Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 12)

In peacetime, the marriage ran into difficulties, and eventually they divorced. Margaret (known as Peggy to those close to her) remarried, but Berkeley stayed on surprisingly good terms with her. When he died, decades after their divorce, she received a legacy under his will. The image he liked to cultivate of a tight-fisted misanthrope was not the whole story.

Not long after Berkeley and Margaret split up, he put his own views into the mouth of his (unmarried) detective, Roger Sheringham: ‘I never think a first marriage ought to count, do you? One’s so busy learning how to be married at all that one can hardly help acquiring a kind of resentment against one’s partner in error. And once resentment has crept in, the thing’s finished.’ This is the best evidence we have about why the marriage collapsed.

Like so many other men returning to Britain after serving on the Front, Berkeley found it hard to adjust. He dabbled in activities ranging from farming, property management, and what he described as ‘social work’ (although he was scarcely a conventional do-gooder), to ‘work in a Government office’ (given his contempt for bureaucrats, that job was presumably short-lived). Keen on shooting, he became a good enough marksman to compete at Bisley, but amateur theatricals appealed to him even more, because they afforded a chance to assume a different personality. When his two-act comic opera, The Family Witch was performed in Watford, he played the Major-Domo, and Margaret designed the women’s costumes.

Berkeley contributed scores of humorous sketches to Punch and other periodicals. These included a Conan Doyle spoof written in the style of Wodehouse. He also wrote a series of sketches featuring a small girl, some of which were collected as Brenda Entertains, and a comic fantasy with elements of ‘biological science fiction’, The Professor on Paws, in which part of a dead scientist’s brain is transplanted into a kitten. He had a facility for catching on to what was currently popular, and detective fiction caught his fancy at a time when, as M. R. James said (drawing a contrast with the ghost story), ‘The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there.’

His first detective novel, The Layton Court Mystery, was published anonymously. The cover said the book was written by ‘?’. Berkeley wrote it ‘for pure amusement, just to see if I could,’ but it sold twenty times better than his earlier books. A country house mystery, it introduced the breezy nosy parker Roger Sheringham and his sidekick Alec Grierson. Berkeley made Sheringham rude and vain, ‘an offensive person, founded on an offensive person I once knew, because in my original innocence I thought it would be amusing to have an offensive detective’. This may explain why Sheringham is portrayed as anti-Semitic. Berkeley developed a taste for taking revenge through fiction that became an addiction.

Yet Sheringham bears an uncanny resemblance to his creator. The son of a doctor, from whom he has inherited a love of puzzles, he is educated at public school and Oxford before military service. He writes successful novels and also for the newspapers. Berkeley was talking about himself and people he knew when he said in a biographical note about Roger: ‘Privately, he had quite a poor opinion of his own books, combined with a horror of ever becoming like some of the people with whom his new work brought him into contact: authors who take their own work with such deadly seriousness, talk about it all the time and consider themselves geniuses.’

Roger comes up with a plausible explanation of who shot the blackmailer Victor Stanworth – only to find that he is wrong. This becomes a familiar pattern for Sheringham, the most fallible of ‘great’ detectives. When he does discover the truth, he helps the culprit to escape punishment, and this thwarting of conventional justice became his trademark. As Berkeley said, Sheringham’s self-confidence was limitless and he was ‘never afraid of taking grave decisions, and often quite illegal ones, when he thinks that pure justice can be served better in this way than by twelve possibly stupid jurymen’. The striking twist in this novel concerns the murderer’s identity. Months later, Agatha Christie used a similar ploy in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but took it a stage further.

An odd connection arose between Berkeley and Christie when, in March 1926, he serialized The Wintringham Mystery in the Daily Mirror. The newspaper offered a total of £500 in prizes to readers who provided the best answers to questions about the story: how did Stella disappear, and who caused her disappearance and why? When the prize winners were announced, one of the runners-up was Colonel Archie Christie, who was awarded five pounds. Presumably Agatha either helped her husband to solve the puzzle or entered the competition under his name. She had already won prize money for solving a previous newspaper mystery competition, but given her growing celebrity, may have been reluctant to enter as herself. Even better, the incident gave her the idea for a novel she wrote a few years later. The plot depends upon one character winning a competition prize under someone else’s name.

Sheringham’s second outing came in The Wychford Poisoning Case. At first, it was again published anonymously. Long after writing the book, Berkeley urged a correspondent to throw his copy into the incinerator, saying, ‘I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages.’ Yet the story offers clues to his own bizarre psychological make-up.

Spanking and sado-masochistic scenes crop up several times in Berkeley’s work. When the mother of Alec Grierson’s girlfriend Sheila Purefoy says that Sheila and most of her friends deserve a good spanking, Roger heartily agrees that a public spanker ought to be appointed. In a chapter accurately titled ‘Mostly Irrelevant’, Alec spanks Sheila in the presence of her father, who genially remarks, ‘Don’t mind me.’ A few chapters later, it is Roger’s turn to inflict discipline on Sheila, with a rolled-up magazine. Berkeley’s interest in spanking was matched by his loathing of bureaucrats, and a few years later he argued in O England! that ‘The President of the Metropolitan Water Board ought to be spanked publicly on Tower Green’ because of the Board’s failure to deal with water shortages.

Roger Sheringham is at his worst when he rants about women: ‘Most women are potential devils … They live entirely by their emotions … they are fundamentally incapable of reason and their one idea in life is to appear attractive to men.’ Yet Sheringham adds, ‘A man without his woman is only half an entity and … a woman … can … turn his life, however drab, into something really rather staggeringly wonderful.’ When Alec Grierson asks why Roger remains a bachelor, the answer is that ‘the right woman in my case … happens unfortunately to be married to someone else.’

Sheringham has few qualms about adultery. Attitudes were changing rapidly in the post-war era, and novels were becoming franker in their treatment of sex. Berkeley took advantage of this, and Sheringham was almost certainly expressing his creator’s opinions. The central mystery of Berkeley’s life is which particular married woman he thought, at that time, was the right woman for him.

Berkeley subtitled the novel ‘An Essay in Criminology’, and he based the plot on a classic Victorian poisoning puzzle. At the age of nineteen, Florence Chandler, a southern belle from Alabama with gold ringlets and large violet eyes, had a shipboard romance with an Englishman called James Maybrick. He was twenty-three years older, a portly man with a fondness for eating arsenic as an aphrodisiac. More appealingly, Maybrick had made a small fortune as a cotton broker, and Florence agreed to marry him. After settling into Battlecrease House, Maybrick’s home in the suburbs of Liverpool, she gave birth to a son and a daughter, but discovered that her husband had several mistresses, including one who had borne him five children. He also had a vile temper and an unshakeable belief that adultery was acceptable for husbands but not wives. When she had the temerity to take a lover of her own, he was so infuriated that he ripped her dress and blacked her eye.

Gloomy, gothic Battlecrease House made a suitably sinister setting for a macabre domestic mystery populated by a cast of inquisitive servants and members of a family hostile to the young American interloper. Florence bought flypapers from a chemist, and soaked them in bowls to extract arsenic from them – to use as a facial cream, she said. Her husband succumbed to a severe gastric illness, and when the children’s nanny intercepted compromising letters between Florence and her lover, she alerted Maybrick’s brother. The next day, a nurse saw Florence tampering with a bottle of meat juice in her husband’s bedroom; within twenty-four hours, he was dead. Florence was convicted of his murder, even thought there was doubt about whether arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. She fell victim to a fit of popular moral outrage fuelled by the Press, and a hostile summing-up from a judge, who was committed to an asylum two years later, after his sanity finally gave way.