The Golden Age of Murder

The worst was not yet over, as Agatha’s brother died. She and Madge had paid for Monty to live in a house on Dartmoor; his poor health was exacerbated by a drug habit, although his personal magnetism attracted women willing to look after him. He emigrated to the south of France, and his final companion was a nurse. A stroke killed him while he was having a drink in a seafront café in Marseilles. Christie had been fond of him, but acutely aware of his failings. Attractive but weak-willed men like Monty often figure in her novels.

As Partners in Crime was published, there was at last a hint of better times to come. Anthony Berkeley introduced Christie to a new social circle, which gave her the chance to meet people with whom she had a great deal in common. Crucially, they were people whom she could trust. Her determination to stay out of the public gaze was shared by many of her new friends. They believed their books should speak for themselves. The camaraderie of their dinners helped her to patch up her self-confidence as she embarked on the long journey towards a new life.

Notes to Chapter 4

Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist

The principal sources for my account of Christie’s life and work, including her disappearance, are listed in the Select Bibliography. The tireless research work undertaken by both Tony Medawar and John Curran has proved especially valuable.

his French rivals Arsene Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille

Created respectively by Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) and Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Rouletabille first appeared in the classic ‘locked room’ novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, but thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Leroux is now better remembered as author of The Phantom of the Opera.

she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions

See Tony Medawar, ‘On this Day’, CADS 64, November 2012, for accounts of Christie’s prize competition entry, and the mock trials mentioned here and in chapter 6.

The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse … had previously used a comparable device

Duse’s work is discussed by Bo Lundin in The Swedish Crime Story (1981).

T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’

Jasper Maskelyne (1902–73) was a British stage magician, and a member of a family of stage magicians, the son of Nevil Maskelyne and a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. The Maskelynes’ claims to fame include not only the creation of countless tricks that fascinated Carr, but also the invention of the coin-in-the-slot toilet door, which has yet to be deployed in a locked cubicle whodunit. John Nevil invented a character dressed in a Chinese-style silk tunic, capable of playing hands of the card games whist and nap, and named Psycho. Psycho appeared to move of its own accord, but was in fact operated by concealed bellows.

5

A Bolshevik Soul in a Fabian Muzzle

A tediously repetitive complaint about Sayers and other Golden Age novelists is that their books were dominated by ‘snobbery with violence’. This is a neat phrase, but a lazy criticism. In reality, Golden Age writers suffered under snobbish attitudes (and still do) at least as often as they were guilty of them. Douglas Cole, a leading socialist intellectual, liked to tell a story from his time as an Oxford don. He remarked to a reactionary acquaintance, Colonel Farquharson, that the BBC had broadcast one of his detective stories the previous week. The Colonel replied: ‘What a pity. Had I known earlier, I could have asked the servants to listen to it.’

Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were conservative in outlook, and their success has caused a peculiar amnesia to afflict critical discussion of the Golden Age. Detective novelists with radical views have become the men – and women – who never were. Even the distinguished historian of the genre Julian Symons, who should have known better, thought it ‘safe to say that almost all of the British writers of the Twenties and Thirties … were unquestionably right-wing.’ In fact, the Liberal Party and centre-left were well represented among Golden Age authors, while others joined the Communist Party or flirted with it. One led the Jarrow Crusade, another married one of Stalin’s senior lieutenants, yet another was killed fighting for the Republican cause in Spain. Some mocked Nazis and Fascists in their detective novels long before it was fashionable to do so. Others wrote mysteries which debated the merits of assassinating dictators.

Douglas and Margaret Cole were the leading lights of the Left among Golden Age detective novelists. Their personal lives seem, at first glance, more straightforward than the emotionally turbulent experiences of Sayers, Berkeley and Christie. Yet the Coles’ apparently happy marriage was more complicated than it seemed.

Douglas Cole was already a pillar of the Labour Research Department, when Margaret Postgate joined after a spell teaching classics at Hammersmith’s prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School. Margaret was a dynamic young woman, with ‘a mop of short thick black wavy hair in which is set swarthy complexion, sharp nose and chin and most brilliantly defiant eyes’. Instantly smitten by Douglas, she wrote the name ‘Mrs G. D. H. Cole’ on a piece of paper to see how it looked before hastily crumpling it up.

Her brother Raymond described Douglas as ‘slender, fairly tall and quite handsome; his eyes were set in a curiously straight line and he could look at you in an oddly hypnotic manner.’ This expression reminded Raymond of a snake, while Raymond’s son Oliver gave Douglas a curious immortality by taking him as the model for the character of Professor Yaffle in the children’s television series Bagpuss. Yaffle was a woodpecker carved from wood, a brilliant academic with a grumpy demeanour, who at times of inactivity served as a bookend.

Margaret debated political theory with Douglas, and secretly wrote ‘a bad poem or two about him’, but was dismayed to find the Department ‘as nearly as possible sexless – it did not fornicate – hardly even“neck”.’ One wet winter night, she spent the evening in Douglas’ flat in Battersea, discussing a propaganda pamphlet. When he offered her the loan of an umbrella for her walk back to Fulham, rather than a bed for the night, she felt aggrieved. Although he did not seem to reciprocate the physical desire she felt for him, she put this down to the all-consuming nature of his dedication to socialism.

After a year or so, it dawned on him that Margaret’s interest in his company was not solely due to her love of politics, and he took her out to the theatre and a concert. When he invited her for a country walk, it turned into ‘a pretty fast march’ along the Thames towpath. He brought along dates and biscuits for them to eat, but forgot about anything to drink. The walk passed mostly in silence. Margaret’s throat was dry with thirst, and she could not think of anything to say. Douglas did not help her out.

Undeterred, a couple of months later, she accepted another invitation for a walk. They went down to Hampden Woods on a fine day in May. ‘Some kind of tension seemed to develop,’ she recalled, and they sat down on a log in the midst of the young beech trees. No-one else was around, apart from an ‘indignant pigeon’ which flew out of the log. With something less than the panache of a born Casanova, Douglas stretched an arm around her and said, ‘I suppose this has got to happen.’

On returning to the Labour Research Department, the couple announced their engagement. The wedding took place at a registry office adorned by a sign warning: ‘No Confetti: Defence of the Realm Act.’ Margaret wrote a poem, ‘Beechwood’, about that close encounter on the log: the pigeon was mentioned, but not the fact that Douglas fell asleep on the train home. People were startled by their marriage, since Douglas was widely assumed to be more interested in men than women. His idea of a stab at humour was to claim he had been forced into matrimony, but Margaret did not care.

‘Physically,’ she said, ‘he was always under-sexed – low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much whether he would have had any sex life at all in the ordinary sense … Up to this time, his physical affections, his desire to caress, had been generally directed towards his own sex; he had fallen in love with various young men … and had written poems to them. But it was all very mild, and needed no sort of legal sanction … his sympathy with homosexuals was intellectual chiefly. For women generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all … he thought that the mass of women were not good Socialist material.’

In 1926, Christie lost a husband, Sayers found one, and Berkeley was contemplating a change of wife. That year was equally momentous for Douglas and Margaret Cole, but for different reasons. Having abandoned the plans they had discussed with Sayers for forming a crime-writing syndicate, they were now writing detective stories together to supplement their academic income. Fiction, however, was put on hold as they rallied to the cause of the workers during the General Strike.

The Coles and their allies on the British Left were convinced that a determined and united industrial movement ‘could make its will prevail’. That confidence was mirrored by the apprehension of people who supported the status quo, such as Christie. Her anxieties were reflected in The Secret Adversary. The spymaster Mr Carter warns Tommy and Tuppence Beresford about the threat to trade posed by a Labour government. ‘Bolshevist gold’ is pouring into the country, in an attempt to foment unrest among the workers. Thanks to the plucky Beresfords, the ‘strike menace’ and the ‘inauguration of a reign of terror’ feared by the newspapers are averted.

While Christie dreaded the prospect of seismic political change, the Coles devoted their lives to trying to achieve it. The General Strike offered the prospect of worker solidarity toppling the established order. After Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, lost office in 1924, Churchill’s ‘Silk Stocking Budget’ reintroduced the Gold Standard, creating pressure to cut wages, and when the mine owners threatened to slash pay, the miners threatened to strike. The government bought off the employers with a temporary subsidy, unable to risk a confrontation because stocks of coal were low. Trade unionists rejoiced over their victory, but their celebrations proved premature.

Margaret concluded afterwards that the General Strike was provoked by the government, once it had bought time to prepare for a fight. Coal was stockpiled, and Churchill set up a strike-breaking force, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. Once the subsidy ended, the mine owners again proposed lower pay and longer hours. ‘Not a penny, not a minute’ was the trade union side’s response, but concessions were not forthcoming. Compositors at the Daily Mail refused to set a leader article attacking the miners, and Baldwin retaliated by calling off negotiations. The next day, the ‘front-line troops’ were called out on strike.

At a rowdy protest meeting, members of Oxford University’s Labour Club argued about how to fight back if the Vice-Chancellor conscripted students into the O.M.S. to keep essential services moving. They were interrupted by the arrival of Douglas and Sandie Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who came to announce a triumph. They had persuaded the authorities to reject compulsory conscription. Douglas, the ascetic intellectual, became an instant hero. A University Strike Committee was set up, based at the Coles’ house in Holywell, to produce propaganda with an ‘inky duplicator’, and organise speakers to address meetings and rally public support.

It was an exciting time. The team of activists borrowed cars to run a courier service between Oxford and London. The plan was to collect messages and instructions from the Trades Union Congress, along with copies of the union newsletter, the British Worker. Margaret was appointed chief courier, and Hugh Gaitskell, one of Douglas’s most gifted students, did most of the driving. Another undergraduate volunteer was Cecil Day-Lewis. He worked on a bulletin arguing that the Archbishop of Canterbury should mediate in the strike., and ruined his only good suit by spilling violet ink over it. Eleven years later, having assumed the identity of crime writer Nicholas Blake, he joined the Coles in the Detection Club.

Margaret was thrilled by the solidarity shown by long-serving employees of the Clarendon Press, who showed the courage of their convictions by walking out of work, even though it meant risking their pensions. For all their brilliance, however, the Coles failed to spot the obvious. The trade union leaders had blundered by calling the print workers out, as this made it harder to get their message across to a fearful public. The government, conversely, was able to influence debate on the radio. After eight days, the engineers and ship workers were called out, but although the miners opposed any compromise, the battle proved unwinnable, and the TUC told its members to go back to work.

Douglas struggled to come to terms with the scale of this defeat, but Margaret concluded that the government’s victory marked the ‘final throw’ of mass industrial action. Yet the Coles’ spirit was unquenchable. Before long they turned their minds back to detective fiction, as well as what to do next in the name of socialism. For all their deeply-felt dismay, they were lucky. The General Strike did not hurt their pockets, as it did those who lost pay they could ill afford. For Margaret, the strike was an enthralling experience, and she had enjoyed Hugh Gaitskell’s company, although it was Douglas who fell in love with him.

Sayers and the Coles bonded on an intellectual level, even though their opinions about life and society were poles apart. Sayers’ priority was to earn a living, and she threw herself into the advertising business with gusto. The Coles believed capitalism was in crisis, and opted for seclusion among the dreaming spires, although Douglas did become honorary research officer to the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.

He was always known as G. D. H. Cole; this was as much a brand name as Sayers’ insistence on her middle initial, although he would have been horrified by anything as redolent of capitalism as the idea of a ‘brand’. Although born in Cambridge, Margaret said later that he ‘developed a violent dislike of Cambridge, partly because it was not Oxford’. At St Paul’s School, he worked on a magazine which G. K. Chesterton praised, and became a devotee of William Morris. By the time he went to study Classics at Balliol, he had embraced socialism.

Douglas fantasized about Britain developing into a society based on ‘Guild Socialism’, with production run and organized by self-governing democratic organisations of workers. He became prominent in the Fabian Society. Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, set in London in 1984 (perhaps a date that stuck in George Orwell’s mind) struck a chord with the Guild Socialists, and Chesterton’s often radical views had much more in common with Douglas’s than those of Berkeley, Sayers or Christie. His friend and fellow Guild Socialist Maurice Reckitt found him kindly, but impatient and hot-tempered: ‘He was always resigning … from bodies which failed to do what he required of them.’ His ‘haughty ruthlessness’ prompted Reckitt to write a short poem:

‘Mr G. D. H. Cole

Is a bit of a puzzle.

A curious role

That of G. D. H. Cole,

With a Bolshevik soul

In a Fabian muzzle.’

Margaret’s brother, Raymond Postgate, also admired Douglas’s intellect, but thought him rude. Postgate later wrote Verdict of Twelve, a superb study of jurors in a murder case, biting enough to confound any lawyer with a sentimental attachment to the notion of trial by jury. The book’s ironic and innovative style owed much more to Anthony Berkeley than to Douglas, but Raymond became better known for founding The Good Food Guide, and as the father of Oliver.

Margaret was born a few weeks before Sayers. Because the Postgates’ father was a classical professor and grammarian 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.’