Second Poirot novel sees the detective triumph over his Parisian rival
Agatha Christie's second Poirot novel takes her Belgian detective to the coast of northern France
An urgent appeal for help from a mysterious millionaire brings detective Hercule Poirot to France. But he finds he is too late. He is told on arrival that his client has been brutally stabbed to death. The victim has been left in an open grave on the golf links near his villa, where a new bunker was in the process of being dug
The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie’s third detective novel, was published in March 1923 in the US and in May the same year in the UK, where it was put on sale for seven shillings and sixpence.
It was the second novel to feature Poirot, the little Belgian detective, and his sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings. They had formed a somewhat unequal sleuthing partnership in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha’s debut crime novel.
In his second case, Poirot finds himself up against the illustrious Monsieur Giraud, a detective from the Paris Sûretè. Giraud resents Poirot’s involvement in the investigation and will not listen to the experienced Belgian detective’s opinions.
But Poirot knows the case is not all that it seems and looks carefully into the strange circumstances surrounding the murder. He discovers that the motive for the murder is connected to a crime committed more than 20 years before.
Poirot uses his understanding of human nature to help him solve the crime, citing a serial wife killer who used the same method each time, believing that what had once succeeded would succeed again. He says that eventually the killer paid the penalty for his lack of originality!
The latest reprint of The Murder on the Links
Reviews when the book was first published compared Agatha and Poirot favourably with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. One reviewer said Poirot was ‘a pleasant contrast to most of his lurid competitors’ and that they suspected he had ‘a touch of satire in him.’
Having embarked on the mammoth task of reading all Agatha’s 76 detective novels in chronological order, I recently read The Murder on the Links for the second time. It was many years after I had read it for the first time and I expected the novel to seem dated and far simpler than I actually found it to be. I was amazed at how complicated the plot was and how skilfully Agatha encourages the reader to believe one thing, whereas the opposite is in fact the case.
Agatha Christie’s biographer, Laura Thompson, has said of The Murder on the Links: ‘It is very French, not just in setting but in tone, which reeks of Gaston Leroux.’ Agatha had read and been influenced by Leroux’s 1907 novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.
Laura also notes that the book is notable for a subplot in which Hastings falls in love, allowing the author to pack him off to wedded bliss in 'the Argentine', a development that was apparently greatly desired by Agatha.
To the relief of Hastings fans, the author did bring him back from 'the Argentine' from time to time to assist Poirot with his future cases.
The Murder on the Links sees Poirot triumph over his arrogant sleuthing rival, Monsieur Giraud, and gives us a good idea of why the Belgian detective was always to succeed in finding out whodunnit for the next 50 years. I think the novel is well worth reading, or even rereading.
Shrewd observer of human nature who became a Queen of Crime
Dorothy L Sayers was keen to promote the role of women
One of the greatest detective novelists of the Golden Age, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, was born 128 years ago today on June 13, 1893 in Oxford.
Dorothy went to the Godolphin School in Salisbury, where she won a scholarship to Somerville College in Oxford. She graduated with first class honours in modern languages in 1915 and was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University.
She worked for Blackwell’s, the Oxford publishers, and then as a copywriter at Bensons, a London advertising agency.
Dorothy produced her first novel, Whose Body, introducing her amateur detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, in 1923. He was to feature in 14 novels and volumes of short stories.
She became a member, and eventually president, of the Detection Club, where she met other crime writers she admired, such as E C Bentley and G K Chesterton.
Dorothy was a keen observer of human nature and was passionate about the education of women and their right to play a positive role in society, as is evident in her third Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Unnatural Death, published in 1927.
Wimsey was played by Ian Carmichael in the BBC series
Unnatural Death also broke new ground in that one of the main characters, Mary Whittaker, has been described as the most clearly delineated homosexual character in Golden Age detective fiction, despite the word ‘lesbian’ never being used by the author to describe her.
Mary Whittaker is seen during the novel trying to entice a young girl into a life of homosexuality and, in a scene where Wimsey kisses her, she is shown to be physically revolted by being kissed by a man.
Dorothy also invented an ingenious murder method in the novel, the injection of an air bubble with a hypodermic syringe into the victim, so that there was no obvious cause of death and a post mortem examination would lead to the conclusion that the victim had died of natural causes.
Some critics found fault with this method, while acknowledging it was very cunning. It was believed Dorothy came up with the idea because of her familiarity with motor engines, having had a relationship with a car mechanic and motor bike enthusiast.
She also made use of brand new legislation on inheriting property, introduced in 1925 in England, for the motive for the murder.
Dorothy’s belief that women should be seen to be playing important roles is reflected in her character Miss Katherine Climpson, who she introduces for the first time in Unnatural Causes as a genteel spinster who helps Wimsey with some of his investigations.
Unnatural Death has been published in a new edition by Hodder
Lord Peter says he employs Miss Climpson as an enquiry agent because her talents are being wasted by a stupid social system that forces unmarried women to become ‘companions’ rather than use their skills and minds in a more useful and profitable way.
The novel begins in the most casual way with Lord Peter and his friend, a Scotland Yard detective, Charles Parker, discussing a murder investigation while having dinner in a restaurant and being overheard by a doctor sitting at the next table, who eventually joins them and tells them about the unexpected death of a woman he had been treating.
Lord Peter is convinced the woman has been murdered and, dragging the reluctant Parker along with him, sets out to investigate with no clues to work on. Unnatural Death, a groundbreaking, gripping story, with plenty of twists and turns and some shrewd observations of human nature that even reminded me of Jane Austen, is the fascinating result.
After World War II, Dorothy taught herself old Italian and made a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy using terza rima, the three-line rhyming scheme that he used in the original . In 1957, while working on Dante’s third volume, Paradiso, Dorothy died of heart failure. Her friend, Dr Barbara Reynolds, completed her work, which she herself had regarded as her greatest achievement.
Unnatural Death was reprinted in 2016 by Hodder and Stoughton and is available from or
Innocent detective
learnt his trade from hours spent in confessional box
Father Brown creator G K Chesterton was the first president of the Detection Club
The
brilliant writer G K Chesterton earned his place in the history of crime
fiction by creating Father Brown, an unusual amateur detective, who as an unassuming
Catholic priest is well aware of the frailties of human nature.
Father Brown
appeared in 53 short stories between 1910 and 1936. He solves mysteries and crimes
using his intuition and his keen understanding of human nature.
The author, Gilbert
Keith Chesterton, was born in 1874 - 147 years ago today (29 May) - in
Kensington in London. He became a philosopher, lay theologian and literary and art
critic and was a prolific writer. He is
estimated to have written about 80 books, many on theology and literary
criticism, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, some appearing in the form of
newspaper columns, and several plays.
He was
baptised into the Church of England but entered full communion with the
Catholic Church in 1922. Chesterton is said to have loosely based Father Brown
on the Right Reverend Monsignor John O’Connor, a parish priest who was involved in
Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism.
Chesterton
was elected as the first president of the Detection Club and served from 1930
to 1936 until he was succeeded by his good friend, the crime writer E C
Bentley. He opened his novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, with a poem written to
Bentley.
The first Father Brown story is included in this collection
Despite his
many other literary works, Chesterton will always be remembered as the creator
of Father Brown, a character who became so popular that many films and TV
series have been made about him.
Father Brown
made his first appearance in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post in July
1910 in the short story, The Blue Cross. This story, and others written later, came
out in book form in The Innocence of Father Brown.
Shabby and
lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, dropping his umbrella and
unable to control the parcels he is carrying, Father Brown seems an improbable
sleuth but his innocence is probably the secret of his success.
At the end
of the story, The Blue Cross, he delivers a master criminal into the hands of the
French detective who has been pursuing him. The criminal, Flambeau, and the master
detective, Valentin, both bow to him in recognition of his superior detection
skills. At this point, ’the little Essex priest blinked about for his umbrella.’
The master criminal,
who has been disguised as a Catholic priest, cannot believe Father Brown has seen
through him and has outwitted him and asks him to explain how he did it.
Father Brown
replies: ‘Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear
men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a
matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a
priest.’
‘What?’
asked the thief, almost gaping.
‘You attacked
reason,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s bad theology.’
This made me
think of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who explains to the police at the end
of each novel why she discovered the murderer before they did. Also seeming very innocent, she made her
first appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930. I am fairly
certain thatAgatha Christie, who was also a leading light
in the Detection Club, must have been a Father Brown fan.
The Blue
Cross appears in The Innocence of Father Brown and The Complete Father Brown Stories.
Novels and short stories by G K Chesterton are available from or
A unique selection of stunning examples of the genre
This handy guide by Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison provides
a treat for all lovers of detective fiction by choosing 100 books to give readers
an overview of the rich and diverse crime writing that has been produced over
the years.
The authors did not intend to provide a list of the 100 best
crime novels because of the difficulty of comparing books written in different eras
and with varied intentions.
An invaluable guide for beginners and established fans of the crime fiction genre
They aimed to provide a book that would be useful as a
starting point for readers wanting to explore the genre. Their selections are
arranged A to Z by author and describe the plot of the novel without spoiling
it for prospective readers. They include information about the authors and where
they are placed in the history of crime fiction.
At the end of each entry there is a Read On list with suggestions
of books to read by stylistically similar authors. Most authors have one entry
only, but Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have
been allowed two entries, because they have been judged so important to the
genre.
There is also a brief history of crime fiction and lists of the winners of
the Edgar Award and the CWA Golden Dagger Award right from the beginning.
The book selects many well-known crime writers but there are
also some names that are less familiar. E C Bentley has an entry for his ground-breaking
1913 novel, Trent’s Last Case. Lawyer Michael Gilbert has been chosen for his
1950 legal mystery Smallbone Deceased and Cyril Hare, who was a judge in real
life, for his legal mystery When the Wind Blows, published in 1949.
Francis Iles, with Malice Aforethought, and Michael Innes,
with Hamlet Revenge! have both been chosen for novels written in the 1930s.
Having to pick just one Dorothy L Sayers novel, it is
fascinating to see that they went for The
Nine Tailors, published in 1934. For
Josephine Tey, they picked her 1948 novel, The Franchise Affair.
Ruth Rendell manages to get two entries, both as herself
with An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) and as Barbara Vine, with A Fatal Inversion
(1987).
European writers are represented with entries on Gaston
Leroux, Georges Simenon, Henning Mankell and Manuel Vasquex Montalban.
American writers featured include Eric Ambler, Dashiell
Hammett, Donna Leon and Vera Caspary.
This guide offers readers an invaluable introduction to authors
they may never have tried before but might grow to love.
100 Must-Read Crime Novels is packed with useful book suggestions
and fascinating information for crime fiction fans.
Nicholas Blake’s first Nigel Strangeways Mystery, A
Question of Proof, published in 1935, is a cleverly written story set in a public
school for boys with a complex plot that keeps the reader guessing right till
the end.
It is the annual sports day at Sudely Hall on a glorious
summer’s day and all the parents and children are looking forward to the races.
But by the end of the afternoon the police have to be called when the
headmaster’s obnoxious nephew is found in a haystack having been strangled.
The English master, Michael Evans, who is in love with
the headmaster’s beautiful young wife, soon finds himself the police’s main suspect
for the murder and so he calls in Nigel Strangeways, an old friend from
university who has become an amateur detective, to investigate the case ‘on
behalf of the school’.
The author of A Question of Proof was the poet Cecil
Day-Lewis, who eventually became Poet Laureate. At the age of 31 he turned to
crime writing to supplement his income from poetry, using the pseudonym
Nicholas Blake.
He was hailed by the reviewers as a master of
detective fiction and went on to produce another 15 Nigel Strangeways Mysteries
as well as four detective novels and some short stories that don’t feature his
series character.
Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, alias novelist Nicholas Blake
I was surprised when I began reading A
Question of Proof that an omniscient point of view is used at the start to show
the reader round the school and introduce the main characters among the masters
and the boys.
The spotlight is on the young good-looking Evans, who
is preoccupied with arranging a secret assignation with Hero, the wife of the
Rev Percival Vale, the headmaster.
But once Nigel Strangeways arrives, the story is
mostly told from his point of view. He joins forces with the investigating
officer, Superintendent Armstrong, to try to solve the crime. Armstrong’s willing
cooperation is explained by the fact that Strangeways is a nephew to the Assistant
Commissioner of Scotland Yard.
Cecil Day-Lewis, aka Nicholas Blake, describes the
environment of a public school for boys brilliantly, showing the bickering
between the masters and the factions among the boys. Strangeways is received
well by masters and boys alike and quickly reveals his talent for blending in with
any company, along with displaying his own small eccentricities, such as
drinking large quantities of tea.
In order to solve the crime, he has to join the Black
Spot gang and pass the initiation rituals imposed by the members, but he then
has the support of a small group of boys who open up about what they know and help
him with his investigation. Interestingly, he uses psychology to solve the
crime, rather than concentrating on the most obvious suspects in the manner of the
police. It is not surprising that Strangeways was a fictional detective who was
going to live on for another 30 years.
All the Nigel Strangeways Mysteries have now been
republished by Vintage Books.
Cecil Day-Lewis adopted Nicholas Blake as a pseudonym
Crime writer Nicholas Blake wrote 20 highly regarded detective novels, 15 of them featuring his likeable amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways.
Many novelists would be happy with achieving this much during their lifetime, but for Nicholas Blake, it was only part of his story.
For Blake was actually the poet, professor and publisher Cecil Day-Lewis - born on this day in 1904 in Ireland - who was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.
In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to increase his income from poetry by trying his hand at writing a detective novel.
His first novel, A Question of Proof, which he published under his pseudonym Nicholas Blake, introduced Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, had access to official crime investigation resources.
From the mid 1930s onwards Day-Lewis was able to earn a living by writing as Nicholas Blake while continuing to write poetry, working in publishing and lecturing at Cambridge University.
The Vintage edition of A Question of Proof
His novel Minute for Murder is set against the background of his experience of working for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War and his novel Head of a Traveller has a principal character who is a well-known poet suffering from writer’s block, whose best poetry writing days are long behind him.
Critics regard his 1938 novel, The Beast Must Die, as perhaps his best work because it skilfully combines a twisting and intriguing narrative with a subtle study of the nature of private and public morality.
Day-Lewis died in 1972 at the home of his friends Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. He left four children by two marriages, including the actor, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, who donated his father's archive to the Bodleian Library.
A Question of Proof (Vintage Publishing) is available fromor
The story
of a complex police investigation full of surprises
The story starts with a consignment of French wines unloaded at the docks in London
Although
it was his first novel, The Cask, by Freeman Wills Crofts, has been judged to
be one of his most ambitious and intricately plotted.
The
action takes place in London and Paris, there are three different sets of
investigators and, according to the author himself, the novel was about 40,000
words too long.
But
despite being published more than a century ago, The Cask is as compelling and
fast moving as many contemporary novels and I think it is still well worth
reading.
The story
begins when a consignment of French wines is unloaded from a steamship at the
docks in London. One of the casks is slightly damaged during the process, so
the shipping clerk, who is overseeing the unloading, looks inside it. He finds
that it doesn’t contain wine after all, but gold sovereigns. He then makes a
gruesome discovery as he searches amongst the sawdust in which the sovereigns
are packed.
He
consults his superior and they decide to go to the police, but when they return
to the docks they find the cask and its contents have gone.
The investigation takes the story's detective, Inspector Burnley, to Paris
Inspector
Burnley of Scotland Yard is put on the case and he manages to track down the
cask. When it is unpacked, the police find they are dealing with a murder
investigation.
Burnley’s
enquiries take him to Paris, from where the cask was dispatched, and he pursues
his investigation with the help of Inspector Lefarge, a detective from the
Sûreté.
After
exhaustive enquiries, the case becomes clearer and a Frenchman living in
London, Leon Felix, is arrested.
The case
is then taken up by the solicitor of the accused, John Clifford, and the King’s
Counsel he instructs, Lucius Heppenstall. They meet to prepare a defence for
their client and review the evidence against Felix.
They
decide that if their client is innocent he must have been the victim of a
cunning plot to implicate him. Their planned course of action is to test the
evidence and they decide to employ a team of private detectives to travel to
Paris and review the work of Scotland Yard and the Sûreté.
The Cask is available as a Collins Crime Club title
Georges
La Touche, who is considered the smartest private detective in London, is
dispatched to Paris with some of his men and he painstakingly tests all the
evidence the police have found, working tirelessly to try to break the alibis of the
people involved
In a
dramatic denouement he confronts the person who has masterminded the whole plot
against Felix.
The
alibis depend on train times, as do many of the alibis of the characters in
later novels by Crofts, who worked for the railways as a civil engineer until
he retired to write full time.
In 1946,
Crofts wrote a Foreword for a new edition of The Cask, describing how he came
up with the idea for the story.
When he
started writing the novel in about 1912 he had been off work for a lengthy period due
to an illness and was bored and wanted something to do. He says he started by
writing down the most absurd and improbable things he could think of. He read
the first chapter of The Caskto his wife and she encouraged him to complete
the book.
Looking
back, he says the story could probably have been told in about 80,000 words
instead of 120,000. Crofts went on to write another 30 novels, developing a
much more systematic way of plotting and writing along the way.
However,
more than a century after The Cask was first published, it continues to
intrigue and entertain new readers.
I found
it to be well written, exciting and constantly surprising, and I would
definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys detective fiction.
The
novels of Freeman Wills Crofts are still in print, even though the author died
more than 60 years ago.
A look back at the career of E C Bentley who wrote the detective novel that heralded the Golden Age
E C Bentley intended his novel to be a send-up of the detective genre
The writer and journalist E C Bentley, who is credited with writing the first modern detective story, Trent’s Last Case, died 65 years ago today in London.
Agatha Christie, who wrote her own first detective novel seven years later, said Trent’s Last Case was ‘one of the best detective stories ever written’.
Dorothy L Sayers, whose first detective novel was published in 1923, said Bentley’s novel ‘holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction.’
But when Bentley wrote Trent’s Last Case, first published in 1913, he intended it to be a major send-up of the genre, which had tended to feature intellectual detectives lacking any obvious human failings.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, Oxford, and then studied Law in London while working as a journalist for several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. Although he was called to the Bar in 1902 he continued to work for the Daily Telegraph until he retired in 1934.
But he returned to the newspaper after World War II started because younger men were being called up, retiring again in 1947.
He became friends with the writer of the Father Brown stories, G K Chesterton, while they were still at school and later in life they were both, in turn, president of the Detection Club.
Agatha Christie spoke in glowing terms of Trent's Last Case
Bentley started work on Trent’s Last Case in 1910 having had the idea for ‘a detective story of a new sort...’
Bentley thought it should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as an average, fallible human being. He said: ‘It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong…’
The story begins with a powerful and ruthless American capitalist being found dead in the garden of his English country house, fully clothed, but without his false teeth. His young, beautiful widow seems relieved by her husband’s death. The household also includes a butler, a French maid and two young male secretaries.
It appears to be an intriguing case and therefore artist, journalist and amateur detective Philip Trent is sent to investigate by his newspaper.
Bentley planned his novel in just a few weeks while walking from his home in Hampstead to his office and he began work on it by writing the final chapter first.
In the novel, he allows his hero, Trent, to fall in love with the beautiful widow, which was at the time considered against the rules of the genre. He then introduces a plotting innovation that qualifies Trent’s Last Case to take its place among the great detective novels of all time.
The Collins Crime Club edition of Trent's Last Case
All detective writers that came afterwards owed a debt to Trent’s Last Case. Bentley’s experiment, with a detective who, unlike his predecessors, is a fallible human being and is operating within a cleverly constructed plot culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Bentley was to point out later that it does not seem to have been noticed that the novel is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.
My copy of Trent’s Last Case, produced by Collins Crime Club, contains an Afterword by Dorothy L Sayers, which was taken from the draft of a talk she had written about a possible radio adaptation of the book, although there is no evidence that the talk was ever delivered.
Dorothy writes: ‘If you were so lucky as to read it today for the first time, you would recognise it at once as a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, but you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence.’
I found this particularly interesting as I recalled that in Dorothy’s first novel, Whose Body?, she used the technique used by Bentley in Trent’s Last Case, of a character dressing in the murder victim’s clothes and sleeping in his bed in order to confuse the authorities about the time of death. Whether this was ‘consciously or unconsciously,’ borrowed from Bentley, we don’t know.
I found Trent’s Last Case gripping and well written. I enjoyed it particularly because there isn’t just one surprise at the end, but two. However I don’t want to give anything else away. In the words of Dorothy, it is sufficient to say the novel is ‘a masterpiece.’
Michael Wilding (above) played Trent opposite the deceased's widow Margaret Lockwood in the 1952 film
Challenging the rules and conventions of detective fiction was not Bentley’s only literary innovation.
His first collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners, published in 1905, made a form of verse popular, which became known as the clerihew, after his middle name. This four line metrically irregular verse is one of his early examples of the clerihew:
‘Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered Sodium.’
Bentley dedicated Trent’s Last Case to G K Chesterton saying he owed him a book in return for Chesterton dedicating the Man Who Was Thursday to him.
Trent’s Last Case was adapted into a film three times, in 1920, 1929 and - with Michael Wilding as Trent in a cast featuring Margaret Lockwood and Orson Welles - in 1952.
After 23 years, Bentley relented and decided Trent hadn’t had his last case after all. He wrote Trent’s Own Case in 1936 and a book of short stories, Trent Intervenes, in 1938.
Trent’s Last Case was republished in paperback by Collins Crime Club in 2020.
Complimentary
theatre ticket gives Inspector Alleyn a front row seat for murder
Patrick Malahide played Alleyn on TV in the 1990s
Ngaio
Marsh draws on her experience as a theatre director in New Zealand to describe
the background of her second Inspector Roderick Alleyn novel published in 1935.
In Enter
a Murderer, she places Inspector Alleyn near the front of the audience at a
London theatre when one of the actors is shot dead on the stage.
A
character in the play is meant to be shot with a gun loaded with dummy
cartridges, but when he falls down and the horrified cast realise he is dead
for real, the gentleman detective, Alleyn, suspects foul play immediately.
He had
been invited to the theatre by his friend, the journalist Nigel Bathgate, who
he met when investigating the death of a guest at a country house party in the
first novel, A Man Lay Dead.
Nigel has
been given complimentary tickets for the play by his old University friend,
Felix Gardener, who is playing the male lead in the production.
Alleyn
and Bathgate visit Felix in his dressing room before the play starts and are
actually introduced to Arthur Surbonadier, the actor who is going to be the
murder victim. He is clearly the worse for wear because he has been drinking
and demonstrates that he is jealous of Felix because of his blossoming
relationship with Stephanie, who is playing the female lead.
Alleyn
and Bathgate leave to take their seats front of house because they feel
uncomfortable in the acrimonious atmosphere of the dressing room.
After
Arthur has been shot and it becomes clear that he really is dead, the
production is halted and the audience sent home.
You can read Ngaio Marsh's first three Alleyn novels in one volume
Helped by
his team who arrive from Scotland Yard, Alleyn secures the forensic evidence
and interview all the members of the cast.
At this
point I was surprised by Alleyn’s demeanour as he makes jokes for the benefit
of Bathgate and his fellow officers, which hardly seemed appropriate, but then
I thought of Dorothy L Sayers and her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Margery
Allingham and her investigator, Albert Campion, and I realised this clowning
around was the fashion at the time and perhaps a nudge to the reader not to
take the story too seriously.
I was
also surprised Alleyn allows Bathgate to play an active part in the case and
sit in on the interviews and take notes.
Bathgate
is involved in the investigation in Ngaio’s first novel, A Man Lay Dead, but
that was because he was actually staying in the house where the murder
investigation takes place and couldn’t be sent away.
But then
I realised Bathgate is kept around in Enter a Murderer to be the Watson for
Alleyn. He gets to know some of what the detective is thinking but not all of
it and, like the reader, he has no idea what to expect at the end.
I was
slightly disappointed at the denouement when Alleyn uses the same trick as in
the first novel, A Man Lay Dead, and holds a re-enactment of the murder. This
time he has all the actors taking part, which eventually leads the murderer to
incriminate himself.
But Enter
a Murderer certainly fulfils what the reader expects from a detective novel as
it is an interesting story with a surprise at the end. Ngaio describes life
backstage at a theatre very well, drawing on her own experiences of acting and
directing
Ngaio Marsh
Her great
passion was the theatre and she joined a touring company in New Zealand as an
actress in 1916. Later in life, she directed several of Shakespeare’s plays for
New Zealand audiences and lived long enough to see the theatre firmly
established in her own country and provided with proper financial support.
The
University of Canterbury in New Zealand named their theatre the Ngaio Marsh
Theatre and she was made a Dame in the 1966 Queen’s Birthday Honours for
services to the arts.
The title, Enter a Murderer, is taken from a line of stage direction from Shakespeare’s
play, Macbeth.
Enter a
Murderer by Ngaio Marsh is available as a hardback, paperback, Kindle or
Audiobook. I read it as part of an omnibus edition comprising A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer and The Nursing Home Murder - the first three Roderick Alleyn mysteries.
Important
advice for aspiring crime writers from author P D James
Over the
years P D James has consistently maintained that setting is a key element in a
detective novel.
When I
interviewed her for a newspaper feature in the 1990s she said her own novels
were nearly always inspired by a particular place she had visited.
She loved
the East Anglian coasts, Suffolk in particular, and set many of her novels in seaside towns
she found particularly inspiring, having explored them thoroughly to enable her
to describe the setting for her stories evocatively.
Helpful book for novice crime writers
She
believed that it is only if the action is firmly rooted in a physical reality
that the reader can fully enter into the world of the characters. She agreed
with the many crime fiction readers who have said convincing
characters are important, but felt the setting for a novel, the place where the
characters live and move about, is also a vital element.
In her
book Talking about Detective Fiction, P D James says the world in which the
characters in a novel live has to be made to seem real. She writes: ‘We (the
readers) need to breathe their air, see with their eyes, walk the paths they
tread and inhabit the rooms the writer has furnished for them.’
She also
believes it’s important for the setting to be seen through the eyes of one of
the characters, not merely described by the author, and that setting can
establish the mood of a novel, citing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles as an example.
P D James
writes: ‘We only have to think of …that dark and sinister mansion, set in the
middle of the fog-shrouded moor, to appreciate how important setting can be to
the establishment of atmosphere. The Hound of Wimbledon Common would hardly
provide such a frisson of terror.’
She was
inspired to write her novel, Devices and Desires, (1989), one of her 14 novels
featuring the detective Adam Dalgliesh, while on a visit of exploration in East
Anglia, when she was standing on a deserted shingle beach one day.
She
writes: ‘There were a few wooden boats drawn up on the beach, a couple of brown
nets slung between poles and drying in the wind and, looking out over the
sullen and dangerous North Sea, I could imagine myself standing in the same
place hundreds of years ago with the taste of salt on my lips and the constant
hiss and withdrawing rattle of the tide. Then, turning my eyes to the south, I
saw the great outline of Sizewell nuclear power station and immediately I knew
that I had found the setting for my next novel.’
PD James
says she was excited because she knew that however long the writing took she
would eventually have a novel.
She began
her research by visiting nuclear power stations and speaking to the scientists
to find out how nuclear power stations are run.
Bergamo's historical upper town
I took
the advice PD James gave me when I met her in the 1990s, but it was not until many years after I
had interviewed her that I wrote my first novel, Death in the High City, having
been inspired by the magical city of Bergamo in northern Italy.
PD James
wrote her book, Talking about Detective Fiction, at the request of the Bodleian
publishing department. She says she was invited by the Librarian to write a
book in aid of the Library on the subject of British detective fiction, because
it is a form of popular literature that had for over 50 years fascinated her
and engaged her as a writer.
At the
beginning she describes how the genre started in the 19th century, pinpointing
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins as the first English detective story. She then
discusses the contributions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with his character,
Sherlock Holmes, and G K Chesterton, with his amateur sleuth, Father Brown.
The work
of the four Queens of Crime – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery
Allingham and Ngaio Marsh is evaluated along with that of other Golden Age
writers. She then casts her eye over the American PI offshoot from the genre
and the modern developments British writers have now introduced.
Perhaps
the most helpful to aspiring crime writers are the final three chapters of this
fascinating little book, where P D James deals with setting, viewpoint and
character.
Looking
into the future, she predicts that many people will continue to turn to the
detective story for ‘relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge.’
PD James
published her final Adam Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, in 2008.
Talking
about Detective Fiction was published by Bodleian Library in 2009.
PD James
died in November 2014 in Oxford.
Talking about Detective Fiction is available from or
Dorothy turns Lord Peter into a man
of action as well as words
The second Dorothy L Sayers novel
featuring amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey was nothing if not ambitious.
The second Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L Sayers
The action took place in Yorkshire,
London, Paris and the US and the denouement sees a Duke being tried for murder
by his peers in the House of Lords.
This is a far cry from the country
house murder with a closed circle of suspects that was all the rage in 1926,
the year Clouds of Witness was published.
Reading it for the second time, many
years after I had first read the novel, I was more impressed with it than ever.
The plot is brilliant and intricately
worked out, considering that the action takes place over such a large canvas.
Peter’s brother, Gerald, Duke of
Denver is hosting a shooting party at a lodge in Yorkshire. His sister, Lady
Mary Wimsey, is acting as the hostess for her brother and her fiancé, Captain
Denis Cathcart, is one of the guests.
Denis Cathcart is found just outside
the conservatory in the early hours of the morning having been shot dead by a
bullet fired from the Duke’s revolver. The Duke is bending over his body when
Lady Mary arrives on the scene. An inquest into Cathcart’s death is later told
that Lady Mary exclaimed: ‘Oh God, Gerald, you’ve killed him!’
Needless to say, the Duke of Denver
is later arrested for the murder of his future brother in law. He refuses to
say why he was up and about at the time he discovered the body and Lady Mary
feigns illness to avoid have to talk to anyone about it at all.
Lord Peter and his manservant,
Bunter, waste no time in returning from their holiday in France to assist the
investigation and they set out to try to prove the Duke’s innocence.
And what could be more convenient
than Peter’s friend, Inspector Parker, being assigned to the case by Scotland
Yard?
Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey in a BBC TV adaptation of Clouds of Witness
Lord Peter and Parker search the
grounds of the shooting lodge and quickly discover footprints belonging to
someone who was not a member of the official party, but who had clearly gained
access to the property. This makes it possible for someone from outside to have
been responsible for the murder. There are two married couples and four single
people staying in the lodge, but Lord Peter establishes that they are not the
only suspects, which is unusual for detective novels written at this time.
P D James, in her excellent book
Talking about Detective Fiction, says she was amused by the plan of the layout
of Riddlesdale Lodge that Dorothy provides for the reader, pointing out that
just one toilet and one bathroom shared by eight unrelated people must have
been rather inconvenient.
The action ranges across the
surrounding moorland, a farmhouse inhabited by a violent farmer and his
beautiful wife, and a nearby market town. Cathcart also had a life in Paris
that has to be investigated.
The Dowager Duchess of Denver arrives
at the lodge to deal with Lady Mary. We were introduced to her in Whose Body?
but in the second novel she is more entertaining than ever. She has long
soliloquies that move from subject to subject as one thought leads her
to another, but there is somehow a strange logic in what she says. She also
provides what she refers to as her ‘mother wit’ to aid the investigation.
The inquiries in Paris, events in
London and further adventures in Yorkshire bring Lord Peter and Parker closer
to the truth.
Sayers's second Lord Peter Wimsey novel saw her character become more an action man
But then the Duke’s trial in the
House of Lords, brilliantly described by Dorothy, gets under way as we get
nearer to the end of the book.
The crime writer Martin Edwards has
suggested that Clouds of Witness is the work of a novelist learning her craft
but that it displays the storytelling qualities that soon made her famous.
I agree with this in part. I feel
that Dorothy made large passages of the dialogue difficult to read by trying to
reproduce the Yorkshire accent in print when Lord Peter is interviewing locals
such as pub landlords and farmers.
She also allowed Lord Peter to
chatter too much at the beginning of the book when he and Parker are sleuthing
together. In real life the more ordinary detective inspector would probably
have begun to find his inane conversation rather trying.
But she allows Lord Peter to become
much more of a man of action than she did in her first novel, more along the
lines of Margery Allingham’s Campion than Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Lord Peter
is sucked into a bog while roaming over the moors at night and has to be
rescued by Bunter with the help of some local labourers and he is shot and
injured while chasing a suspect in London.
Near the end Lord Peter has to make a
last minute dash to New York to secure a final piece of evidence to exonerate
the Duke, which will reveal the truth about Cathcart’s death.
To be in time to present his evidence
at the trial in the House of Lords he has to make a daring and dangerous flight
back to London.
The Duke’s defence counsel, Sir Impey
Biggs, explains to the court how Lord Peter is making a transatlantic dash to
return before the end of the trial: ‘My Lords, at this moment this
all-important witness is cleaving the air high above the wide Atlantic. In this
wintry weather he is braving a peril which would appal any heart but his own
and that of the world-famous aviator whose help he has enlisted, so that no
moment may be lost in freeing his noble brother from this terrible charge. My
lords, the barometer is falling.’
Lord Peter’s fictional flight was
described in a novel published in 1926, a year before Charles Lindbergh was to
achieve the same feat in reality.
The amateur detective arrives at the
House of Lords looking ‘a very grubby and oily figure’ and presents the vital
evidence that will exonerate his brother.
He also provides a satisfying
conclusion to the mystery for the reader, which is one of the key ingredients
of any crime novel.
Clouds of Witness is available in a
variety of formats from or
