The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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and talk together. Most of them prized their privacy, and not only loathed personal publicity, but kept direct contact with readers to a minimum.
‘I never supply biographical notes or photographs: a form of publicity which I deplore,’ Berkeley said, when refusing to allow his likeness to appear on Penguin paperback editions of his novels. ‘But seeing how often I myself am put off by a photograph of the author on the back of a book, I cannot but feel that some reason at any rate is on my side.’
Christie would never be so rude. She replied to fan letters by saying that she never sent out photographs of herself to anyone but personal friends, though she was willing to send autographed cards instead. Sayers took a similar line, happy to advertise her books but determined at all costs to keep her personal life under wraps. Berkeley may have been poking fun at a post-war Detection Club member, Mary Fitt (in real life, the classicist Kathleen Freeman), who did permit Penguin to publish a photograph of her, resembling a grim Borstal boy, complete with a short back and sides. In other respects Fitt, who lived with another woman, was as reticent as Berkeley: ‘It is, I think, the writer of fiction who is of interest to the public, not the person of whom the writer is part. Therefore I do not propose to give details of where I was born, where educated and so forth …’ As late as the mid-Fifties, it was perfectly credible for Christianna Brand (who was far from diffident) to conjure up a detective novel with a plot depending upon a successful writer’s hatred of personal publicity.
Keeping a distance from inquisitive strangers was one thing. A chance to meet fellow detective novelists was something special. It is no surprise that so many of those Berkeley approached leapt at the chance, just as Ngaio Marsh was thrilled to attend E. C. Bentley’s installation as President. Younger writers loved playing the game of whodunit, but that was not quite enough. Could the detective novel metamorphose into something more than a mere puzzle? Conversations over dinner at the Detection Club promoted fresh thinking, above all about collaborative writing projects.
For Sayers, as for Christie and Berkeley, the dinners offered a break from the acute stresses of their personal lives. Christie had been deserted by Archie, Berkeley wanted to be free of Margaret, and Sayers was finding Mac a trial. They were working long hours. Financial pressures meant the two women felt under pressure to write without let-up, while Berkeley was driven by the urge to show that he was as gifted as the rest of his family.
Margaret Cole was much more sociable than Douglas, and enjoyed crossing swords with intellectual equals, such as Sayers, Berkeley, and Ronald Knox, whose attitudes differed sharply from hers. They talked about real-life murder cases, crime writing, and (a constant refrain of writers the world over) the shortcomings of publishers. The dinners proved so popular that, within a year or so, about twenty writers had attended. Excited by the success of his initiative, Berkeley decided the time had come for them to organize themselves into a permanent club.
Berkeley reimagined his get-togethers as the Crimes Circle, whose activities are at the heart of The Poisoned Chocolates Case, published in 1929. The novel was an expansion of ‘The Avenging Chance’, a story often cited as an all-time classic, in which Roger Sheringham solves an ingenious murder committed by means of chocolates injected with nitrobenzene. The crime is broadly replicated in the novel, but this time Chief Inspector Moresby recounts the story to the Crimes Circle, a group of criminologists founded by Sheringham. Scotland Yard has given up hope of solving the mystery – can the amateurs do better?
Sheringham, like Berkeley, rejoiced in assembling a talented array of colleagues, and his elitist group prefigures the Detection Club: ‘Entry into the charmed Crimes Circle’s dinners was not to be gained by all and hungry.’ Membership was by election ‘and a single adverse vote meant rejection’. The intention was to have thirteen members, though only six had so far been admitted, and it is easy to imagine that plans for the Detection Club were at a similar stage of development. In addition to Sheringham, the Circle included a distinguished KC, a famous woman dramatist, ‘the most famous (if not the most amiable) living detective-story writer’, a meek little man called Ambrose Chitterwick, and ‘a brilliant novelist who ought to have been more famous than she was’.
Each of the six armchair detectives is tasked with looking into the murder of Joan Bendix and finding a culprit, and this enables Berkeley to poke fun at the methods of detective story writers. ‘Just tell the reader very loudly what he’s to think, and he’ll think it all right,’ proclaims Morton Harrogate Bradley, a crime novelist and former car salesman (like Berkeley). He makes his point by seeming to prove that he was the culprit, emphasizing: ‘Artistic proof is … simply a matter of selection. If you know what to put in and what to leave out, you can prove anything you like, quite conclusively.’
One by one, the members propound their solutions – and each identifies a different murderer. Sheringham takes fourth turn and comes up with the explanation from ‘The Avenging Chance’. He is followed by Alicia Dammers, who puts forward an even more convincing solution, which wins over all her colleagues except the diffident Chitterwick. He draws up a chart analysing the deductions of the other five members before explaining how they all went wrong. His is a classic ‘least likely culprit’ solution, delightfully revealed. Berkeley’s belief in the infinite possibilities of solutions to mysteries was confirmed half a century after the book’s publication when Christianna Brand devised yet another surprise ending to the book for an American publisher.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case is a tour de force. Julian Symons, a demanding critic, called it ‘one of the most stunning trick stories in the history of detective fiction’. Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse admired each other’s work, but – regrettably – never collaborated with each other. Had they done so, they might have produced such a novel, blending wit with dazzling ingenuity. And as if to underline his cleverness while indulging in his new-found fascination with true crime, Berkeley drew a parallel between each of the solutions to the puzzle put forward by his characters and a real-life murder mystery. These included the story of Constance Kent, Carlyle Harris’s killing of his wife by morphine in New York, and the startling case of Christiana Edmunds, ‘the Chocolate Cream Poisoner’.
‘This correspondence must cease,’ declared Dr William Beard during the summer of 1870, in a frantic attempt to break off contact with a woman he had treated for nervous trouble. Christiana Edmunds had begun to frighten him. She lived quietly with her widowed mother in Brighton, but Beard failed to diagnose her long-standing mental illness, and Christiana started deluging him with letters proclaiming her devotion. Beard’s suspicions were not aroused when she turned up at his house with a box of chocolates as a present for his wife, but when his wife became sick after eating them, belatedly he put two and two together. However, Emily Beard recovered, and Beard said nothing to the police.
Christiana blamed Mrs Beard’s illness on a confectioner called Maynard, and set about acquiring supplies of strychnine from a local dentist, telling him that she meant to poison stray cats. She paid a number of boys to buy chocolate creams from Maynard’s shop, and duly laced them with strychnine, before leaving them around the town. One set of poisoned creams was returned to Maynard’s, and subsequently eaten by Sidney Barker, the four-year-old nephew of the man who bought them. Sidney died, and at his inquest, Christiana testified that she too had fallen ill after eating chocolates bought from Maynard’s. A verdict of accidental death was recorded, prompting Christiana to step up her campaign against the luckless scapegoat. She sent Sidney’s parents a series of anonymous letters blaming Maynard for the boy’s death, and gave arsenic-laced fruit and cake to a handful of local people, including the dentist who supplied the strychnine and Emily Beard. At last Dr Beard contacted the police, and showed them Christiana’s letters, although he always denied having had a sexual relationship with her. Christiana was tried at the Old Bailey for Sidney’s murder.
The Press loves nothing better than a sensational murder, and the journalists deduced homicidal tendencies from Christiana’s appearance in the dock: ‘Short of stature, attired in sombre velvet, bareheaded, with a certain self-possessed demureness in her bearing … a rather careworn, hard-featured woman … The character of the face lies in the lower features. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long and convex; … chin straight, long, and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive, and animal in its