Background romance adds extra interest to investigation
The 2016 Hodder edition of the novel, first published in 1932
Lord Peter Wimsey’s character comes to life in Have
His Carcase, the seventh novel by Dorothy L Sayers to feature her gentleman
sleuth.
Instead of appearing as just an amiable aristocrat
indulging himself with his detecting hobby, tolerated by Scotland Yard because
of his status in society, he shows himself to be energetic and determined during
this novel, which was first published in 1932, because he is trying to help the woman he
loves.
Mystery novelist Harriet Vane is on a solitary walking
tour along the south west coast of England when she discovers a dead body on
the beach.
She has stopped for refreshment and a brief doze in
the afternoon sun. But instead of just enjoying a peaceful picnic and then resuming
her journey, she wakes up to find a corpse nearby. A man, who has had his
throat slashed from ear to ear, lies spreadeagled on the rocks below her.
Harriet tries to gather evidence at the scene before
the incoming tide sweeps the body out to sea. Then she finds she has to walk several
miles before she can find a telephone to report her discovery to the police.
As a woman who has recently been acquitted of murder,
a case featured in Strong Poison, a previous Wimsey novel, Harriet finds it
unpleasant to come under suspicion and be the subject of police scrutiny again.
Ian Carmichael as Wimsey in a 1970s TV adaptation
But she does not have to wait long before Wimsey joins
her at the seaside and involves himself in the investigation, having been
tipped off by a journalist about Harriet’s predicament.
The amateur detective duo discover that it is a complicated
case to solve and it involves them, and Bunter, Wimsey’s manservant, in painstaking
work to try to break the alibis of their main suspects.
They also have to crack a secret code used by the
murderer to communicate with his victim beforehand. This was the only part of
the novel that I found less than riveting, as the codebreaking lasted for
several pages that weren’t very interesting to read.
However, Wimsey’s character acquires more depth in
this novel, and the ‘will they, won’t they?’ sub plot of their romance also
adds interest to the story.
The couple part as friends at the end of the book, but
Harriet has still not accepted Wimsey’s proposal of marriage, providing a major
incentive for fans to keep reading!
A murky tale of murder among the Morris men and pig
farmers
The Vintage edition of Death Comes at Christmas
We get a glimpse of Mrs Bradley’s gentler side when
she goes to spend Christmas with her nephew, Carey, who is a pig farmer, in
this sixth novel about the eccentric psychoanalyst and sleuth.
Taking with her a boar’s head as a present for her
host, she settles down to enjoy the festive season in Oxfordshire in the company
of Carey, who seems genuinely fond of his distinguished aunt, her grand-nephew,
Denis, and Carey’s friend, Hugh.
Cackling, and wearing some of her luridly-coloured
cardigans, Mrs Bradley dines on, not surprisingly, lots of pork, and she entertains
her fellow guests with anecdotes about murderers and unusual psychological
cases she has encountered.
But then one of Carey’s neighbours, a local solicitor,
is found dead near the river on Christmas Day and although he is thought to have
suffered a heart attack, Mrs Bradley is not convinced that his death was the result
of natural causes.
Later, a neighbouring pig farmer is also found dead, seemingly having been killed by one of his owns boars. Suspecting murder again,
Mrs Bradley fearlessly tries to uncover the truth about the death, despite facing
physical threats herself.
Although the first death occurs at Christmas, it takes
the lady detective until Easter to unravel the complex case, but I would still recommend
this novel as a good read for the festive season.
Death Comes at Christmas is enlivened by descriptions
of some of the local characters. Carey’s housekeeper, Mrs Ditch, who he summons
to his presence by yodeling, her Morris Dancing husband and son, and her daughter,
Linda, who is frequently criticised by local people for ‘trollopsen’ about the
area, all add to the bizarre humour.
Mrs Bradley and Denis discover that Carey’s house has secret
passages and a ghost, and the reader gets the chance to learn a lot about Morris
dancing, pig farming and heraldry during the novel, which was originally
published under the title Dead Men’s Morris in 1936.
Gladys Mitchell wrote 66 Mrs Bradley novels
Gladys
Mitchell wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Beatrice Adela
Lestrange Bradley, as well as some mystery novels under the name, Malcolm
Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the name, Stephen Hockaby.
A teacher
by profession, Gladys wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and
over the years she built a large and loyal following for her eccentric, but
brilliant, detective, Mrs Bradley.
Gladys was
an early member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton,
and Dorothy L Sayers, but she frequently enjoyed satirising or reversing the
traditional patterns of the genre.
She was
interested in architecture, ancient buildings, folklore and British customs, subjects
that were often explored in her novels and short stories. She also studied the
works of Sigmund Freud and developed an interest in witchcraft.
In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but she continued to write detective novels and received
the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. The last Mrs Bradley
mystery was published in 1984, the year after her death.
An intriguing mystery told with humour and well-drawn
characters
The British Library edition of Farjeon's Thirteen Guests
Thirteen Guests is a traditional country house
mystery, the type of story popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction in
the 1920s and 1930s.
The Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L
Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, are still famous for their Golden
Age novels and their books remain in print. However, many other good writers of
the detective novel from this period have now been forgotten.
One crime writer the novelist Dorothy L Sayers
particularly admired from the Golden Age was J Jefferson Farjeon, who she
praised for his ‘creepy skill.’
She may have read Thirteen Guests, when it was first published
in 1936, but few copies of the original book had remained in existence for the
modern reader to enjoy until 2015, when, happily, the novel was rescued and
republished by the British Library.
The story begins at a railway station where a young
man, John Foss, falls from a train when leaving it and injures his foot.
He is recued by an attractive widow, Nadine Leveridge,
who is on her way to a country house party. She takes the young man with her in
the car that has been sent to pick her up by her host, Lord Aveling, to try to
get medical help for him.
When they arrive at her destination, Bragley Court,
the hospitable Lord Aveling welcomes Foss and offers him the chance to stay for
the weekend while he recovers.
Lord Aveling is hosting a weekend house party for 12
people and therefore Foss is his 13th guest.
But because they arrive before two of the other
guests, Mr and Mrs Chater, it is Mr Chater who is the last to enter the house
and who becomes, technically, the 13th guest.
J Jefferson Farjeon worked for the Amalgamated Press before becoming a freelance writer
Foss is not superstitious and he has been reassured by a
fellow guest that the bad luck will come to the 13th guest who enters the
house.
During the weekend a serious of bizarre things happen.
A painting is damaged, a dog is killed, a stranger’s body is found in a quarry
on Lord Aveling’s land and then one of the guests is found dead.
Foss observes all the comings and goings during the
weekend and overhears snatches of people’s conversations as he lies, sometimes
forgotten, recuperating on a settee in a side room. He is visited from time to
time by Nadine and together they try to work out what is going on in the house,
as the relationship between them blossoms.
Farjeon does not write cardboard characters and therefore
the guests, who are also the suspects, are all interesting and depicted well.
In one scene, an artist, and a journalist, who are sharing a bedroom, give as
good as they get in an entertaining conversation with the investigating detective,
Inspector Kendall, who is by no means cast as a plodding policeman.
We learn that the Detective Inspector moves from place
to place when a district needs ‘gingering up.’ When he is introduced, he is
having some amusing exchanges with his new subordinates as they make their way
to Bragley Court to investigate.
The weekend guests include an MP, an actress, a cricketer,
and a writer of mystery novels. They all have their own secrets and
peculiarities, which Detective Inspector Kendall uncovers as he tries to get to
the truth about what has happened.
Farjeon was a crime and mystery novelist, playwright,
and screen writer. Born in 1883, he worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press
in London before going freelance. He went on to become the author of more than
60 crime and mystery novels, short story collections and plays.
He was named
after his maternal grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, who was an American actor.
His father, Benjamin Farjeon, was a successful novelist, one of his brothers
was a composer, another a drama critic and director, and his sister, Eleanor
Farjeon, wrote poems, including the words for the hymn, Morning Has Broken.
Although the plot of Thirteen Guests is far from
straight forward, Farjeon plays fair with the reader and a credible solution to
the mystery is unveiled at the end.
I enjoyed Thirteen Guests and would recommend it to
other fans of country house mysteries.
So far, not all of Farjeon’s many novels have
been republished, but I hope more of this author’s forgotten work will be rescued
and made available for contemporary crime fiction fans to relish.
A fishing story with no red herrings to confuse the
trail
Death Is No Sportsman was first published in 1938
The sport of fly fishing is at the centre of the mystery in Death Is No Sportsman, Cyril Hare’s second detective novel.
A group of men, who are all devoted to the pastime,
gather at a small hotel, looking forward to spending a pleasant weekend on the
river bank. Although the men are not friends, they try to get on amicably so they
can continue to share the fishing rights they hold jointly to a small, but
desirable stretch of the river Didder.
Behind their superficial courtesy towards each other,
there are clearly tensions. Also, as regular guests at the hotel, they know the
local people and are aware of the passions and rivalries going on below the
surface in the small community.
All this is beautifully set up by Cyril Hare in the
first few pages and it will come as no surprise to the reader when a body is
discovered at the side of the river the following day.
The victim is the local squire, a man who was
unpopular with both the fishermen and the villagers. It is quickly established
that he has been shot in the head.
The corpse is discovered by a young man connected with
the fishing syndicate, soon after his arrival at the inn. He is subsequently
revealed to have deep feelings for the wife of the dead man, so the stage is expertly
set by the author for a mystery involving interesting characters in an
evocative setting.
Cyril Hare was, in fact, the pen name for Alfred
Alexander Gordon Clark, who was born in 1900 in Mickleham in Surrey and went on
to become a barrister and a judge.
The writer’s pseudonym was derived from a mixture of
Hare Court, where he was in Chambers as a barrister in London, and Cyril
Mansions, where he lived.
Hare was a practising barrister and judge as well as a writer
Hare wrote many short stories for the London Evening
Standard and some radio and stage plays and he was a keen member of the
Detection Club along with AgathaChristie, Dorothy L Sayers and other famous crime writers.
After the war, Hare, as Clark, was appointed a county
court judge in Surrey. He died in 1958, when he was at the peak of his career
as a judge and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.
In 1990, when the British Crime Writers’ Association
published their list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, they awarded the
85th place to Hare’s 1942 novel, Tragedy at Law, which is considered by many to
be his best work.
In Death Is No Sportsman, the police quickly find
the murder of the local squire too complex for them to solve and call in Scotland Yard. In the following
chapter, we see Inspector Mallet, ‘a very tall, very broad man, with a mild red
face set off with an unexpectedly ferocious-looking waxed moustache,’ descending
from the train ready to take over. He investigates with the thoroughness the
reader expects of him, but the local police find his attention to detail mildly
irritating.
I found Death Is No Sportsman to be an intriguing
mystery that always plays fair with the reader. It was so well written that I
enjoyed being guided along by Hare in the direction of the inevitable and satisfying
scene at the end. The suspects have all gathered in a room at the inn next to
the river where Mallet explains everything and the identity of the murderer is
revealed.
Death Is No Sportsman was first published in 1938.
Madness
and witchcraft in a village that seems to be living in the Middle Ages
The Devil at Saxon Wall is the sixth Mrs Bradley mystery
Probably the
most bizarre Mrs Bradley mystery yet, The Devil at Saxon Wall, the sixth novel
about the eccentric psychoanalyst and amateur detective, published in 1935, is
the first of a number of Gladys Mitchell’s books to feature the theme of
witchcraft.
The story was
inspired after Gladys heard a lecture on witchcraft by her friend, the
detective fiction writer Helen Simpson, and she dedicated this book to her.
Mrs Bradley
has advised her best-selling novelist friend, Hannibal Jones, who has had a
breakdown and is suffering from writer’s block, to retreat to a quiet, rustic
village to find rest and inspiration for his work.
Although the
village of Saxon Wall might seem the perfect rural escape to begin with, Jones soon
finds himself intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers and their
pagan beliefs.
He also
finds himself compelled to try to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding
Neot House, a place where a young couple died soon after the birth of their
first child.
It is a hot
summer and the villagers are desperate for rain because they are short of
water. They decide the local vicar is to blame for the lack of water and Jones
has to step in to defend him when their anger drives them to march on the
vicarage armed with weapons.
Gladys Mitchell tells the story with the skill that was her hallmark
Jones makes
some enquiries to try to sort out what happened to two babies who he thinks may
have been swapped at birth, but when a man from the village is found bludgeoned
to death, he decides he must call in Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley to help
him.
The strangely
dressed old lady with her hideous cackle is more than a match for the angry
villagers and she proceeds to root out the devil at Saxon Wall using her own unique
and unorthodox methods.
At the end
of the novel, Mrs Bradley expresses the opinion that the inhabitants of Saxon
Wall are incapable of making straightforward statements. She thinks that this
peculiarity dates back to the days of the Norman conquest when the Saxons of those
parts, too cunning to tell direct lies to their overlords, resorted to
maddening half statements and obscure pronouncements, which made them difficult
to understand.
Although the
characters and situations are bizarre, the novel presents an intriguing mystery
which Mrs Bradley skilfully unravels and the story is well told by Gladys, who
helpfully provides ‘End Papers’ to clarify issues for the reader.
I found The
Devil at Saxon Wall entertaining and enjoyable and well worth reading.
An award
winning masterpiece by the Queen of Crime
The latest HarperCollins reprint of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha
Christies’s sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was voted ‘the best crime
novel ever’ by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 2013.
Published in
1926, the book remains Agatha’s best known and most controversial novel because
of its ingenious final twist, which had a significant impact on the detective
fiction genre and has been imitated by many other writers since.
Agatha, who
died on 12 January, 1976 - 47 years ago today - has become famous for being the supreme
exponent of the old-fashioned English crime novel. Her skill in constructing
complex and puzzling plots and her ability to deceive readers until the very
last page, or paragraph, are unequalled.
But this
third Poirot novel, narrated by the local physician, Doctor Sheppard, in the
absence of Captain Hastings, who has gone to start a new life in the Argentine,
is considered by many readers and critics to be her masterpiece.
Wealthy
businessman turned country squire Roger Ackroyd lives in a charming English
country village, where dark secrets and dangerous emotions lurk beneath the
apparently calm surface.
When Ackroyd
is murdered, stabbed in the neck while sitting in his study after a dinner
party at his home, there are, as usual, plenty of suspects.
Poirot, who
has just come to live in the village, after retiring to grow marrows,
lives next door to Dr Sheppard. He is asked by a member of Ackroyd’s family to
investigate the murder because they are worried the police will get it wrong. Suspicion
has fallen on Ackroyd’s stepson, Ralph, who is a popular young man locally.
Agatha Christie died 47 years ago today at the age of 85
After many
twists and turns, Poirot gathers all the suspects together in his sitting room
after dinner one night and reveals the extraordinary and unexpected identity of
the killer.
According to
The Home of Agatha Christie, the author’s own website, The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd was ‘the book that changed Agatha Christie’s career’. It was the first
of her novels to be published by William Collins, which later became part of
HarperCollins, who remain Agatha’s publishers today and attracted enormous
attention in the media at the time.
Following her death, Agatha Christie's body was buried four days later after a service at St
Mary’s Church in the village of Cholsey in Oxfordshire.
The
inscription on her tombstone is a quotation from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie
Queen:
‘Sleepe
after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after
war, death after life, does greatly please.’
Dickson's story appears in the collection A Surprise for Christmas
Golden Age
mystery writers wrote many excellent short stories as well as the novels they were
famous for, and they loved to turn their hand to writing short, seasonal detective
stories for the periodicals published over the festive season.
Persons or
Things Unknown was written by one of only two American writers admitted to the
prestigious British Detection Club, Carter Dickson, who was much admired by his
fellow Golden Age writers for his locked room mysteries.
Carter
Dickson was one of the pen names for John Dickson Carr, who lived in England and
wrote most of his novels and short stories with English settings. He wrote
Persons or Things Unknown for The Sketch, a weekly illustrated journal, for
their Christmas edition in 1938.
Dickson
served up a locked room mystery in a spooky setting with a historical
background, which is perfect entertainment for whiling away an afternoon in
December or January in front of a fire as a guest in someone’s unfamiliar, and
not particularly comfortable, house.
Persons or
Things Unknown has the reign of King Charles II as its background. When it was
written, it was far less common to combine mystery with history, particularly
in short story form, than it is now.
John Dickson Carr wrote under a number of pseudonyms
A group of
guests have gathered after dinner in the drawing room of ‘a long, damp,
high-windowed house, hidden behind a hill in Sussex.’ Their host has just bought the property and
the party after Christmas is also meant to be a house warming.
One of the
guests, who narrates the story, tells us that the smell of the past was in the
house and that you could not get over the idea that ‘someone was following you
about.’
The host alarms
the group of guests by saying he wants to know if it is safe for anyone to
sleep in the little room at the top of the stairs. He says he has ‘a bundle of
evidence’ about ‘something queer’ that once happened in the room.
He then
tells them he has been given a diary in which the writer says he once saw a man
hacked to death in the little room at the top of the stairs. The man’s body is
alleged to have had 13 stab wounds caused by ‘a weapon that wasn’t there, which
was wielded by a hand that wasn’t there’.
The diary tells
the story of the beautiful young daughter of the house, who was once engaged to
a local landowner. Then along came a fashionably dressed young man from the
court of the newly restored King Charles II, who fell for her and was determined to win her hand
in marriage. The subsequent dramatic events led to a seemingly impossible
murder in the little room at the top of the stairs, which used to be called The
Ladies’ Withdrawing Room. It was a mystery that no one had ever been able to
solve.
The host
then puts all the facts he has been able to discover before his guests, who
include a policeman and an historian, and invites them to come up with a
solution.
The Hollow Man is regarded as Dickson Carr's masterpiece
John Dickson
Carr was born in Uniontown in Pennsylvania in 1906 and moved to England in the
1930s, where he married an Englishwoman and began writing mysteries. He was
published under the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger
Fairbairn.
Most of his
novels had English settings and English characters and his two best-known
fictional detectives, Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, were both
English. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of Golden Age mysteries.
He was influenced by his enthusiasm for the stories of Gaston Leroux and became
a master of the locked room detective story in which a seemingly impossible
crime is solved. His 1935 Dr Fell mystery, The Hollow Man, is considered his
masterpiece and was selected as the best locked room mystery of all time in
1981 by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers.
Persons or
Things Unknown was republished by the British Library in 2020 in A Surprise For
Christmas, a collection of seasonal mysteries selected by the crime writer Martin
Edwards.
In his
introduction to Persons or Things Unknown, Edwards says the author ‘blends
historical atmosphere with a pleasing locked room mystery in the form of an
inverted detective story of the kind first popularised by R. Austin Freeman.’
In my
opinion, this pleasing locked room mystery by Carter Dickson, which takes up
just 20 pages of the book, would be the perfect post lunch, or post dinner, winter
diversion.
Inspector
Mallett joins the ranks of fictional detectives who like a good lunch
Tenant for Death is published by Faber and Faber
When two
young estate agent’s clerks are sent to check an inventory on a house in South
Kensington they find the dead body of a man on the premises, an item that was
definitely not on their list.
Tenant for
Death, published in 1937, is the first crime novel written by the detective
novelist Cyril Hare, and it introduces his series sleuth, the formidable
Inspector Mallett of Scotland Yard.
Set in the
world of high finance as it was in the 1930s, Tenant for Death is ‘an ingenious
story’ to use the words of the Times Literary Supplement review. It provides
Mallett with a difficult and puzzling mystery to solve and establishes the
Inspector as a thinking detective with a love of good food.
The murder
victim turns out to be a businessman who had a lot of enemies. The police spend
a great deal of time trying to establish the identity of the mysterious man who
has rented the house where the body has been found and we do not find out who
he really was and what has become of him until the last pages of the book.
Some of the
suspects are extremely plausible characters in their own right and the reader
can feel varying degrees of sympathy for them.
The author
shows his detailed knowledge of the legal district of London as we follow
Mallett along its streets and through its alleyways. I thought Tenant for Death
was very well written and an interesting story, considering it was Hare’s first
published detective novel.
Cyril Hare
was, in fact, the pen name for Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, who was born in
1900 in Mickleham in Surrey and became a barrister and a judge.
Cyril Hare was a psuedonym for the barrister Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark
The
writer’s pseudonym was derived from a mixture of Hare Court, where he was in chambers
as a barrister in London, and Cyril Mansions, where he lived.
Hare also wrote
many short stories for the London Evening Standard and some radio and stage
plays and he was a keen member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and many other famous crime writers.
After the
war, Hare - as Clark - was appointed a county court judge in Surrey. He died in
1958, when he was at the peak of his career as a judge and at the height of his
powers as a master of the whodunnit.
In 1990,
when the British Crime Writers’ Association published their list of The Top 100
Crime Novels of All Time, they awarded the 85th place to Hare’s 1942 novel, Tragedy
at Law, which is considered by many to be his best work.
Although I
enjoyed Tragedy at Law when I reviewed it for this website, I actually preferred
Tenant for Death, finding it a more compelling story with well-drawn characters
and a very clever ending.
Author
departs from tradition by letting her detective fall in love
Strong Poison is the fifth of Dorothy L Sayers's Wimsey novels
Dorothy L
Sayers allows her noble sleuth to have a love interest in Strong Poison, the
fifth novel she wrote featuring the exploits of amateur detective Lord Peter
Wimsey.
The author
introduces the character of Harriet Vane, a crime novelist, who, like Wimsey,
is Oxford educated and has had an unhappy time romantically.
When Wimsey
sees Harriet Vane for the first time, she is in the dock, accused of the murder
of her ex-lover, the poet Philip Boyes.
Strong
Poison, which was published in 1930, is considered to be a major departure for a
Golden Age mystery as it shows the detective falling in love with a woman
accused of the murder that is central to the plot.
Dorothy L
Sayers fans have speculated that the writer modelled Harriet Vane on herself. The
writer had suffered a romantic disappointment and by creating the long-drawn-out
romance between Harriet Vane and Wimsey, which was to run through four novels,
it allowed her to have a vicarious affair with the detective herself, far-fetched
though this might seem now.
Dorothy had
been very impressed with the novel Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published
in 1913. In the story, the detective, Philip Trent, falls in love with the wife
of the murder victim.
Right until the end of the novel the reader does not know
for certain that the wife is not the murderer. E C Bentley’s novel was intended
as a send up of the classic crime story and it also involves the hero detective
identifying the wrong person as the murderer close to the end of the story,
completely at odds with the conventions of the genre. But Dorothy, along with
many other readers, really liked the novel and went on record as saying that
Bentley’s novel ‘holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction.’
In Strong
Poison, the victim, Harriet’s ex-lover Philip Boyes, has died from arsenic poisoning.
He has attempted to engineer a reconciliation with Harriet on the night of his
death and she has given him a cup of coffee while listening to what he had to
say. She is accused of the murder because she is found to have bought poison
under an assumed name. She has claimed this was to test one of the plot points
in the crime novel she is currently writing.
Sayers herself had suffered a romantic disappointment
Fortunately,
the trial results in a hung jury and the judge has to order a retrial. With no
time to lose, Wimsey visits Harriet in prison to tell her he is convinced of
her innocence and is determined to catch the real murderer. He also asks her to
marry him, but she turns him down politely.
The jury has
failed to return a unanimous verdict because one person sitting on it could not
bring herself to believe in Harriet’s guilt. This is Miss Katharine Climpson, a
spinster who, coincidentally, sometimes works for Wimsey by carrying out
inquiries and undercover work because she has to live in difficult financial circumstances
and needs to earn some money.
As well as being
an intriguing mystery, Strong Poison explores some of the issues of the time,
such as sex before marriage and the double standards that were applied to the
behaviour of men and women. The novel is intricately plotted and written in a
very entertaining style and I would highly recommend that you read it.
Author was a
bank clerk by day and a novelist by night
A new edition of Murder in Blue was published in 2021
Clifford
Witting, who was born on this day in 1907, 115 years ago today, in Lewisham in
Kent, was one of the younger of the
Golden Age mystery writers. He worked as a clerk for Lloyds Bank during the day
and wrote 16 detective novels in the evenings, between 1937 and 1964.
His first
novel, Murder in Blue, was republished in 2021 by Galileo Publishers, making it
available again for present day fans of vintage detective stories to read and
enjoy. The novel was written while Witting was commuting to London for his day
job and he would work on it every night, despite the distractions of becoming a
young father.
Witting set
a lot of his mysteries in the small town of Paulsfield in the county of
Downshire behind the South Downs, which was based on the town of Petersfield in
Hampshire. He included many details about Petersfield as it was in the 1930s,
even describing the statue of King William III mounted on a horse that stands
in the market place, although in the fictional town of his novel, he says it is
the statue of a local lord.
He had a
flair for describing settings and wrote in a witty style. He also experimented with
the conventions of the detective story, showing his fascination with the genre.
His protagonist
in Murder in Blue, John Rutherford, runs a bookshop that stocks detective
fiction. He employs a young assistant, George, who is fascinated with whodunits
and is thrilled when his employer becomes involved in a real-life murder case.
Rutherford
is out walking one evening when he discovers the body of a young police officer
lying in a lane on the outskirts of the town. The police officer appears to have
been bludgeoned to death. Rutherford tries to think quickly and uses what he believes
to be the police officer’s bicycle to cycle to the police station and report
the tragedy.
Clifford Witting worked as a bank clerk by day
He is later taken
back to the scene of the crime by the investigating officer, Inspector
Charlton, so that he can point out the tracks he himself has left in the sodden
ground and help the Inspector identify any clues that have been left by the
murderer. He is also called to give evidence at the inquest and soon becomes on
friendly terms with the detective.
The story is
given additional interest by the complication that Rutherford has recently
fallen in love with a beautiful young woman after their cars collided in the
fog. A love interest in a detective story was frowned on in those days by other
Golden Age writers, but in Murder in Blue it is an additional source of
suspense for the reader. I found myself wondering how the relationship would turn
out and whether it would have anything to do with the murder.
Witting’s
two series characters, Sergeant - later Inspector - Peter Bradford and Inspector
Harry Charlton, appear in most of his 16 books.
During World
War II, Witting served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery and a Warrant
Officer in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He joined the Detection Club in 1958,
11 years after the original publication of Murder in Blue, at a time when
Agatha Christie was the president. Witting died in 1968 in Surrey.
Newspaper
critics of the time gave his books good reviews, saying he produced interesting
puzzles with ingenious solutions and that he played fair with the reader. I
would definitely recommend Murder in Blue, as I think it is a good read and keeps
up the whodunit element well. The novel also provides an interesting snapshot
of life at the time it was set.
The creator of academic sleuth Dr Priestley also invented Eric the Skull
Cecil Street, whose pen names included John Rhode
The writer known as John Rhode, who wrote 72 detective novels featuring the academic turned amateur detective, Dr Priestley, was born as Cecil John Charles Street 138 years ago today in Gibraltar.
Street also wrote 61 Desmond Merrion crime novels under the pseudonym Miles Burton and several detective stories under the pen name Cecil Waye.
He served as an artillery officer in the British Army and during World War I became a propagandist for MI7, rising to the rank of Major.
After the war, Street worked in both London and Dublin as an Information Officer during the Irish War of Independence.
Street produced his first detective novel, The Paddington Mystery, featuring Dr Priestley, under the pseudonym John Rhode in 1925. He then wrote at least one Dr Priestley novel a year, sometimes more.
Writing as Miles Burton, his Desmond Merrion novels began in 1930 and went on until 1960. He also wrote other non-series novels, short stories, radio plays, stage plays and non-fiction.
The Dr Priestley books are classics of scientific detection, with the elderly academic demonstrating how apparently impossible crimes have been carried out.
In The
Paddington Mystery, a young man, Harold Merefield, returns to his lodgings in
the early hours after visiting a night club to find the dead body of a man
lying on his bed. Although an inquest gives a verdict of death by natural
causes, Harold finds his reputation is tarnished as a result of all the
publicity and he is determined to solve the mystery to prove the death had
nothing to do with him.
The great Dorothy L Sayers, pictured with Eric the Skull
He turns to
an old friend of his father’s, Professor Lancelot Priestley, a mathematician, for
help. Dr Priestley is an armchair detective, who sometimes helps the police. He
solves mysteries through logical reasoning, guided by facts and facts alone,
not by flashes of intuition or guesswork. Some of the scenes, where Dr
Priestley, does most of the talking because he hates to be interrupted, seem long
and unexciting, but as he considers each fact on its merits and chooses to accept
it, or discard it, he takes the characters and the readers nearer and nearer to
the truth.
Dr Priestley
was an immediate success with the public and Street, as John Rhode, quickly produced
another six novels about his cases.
By 1930,
Street was no longer just a distinguished, retired army Major, he had written
25 books under various pseudonyms and he was still only 45 years old.
Street was a founding member of the prestigious Detection Club in 1930, where crime writers dined together regularly to discuss their craft. He edited Detection Medley, the first anthology of stories by members of the club and also contributed to the club’s first two round robin detective novels, The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman, along with other distinguished writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers.
Perhaps Street’s most important contribution to the club was Eric the Skull, which he wired up with lights so that the eye sockets glowed red during the initiation ceremony for new members. Eric is said to participate in the initiation rituals for new members to this day.
Cecil Street died at the age of 80 in 1964 in Eastbourne.
.jpg "Tenant for Death is published by Faber and Faber")
.jpg "Sayers herself had suffered a romantic disappointment")
.jpg "Cecil Street, whose pen names included John Rhode")
