Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 19)

Douglas struggled to come to terms with the scale of this defeat, but Margaret concluded that the government’s victory marked the ‘final throw’ of mass industrial action. Yet the Coles’ spirit was unquenchable. Before long they turned their minds back to detective fiction, as well as what to do next in the name of socialism. For all their deeply-felt dismay, they were lucky. The General Strike did not hurt their pockets, as it did those who lost pay they could ill afford. For Margaret, the strike was an enthralling experience, and she had enjoyed Hugh Gaitskell’s company, although it was Douglas who fell in love with him.

Sayers and the Coles bonded on an intellectual level, even though their opinions about life and society were poles apart. Sayers’ priority was to earn a living, and she threw herself into the advertising business with gusto. The Coles believed capitalism was in crisis, and opted for seclusion among the dreaming spires, although Douglas did become honorary research officer to the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.

He was always known as G. D. H. Cole; this was as much a brand name as Sayers’ insistence on her middle initial, although he would have been horrified by anything as redolent of capitalism as the idea of a ‘brand’. Although born in Cambridge, Margaret said later that he ‘developed a violent dislike of Cambridge, partly because it was not Oxford’. At St Paul’s School, he worked on a magazine which G. K. Chesterton praised, and became a devotee of William Morris. By the time he went to study Classics at Balliol, he had embraced socialism.

Douglas fantasized about Britain developing into a society based on ‘Guild Socialism’, with production run and organized by self-governing democratic organisations of workers. He became prominent in the Fabian Society. Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, set in London in 1984 (perhaps a date that stuck in George Orwell’s mind) struck a chord with the Guild Socialists, and Chesterton’s often radical views had much more in common with Douglas’s than those of Berkeley, Sayers or Christie. His friend and fellow Guild Socialist Maurice Reckitt found him kindly, but impatient and hot-tempered: ‘He was always resigning … from bodies which failed to do what he required of them.’ His ‘haughty ruthlessness’ prompted Reckitt to write a short poem:

‘Mr G. D. H. Cole

Is a bit of a puzzle.

A curious role

That of G. D. H. Cole,

With a Bolshevik soul

In a Fabian muzzle.’

Margaret’s brother, Raymond Postgate, also admired Douglas’s intellect, but thought him rude. Postgate later wrote Verdict of Twelve, a superb study of jurors in a murder case, biting enough to confound any lawyer with a sentimental attachment to the notion of trial by jury. The book’s ironic and innovative style owed much more to Anthony Berkeley than to Douglas, but Raymond became better known for founding The Good Food Guide, and as the father of Oliver.

Margaret was born a few weeks before Sayers. Because the Postgates’ father was a classical professor and grammarian who invented a ‘new’ pronunciation of Latin, at the age of six Margaret was required to ask for Sunday dinner in Latin. After leaving Roedean, she combined the study of Classics at Girton College, Cambridge, with helping to educate five younger brothers and sisters. Rebelling against her father’s right-wing views, she embraced socialism, atheism, feminism and pipe-smoking. Like her future husband, she wrote poetry, and ‘The Falling Leaves’, a poignant perspective on the consequences of war, has featured on the GCSE syllabus for English Literature students. Her father was so outraged when she chose to share her life with a socialist that he disinherited her.

In the aftermath of the war, arguments about the Russian Revolution led to divisions on the left. Raymond Postgate joined the newly formed British Communist Party, but although Douglas Cole was sympathetic to the party’s aims, he did not follow suit, and neither did Margaret. The dream of Guild Socialism turned to dust, and the Coles moved to Hampstead, where Douglas threw himself into writing and what Margaret described as ‘the pleasures of bourgeois family life’. They socialized with the likes of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and relaxed by watching Sussex play cricket. Margaret gave birth to two daughters in quick succession, and Douglas, while recovering from a bout of pneumonia, started work on a detective novel. Margaret bet he would not finish it, which provoked him to carry on to the end.

His approach was influenced by the success of Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels about policemen who got results by sheer hard work. Douglas was in good company in admiring Crofts; T. S. Eliot rated him as the finest detective story writer to have emerged during the Twenties. Crofts was born in Dublin, but moved to Ulster in his youth, ultimately becoming Chief Assistant Engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. During a long illness, he wrote The Cask, which became a bestseller. A cask unloaded at St Katharine’s Dock breaks open and is found to contain sawdust, gold coins – and a dismembered female corpse; but the cask and its contents vanish before the police arrive at the scene. Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard travels to Paris in order to crack an ingenious alibi, working with the unflagging attention to detail that became the hallmark of Crofts’ detectives. The book sold so well that eventually Crofts moved to England to write full-time. In his fifth book he introduced the painstaking and utterly relentless Inspector Joseph French, whose arrival on the scene invariably spelled disaster for murderers whose chances of escaping the gallows depended on intricate alibis.

Crofts was published by Collins, and Douglas submitted his first novel to them, but at first they turned it down, saying it contained too many murders. He cut out one ‘gory death’, although what counted as ‘gory’ then seems cosy today. This was the only time, his wife said, that he agreed to make a significant change to any of his books. The touch of arrogance in Douglas’s unwillingness to accept that his work could be improved, coupled with furious productivity, contributed to the sterility of much of his later writing.

The Brooklyn Murders introduced Superintendent Henry Wilson, sleuthing alongside a young couple in the same mould as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The Coles decided to play the detective game together, and co-write a follow-up. Death of a Millionaire appeared under the joint by-line of ‘G. D. H. and M. Cole’, the brand name for all the subsequent novels, whoever wrote most of the text. The book was unusual in its day for its sympathetic portrayal of trade union leaders and refusal to demonize Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, Superintendent Wilson’s lack of charisma made Inspector French seem like a quirky maverick. Even when he resigned briefly from Scotland Yard to operate as a private eye, Wilson was no Sam Spade. The most exciting thing that happens to him during the series is that he grows six inches taller – a simple mistake, Margaret confessed. Even so, his career lasted for two decades. Having settled a plot in outline, one spouse wrote a first draft which the couple then discussed and worked on together.

The Murder at Crome House features a self-portrait of Douglas in the form of James Flint, a lecturer and tutor in history and economics. Flint turns amateur detective after discovering a bizarre photograph showing an apparent murder. It has been concealed inside a library book on the subject of psychoanalysis and autosuggestion. After the astonishingly careless owner of the photograph turns up on his doorstep, hoping to retrieve it, Flint tries to establish the truth about the crime. An elaborate alibi is unravelled with tedious persistence, and at the end of the book Flint contemplates marriage to the deceased’s widow – but the Coles amuse themselves by describing his relief when he is talked out of it. The don is not the marrying kind. The same is true of Dr Preedy in the locked room mystery novella Disgrace to the College – he is ‘fastidious to the point of confirmed celibacy in his relations with women’ but enjoys the intimacy of private conversations with his male students. Unlike Berkeley, Douglas was reluctant to fictionalize his private sexual predilections, and this is as close as the Coles came to including a homoerotic subtext in their stories. Raymond Postgate featured a gay academic in Verdict of Twelve, differentiating the character from Douglas simply by making clear that he was neither handsome nor an economist.

In a fit of optimism during a short-lived economic recovery, Douglas wrote a massive tome, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy, suggesting that a Labour government with a majority in Parliament might ‘socialize’ all the land in Britain within a decade. Margaret later described his proposals as a testament to the ‘irresistible buoyancy’ of his spirit. Soon he had plenty to be buoyant about. After five years of Conservative rule, the general election of 1929 returned a minority Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald.