Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 14)

In July 1928, he wrote a letter – in French, for some reason – to his agent, A. D. Peters about a play he was writing, and sent ‘Mes salutations à la belle Hélène.’ This is the first known record of his interest in Helen Peters (who was not French but Scottish, the daughter of MacGregor of Glengyle, a distant descendant of Rob Roy). Perhaps Helen was flattered. For all his faults, women found Berkeley attractive. He was rather like those handsome cads who so often crop up in Golden Age novels, and cannot be trusted with other men’s wives. Years later, Clarice Dickson Carr, wife of American detective author John, recalled that Berkeley was ‘very good looking in an English film star way’. And he did not lack stamina. As the Twenties drew to a close, in addition to writing prolifically and pursuing his amorous adventures, he was busily laying the foundations of the Detection Club.

Notes to Chapter 3

Edith Thompson never believed she would really hang

Among the many accounts of the Thompson–Bywaters case (which, as is invariably the way with discussion of past cases, contain much conflicting information) I have found René Weis’s Criminal Justice especially useful.

in George Orwell’s phrase, the end of an ‘Elizabethan Age’ of English murder

See Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Tribune, 15 February 1946.

Anthony Berkeley was appalled by Edith Thompson’s fate.

For convenience, I refer to authors such as Berkeley, Henry Wade, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, J. J. Connington, and Anthony Gillbert by their principal pseudonyms; they were for the most part known to their fellow Detection Club members by their pen names rather than by their real names. Sometimes their novels appeared under alternative titles, typically when an American publisher made a change. Titles mentioned in this book are generally those first used in the UK, although there are exceptions, notably Christie’s And Then There Were None.

In Berkeley, wit, charm and flair warred with demons.

Information about Berkeley’s life is notoriously hard to come by, and I am indebted to Malcolm J. Turnbull (author of Elusion Aforethought), George Locke (author, under the name Ayresome Johns, of a slim but informative volume about Berkeley’s writings), Arthur Robinson, Tony Medawar, and members of Berkeley’s family for supplying material that has proved invaluable in writing this book. Medawar and Robinson (jointly) and Locke have written informative introductions to two collections of Berkeley’s shorter work, The Avenging Chance and other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham’s Casebook, and the privately published The Roger Sheringham Stories respectively. William F. Stickland’s chapter ‘Anthony Berkeley Cox’ in Earl F. Bargainnier’s Twelve Englishmen of Mystery, and the sources he quotes, also offer useful insight.

Julian Symons … believing that Berkeley’s ‘ruddy-faced geniality’ concealed a disturbingly shy and secretive character.

Symons’ posthumous memories of Berkeley, quoted in Elusion Aforethought, appeared in an obituary for The Sunday Times on 14 March 1971, and in the Times Literary Supplement of 10 March 1978.

‘Detection and crime at its wittiest’, Agatha Christie said.

In ‘Detective Writers in England’; see CADS 58, December 2008, and below.

The glamorous Christianna Brand … said he once confided that there was ‘not one soul in the world he did not cordially dislike’.

Christianna Brand (1907–1988), a distinguished post-war practitioner of books in the Golden Age tradition, had mixed feelings about Berkeley, which she expressed in private correspondence with a younger Detection Club colleague, Robert Barnard (1936–2013), and in several versions of an essay which appeared as the Introduction to The Floating Admiral, on the book’s republication in the US in 1979; see also Tony Medawar, ed., ‘Detection Club Memories: Christianna Brand’, CADS 52, August 2007.

as M. R. James said …‘The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date …’

In an Introduction he wrote in 1924 to Ghosts and Marvels, edited by V. H. Collins.

An odd connection arose between Berkeley and Christie

See Tony Medawar, ‘On This Day: 9 April 1926’, CADS 64, November 2012.

The newspaper offered a total of £500 in prizes to readers who provided the best answers to questions about the story

During the Golden Age, prize competitions linked to detective stories were highly popular. They can be cost-effective marketing devices – if carefully handled. In 1905, Edgar Wallace offered £1,000 in prize money for readers who solved the puzzle in his debut thriller, The Four Just Men, and found himself courting bankruptcy as a result. Almost sixty years later, Len Deighton’s second spy novel, Horse Under Water, included a crossword with clues which could be solved through reading the novel. The clues were printed on the endpapers of first editions, and readers were given ten days to complete the puzzle; the first ten to send in correct solutions were awarded book tokens.

4

The Mystery of the Silent Pool

On the morning of Saturday 4 December 1926, a gypsy boy called George Best came across a Morris Cowley motor car at Newlands Corner, near Guildford in Surrey. The lights were on, but nobody was inside, although a fur coat and small suitcase had been left. The police soon traced the car to Agatha Christie, who lived with her husband in the stockbroker belt at Sunningdale in Berkshire. At the age of thirty-six, Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist, and the couple had named their house Styles, after the scene of the crime in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

When the police called at Styles, they spoke to Charlotte (‘Carlo’) Fisher, who acted as Christie’s secretary and helped to look after her daughter Rosalind. Carlo said the author had left home, driving off without telling anyone where she was going. According to Carlo, Christie had been unwell recently, and her family were worried about her. Christie’s husband Archie was staying with friends, along with his secretary Nancy Neele. He’d recently confessed to Agatha that he’d fallen in love with Nancy.

The police took Archie and Carlo to the spot where the car had been found. The news had already leaked out, and the car was surrounded by a crowd. The area rapidly became a magnet for sensation-seekers, and the Press salivated over the puzzle, indulging in feverish guesswork about the mysterious affair of the beautiful young writer, and her dashing war hero husband. Words of wisdom from Superintendent Kenward, the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey Police, featured prominently in their reports.

‘The most baffling mystery ever set me for solution’ was Kenward’s quotable description of the case. An early theory was that Agatha had crashed her car and wandered into nearby woodland in a disorientated state and become lost. The area was searched, with help from members of the public, but there was no sign of Agatha. When questioned by the police and newspapers, Archie was defensive. He dreaded the truth about his relationship with Nancy coming to light. The police guarded his house, and monitored his phone calls.

‘They suspect me of doing away with Agatha,’ he told a business colleague. To deflect suspicion, he revealed to the Daily News that his wife had been thinking of ‘engineering her disappearance’. The newspaper offered a £100 reward for information leading to her discovery, helpfully printing a set of photographs showing how she might have altered her appearance with a disguise.

Close to Newlands Corner, in a hollow shaded by box trees, lay the Silent Pool. Fed by underground springs, the water was clear and still. A woodcutter’s daughter had been surprised there by wicked King John, so legend said, while she was bathing naked. She drowned while trying to flee from him. Her ghost was seen by local people from time to time, floating on the surface of the pool.

Had Christie chosen this serene yet spooky place to end her life? There was only one way to find out. The Silent Pool was dredged with the aid of a pump and large grappling irons to slash the weeds. Tractors and a light aircraft scoured the countryside, and dogs searched the land. They found no sign of a corpse.

With each passing day, the theories became wilder. A clairvoyant called in by the Daily Sketch suggested that Agatha’s body might be found in a log-house. Cynics suggested that the ‘disappearance’ was a stunt to publicize her latest novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or had she disguised herself in male clothing and gone into hiding, like Dr Crippen’s mistress Ethel Le Neve sixteen years earlier? The Daily Express consulted a former Chief Inspector of the CID, Walter Dew, renowned as ‘the man who caught Crippen’, who reinvented himself as an occasional media pundit on matters criminal and mysterious after retiring from Scotland Yard. Dew doubted whether Christie was the victim of foul play, or had vanished for publicity or financial reasons. ‘All women are subject to hysteria at times,’ he pronounced, opining that perhaps the fact that she ‘thought about crooks and murder all day’ had affected her. Reporters thirsting for sensation found leading crime writers equally keen to share their wisdom.