Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 18)

Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were conservative in outlook, and their success has caused a peculiar amnesia to afflict critical discussion of the Golden Age. Detective novelists with radical views have become the men – and women – who never were. Even the distinguished historian of the genre Julian Symons, who should have known better, thought it ‘safe to say that almost all of the British writers of the Twenties and Thirties … were unquestionably right-wing.’ In fact, the Liberal Party and centre-left were well represented among Golden Age authors, while others joined the Communist Party or flirted with it. One led the Jarrow Crusade, another married one of Stalin’s senior lieutenants, yet another was killed fighting for the Republican cause in Spain. Some mocked Nazis and Fascists in their detective novels long before it was fashionable to do so. Others wrote mysteries which debated the merits of assassinating dictators.

Douglas and Margaret Cole were the leading lights of the Left among Golden Age detective novelists. Their personal lives seem, at first glance, more straightforward than the emotionally turbulent experiences of Sayers, Berkeley and Christie. Yet the Coles’ apparently happy marriage was more complicated than it seemed.

Douglas Cole was already a pillar of the Labour Research Department, when Margaret Postgate joined after a spell teaching classics at Hammersmith’s prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School. Margaret was a dynamic young woman, with ‘a mop of short thick black wavy hair in which is set swarthy complexion, sharp nose and chin and most brilliantly defiant eyes’. Instantly smitten by Douglas, she wrote the name ‘Mrs G. D. H. Cole’ on a piece of paper to see how it looked before hastily crumpling it up.

Her brother Raymond described Douglas as ‘slender, fairly tall and quite handsome; his eyes were set in a curiously straight line and he could look at you in an oddly hypnotic manner.’ This expression reminded Raymond of a snake, while Raymond’s son Oliver gave Douglas a curious immortality by taking him as the model for the character of Professor Yaffle in the children’s television series Bagpuss. Yaffle was a woodpecker carved from wood, a brilliant academic with a grumpy demeanour, who at times of inactivity served as a bookend.

Margaret debated political theory with Douglas, and secretly wrote ‘a bad poem or two about him’, but was dismayed to find the Department ‘as nearly as possible sexless – it did not fornicate – hardly even“neck”.’ One wet winter night, she spent the evening in Douglas’ flat in Battersea, discussing a propaganda pamphlet. When he offered her the loan of an umbrella for her walk back to Fulham, rather than a bed for the night, she felt aggrieved. Although he did not seem to reciprocate the physical desire she felt for him, she put this down to the all-consuming nature of his dedication to socialism.

After a year or so, it dawned on him that Margaret’s interest in his company was not solely due to her love of politics, and he took her out to the theatre and a concert. When he invited her for a country walk, it turned into ‘a pretty fast march’ along the Thames towpath. He brought along dates and biscuits for them to eat, but forgot about anything to drink. The walk passed mostly in silence. Margaret’s throat was dry with thirst, and she could not think of anything to say. Douglas did not help her out.

Undeterred, a couple of months later, she accepted another invitation for a walk. They went down to Hampden Woods on a fine day in May. ‘Some kind of tension seemed to develop,’ she recalled, and they sat down on a log in the midst of the young beech trees. No-one else was around, apart from an ‘indignant pigeon’ which flew out of the log. With something less than the panache of a born Casanova, Douglas stretched an arm around her and said, ‘I suppose this has got to happen.’

On returning to the Labour Research Department, the couple announced their engagement. The wedding took place at a registry office adorned by a sign warning: ‘No Confetti: Defence of the Realm Act.’ Margaret wrote a poem, ‘Beechwood’, about that close encounter on the log: the pigeon was mentioned, but not the fact that Douglas fell asleep on the train home. People were startled by their marriage, since Douglas was widely assumed to be more interested in men than women. His idea of a stab at humour was to claim he had been forced into matrimony, but Margaret did not care.

‘Physically,’ she said, ‘he was always under-sexed – low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much whether he would have had any sex life at all in the ordinary sense … Up to this time, his physical affections, his desire to caress, had been generally directed towards his own sex; he had fallen in love with various young men … and had written poems to them. But it was all very mild, and needed no sort of legal sanction … his sympathy with homosexuals was intellectual chiefly. For women generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all … he thought that the mass of women were not good Socialist material.’

In 1926, Christie lost a husband, Sayers found one, and Berkeley was contemplating a change of wife. That year was equally momentous for Douglas and Margaret Cole, but for different reasons. Having abandoned the plans they had discussed with Sayers for forming a crime-writing syndicate, they were now writing detective stories together to supplement their academic income. Fiction, however, was put on hold as they rallied to the cause of the workers during the General Strike.

The Coles and their allies on the British Left were convinced that a determined and united industrial movement ‘could make its will prevail’. That confidence was mirrored by the apprehension of people who supported the status quo, such as Christie. Her anxieties were reflected in The Secret Adversary. The spymaster Mr Carter warns Tommy and Tuppence Beresford about the threat to trade posed by a Labour government. ‘Bolshevist gold’ is pouring into the country, in an attempt to foment unrest among the workers. Thanks to the plucky Beresfords, the ‘strike menace’ and the ‘inauguration of a reign of terror’ feared by the newspapers are averted.

While Christie dreaded the prospect of seismic political change, the Coles devoted their lives to trying to achieve it. The General Strike offered the prospect of worker solidarity toppling the established order. After Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, lost office in 1924, Churchill’s ‘Silk Stocking Budget’ reintroduced the Gold Standard, creating pressure to cut wages, and when the mine owners threatened to slash pay, the miners threatened to strike. The government bought off the employers with a temporary subsidy, unable to risk a confrontation because stocks of coal were low. Trade unionists rejoiced over their victory, but their celebrations proved premature.

Margaret concluded afterwards that the General Strike was provoked by the government, once it had bought time to prepare for a fight. Coal was stockpiled, and Churchill set up a strike-breaking force, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. Once the subsidy ended, the mine owners again proposed lower pay and longer hours. ‘Not a penny, not a minute’ was the trade union side’s response, but concessions were not forthcoming. Compositors at the Daily Mail refused to set a leader article attacking the miners, and Baldwin retaliated by calling off negotiations. The next day, the ‘front-line troops’ were called out on strike.

At a rowdy protest meeting, members of Oxford University’s Labour Club argued about how to fight back if the Vice-Chancellor conscripted students into the O.M.S. to keep essential services moving. They were interrupted by the arrival of Douglas and Sandie Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who came to announce a triumph. They had persuaded the authorities to reject compulsory conscription. Douglas, the ascetic intellectual, became an instant hero. A University Strike Committee was set up, based at the Coles’ house in Holywell, to produce propaganda with an ‘inky duplicator’, and organise speakers to address meetings and rally public support.

It was an exciting time. The team of activists borrowed cars to run a courier service between Oxford and London. The plan was to collect messages and instructions from the Trades Union Congress, along with copies of the union newsletter, the British Worker. Margaret was appointed chief courier, and Hugh Gaitskell, one of Douglas’s most gifted students, did most of the driving. Another undergraduate volunteer was Cecil Day-Lewis. He worked on a bulletin arguing that the Archbishop of Canterbury should mediate in the strike., and ruined his only good suit by spilling violet ink over it. Eleven years later, having assumed the identity of crime writer Nicholas Blake, he joined the Coles in the Detection Club.

Margaret was thrilled by the solidarity shown by long-serving employees of the Clarendon Press, who showed the courage of their convictions by walking out of work, even though it meant risking their pensions. For all their brilliance, however, the Coles failed to spot the obvious. The trade union leaders had blundered by calling the print workers out, as this made it harder to get their message across to a fearful public. The government, conversely, was able to influence debate on the radio. After eight days, the engineers and ship workers were called out, but although the miners opposed any compromise, the battle proved unwinnable, and the TUC told its members to go back to work.