The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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who invented a ‘new’ pronunciation of Latin, at the age of six Margaret was required to ask for Sunday dinner in Latin. After leaving Roedean, she combined the study of Classics at Girton College, Cambridge, with helping to educate five younger brothers and sisters. Rebelling against her father’s right-wing views, she embraced socialism, atheism, feminism and pipe-smoking. Like her future husband, she wrote poetry, and ‘The Falling Leaves’, a poignant perspective on the consequences of war, has featured on the GCSE syllabus for English Literature students. Her father was so outraged when she chose to share her life with a socialist that he disinherited her.
In the aftermath of the war, arguments about the Russian Revolution led to divisions on the left. Raymond Postgate joined the newly formed British Communist Party, but although Douglas Cole was sympathetic to the party’s aims, he did not follow suit, and neither did Margaret. The dream of Guild Socialism turned to dust, and the Coles moved to Hampstead, where Douglas threw himself into writing and what Margaret described as ‘the pleasures of bourgeois family life’. They socialized with the likes of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and relaxed by watching Sussex play cricket. Margaret gave birth to two daughters in quick succession, and Douglas, while recovering from a bout of pneumonia, started work on a detective novel. Margaret bet he would not finish it, which provoked him to carry on to the end.
His approach was influenced by the success of Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels about policemen who got results by sheer hard work. Douglas was in good company in admiring Crofts; T. S. Eliot rated him as the finest detective story writer to have emerged during the Twenties. Crofts was born in Dublin, but moved to Ulster in his youth, ultimately becoming Chief Assistant Engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. During a long illness, he wrote The Cask, which became a bestseller. A cask unloaded at St Katharine’s Dock breaks open and is found to contain sawdust, gold coins – and a dismembered female corpse; but the cask and its contents vanish before the police arrive at the scene. Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard travels to Paris in order to crack an ingenious alibi, working with the unflagging attention to detail that became the hallmark of Crofts’ detectives. The book sold so well that eventually Crofts moved to England to write full-time. In his fifth book he introduced the painstaking and utterly relentless Inspector Joseph French, whose arrival on the scene invariably spelled disaster for murderers whose chances of escaping the gallows depended on intricate alibis.
Crofts was published by Collins, and Douglas submitted his first novel to them, but at first they turned it down, saying it contained too many murders. He cut out one ‘gory death’, although what counted as ‘gory’ then seems cosy today. This was the only time, his wife said, that he agreed to make a significant change to any of his books. The touch of arrogance in Douglas’s unwillingness to accept that his work could be improved, coupled with furious productivity, contributed to the sterility of much of his later writing.
The Brooklyn Murders introduced Superintendent Henry Wilson, sleuthing alongside a young couple in the same mould as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The Coles decided to play the detective game together, and co-write a follow-up. Death of a Millionaire appeared under the joint by-line of ‘G. D. H. and M. Cole’, the brand name for all the subsequent novels, whoever wrote most of the text. The book was unusual in its day for its sympathetic portrayal of trade union leaders and refusal to demonize Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, Superintendent Wilson’s lack of charisma made Inspector French seem like a quirky maverick. Even when he resigned briefly from Scotland Yard to operate as a private eye, Wilson was no Sam Spade. The most exciting thing that happens to him during the series is that he grows six inches taller – a simple mistake, Margaret confessed. Even so, his career lasted for two decades. Having settled a plot in outline, one spouse wrote a first draft which the couple then discussed and worked on together.
The Murder at Crome House features a self-portrait of Douglas in the form of James Flint, a lecturer and tutor in history and economics. Flint turns amateur detective after discovering a bizarre photograph showing an apparent murder. It has been concealed inside a library book on the subject of psychoanalysis and autosuggestion. After the astonishingly careless owner of the photograph turns up on his doorstep, hoping to retrieve it, Flint tries to establish the truth about the crime. An elaborate alibi is unravelled with tedious persistence, and at the end of the book Flint contemplates marriage to the deceased’s widow – but the Coles amuse themselves by describing his relief when he is talked out of it. The don is not the marrying kind. The same is true of Dr Preedy in the locked room mystery novella Disgrace to the College – he is ‘fastidious to the point of confirmed celibacy in his relations with women’ but enjoys the intimacy of private conversations with his male students. Unlike Berkeley, Douglas was reluctant to fictionalize his private sexual predilections, and this is as close as the Coles came to including a homoerotic subtext in their stories. Raymond Postgate featured a gay academic in Verdict of Twelve, differentiating the character from Douglas simply by making clear that he was neither handsome nor an economist.
In a fit of optimism during a short-lived economic recovery, Douglas wrote a massive tome, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy, suggesting that a Labour government with a majority in Parliament might ‘socialize’ all the land in Britain within a decade. Margaret later described his proposals as a testament to the ‘irresistible buoyancy’ of his spirit. Soon he had plenty to be buoyant about. After five years of Conservative rule, the general election of 1929 returned a minority Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald.
Douglas sent MacDonald a copy of his book, and the Coles were invited to spend a day at Chequers. The new Prime Minister held court over a meal of ‘most superior’ salmon fishcakes washed down with wine, and invited Douglas, along with John Maynard Keynes, to join a new Economic Council. Margaret admitted that this produced ‘very little positive result’.
These were hectic years for radical activists, and on returning to live in London the Coles kept in touch with the working classes by engaging three servants. The children were looked after by a nurse, and an unemployed Yorkshire miner and his wife were hired to do the housework. Before long the family moved to a house in Hendon with grounds large enough for both badminton and tennis courts.
Hugh Gaitskell accompanied Douglas on a series of walking tours, and Douglas eventually declared his love for his former pupil. Gaitskell was flattered but embarrassed. Resolutely heterosexual, he was probably more attracted to Margaret, and his subsequent conquests included Ann Fleming, wife of the creator of James Bond. Douglas accepted defeat, as he had to do so often in his life, and climbed back into the closet. Gaitskell became leader of the Labour Party in the Fifties, and after his death he was succeeded by another of Cole’s brilliant Oxford pupils, Harold Wilson, who made it all the way to 10 Downing Street.
Margaret’s startlingly candid posthumous biography of Douglas included an appendix written by the family doctor. A classic example of ‘too much information’, this contained exhaustive detail about her husband’s ailments, including a refractory bowel and a degenerative narrowing of the arteries. Margaret suggested that Douglas’s lack of interest in sex may have been due to the lack of a robust constitution; ‘bleeding piles … were a constant drain on his energy … One feels that he would scarcely have had energy for vigorous love-making; and the idea of ‘love-play’ would have shocked him … His sex-life diminished gradually to zero for the last twenty years of his life … He came to feel that it was all revolting.’
Margaret’s frankness did not extend to describing how she felt about all this, but she confided in her friend, the Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison, that she ‘was made monogamous but not faithful’. She and Berkeley got on remarkably well, but even if he had designs on her, their political views were irreconcilable. Instead, she fell for Naomi’s husband Dick, an affable lawyer and future Labour MP, whose oysters-and-champagne lifestyle and baronial Scottish castle appealed to her almost as much as his personality and socialism. She described him slyly in her autobiography as ‘deceptive … because he looks so large and so respectable. He did, when I first knew him, all the things that a gentleman should, except play cricket.’ Their relationship did not jeopardize either marriage, and Margaret remained steadfast in her commitment to Douglas and their shared political values. When she wanted a break from politics, she took refuge in the Detection Club.