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!
No Oxford degree for author but she found a good setting for a crime novel
The murder at the heart of this mystery occurs on the River Cherwell, still popular with students today
Death on the Cherwell, a classic Golden Age detective story by Mavis Doriel Hay published in 1935, is set in a fictitious women’s college in Oxford. The novel appeared during the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, which was also set in a women’s college in Oxford. Both settings were loosely based on the colleges the authors had attended themselves.
Mavis writes at the beginning of the first chapter: ‘Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult.’ The students featured in this novel come across as very young indeed, more like the girls in boarding school stories than intelligent students. Nevertheless, they make good amateur sleuths, who are as entertaining as they are industrious.
A group of first year girls, who have formed a secret society that meets on the roof of the Persephone College boathouse, come across the dead body of the college bursar lying in her canoe. She is later discovered to have drowned in the river but it is a mystery how her body ended up back in her own boat.
The police are called in but to begin with they assume it is a student prank that has got out of hand. However, the group of young ladies who found the body immediately suspect foul play and take the investigation into their own hands.
Led by Sally Watson, whose older sister, Beryl, appeared in Murder Underground, the first crime novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, the undergraduates uncover the tangled secrets that led to the bursar’s death and follow up clues that point in the direction of a fellow student.
The British Library Crime Classics edition of Death on the Cherwell
Mavis Doriel Hay, who was born on either 12 or 13 February 1894, 130 years ago, in Potters Bar in Middlesex, attended St Hilda’s College in Oxford between 1913 and 1916. She published three mystery novels within just three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell, and the Santa Klaus Murder.
After Murder Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times saying: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most feckless, exasperating, and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’
That exasperating literary man, Basil Pongleton makes an appearance in the author’s second novel, Death on the Cherwell, when he and his wife, Beryl, are visiting Beryl’s sister, Sally, in Oxford. But Sally doesn’t need any help from him to uncover the truth about the bursar’s death and her sleuthing efforts even earn her the respect of the investigating officer in the case, Detective Inspector Braydon.
Like Dorothy L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford when women were allowed into the university to study, but were not allowed to graduate, and so she left the university empty handed. But because she was interested in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain, she was later sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University to collaborate with another writer, Helen Fitzrandolph, on a series of works surveying rural industries
She went on to marry Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. Sadly, he was killed in a flying accident during World War II.
Mavis, who was also interested in quilting, went on to publish several books on crafts during her life. She died in 1979 at the age of 85.
Nearly 90 years after it was first published, Death on the Cherwell was republished by British Library Crime Classics. In his introduction to the novel in 2014, crime writer Stephen Booth regrets that Mavis Doriel Hay had such a short literary career and published just three detective novels. He says it is ‘even sadder’ that she was almost forgotten by crime fiction readers for so many years after her death and he was delighted that the British Library editions of her books were finally remedying that oversight.
I am sure lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get to know this author and will be fascinated by her portrayal of life inside a women’s college in Oxford, in the days when female students weren’t even considered worthy of being awarded degrees by the university they attended.
Buy Death on the Cherwell from or
(River Cherwell pic by Steve Daniels via Wikimedia Commons)
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.
Six people
didn’t regret the death of the victim, one of them committed murder
Five Red Herrings was the sixth Lord Peter Wimsey novel
Five Red
Herrings, published in 1931, has Galloway in Scotland as its backdrop and is peopled
by a large cast of colourful characters, many of who are artists who enjoy
fishing.
The novel is
the sixth by Dorothy to feature her amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, who is
holidaying in Scotland and amusing himself by living the simple life in a
cottage, although he is accompanied by his manservant, Bunter, who attends to
his every need.
Early in the
novel, Wimsey comes across the dead body of an artist in a stream and finds an
easel nearby with a half-finished painting that is still wet.
It is
assumed that the painter, Campbell, who is a heavy drinker and has quarrelled
with most of the other artists in the area, has fallen into the stream
accidentally and has fractured his skull, causing his death.
However,
Wimsey notices that there is an important item missing from the crime scene and
suspects Campbell has been murdered and that another artist has painted the
picture, skilfully faking Campbell’s distinctive style.
He shares
this information with the police officers who arrive at the scene, but Dorothy
doesn’t reveal to the reader the identity of the important missing item, although
she puts all the information Wimsey had at the time at the disposal of the
reader so they can work it out for themselves.
And so, once
again, we’re off! The police know of Wimsey’s reputation and invite the English
Lord to join the investigation, giving him full access to all the information
they obtain during their enquiries, which Dorothy shares with the reader.
Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey in the BBC TV adaptations of the stories
There are
six other artists living in the area who could have painted the picture in
Campbell’s style. They are all rather elusive and seem to have something to
hide. Wimsey concludes that five of them must be red herrings, but must
investigate them all. He visits all six in their workshops and hangs around,
watching them work and noting their individual habits.
It is complicated
for the reader to differentiate between the six artists and their various homes
and financial circumstances. Their alibis involve intricacies such as train
timetables, different bicycles, the technicalities of various ticket punchers at
stations and railway accounting procedure.
The reader
is not helped by Dorothy faithfully reproducing in her dialogue the different
Scottish accents and dialect words used by the characters, which sometimes makes
the novel a difficult read.
At the end
of the story, Wimsey carries out a
reconstruction of the events that take place during the 24 hours leading up to
the murder, to try to convince the police that his theory about the identity of
the murderer, which differs from their own, is the correct one.
It is a
complicated story, with perhaps too many suspects, but Dorothy plays fair with
the reader, as always, and makes it theoretically possible to work out the whodunit
element of the novel, if the reader is clever enough. She describes the Scottish
setting evocatively and convincingly, her knowledge of, and love for the area, shining
through.
Five Red
Herringswill particularly appeal to readers who enjoy the puzzle aspect of
detective novels.
A classic
mystery novel set in and around the Northern Line
The British Library Crime Classics edition of Murder Underground
Murder
Underground, the first detective novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, is underpinned by a
very clever plot. It has a satisfying ending and enjoyable resolution scenes that
wrap up the individual stories of the characters and I found it to be a very
good read.
First
published in 1934, during the Golden Age of British crime fiction, the setting
for this classic mystery novel is the Northern Line of the underground in
London.
When Miss Pongleton,
who is considered by others to be a tiresome old spinster, is found murdered on
the stairs at Belsize Park Station, her fellow boarders at the Frampton Hotel
are not exactly overwhelmed by grief, but they all have their theories about
the identity of her murderer.
They help to
unravel the mystery of who killed ‘Pongle’ with the help of Tuppy the terrier, the
victim’s dog, and each play their part in the events that lead to the dramatic conclusion.
There is of
course an official police investigation,
led by Inspector Caird, but he is in the background for most of the story and it
is the amateur sleuths at the Frampton Hotel who unearth the clues and finally make
sense of the different pieces of the puzzle.
Hay was born in February 1894 in Potters Bar in Middlesex. She attended St
Hilda’s College in Oxford from 1913 to 1916. She published three mystery novels
within three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell and
TheSanta Klaus Murder. Her second novel, Death on the Cherwell, appeared during
the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers and coincidentally both novels
were set in women’s colleges in Oxford.
After Murder
Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times
in 1934, saying: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The
numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most
feckless, exasperating, and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’
Like Dorothy
L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford before women were allowed to graduate. She was interested
in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain and, after leaving
university, she was sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute
of Oxford University to collaborate with Helen Fitzrandolph on a series of
works surveying the rural industries. Mavis was also interested in quilting and
published several books on crafts.
She married
Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. He was
killed in a flying accident during World War II. Mavis Doriel Hay died in 1979
at the age of 85.
Eighty years
after it was first published, Murder Underground was republished by British
Library Crime Classics in 2014. In his introduction to the new edition of the novel, crime writer
Stephen Booth said that Mavis Doriel Hay had been ‘unjustifiably overlooked.’
He also bemoaned the fact that her third detective novel, The Santa Klaus Murder, published in
1936, was sadly her last, and wondered whether the approach of World War II was
the reason for this.
I am sure
that lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get
to know this author now. I have to admit that I found Murder Underground to be a
slow starter, but I kept in mind the fact that it was Mavis’s first novel.
Novel's fascinating format makes for a compelling and ingenious murder mystery
The Documents in the Case is notable for its experimental format
A bundle of letters and statements can be daunting to sort out in real life, but when a reader is presented with the same challenge at the beginning of a detective novel, they might be put off from even starting to read the story.
However, when the author of the novel happens to be Dorothy L Sayers, I think most readers would probably be prepared to make the effort.
In The Documents in the Case,the sixth detective novel by the author, which was published in 1930, there will be a murder to be solved eventually, and two men will join forces to play detective. But that is about all this story has in common with Dorothy’s other detective novels featuring her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, who doesn’t appear in this book at all.
The murder victim is not discovered until page 135. By then Dorothy has introduced us to the main protagonists in the story by presenting us with a succession of letters that they have written to other people, which will eventually become part of a bundle of evidence presented to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
We learn a lot from all the letters about the relationship between an older man and his young wife, information that is destined to be sent to Sir Gilbert Pugh, Director of Public Prosecutions, which will ultimately lead to a murder conviction and a hanging.
Robert Eustace, the pen name for Eustace Robert Burton, a doctor and a writer of crime and mystery novels himself, was credited by Dorothy with supplying her with the plot idea for The Documents in the Case and with also giving her the supporting medical and scientific details to use.
The concept for the book was based on the ingenious idea of giving the reader all the evidence that the DPP will trawl through before deciding whether there is a case to answer.
I think Dorothy makes a success of this because she is a superb writer. Some of the letters written by the spinster, Agatha Milsom, who is working as housekeeper to the married couple, Mr and Mrs Harrison, that she sent regularly to her sister, Olive, reminded me of the letters in Jane Austen’s novels, written by characters to each other that help to move the plot forward without every scene having to be played out. Using the multiple viewpoints of the letter writers not only establishes their own characters with the reader, but also reveals their real opinions of the other characters.
My only, very slight criticism of the book is that the scientific evidence put before the reader at the end of the story was lengthy and hard for a non-scientist, such as myself, to understand completely. But I mention this as just the faintest of criticisms because I still persevered and read through it all and I think I just about understood it.
Sayers was given the idea for The Documents in the Case by a doctor friend
The story is essentially about people and their relationships and reveals how people see things very differently. The fact that there is a murder and therefore a whodunit element to the story was a bonus for me. Without it, there wouldn’t have been much incentive to read all the letters and statements!
Pulling out the essential truth about the case from each character’s version of events is a task that falls to the victim’s son, Paul, with the reader going along for the ride. I found The Documents in the Case to be a compelling story and a real page turner and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
It transpires that the victim died as a result of being poisoned by a substance that could either have been administered deliberately, or that they could have consumed it accidentally. It falls to scientific analysis of the poison to prove whether it was administered to the victim deliberately, or whether it could have been present in food naturally, and it is not easy for the pathologist to find out the truth.
Sadly, Dorothy is said to have been disappointed with the way The Documents in the Case turned out and she confessed to wishing she had done better with the brilliant plot she had been given by her doctor and writer friend, Eustace.
In my opinion she did extremely well with it, but it is up to other readers to pronounce their own, final judgments.
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.
The novel that
introduces the likeable but fallible Inspector Alan Grant
The Arrow edition of The Man in the Queue
A man is
found with a stiletto in his back, having been stabbed to death while queueing
for the last night of a popular West End show. The main problems for Inspector
Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, who is deployed to investigate the killing, are the
lack of clues to the victim’s identity and the fact that no one in the queue seems
to have seen what happened.
The Man in
the Queue, the first detective novel by Josephine Tey, was published in 1929,
just eight years after Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at
Styles, and six years after Dorothy L Sayers published her first novel, Whose Body?
But unlike
Poirot and Wimsey, Alan Grant is a detective by profession and not an amateur
sleuth. The novel is an early version of a police procedural and shows Grant
interacting with his superiors and subordinates and making use of the forensic
tools the police had at their disposal in the 1920s to try to solve the case.
Josephine Tey
was a pseudonym used by the writer Elizabeth MacIntosh, who was born in 1896 in
Scotland. She trained as a Physical Training instructor and taught at schools
in Scotland and England. In 1923 she returned to her family home in Inverness to care for
her invalid mother and keep house for her father and it was then that she began
writing.
The Man in
the Queue was her first mystery novel and introduced her series detective,
Inspector Alan Grant. It was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize after it was
published in America.
MacIntosh’s main
ambition was to write a play that would have a run in the West End and her
drama, Richard of Bordeaux, was such a success when it was first staged in 1932
that it was transferred to the New Theatre, now the Noel Coward Theatre, where
it had a year-long run and made a household name of its young leading man, John
Gielgud.
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth MacIntosh
As Josephine
Tey, MacIntosh produced six novels featuring Alan Grant. The fifth novel, The Daughter
of Time, published in 1951, was voted the greatest crime novel of all time by
the British Crime Writers Association in 1990.
There is a
lot to like about The Man in the Queue. There are beautiful descriptions of Tey’s
native Inverness, where she sends Grant in pursuit of a suspect. All the
characters, police and suspects alike, are interesting and believable. Grant is
a well-rounded policeman, not just a caricature, who is looked after by his
landlady, dines regularly at a French restaurant, and is popular with the
ladies, making me keen to read the next book in the series, A Shilling for Candles.
Perhaps the
most strikingthing about the novel is
the clever plot. Like other writers of the period, Tey is not afraid to show
Grant arresting the wrong man and feeling dissatisfied with his solution. She
also manages to keep the true identity of the murderer a secret right up to the
end.
The Man in
the Queue was republished by Arrow Books in 2011.
First
appearance by author turned sleuth Roger Sheringham
The paperback edition of The Layton Court Mystery
The Layton
Court Mystery, published in 1925, was the first detective novel by journalist
Anthony Berkeley Cox, who was to become one of the founding members of the
elite Detection Club.
His series
detective, Roger Sheringham, is one of the guests at acountry house party being held at a Jacobean
mansion called Layton Court. The character, who is an author, was to feature in another ten detective novels
and many short stories by Berkeley.
The party is being hosted by Victor Stanworth, a genial and hospitable man, aged
about 60, who has taken Layton Court for the summer to enable him to entertain
his friends in style.
At the start
of the book, Sheringham has been enjoying Stanworth’s generous hospitality for
three days until the party is given the grim news during breakfast that their
host appeared to have locked himself in the library and shot himself.
Sheringham
is not convinced that his host has committed suicide and sets out to
investigate the mystery himself, using his friend, Alec Grierson, who is also
in the party, as his ‘Watson’.
Anthony
Berkeley was just one of the pen names used by Anthony Berkeley Cox, who died
51 years ago today (9 March 1971). He also wrote novels under the names Francis
Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.
Anthony
Berkeley Cox helped found the Detection Club in 1930, along with Agatha
Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. It was to become an elite dining club for
British mystery writers, which met in London, under the presidency of G. K.
Chesterton. There was an initiation ritual and an oath had to be sworn by new
members promising not to rely on Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo
Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God in their work.
Berkeley Cox wrote 19 crime novels before returning to journalism
In The
Layton Court Mystery, Sheringham does not conceal anything from his friend,
Alec Grierson, and therefore the reader has the same information to help them
solve the crime as the detective himself.
I found The
Layton Court Mystery unexciting and stilted at the beginning, but the writing improved
a lot as the book progressed.
I thought Roger
Sheringham had the potential to be a good character, although some of the rather
fatuous dialogue at the beginning reminded me of Lord Peter Wimsey at the
start of Whose Body?the first novel by
Dorothy L Sayers that he appeared in.
Sheringham
sometimes tells Grierson what detectives in books would do in particular
circumstances, showing that the character, like his creator Berkeley, is a
devotee of the genre.
The amateur
detective jumps to a few wrong conclusions along the way and
follows up each of his theories until he accepts that they are disproved. He
tells the other characters that he is asking questions because he has ‘natural
curiosity’, to cover up the fact he is interrogating people he doesn’t really
know, which was not considered good form at the time.
He sometimes
says he is looking for material for his next novel and one of the characters
actually says to him: ‘Everything’s “copy” to you, you mean?’
He also
finds clues, such as a footprint, a hair, a piece of a broken vase and a trace
of face powder, to help him work out what has taken place in the library.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case sold more than a million copies
Anthony
Berkeley Cox was born in Watford in 1893 and educated at Sherborne School and
University College, Oxford. After serving as an officer in the First World War,
he began writing for magazines, such as Punch and The Humorist.
He wrote 19
crime novels between 1925 and 1939 before returning to journalism and writing
for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. From 1950 to 1970, the year
before he died, he contributed to the Manchester Guardian, later, the Guardian
newspaper.
Berkeley’s
amateur detective, Sheringham, had his most famous outing in The Poisoned
Chocolates Case, which was published in 1929. The novel received rapturous
reviews and sold more than one million copies. It is now regarded as a classic
of the Golden Age of detective fiction.
At times, The
Layton Court Mystery reminded me of Trent’s Last Caseby E C Bentley, published in 1913, which was
originally intended to be a skit on the detective story genre. Like Trent,
Sheringham doesn’t actually solve the case until the real murderer confesses to
him right at the end.
However, by
the end of The Layton Court Mystery, I had taken to Roger Sheringham and I now look
forward to reading the next book in the series.
The Layton
Court Mystery was first published in London by Herbert Jenkins in 1925 and in
New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1929. It was republished by
Spitfire Publications Ltd in 2021.
A well-plotted novel that offers a glimpse of life after the First World War
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is the fourth Wimsey novel
The fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, begins with Wimsey chatting with an acquaintance, Captain George Fentiman, in the bar of the Bellona Club on the evening of Armistice Day.
They joke about the club being like a morgue or funeral parlour, recalling a cartoon in the humorous magazine, Punch, in which an elderly member of a gentleman’s club summons a waiter to remove a fellow member from his chair on the grounds that he had been “dead for two days”.
Fentiman points out that his grandfather, General Fentiman, comes in every morning at 10 am, collects the Morning Post, settles into the armchair by the fire and becomes part of the furniture until the evening.
When Wimsey’s dinner companion, Colonel Marchbanks, arrives he goes to speak to General Fentiman who is still in his chair by the fire. He comes back to Wimsey and tells him something ‘rather unpleasant’ has happened.
It transpires that while they have been joking at the bar, old General Fentiman really was dead in his chair. A doctor is called and says rigor mortis is already well established.
Most of the action in the novel, first published in London in 1928, takes place in the fictional club for war veterans that Sayers has invented.
Doctor Penberthy, General Fentiman’s personal physician, certifies death by natural causes but is unable to give the exact time of his passing. This turns out to be rather crucial. As it happens, his wealthy sister had died on the morning of Armistice Day. If she had passed away first, the General would have inherited her fortune, which would then be left to his grandsons, Captain George and Major Robert Fentiman, who could both do with the money.
The brothers ask Wimsey to investigate, because unless they can prove that the General died after his sister, the entire fortune would go to her young, female companion.
Sayers was short of money until her novels took off
The novel paints an interesting picture of life in Britain after the First World War. Captain George Fentiman is still suffering from post-traumatic stress and his physical injuries have left him unable to work. He is dependent on his wife keeping them both on her earnings from a low-paid job and they are having to live in uncomfortable lodgings.
He is bitter that all he has been given by his country is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, and yet serving in the war has cost him his job, his income and his good health.
Sayers herself knew what it was like to live on a low income in London between the wars and did not become prosperous until her Lord Peter Wimsey novels became a success.
There was a time when she was so hard up and short of money for food she considered taking a job as a teacher. Finally, in her 30th year, she sold the detective novel she had been working on in her spare time, Whose Body? which introduces Lord Peter Wimsey.
Sayers herself said of her creation of Wimsey: ’At the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly… I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes.’
Once Wimsey has started his investigation on behalf of the brothers, he finds establishing the time of the General’s death difficult. Unusually, no one saw the old man arrive at the Club on the morning of Armistice Day and can swear to him having been alive at that point. Eventually, Wimsey has to have the body exhumed and re-examined.
After discovering that the General had been poisoned, Wimsey tracks down the murderer, who then shoots himself in the Bellona Club library.
More unpleasantness for the members of the club to complain about!
This fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel from Dorothy L Sayers, who was, in her day, judged to be one of the Queens of Crime, is definitely worth reading.
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
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.
.jpg "Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey in the BBC TV adaptations of the stories")
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.jpg "Sayers herself had suffered a romantic disappointment")
