The Golden Age of Murder

After her father died in September 1928, Sayers and Mac bought a house in Witham, Essex. Today, her statue stands across the road from her home in Newland Street. Sayers’ mother died ten months after her father, and the double bereavement was a crushing blow. A contract with an American publisher enabled her to resign from Benson’s, but she took on responsibility for caring for an elderly aunt, as well as supporting John Anthony. Money remained tight. Mac Fleming’s health worsened, and as her increasing fame provoked his jealousy, he became depressive and difficult. He had promised to adopt John Anthony, but kept putting off any action. So the boy stayed with Ivy, and when Ivy suggested moving nearer to Witham, Sayers discouraged her. She had her hands full with Mac.

When Anthony Berkeley invited her to dine with fellow detective novelists, he offered her much more than simply the opportunity to socialize with people who played the same literary game. For Sayers, the Detection Club came to mean an opportunity to escape for a few hours, just as the stories the Club members wrote were enjoyed by people in search of escapism.

Sayers was becoming interested in real-life murders, absorbing herself in the fears and passions of victims, suspects and culprits alike. She and her colleagues in the Detection Club understood that these cases posed puzzles of their own – and itched to solve them. These puzzles differed from the contrived complexities of the typical detective story. They concerned guilt and innocence, the mysteries of human motivation, and the frighteningly unpredictable workings of justice. And the crime that made the greatest impression on the Detection Club was the brutal stabbing that led to the equally shocking execution of Edith Thompson.

Notes to Chapter 2

My account of Sayers’ life and work owes much to information supplied by the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, Sayers’ reviews of detective fiction, and the biographies and collections of letters mentioned in the Select Bibliography, in particular Barbara Reynolds’ Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, together with material held in the Sayers Archive at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.

One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females.

To identify the book in question would be too much of a spoiler, but the author was Ethel Lina White (1876–1944), a specialist in ‘women in jeopardy’ novels, and best known for The Wheel Spins (1936), filmed by Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes. Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay for The Unseen, also based on a White novel, Midnight House (1942).

the Sexton Blake series

Blake was another private eye with rooms in Baker Street; he was originally created by Harry Blyth in 1893. The many later, often pseudonymous, writers of Blake stories (Margery Allingham may have been among them) included the science fiction and fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock (born 1939) whose first Blake story, Caribbean Crisis (1962), a locked room mystery with a corpse in a bathysphere, is now a sought-after rarity. Blake was brought to the television screen in the Sixties, with Laurence Payne (1919–2009) in the title role; Payne later wrote crime novels, starting with The Nose on My Face (1961), a whodunit filmed as Girl in the Headlines.

Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian

Guedella (1889–1954) was a barrister and popular writer who stood five times as a Liberal candidate for Parliament without success. His epigrams include ‘Even reviewers read a Preface’, while his remark about detective stories is quoted in Antony Shaffer’s play Sleuth.

The Daniels puzzle remained unsolved.

Three years later, a workman called Prudhomme was interrogated by police after his wife accused him of stealing a gold watch, which was discovered at his home. But the watch proved not to be May Daniels’, and justice went no further than seeing the French police charge Prudhomme with the theft of a bicycle, and his wife with stealing vegetables.

a projected book about Wilkie Collins

The surviving fragment was published posthumously: E. R. Gregory, ed., Wilkie Collins. A Critical and Bibliographical Study (Toledo: Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1977).

Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords

Charles Parker mentions to Wimsey the real-life precedent of Earl Ferrers, the last peer to be hanged, in 1760 (for the murder of his land steward). The novel achieved a strange form of notoriety in 1962, as one of the library books mischievously vandalised by the playwright Joe Orton and his lover and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell; the pair were sent to prison for malicious damage to the property of Islington Public Library.

George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses)

In ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Horizon, October 1944. Drawing a contrast with the stories about Holmes, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, and Dr John Thorndyke, Orwell argues that: ‘Since 1918 … a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited.’ A modern perspective is supplied in Jake Kerridge, ‘Does Crime Writing Have a Misogynistic Heart?’, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2014. Thanks to the success of the Carrados stories, Ernest Brammah Smith (1864–1942), who wrote as Ernest Bramah, was an obvious candidate for membership of the Detection Club, but although he corresponded amiably with Sayers, probably his natural reclusiveness led him to decline the chance to join.

under the new imprint of Victor Gollancz

Details about Gollancz’s life and career are drawn from Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Victor Gollancz: a Biography (London: Gollancz, 1987).

influenced by Wright and Wrong

The seminal essays were Willard Huntington Wright’s ‘Detective Story’ in Scribners, November 1926, and E. M. Wrong’s ‘Introduction’ to Crime and Detection (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).

3

Conversations about a Hanged Woman

On a cold, damp January morning in 1923, a terrified woman was dragged to the gallows at Holloway Prison. Even after a judge put on the black cap at the end of a calamitous trial and sentenced her to death, Edith Thompson never believed she would really hang. Her morale only collapsed when the date was fixed for her execution. On that final morning, when no last-minute reprieve arrived, she started to sob and scream. She was injected with a cocktail of drugs to calm her, and given a large measure of brandy and a cigarette. The hangman strapped her wrists, and his assistant tied her skirt and ankles, but it took four men to manhandle her outside into the drizzle, and then into the shelter of a brick shed. The scaffold stood waiting for her.

Edith was put in a wooden bosun’s chair, so the noose could be tied around her neck. She was barely conscious as a white hood was placed over her head. After the trapdoor opened and she fell, her underclothes were drenched with blood. Lurid rumours claimed that her ‘insides’ fell out. The bleeding was so severe that the authorities insisted that any woman to be hanged subsequently must wear canvas pants. One possibility is that Edith suffered a haemorrhage, another that she was pregnant.

Edith Thompson’s name was on everyone’s lips. She had become notorious as the ‘Messalina of Ilford’, a scandalous modern successor to the predatory and sexually insatiable wife of the Emperor Claudius. Yet Edith’s beginnings could not have been more ordinary, and the events leading to her death were more like a blend of crime passionnel and black farce than a story of calculated and cold-blooded cruelty.

Born on Christmas Day, six months after Sayers, Edith Graydon was a pretty, vivacious Londoner. Her father was a clerk with a profitable sideline as a dancing teacher. One of his pupils, a neighbour in Leytonstone, was Alfred Hitchcock. Despite his physical bulk, the young Hitchcock was surprisingly nimble. He knew the Graydon family, and formed a lasting friendship with Edith’s younger sister Avis.

Dancing and acting were Edith’s favourite pastimes. Her imagination was fired by a touch of drama and romance, but she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and became head buyer for a milliner’s. Edith met Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, when she was fifteen. After a six-year courtship they married and settled down in Ilford. Their life was comfortable, but lacked glamour and excitement, and Edith craved both. There was nothing dowdy or old-before-her-time about her. She bobbed her hair, wore calf-length sleeveless dresses and spoke French.

When she was twenty-six, she took a fancy to Frederick Bywaters, an eighteen-year-old ship’s laundry steward who had previously courted Avis. Handsome and widely travelled, Bywaters was not staid and set in his ways, like Percy. The three of them, and Avis, went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, and Percy suggested that Bywaters stay with them in Ilford in between voyages. Before long Edith was skipping work for breakfast in bed with the lodger, but Percy discovered that they were having an affair. He refused Bywaters’ demand to allow Edith a divorce, and threw the lad out of the house.

Undeterred, Edith and Bywaters kept seeing each other. When he went back to sea, she sent him dozens of intimate letters. She claimed that she had tried to poison Percy, grinding up broken glass from light bulbs and feeding the shards to him, mixed up with mashed potato. Begging Bywaters to ‘do something desperate’, she sent him press cuttings with accounts 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 soup at a literary luncheon, he could not tell whether it had been put there by a careless cook, by a fellow guest Berkeley had insulted, or by Berkeley himself: ‘With Anthony Berkeley Cox, such a joke was possible.’ Even when relatively young, Berkeley relished playing the grumpy old man, and liked to give the impression that he was a misanthrope. Perhaps he used this as a cover to hide his compulsive womanizing. The glamorous Christianna Brand, who joined the Detection Club after the Second World War, and certainly caught Berkeley’s eye, said he once confided that there was ‘not one soul in the world he did not cordially dislike’. Thin-skinned and quick to take offence, he was a rich man who earned a reputation for stinginess. Legend has it that the reason why books signed by Berkeley are rare is because he charged for giving his autograph.

Yet he showed kindness and generosity to little-known writers, inspired loyalty in those who worked for him, and was renowned as a genial host. Christianna Brand judged him ‘an excellent companion, clever, erudite and very well read’, and Symons said he was ‘particularly sympathetic to the young’. When he published a fiercely opinionated book about England’s social and political ills, some of his arguments were not merely perceptive and enlightened, but decades ahead of their time. He argued in favour of equal pay for women, a minimum wage, fairer rents and worker participation on company boards. He also forecast the creation of a League of European Nations.

When the First World War broke out, Berkeley joined up, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He was gassed while serving in France, and also wounded by shrapnel before being invalided out of the army. Bouts of ill-health contributed to the uncertainty of his temperament throughout the rest of his life. In the reckless whirl of wartime, he married Margaret Farrar while on leave in 1917. He was twenty-one, she was just nineteen. They were too young, but what was the point of thinking long-term? Soldiers did not know whether they would ever come back from their next tour of duty. Nor did their lovers.

In peacetime, the marriage ran into difficulties, and eventually they divorced. Margaret (known as Peggy to those close to her) remarried, but Berkeley stayed on surprisingly good terms with her. When he died, decades after their divorce, she received a legacy under his will. The image he liked to cultivate of a tight-fisted misanthrope was not the whole story.

Not long after Berkeley and Margaret split up, he put his own views into the mouth of his (unmarried) detective, Roger Sheringham: ‘I never think a first marriage ought to count, do you? One’s so busy learning how to be married at all that one can hardly help acquiring a kind of resentment against one’s partner in error. And once resentment has crept in, the thing’s finished.’ This is the best evidence we have about why the marriage collapsed.

Like so many other men returning to Britain after serving on the Front, Berkeley found it hard to adjust. He dabbled in activities ranging from farming, property management, and what he described as ‘social work’ (although he was scarcely a conventional do-gooder), to ‘work in a Government office’ (given his contempt for bureaucrats, that job was presumably short-lived). Keen on shooting, he became a good enough marksman to compete at Bisley, but amateur theatricals appealed to him even more, because they afforded a chance to assume a different personality. When his two-act comic opera, The Family Witch was performed in Watford, he played the Major-Domo, and Margaret designed the women’s costumes.

Berkeley contributed scores of humorous sketches to Punch and other periodicals. These included a Conan Doyle spoof written in the style of Wodehouse. He also wrote a series of sketches featuring a small girl, some of which were collected as Brenda Entertains, and a comic fantasy with elements of ‘biological science fiction’, The Professor on Paws, in which part of a dead scientist’s brain is transplanted into a kitten. He had a facility for catching on to what was currently popular, and detective fiction caught his fancy at a time when, as M. R. James said (drawing a contrast with the ghost story), ‘The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there.’

His first detective novel, The Layton Court Mystery, was published anonymously. The cover said the book was written by ‘?’. Berkeley wrote it ‘for pure amusement, just to see if I could,’ but it sold twenty times better than his earlier books. A country house mystery, it introduced the breezy nosy parker Roger Sheringham and his sidekick Alec Grierson. Berkeley made Sheringham rude and vain, ‘an offensive person, founded on an offensive person I once knew, because in my original innocence I thought it would be amusing to have an offensive detective’. This may explain why Sheringham is portrayed as anti-Semitic. Berkeley developed a taste for taking revenge through fiction that became an addiction.

Yet Sheringham bears an uncanny resemblance to his creator. The son of a doctor, from whom he has inherited a love of puzzles, he is educated at public school and Oxford before military service. He writes successful novels and also for the newspapers. Berkeley was talking about himself and people he knew when he said in a biographical note about Roger: ‘Privately, he had quite a poor opinion of his own books, combined with a horror of ever becoming like some of the people with whom his new work brought him into contact: authors who take their own work with such deadly seriousness, talk about it all the time and consider themselves geniuses.’