IN THE EARLY 1920s the British were recovering from a war in which
three-quarters of a million of their young men died. Recriminations were
replacing patriotic euphoria, and the unemployed ex-army salesman was a
familiar sight in the streets. But for most people the overwhelming
desire was to put those four years behind them. There were innumerable
musical shows to go to, both home-grown and transatlantic. Nigel
Playfair was reviving Restoration comedies with Edith Evans at the
Lyric; Noel Coward, with Hay Fever, was proving that the comedy of
manners was not dead. And for reading matter there were Christie,
Sayers, and a whole host of lesser names who make up what we today call
the Golden Age of the detective story.
One should not take the comparison between the classic crime story and
the comedy of manners too far, but the parallels are striking. In 1660
in Britain the metropolitan upper class had just been through two
gruelling decades: their king had been executed, their estates
sequestered, they themselves had been reduced to risible or pathetic
hangers-on at continental courts. Through Restoration comedy they built
a new wall around themselves, to keep out the realities of the changed
world: they created an artificial world of aristocratic elegance, where
their standards ruled, where their wit and taste were exalted, where the
rude outsider could be ejected from the charmed circle.
In 1920 the English middle classes had seen empires crumble, new
Bolshevik republics established, Labour parties flourishing, a whole
battalion of middle-class standards collapse. They suspected, like the
Restoration nobility, that their world was gone for ever, and they took
refuge Jn a form of literature that was hedged with rules and
conventions, that flourished on stereotyped situations and characters,
that looked back to a period of stability, a period where class
distinctions were easily denned and generally accepted. In the detective
story, too, the outsider could be cast out of the charmed circle.
Permanently. By murder, or by judicial execution. The detective story
was a way of saying that the dykes had not given way.
Which is not to be taken for a criticism. The golden age crime writers
created an artificial world, and critics who complain that Sayers and
Christie are stereotyped and dated have missed the point as surely as
the modern teenager who reads a fifty-year-old Christie as if it were
written yesterday has got it. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not dated,
it is dateless.
This highly artificial product, created partly as an escape from an
intolerable reality, had the effect of highlighting one aspect of great
appeal in the traditional detective story. This was a contract between
author and reader' that the latter would be entertained (not necessarily
excited, but entertained) by the presentation of a problem that appealed
to his intellect. The author promised to present the problem in a fair
way, and the reader, if he was to be entertained at all, was bound to
keep his mind working to spot the clues and wrestle with their
significance. If the reader guessed the solution he was pleased with
himself; if he did not he was pleased with the author. In neither case
was the author the loser.
It was, like Restoration drama, a literary form abounding in rules,
conventions, imperatives, prohibitions. These were wittily formulated by
Ronald Knox in 1929 into a Decalogue. Some of the Ronald Knox Ten Commandments seem
designed to mark the detective story off from other (by implication
lesser) popular literary forms: "No Chinaman must figure in the story"
distinguishes it from the cheap thriller; "Not more than one secret room
or passage is allowable" prevents contamination from the Gothic. But
most of the others (for example "The detective must not light on any
clues which are not instantly produced for the inspections of the
reader", or "No accident must ever help the
detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves
to be right") affirm the logical rigour which should be maintained, and
amplify that part of the contract between author and reader which
enjoins "fair play". The term itself, with its overtones of
gentlemanliness, is one more indication of the conservativeness of the
form. The sort of fuss that arose over whether or not the solution of
Roger Ackroyd was "foul" seems to us absurd. But it may, on
consideration, seem endearing as well. One cannot, sadly, imagine any
popular writer today engendering any sort of even marginally ethical
debate.
What the classic English detective story essentially was can be more
easily described than defined. When one thinks of likely or essential
ingredients one could name: a country house or rural village; a corpse;
a closed circle of suspects; an extended family group; a surprise
solution. These conjure up the sort of book well enough, but there are
many oddities and exceptions. Agatha Christie began with a country house party
(Mysterious Affair at Styles) but it was not a setting she was
particularly happy with, and Dorothy Sayers only uses it once; Sayers
often forswears the surprise solution, and once forswears the corpse;
Sayers and Allingham are as happy in London as in the country; Allingham
often edges her books in the direction of the thriller by using a basic
chase formula.
Of the writers whom we now think of as the big four, Agatha Christie was
the first to publish (Styles was set in the war, and came out in 1920),
and to judge by sales she is the one most triumphantly to survive. We
think of her as an English village writer, but in fact her production is
very varied: she liked to alternate her home settings with international
excursions, and (like any country gentlewoman) took the occasional trip
to London.
Her hold on the reader was due, to my mind, to her productivity, her
consistency, her narrative skill, and her clear-eyed concentration on
problem, on reader deception. In her heyday (say 1925-1950) she usually
produced two, sometimes three titles a year. There is not a dud among
them, except for the odd thriller or inferior short story collection. If
the characterization is basic, the writing lacklustre, the story-telling
on the other hand is superb, brilliantly organized around the need to
present a problem and to
both conceal and facilitate its solution. The clues are always there,
though not always presented as clues, and Christie showed her
understanding of the average reader in the way she used everyday objects
as clues - things he could relate to as he could not to the intricacies
of railway timetables, or some erudite piece of scholarship.
The reader loved Christie, above all, for the panache of her solutions.
Styles used a "Yes he did, no he didn't, yes he did" formula (repeated
later in Murder at the Vicarage) and later books break every convention
and code of honour by incriminating the romantic interest, the narrator,
a child, the whole cast list, the detective and so on. And yet in spite
of this, the reader always felt that Christie played fair: like the
traditional arrested burglar he could always say "It's a fair cop,
governor".
Her construction of her stones must have been highly abstract - she
worked rather like a mathematician evolving a brain-teaser. It is in
this
abstract ingenuity that much of her strength lies, and she decisively
tipped the balance away from character and setting, and back towards the
supremacy of plot. She understood better than any that popular
literature demands story, that it must force the reader to get through
just one more chapter before putting the light out.
Dorothy Sayers was a much more intellectual, perhaps a much more
intelligent woman than Christie. In the earlier novels she was
intelligent enough not to let this show. We note her perceptive
treatment of young men physically or mentally shattered by war, of women
enforced by the slaughter of war to a life of spinsterhood, even on
occasion of intellectuals, usually ridiculed in crime stories. We also
note that her intelligence failed her a little when confronted with
Bolsheviks, Jews or admirers of D. H. Lawrence - but we all have our
limitations of sympathy.
The novels Sayers wrote in the first years of her brief career as crime
writer were brilliant and varied. Very often they were not whodunits so
much as "How did he's", and the way Sayers rang changes on the basic
formula yet kept up suspense to the end is a testimony to her lively
mind and story-telling talents. Her characterization is sharp, and she
is very good on the shabby, the failures, the commonplace - the second-raters
whose moral obtuseness just might shade off into sheer evil. Snobbish
she may be, but she has an eye for sheer upper-crust nastiness, notably
in the Duchess of Denver.
Each story has shape, but a different shape, and the oeuvre is united by
the powerful myth-figure of Lord Peter Wimsey - nonchalant aristocrat,
effete man of action, athlete-scholar. Lord Peter is absurd, perhaps, to
modern tastes, but television adaptations have suggested that we can
still relate to this nobleman with the common touch, the man who can eat
pig's trotters with a reformed burglar and only draws the line at the
pushy middle-classes.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Sayers fell victim to her
own ingenuity and intellectual pretensions. This can be illustrated from
one of the 'thirties novels (by no means the dullest) Have His Carcase
(1932). The solution to the puzzle hangs on a perfectly brilliant use of
a simple piece of knowledge - the effects of the disease haemophilia.
Christie would have revelled in such a reader-deceiver - she would have
surrounded it with one or two double-edged clues from her drawer
containing everyday objects, and hey-presto the trick would make a book.
Sayers, on the other hand, keeps the trick for the very end, naturally,
but to get to it we have to plod through acres of dreary alibi-busting,
false identities and (worst of all) code-breaking. It is unbearably
heavy, though not as totally unreadable and exhausting as Five Red
Herrings (1931).
By the time of Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman's Honeymoon (1937) she was
writing discursive conversation pieces with as she called it "detective
interruptions". For all her proclaimed high critical ideals for the
detective story, it is clear that she gave it up because she no longer
believed in it.
There was always a danger that Margery Allingham might follow in Sayers'
footsteps. Her detective, Albert Campion, began as a straight crib of
Wimsey, though with typical zany cheek, the desire to go that crucial
one step further, she declared to a fellow crime writer that "his
destiny was to inherit the British throne", and that he was based on the
then Duke of York (later George VI). Again, in the late 'thirties a
foolish critic wrote that "to Albert Campion has fallen the honour of
being the first detective to feature in a story which is also by any
standard a distinguished novel". When a crime critic says something like
that you can be sure the book under review is a dreary
middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-brow sort of piece, and indeed Dancers
in Mourning (1937) is one of Allingham's dullest books.
But though, sadly, she took that review as the greatest compliment her
books had ever received, she climbed back up from the slippery slope
that that kind of attitude leads to. She did not try to write competent
novels for the middle-classes, but she brought to the traditions of the
popular crime story a quirky imagination, a zest and a truly Dickensian
gift for creating and utilizing grotesques. More Work for the Undertaker
(1948) is her best work of this kind: it has a marvellous sense of
place, and the family of decaying intellectuals is both funny, alarming
and touching, m the manner of the great Victorian.
The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is her best work in the chase genre: the
villain genuinely attractive and terrifying (she is usually good with
young thugs), and the atmosphere of London in a pea-souper brilliantly
caught. Agatha Christie rightly paid tribute to the variety of
Allingham's production : "Everything she writes has a definitive shape .
. . each book has its own separate and distinctive background."
This is true, and the character of her work changed a good deal during
her career. There are the early high-spirited romps (fiendishly
difficult to bring off, because effort is so immediately visible). Then
there are more serious works in the late 'thirties, some of which escape
ponderousness. Then the complete mastery of the 'forties and 'fifties,
in which her eye for absurdity, as well as her feeling for evil, are
given full rein.
She did dull work, as well as first-rate work, throughout her career,
for she was essentially an erratic writer. But Police at the Funeral
(1931), Hide My Eyes (U.S. Tether's End, 1958) and The China Governess
(1962) as well as the two just named, are brilliant, nourishing works.
She proved that the crime story could be a work of art without
ponderousness, pretension, or aping the middle-brow novel. Only Ruth
Rendell, in our own time, has done work that one would think of
mentioning in the same breath.
Ngaio Marsh began her career with a murder game in a country house-party
(A Man Lay Dead, 1934), and continued it with the one where the stage
gun that should be loaded with blanks has real bullets in (Enter A
Murderer, 1935). A suspicion of cliche, in fact, hangs over much of
Marsh's production.
She is wonderfully readable, she brings off some kinds of thing
enormously well, but she Is no trail-blazer, and at times her
determination to follow in other people's footsteps becomes just a
little tedious.
The country house murder is her forte, or at least the kind she docs
most often: as late as 1972 she was serving up the one where a
house-party is snowed up on Dartmoor with only ex-convicts for servants.
She gets away from this stereotype now and then, notably with the odd
occult murder, the odd New Zealand murder (which mostly prove that
patriotism is not enough) and, best of all, the theatre murder. A touch
of backstage releases Miss Marsh's inhibitions most wonderfully. There
is no danger there of those embarrassing displays of Edwardian snobbery
when Alleyn (her detective)'s gentlemanly origins are revealed: just a
collection of egos competing for attention, which almost always makes
for a good read.
The puzzle in Marsh is meticulously worked out, though it sometimes
lacks the brilliant sleight-of-hand of Christie's inter-war production.
But where Christie relaxed the meticulous plotting in her later books,
Marsh has retained all her care and fairness. The danger is that she
plots so carefully and ingeniously that the investigation of the
minutiae and the final explanations may become a heavy-handed working
over of boring details. And If there is about Alleyn a touch of
stiffness, as of a gentleman from Trollope who doesn't quite know what
he is doing in a detective story or in the twentieth century,
nevertheless he dates wonderfully less than most of the other Golden Age
detectives.
When did the traditional whodunit die? It didn't, of course, for readers
-any glance at railway bookstalls will tell that. All the writers I have
talked about are still triumphantly read, and many others such as John
Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and Anthony Berkeley are read by
devotees and enjoy spasmodic revival.
But for writers? Critics keep telling us it is dead, but in fact
probably half the crime books published today still stick broadly to the
classic formula. At least half of Ruth Rendell's production, more than
half of P.D. James (to name the most obvious successors of the big
four I have talked about) adhere to the classic mould, have detectives
that are recognizable successors of those towering twenties figures.
What writers have learned is that the formula is adaptable, that it will
take more realism, more humour, a wider class range, more psychological
depth than the Golden Age writers used. But the basic formula is still
very much alive and useful. The whodunit is not dead. It is hardly even
dozing.
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