Issue 4: Summer 2009

MURDER IN THE STACKS

Richard Davenport-Hines on the escapist pleasures to be found in the Library’s detective fiction collection.

The London Library is a treasure trove of works from the golden age of detective fiction. The whodunits are heavily borrowed from the Fiction shelves – carried home with stealthy pleasure by members of the Library who feel a heavy cold coming on or are facing a Bank Holiday weekend with dull or abrasive relations. They are an escapist consolation for all of us who want to step away from the harsh din, angular edges and importunate needs of the present. ‘To resist living in one’s own time, to attempt to live in an imaginary past, is human in the same way that being neurotic is human, ’ the American scholar Edward Mendelson has written. Detective novels are a retreat into an imaginary past in which a small number of protagonists circle one another in an enclosed dream world. A cordon sanitaire of fantasy protects the characters from the clumsy, grubby reality of life around them; although there are plots, betrayals and killings, these seem far removed from the paranoia of one’s own time, and readers have the satisfying certainty that the sleuth will resolve the puzzle and rout the murderer.

The Library’s collection of detective fiction is rich, idiosyncratic and uneven – like much of the best of this unique institution. This is a brief survey of the more significant or suggestive holdings. I promise not to spoil any surprise endings.

In England, Agatha Christie published her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Freeman Wills Crofts made his debut with The Cask in 1920, Dorothy L. Sayers published Whose Body? in 1923, Nicholas Blake A Question of Proof in 1935, Edmund Crispin The Case of the Gilded Fly in 1944. We have them all. These English whodunits, in which the pleasure lies in deducing the guilty party from baffling clues, had American imitators, notably the drug-besotted art critic writing under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine, who launched his camp sleuth Philo Vance in 1926 (we have nine of his twelve novels); Ellery Queen, who published his first whodunit, The Roman Hat Mystery, in 1929 (one of the nineteen Queen books at the London Library); and John Dickson Carr, who published the first of his locked-room mysteries in 1930. Raymond Chandler declared in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘a writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong’ .

I wish, though, that Dickson Carr had been more fearful in the stretch of his plots. The contrivances of The Waxworks Murder (1936) or The Problem of the Wired Cage (1939) are just about tolerable, but the solutions to The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) or the murder by an invisible killer of a man standing alone at the centre of a labyrinth of low box-hedges seem ludicrously overreached. They are among the seventeen Carr novels to be found in Fiction.

W.H. Auden in his essay on whodunits entitled ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ (1949) identified five elements in the classic detective story – ‘the milieu, the victim, the murderer, the suspects, the detectives’ . I approve of this ordering, for the milieu of the crime is decisive for my pleasure, and I relish whodunits that are set in distorted versions of milieux I know. My favourite of the twenty detective novels written by C. Day Lewis under his pseudonym Nicholas Blake is End of Chapter (1957), set in a publisher’s office, in which a bestselling but deeply annoying novelist is found with her throat cut.

Michael Innes’s debut detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging (1936), in which the head of an Oxford college is shot by one of his dons, and The Weight of the Evidence (1944), in which a biochemist called Pluckrose is crushed by a meteor dropped on him while he lazes in a deckchair in a university quadrangle, are similarly among my favourites. (Other Innes novels, such as The Journeying Boy of 1949 and Hare Sitting Up of 1959, are far removed from my reality, but equally joyful to read.) Twenty-eight Innes books are shelved in Fiction. The Library has, alas, never bought Robert Robinson’s Landscape with Dead Dons (1956), an Oxford novel to compare with Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911). Robinson’s novel contains the fairest clue of any whodunit – a clue that is more wittily conceived and finely turned than a comparable jeu d’esprit in Dorothy Sayers’ novel about a Russian gigolo murdered in a Devon resort, Have His Carcase (1932).

Auden in his essay declared that only three ‘completely satisfactory detectives’ had been devised: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French. ‘His class and culture are the natural ones for a Scotland Yard Inspector, ’ Auden wrote of French. ‘His motive is love of duty. Holmes detects for his own sake and shows the maximum indifference to all feelings except a negative fear of his own. French detects for the sake of the innocent members of society, and is indifferent only to his own feelings and those of the murderer … He is exceptional only in his exceptional love of duty which makes him take exceptional pains ... He outwits the murderer ... partly because the murderer must act alone, while he has the help of all the innocent people in the world who are doing their duty (the postmen, railway clerks, milkmen, etc., who become, accidentally, witnesses to the truth). ’

Crofts excels at devising intricate hidden worlds behind conventional stolid façades – a combination that haunts Western imagination, as Michael Frayn wrote in Constructions (1974): ‘Of these five apparently normal, respectable citizens, one is a ruthless murderer who disembowelled Sir Toby with the ornamental Javanese paper-knife! At once they all five become interesting in their very uninterestingness. ’ I favour those Crofts novels that delve into the depths of business life and make the humdrum mystifying: The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), for example, succeed in making the timber trade and cement manufacturing seem intriguing. Similarly, Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise (1933), set in an advertising agency during a consumer boom, and Cyril Hare’s With a Bare Bodkin (1946), a wonderful evocation of terminal boredom and incarnadine mayhem amid the red tape and circulating files of the wartime Department of Pin Control, score high for their documentary power.

The Library holds twenty-two books by Crofts, with such titles as The Box Office Murders (1929) and The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933). His first novel, The Cask, was perhaps his best. In one year alone, 1934, he produced three books: one set on a commuter train, and two at sea: The 12:30 from Croydon, Mystery on Southampton Water and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey.

I love novels with a strong feel of time and place. Dorothy Sayers’ novel set in Mayfair on Armistice Day, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928); the pervading Fens melancholy of her The Nine Tailors (1934); and A.E.W. Mason’s detective mystery The House of the Arrow (1924), set in Dijon, all satisfy on this score. The London Library has fourteen of Anthony Berkeley’s whodunits, with titles as evocative of the time as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1924) or Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930): The Silk Stocking Murders (1928), The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929). It also holds the two murder novels that Berkeley wrote under the name of Francis Iles: Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932) are pioneering novels of psychological suspense rather than whodunits. The pivot of Malice Aforethought turns on the same device as James M. Cain’s more famous The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Both books are on the Library’s shelves: one set in the Devon backwoods, the other in a cheap California roadside diner. They make an enjoyable contrast.

It is little known that C.P. Snow wrote a passable detective novel, Death Under Sail (1932), and there are other writers whose whodunits are undeservedly neglected. For over twenty years admirable detective novels were written during their summer holidays by the political economist G.D.H. Cole and his wife Margaret. Many of these show their socialist sympathies and capitalist antipathies. The Death of a Millionaire (1925) begins in St James’s Square, features a monstrously pompous, money-grubbing cabinet minister Lord Ealing (Lord Curzon crossed with Silvio Berlusconi) and portrays a touching love affair, which the Coles discreetly liken to ‘David and Jonathan’ . The Murder at Crome House (1927), Big Business Murder (1935), Disgrace to the College (1937) and other Cole novels target crude capitalism or obtuse authority.

Cyril Alington, Eton headmaster and cathedral canon, agonised whether a clergyman could fitly write a novel in which anyone was murdered, and decided not. His homicide-free whodunits, which the DNB described as ‘clever, witty, but quickly perishable’ , included Mr Evans: a cricketo-detective story (1922) and Crime on the Kennet (1939). No such scruples affected Father Ronald Knox: there are corpses galore in The Viaduct Murder (1925), The Three Taps (1927), Footsteps at the Lock (1928), The Body in the Silo (1933) and his other whodunits.

My selection precludes, of course, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), and Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), as preceding the golden age. It is hard to omit such wonderful novels of suspense as Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), with its murder, espionage and drug trafficking, or Caroline Blackwood’s The Fate of Mary Rose (1981), describing the effect on a Kent village of the rape, torture and murder of a child, and its repercussions on the domestic life of a self-obsessed historian who lives in the village. These two books are both thrillers and deadly studies of selfishness, neurosis and cruelty. I have a susceptibility to whodunits like the Coles’ Poison in the Garden Suburb (1929) or Crofts’ Fear Comes to Chalfont (1942) in which, as in Blackwood’s novel, violence erupts in gentle localities.

The Library has all of the detective novels of our fellow member Agatha Christie, but only a handful by Patricia Wentworth, whose heroine Miss Maud Silver, a retired governess turned private investigator, is one of the most attractive detectives of all: Miss Silver is Miss Marple in three dimensions. The Amazing Chance (1926), Beggar’s Choice (1930), The Coldstone (1930), The Case is Closed (1937), Down Under (1937) and The Silent Pool (1953) are all we have. There are other regrettable omissions. The Fiction shelves have three of the ten wise, elegant novels by the county judge who wrote under the pseudonym of Cyril Hare: Tenant for Death (1937), Death is No Sportsman (1938) and Tragedy at Law (1942). It is a pity that the Library does not own An English Murder (1951), which has a brilliantly convincing motive for homicide that no novelist has used before or since.

In reaction to the effeteness of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, Dashiell Hammett in 1929, Raymond Chandler in 1939 and Mickey Spillane (the most famous Jehovah’s Witness convert) in 1947 devised their hard-bitten private eyes Sam Spade, Philip Marlow and Mike Hammer. The London Library was generally out of touch with trends in American literature from the 1940s until the 1960s, and is only gradually filling the lacunae in all types of fiction. Perhaps there seemed little to admire in Sam Spade or Mike Hammer in the days when Lord Ilchester was President – although he was sprightly enough to defeat moves to grass over part of the chalk Cerne Abbas Giant by threatening to found a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Erections. Nowadays, the London Library’s subscription to the incomparable Library of America series means that we have complete sets of the novels of both Chandler and Hammett.

From the start, though, the Library has collected the works of Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy (1985–6) is an incomparably exciting combination of Hammett-pastiche and Franz Kafka. The Library has also bought – fifty years late – Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and W.R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle (1949). Neither of them are whodunits, but both are classics of criminal fiction set in Chicago. Algren’s anti-hero Frankie Machine is like a Saul Bellow existential anti-hero, but with a morphine habit; Burnett’s account of a jewellery heist that goes awry makes Tarantino seem puerile.

I prefer escapism to realism, and haven’t chosen to sample much of our holdings of twenty-five Ruth Rendell titles, the eight novels under her alias Barbara Vine, or the eleven Sara Paretsky titles.

As to the inevitable gaps, if anyone offers the Librarian a good copy of An English Murder or Landscape with Dead Dons, or a hardback set of Patricia Wentworth, I am sure she will accept. But no dog-eared airport paperbacks of Ed McBain or Robert Ludlum, please.