Conservative History Journal

Martin Edwards's book that is undoubtedly seminal in the study of detective fiction, The Golden Age of Murder, is proving to be as fascinating as it is important. Yes, TH managed to borrow a copy from London Library within two weeks of publication. There is already a queue forming for it among that august institution's members but returning it in time will not be a problem.

Actually, the book needs a proper long review and it shall be done but first, an interesting point analyzed by Mr Edwards and that is the concept of "justified murder" in the writings of the Golden Age authors. It was Julian Symons who was largely responsible for the literary assumption that traditional detective fiction was somehow inferior to the more recent crime books, not least in its social and political conservatism and refusal to look beyond accepted norms in life and writing. (This is a rough and not entirely fair summary but then Symons was not entirely fair to many of the writers he had analyzed.)

There have, of course, been critics who have shown that view to be nonsensical but, unfortunately, the more popular books on the subject, including, sad to say, one by the late, lamented Baroness James, have stuck to a limited view, which ignored most of the writers of the period and a good many books and themes.

The Golden Age of Murder is a study of the Detection Club and its members about whom Mr Edwards has unearthed an astonishing amount of information as well as a study of their writings, which are, as anyone who has bothered to read at all widely knows, considerably more complex and varied in attitude than popular opinion would have it.

So we come to "justified murder", theoretically an anathema to detective fiction writers but a surprisingly frequent theme. It is inevitable that people who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about crime, especially murder, who are also fascinated by real-life crime, especially the unsolved or dubious cases, should sooner or later turn to the question of whether murder can ever be justified. In addition, the mid and late thirties saw the growth and strengthening of extremely unpleasant dictators and the appearance of would-be dictators in other countries, even Britain.

Then again, as this blog has pointed out before, a true conservative would dislike those dictators, real or tin-pot as radical, statist and socialist but that gets us on to the "are fascists right-wing?" discussion, which will, undoubtedly come up again.

Hitler and Mussolini came to power or held on to power through revolutionary means (despite those elections in Germany in 1932 and 1933), changing the political and constitutional structures of their countries as well as attempting to change the social ones. In this they did not succeed nearly as well as their contemporary Joseph Stalin did but none of them can be called conservative or reactionary. By the time Dictator's Way was written (late 1937 or early 1938 as the book came out in 1938) Mosley had put himself outside the political establishment and the couple of disdainful references to him in the book sum up quite well the general attitude towards him. The Labour Party and the trade unions, on the other hand, were by this time an integral part of that establishment and it was hardly radical to support them.

Was the murder of such a person justified? Debates about tyrannicide go back a long way and many people thought that the killing of, say, Hitler would bring much good to the world. Would the killing of a Mosley-like figure do the same? That depended, largely, on how dangerous one thought the man to be and by the end of the thirties it became obvious that unpleasant posturers though they were, the British Union of Fascists were not really a threat. (Little did they know that the real threat to democracy came from the other lot, the Communist Party of Great Britain and, even more, from the secret agents who worked for the party's paymaster without ever really acknowledging their political allegiance.)

Moving on from there, is the murder of an unpleasant person who is making other people's lives a misery or is simply a wasteful, useless individual (the theme of one novel by Anthony Berkeley) justified? This was not a new idea in the late thirties either. Sherlock Holmes refuses to investigate on murder (he actually knows who the perpetrator is) and lets three other killers go because he sees the crimes in question as more or less justified.

Detection Club members wrestled with the problem in various ways. Gladys Mitchell subscribed to the idea strongly enough to make her detective Beatrice Lestrange Bradley (later Dame Beatrice) a murderer in at least two novels, E. R. Punshon, Margery Allingham and, especially, Anthony Berkeley used the concept in various ways and clearly approved of it, Sayers has Wimsey agonize over it only to come down on the side of law and order or, at least, conventional morality. Christie, so often dismissed by people who have not read her books as the writer of the most predictably "cosy" village murders that end with God being in His heaven and all being well with the world, based three of her best books on the idea that murder can be justified. (No, TH is not going to say which ones as readers should work it out for themselves.)

It was, however, Christie who gave the best answer to anyone who might get too carried off with the notion. Hercule Poirot who in most of his cases refuses to acknowledge that there is such a thing as justified murder, explains at least once why he holds that view. Yes, the world is better off without some people and, quite possibly, it might be a good idea to take the law into one's own hands. But what of the murderer? What will happen to him or her? For once somebody gets away with one "justified" murder and a bad person is destroyed for the good of the rest of humanity or a small part of it will the temptation to repeat that not be too strong? Who is to define precisely the extent to which harmfulness or uselessness deserves death and when will the "justified murderer" become an unhinged serial killer? For good reasons Christie's own "justified murderers" will not be carrying out any more crimes. Neither she nor the other writers who experimented with the idea solved the conundrum but Poirot's objections stand.

When I wrote about the Labour landslide victory in 1945 it was pointed out to me, inter alia, that the Golden Age Detective (GAD) writers did not like the victory or the country it created. They certainly did not. Let me just mention a few.

Cyril Hare's post-war novels are full of sad nostalgia and his non-series book, An English Murder, published in 1951 is not just nostalgic and unhappy but shows real anger towards socialist politicians and their destructive actions. Agatha Christie largely took the changes in her stride and carefully adjusted her description of middle class life (unlike Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh, for example, who still produced examples of country houses with grandes dames in them) but even she made disdainful comments.

In Mrs McGinty's Dead (1952) there is a sad acceptance that the government is always sending your forms that you need to fill in, a theme that is repeated in other novels. In A Murder Is Announced (1950), one of Christie's best, there is a clear indication that everybody is involved in the black market because it is the only way to survive. When Inspector Craddock chides the vicar's wife with it being against the law, she spiritedly replies that there should not be such silly laws.

The dislike for the controls, the shortages and, especially, the bureaucracy that seems to have flourished in the war and continued to do so afterwards runs through many novels of the period, such as Michael Gilbert's Smallbone Deceased (1950).

In Duplicate Death (1951) Georgette Heyer makes cutting remarks about the destructively high taxation that makes life difficult for people who want to lead a middle class life.

One could go on listing novels and, perhaps, quoting from letters for a while but, undoubtedly, the situation was most devastatingly summed up by John Dickson Carr in a letter to Frederic Dannay (one half of Ellery Queen) in mid-1946, as quoted in Douglas G. Greene's biography:

The regulations in this country grow more and more damnable. One more war for liberty and we shall all be slaves. 

I suspect very many people felt the same way though they might not have been able to express their feelings quite so pithily.

Tory Historian was reading some of the essays in H. R. F. Keating's splendid collection, Agatha Christie - First Lady of Crime and found a highly entertaining one by Emma Lathen (really two formidable ladies, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart). Entitled Cornwallis's Revenge, it analyzes Christie's technique and her extraordinary popularity, especially in the United States. In fact, posits Ms Lathen, it is the return battle of the War of Independence and it has made the outcome somewhat doubtful.

In 1781 Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown and, for all practical purposes, the Revolutionary War was over. The viscount went on to a distinguished career in India, the rebels became preoccupied with the problems of forging a new political state, and the world assumed that British domination over the colonies was at an end. There the matter rested until 1920 which saw the publication of the first American edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Now, fifty-six years later, any detached observer on these shores would have to admit that the second British Expeditionary Force had been considerably more successful than the first. 

Heh! That would be the force led by General Hercule Poirot, ably assisted by Brigadier Jane Marple and Lieutenant-Colonels Battle and Race. I think we might forget about the Beresfords for the time being.

Tory Historian has never quite understood why the bien pensants otherwise known as people who never read detective stories, considering them to be inferior, but like pontificating consider Agatha Christie's novels to be particularly unrealistic. It is true that criminals are not always brought to justice (and they are not always in her novels either) but that is the premiss of that most conservative of genres, the detective story.

It is also true that she is often slapdash and cavalier about certain details, in particular dates, time spans, ages. All of that annoys Tory Historian as readers can imagine. This is so different from the silly but precise novels by Georgette Heyer. But when it comes to descriptions of life and social mores she is far more realistic and accurate than her contemporaries Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham.

The accusations that she wrote about large country houses and aristocratic families and parties is completely untrue. Her milieu was the middle class, her people almost entirely professionals, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, the occasional businessman, maybe members of the squierarchy like Colonel Bantry. That is why she managed to write well about changes in social life. The village in A Murder is Announced is very different from the village of Murder in the Vicarage. The people who may have had a couple of servants before the Second World War have maybe a foreign refugee, a cleaning woman or an au pair after it. The large households either disappear or are reinvented to suit some Hollywood star. All very realistic.

People who consider Raymond Chandler to be more realistic have, one assumes, read neither author but have dimly heard the expression about the man in the mean streets. Murder happens in mean streets and in well-appointed homes or flats shared by three middle-class girls. Are those convoluted, incomprehensible plots of Chandler's, full of wisecracking people truly realistic? Hardly.

So we come to Tory Historian's reading matter of the day and that is John Curran's Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. Some interesting stuff about the way Christie developed her plots though after a while one loses interest in the minutiae of literary invention. There are also two stories that have never been published before, one called The Incident of the Dog's Ball, which, Mr Curran works out, was probably written in 1933 but never offered to Christie's agent. Readers of her novels will instantly recall one of her best, Dumb Witness, published in 1937. Mr Curran thinks the story was withheld because the author decided almost immediately to turn it into a novel. That seems a little odd. After all, Yellow Iris, which became Sparkling Cyanide, was published and Mr Curran lists several others. On the whole, Christie's novels are better than her short stories, entertaining though these often are. In that respect she is the opposite of Conan Doyle.

The Incident of the Dog's Ball is not bad but Dumb Witness is excellent if one forgets about the peculiar incident of Captain Hastings and the dog. At the beginning of the novel Hastings explains that he has just come back from Argentina, leaving his wife "Cinderella" Dulcie to manage the ranch while he deals with business matters in England. By the end of the novel he seems to have acquired a dog, settled back into English life an forgotten all about his wife, his ranch and Argentina. (Yet we know from later novels that he does go back. Most mysterious.)

The story does, however, show village life of the period in brisk and amusing fashion as is Christie's wont. In particular she destroys the myth of the wonderful food one could have in country inns and pubs back in the good old days, whenever these might have been. This is what Captain Hastings says:

Little Hemel we found to be a charming village, untouched in the miraculous way that villages can be when they are two miles from a main road. There was a hostelry called The George, and there we had lunch - a bad lunch I regret to say, as is the way at country inns.

What wealth of suffering and realism lies in that last phrase.