The last word belongs to Christie. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when she could not know if she or her family and friends would survive for long, she inscribed a copy of Sad Cypress: “Wars may come and wars may go, but MURDER goes on forever!”How right she was. Furthermore, despite all predictions to the contrary, traditional murder and detective fiction go on forever. Nothing could prove that more clearly than the popularity of the British Library series of reprints, first of Victorian but more recently of various half-forgotten Golden Age detective novels and collections of short stories, all of which have been immensely popular.
Martin Edwards’s role in publishing and
publicizing the series cannot be overestimated. He has chosen the books, provided
highly knowledgeable introductions to a number of them and edited collections
of short stories. While doing all that he has been writing his own books and
running a blog about detective fiction that is to be recommended to anyone who
is even half-way interested in the subject. His greatest achievement to date,
however, is this massive volume, a history of the Detection Club in the
thirties and forties, a collection of biographies of the extraordinary people
who were its members and, incidentally, a history of the genre in the period.
That is what I call a useful book.
Not only is it useful but it is wonderfully
well written; indeed the story of the Detection Club [photo of one of their dinners above], whose headquarters at 31
Gerrard Street in Soho (though nowadays mostly known as Chinatown) ought to be
commemorated with a blue plaque, unfolds like a collection of interlocking
thrilling short stories. One cannot say this often enough: the people who
created the Club and the genre, which has not died out to this day, were quite
extraordinary. And while many of us know the story of Agatha Christie, her
sensational disappearance, divorce and second marriage to Max Mallowan, the
story of Dorothy L. Sayers and her secret illegitimate son, the story of
Margery Allingham (though this is less well known) we do not necessarily know
the story of John Dickson Carr, John Rhode/Miles Burton, Henry Wade, Anthony
Berkeley, Helen Simpson, Christianna Brand and a number of others. The fact is
that despite the rather lazy assumption by people who have recently written
about the subject, there were far more writers than just the “Four Queens”,
many of them more popular at the time (though Christie overtook most of her
colleagues by the forties) and, whisper who dares, many of them men. Nor were
these writers particularly cosy in their approach to the subject or,
necessarily, conservative in their attitude though I still maintain that
somewhere at the heart of the genre there is a conservative moral attitude,
which did not mean the same in political and social terms.
To me the most interesting “discovery” was
the relationship between Anthony Berkeley (real name Anthony Berkeley Cox and
also Francis Iles) and the underrated E. M. Delafield, a very popular novelist
of the period who dared to touch a lot of rather difficult subjects in her
novels but who is known now largely for the delightful series of Provincial
Lady diaries, rather deceptive in themselves, and who is often confused with
the main character of those books, the Provincial Lady herself. Martin Edwards
thinks he has traced a much closer relationship between these two difficult,
talented and now half-forgotten writers than most of us, including Violet
Powell, Delafield’s biographer realized. Admittedly, the trail that leads
through novels more than letters and reminiscences depends a great deal on
hypotheses and assumptions but it may not be too far off the truth. (Though I
do not believe and neither, I think, does Mr Edwards that Delafield’s husband
was abusive, no matter what Anthony Berkeley implied in his novels.)
I do have a couple of bones to pick. One
has nothing to do with the author and much to do with the publisher. Is it
really not possible for a respectable publisher like HarperCollins to employ a
proof-reader? The number of serious errors is outrageous and completely
unnecessary: this is not a hastily produced paperback. (I wonder if
HarperCollins would consider employing a highly experienced eagle-eyed
proof-reader.)
My second bone is to do with the general
assumption of what the thirties were like. There were serious economic problems
in many parts of the country, especially after the 1929 crash and there was a
great deal of uncertainty, both with employment and more generally in the
second half of the decade as the probability of another big war became
stronger. But, at the same time, it was the decade of much house building, when
the well-known two-down-three-up houses with decent sized gardens grew in large
numbers and many more families could afford to live in their own homes; it was
also the period when many more council and housing association estates went up
and these remain far better and more attractive than those built later on; when
the popular Morris Minor meant that a good many more people had cars than just
Lord Peter Wimsey; when holidays became statutory for many more people. It was
also the period when new publishing houses were created and magazines were set
up; when writers could live off their writing and the audience for new books
and periodicals grew; when Allen
Lane
The two views are not mutually exclusive
but both are important as we look at the background to the enormous popularity
of detective stories, both bought and borrowed from various libraries.
Martin Edwards: The Golden Age of Murder
The Mystery of
the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story
2015 London
HarperCollinsPublishers