Conservative History Journal

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.

If ever there was a conservative writer of detective stories it was Cyril Hare, a.k.a. Alfred Alexander Clark, a County Court judge, even if an aunt of his seems to have been a socialist politician. (Well, a Labour politician, at least, one of the large group of wealthy non-working class socialists, ever present in the Labour Party.)

Tom Fort reviews an interesting new book, When in Rome, the story of the Eternal City through the eyes of visitors who wrote about it. Few visitors can rival the historian Edward Gibbon, who spent 18 weeks in Rome and wrote later in his Memoirs:

It was at Rome, on the [fifteenth] of October[,] 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare[-]footed fryars were singing [V]espers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the [C]ity first started to my mind.

It is a curious feature of this blog that the most likely postings that other blogs might link to are those about detective stories. One posting about the clerical mysteries of D. M. Greenwood has elicited at least two links from widely differing blogs. One from the very fine Clerical Detectives and another from the slightly more dulalee Mystery Mile, whose author a soi-disant atheist who is fascinated by theology, socialist and anarchist (which two are incompatible) shows some lack of understanding of conservative thinking. Still, his own writing is interesting and a link is a link is a link.

It would be good to think that people have also linked to the posting about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his creations but, so far, no evidence of that has surfaced. We return to that subject after the sad news of the death of Edward Hardwicke, one of the best Dr Watsons to the best Holmes, played by Jeremy Brett.

One of the oddest things about Watson is how misunderstood he is by so many people. This obituary in the Telegraph, for instance, describes him as "the bumbling foil" to Holmes. As a number of comments point out, this is far from the truth. (A much better obituary in the Guardian.)

The Watson of the stories is steady, decent, intelligent though not a genius, courageous, a successful doctor, a man anyone would want to have around and one whom Holmes appreciates though when in a bad mood he does make derogatory comments. Holmes's appreciation of his friend and colleague is not the affectionate sarcasm of Poirot towards his genuinely stupid friend, Captain Arthur Hastings.

Where on earth did the myth of the stupid, bumbling Watson come from? Partly, one suspects, it is the influence of Agatha Christie's Hastings; partly it is the fault of Nigel Bruce in those execrable films with Basil Rathbone (such as The Hound of the Baskervilles).

All that began to change with Nigel Stock, in TH's opinion the best Watson, played to both Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing (an excellent Holmes). Jeremy Brett had two Watsons, David Burke and Edward Hardwicke who restored the original character of the sturdy, steady, perfectly presentable Watson. The most interesting interpretation was Michael Williams's on radio with Clive Merrison. Tory Historian possesses tapes of several episodes and enjoys listening to them. There seems to have been a clear decision made by the producers to make Watson's role bigger and more important - in a number of episodes he is an almost equal partner. A long way from Nigel Bruce's genuinely bumbling idiot but not too far from Edward Hardwicke's interpretation.

Tory Historian had long intended to read Max Pemberton's Jewel Mysteries I Have Known, as it contained the splendid Ripening Rubies, a tale first disinterred by Sir Hugh Greene in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. As this blog describes, the collection, the TV plays made from the stories and the particular tale of dastardly deeds in upper class London are a joy. TH did not manage to purchase the volume referred to but borrowed it from London Library. It does, indeed, give tactile pleasure to anyone who reads it. The illustrations are delightful.

Tory Historian has been reading three different books at different rates. Firstly a collection of Victorian detective stories, edited by Michael Cox, consisting of some very well known works, some not so well known and some quite obscure, which is always a joy to find. Even the least well known and the weakest of the writers (not always the same thing) display an ability to manipulate style that is seen only among the best nowadays. And, as ever, it is astonishing how many of the stories are not about murder but fraud or robbery, all too often of jewels but sometimes of money, which comes in both paper and gold.

Tory Historian possesses a slightly battered copy of If It Had Happened Otherwise, a book of counterfactuals, published in 1931, in which the best essay is undoubtedly by Mr Guedalla who envisages European history after a Moorish victory at Granada.

And finally, Monarchy Matters by the Director of the New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle. This one has only just been started so little can be reported apart from that it is enormously interesting. TH cannot help quoting a paragraph or two, found by random leafing through, on the Royal Family and the general thirst for celebrity:

Diana had always understood the need for visibility - the need to be seen to be doing what you were doing. Even though she died before the celebrity age took proper hold, it was obvious that she had a well-developed instinct for the headline or the arresting photograph. There can be nobody left in the country who does not know of the attention she paid to Aids sufferers or the victims of landmines. Her friendship with fashion and showbiz stars epitomized by the image of her comforting Elton John at the funeral of the fashion designer Gianni Versace, added to her lustre as a sort of international celebrity. In this kind of atmosphere, those who went about their duties without the aid of stardust simply could not compete. The hundreds of public engagements carried out by Princess Anne every year, and her decades of work for theSave the Children Fund, now go largely unremarked and uncovered by the media. Even the Prince's Truyst - which, since it was first established by Prince Charles, has gone on to become one of the most important and successful public endeavours of its kind ever to be initiated by a member of the royal family - has still not been accorded the recognition it is due.

Searching through second-hand detective stories in Charing Cross Road Tory Historian found a collection of Lillian de la Torre's stories about Dr Johnson, entitled The Detections of Dr. Sam: Johnson.

Tory Historian rarely makes predictions (better not say never but hardly ever will do). One reason is the silliness of predictions found in many books. Books on politics, particularly those that deal with slightly volatile regions are notorious - the vagaries of publishing are such that by the time a book comes out everything would have succumbed to events.

It has been said that the 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age of the detective story. Tory Historian has always found that rather hard to accept as all too many of those novels are either completely unreadable or utterly preposterous, such as the adventures of Colonel Gore.

Overwork means undue congestion of certain lobes of the brain. In order to draw the blood from these lobes, other contiguous lobes must be stimulated. A week in the country merely means that you brood on your work. Detective novels act like iodine on a gum and serve as counter-irritant.

One can pick up very interesting and somewhat random information from detective stories. Tory Historian was re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers' novels and, indeed, reading her essays. One of the early Wimsey novels was The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, whose plot revolves round the problem of who died first, General Fentiman or his sister Lady Dorland.

The General's body is discovered in the Bellona Club in the early evening of November 11. Wimsey is asked to find out when he had died but immediately discovers a number of odd facts. He cannot find a single club servant who had seen the general come in on the morning of that day. But there is something else.

Wimsey looks at the general's clothes as sent back to his flat and is surprised to find something missing: a poppy. It is inconceivable, he argues correctly, for someone like General Fentiman to walk about on November 11 without a poppy. However, it is obvious that he does not expect the general or, presumably, anyone else to be wearing a poppy on November 10. Clearly, the habit of wearing the poppy for weeks before actual Remembrance Day developed somewhat later than 1928.

Tory Historian is immensely grateful to a sadly anonymous commenter on a previous posting on a clerical detective, who has pointed out that the excellent website, Clerical Detectives has moved. Here is the link. Very well worth browsing and following up on suggestions.

Temporarily, anyway, as a trip to Central Europe is looming next week. In the meantime, it is worth noting that today is the very sad anniversary of the day when we knew that there would be no more Christies for Christmas. Dame Agatha Christie, one of the greatest and certainly the most widely read detective story writer died on January 12, 1976, having written 83 books under her own name and that of Mary Westmacott. Tory Historian has read but one short story by M Westmacott. It was very readable. The general opinion is that the Westmacott novels and plays are good middle-brow stuff and higher praise than that is difficult to find when discussing literature.

Here, incidentally, is a handy list of all Christie's detective stories that also tells you who does the detection (well, more or less).

Two Christie curiosities were published shortly before the lady's death: a Miss Marple novel, which is rather good, Sleeping Murder and a very bad Hercule Poirot one, Curtain. There is no question, she really hated Poirot by this stage. Both novels were written forty years earlier but put aside for posthumous publication, though it is not clear why that should be so with Sleeping Murder. As it happens both came out prematurely, so to speak.

Christie's books, the good, the bad and the rather weak, all stay in print. It is hard to tell what it is about her work that attracts so many people. The style is largely pedestrian but absolutely clear and correct - the books are often used for teaching English and, one must admit, often there is a good deal of light irony. She could write considerably better as she demonstrated in the delightful story of her life as Sir Max Mallowan's wife, Come Tell Me How You Live. The actual autobiography, published the following year, is far less interesting.

The stories move at a cracking pace though some of the plots creak just a tad. Others, of course, dovetail perfectly. The characters tend to be one dimensional but highly entertaining. And don't even mention time lines or dating. For someone who helped at archaeological digs she is very cavalier with dates and lapses of time in her novels. As against that, she often uses archaeology and archaeologists in the novels. When one thinks about it, the process of working out what there is in a dig and what it means is very similar to the process of working out what happened when a crime was committed.

There is a great deal more to say about Dame Agatha and no doubt Tory Historian will do so on some future occasion. Now it is time to recall the lady who has given more pleasure per page of writing to more people all over the world than anybody else.

She has also inspired books about her [scroll down]. Last year there was Elena Santangelo's Dame Agatha's Shorts (no it is not a little tale of Dame Agatha's career as a footballer) as well as Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, which proved to be less than revealing, though the book also included two hitherto unpublished and unknown Poirot short stories.

Tory Historian's favourite of these studies remains the very French and intellectual Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by the psychoanalyst and literary critic, Pierre Bayard. Professor Bayard not only thought Poirot got it wrong but explained at great length why though there is some evidence that he might have been playing games with the reader of the kind he accuses Dame Agatha of doing.

Tory Historian is, understandably, fond of historical mysteries, which term does not refer to the perennial question of who, if anyone, killed the Countess of Leicester, but detective stories written in modern times about older times. One of the curious developments in the detective story genre has been the ever growing number of mysteries that feature real or imagined figures from the past who solve various crimes. We can only assume that detective story writers, as opposed to crime story or thriller writers, have found it difficult to keep up with modern police technology or, maybe, decided that much of that is rather dull. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine too many brilliant amateurs on the job these days.

There are advantages to placing one’s detective story in the past – the need to keep up with the latest police methods, political developments, institutional changes and suchlike boring nonsense disappears. There are also disadvantages – the story and the characters do have to be credible and a good understanding of the period is required.

Critics of detective stories these days are rarely knowledgeable bods as the genre is considered to be too lowly to be given to anyone but some junior literary aspirant. Therefore, the most ridiculously impossible historical mysteries are applauded because they have a few seemingly knowledgeable references to olden days.

David Dickinson, for instance, seems to be highly regarded by the fraternity and sorority of critics. Yet the one novel in the series about Lord Francis Powerscourt Tory Historian managed to struggle through, Death of an Old Master, was full of the most appalling errors, both factual and thematic.

Lord Francis goes to his club to read newspapers and journals that were not published till years later, for instance; there is a constant muddle with titles, something that a novelist whose hero is a rich aristocrat should get right; in one scene Lord Francis comes home to his house in St James’s Square and is described as taking off his coat while his wife comes running out to tell him some important news. Does this rich aristocratic family not have footmen? Apparently not. Neither do they seem to have a nanny for their children or a green baize door between the family and the servants. In fact, they lead the life of a suburban family from the 1950s. The book went straight back to a charity shop.

However, Tory Historian was pleased to find another historical mystery series about the Georgian apothecary, John Rawlings and the great jurist and investigator Sir John Fielding.

There is another series in existence about Fielding by Alexander Bruce (real name Bruce Alexander Cook) and it might be a good idea to try one of those. In the meantime, there is Deryn Lake’s series and, in particular, Death at St James’s Palace, in which John Fielding is knighted. In other words, it takes place in 1761.

In parenthesis, one should note that though British detective story writers love historic themes, it is Americans who often make famous English people into detectives. Both the above writers are American, as was Lillian de la Torre who made Dr Johnson into a detective. Then there is Stephanie Barron, who has written a whole series about Jane Austen detecting, presumably as a sort of Regency Miss Marple.

Death at St James’s Palace comes reasonably highly recommended. Lindsey Davis praises the series in words that make one doubt she has read any of the books; the Yorkshire Post informs us that “Lake brings eighteenth century England to life in a colourful style …. Georgette Heyer …. but with the knickers off”. As usual, one wonders what is missing from that quotation. But knickers off? Ahem, they did not wear knickers in the eighteenth century. Presumably, this means that there is more sex in Deryn Lake’s series. Tory Historian suspects that the author of those words had not read Ms Heyer’s books.

Nevertheless, Ms Lake is described as the Queen of Georgian Mysteries and Maxim Jakubowski, himself a writer, editor, critic and quondam owner of the sadly missed Murder One bookshop, writes that this series is “meticulously researched”.

Well, Tory Historian has to disagree with the great Mr Jakubowski. Death at St James’s Palace is “meticulously researched” in the sense that Ms Lake does seem to have read detailed descriptions of what parts of London looked like at the time or what sort of underwear ladies wore. We know she has done this research because she reproduces acres of it in her own book.

When it comes to understanding how people thought or spoke, Ms Lake is sadly at a loss, preferring a twentieth century speech pattern with the odd eighteenth century word thrown in. Not only gentlemen swear in front of ladies, something that the most cursory reading of contemporary literature (or of Ms Heyer’s truly meticulous novels) would have shown to be erroneous, they all use words and expressions that are simply not possible for the period.

Tory Historian very nearly consigned the book to the charity shop bag when a character in it referred to badly behaved boys as a “bunch of hooligans”, hooligan being a word that came into the English language some time in the mid-1890s, 130 years after the events described in Death at St James’s Palace.

For the moment, however, the decision is to persevere, in the hopes that the plot will develop reasonably soon.

It is normally in one’s youth that one prefers rather pretentious novels, particularly if they are written in a beautiful and elaborate style, replete with quotations and abstruse references. How clever one thinks oneself to be in one’s late teens and early twenties, reading this sort of stuff before sneaking away for a quick perusal of thrillers or romances (to be disowned and despised). Later in life one finds those pretentious novels to be utterly dull and unworthy of attention.

The one exception to this rule, in Tory Historian’s experience is Michael Innes (though not in his J. I. M. Stewart persona – there the rule applies in full). What seemed utterly dull and pretentious in those halcyon days of intellectualism has, for the last few years, appeared to be amusing and entertaining with quite interesting apercus. Ha, Tory Historian can do pretentious as well.

A recently picked up novel is about the art world (they often are) and forgeries. Silence Observed is highly entertaining and has a remarkable summary of English life early on. John Appleby is now at the top of his profession in Scotland Yard as Commissioner of Metropolitan Police but still finds people approaching him informally about their problems in his club.

He muses on this extraordinary phenomenon:

There are levels of English society in which nearly all professional advice is picked up free. Cabinet ministers murmur their symptoms negligently into the ear of distinguished consultant physicians when the ladies have withdrawn from the dinner-table. Leading Queen’s Counsel know precisely what lies ahead of them when they find themselves on the right hand of brilliant and frequently dis-married hostesses. Top-ranking architects, summoned to indigestible feasts in ancient colleges, commonly take the precaution of bringing a junior staff with them and lodging them in an adjacent hotel.

… than the detective novels of the so-called Golden Age, that is the twenties and thirties. To be perfectly honest, even Tory Historian finds many of them a tad tedious but they have their virtues. The one under discussion is “Colonel Gore’s Second Case” by Lynn Brock (real name Alexander McAllister but also wrote under the name Anthony Wharton), once a very well known and popular writer of detective stories, now barely remembered.

Willard Huntington Wright (otherwise S. S. Van Dine) thought Colonel Gore to be “ponderous and verbose”. Then again, most readers think that the precious hero of Van Dine’s novels, Philo Vance, needs, as Ogden Nash so aptly put it, “a kick in the pance”.

Dorothy L. Sayers was more charitable in her famous Introduction to the “Great Short Stories of Crime, Mystery and Horror”, published in 1928 and Marjorie Nicolson, the eminent academic and the author of a wholly delightful essay, “The Professor and the Detective”, published in Atlantic Monthly in 1929 says:

There is the amateur Colonel Gore, who began his career by a chance application for a golf secretaryship, and has now opened his private inquiry office – a movement which his admirers greet with pleasure, as promising an indefinite number of cases for the future.

So there is the story away to a good start – Sir Charles’s Body found next morning by a “terrified” maid – all maids are terrified – who “could scarcely give an intelligent account of what she saw” – they never can. Then the local police (Inspector Higginbottom of the Hopshire Constabulary) are called in and announce themselves “baffled”. Every time the reader hears that the local police are called in he smiles an indulgent smile and knows they are just there to be baffled.

Although it is the twenties and thirties that are considered to be the golden age of detective story writing, Tory Historian, on the whole, prefers their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. One reason is the more leisurely and better written style (with some exceptions on both sides).

Then there is the fact that many of the Victorian stories, of whatever length, are about other crimes, not just murder, which is unthinkable either with the golden age writers or the considerably more prolix and slapdash modern ones.

Murder is, after all, a relatively unusual crime while theft, robbery, fraud and other suchlike activities are far more common. Reading about them and the detectives who solve them give an impression of real life disintegrating and being reconstituted. Of course, there are writers like the great Emma Lathen who follow the Victorian pattern and start with some kind of financial shenanigans, which degenerate into an often reluctant murder.

It is also fair to say that the villains of Victorian detective stories are considerably more satisfying than those of subsequent periods. Admittedly, they are not real dyed-in-the-wool villains and there are various occasions when unfortunate or noble-but-walked-into-a-nasty-situation criminals are released by detectives on condition that they go off to the colonies and redeem themselves. Sherlock Holmes was particularly apt to exercise such stern compassion.

These thoughts have been floating in Tory Historian’s head as a result of reading a volume, acquired for £2 in a charity shop, gradually the only remaining second-hand bookshops in London, entitled “Three Victorian Detective Novels” one of the numerous excellent reprints by Dover Publications.

The three novellas are “The Unknown Weapon” by Andrew Forrester, “My Lady’s Money” by Wilkie Collins and “The Big Bow Mystery” by Israel Zangwill. The first of these is one of the earliest modern English detective stories, part of a collection of tales about the exploits of a woman police officer, known only as Mrs G--- (though Katherine Gregory Klein seems to think that she is Mrs Gladden). The whole collection, published in 1846 was called “The Female Detective” (a very hard to find volume).

Wilkie Collins’s relatively late novella, published in 1879, is a disappointment, largely because Collins was a near-genius in his best works. “My Lady’s Money” is beautifully written with highly entertaining characters – an excellent villain and a rather annoying detective who shuffles around doing no detecting but being a character as well as very good female personalities. But the plot is ridiculous. Every reader knows what is going to happen a page or two before it does and once the theft takes place it ought to be clear to the meanest intellect who the criminal is. There is only person with the necessary opportunity, motive and personality, yet that person’s guilt is dismissed as being out of the question.

Undoubtedly the best is the last tale, a classic of its genre, that being the locked room mystery. Israel Zangwill was a writer, journalist and Zionist activist, most of whose novels and plays concerned various social issues, often but exclusively to do with Jewish immigrants to London’s East End and New York’s Lower East Side. “The Big Bow Mystery” is a delightful exception, a tale of crime and detection written to order in the space of a fortnight and published in the same space of time in the daily newspaper Star in 1891.

Locked room mysteries are rather tiresome, in Tory Historian’s opinion, because of the need either to cheat or to produce an extraordinary number of coincidences for the solution. One by Edmund Crispin presupposes the firing of a bullet through several open windows in order to hit the required target with the loud and engrossing music making it impossible for the people in the first room to realize what is going on. Too ridiculous for words.

The "Big Bow Mystery" is just about credible, largely because, as Julian Symons points out in his seminal history of the genre “Bloody Murder” it is really a parody; it is not, on the other hand, parodic enough to make it dull – the story is still there. There is something else there: a thrilling and highly amusing account of the East End at the end of the nineteenth century, seething with meetings, organizations, debates, disputes and manifold ambitions. It is, in a way, a microcosm of the whole Victorian era and, perhaps, that is why those years produced some of the greatest detective stories.

Tory Historian, half-way through Baroness James's last novel "The Private Patient" is once again perplexed why it is impossible to like the lady's late novels. After all, she is a conservative writer (as well as a Conservative peer) and one who is a practitioner of the traditional form of detective story. She has, indeed, been in trouble for expressing views that detective stories can be written only about people who understand the difference between right and wrong. She was accused of snobbery (presumably with violence, to quote Colin Watson).

Her early books about Adam Dalgliesh (a most unlikely police officer who is also a talented poet and the son of a rector) were controlled, well-plotted and extremely likeable. The first book about Private Investigator Cordelia Gray, "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" was, despite its slightly preposterous plot, extremely taut with excellent descriptions of Cambridge, its spoilt denizens and of Ms Gray, the dedicated PI, herself. In the second book, "The Skull Beneath the Skin" the seriously preposterous plot destroys the good qualities. Though Ms Gray is mentioned in one of the Dalgliesh mysteries casually, she has been dropped by Baroness James.

However, several of the more recent Dalgliesh books have been bad. They have all become too long and far too verbose with far too much introspection by all the police officers. Some introspection adds an extra dimension; pages and pages of it merely bore the reader.

Incidentally, only one of her police officers, Inspector Kate Miskin comes from the sort of class most coppers do, though she is actually one of the underclass who makes good. The others all seem to be upper middle class graduates with excellent knowledge of many things. A tad unlikely, Tory Historian thinks, risking accusations of snobbery without violence.

It's the plots that are the problem. From the 1986 "A Taste for Death", published after a longer than usual gap, the plots have steadily become more and more fantastical and less and less logical, achieving a kind of nadir with "Original Sin" (an unconscious re-writing of a far better novel by Nicholas Blake), "A Certain Justice" (where the original plot disappears into a memory hole to reappear in a completely incomprehensible solution) and "Death in Holy Orders" (where a young man commits suicide by pulling a great deal of earth down on himself). These were so poor that even the critics had to admit that.

The last three novels were an improvement. Let's face it, they could not get any worse. But they are still too long, too verbose and too fantastical with far too much introspection.

Ah well, at least they are wonderfully well written and at the end of "The Private Patient" Commander Adam Dalgliesh will finally tie the knot with Cambridge academic Dr Emma Lavenham. Even Lord Peter Wimsey took less time to woo and gain Harriet Vane.

G.K.Chesterton is a difficult person to write about or to assess. He was, in that much overused phrase, larger than life, physically and intellectually, though in the latter he often produced small mean-minded ideas.

The Father Brown stories, possibly the best known of his output, are largely so-so as detective stories though immensely enjoyably for other reasons, not least the protagonist's philosophical and theological musings. Those famous paradoxes, on the other hand, do pall after a while.

Chesterton also wrote about the art of detective fiction and many of his ideas are of great interest. In "A Defence of Detective Stories" published in 1901 in a not very well remembered collection, "The Defender" he had this to say:

There is, however, another good work that is don by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal an automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activiey keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departurres and the most romantic
of rebellions.

By dealing with the unsleeping sentinesl who guard the outsposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.

When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and
wolves.

The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.

There seems to be something irresistible about making priests, bishops, nuns, deacons and all sorts of clerics into detectives. It makes a certain amount of sense in that clerics have the right to go to many places others would be excluded from and enquire in a way that would be considered insolent in anybody else. Also, they are supposed to be able to understand human nature (this is a little dodgy, really) and to have divine guidance.

Detective stories are essentially conservative in their outlook and are particularly successful if a settled environment is described. What could be more settled than the environment in which most clerics inhabit, at least, in intention?

So popular clerical detectives are that there is even a website dedicated to the subject. Tory Historian is addicted to detective stories and is reasonably fond of the clerical variety. Too many of them have recently been on the leftish liberal side of the spectrum, which would not matter if all these clerics did not insist on pushing their politics into the face of the reader. Neither they nor their authors appear to understand the essential conservatism of the detective story genre.

A certain amount of liberalism creeps into one of the best series of clerical detection from the nineties, that of D. M. Greenwood’s tales of Deaconess Theodora Braithwaite. Better declare an interest here. Many years ago D. M. Greenwood was known as Miss Greenwood, a classics teacher of terrifying erudition and eccentricity.

While the slight left-leaning is a little unexpected, the clear and beautiful writing and the sharpness with which the shortcomings of the present-day Church of England are dissected are entirely in character with the woman who used a similar scalpel on Tacitus and his characters.

Subsequently Miss Greenwood went back to university to study theology, became what she calls an ecclesiastical civil servant and started writing detective stories. Presumably working for the church at a relatively low level makes it easy to imagine all sorts of nefarious dealings up to and including murder.

Deaconess Braithwaite, a scion of a distinguished Anglican family, a student of classics who turned to theology and who refuses to be priested because she feels the Anglican Church should not break away from all the other ones within Christianity (presumably she means Roman Catholic and the various Orthodox ones as many of the Nonconformist denominations have had women ministers for some time) is an engaging character. So are many of the others who appear in the various novels though, sadly, few more than once. The intrigues and shabbiness of the Church hierarchy are brilliantly described and there are sharp portraits of various people who are attracted to the institution for various reasons.

In addition, Theodora Braithwaite is writing a biography of an eminent (fictitious but so realistic) Victorian Tractarian, Thomas Henry Newcome, who is brought into sharp focus, together with his formidable wife in the book Tory Historian has just finished reading, “Heavenly Vices”.

In other words, this is an entirely admirable series and strongly recommended to all readers. There is just one problem: the plots are terrible. Even Philip Grosset, onlie begetter of the Clerical Detectives site, has to admit this, though he, too, lists Theodora Braithwaite as one of his favourite detectives.

“Heavenly Vices” just about works if one can accept the dubious notion that people will murder in order to preserve the Church of England from yet another highly unpalatable scandal.

However, Tory Historian finds it extremely unlikely that a woman like Deaconess Braithwaite would think in meters rather than feet and yards. Was it D. M. Greenwood herself or some officious editor who described the appearance of a cottage Theodora Braithwaite is approaching:

The Saplings was a solid red brick villa with mock Tudor beams. The front garden, no more than three metres from gate to front door, was laid out with miniature box hedges interspersed with fine gravel.

“Whom do you hate?”

“Myself, my father.”

“Count your blessings and act out of them.”

“What blessings would those be then?”

Isaiah looked down at this flimsy youth and thought of his own country: “You ate well last night. You can read and write. You can journey from one end of this country to the other without men with Kalashnikovs demanding your deference. You have no right to your discontent, no right to your hatred. Your only proper emotion is gratitude.”

“You don’t understand.”

“There is One who does. Seek His path and healing will surely follow.”

But Crispin had been raised by and among people who considered the development of self in all its florescent glory was the true end of man.