Dorothy Sayers – The Anatomy of Murder (страница 2)

Margaret Cole (1893–1980) tackled an equally celebrated Victorian mystery, “The Case of Adelaide Bartlett”, concerning a woman whose husband died of chloroform poisoning after the couple had become involved in a ménage-a-trois with a vicar. The essay appeared under Margaret’s name alone, although all her detective novels appeared as joint productions with her husband Douglas, better known as the left-wing economist G.D.H. Cole, and also a founder member of the Detection Club. By the mid-Thirties, Douglas was in poor health, and although he continued to write with feverish productivity, his wife came to take a much greater interest in the Detection Club than he did. Margaret was a feisty radical, whose views on politics and society were very different from Sayers—who, along with Anthony Berkeley, was the prime mover of the Club’s activities—but she enjoyed the social side of their get-togethers. She also shared with Douglas a fondness and admiration for G.K. Chesterton, first President of the Detection Club, who died a few weeks before The Anatomy of Murder was published.

Margaret Cole’s contribution to this book was her most significant venture into the field of true crime, but the Bartlett mystery has exerted a lasting appeal for detective novelists. The ingredients of sex, death and a puzzle are irresistible, and Hitchcock thought about turning the story into a film, Raymond Chandler said the events in the case were “relatively simple to tell, but completely goofy”, and in 1980, one of Chesterton’s successors as Club President, Julian Symons, factionalised the story in Sweet Adelaide, a novel offering a clever explanation of the conundrum at the heart of the case.

Ernest Robertson Punshon (1872–1956) was perhaps the least renowned contributor to The Anatomy of Murder, both at the time of publication and today, yet he was a talented writer who finally hit his stride in his sixties after a long literary apprenticeship. In his fifteenth novel, Information Received, published in 1934, he introduced the young police constable Bobby Owen, and Owen progressed up the ranks in a long series of books which often articulated distinctive and radical views on politics and society. “Business as Usual: an Impression of the Landru case” considers the criminal career of Henri Landru, a serial killer convicted of eleven murders. The essay is adorned with touches that illustrate why Sayers—a discerning but often acerbic critic—used to enthuse about his writing. An encomium from her review of Information Received adorned the covers of many of Punshon’s later books, and although there is something of the curate’s egg about Punshon’s work, at his best he was, as Sayers insisted, a writer of distinction.

Sayers’ interest in true crime is apparent in several of her novels, above all in The Documents in the Case, published in 1930, and written in collaboration with another Detection Club member, Robert Eustace. The story is influenced by the controversial case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, lovers who were tried for the murder of Thompson’s husband. Nowadays, the hanging of Edith Thompson is widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice, but Sayers lacked sympathy for Edith, and helps to explain why the characterisation in the book is not of the same high standard as the scientific concept underpinning the mystery and the epistolary style which Sayers adapted from a novelist whom she much admired, Wilkie Collins. In “The Murder of Julia Wallace”, however, Sayers showed much deeper understanding of the central character in the drama, an insurance agent accused of battering his wife to death in their Liverpool home.

She argued that the mystery “provides for the detective novelist an unrivalled field for speculation.” If Wallace was guilty, “then he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels; and if he was innocent, then the real murderer was still more typically the classic villain of fiction.” At a time when detective novelists, with Anthony Berkeley in the vanguard, were setting up multiple possible solutions to fictional crimes, Sayers suggested that such ingenuity was not as unrealistic as it might seem. In the Wallace case, there was “no single incident which is not susceptible of at least two interpretations, according to whether one considers that the prisoner was, in fact, an innocent man caught in a trap or a guilty man pretending to have been caught in a trap.” These are compelling ingredients for a novelist, and the Wallace story has provided plot material for numerous detective novels—Sayers noted two early examples in the bibliography she appended to her essay. Two more came from the pen of the industrious Rhode: Vegetable Duck appeared in 1944 and The Telephone Call four years later. Much later, elements of the case informed P.D. James’ The Skull Beneath the Skin and The Murder Room.

For Sayers, character and psychology were crucial to a proper analysis of whether or not Julia Wallace was murdered by her husband: “Though a man apparently well-balanced may give way to a sudden murderous frenzy, and may even combine that frenzy with a surprising amount of coolness and coming, it is rare for him to show no premonitory or subsequent symptoms of mental disturbance. This was one of the psychological difficulties in the way of the prosecution against Wallace.… The mind is indeed peculiar and the thoughts of the heart hidden. It is hopeless to explain the murder of Julia Wallace as the result of a momentary frenzy, whether Wallace was the criminal or another.”

Guarded though her conclusions were, it seemed that they were vindicated by research undertaken years after her death. True crime expert Jonathan Goodman and journalist Roger Wilkes made a convincing case that one of Wallace’s work colleagues committed the murder. The Wallace case has, however, never ceased to entrance crime writers. Margery Allingham wrote a short essay about the case, “The Compassionate Machine”, which surfaced recently, although it was unpublished during her lifetime. Chandler considered writing about the case for the American Weekly; he called it “The Impossible Murder … the nonpareil of murder cases”, but decided not to go ahead because “it has been done to a turn by Dorothy Sayers”—evidence that he read The Anatomy of Murder, and was impressed. He made detailed notes about the circumstances surrounding the death of Julia Wallace, and concluded that it “will always be unbeatable”. As if to prove his point, during the past few years, doubts have surfaced again about Wallace’s innocence, and P.D. James, a long-standing member of the Detection Club, recently contributed a thoughtful article to the Sunday Times Magazine which came to a very different conclusion from Sayers. The continuing swirl of speculation about Julia Wallace’s murder demonstrates the lasting appeal of classic true crime cases—they are open to endless reinterpretation.

Sayers had a complicated friendship with the founder of the Detection Club, Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971). He wrote most of his novels under the name Anthony Berkeley, but also earned a distinct reputation with ironic studies of criminal psychology published under the pseudonym Francis Iles, had a good deal in common with Sayers. Like her, he was talented and highly intelligent, but he was also a difficult and troubled man. At first their relations were cordial, and Sayers worked closely with Berkeley in establishing the Detection Club on a firm footing. As time passed, however, the two forceful personalities clashed more than once—not least when Berkeley complained about Sayers’ delay in producing her contribution to The Anatomy of Murder, although this was due not to laziness on her part (far from it) but rather her relentless perfectionism.

“The Rattenbury Case” appeared under the Iles name. Perhaps this was an exercise in “branding”, since his work as Iles was generally more serious and substantial than most of the books which appeared under his real name, or as by Berkeley. Under both his pen-names, he often drew on classic cases for his fiction. The death of James Maybrick in Victorian Liverpool, for instance, inspired the second Berkeley book, The Wychford Poisoning Case, the Armstrong and Palmer cases influenced the first two Iles books, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact, and the Thompson-Bywaters case, which preoccupied him for years, supplied both plot elements and even the title of the third and final Iles book, As for the Woman.

Berkeley had long been disgusted by the hanging of Edith Thompson, and was struck by the similarities between her story and that of Alma Rattenbury. He argued—controversially, but not implausibly—that “if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.” For Berkeley, studying real life murder cases had an enduring appeal: “nothing outside fiction so effectually knocks down the front wall of a house and exposes its occupants in the details of their strange lives as does a trial for murder.” His essay is, by some distance, the longest in the book. Discussing the case gave him a chance to mount a hobby horse—the hypocrisy of English society about adultery: “To say that respect cannot exist between a man and woman whose relations are legally improper is just as silly as to say that respect invariably exists between married couples.”