Dorothy Sayers – The Anatomy of Murder (страница 1)

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

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This edition published 2014

First published in Great Britain by John Lane, The Bodley Head 1936

Copyright © The Detection Club 1936, 2014

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Source ISBN: 9780007569687

Ebook Edition © MAY 2014 ISBN: 9780007569694

Version: 2014-07-14

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

PART

I DEATH OF HENRY KINDER

Helen Simpson

II CONSTANCE KENT

John Rhode

III THE CASE OF ADELAIDE BARTLETT

Margaret Cole

IV AN IMPRESSION OF THE LANDRU CASE

E. R. Punshon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V THE MURDER OF JULIA WALLACE

Dorothy L. Sayers

VI THE RATTENBURY CASE

Francis Iles

DEDICATION

VII A NEW ZEALAND TRAGEDY

Freeman Wills Crofts

KEEP READING

OTHER BOOKS BY

NOTES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

BY MARTIN EDWARDS

THE DETECTION CLUB was established in 1930 thanks to the initiative and drive of Anthony Berkeley, who wanted to create a social network of the leading detective novelists of the day. Berkeley was fascinated by criminology, as were many of his colleagues, and discussion about real life murder cases was a feature of Detection Club meetings. The prospect of playing detective themselves enthralled Club members, and they loved to discover and debate new angles on famous crimes, whether or not they had officially been “solved”.

The Club funded its dinners, and the cost of renting premises at 31 Gerrard Street, Soho, through ventures such as the “round-robin” mysteries Behind the Screen and The Scoop, and the collectively produced novels The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman. The Club’s leading lights were restless innovators in their fiction, and they liked to avoid repeating themselves. Given their shared interest in true crime (one illustration among many is the fact that the macabre Crumbles bungalow murder of 1924 provided raw material for The Scoop), it was almost inevitable that they should decided to put together a book of essays about intriguing cases. The highly successful result was The Anatomy of Murder, published in 1936.

Nobody is named as editor of the book, but it seems that Helen Simpson took on the job of liaising with the publishers and collating the essays, as well as writing one herself. The short Foreword reflects an ambitious approach characteristic of the Club’s projects. The writers were not content simply to recount the facts of their cases. They aimed to add value by including new information, making use of modern investigative techniques, or by seeking to examine the psychology of the characters in the story.

In “Death of Henry Kinder”, Simpson re-examined a nineteenth century case in which “the assassin had at one time some notion of dressing the part, and purchased a red Crimean shirt, on which bloodstains would not be conspicuous; but the crime itself was committed … in the ordinary sombre undress of a dentist.” Kinder lived in Sydney, and the essay begins with a short discussion about crime in Australia. Helen de Guerry Simpson was herself born in Sydney in 1897, 32 years after Kinder met his end. Her father was a solicitor, her grandfather a French marquis, and after her parents separated, she and her mother moved to Europe. She attended Oxford University, and was a co-founder of the Oxford Women’s Dramatic Society, but was sent down for breaking university rules which banned male and female students from acting together. She became a prolific author, producing poetry, plays, translations and short stories as well as novels such as Acquittal, and contributed dialogue to Hitchcock’s film Sabotage. In 1927 she married fellow Australian Denis Browne, a surgeon whose uncle wrote Robbery under Arms, using the pen-name Rolf Boldrewood, name-checked in the first sentence of “Death of Henry Kinder”.

Simpson’s major contribution to detective fiction was the three books she co-wrote with Clemence Dane, also a Detection Club member. The first, Enter Sir John, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder! Writing solo, she produced in 1931 an unusual and eccentric crime novel, Vantage Striker (re-titled The Prime Minister is Dead when published in the US), and achieved both commercial success and literary acclaim with her non-criminous novel Boomerang in 1932. Sarabande for Dead Lovers and Under Capricorn were filmed, the former by Ealing Studios and the latter by Hitchcock. Simpson’s talents and interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging, and included riding, music, cooking and collecting antiques. She was adopted as Liberal Parliamentary candidate for the Isle of Wight in 1938, but cancer cut her life short, much to the distress of her close friend, Dorothy L. Sayers, who said, “I have never met anybody who equalled her in vivid personality and in the intense interest she brought into her contacts with people and things”.

Just as an essay about a killing in the Antipodes opened the book, so “A New Zealand Tragedy” by Freeman Wills Crofts closed it. Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) was an Irish-born railway engineer who beguiled a long illness by writing a detective novel. The Cask, which appeared in 1920, made much more of a splash than Agatha Christie’s debut novel, published at about the same time, and launched a long career. Crofts’ speciality was meticulous investigation, and his principal detective, Inspector French, was unequalled in the art of dismantling seemingly unbreakable alibis. Crofts’ mastery of detail equipped him perfectly for the analysis of real life crime, and he took as his subject the Lakey murder case of 1933. The key elements of the story are worthy of Inspector French: “detective work of an extremely high order, involving persevering research, precise observation and deduction, magnificent team work and the use of the latest scientific methods.” Crofts’ concludes his account with the observation that: “Real life stories have an atmosphere of sordidness and evil which is happily absent from almost all detective novels.” Suffice to say that times and tastes in fiction have changed a good deal since those words were written.

The Kinder and Lakey cases are today little discussed, but the second essay in the book—which again has a connection with Sydney—tackled a murder that ranks as a classic, and was explored in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a best-seller which has spawned a television series. John Rhode, another good friend of Sayers, was ideally qualified to write “Constance Kent”, as he had previously been responsible for The Case of Constance Kent, an entry in the Famous Trials series. Rhode’s real name was Cecil John Street (1884–1965) and after a varied career encompassing distinguished service in the army, working as an electrical engineer, and writing non-fiction books about international affairs, he turned to detective fiction with aplomb, producing well in excess of one hundred novels, many of them featuring the irascible armchair detective Dr. Priestley.

Months after his book about Constance Kent appeared, Rhode received an anonymous letter from Sydney, challenging some of his statements about the case. He believed it had been written by Constance herself, but a handwriting “expert” disagreed. Not until further research took place in the Seventies was Rhode’s theory vindicated. “The Sydney document” helped to shape Rhode’s essay in The Anatomy of Murder, as he explored Constance’s “elusive personality”. Here he shows rather more interest in criminal psychology than he did in many of his novels, where the emphasis is on ingenious methods of murder—howdunit, rather than whydunit. Rhode donated the original letter to the Detection Club’s library, although depressingly this unique item of criminal history, like the Club’s Minute Book, seems to have gone astray during the Second World War, and has never turned up since.

The Constance Kent case so intrigued Sayers that she indulged in some private sleuthing of her own, annotating her copy of Rhode’s book about the trial with her thoughts on aspects of the mystery. When Rhode discussed the “nerve” of the murderer, she referred back to the case that inspired The Scoop, pointing out that Patrick Mahon invited a woman back to the bungalow where he had killed Emily Kaye the night before, and slept with her there, with his victim’s corpse in the next room.