Conservative History Journal

and there is also a savage attack on VAT and on Ted Heath, the Prime Minister for some of the time the book was being written (he is called a 'monomaniac mugwump').

What with one thing and another this blog has been languishing, which shameful. There have been other projects but that is not a real excuse. Anyway, one of the projects concerns Josephine Tey, who is sometimes described as the fifth Queen of Crime, after Christie, Sayers, Marsh and Allingham. I like Tey's novels but am not altogether sure she is up there with the leaders. My own preference for that fifth queen would Edith Caroline Rivett who wrote as E. C. R. Lorac and Carol Carnac. As they say, discuss.

However, reading about Tey I came across an interesting point. In her first detective novel, The Man in the Queue, published in 1929 under the name she used as a playwright and novelist, Gordon Daviot, part of the problem that faces Inspector Alan Grant is the lack of any identification on the victim. There are, for instance, no laundry marks on his clothes. Not a detail that could be used by detective writers these days: we no longer send our shirts, handkerchiefs or other parts of our apparel to the laundry, using washing machines at home or in the nearest launderette. There are, of course, dry cleaners and some clothes do have to go to them but that is a much less reliable form of identification.

That set me thinking about other details of evidence that can no longer be used by detective story writers but were so very popular in the thirties and even the forties. Monograms, for instance. Who on earth has his or her luggage, handkerchiefs, underwear and, in the case of certain very unreliable characters, both male and female, their specially made cigarettes monogrammed?

Then there are bigger issues: train timetables. Inspector French solved many a case in Freeman Wills Crofts's novels by co-ordinating trains whose arrivals and departures could be predicted with the use of the published time table. Imagine trying to do that nowadays. Imagine being the criminal planning an elaborate heist or murder, using that timetable, only to find that the original train has been cancelled and the one that was running later was so delayed that the connection was missed.

Mind you, there were problems even in those halcyon days. In Murder at the Vicarage (1930) Griselda Clements, the vicar's young and irresponsible wife, tells everyone that she came home from London, it being a day when you could get a cheap daily excursion ticket, with a certain train. Miss Marple, on the other hand, knows that the train was late so if Griselda was seen in the village at the "right" time she must have returned with an earlier trains. Sure enough she had done just that in order to carry out a somewhat dubious though not criminal plan with the vicar's nephew.

Then there is a question of postal delivery. I vividly recall a short story by Margery Allingham where the solution depends entirely on when the evening post is delivered in a certain street. First of all, what is this concept, the evening postal delivery? Is there anyone still alive who remembers it? Secondly, the notion that anyone, let alone the man who runs, as I recall the chemist's on the corner, should be able to tell you for certain, what time the post is delivered on any day, is so weird and wonderful as to belong to another genre, fantasy.

Delivery boys play a big part in various detective stories right up to the fifties. Messages are carried by the boy from the butcher, the fishmonger, the grocer to various houses and behaviour in those houses is noted by those self-same boys. We have delivery vans but I somehow do not think the driver from Waitrose or Tesco's is going to be much use to the detective, whether police or private. Then again, with the absence of those boys how would Miss Marple or even Miss Silver find out all that detailed information the police always misses?

The last word belongs to Christie. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when she could not know if she or her family and friends would survive for long, she inscribed a copy of Sad Cypress: “Wars may come and wars may go, but MURDER goes on forever!”

Martin Edwards’s role in publishing and publicizing the series cannot be overestimated. He has chosen the books, provided highly knowledgeable introductions to a number of them and edited collections of short stories. While doing all that he has been writing his own books and running a blog about detective fiction that is to be recommended to anyone who is even half-way interested in the subject. His greatest achievement to date, however, is this massive volume, a history of the Detection Club in the thirties and forties, a collection of biographies of the extraordinary people who were its members and, incidentally, a history of the genre in the period. That is what I call a useful book.

The rest of this posting is here and the details of the book are:

Martin Edwards:                     The Golden Age of Murder

The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story

2015                                        London

                                                HarperCollinsPublishers

And here is Dorothy L. Sayers with Eric the Skull:

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.

Tory Historian has already written about the British Library's excellent idea to reprint little known Victorian detective stories and to do the same for less well known writers of the Golden Age though this might turn out to be a task beyond even that formidable institution. New books are, however, being published with remarkable speed and it is quite a task to keep up with them. A number of them are selling very well both on Amazon and in bookshops, Waterstone's in Piccadilly being a prime example.

Martin Edwards, who has been appointed Series Consultant to the Crime Classics series gives some figures here. They are impressive.

Tory Historian has now read three more books, one of the early ones, Mr Bazalgette's Agent and two of the Golden Age ones, both by Mavis Doriel Hay, Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell.

Leonard Merrick's Mr Bazalgette's Agent is the third book of the Victorian period to have a female detective at its centre (though in this case there are many qualifications) and is usually described as the first actual novel about one such lady but as Mike Ashley explains in his excellent introduction, Miss Miriam Lea, who becomes a Private Agent as she cannot find more "respectable" employment is really the second one, the first being an American, The Lady Detective, Kate Goelet, whose investigation of The Great Bond Robbery was told by "Old Sleuth" alias Harlan Page Halsey (1837 - 1898) was told in 1880. Leonard Merrick's novel appeared in 1888.

Leonard Merrick (1864 - 1939), an unknown figure these days, was according to J. M. Barrie "a novelist's novelist" and was highly regarded in his day. He, on the other hand, disliked Mr Bazalgette's Agent so much that he tried to buy up and pulp every copy of it. Mike Ashley speculates that his dislike may have been based on some feeling of guilt for using Harlan Page Halsey's material.

In Mr Ashley's expert opinion Mr Bazalgette's Agent is a better novel than its predecessor. Undoubtedly, it is well written and extracts some sly enjoyment out of the narrator heroine's diary, which shows her to be strong-minded and determined but also not very good at recognizing certain truths about herself and other people. Miss Lea is not particularly likeable, being insufferably snobbish and supercilious, even towards the other strong-minded female in the book, a professional detective who travels with her as her maid.

The plot is exciting and the ending is amusing as well as unexpected (TH will not even  hint at it) but the ease with which Mr Bazalgette's Agency finances Miss Lea's somewhat speculative travels across Europe, back to Britain, then to South Africa and its diamond fields is astonishing. What sort of a budget do they have and how is it that they do not go bust?

The other two books under discussion are of the later and by some definition golden age of the detective story, published respectively in 1934 and 1935. There were a good many writers in that period, many of good and even outstanding quality and the British Library, one hopes, will get round to a number of them so that supposed historians of the genre stop thinking that hardly anyone existed outside the "four queens", Christie, Sayers, Marsh and Allingham.

It is not clear why anyone thought Miss Hay was so good that all three of her novels had to be reprinted though the suggestion that it was easy to negotiate with her estate is one to be taken seriously.

The novels are introduced by Stephen Booth who is more interesting on Miss Hay's life than on her writing. The introduction to Murder Underground gives a general outline and the one to Death on the Cherwell fills in some details. It seems that Miss Hay was at St Hilda's about the same time as Sayers was at Somerville 1913 - 1916 so one can, perhaps speculate about them meeting at some tea party or literary discussion though Sayers does not mention her in her letters. Hay does not seem to have gone back in 1920 or subsequently to collect her degree when women were finally allowed to have them. Sayers did. Another interesting parallel between the two is them both publishing novels about Oxford in 1935, the year of Gaudy Night as well as Death on the  Cherwell.

Stephen Booth speculates briefly why there were no more detective stories from Mavis Doriel Hay after 1937 (the year Sayers also stopped writing them with the unfinished Thrones Dominations) and comes to the conclusion that the general situation that eventually led to the war was too serious for her to produce frivolous novels. Given how many Golden Age writers went on working in that field, this does not sound adequate. It has to be said, though that Miss Hay lost one brother in the First World War and two brothers as well as her husband in the Second one. A higher than average rate.

Murder Underground is described by Curtis Evans as being underwhelming and TH has to agree with that. There are some good aspects to the book: the description of life in London in the early thirties, of the various people in Frampton Guest House (a genteel boarding house) as well as of its owner are amusing and probably accurate. The description of servants and a good time girl one of the Bright Young Things picks up and then uses to cover up his stupidity is less successful though there is some  indication that the author is not altogether enamoured of the BYTs' attitude to the rest of the world.

What is particularly problematic about the book is its laughing attitude to a gruesome crime (an old woman is strangled with a dog leash, causing suffocation by falling forward on the stairs of Belsize Park station). Stephen Booth, whose understanding of Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels is of the superficial and dismissive kind, quotes P. D. James on the subject:

The detective stories of the interwar years were paradoxical. They might deal with violent death, but essentially they were novels of escape. We feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. 

Hay seems to have been pleased with the police inspector who made an unobtrusive entrance in her previous novel, because here we meet Inspector Wythe, a sympathetic and intelligent character, not the typical clodhopping local bobby. He is not quite quick enough to beat the amateur sleuths to the solution, but he gives them a run for their money. The sleuthing becomes a competition between rival groups of male and female students from Persephone and St Simeon's. In the end, it seems none of the people concerned may be capable of crime, though moral guilt turns out to be a powerful thing in Mavis Doriel Hay's world.

The British Library is, as everyone knows or should know, one of the finest institutions in the world with a wonderful collection of books and helpful staff in the reading rooms, fascinating exhibitions, a superlatice collection of stamps for those who find the subject interesting (alas, TH seems to have got over that particular obsession some years ago) and a publishing arm of some distinction.

In particular, Tory Historian has been overjoyed by the Library's decision to reprint detective stories from the Victorian period and, more recently, from what is known as the Golden Age that have been forgotten by all except a few historians of the genre. It may be added that not a few of the better known "historians" who are constantly interviewed and commissioned to write articles on the subject know very little beyond the best known authors. But that is another and more painful story that requires at least one separate article.

In the circumstances, the British Library is doing us all a favour by publishing books that are of importance in the history of the genre but have fallen into a literary memory hole.

The Notting Hill Mystery

The Cornish Coast Murder

The Lake District Murder

The more Tory Historian reads works by and about Dorothy L. Sayers (who has appeared on this blog a few times) the more it becomes apparent that Miss Sayers (who was, for certain purposes Mrs Fleming) would not have liked the appropriation of her carefully crafted characters by Jill Paton Walsh. She spent some time discussing the whole process of creation both in literary and theological terms in The Mind of the Maker, a book TH has read twice and intends to read again at some later stage. She has also referred to the subject if obliquely in the letters she exchanged with Dr Eustace Barton, her co-author or, at least, collaborator in the unusual Documents in the Case. [The link gives away some of the plot.]

Dr Barton was a fascinating character, a doctor and a writer of mystery stories (not an unusual combination) but mostly a collaborator with other writers like L. T. Meade and, in the case of one novel, Dorothy L. Sayers. He supplied the outline of the plot and the scientific details about which there was a great deal of discussion in various letters and scientific journals after the book's publication. So far as Tory Historian who is, most definitely not a scientist, can tell, the general view now is that the detection of the crime is entirely possible but there might be more recent theories that say otherwise. Catherine Kenney discusses his role in the creation of the book here as part of her own study, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, mentioned on this blog before.

I am so glad you like Lord Peter. I certainly don't intend to kill him off yet, but I think it would be better to invent a new detective for any tales we do together. For one thing, people would associate his name with mine and be inclined to hand me out more than my half-share of credit for the story, which wouldn't be just. Also, it would simplify matters to have somebody with more scientific surroundings, don't you think? Lord Peter isn't supposed to know a lot about chemistry and that sort of thing, and it would mean inventing a docotr or somebody to help him out. Also, I'm looking forward to getting a rest from him, because his everlasting breeziness does become a bit of a tax at times!

It is possible that the remembrance season we entered two days ago will last the four or five years until it will be time to commemorate the tragic peace that followed the unusually tragic war but it is much more likely that there will be a complete exhaustion of commemoration all round and even politicians and media hacks will stop reminding us about the need to remember those who died for us and to draw the necessary lessons.

It seems very unlikely that people will remember the dead of the various wars of the last century on a day to day basis but equally unlikely that they will forget them completely. We are, after all, reminded of them every year at the moving and solemn Remembrance Day events. Is that not enough? In recent years, because of Britain's involvement in two major wars in Iraq (at an end for several years) and Afghanistan (coming to an end) there has been a revival of interest and emotion connected with that solemn moment of the Eleventh Hour on the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, which has become a time when we recall all the other wars as well and their various heroes and victims. It is my great fear that the multiplication of remembrance and the outright gorging on sentimentality of the last few days will take away attention from Remembrance Day. People may well feel quite bloated with remembrance by the time we get to the right day.

And so, on to August 4, 1914, generally seen as the beginning of the First World War, the horror unleashed on Europe and the world that, in its turn, precipitated further horrors. On that day Britain declared war on Germany. While there is evidence that politicians and diplomats felt that they had failed in solving the crisis, the public in both countries was enthusiastic about the war but, as is natural, lost that enthusiasm in years to come.

In Britain, when Asquith addressed a packed House of Commons, he said:

“We have made a request to the German Government that we shall have a satisfactory assurance as to the Belgium neutrality before midnight tonight. The German reply to our request was unsatisfactory.”

Asquith explained that he had received a telegram from the German Ambassador in London who, in turn, had received one from the German Foreign Secretary. Officials in Berlin wanted the point pressed home that German forces went through Belgium to avoid the French doing so in an attack on Germany. Berlin had “absolutely unimpeachable information” that the French planned to attack the German Army via Belgium.

Asquith stated that the government could not “regard this in any sense a satisfactory communication.”

He continued:

“We have, in reply to it (the telegram), repeated the request we made last week to the German Government that they should give us the same assurance with regard to Belgium neutrality as was given to us and to Belgium by France last week. We have asked that a reply to that request and a satisfactory answer to the telegram of this morning, should be given before midnight.”

Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by His Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin has received his passport, and His Majesty’s Government has declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11pm on August 4th.

Cheer up. All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don't it? It's my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn't run it for all it's worth. However, it don't do to say so.

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

Having just read one of E. C. R. Lorac's novels, These Names Make Clues, (not one of her best, as it happens though it strengthens my suspicion that Edith Caroline Rivett, a. k. a. E. C. R. Lorac, a. k. a. Carol Carnac, was a crossword addict who would not have dreamed of starting her day's activity without finishing the one in the Times first) I have once again noted a curious aspect to Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels. The characters, if they happen to be educated literate ones, which they often are, always seem to have read every single recently published book.

When did they have time to do all that and do their own work as well as other activities and keep up with their knowledge and reading of the various classics? Were there fewer books published in the thirties? There certainly were in the forties because of paper shortage but it all picked up again in the fifties. Were there more hours in the day, more days in the week? Books were certainly cheaper but not that cheap, relative to income, so there is the financial consideration to be taken into account. Or was it simply the fact that they did not have to do the washing up and there was no TV to watch?

While we are on the subject of detective fiction characters' reading, I may add that one aspect of P. D. James's novels have always bemused me. Her hero, who rises through the higher ranks of the Metropolitan Police is Adam Dalgliesh, Commander, I believe, towards the end of the series (so far) and a well-known and highly regarded poet. Now, I happen to be acquainted with poets and know about the extent of poetry reading in this country. Actually, extent is not really a word one would use, so negligible it is, when it comes to newly published poetry. Yet, whenever Adam Dalgliesh with whatever rank turns up to investigate a crime and interview the various suspects and people involved, among them he always finds a number who have read his poetry and have acquired his latest book. This is not remotely realistic.

The nexus between railways and the clergy (today including at least two bishops, and extended to include such fringe churchmen as organists) has been often remarked upon but never fully explained. Should one, for instance, accept the view of a current professor of scripture that the organisation of a railway is a microcosm of God's organisation of the universe, or agree with that vicar and author of popular children's books who claims that despite their faults the railways and the church are the best ways of transporting a man to his final destination? Or should one look to the late Canon Roger Lloyd's opinion that railway-lore is 'morally good in the sense that it healthily occupies the mind and so becomes a subsidiary and indirect cause of that self-forgetfulness which is at the root of all virtue'?

Certainly, though, the clerical or lay enthusiast of the early years of the present century was a happy man; for Britain's railways were then at their peak of glory. 'Brief years, from the death of Queen Victoria to the outbreak of war', as Mr Hamilton Ellis has written, 'were proud years. Enormous coal-trains rumbled and handsome expresses rushed about the country. Maintenance was high and locomotives were often painted in gorgeous colours.' Bradshaw ran to nearly 1200 pages (a figure never preceded or exceeded) and in many a country rectory stood as a work of reference beside Crockford's. Numerous parsons stumped while drafting a sermon must have relaxed intellectually by working out the quickest route between Saxmundham and Blisworth.

Punshon had liberal/leftish political views, and takes the opportunity to show his contempt for Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley in the course of a story dealing scathingly with the so-called "Redeemer" of Etruria. This political perspective gives the book spice, and also gives the lie to the often repeated but false claim that Golden Age writers were just a bunch of cosy reactionaries. Why have so many otherwise sensible people made such a claim? I suspect it's because, for the most part, the really successful Golden Age writers were conservative in outlook, although I'd describe some of them at least as questioning conservatives.