The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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was invented). Many of the finest books defied stereotypes. The received wisdom is that Golden Age fiction set out to reassure readers by showing order restored to society, and plenty of orthodox novels did just that. But many of the finest bucked the trend, and ended on a note of uncertainty or paradox. In some, people were executed for crimes they did not commit; in others, murderers escaped unpunished. The climax of one of Berkeley’s novels was so shocking that when Alfred Hitchcock came to film it, even the legendary master of suspense, the man who would direct Psycho, lost his nerve. He substituted a final scene that was a feeble cop-out in comparison to Berkeley’s dark and horrific vision.
Sayers, Berkeley and Christie came to detective fiction young – in their late twenties and early thirties. All three were full of energy and imagination, fizzing with fresh ideas. Each was an obsessive risk-taker. The First World War changed them, as it changed Britain. After the bloodshed of the trenches, writers craved escapism just as much as their readers. Though their stories often seem as artificial as they are ingenious, Sayers, Christie and Berkeley were intent on transforming the genre. Along the way, they fought against personal catastrophes, and suffered spells of deep despair. The lonely nature of their work – no publicity tours, no fan conventions, no glitzy awards ceremonies – contributed to their torments. Thanks to Detection Club meetings, writers found new friends who shared their literary enthusiasms. Not only did members eat, drink and talk together – they wrote and broadcast together, raising money by collaborating on crime stories in unique cross-media initiatives. For Sayers and Christie in particular, the Detection Club became a lifeline.
Christie’s controversial eleven-day disappearance in 1926 is by far the most high profile of the numerous disasters that befell Club members, affecting their writing as well their lives. Much as they wanted to promote their books, they were determined to keep their personal lives out of the public gaze. Many hid their private agonies in a way impossible in the age of paparazzi and Press intrusion, and of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Beneath the façade of middle class respectability lay human stories as complex and enthralling as any fiction.
Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were fascinated by murder in real life. True crime stories influenced and inspired them. And they did much more than borrow plot elements from actual cases. There is a long tradition of mystery writers undertaking detective work for themselves – from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, to P. D. James’s re-evaluation of the murder of Julia Wallace, and Patricia Cornwell’s investment of two million dollars in her efforts to establish that Walter Sickert really was Jack the Ripper. Other than Conan Doyle, however, none have investigated real-life mysteries with the zeal of the Detection Club in the Thirties.
Anyone researching the Club must navigate a labyrinth of blind alleys and wrong turnings. The challenge is to unravel three sets of mysteries – about the books, the real-life murder puzzles, and the dark secrets of the writers’ personal lives. All are woven together in a tangled web.
The simpler riddles are literary. Who wrote the first serial killer mysteries? What game did Club members play with a superintendent from Scotland Yard? Who pioneered the novel of psychological suspense? How did Anthony Berkeley anticipate Lord of the Flies?
Trickier questions arise about real-life crimes. Did a young woman’s horrific death trigger Berkeley’s infatuation with a married magistrate? Why was Christie haunted by the drowning of the man who adapted her work for the stage? What convinced Sayers of the innocence of a man convicted of battering his wife to death with a poker? And what did she make of the blood-stained garment that supplied a vital clue in the murder investigated by the legendary Inspector Whicher?
Detection Club members seldom confessed to writing about themselves, or the increasingly fragile social order to which they belonged. Yet they scattered hints throughout their writing, just as their fictional culprits made mistakes that gave away their clever schemes. We can deduce more from reading between the lines of the books than the authors realized.
Which novelist wrote a secret diary in an unbreakable code? How did two famous writers conduct a forbidden love affair through hidden messages in their stories? Why did Sayers and Berkeley suddenly abandon detective fiction at the height of their fame? Clues, outlandish as any ever picked up by Poirot, lurk in the unlikeliest settings – an inscribed first edition, a unique form of shorthand, a murderous fantasy transformed into fiction, even the abdication of a king.
Christie once hinted she was guilty of ‘crimes unsuspected, not detected.’ Sayers found herself confronting a blackmailer. And Berkeley fantasized about murdering the man who stood between him and happiness. Searching for the truth about this gifted trio is as enthralling as any hunt for fictional culprits.
After a series of economic earthquakes on a scale not seen for generations, uncanny parallels exist between our time and the years between the wars. This is the perfect moment for a cold case review of the Detection Club: to unmask the Golden Age writers and their work, against the backdrop of the extraordinary times in which they lived.
Notes to Chapter 1
In one account, she identified the setting for the ritual as Grosvenor House; in her biography, written in old age, she said it was the Dorchester.
The former version of events, referred to by Joanne Drayton, in Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, seems more reliable than Marsh’s later recollection in Black Beech and Honeydew. The ritual has been held at a variety of prestigious venues in central London over the years. By coincidence, it currently takes place at the Dorchester.
Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan
Freud ‘relished in particular Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express’: Paul Roazen, ‘Orwell, Freud and 1984’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1978.
‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said
In Christianna Brand’s Introduction to the 1979 edition of Sayers’ The Floating Admiral.
the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularised … by John Strachey
The first use of the term seems to be in Strachey’s ‘The Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, The Saturday Review, 7 January 1939. Another Marxist critic, Ernest Mandel, echoed Strachey forty-five years later in Delightful Murder: ‘The inter-war period was the golden age of the detective story.’ Over the years, there has been extensive debate about the distinction between ‘detective stories’, ‘crime novels’, and ‘mysteries’, but precise and satisfactory definitions of the differences between them have remained elusive. For the sake of simplicity, the terms are treated broadly as synonyms in this book.
One dark November day in 1923, Dorothy Leigh Sayers sat in her London office, rehearsing a lie until it sounded like the unvarnished truth. She excelled at playing with words, and making things up, whether in advertising copy or detective fiction. Now her imagination faced its sternest challenge. The daughter of a vicar and a devout Christian, she possessed fierce moral principles and an acute sense of sin, but she felt afraid and alone, and saw no alternative to deceiving the people she worked with. She hated what she was doing, but desperation drove her to bury her scruples.
She had invented a mysterious illness to justify taking eight weeks off work, hoping none of the men she reported to would enquire too closely into the medical problems of a valued female member of staff. This was the first step in an elaborate charade, designed with the same attention to detail she lavished on her fictional mysteries. Family and friends must be fooled as well.
Sayers worked for S. H. Benson Ltd, an advertising agency based in Kingsway Hall, close to the newspapers of Fleet Street, and ten minutes from her flat in Great James