Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 20)

Douglas sent MacDonald a copy of his book, and the Coles were invited to spend a day at Chequers. The new Prime Minister held court over a meal of ‘most superior’ salmon fishcakes washed down with wine, and invited Douglas, along with John Maynard Keynes, to join a new Economic Council. Margaret admitted that this produced ‘very little positive result’.

These were hectic years for radical activists, and on returning to live in London the Coles kept in touch with the working classes by engaging three servants. The children were looked after by a nurse, and an unemployed Yorkshire miner and his wife were hired to do the housework. Before long the family moved to a house in Hendon with grounds large enough for both badminton and tennis courts.

Hugh Gaitskell accompanied Douglas on a series of walking tours, and Douglas eventually declared his love for his former pupil. Gaitskell was flattered but embarrassed. Resolutely heterosexual, he was probably more attracted to Margaret, and his subsequent conquests included Ann Fleming, wife of the creator of James Bond. Douglas accepted defeat, as he had to do so often in his life, and climbed back into the closet. Gaitskell became leader of the Labour Party in the Fifties, and after his death he was succeeded by another of Cole’s brilliant Oxford pupils, Harold Wilson, who made it all the way to 10 Downing Street.

Margaret’s startlingly candid posthumous biography of Douglas included an appendix written by the family doctor. A classic example of ‘too much information’, this contained exhaustive detail about her husband’s ailments, including a refractory bowel and a degenerative narrowing of the arteries. Margaret suggested that Douglas’s lack of interest in sex may have been due to the lack of a robust constitution; ‘bleeding piles … were a constant drain on his energy … One feels that he would scarcely have had energy for vigorous love-making; and the idea of ‘love-play’ would have shocked him … His sex-life diminished gradually to zero for the last twenty years of his life … He came to feel that it was all revolting.’

Margaret’s frankness did not extend to describing how she felt about all this, but she confided in her friend, the Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison, that she ‘was made monogamous but not faithful’. She and Berkeley got on remarkably well, but even if he had designs on her, their political views were irreconcilable. Instead, she fell for Naomi’s husband Dick, an affable lawyer and future Labour MP, whose oysters-and-champagne lifestyle and baronial Scottish castle appealed to her almost as much as his personality and socialism. She described him slyly in her autobiography as ‘deceptive … because he looks so large and so respectable. He did, when I first knew him, all the things that a gentleman should, except play cricket.’ Their relationship did not jeopardize either marriage, and Margaret remained steadfast in her commitment to Douglas and their shared political values. When she wanted a break from politics, she took refuge in the Detection Club.

Notes to Chapter 5

‘snobbery with violence’

This phrase, often attributed to Alan Bennett, seems to have been coined as the title of a pamphlet published in 1932 by Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (1903–1997). Colin Watson, himself a member of the Detection Club, borrowed it for his critique of pre-war thrillers and detective novels.

He remarked to a reactionary acquaintance, Colonel Farquharson

For this anecdote, I am indebted to crime novelist Keith Miles, also known as Edward Marston, who found it in L. G. Mitchell’s article ‘Murder, Univ and G. D. H. Cole’, in the University College Record, vol. xiv, no. 1 (2005).

the Liberal Party and centre-left were well represented among Golden Age authors

To take a few examples, A. E. W. Mason served briefly as Liberal MP for Coventry, and Helen Simpson campaigned as a Liberal candidate prior to her early death. Lord Gorell served in David Lloyd George’s government before defecting to the Labour Party.

One led the Jarrow Crusade, another married one of Stalin’s senior lieutenants, yet another was killed fighting for the Republican cause in Spain.

The writers concerned were Ellen Wilkinson, Ivy Low (also known as Ivy Litvinov) and Christopher St John Sprigg.

Douglas and Margaret Cole were the leading lights of the Left among Golden Age detective novelists.

The Coles’ lives have been extensively documented, with the predominant focus on their political activities. I have found Margaret’s autobiography, her biography of Douglas, and Betty Vernon’s biography of her especially valuable.

Margaret’s brother, Raymond Postgate

Postgate (1896–1971) published three crime novels in all, but neither Somebody at the Door (1943) nor The Ledger is Kept (1953) matched the success of Verdict of Twelve. His father-in-law, George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party from 1932–35, was grandfather to Angela Lansbury, who played Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, She Wrote and Miss Marple in the film The Mirror Crack’d.

Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels about policemen who got results by sheer hard work

Authors whose early work shows the influence of Crofts include not only Douglas Cole and Henry Wade but also John Bude, the name under which Ernest Carpenter Elmore (1901–57) wrote a long series of detective novels.

Crofts explained his painstaking method of story construction in ‘The Writing of a Detective Novel’, reprinted in CADS 54, July 2008 with an introduction by Tony Medawar. Extensive discussion of his life and work is to be found in Curtis Evans’ Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery. ‘Humdrum’ is a term that Julian Symons applied in Bloody Murder to Crofts, Rhode and certain other novelists who ‘had some skill in constructing puzzles, nothing more’. An entertaining overview of their work is supplied in H. R. F. Keating’s Murder Must Appetize. Symons’ assessment was challenged by B. A. Pike and Stephen Leadbeatter in ‘Give a Dog a Bad Name …’, CADS 21, August 1993. Pike and Leadbeatter are champions of the ‘humdrums’, as is Evans.

T. S. Eliot rated him as the finest detective story writer to have emerged during the Twenties

See Curtis Evans, ‘Murder in the Criterion: T. S. Eliot on Detective Fiction’, in Mysteries Unlocked. Eliot’s other favourite was Richard Austin Freeman, who started writing detective stories much earlier.

Having settled a plot in outline, one spouse wrote a first draft which the couple then discussed and worked on together.

See ‘Meet Superintendent Wilson’ in Meet the Detectives. However, the extent to which the Coles’ books were joint endeavours is open to debate; see Curtis Evans, ‘By G. D. H. AND Margaret Cole?’, CADS 63, July 2012, which strives to identify the books written solely or predominantly by one or other of the Coles.

the Coles kept in touch with the working classes by engaging three servants

The Coles’ novels sometimes offered gentle satire, but penetrating social critiques tended to be in short supply. In Dead Man’s Watch (1931), for instance, the cast includes an eccentric and unpleasant husband and wife called Mr and Mrs Cole, who are members of a Pentecostal sect. Mention is made of a young unmarried woman who becomes pregnant, faints at work, and is sacked when her condition is revealed by the doctor called to attend her, but there is no hint that anyone would or should be surprised by this. Unusually, in Knife in the Dark (1941) a motive for murder is rooted in a xenophobe’s hostility towards foreign refugees; the well-evoked atmosphere of a university town in wartime compensates for a thin plot.

6

Wearing their Criminological Spurs

The first person who set out to solve ‘the riddle of the Detection Club’ was Clair Price, the London correspondent of The New York Times. Her quest led to a top-floor flat ‘in a remote suburb of London’. By this, she meant Watford. There, ‘a cloud of cigarette smoke, rising from the depths of an easy chair’ revealed the debonair presence of Anthony Berkeley. Having conducted the first press interview about the recently formed Club with its debonair but daunting founder, Price was left in no doubt whatsoever that its members were ‘neither meek nor humble’.

It was typical of Berkeley that, despite his occasional professions of misanthropy, he not only decided to create the first social network of crime writers, but also possessed the charisma and drive to transform his idea into reality. It was equally characteristic that he embarked on this initiative a mere three years after publishing his first detective novel.

Mystery has shrouded the origins of the Detection Club. Julian Symons, a historian as well as a crime writer of distinction and former Club President, mistakenly wrote that the Club started in 1932. The Club itself continues to circulate a private list of members’ details giving the same date. The misunderstanding arose because a formal constitution and rules were not adopted until 11 March 1932, but the Club effectively came into existence two years earlier, and its origins date back to 1928.