The Golden Age of Murder

Roger comes up with a plausible explanation of who shot the blackmailer Victor Stanworth – only to find that he is wrong. This becomes a familiar pattern for Sheringham, the most fallible of ‘great’ detectives. When he does discover the truth, he helps the culprit to escape punishment, and this thwarting of conventional justice became his trademark. As Berkeley said, Sheringham’s self-confidence was limitless and he was ‘never afraid of taking grave decisions, and often quite illegal ones, when he thinks that pure justice can be served better in this way than by twelve possibly stupid jurymen’. The striking twist in this novel concerns the murderer’s identity. Months later, Agatha Christie used a similar ploy in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but took it a stage further.

An odd connection arose between Berkeley and Christie when, in March 1926, he serialized The Wintringham Mystery in the Daily Mirror. The newspaper offered a total of £500 in prizes to readers who provided the best answers to questions about the story: how did Stella disappear, and who caused her disappearance and why? When the prize winners were announced, one of the runners-up was Colonel Archie Christie, who was awarded five pounds. Presumably Agatha either helped her husband to solve the puzzle or entered the competition under his name. She had already won prize money for solving a previous newspaper mystery competition, but given her growing celebrity, may have been reluctant to enter as herself. Even better, the incident gave her the idea for a novel she wrote a few years later. The plot depends upon one character winning a competition prize under someone else’s name.

Sheringham’s second outing came in The Wychford Poisoning Case. At first, it was again published anonymously. Long after writing the book, Berkeley urged a correspondent to throw his copy into the incinerator, saying, ‘I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages.’ Yet the story offers clues to his own bizarre psychological make-up.

Spanking and sado-masochistic scenes crop up several times in Berkeley’s work. When the mother of Alec Grierson’s girlfriend Sheila Purefoy says that Sheila and most of her friends deserve a good spanking, Roger heartily agrees that a public spanker ought to be appointed. In a chapter accurately titled ‘Mostly Irrelevant’, Alec spanks Sheila in the presence of her father, who genially remarks, ‘Don’t mind me.’ A few chapters later, it is Roger’s turn to inflict discipline on Sheila, with a rolled-up magazine. Berkeley’s interest in spanking was matched by his loathing of bureaucrats, and a few years later he argued in O England! that ‘The President of the Metropolitan Water Board ought to be spanked publicly on Tower Green’ because of the Board’s failure to deal with water shortages.

Roger Sheringham is at his worst when he rants about women: ‘Most women are potential devils … They live entirely by their emotions … they are fundamentally incapable of reason and their one idea in life is to appear attractive to men.’ Yet Sheringham adds, ‘A man without his woman is only half an entity and … a woman … can … turn his life, however drab, into something really rather staggeringly wonderful.’ When Alec Grierson asks why Roger remains a bachelor, the answer is that ‘the right woman in my case … happens unfortunately to be married to someone else.’

Sheringham has few qualms about adultery. Attitudes were changing rapidly in the post-war era, and novels were becoming franker in their treatment of sex. Berkeley took advantage of this, and Sheringham was almost certainly expressing his creator’s opinions. The central mystery of Berkeley’s life is which particular married woman he thought, at that time, was the right woman for him.

Berkeley subtitled the novel ‘An Essay in Criminology’, and he based the plot on a classic Victorian poisoning puzzle. At the age of nineteen, Florence Chandler, a southern belle from Alabama with gold ringlets and large violet eyes, had a shipboard romance with an Englishman called James Maybrick. He was twenty-three years older, a portly man with a fondness for eating arsenic as an aphrodisiac. More appealingly, Maybrick had made a small fortune as a cotton broker, and Florence agreed to marry him. After settling into Battlecrease House, Maybrick’s home in the suburbs of Liverpool, she gave birth to a son and a daughter, but discovered that her husband had several mistresses, including one who had borne him five children. He also had a vile temper and an unshakeable belief that adultery was acceptable for husbands but not wives. When she had the temerity to take a lover of her own, he was so infuriated that he ripped her dress and blacked her eye.

Gloomy, gothic Battlecrease House made a suitably sinister setting for a macabre domestic mystery populated by a cast of inquisitive servants and members of a family hostile to the young American interloper. Florence bought flypapers from a chemist, and soaked them in bowls to extract arsenic from them – to use as a facial cream, she said. Her husband succumbed to a severe gastric illness, and when the children’s nanny intercepted compromising letters between Florence and her lover, she alerted Maybrick’s brother. The next day, a nurse saw Florence tampering with a bottle of meat juice in her husband’s bedroom; within twenty-four hours, he was dead. Florence was convicted of his murder, even thought there was doubt about whether arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. She fell victim to a fit of popular moral outrage fuelled by the Press, and a hostile summing-up from a judge, who was committed to an asylum two years later, after his sanity finally gave way.

Locked in the condemned cell in Walton Gaol, Florence had the excruciating experience of listening to workmen hammering in the prison yard as they assembled the gallows on which she was to hang. In a bizarre twist of fortune, the death sentence was belatedly replaced with life imprisonment for ‘administering and attempting to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder’. Since this was a crime for which she never stood trial, she suffered from the most outrageous compromise in British legal history, serving fifteen years before her release. She fled back to the United States under an assumed name, where she lived to a ripe old age in a squalid cabin in Connecticut. She only had her cats for company, but no doubt she felt safer with them than in the sinister household at Battlecrease House. Decades after her death, a diary was published purporting to amount to a confession by her late husband that he was Jack the Ripper.

The Maybrick mystery, and its multiple interpretations, fascinated Berkeley and also a new friend of his. This was Elizabeth Delafield, a stylish and often poignant novelist widely regarded as a twentieth-century Jane Austen. He dedicated the novel to her, saying it grew out of ‘those long criminological discussions of ours’. He hoped that Delafield would ‘recognise the attempt I have made to substitute for the materialism of the usual crime-puzzle of fiction those psychological values which are … the basis of the universal interest in the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life. In other words, I have tried to write what might be described as a psychological detective story.’

The psychological puzzle of the relationship between Berkeley and E. M. Delafield is the great untold story of the Golden Age. Born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (her pen name was a jokey version of de la Pasture), Delafield was the daughter of a count whose family fled to England to escape the French revolution and of a novelist. At nineteen, she made a beautiful debutante, but was too tall for most of her dancing partners. She joined a French religious order based in Belgium, but a life of chastity as a Bride of Heaven was not for her. After leaving the convent, she worked in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war, published her first novel, and married Major Paul Dashwood, an engineer and third son of a baronet.

The couple had two children, and after three years in Malaya, they moved to Kentisbeare in Devon, where Dashwood acted as land agent for a large estate. Delafield became a pillar of the community, and a doyenne of the Women’s Institute. She was appointed as Cullompton’s first female Justice of the Peace, causing one elderly magistrate to resign from the bench in protest at this invasion of male territory. Like Berkeley, she wrote under a pseudonym, but they had much more in common than that. Each hid deep-rooted feelings of inferiority beneath a veneer of sophistication. They shared a taste for irony, an acute sense of humour, and a risky delight in turning their private lives into fiction.

Delafield and Berkeley talked long into the night about the hanging of Edith Thompson, and Florence Maybrick’s narrow escape from the rope. They regarded both women as victims of a hypocritical morality that punished them for having sex outside marriage. Delafield empathized with their craving for excitement, although unlike Edith and Florence she did not make the mistake of writing letters revealing her intimate secrets. Today, she is never considered as a crime writer, but she was the first author to base a novel on the Thompson–Bywaters case, years before Sayers, Berkeley and the rest. Messalina of the Suburbs appeared just a year after the double execution.

Berkeley’s interest in married women was not confined to Delafield. He nursed a hopeless passion for a budding actress called Hilary Reynolds, but unfortunately she was the wife of his brother, Stephen Cox. She had starred in the West End under the name Hilary Brough, but she and Stephen emigrated briefly to Canada, returning when she became pregnant. By the time their daughter was born, the marriage was on the rocks, and Hilary decided to return to the stage. A brief reunion with Stephen resulted in another pregnancy, and Hilary abandoned her career in the theatre. She and Stephen stayed together until the end of the Thirties for the sake of their son and daughter.

Brenda’s elder sister in Brenda Entertains is a fictional counterpart of Hilary, an early example of Berkeley’s penchant for populating his books with women who appealed to him. Stephen discovered Berkeley’s interest in his wife, and for years he and Hilary broke off contact with Berkeley. Berkeley’s interest in Hilary did not go unnoticed by Delafield, whose No One Now Will Know features the seduction of a sister-in-law.

Berkeley was undaunted. He began to dream of another dangerous liaison, this time with Helen Peters, a gentle and attractive woman. Once again, there was a stumbling block which would have deterred any other writer, no matter how lustful. Not only was Helen married, her husband was Berkeley’s literary agent.

The storyline of The Wintringham Mystery resurfaced in revised form as a novel entitled Cicely Disappears. Berkeley borrowed the names of his Watford properties for a new pseudonym, A. Monmouth Platts, and gave repeated nods and winks to Delafield. One character is named Cullompton, another Kentisbeare, while the heroine marries someone who takes a job as a land agent, like Paul Dashwood. The changes to the story and author’s name may have been designed to evade an agreement that he should not publish the original without the newspaper’s consent. The novel is flimsy, but for Berkeley, its publication represented a shrewd bit of business.

A scene in Mr Priestley’s Problem takes place at a cocktail party where two people discover a shared fascination in criminology, as Berkeley and Delafield had done. The story is a Wodehousian romp in which a group of pranksters trick a naïve man into thinking that he has shot and killed a supposed blackmailer. Berkeley was a member of the Gnats, an amateur dramatic group based in Watford, and wrote the libretto and music for several musicals, including two which reached the London stage – a comic opera, and a stage version of Mr Priestley’s Problem.

Priestley is handcuffed to an attractive woman during the story. Did Alfred Hitchcock read the book or see the play? The situation bears an uncanny resemblance to the scene in Hitchcock’s version of The 39 Steps in which Robert Donat is handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. There was a touch of sado-masochism in Hitchcock, as there was in Berkeley. For both men, the scenario was a sexual turn-on.

The Vane Mystery saw Berkeley playing with the conventions of the genre. Sherlock Holmes’ superiority over Inspector Lestrade led to innumerable stories contrasting incompetent professional policemen with gifted amateurs, but in this book, Sheringham is humiliated by Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard, who prefers evidence to psychology, believing that ‘No good detective ought to have too much imagination.’ As if unable to help himself, Berkeley not only gave his own name to Sheringham’s amiable cousin, but audaciously named two key characters with guilty secrets after the two people who stood in the way of a relationship with Helen Peters. They were his wife Margaret, and Helen’s husband. Given such effrontery, to dedicate the book to his parents-in-law was hardly an olive branch.

Unabashed by his humiliation, Sheringham triumphs over Moresby, now promoted to Chief Inspector, in The Silk Stocking Murders. The title illustrates Berkeley’s knack of gaining attention for his detective novels. The first two had been published anonymously, to create a frisson of mystery, and now he calculated that silk stockings, suggestive of sex and suspense, would capture people’s attention. As so often in his literary career, he was ahead of his time, creating a serial killer before the term ‘serial killer’ was invented. Again, he borrowed from a real life crime – the strangling six years earlier of Lilian Othen, a prostitute who worked in the West End under the name Lily Ray. One evening, she picked up a young petty crook called Anthony Castor in Regent Street. He had been drinking heavily, and after going for a late-night walk on the Embankment, they took a tram ride back to her flat in Brixton. During a quarrel, he seized her by the throat, and squeezed until she was dead. He then took off one of her silk stockings and tied it around her neck to make it seem that she had killed herself. But in the early hours of the morning, a policeman saw him trying to break into a shop, and he admitted at once that he had killed a girl. ‘I didn’t think it was so easy to kill anyone,’ he said. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude.

Berkeley’s killer adopts Castor’s modus operandi. An aspiring actress, a chorus girl, and a diplomat’s daughter are found dead in quick succession, hanged with silk stockings. Roger deduces that they have been murdered by a sex maniac who seeks out victims whose deaths he can twist into apparent suicides. Berkeley dedicated the book to ‘A. B. Cox, who kindly wrote it for me in his spare time.’ He even inscribed a copy ‘To A. B. Cox from the Author’ and kept it himself. A sign of a split personality, perhaps, or one more example of his weird sense of humour.

In July 1928, he wrote a letter – in French, for some reason – to his agent, A. D. Peters about a play he was writing, and sent ‘Mes salutations à la belle Hélène.’ This is the first known record of his interest in Helen Peters (who was not French but Scottish, the daughter of MacGregor of Glengyle, a distant descendant of Rob Roy). Perhaps Helen was flattered. For all his faults, women found Berkeley attractive. He was rather like those handsome cads who so often crop up in Golden Age novels, and cannot be trusted with other men’s wives. Years later, Clarice Dickson Carr, wife of American detective author John, recalled that Berkeley was ‘very good looking in an English film star way’. And he did not lack stamina. As the Twenties drew to a close, in addition to writing prolifically and pursuing his amorous adventures, he was busily laying the foundations of the Detection Club.

Notes to Chapter 3

Edith Thompson never believed she would really hang

Among the many accounts of the Thompson–Bywaters case (which, as is invariably the way with discussion of past cases, contain much conflicting information) I have found René Weis’s Criminal Justice especially useful.

in George Orwell’s phrase, the end of an ‘Elizabethan Age’ of English murder

See Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Tribune, 15 February 1946.

Anthony Berkeley was appalled by Edith Thompson’s fate.

For convenience, I refer to authors such as Berkeley, Henry Wade, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, J. J. Connington, and Anthony Gillbert by their principal pseudonyms; they were for the most part known to their fellow Detection Club members by their pen names rather than by their real names. Sometimes their novels appeared under alternative titles, typically when an American publisher made a change. Titles mentioned in this book are generally those first used in the UK, although there are exceptions, notably Christie’s And Then There Were None.

In Berkeley, wit, charm and flair warred with demons.

Information about Berkeley’s life is notoriously hard to come by, and I am indebted to Malcolm J. Turnbull (author of Elusion Aforethought), George Locke (author, under the name Ayresome Johns, of a slim but informative volume about Berkeley’s writings), Arthur Robinson, Tony Medawar, and members of Berkeley’s family for supplying material that has proved invaluable in writing this book. Medawar and Robinson (jointly) and Locke have written informative introductions to two collections of Berkeley’s shorter work, The Avenging Chance and other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham’s Casebook, and the privately published The Roger Sheringham Stories respectively. William F. Stickland’s chapter ‘Anthony Berkeley Cox’ in Earl F. Bargainnier’s Twelve Englishmen of Mystery, and the sources he quotes, also offer useful insight.

Julian Symons … believing that Berkeley’s ‘ruddy-faced geniality’ concealed a disturbingly shy and secretive character.

Symons’ posthumous memories of Berkeley, quoted in Elusion Aforethought, appeared in an obituary for The Sunday Times on 14 March 1971, and in the Times Literary Supplement of 10 March 1978.

‘Detection and crime at its wittiest’, Agatha Christie said.

In ‘Detective Writers in England’; see CADS 58, December 2008, and below.

The glamorous Christianna Brand … said he once confided that there was ‘not one soul in the world he did not cordially dislike’.

Christianna Brand (1907–1988), a distinguished post-war practitioner of books in the Golden Age tradition, had mixed feelings about Berkeley, which she expressed in private correspondence with a younger Detection Club colleague, Robert Barnard (1936–2013), and in several versions of an essay which appeared as the Introduction to The Floating Admiral, on the book’s republication in the US in 1979; see also Tony Medawar, ed., ‘Detection Club Memories: Christianna Brand’, CADS 52, August 2007.

as M. R. James said …‘The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date …’

In an Introduction he wrote in 1924 to Ghosts and Marvels, edited by V. H. Collins.

An odd connection arose between Berkeley and Christie

See Tony Medawar, ‘On This Day: 9 April 1926’, CADS 64, November 2012.

The newspaper offered a total of £500 in prizes to readers who provided the best answers to questions about the story

During the Golden Age, prize competitions linked to detective stories were highly popular. They can be cost-effective marketing devices – if carefully handled. In 1905, Edgar Wallace offered £1,000 in prize money for readers who solved the puzzle in his debut thriller, The Four Just Men, and found himself courting bankruptcy as a result. Almost sixty years later, Len Deighton’s second spy novel, Horse Under Water, included a crossword with clues which could be solved through reading the novel. The clues were printed on the endpapers of first editions, and readers were given ten days to complete the puzzle; the first ten to send in correct solutions were awarded book tokens.

4

The Mystery of the Silent Pool

On the morning of Saturday 4 December 1926, a gypsy boy called George Best came across a Morris Cowley motor car at Newlands Corner, near Guildford in Surrey. The lights were on, but nobody was inside, although a fur coat and small suitcase had been left. The police soon traced the car to Agatha Christie, who lived with her husband in the stockbroker belt at Sunningdale in Berkshire. At the age of thirty-six, Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist, and the couple had named their house Styles, after the scene of the crime in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

When the police called at Styles, they spoke to Charlotte (‘Carlo’) Fisher, who acted as Christie’s secretary and helped to look after her daughter Rosalind. Carlo said the author had left home, driving off without telling anyone where she was going. According to Carlo, Christie had been unwell recently, and her family were worried about her. Christie’s husband Archie was staying with friends, along with his secretary Nancy Neele. He’d recently confessed to Agatha that he’d fallen in love with Nancy.

The police took Archie and Carlo to the spot where the car had been found. The news had already leaked out, and the car was surrounded by a crowd. The area rapidly became a magnet for sensation-seekers, and the Press salivated over the puzzle, indulging in feverish guesswork about the mysterious affair of the beautiful young writer, and her dashing war hero husband. Words of wisdom from Superintendent Kenward, the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey Police, featured prominently in their reports.

‘The most baffling mystery ever set me for solution’ was Kenward’s quotable description of the case. An early theory was that Agatha had crashed her car and wandered into nearby woodland in a disorientated state and become lost. The area was searched, with help from members of the public, but there was no sign of Agatha. When questioned by the police and newspapers, Archie was defensive. He dreaded the truth about his relationship with Nancy coming to light. The police guarded his house, and monitored his phone calls.

‘They suspect me of doing away with Agatha,’ he told a business colleague. To deflect suspicion, he revealed to the Daily News that his wife had been thinking of ‘engineering her disappearance’. The newspaper offered a £100 reward for information leading to her discovery, helpfully printing a set of photographs showing how she might have altered her appearance with a disguise.

Close to Newlands Corner, in a hollow shaded by box trees, lay the Silent Pool. Fed by underground springs, the water was clear and still. A woodcutter’s daughter had been surprised there by wicked King John, so legend said, while she was bathing naked. She drowned while trying to flee from him. Her ghost was seen by local people from time to time, floating on the surface of the pool.

Had Christie chosen this serene yet spooky place to end her life? There was only one way to find out. The Silent Pool was dredged with the aid of a pump and large grappling irons to slash the weeds. Tractors and a light aircraft scoured the countryside, and dogs searched the land. They found no sign of a corpse.

With each passing day, the theories became wilder. A clairvoyant called in by the Daily Sketch suggested that Agatha’s body might be found in a log-house. Cynics suggested that the ‘disappearance’ was a stunt to publicize her latest novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or had she disguised herself in male clothing and gone into hiding, like Dr Crippen’s mistress Ethel Le Neve sixteen years earlier? The Daily Express consulted a former Chief Inspector of the CID, Walter Dew, renowned as ‘the man who caught Crippen’, who reinvented himself as an occasional media pundit on matters criminal and mysterious after retiring from Scotland Yard. Dew doubted whether Christie was the victim of foul play, or had vanished for publicity or financial reasons. ‘All women are subject to hysteria at times,’ he pronounced, opining that perhaps the fact that she ‘thought about crooks and murder all day’ had affected her. Reporters thirsting for sensation found leading crime writers equally keen to share their wisdom.