Mini Reviews #21

‘Too Clever by Half’ (1939) by G.D.H. and M. Cole. A short story featuring a locked-room puzzle, although we are told the murderer at the outset. In what would become a Columbo-style set-up, we follow the detective as he unravels the clues. The idea is that if the killer hadn’t been so attentive in trying to cover up the crime, he’d probably have gotten away with it; the extra touches were his undoing. If any real murderer made any one of this killer’s five mistakes (e.g. leaving a ‘suicide note’ but neglecting the pen), then ‘clever’ is not the word one would use.

Busman’s Honeymoon (1940) directed by Arthur B. Woods. Competent film adaptation of the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and the play she co-wrote with Muriel St Clare Byrne, featuring Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter Wimsey and Constance Cummings as Harriet Vane. Yes, Americans! Take it as a period murder mystery, rather than as anything to do with Sayers’ ambitious (and, arguably, unsuccessful) novel, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

A Simple Favour (2018) directed by Paul Feig. This movie, based on Darcey Bell’s debut and starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, is absolutely marvellous. I haven’t read the novel, and, candidly, I’m not keen to because it looks like a serious thriller, and the plot is an utterly ridiculous elevation ofGone Girl. However, the film is so splendidly camp – every scene contains one of those cringy stress-release gags that appear once an hour in normal thrillers – that it works brilliantly. Kendrick gives her best ever performance as a single mother-turned-YouTuber and Lively plays her mysterious rich new friend in a way that will make everyone recognise someone they know. The whole thing is very slick and very entertaining.

Bodyguard (BBC, 2018). Honestly, I don’t know why you’re all raving about this, or why you’re all complaining about the last episode. It starts as it means to go on: as a pretty standard BBC political thriller. That is, very gripping, quite preposterous, and mildly jingoistic, like London Spy. The final episode which disappointed so many viewers (seriously, I don’t know why?) is exactly what the first five episodes promised.

Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) by Liane Moriarty. Moriarty’s new novel is a satire that is sometimes witty and sometimes poignant. Set in an unorthodox health resort, it features an engaging and very believable villain, and a nice range of annoying rich protagonists. There is a delightful meta moment in chapter 58, in which a middle-aged romantic novelist trips out on LSD and realizes that she is a character in a poorly written detective story in which no one has yet died. The move towards satire in what used to be called ‘grip-lit’ is very reassuring, although I’ve not yet seen it perfected; Moriarty veers from dark humour to ‘I’m being serious’ moments – and she isn’t alone in that.

Double Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and others

A few years ago, I was doing some private research in estates and came across a title that was wholly unfamiliar to me: Double Death (1939) by Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Valentine Williams, F. Tennyson Jesse, Anthony Armstrong, and David Hume. Wow! I thought. This is a must-read! So I quickly bought a copy, and over a year later, finally got round to reading it.

The Detection Club’s round-robin novels have received renewed attention since HarperCollins reprinted the most famous one, The Floating Admiral, nearly a decade ago. But many still languish in obscurity: The Scoop (not very good, but containing an Agatha Christie contribution), Behind the Screen (very good, and again featuring pre-Dame Agatha), Crime on the Coast, No Flowers by Request, and more. All of these are items I got hold of in my teens and enjoyed, but, somehow, Double Death passed me by.

There are six chapters to this novel, each written by a different distinguished crime writer. The story was written as a newspaper serial and later tidied up with a fresh prologue by John Chancellor before its original publication. In 1939, it was reprinted in book form, along with each author’s notes on how the story should continue, which appear – fascinatingly – at the end of their respective chapters (rather than in an appendix). This aspect, the inclusion of the notes, is by far the book’s most interesting feature.

The story concerns Mrs Farland, a wealthy hypochondriac who might, for the first time in her life, be truly ill. She believes that she is being poisoned and keeps changing her will to inherit, then disinherit, various relatives and hangers-on, including her soon-to-be-married nephew John. When a nurse, who has experience of poisons, is sent for, someone decides to act. The nurse is drugged and killed in the railway station.

Dorothy L. Sayers, who needs no introduction, sets the scene in her chapter. She introduces various characters, each of whom, she explains in her methodical notes, could be the murderer, and gets slightly caught up in the topography and railway timetables of the imagined village of Creepe. She also introduces a real, over-the-counter and quite lethal sleeping draught, which the editor wisely fictionalises as Sleepine, and kills off Nurse Ponting.

Freeman Wills Crofts has Chapter Two, which is largely devoted to reproducing Sayers’ notes on poison in the mouth of a police doctor, and which culminates in a second death. I’ve always found Crofts quite boring but in a single chapter format, where he’s clearly annoyed at having to beboring, he shines and I found his contribution highly entertaining.

The third chapter is by Valentine Williams, the only contributor I’d never heard of, and, based on this contribution, I’m not keen to check him out. However, I did find hugely exciting the politics of his chapter.  To set the scene, Williams has decided that John, the romantic hero, will be the murderer, so he sets up a secondary love interest for John’s fiancé (more on this later).  Of this other chap, John says: ‘he hates me. He’s hated me ever since we blackballed him at the Conservative Club as an out and out Bolshie.’ In his notes, Williams explains that the aim of this is to make the rival appear ‘honest-minded’ and in touch with ‘the plight of the poor’ on a subconscious level, and to make John appear (again subconsciously) as a bully so that the reader is prepared, if still surprised, when he is unmasked.

F. Tennyson Jesse, author of the fourth chapter, displays such bitterness towards her peers and the whole task in general in her notes that I’ve gone off her for life! In her chapter, she decides that it would be cool and totally unexpected to make the young beautiful woman the murderer (yeah, that’s never been done before), so everything she writes is devoted to blackening this character’s name. So much so that, if anyone had taken up her suggestion, the reader would have felt hugely cheated at such an obvious outcome. While the three-quarter point is probably the easiest part to write in a collaborative mystery (you need suspense and action, you already have the characters and the big clues should have been dropped by now), Jesse insists that it’s the hardest – and her chapter makes it look that way.

The penultimate chapter is by Anthony Armstrong, an author I’d heard of but never read, and it aims to move everything towards the solution that Armstrong has devised. This is probably the most skilful chapter in the entire book and I do hope one day to check out more of Armstrong’s work.

As stated, though, the notes are really the interesting thing here. I love seeing the petty egos, the thinly-veiled contempt for other writers, and the sense that everyone is slightly afraid of Sayers. Everyone refers to each other with initials – FWC, FTJ, etc. – but Sayers is always ‘Miss Sayers.’ In the preface, John Chancellor can’t resist a swipe at ‘one or two of the authors’ who ‘would not permit their manuscript to be altered’ or who were ‘ignorant of, or indifferent to, the peculiar needs of newspapers.’ Several of the contributors express their ardent hope for a very good copyeditor, who is eventually named ‘The All-Seeing Eye of God (ASEOG).’

Each writer approaches not only the text but also the explanation of process and ideas differently: Armstrong highlights all his clues with page references. Sayers gives an essay on poison and a map. Crofts draws the map to scale and goes through each character methodically. Williams and Jesse state outright that that’s too much to get their head around and that maps and timetables can be red herrings, best ignored.

The romance angle is what struck me most. Over a decade earlier, Sayers herself had decried the need for romance in crime fiction as a ‘fettering convention’. In her notes, though, she explains that she has introduced a young couple purely in case John or his fiancé Penelope turn out to be guilty – the couple ‘may supply the love-interest (since the murderer obviously can’t have the love-interest)’. It seems that all her hopes of reinvigorating the genre retired with Lord Peter Wimsey. When Williams identifies John as the murderer, he introduces another young man for Penelope, as stated. Jesse goes for Penelope, writing: ‘I admit that if Penelope is the guilty one we are left without a love interest (which is not a thing that interests me personally in a detective story).’ However, she introduces another young woman (late on and unnecessarily sharing a Christian name with Sayers’ alterna-interest) for John, and spends a great deal of this chapter comparing that woman’s ‘natural beauty’ to Penelope’s obvious ‘golden’ sexiness. If all these writers felt so fettered by the convention, I just wish they’d had the guts to spice it up a bit!

A final point of interest in the notes is each writer’s proposed solution to the case, and how they’ve tried to present clues towards it; also how they’ve manipulated the previous information to serve it.  Recently, on a Facebook page where I lurk more than I post, someone asked the question: have you ever read a Golden Age book and come up with a better solution than the author, which still fits all the clues? Several replies to the question came from writers who had been convinced they’d solved a mystery, found themselves proved wrong, and then determined to write a new story along the lines they’d thought of. Often when I read crime fiction from the 1920s and 1930s I feel like Agatha Christie might have had a similar idea. And here, I think, one of the solutions Armstrong proposes is almost certainly the basis for the solution to Sad Cypress, Christie’s 1940 novel. 

David Hume’s final chapter is supposed to tie everything together. Instead, Hume picks a character no one else has suggested as the murderer, and then introduces a load of new evidence to incriminate them! This is not at all a satisfactory ending to the story as a story – and necessitates a fresh prologue by John Chancellor so that there is at least some basis for such an ending.

Written on the verge of war, Double Death comes at the end of crime fiction’s playful Golden Age and its publication with private notes shows some of the magic wearing off the genre. As a story, it’s frankly a mess, but as a curiosity and an insight into the workings of these writers’ minds, it’s of greater value than all the other round-robin novels put together.

Behind the Screen by the Detection Club

BBC Radio 4 Extra has just finished a rather exciting serial rebroadcast. The production in question, Behind the Screen, is an abridgement of an eccentric novella co-written by members of the Detection Club in 1930, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to revisit the original.

The novella (not a novel, as it's only 70 pages long) was first published as a six-part serial in The Listener, at the same time as it was broadcast over the radio. The round-robin project was a deliberate fundraiser, followed by many other efforts of a similar ilk, most notably The Floating Admiral (1931). A much longer, and better-known, book, The Floating Admiral would feature several crime-writing heavyweights, each contributing a chapter towards an un-plotted murder mystery, and nearly all of them preferring their own solutions in sealed envelopes, to be published at the end of the book.

Behind the Screen, later published with a similar effort called The Scoop, was written differently. The six contributors planned in advance what would happen when, and who would write what. The result is a more conclusive, but sadly also a more conventional, mystery, reading very much like the minor effort of a middling star of the age.

The Ellises are having a quiet evening in, with a few guests, the housekeeper Mrs Hulk, and their hated lodger, Paul Dudden.  Young Amy Ellis is with her fiancé, a medical student  called Wilfred, who senses a sinister atmosphere in the house. His thoughts take shape when he discovers, behind a Japanese screen, 'Dudden dead [...] Dead Dudden!' Moreover, Dudden has been killed up to three times. Soon, the local police inspector arrives and buggers everything up, so it falls to Wilfred to get to the bottom of things.

The contributors to Behind the Screen are, in order: Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley, and Ronald Knox.

All six writers keep the tone light, though some are lighter than others. Walpole's opening is inevitably melodramatic, and Christie's second chapter, introducing a few more characters including one of her own trademark busybody spinster men (these remind me so much of so many of her fans), makes the whole thing readable. Sayers and Berkeley are reliable, but neither is in their element. Bentley is demonstrably outside of his comfort zone. One of the reasons it took me so long to read Trent's Last Case -- a pioneering masterpiece of golden age crime -- was an aversion to his chapter in Behind the Screen.  In the final chapter, Knox trips over himself a little in an attempt to explain the complicated solution whilst retaining his trademark moralistic levity.

Back in 1930, each part was broadcast on the BBC, with the author reading her or his own chapter. This was quite a common feature of the genre at the time, and has to do with a number of things: a now-alien celebrity culture, crime fiction's quest for legitimacy, and the national spirit of game-playing that accompanied the genre's success. Fun fact: the first person to play Miss Marple was in fact Agatha Christie, who read out the character's monologue, 'Miss Marple Tells a Story', on the radio in 1934. Not for the first time, I'm dreadfully irritated that no one has recordings of the older BBC broadcasts.

The serial in The Listener was published as a competition: readers were given key questions and invited to send in their ideas by post. There were 170 entries, and Miss E.M. Jones of Birmingham won the top prize of ten guineas. In my edition (a standard 1980s American paperback), all the competition-y bits appear as appendices.

A while ago now, HarperCollins reissued The Floating Admiral, resetting the text of an American reprint inside the first edition cover, with a new retro dust-jacket. It did very well, and was followed up with a string of other round-robin reissues. Most of them were published with 'forewords' by Agatha Christie, because she didn't actually take part in many, and this enabled her name to be huge on the dust-jackets (these 'forewords' would take the form of a newspaper column, a private letter, a shopping list ... well, not quite, but more or less). The project culminated in the production of a new round-robin novel, The Sinking Admiral, by some of the Detection Club's current crop. I must get a copy. If you've read it, what did you think?

Why there hasn't been a reissue of Behind the Screen is something of a mystery. I wonder if it's because The Scoop, with which it has traditionally been published, and to which Christie also contributed, is decidedly politically incorrect in places. However, that hasn't stopped revivalists before. Maybe it's because neither novel is massively brilliant -- and, certainly, both lack the fun spontaneity, the sense of maliciously tying the next writer up in knots, that makes The Floating Admiral so unique. But if not being very good was a bar to big-scale publication, our bookshelves would be considerably barer.

Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lately, I’ve not had much time to read crime fiction. My two jobs – lecturing at a university and doing admin for a novelist – have meant reading a hell of a lot of books in completely different genres. That’s why my last two posts have been – cringe – recycled versions of reviews that are nearly five years old. I have, however, been getting my criminal fix by regularly checking my favourite blogs and also by dipping in and out of books. Today, I’ll be looking again at Dorothy L. Sayers; this time at a short story.

The three stories collected in Striding Folly (1972) are among the only pieces of Sayers’ ‘detectivism’ (her word) that I still had left to read. So I had a go at the title story, originally published in a 1939 anthology. Technically, this is a Lord Peter Wimsey tale, although His Lordship only appears three quarters of the way through, and doesn’t do much except polish his monocle and reference the classics. Then he identifies some hitherto unintroduced culprit, despite never having been given any details of the case, and disappears – a deus ex machina created by someone who no longer believes in that particular god.

We follow an evening in the life of Mr Mellilow, who is waiting for his friend to arrive for a game of chess. While he waits, a stranger pays a visit – a man called Mr Moses who endures that smarmy middle-class condescending antisemitism (on the parts of both the protagonist and the author) that certain other minorities experience today. The two men play chess for a couple of hours. Realising that his expected guest is a no-show, Mellilow goes to bed. He wakes up, prompted by a violent dream, and rushes out to a folly, where he finds that his friend is not just late for chess, but late as late can be.

When he tells the police about his alibi – he can’t have killed the man because of Mr Moses – nobody believes that Mr Moses exists … until Wimsey rolls up and sets everything right. The solution Wimsey expounds is amazingly flimsy. You know how, when you read a murder mystery, you can spot some bits but generally not work out a whole conclusive solution? Well, Sayers gives us the bits we can easily work out and anticipate and does nothing with them. It literally goes no further.

Personally, I had a much more elaborate solution in mind when I read this story, and I am fairly sure that Sayers was thinking of something along those lines. I wonder if she got bored writing ‘Striding Folly’ and just dashed off the ending, from Wimsey’s entrance onwards? I’m not sure of the circumstances of commission and publication, but I would be genuinely shocked if she wrote this story for anything but stone-cold cash.

                                                             

As you might have gathered, I wasn’t wildly keen on this story, finding it a little pointless. Sure, there is something going on with chess: the self-conscious presentation of a strategy game in a genre that Sayers perceived to be reprehensibly fixated on puzzles at the expense of social and literary imperatives. However, she did something along these lines but with crosswords much more effectively in ‘Uncle Meleager’s Will’. All in all, ‘Striding Folly’ strikes me as uninspired, and little more than a Golden Age zombie.

Only read this final bit if you’ve already read the story, or don’t care how it ends:

If you would like to know the solution I think Sayers might have planned:  I think that Mr Moses had some kind of remote control device hidden in his left glove – hence keeping his gloves on and only using his right hand to play chess – which he triggered at ten minutes to nine (the exact time he fell into his first trap in the chess game, because his mind was elsewhere).  I think this set off some kind of electrical charge in a chess piece that the victim was holding, or which was in his boot, and which was later found by the body, or possibly switched with an identical piece by Moses after the event. There is precedence for this kind ending with Sayers; 'The Cave of Ali Baba' (1929) hinges on voice recognition software. Anyway, just a theory!

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Forgive the horrible cover -- I always try to post the edition I read, and this is it!

Seriously, my opinion on Sayers changes with every new moon. At the moment, I like her books a lot, although a reread of Whose Body? (1923) does little to cement the notion that we're dealing with one of the greatest minds in twentieth century crime fiction.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) remains a fascinating figure. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford University, she initially started writing detective fiction for pecuniary reasons while working in an advertising agency. Whose Body? was her first novel, and it was an immediate success -- so she went on to write about her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in several more volumes. As the series progressed, she also sought to stretch the possibilities of the crime fiction form, introducing ethical questions and thematic experiments. The ending of Busman's Honeymoon (1937) is rightly well-known for the unusual attention given to the psychological impact of sending a murderer to the gallows. Ultimately, Sayers abandoned crime writing in favour of translation and quite bad theology.

Sayers was very good at quotable quotes. Among my favourites is this, from Have His Carcase:

I always have a quotation for everything -- it saves original thinking.

But I also like a little poem she wrote (not sure where it comes from, as I've only ever seen it quoted):

As I grow older and older
and totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
who goes to bed with whom.

The first Sayers I read was Murder Must Advertise. I was quite young and determined to hate it because all the glossy crime scholarship I'd read sneered at the 'highbrow' pretensions of 'Miss Sayers' (use of the prefix should have been my clue that these were not discerning critics). So I was kind of annoyed to thoroughly enjoy it. I just told myself that I didn't like it because the murderer was easy to spot -- although that was very much the point. I then started reading her again at university, and now have two novels and a few short stories left to tackle.

But Whose Body? was a re-read. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed this book less the second time around, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it at all. It begins with His Lordship dashing out to an art sale, only to be assailed over the telephone by his mother, the Duchess of Denver, who informs him that a body has been found in a bathtub. And not just any body. This is the corpse of a man wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez.

The plot is okay, but not substantial. It's not really a whodunit, because there are so few characters you spot the killer straight away and have fun watching Wimsey catch them. The best bit about the book is certainly Wimsey himself, who appears here fulfilling his author's stated aim: to create a hero who was 'part Fred Astaire and part Bertie Wooster'. His first dialogue is 'Oh, damn!' (this may sound silly, but the comma shows that the author takes the written word seriously), and these words -- which also open the entire canon -- are a rather nice way to set things off. When we meet Wimsey, he is described as possessing a 'long, amiable face [that] looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.' Phwoar.

Agatha Christie loved this description of Wimsey, and when Sayers gave her hero more depth, and a girlfriend, Christie got miffed and wrote a gloriously passive aggressive account of Sayers' (and others') work for a Russian newspaper. She concluded that Wimsey's marriage, which happens somewhere between Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman's Honeymoon (1947) had made him 'a good man spoiled.'

Even at this early stage, however, Wimsey has more psychological nuance than many of his peers. He suffers very clearly from shell-shock, and there is a genuinely shocking scene in which he experiences night-terrors, reliving his horrific experiences on the front line in France during the First World War. This scene also gives Bunter -- in many ways, a cross between Wooster's Jeeves and Poirot's George(s) -- more depth than one might expect from such a conservative writer. We see his servile position as one based on mutual dependence, friendship, and the great equalising consequences of war.

There are some issues in this book that I don't think we can ignore. Many of the golden age crime writers were downright anti-semitic, and I don't think we can excuse this as being 'of its time'. I think it's important to call it out.  Writing in a Jewish e-zine, Amy E. Schwartz has called Whose Body?  'a welter of obsession with Jews': it begins with an apparently Jewish corpse, proceeds through numerous problematic quips (outlined in the linked article), and ends quite unrepentantly in the same vein. Apparently, the first draft of the novel had Lord Peter wowing the implied reader with his cheekiness by pointing out that the body in the bathtub cannot be that of a Jewish financier because it isn't circumcised.

Of course, Sayers toned down the anti-semitism in later novels, once she became aware of the problem's extent and reach -- nearly all the guilty writers did this, whether by design or co-ercement (and it's an area where Agatha herself falls regrettably short). This book, on one level, so drenched in problematic attitudes that it's about anti-semitism. But, at the same time, it's equally indulging-while-pointing-out hilarious snobbery, the death of class security, and the conflict between post-war trauma and post-war nostalgia.

Whose Body? is not a great novel. It's the work of an author still finding her feet, and working out what she wants to do or say with the genre. But any assessment must bear in mind what it spawned -- one of the most significant and interesting series of the golden age.