrait, and Alan’s family bears a close resemblance to Berkeley’s. Alan is an Oxford graduate, the oldest of three children, and feels inadequate in comparison to his sister, a musician, and his brother, a Cambridge scholar. Like Berkeley, he has literary ambitions; and as a teenager he publishes a romantic sonnet. Alan inadvertently overhears Mrs Littlewood, probably echoing Berkeley’s own mother, dismiss his poetry as ‘empty, pretentious nonsense’. Like Berkeley, he suffers from poor health, and an inferiority complex which is exacerbated by a sense that his powerful and intelligent mother finds him a disappointment. And like Berkeley, he finds women both fascinating and frightening. Alan lusts after a married woman, who encourages his devotion, but proves unworthy of it. Was this strange and disastrous relationship based on an early episode in Berkeley’s love life – or is there another interpretation?
Berkeley’s sense of humour was acute but idiosyncratic. Julian Symons recalled that when, inexplicably, a rusty nail appeared in Berkeley’s