Crime writing is
fun, but don’t give up the day job... A look at two vintage detective stories by men who
didn’t
When I was a child my
parents used to like a good thriller or crime story on TV, especially on a
winter’s night. “See what’s on tonight?” my mother would say, as my father
dutifully opened The Times at the telly page; and then she would almost
always, say, “I do hope there’s a good murder.” Back then, that meant a
series such as The Saint, adapted from the stories of Leslie Charteris
and starring Roger Moore, then in his 30s. Or, a little later, The Expert,
in which Marius Goring played a forensic pathologist. There were many more,
including the odd American import.
Like my mum, I do enjoy
a good murder. Committing one oneself means lots of messy paperwork and there
are ethical questions, so I prefer to read a good crime novel. A year or so ago
I wrote a piece about the Golden Age of Crime, focused on the
four famous Queens of Crime – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery
Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. But I mentioned that there were a host of others, often
now forgotten – some with good reason, but others still well worth the read. A
recent rummage round a Norwich bookshop (The City Bookshop, since you ask;
others are available) turned up a selection. Some had been ‘rediscovered’ and
put out under a modern imprint, but one of those was very disappointing; I
could not read more than 20 pages. However, there were also some original
Penguins in their green-and-white covers, very old, very pre-loved and in one
case stuck together with Sellotape. These proved rewarding.
First, A Question of
Proof by Nicholas Blake.
*
A Question of Proof is a classic Golden Age of Crime
story. If you like Agatha Christie & Co., you may well enjoy this.
Written in 1935, it is
set in an English prep school. It’s summer and the school’s Sports Day has
rolled around. Sometime between lunch and tea, one of the pupils, a ghastly
little tick called Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss, meets with a most unfortunate end.
Suspicion rests on the members of the staff common-room. Was it Evans, who is
carrying on with the headmaster’s wife, and may have been blackmailed by the
boy? Wrench, who is doing likewise with one of the maids? Either could be
ruined if rumbled (this is the 1930s). Or was it Gadsby, the prodigious
drinker? Or Sims, who cannot keep order? Evans’s eccentric friend Nigel Strangeways
is brought in to find out.
It’s the first of many
outings for Strangeways, who was to feature in most of Nicholas Blake’s
detective novels, of which there were 20 in all. As many people will know,
“Nicholas Blake” was a pseudonym for C. Day Lewis; the future poet laureate was
himself an impoverished prep-school schoolmaster at the time and wanted to earn
some money from detective fiction without risking his reputation as a poet. He
proved quite successful; the books were never quite as popular as (say) Agatha
Christie’s, but they did do well and are still read.
It’s easy to see why. A
Question of Proof seems a bit old-fashioned now, but it’s well-written and
well-paced and the characters very well-drawn. And having gone to a prep school
myself, I think he catches the atmosphere. No-one mourns the dead pupil; for
the other boys, his sudden death is the occasion not for sadness but for
excitement and speculation, and Day Lewis catches this callousness rather well.
The chaos in Sims’s classroom is realistic; there were always teachers like
that who could not control their pupils. There’s also a surprising whiff of
radical politics, though it’s very subtle – Day Lewis was on the left most of
his life and at the time this was written was actually a member of the
Communist Party. One wonders how he really felt about teaching in a place like
this.
 |
C. Day Lewis in 1936 (Howard Coster/
National Portrait Gallery) |
I am not sure how I feel
about Strangeways. He is somewhat contrived, with his carefully crafted
eccentricities such as an addiction to tea, in huge quantities, throughout the
day – though some people do have that in real life (the late Tony Benn was an
example). Still, most writers of detective fiction have such a lead character,
a cipher through which the reader follows the crime being solved. They are
often given an odd backstory or a pattern of eccentric behaviour, and this is
consistent from one book to another. That consistency means readers know what
to expect, and will buy the book. Christie of course had Poirot; Sayers had
Lord Peter Wimsey; P.D. James had Adam Dalgleish. But the writer must ensure
that their investigator acts true to character, and that – especially in later
books – their eccentricities do not become so hackneyed that they become a
caricature of themselves.
A number of “Nicholas
Blake’s” detective novels are still in print, including at least three or four
for Kindle. A Question of Proof, the first, was published in 1935 and
the last, The Private Wound, as late as 1968. By then Lewis was Poet
Laureate, having been appointed at the start of the year. It is one of four
“Nicholas Blake” novels that doesn’t feature Nigel Strangeways. The other 16
do.
Detective fiction does
seem an odd departure for an intellectual like Lewis. At the time A Question
of Proof came out he was 31 and had published his first collection of
poetry 10 years earlier; he was an associate of W. H. Auden and was strongly
influenced by him as a poet. (Nigel Strangeways is said to have initially been
modelled on Auden, though he acquired a more distinct character in later
books.) Patrick Maume, writing in the Irish Dictionary of National Biography,
says that Day Lewis had reviewed numerous detective stories for the Spectator
and thought he might as well have a go himself. It is also said Day Lewis
needed the money. Whatever his motives, the identity of “Nicholas Blake” soon
became known; the board of Cheltenham College, where he was teaching, were
concerned and he had to assure them A Question of Proof was in no way
autobiographical. (The board were already displeased by his membership of the
Communist Party.)
As to the Blake novels
themselves, it may seem that they were meant purely as entertainments but this
was not entirely so. “Day Lewis always made it clear that he did not regard the
Nicholas Blake novels as serious works of art, but that they should not be
dismissed as purely commercial,” says Maume, adding that Day Lewis used the
books to explore certain morbid psychological states. There are also political
overtones; The Smiler With the Knife (1939) revolves around a fascist
conspiracy, very topical at the time. Maume says the film rights were optioned
by Orson Welles. Moreover crime fiction might have been a sideline for Day
Lewis, but it was a jolly successful one. One of the novels, The Beast Must
Die (1938), sold some 430,000 copies, according to Maume. It was filmed in
1969 by Claude Chabrol, and is still in print.
*
During the war Day Lewis
was in a long and troubled affair with the writer Rosamond Lehmann. He was thus
a frequent visitor to her cottage at Aldworth, on the Berkshire Downs west of
Reading. There he will have become acquainted with the journalist Anne Scott-James
– then women’s editor of Picture Post – who owned the cottage next door.
He will thus also have known Scott-James’s then husband, Macdonald Hastings,
who also worked for Picture Post, in his case as a war correspondent. After
the war he too decided to try his hand at crime fiction. Cork and the Serpent (1955) was one of
several detective novels he produced between 1951 and 1966.
However, it turns out
that not one but two clients have reported it as such. So whose was it? One of
the two is clearly lying. The eccentric playboy Maharaja of Lumphur? Or the
Berkshire racehorse owner and peer Lord Pangbourne? Before Cork can dig
further, something most regrettable happens to the Maharaja. Cork decides to
speak to Pangbourne and glides off down the Great West Road in his Bentley. The
action takes place mainly on the Berkshire chalk downs that to this day are an
important centre for the horse-racing industry. The world of horse racing is an
important backdrop to the story, as are the rural locations.
It all sounds a bit
genteel. It isn’t; the folks in this book do some quite unpleasant things to
each other, there are well-drawn, colourful characters and, as in all the best
detective yarns, you do become invested in the story and want to guess who the
villain is before Cork does. There is also a surprising final scene involving a
Royal garden party. Now and then the plot does get contorted, and it was never
quite clear to me exactly how the streetwalker, Carmel, came by the brooch. But
it’s all good fun. Moreover Hastings’s depiction of Carmel and of the Indian
characters seems old-fashioned today but was probably liberal for its time
(although Macdonald Hastings himself was not; he held very conservative views).
The rural and racing
themes are not surprising, as author Hastings was a great lover of country life
and of country sports. According to his son, the journalist and historian Sir Max
Hastings, he spent a great deal more than he could afford on the latter,
keeping a collection of superb shotguns. He had been quite a distinguished war
correspondent; his more dangerous assignments included trips on motor torpedo
boats and a bombing raid over Germany in a Short Stirling, the crew of which
were killed the following night. His son wrote in a family memoir (Did You
Really Shoot the Television?, published in 2010) that he was probably quite
reckless. After the war he edited the prestigious Strand Magazine, and
when that folded in 1950 he started a magazine on the countryside and country
pursuits, Country Fair (this too lost money). It was about the same time that he started
writing detective novels. His character, Montague Cork, was based on a real
insurance magnate who Hastings knew, Claude Wilson, head of the Cornhill
Insurance Company. History seems to record little of Wilson, and Hastings
himself once said that nothing so exciting had happened to Wilson in real life.
There were five Montague
Cork novels. In Sir Max’s view, Cork and the Serpent is actually the
weakest of them; it draws on Hastings’s knowledge of racing, which was not as
great as he supposed it to be, according to Sir Max. Neither, he adds, was his
father really familiar with the aristocracy, and this also shows. Critic Daniel
P. King, writing in Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers
(1980), calls it a “slow moving tale with much muddling about”. He also states
that the Cork novels “range from the trite to the noble”. This might be
sweeping. To be sure, Macdonald Hastings was not Agatha Christie or Dorothy
Sayers. Detective novels, for him, were a sideline in a busy life. Still, the
Cork books sold well; and I thought Cork and the Serpent much better
than King judged it to be. If it is the weakest, then the others might be well
worth reading.
In Did You Really
Shoot the Television?, Sir Max is often highly critical of his father, who
was bad with money, had very right-wing views and was monumentally tactless.
But he had a varied and successful career in journalism, and later in
broadcasting. And Montague Cork, says
Sir Max, was a “delightfully original fictional creation”; he praises, too, the
countryside descriptions in the books, especially in Cork on the Water
and Cork in Bottle. I would like to read the rest.
Not all vintage crime
fiction is worth reading. Although some books are unjustly neglected, others
are neglected all too justly. But Nigel Strangeways and Montague Cork do
deserve our time. As it happens, both were written by men who had remarkable lives
of which crime fiction was but one part. So if, as crime writers, both are
still worth reading, maybe that is not a coincidence.
Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now
available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.
