Short fiction: Who Killed Walter Williams?

Don’t ask. Even now

“So – who did kill Walter Williams?” thought Amy as she walked up the riverside path. “I mean, I posed the question in the headline. And I wrote the article. And I bet I’ll be asked.”

She looked at her watch. It was just on ten, and she was not expected at the studio until eleven. And it was one of those beautiful bright October mornings when, just for a day, summer fights back, refusing to yield to mellow fruitfulness. It was a weekday and schoolday and there were few people about, but the odd paddleboarder passed by. A family of swans splashed past; the cygnets were getting flying lessons. They weren’t doing very well. “Pull back on the stick! Hard!” thought Amy, and giggled. She sat down on one of the benches. On the City bank opposite, there were still a few old warehouses and workshops, some dilapidated, others cleaned up and still in use. But Pepperdine’s had long been razed and where the factory had been there were blocks of luxury flats.

Mike Robbins

She gazed across at the site where Pepperdine’s had been, and where her grandfather, a lathe operator, had once worked; and his father before him. Back then small sea-going coasters had come this far up the river; it seemed too small for them, yet they’d come. with coal from the North-East and timber from Sweden, and newsprint from the Baltic for the printworks farther up. In fact they had come for a thousand years, bringing stone from Normandy for the medieval Cathedral, textiles from Bruges, salted herring, cereals from Prussia and German beer, and furs – sable and ermine from Russia; and amber; much of it bound for the Hanseatic League’s warehouse that had once stood not far from Pepperdine’s, where the crash and hum of machinery had once marked it as one of several engineering shops along the river that made machine tools, and fabricated aircraft parts and forged beams and trusses.

Then forty years ago the ships had gone; the works buildings had closed and, in time, been torn down, and now there were paddleboarders and luxury flats. That was the only river Amy had known.

She stood and walked slowly towards the city centre, trying to look at the river as Walter Williams would have seen it on that last day of his life – 94 years ago, 70 years before she was born.

*

She was sat in front of a microphone and had a heavy pair of headphones clamped over her long brown hair. A big mug of coffee steamed on the desk. Slightly to her alarm, there was a webcam pointing at her. “I know it’s radio,” said the presenter, a bubbly woman in her 40s called Carly. “But nowadays people follow us on YouTube sometimes, or listen later on Spotify and they can see you too. Are you ready?”

She faded out the music that had been playing and said: “I’d like to welcome Amy Tyler from the Daily Press. Amy, it’s lovely to have you.”

“Thank you.”

“And Amy has come to tell us about a murder. In today’s paper she has a feature on a death in the city 94 years ago – an unsolved murder that was notorious once, but has now been forgotten; that of Walter Williams. Amy, how did you stumble across this?”

“I was looking for interesting stories about our city,” said Amy. “In the newspaper archives in the British Library. Every now and then we’ve made the national papers. But people today often don’t know. About us having an early woman MP, for instance.”

“Yes, I remember your story on her,” said Carly. “That was fascinating. So is this. But it’s a bit grisly, isn’t it? Tell us about the Pepperdine’s murder.”

“Well, in the spring of 1933, they were dredging the river just downstream of the city,” said Amy. “Today it’s done very carefully, and only in the winter, to do minimum damage to fishing and to nesting birds and riverbank mammals. They weren’t so fussy then.  One day in April a dredger was at work a few miles downstream, near Westham Bridge. It was a steam-powered bucket dredger, a big boat that dredged the riverbed with buckets that ran on a continuous loop. The mud was dropped into a barge moored alongside. And of course stuff came up with the mud…”

“Old bikes,” said Carly. “Prams.” She chuckled.

“Of course! But that day, something nastier dropped into the barge. It was the bloated, partially decomposed body of a man, unidentifiable after many weeks in the water. At first the crew thought it was a large dog, or a farm animal. Then they realised otherwise.”

“But the police found out who he was,” said Carly.

“Oh yes,” said Amy. “They suspected it was the body of Walter Williams, an overseer at Pepperdine’s who had disappeared just before Christmas. “

“But they didn’t have our ways to check then, did they? There was no DNA analysis.”

“No,” said Amy. “But they had plenty of other tools. Believe it or not they could take fingerprints from a badly decomposed body, even then. They matched them up with prints from Williams’s home. And they checked with his dentist. It was him. He was 42 and had been apprenticed at Pepperdine’s in 1904. They were doing war work so he had been exempt from conscription when it was first introduced, but later the Army needed men badly, and he had to go to the Western Front. But though he had a head wound, he got back. Not everyone did, of course, so he was promoted. He became a chargehand, then in his 30s a foreman. He’d have had a lot of power over the workmen in his shop.”

“And someone made away with him?”

“Yes. On Thursday December 22 1932, he went into work as normal. He was still in the plant when the whistle blew at 5pm. No-one saw him leave. But he never came home. His wife had his tea ready as normal – they had no children – but she never saw hide nor hair of him. She thought he might have gone to the pub. But when he didn’t come in after closing time, she went and spoke to the night watchman at the works, but there was no trace of him. And there never was. Until the following April.”

“And did the police establish how he’d died?” asked Carly.

“Yes. A blow to the back of the head with a blunt object. I suppose now we’d call it blunt-force trauma.”

“Oh my goodness. So someone came up from behind him?”

“It looked like that,” said Amy. “A heacy implement, maybe a hammer or spanner. Of course the blow could have been due to a fall. But if so, why was the body in the river, weighted with a heavy chain? The inquest concluded that this might or might not have been murder, but was either that or manslaughter. As no-one knew, the coroner recorder an open verdict. The case has never been closed.”

“My goodness,” said Carly. She gave an involuntary shiver. “Listeners, an unsolved death from long ago. Has anyone heard of this death, maybe from older relatives? Does anyone have memories of Pepperdine’s? Do tell us. If you’re watching on YouTube, do comment below, or on our website, or call us on….”

She had cued up a Paloma Faith track. While that was playing, a call flooded in.

“And here’s a caller – it’s George from West Badger’s Neate. Hello George!”

“Hello Carly,” said a deep, slow voice with a strong local accent. “I wanted to say something about Walter Williams.”

“Do go ahead.”

“I was born a year or two later,” said the voice. “But I knew about this when I were growin’ up. And I’ll tell you, Walter Williams, he was a right shit.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Oh dear,” said Carly. “George, perhaps we shouldn’t use that word on air. What did folks say to you about him… George?”

There was a dialling-tone sound.

“We seem to have lost George,” said Carly, her voice bright. ”Let’s go to our next caller. David from Westfield. Hallo David!”

“Hello Carly.” Again, it was a local accent. “I were born ’bout then mesself. Walter Williams was a piece of work. Everyone hated him. And everyone knew who’d done ‘im in. Everyone in the city knew. But they just never said. Not then. Not later. Not now.”

Amy saw Carly’s jaw dropping.

“Now, we shouldn’t make accusations,” she said. She looked worried.

“Don’t you fret,” said David. “All three men long dead. Last one’s sixty year gone now. And may they rest in peace. He were a bad man. And don’t you tell me your lady writer there don’t know who killed him. Whole city knew. She does.”

“I don’t,” said Amy. She bit her lip. Oh God, I think I’ve opened a can of worms, she thought.

“Time for some music,” said Carly, a little brittle. “And here’s some nostalgia. The Beatles, with – “ she gulped slightly – “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

The music began. Carly looked through the window at the producer. “Great choice of track, genius,” she muttered.

*

The studio was in the smart civic centre that loomed above the market square. The square was packed with stalls selling everything from books to cookware, spicy sausages and local cheeses. It had been there many hundreds of years. Sometimes Amy thought how a 12th-century trader from Lübeck or Bruges would feel if they landed in the city today; at first they would be bewildered, but then they would come to the Market Square and understand at once the place and feel at one with the people who worked there. She usually felt very at home in the Market.

But after the interview she felt an odd disquiet.

She lunched on a takeaway from one of the market stalls; she often did this and today she had fish and chips, but it did not agree with her as it usually would. She sat eating on the terrace overlooking the market, in front of the Town Hall, where the War Memorial was. Many people did that, and it was busy and cheerful.

“What have I missed?” she asked herself. “What should I have known?”

Her phone chirruped and she opened the text. It was from her mother.

Will you go and see grandad today

She texted back: Yes in visiting hours after four. All good?

Her mother replied: Tests inconclusive. He is comfortable

Then: He rang just now. He wants to see you today

She frowned as she put her phone away. She looked out across the square. It was the same as ever.

*

Sometimes Grandad put on his dressing-gown and sat in the easy-chair beside his bed, but today he was lying back on the bed itself, propped by pillows. His face was thin. She kissed him on the forehead, then sat down in the easy-chair herself. They were on the first floor; outside a knot of children were playing a ball-game of some kind, and their voices could be clearly heard. The early-evening sun streamed in through the big modern window and cast an apricot light on Grandad’s face.

“Heard you on the radio today,” he said.

“You listened to me?”

“Oh yes. Feel quite proud really. Silly old sod, I am. But that’s how I feel. That’s our Amy on the radio.”

They smiled at each other.

“Didn’t know you’d be talking ‘bout Walter Williams, though. I’d’a told you no. Don’t you talk ‘bout him.”

She frowned.

“You another person going to tell me what a bad man he was?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I knew. He was 15 years dead when I was born. But I knew. And I knew who killed him.”

“Do you? I wish you’d tell me,” said Amy. Her frown deepened. “All these hints, here and there, like – OK, who killed Walter Williams, Grandad?”

“Your great-grandfather,” he replied.

She stared.

Outside, a ball hit a car. The children were laughing. “Ha!” yelled one of them. “You ain’t joining the England squad.” The sun was getting lower and it caught the steel rings that held the curtains around the bed, and they shone.

*

“Dad was 22 then,” said Grandad. “When he was five his own dad, your great-great-grandfather, went off to war. He never did come back and Dad was the breadwinner. He’d been apprenticed at Pepperdine’s when he was 14. In the machine shop.” He thought for a minute. ”He’d have done about seven years as an apprentice, so by the time this happened he’d have been a journeyman. Had been for about a year. You know what was happening then? Around the world?”

“The Depression,” said Amy.

“Yes.,” said Grandad. “’Cept they didn’t call it that. The Slump, they always called it. You had a job, you held on to it like dear life. Well, in them days a machine shop was run on piecework. You know about that? There’d be a rate for the bits of work you did. And the fights they had over fixing those rates. You don’t want to know. But it wasn’t just that. You heard of ca’canny?”

“What?” asked Amy.

“No, you’d not have heard of it,” he said. “Mind you by the time I grew up the worst of all this was gone. Well, ca’canny – it’s a Scots phrase – it was the workers balancing their speed so they didn’t make the piece rate look too high, or too low. Very careful they were. And if the foreman saw a skilled man slowing his lathe to keep the piecework rates high, he’d quite likely hand him his cards. He’d be out. Foremen could do that then. You’d be out on your ear. Fourth winter of the Slump, you didn’t want that. You didn’t want it. You didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to lose your job.”

“So what happened, Grandad?”

Mike Robbins

“There were three of them. Dad, Josh Spencer and John Crowe. Williams’d been picking on all of them. Dad was too fast so he’d slowed down to protect the piecework rate, and Williams noticed. Spencer was a Bolshie and Williams hated him. Crowe – well, he was a nice enough lad by all accounts, but he was never very fast. Dad had to look after his mother and his younger sister. Spencer had three children and Crowe had two. Williams called them in at the end of the shift – it was the last shift of the day, everyone was leaving – and told them they’d be getting their cards. He was pretty nasty about it, from what Dad said. Thirty years later, he were still angry. Crowe started crying. Walter Williams was a braggart and a bully. Always was, always had been. Scum who crawled on his belly.

“Well, Williams turns toward the filing cabinet to get their cards. And Dad, he had this hammer in his hand, he’d been fixing something when he’d been called in. Big heavy hammer it was, he said. They never did find that. Didn’t think about it, he said. Red mist.You’re not going to swing for that miserable bastard, Spencer said, and he wasn’t joking; you could hang then. They got a chain off the shop floor and weighted the body with it, and tossed it in the river outside the factory. Truth be told, I think they panicked; it wasn’t the best place to put it. But the current dragged it downstream, and it wasn’t found till spring.”

He stopped talking and looked away. Voices came from the children outside, and from around the ward. “Mr Clark, it’s time for your medications,” a nurse was saying to someone. “Dad, you’re looking a bit better,” said someone else’s visitor. There was a grating sound as the curtains were drawn round a patient’s bed.

*

“He told you all this?”

“Yes,” said Grandad. “He died in 1961. He told me not long before. He knew he was going. He was only 51. But he’d not been the same since – well, he said he never thought there’d be foremen as bad as Williams. But he bloody well met them on the Burma Railway. He wasn’t going to be old. Not after that.”

“I’ve got some tissues,” said Amy. She opened her bag.

“Thank you,” said her grandfather.

“What happened to the others?” she asked, after an interval.

“Josh Spencer was killed in Spain,” he replied. “They said he died fighting, but I heard he fell off a lorry. Crowe stayed at Pepperdine’s. He was in a reserved occupation. So he was still in the machine shop when the Germans bombed it. He was crushed under a steel roof truss. Dad was the last to die. But people knew, you know. I don’t know who talked. Not your great-grandad. Maybe Spencer. But I reckon it was Crowe. It was a burden, like. He wasn’t a strong man.”

“People seem to know,” said Amy.

“Yes,” said her grandfather. “But it’s funny, you know, people often do but they don’t talk. Walter Williams wasn’t unusual. When times are hard, the scum always float to the surface by looking after the powerful’s business. But people have a way of sticking together.”

A nurse in scrubs approached. She was young and vital but tired.

“It’s time for your pills, Mr Tyler,” she said. She looked at Amy. “Maybe he should rest now.”

“You kicking me out?” asked Amy.

“In the nicest possible way,” said the nurse. She grinned. “Scram.”

“I suppose she’d better then,” said her grandfather.  He turned towards Amy. “Do you ever walk along the Riverside?”

“Yes, often. Did this morning,” she said.

“Remember what was there,” he said. “The ships and the forges. And what we were. Walter Williams was scum but let the dead bury the dead. But don’t forget who we were and where we’ve been. Or we lose our soul. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” she said.

She kissed him, stood and then paused for a moment beside his bed. Then she went out through the hospital’s main entrance. The children had gone and it would soon be dark. Autumn was on the air and the season would soon change, as it had so many times before.

More short fiction from Mike Robbins

A Difficult Life When the world dislikes your birth

Come and See the Chickens A rather English love story

In Search of a Plot  Be careful. Elspeth may put you in a bacon slicer

A Question of Character Pity the nation...
The End A gun on a brownstone roof
The Last Time A figure skater leaves the ice
After the Flood An end? Or a beginning?
Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place
A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit
Time After Time When you have to warn the children
Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style
A Time of Darkness History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes
Another Time A tear in the fabric
Evolution The world is turning
When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square
Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala
A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip
A History Lesson Why do we study it? So we can spot it happening
The Creatives Meeting a tech bro
Cold Everything is cold here
Homecoming A sort of love story
Solitude A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography
Hiraeth A yearning…
Strange Places A spirit in the sky 
A Sideways Journey Things might have been different
Displaced Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.

Original crime

Detective fiction is not dead. Two recent crime novels have been bestsellers. And both deserve to be

In a week or two, God willing, about 500 books will arrive on my doorstep. They’re mine; I last saw them in New York over a year ago. They arrived in England last August but I have had nowhere to put them, so they’ve been sitting in a Pickfords facility somewhere in Suffolk. I shall soon summon them to my new home. That’s if the vendors and I complete as planned in a few days’ time.

Still, I’ve had books to hand. I have read, among other things, two very enjoyable vintage crime stories; I posted about these some weeks ago (Crime on the Side, May 19). Now I’ve read two more recent bestsellers. Both have been highly praised and I was afraid I’d be disappointed. I wasn’t.

First, The Thursday Murder Club.

So who’s the sleuth?
In any good crime story, there is a detective or amateur sleuth the reader can accompany on the journey of detection. The stronger their identity, the stranger their quirks, the more likely it is we’ll be back to keep them company in the next story as well. Agatha Christie of course had Poirot; Dorothy Sayers had the sometimes-annoying Lord Peter Wimsey. C. Day Lewis had his eccentric amateur, Nigel Strangeways. A writer can buck that convention. But they’d better know what they are doing.

Richard Osman does. Instead of a detective as such, his very successful The Thursday Murder Club (2020) was the first of (so far) three books to feature an ill-assorted group of four friends, all in their 70s and 80s, living in a retirement village and trying to solve cold cases. It’s a hobby. Then a dodgy local builder is dispatched in his kitchen with a heavy blow to the head. Suddenly it isn’t a hobby any more. And although there are two police detectives, they’re there mainly for human interest and as a foil for the sleuthing seniors. Meanwhile, there’s another death – and then a third and a fourth, both long ago, come to light. Are they connected, or are they muddying the waters?

As a detective novel, The Thursday Murder Club does have some flaws. Now and then it’s hard to suspend disbelief; the fearsome four are sometimes just a bit too lucky, and the two “real” detectives a little too complicit in their activities (and a police investigation of a murder like this would be a lot more professional). The plot is quite complicated, and I think most crime fans would want to have more clues that would help them join in with the investigation in their heads, and let them build their own theories. At the end, when we find out who did dispatch the dodgy builder, it’s a surprise. It should be, of course; but I’d have liked more clues that would have made me kick myself for not spotting them.  

And yet it all sort of works, because – like some of the best crime stories – this book has features that transcend its qualities purely as detective fiction. For a start, it’s also got a strong sense of time and place. There’s the retirement community itself, and its setting. It’s been built around a former convent, with a clinic, and a chapel that has not been deconsecrated; and it’s set on a verdant hillside that seems to be near Robertsbridge in Kent – a beautiful part of the country. (The nearest shopping centre is called Fairhaven but seems to be Hastings in disguise.) The residents are not just nice old dears; some of them did a lot with their lives and are still people to be reckoned with.

There is also a frankness about dementia and ageing. Osman understands that older people actually confront this more than the young realise. They bluntly accept the brutal fact that they don’t know how long they’ll be around, or how long they’ll be compos mentis. Amongst Osman’s characters, for instance, there is Elizabeth; every day she opens her diary at a date two weeks hence and writes a question, the answer to which she knows today – but will she then? If she doesn’t, it’ll be a warning that her grasp is weakening.  Her husband Stephen has already crossed the threshold and she does not want to lose him to full-time care, but knows she soon must.

There’s a fair bit of social commentary. A ghastly get-rich-quick builder has a house of almost comic vulgarity, and attitudes (especially to women) to match. A police officer drops by to talk to the residents on crime prevention; she’s a woman (and, we learn much later, black). She says she is happy to be addressed by her first name, but not as “love”. Elderly resident Joyce has a go-getter daughter who works in finance. Joyce herself was once a nurse, and remembers how horrible some consultants were. Moreover Osman’s turn of phrase makes the narrative more vivid. Elizabeth, looking for signs of dementia in herself, thinks with dread of the time when you “become ‘Poor Rosemary’ or ‘Poor Frank’, catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they really were.” The old convent has “a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing.” The murder victim is clubbed in his kitchen and his “fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.” This book might have limitations if seen solely as detective fiction. But it is much more than that, and is compulsively readable.

Author Richard Osman turned to writing books only recently; The Thursday Murder Club, published in 2020, was his first book (though he’s since written three more – a productive use of lockdown perhaps). But he has been involved in creative ventures of one kind or another (including scriptwriting) for a very long time, and has been producer or presenter of some of the best-known shows on British TV, working or appearing on The One Show, Have I Got News for You, The Dragon’s Den and Whose Line Is It Anyway. He was also for many years presenter of a BBC quiz show, Pointless. He dropped the latter last year to concentrate more on his writing after the huge success of his crime novels. As I was writing this, he tweeted: “This week marks 150 weeks in the bestseller list for The Thursday Murder Club. I couldn't have dreamt of this three years ago, so heartfelt thanks to everyone who has read the books.”

But her emails…
So to the second of these two bestsellers; it’s just as good – and just as original. It’s Janice Hallett’s The Appeal.  

Like Osman, Hallett had never published a book before this one – and walked off with an instant bestseller. But she too had been a journalist and screenwriter. (She co-wrote the 2011 film Retreat, a rather bleak and grisly thriller set on a remote island during a pandemic – about which, she now says, the script was very prescient.)

The Appeal is a whodunnit with a daring structure. It does not start with a crime; you don’t learn of it until quite close to the end of the book. Instead it starts with a note from Roderick Tanner QC to two of his juniors. He is clearly vexed by a case and wants them to unravel it from a huge pile of emails sent and received, over many months, by the various characters. We realise that one of them may be in trouble and may be in jail; we also guess that they are mounting an appeal and that Tanner is their brief. But even these facts we are not told; we infer them. And for the moment we learn nothing else. Instead we are given all the emails, in chronological order – which is how Charlotte and Femi, the juniors, are reading them. We don’t get much comment from either of the juniors. Mostly, we just get the emails.

They revolve around a production by an amateur dramatics group, the Fairway Players (it’s Arthur Miller’s All My Sons). The members of the group are jockeying for parts in the play; the auditions begin. The production is led by Martin, a wealthy local businessman and owner of an hotel/conference centre. Then, not far in, he announced that his infant granddaughter Poppy has brain cancer and needs an experimental treatment from the States. He mounts an appeal to pay for it. From then on the stories of the play, the appeal for Poppy, and the crime to come are intertwined.

The emails structure lets us see each character’s personality for ourselves, without description, from the way they relate to each other – a powerful piece of show-don’t-tell that works very well. It’s a large cast, but they include Isabel, the twittery, verbose, rather nervous nurse who seems to irritate everyone. There’s Martin himself, the local middle-class alpha male, and the members of his family. There is Sarah-Jane, professional appeals organiser, curt with Isabel but emollient with others. And there is Samantha, also a nurse, who has recently returned from some very dodgy parts of Africa, where she has been working with Médecins Sans Frontières. There is something unclear about her and we learn of her mainly from the emails of others. Bit by bit, we sense that all is not as it appears with the fundraiser for Poppy, or with the doctor treating her, or with Samantha’s time in Africa. Bit by bit these themes combine until we are finally confronted with the crime itself.

I thought this book a real tour de force – an unusual crime story told in a highly original way. I wrote once that Dorothy Sayers’s Wimsey novels work so well because she puts you inside his head and unscrolls the story much as he sees it, so that you share the process of detection with him. Something even better happens here; you keep Femi and Charlotte company as they wade through a mass of emails through which threads emerge but are seen through a glass, darkly. The emails also reveal a great deal about each individual with splendid clarity. In 2021, Guardian interviewer Kate Kellaway asked The Appeal author Janice Hallett how much an email could say about someone’s character. “More than you might think,” she replied. “Even the one-line emails people think give nothing away can be revealing.” She is not joking. All of us will have had friends or colleagues whose emails gush like Isabel’s or are curt like Sarah-Jane’s.

Amateur dramatics, 1930s-style

Moreover, like The Thursday Murder Club, this book is a sly snapshot of modern Britain. There is the too-busy health service, the wary HR departments, and the class structure that is never discussed but is always just below the surface, and is baked into our DNA. Here as in real life it defines so much of people’s behaviour – our acceptance of our place in any process, our deference to people who do not deserve it, and our failure to question their motives. I’d guess that this realistic setting is, indirectly, part of the reason for both books’ success. This is not because people want social commentary in their leisure reading; I’m not sure they do. It’s more because they recognise the settings and characters and identify with them. It’s something the Golden Age crime novel didn’t always do quite so well. Neither Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers appeared socially aware, at least in their books; indeed Sayers was (it’s said) a snob. And at times the standard plot of the day seemed to be death at a country-house weekend, not something most of their middle-class readers would have experienced.

The Appeal did have a flaw: the characters, though well-drawn, were mostly just not very attractive. A few were unpleasant and the rest left me mostly cold. Do you need someone to root for in a book? I do. In this respect, Osman’s characters worked better for me and were part of why I liked the book. I enjoyed The Appeal anyway because it was so original and well-written. But I should have liked to have someone who made me care more about the outcome. Still, I think this matters more to some readers than others.

The good news is that both writers have decided to keep writing. Hallett has produced four more crime novels since; Osman, two. Both manage to entertain while reflecting a fast-changing world. I think they’ll be with us a while.

Read some of Mike's own fiction here.

Mike is now also on Substack at https://mikerobbinswrites.substack.com/

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

 

Crime on the side

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.

The books have an original premise; instead of a detective or private investigator, they feature one Montague Cork, the head of a large London-based insurance company. Now and then, should a claim seem doubtful or fraud possible, he will investigate personally. He has thus become something of a sleuth. One evening he is walking down Mayfair’s Cork Street when he is accosted by a lady of business. She is taken aback by Cork’s response, which is to examine the brooch she is wearing; how did she come by it? He has realised that it fits the description of a valuable jewel that has been reported to his company as lost.

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 his son. 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.

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The butler did it! ...Or did he?

A trip back into the Golden Age of crime

Some months ago, tired and worried after months of lockdown (and in the middle of a health scare of my own), I decided that a detective novel seemed a good way to relax. So I downloaded a collection of early Agatha Christie books. I had read one or two of hers before, of course; most of us have – but I had forgotten just how good they could be. It was the start of a journey into a peculiarly English phenomenon – the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

That golden age is widely accepted as having been between the two world wars. That is not to say that no good crime novels have been written since. That would be absurd, as anyone who has read P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Colin Dexter, Ruth Rendell or a host of others will happily attest. Neither was it solely British; the “hardboiled” style of American crime fiction had its golden age too, led by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – both still widely read. But there is something essentially English in the world of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham that is of its time and place. It’s a world of bodies in libraries, ingenious poisons and genteel murderers. And of quaint Cotswold villages full of unseemly death. 

It reflected the English newspaper reader’s preoccupation with a certain type of real-life crime, defined by George Orwell in his 1946 Tribune piece The Decline of the English Murder as committed by: “A little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs ... He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion …Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail.” In Orwell’s view, interest in real-life crimes of this kind had declined partly because in line with the times, crime had become more violent and nihilistic. He also commented that “the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant” – which, in 1946, it had. If he was right, then a waning interest in genteel, cerebral crime fiction was also a result.

Much later, P.D. James wrote a piece in The Spectator titled Who Killed the Golden Age of Crime? (December 14 2013). She did not answer her own question directly, but it seems clear that she, too, saw Golden Age stories as the product of a vanished world in which we can no longer believe. “The world these writers portrayed was one which …any sense of the world outside the comfortable confines of conventional English village life was absent,” she writes. “Readers expected the detective to be a gentleman in all senses of the word.” Those detectives were, she points out, often wealthy aristocrats. She quotes an Alan Bennett character’s description of English literature as “snobbery with violence”, which seems to fit the inter-war detective novel. Besides, she says, policing is different now and the copper’s relations with the community rather more complex. “The best of the Golden Age stories have survived and will continue to survive,” she wrote, “but they they are not being written today.”

I am sure that both Orwell and James are right. The TV news and the Internet confront us constantly with sordid realities of life – so they must be reflected in fiction, or we can’t suspend disbelief. We are also less squeamish; I don’t believe 1930s readers would have easily accepted a book like P.D. James’s own Innocent Blood (1980), which features the sexually motivated murder of a child. I wonder, too, if the audience has changed in other ways. Before 1939, fairly ordinary middle-class families would have been able to afford domestic help – so women, in particular, may have had more time to read (a point made by Colin Watson in his book Snobbery With Violence, of which more later). After the war, detective fiction may have had to seek a broader, less genteel class of reader. Suddenly, the Golden Age detectives were dated.

On the other hand the best writing will always be worth reading, or why would we read Shakespeare – or Orwell himself, or Graham Greene? James herself says in the Spectator piece that the best Golden Age detective stories “have survived and will continue to do so”. Besides, the success of the “cosy mystery” in our own time – not just in print, but with TV series like Midsomer Murders and Rosemary and Thyme – suggests that the Golden Age of murder still has a place in our hearts. Why? I decided to take a break from heavier reading and find out for myself. Should one still be reading Golden Age detective fiction today? Or does it belong in the museum?

I started with Agatha Christie. One would, after all.

*

Christie was born in 1890 and brought up in a comfortable home in Torquay. Although she is a quintessentially English figure, her father was American. Born and brought up in New York, he had inherited money from the family business. But he died when she was 11, and with no formal skill or career – a well-to-do girl wouldn’t have them, then – she married at 24. In the 1920s, her marriage failing, she famously disappeared for 11 days, turning up in Harrogate, where she had booked into a hotel under the name of her husband’s mistress; she claimed to remember nothing. Her brother Monty, too, would cause her endless worry – a spendthrift who couldn’t cope with life; at about the same time she parked him in a small house on Dartmoor to keep him out of trouble. But in 1929 he decamped with his housekeeper to Marseilles, where he died not long afterwards after suffering a stroke in a bar.

A young Agatha Christie...

But a much happier second marriage followed. Moreover, by the time of the Harrogate incident, Christie was already a successful writer. During the First World War, with her first husband away on active service, she had had time to occupy; liking mystery stories, she decided to write her own. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was written in 1916 and benefited from her wartime work in a dispensary (she would do that  in the second war too, updating her knowledge of poisons). The book was not accepted by a publisher until 1920. But it was then quite a hit. Agatha Christie was on her way.

I decided to begin with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, since she did. A young officer, Hastings, has been wounded on the Western Front and is invited to spend part of his convalescent leave with an old friend at the latter’s country home, Styles. Very soon the mistress of the house dies horribly in the night, as one does. However, Hastings has found that a distinguished Belgian refugee detective of his acquaintance is staying nearby. Hercule Poirot has arrived, and the “little grey cells” are deployed for the first time.

The lady has been poisoned. Forensic science is not where it is now, but no matter – M. Poirot has other tools of deduction, from a random footprint to a fragment of burned paper in the grate. Clues are scattered where the attentive reader will find them and others will not, which is part of the fun with a book like this. The characters come alive. There are complex motives and red herrings aplenty. In fact, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is rather good. I needed no encouragement to read Christie’s second book, The Secret Adversary (1922).

It disappointed me. It is as much an adventure story as a detective novel – but that is fine if one can combine the two; John Buchan could. But M Poirot is, regrettably, absent. Instead we have Tommy and Tuppence. The former is a somewhat stolid middle-class English chap, a little dim but a good egg; Tuppence is the impoverished daughter of a country deacon, but an awfully good sport. They are so relentlessly jolly that I wanted to throttle them both. The narrative concerns a desperate attempt to foil a wicked Bolshevist coup in which, through either wickedness or stupidity, Labour leaders have become complicit. Perhaps, in 1922, this was popular with middle-class readers, but it has not aged well. Moreover one or two plot devices do not really work. For example, much turns on the text of a secret treaty, now abandoned, that must on no account be made public lest it bring down the Empire; Christie never troubles to tell us how it could have done so. The book was quite well received in 1922, and was even made into a silent film in Germany. But it was clearly not Christie’s best.

Still, she only used Tommy and Tuppence in five books; M. Poirot featured in over 30, and Christie’s evergreen heroine Miss Marple, the nice old lady with a mind like a razor, in 12. I decided to go in search of something better. I knew where to look.

In 1928, the year in which her divorce became final, Christie travelled to Iraq – presumably to get away from personal troubles and to catch some sun. When there, she met a young archaeologist, Max Mallowan; they married in 1930. This second marriage was far happier and lasted nearly fifty years, ending only with Christie’s death. Mallowan’s work would take them back to the Middle East more than once. On at least one of these trips, Christie spent an extended stay at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo.

The Baron, like the city, is a storied place, and I often drank in its bar when I lived in Aleppo in the 1990s. Opened in 1911, it soon became the hotel of choice for Europeans passing through the ancient city; they included T.E. Lawrence, who, as a young student, was studying the fortifications of the Crusader castles in the region. After 1919, Syria ceased to be part of the Ottoman empire and was instead occupied by France; as with the British occupation of Palestine, this was either done under a League of Nations mandate or was a colonial land grab, depending on your point of view. In any case, the Baron weathered the changes and continued to welcome the great and the good, who sometimes arrived via the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul and thence to Aleppo on the Taurus Express. They included Christie and Mallowan. In Murder on the Orient Express, M. Poirot makes this journey in reverse.

Agatha Christie wrote the book at the Baron in 1930 – officially in room 203, which retains the writing-desk on which it is said to have been written. In fact, I believe some of it at least was written on the terrace. I knew it well; in the winter I sat at the cluttered bar, which had changed little since Christie’s day, and imagined Kim Philby drowning his sorrows there in the last months before his defection (which apparently he did). But in summer one could sit outside and hope to catch some cool breeze in the stifling Syrian summer. I suppose Christie did the same.

Murder on the Orient Express opens in Aleppo station on a freezing night; M. Poirot has been in the city to render some unspecified service to the French military and is being wished on his way by a French officer. They do not know each other well, and would clearly happily be rid of each other, but are too polite to make this clear. Eventually the Taurus Express pulls out bound for Konya and Istanbul via the Cilician Gates, the mountain pass that admits it from the Middle East to Anatolia. It is a spectacular journey. It would be made some years later by Richard Dimbleby, who took the same train on a tense journey through Vichy territory and neutral Turkey in 1941, and described it in The Frontiers are Green (1943).

M. Poirot's eye, however, is caught not by the scenery but by an English governess and a straight-backed British officer who have travelled, together and yet apart, from Iraq. Poirot will go on with them on the Orient Express from Istanbul and, in a snowdrift in the Balkans, there will be murder most foul in the sleeping-car.

It is a wonderful setting; a cast of exotic characters who cannot leave the train, and one of them must be the murderer. Is it the Hungarian diplomat, Count Andrenyi? The Russian Princess Dragomiroff? The English governess? I knew the solution; I had seen the film. I was drawn in nonetheless. This is so much better than The Secret Adversary and shows just how Christie has captivated generations, although the world in which her books were set has long gone. Pick the plot apart and one can find the holes; but why would one wish to? It really is such splendid fun. It is not surprising that, at about the same time, Graham Greene used the Orient Express for his own adventure story, Stamboul Train.

So Agatha Christie is still worth reading – if you get the right book. To be sure, her books are dated now; but while The Secret Adversary grates for that reason, in Murder on the Orient Express this glimpse back into a vanished world is part of the appeal. In any case, readers are still in no doubt. In 2019 they bought 20 million copies in the English-speaking world alone – adding to the two billion already sold. We still cannot get enough of either Poirot or Miss Marple. Neither are they just in print; both have made both the big and the small screen. Poirot has been portrayed most notably by David Suchet, but also by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, John Malkovich and Kenneth Branagh, amongst others. Marple has been played by Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine McEwan, June Whitfield and, amazingly, Gracie Fields – the latter for American TV.

But what about Christie’s rivals? Do they stand the test of time?

*

After Christie, I suppose one would turn to Dorothy L. Sayers. Just three years younger, she too began to publish in the 1920s. She would never be anything like as prolific, and her detective fiction is sometimes seen as far more cerebral. To some extent, that reflects the women themselves; although clearly extremely intelligent, Christie was not an intellectual. Sayers was; she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and in later life translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and wrote extensively on Christian theology. But she also spent some years as an advertising copywriter, and there is no doubt that her detective fiction was intended to entertain. Much of it features her aristocratic amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, who is introduced in Sayers’s first book, Whose Body?, published in 1923. So once again I decided to start there.

The book starts with a body in Battersea. To be precise, it has appeared in the bath in someone’s flat, in one of the big 1890s mansion-blocks face the south edge of Battersea Park, along Prince of Wales Drive. (One of the blocks was the scene of a notorious real-life murder that remains unsolved – that of Thomas Weldon Atherstone, a music-hall performer, in 1910.) In Whose Body?, the flat’s resident appears to have no connection with the crime, or with the body; and, flustered, he accepts the help of the aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, with whose mother he is distantly acquainted. In the meantime Lord Peter is also trying to solve the disappearance of a well-known London financier, Sir Reuben Levy. The body in the bath is, it appears, not Levy’s; but are the two matters connected?

I confess that the first 50 pages or so of this book did not impress. Lord Peter is too much the lordly fool; his logorrheic banter is so dated that now and then it flummoxed even me (and I am only 30 years younger than the book). To be sure, Sayers wishes us to see the fatuous ass before we glimpse the steel-trap brain beneath, but it seemed to me overdone. In contrast, his loyal valet and confederate, Bunter, has an intellect and skills that would surely have fitted him for a career with more prospects. Meanwhile the doltish detective assigned the case, Sugg, appears a cypher, a straw man from the lower classes set up as a foil for our posh hero.

One is reminded of Raymond Chandler’s skewering of Sayers in a 1944 essay in The Atlantic, titled The Simple Art of Murder. As I noted briefly at the beginning, the American detective story had its own golden age at roughly the same time – the ‘hard-boiled’ style of which Chandler was a prime exponent, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and others. Chandler wrote that Sayers had “an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. ...if it started out to be about real people..., they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things... They became puppets.” For Chandler, the hard-boiled American style is clearly more realistic so works better; Sayers is trite.

Is that fair? Reading Whose Body?, I would at first have said yes. It seemed as if it may have pleased readers in the 1920s, but was a dated confection that was best left there. But something made me think I should read on. And I was right. In fact one wonders if Orwell had read this book; he might have been less sure that the English murder was quite so cosy, because – without revealing too much – this book has an undercurrent of Gothic horror that admits one to the darkness at the heart of the human condition. I think Chandler missed something.

Moreover there is a chilling insight into the psychology of crime that tells us how Sayers herself saw the world. Speaking through one of her characters, she tells us that a mechanistic view of the human character – a belief that one’s motivations are purely biophysical – leaves no space for morality, or for a conception of good and evil. It seems to Sayers that we need a dimension we do not understand if we are to refrain from evil. A humanist would not agree with this view, but Sayers was religious and it was probably deeply held.

...A young Dorothy Sayers

A more serious criticism of Sayers than Chandler’s is that Sayers was antisemitic. Whose Body is sometimes cited as the book in which this is most evident. There is a prima facie case there, and there are antisemitic remarks in some of her private letters. However, some writers on her disagree with this; and as a young woman she had a long affair with a Russian-Jewish poet, John Cournos. Sayers’s relationship with antisemitism is actually complicated – and there seems to have been a link with her private life. It’s a topic discussed with sympathy and insight in an essay by American critic Amy E. Schwartz, The Curious Case of Dorothy Sayers & the Jew Who Wasn’t There (2016). (Sayers’s private life was itself complicated; in 1924 she gave birth to an illegitimate child, who was fostered by relatives, but who she adopted some years later without telling him she was his birth mother. He did eventually find out.)

Sayers might not be so easy a read as Agatha Christie, but Whose Body suggested to me that she more interesting. To see if that was true, I decided to read two more books – The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and what devotees consider her finest work, The Nine Tailors (1934).

The first of these opens in a London club, one of those old-fashioned institutions where men used to gather to read the papers, have a drink, dine and, if from out of town, stay overnight. A few still exist. One day an elderly member, sitting in his normal place in front of the fire, turns out to have died. No-one is very surprised. Then it turns out that his actual time of death might be of some importance to his legatees. Wimsey is asked to establish it. He finds he has opened a rather nasty can of worms.

Once again, there is more to this story than one might suppose. As in Whose Body?, Wimsey comes across as a fatuous ass, but in that first book Sayers hinted that he might be more complicated than he seemed. In The Unpleasantness this is confirmed. “I find you refreshing, Wimsey,” says an acquaintance. “You’re not in the least witty, but you have a kind of obvious facetiousness which reminds me of the less exacting class of music-hall.” The reader sees that it is a front. Meanwhile the Bellona Club is the haunt of old soldiers and there is a certain tension between the older members, with their Victorian and Edwardian imperial values, and those who have served in the recent war; some of the latter, including Wimsey himself, have been seriously injured and are suffering, sometimes very badly, from what we would now call PTSD. Sayers writes to entertain. But she is not trivial.

The Nine Tailors, meanwhile, is something else again. Wimsey and his man Bunter skid off the road in heavy snow one New Year’s Eve in some Godforsaken part of the Fens. Seeking refuge in the parsonage in a nearby village, they find that their host, the vicar, is an ardent campanologist. The Nine Tailors has nothing to do with tailors. It is (in part) about bells. To the traditional bellringer, ‘Tailor’ is a corruption of ‘Teller”, or toller – the largest, lowest-register bell in a church, which is used to toll the news of a passing; so many for a man or for a woman, then the tally of their years. The plot of The Nine Tailors concerns a long-ago theft and a murder, but is set around the almost uniquely English discipline of change-ringing – the art of making church bells peal in different sequences.

The Nine Tailors is gripping, and infuriating. It is gripping for its claustrophobic tension; almost all the story takes place in the cramped confines of a Fenland village, set on a low rise that is an island in the sinister drained flatlands around it. We thus know that the murderer is near at hand. But this book is also infuriating, as Sayers plays mind-games around the mathematical sequences in which bells are to be rung to produce various traditional peals. And the huge, ancient bells themselves – the medieval Batty Thomas, the 17th-century Tailor Paul – are among the characters. It isn’t hard to see why Sayers fans think this very original book is her crowning achievement.

The Sayers devotee would have you believe that the intellect behind the books is the attraction, but I think it is subtler than that. In the three books by Agatha Christie, I foresaw the culprit in only one; in another, I was taken by surprise, and in the third I already knew but would not otherwise have guessed. Sayers is different. In all three books I did guess at least part of the solution, and at first I was pleased with myself for doing so, then realized that this was exactly what Sayers intended – that the attentive reader would uncover the truth at the same pace as Wimsey himself and would share his thought-processes without being told what they were. It works beautifully, making the reader identify with Wimsey and holding their attention. Forget the mind-games; Sayers’s real strength is to put you in her hero’s head, and keep you there.

I asked whether Agatha Christie’s rivals had also stood the test of time. Sayers has, although she appeals to a narrower readership. What of Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh?

*

Margery Allingham’s parents were both journalists; her father Herbert Allingham was also a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Writing was in her blood and she pursued it from an early age. She was born in 1904 in London, but the family soon moved to Essex, where she would spend most of her life. Its coastline, with its damp foggy estuaries and sinister marshes, would exercise a pull on her imagination that is evident in her books, beginning with her first effort, Blackkerchief Dick (1923), a tale of smugglers set on the county’s Mersea Island, which Allingham knew well in her youth.

Margery Allingham in 1936, by 
photographer Howard Coster
(National Portrait Gallery)

That book was not a success, but she broke through with The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). In it, we are introduced to amateur detective Albert Campion, who would feature to a greater or lesser extent in pretty much all her books. Like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, he is an aristocrat (of, it is hinted, most noble origins). And, like Wimsey, he is – on the surface – a fatuous ass. He so strongly resembles Wimsey in concept that when Agatha Christie read The Crime at Black Dudley, she wondered if Allingham was Sayers writing under a pseudonym. In fact Campion is thought to have been meant, at first, as a caricature of Wimsey, but he soon acquired a life and character of his own.

Allingham is a much-admired writer, but The Crime at Black Dudley was nothing special. Like so many crime stories of its time, it is set at a country-house weekend. This is a posh function that middle-class readers of the day would probably not have attended themselves, but would have understood. The hero is not Campion but another young man, Abbershaw; Campion, however, rather steals the show as the assembled bright young things find themselves imprisoned in a decaying medieval Suffolk mansion, embroiled against their will in an international criminal conspiracy. There is snobbery and violence aplenty. But the plot is not believable, driven as it is by evil masterminds, creepy mysterious foreigners, hidden doors and secret passages. And the characters are hackneyed stereotypes of their day; frightfully decent overgrown schoolboys partnered by girls who are, of course, complete bricks. This is Enid Blyton for adults and it has not aged well.

You can’t condemn a well-loved writer on the basis of one book. So I went on to her next one, Mystery Mile (1930) – one of eight Albert Campion stories adapted long afterwards for TV (by the BBC in 1990; I never saw them). This is set partly on a remote near-island off the Essex coast, thought to again be Mersea, on which Campion has decided to sequester an American judge that someone is trying to kill. Meanwhile Campion sets about finding who that someone is.

Mystery Mile, too, was a disappointment for me; too many jolly japes, an implausible adventure or two, and characters too much stereotyped according to the conventions of their time. Yet in this book, there were things that did grab me. The setting – the salt flats, the treacherous mud, the sea mists – did have a ring of truth and as we have seen, Allingham loved that landscape for most of her life. Moreover the final scenes in which Campion must confront the villain are very well done, and there is a sub-plot concerning the death of a parson that is neatly tied up at the end. Could I be wrong about Campion – and his creator? After all, she is still widely read, and Agatha Christie herself was generous in her praise of Allingham when the latter passed away.

At this point I came across an article by literary historian Jane Stevenson in The Guardian (Queen of Crime, August 19 2006) that compares her favourably with both Christie and Sayers. “All Allingham novels (except perhaps the first two) will, like those of Dorothy Sayers, stand a good deal of rereading,” she writes. But Sayers, she says, “is made hard to read by her snobbery and racism …and she was profoundly anti-semitic [as we have seen, this is disputed]. This is not a problem with Allingham, who was a person of genuinely wide human sympathy.” A charwoman in one of her books, says Stevenson, is a “precisely observed character with a history and something of an inner life, presented without condescension.” Moreover, as Stevenson says, Allingham’s first two books – the ones I had read – are not her best. Ask Allingham’s fans which one was, and they all seem to have the same answer:The Tiger in the Smoke.

Published much later, in 1952, it is set in the midst of a London November smog, five or six years after the war. A beautiful young war-widow, Meg, is about to remarry. But mysterious messages arrive suggesting that her late husband is far from dead. There are even photographs and newspaper-clippings that purport to show him. Is she being blackmailed? If so, what does the blackmailer want? Is her husband really still alive? As the book opens, she is in a taxi, on her way to Paddington Station to meet a train on which he may, it has been hinted, be travelling. Meanwhile a violent and extremely dangerous convict has escaped and is somewhere nearby, killing people. He, too, is interested in Meg; why, and is she in danger?

The Tiger in the Smoke has been highly praised, not least by fellow crime writers such as H.R.F. Keating and Susan Hill. In her foreword for the 2015 Vintage edition, Hill comments that “There are not many crime novels more genuinely frightening.” And Hill should know, having written The Woman in Black (1983), the creepy 1989 TV adaptation of which still has the power to shock. Hill also praises the power of Allingham’s villain. “In real life,” she writes, “criminals are rarely very interesting ...but detective fiction usually benefits from having a murderer who exerts a terrible fascination.” The Tiger in the Smoke has the escaped convict, Havoc. “He is her most repellent, dangerous, evil, and unusual killer,” says Hill, “a man with a wounding childhood, and a strange past history, without emotion or empathy or conscience, and yet not entirely without humanity, cold-blooded, shocking, brutal, and yet perhaps, just perhaps, redeemable.”

Moreover, as Jane Stevenson points out, you know early on who the criminal is, and “the interest is transferred to questions of the villain's psychology and how, or if, the detectives catch up with him.” Or as Hill puts it: “This is not a whodunit, it is a why-dunnit, a complex novel of character. It is also, at its core, about the essential Biblical, and specifically, the Miltonian, conflict between good and evil: the devil in the shape of Jack Havoc, and an angel, the saintly Canon Avril.” (The latter is a clergyman who confronts Havoc towards the end of the book.) Hill praises, too, Allingham’s sense of place and the way in which she uses the London smog to create a sinister backdrop that seeps through the narrative. The book is, she says, a masterpiece.

At least some of this is true. The way Allingham co-opts the notorious London smog as a character in her book is indeed masterful, and reminded me of Iris Murdoch’s sinister The Time of the Angels (1966); this too is wreathed in a wintry London fog through which the nature of evil slowly becomes apparent. Hill and Stevenson are also surely right that this book isn’t simply a whodunnit; it is a complex novel of motive and morality, with a big dollop of religion thrown in. I myself felt that the book was not so much Agatha Christie, more Graham Greene – it reminded me a little of Brighton Rock. Yet there is also plenty of complex plotsmithing, with twists and turns of which Dorothy Sayers would have been proud.

Greene himself did not like the book. Travelling in Africa in February 1959, he noted in his diary that friends had “lent me Tiger in the Smoke – a most absurd unreal story by Margery Allingham. It didn’t even pass the time; it was an irritation” (In Search of a Character; Two African Journals, 1961). This is rather ungracious; perhaps Greene felt Allingham was muscling in on his territory. That said, some of the praise for Tiger in the Smoke does seem overdone. Albert Campion and his extended family take up too much bandwidth; in fact Campion himself isn’t even essential for the plot (the 1956 film adaptation omitted him altogether). A group of street musicians plays a large part in the story, but for me they did not come to life. There were two or three other characters who did not seem right. Even so, The Tiger in the Smoke is rather good. It’s not hard to see that for some, it might be Allingham, not Christie or Sayers, who was the true Queen of Crime.

It seems to have done her little good in life. Julia Jones’s 2009 biography (The Adventures of Margery Allingham) records that she worked and worked. This was driven in part by a strong work ethic – she was from a journalistic family that had always lived from one commission to the next. But it also reflected her material support of others, including her husband, who was not faithful and may have had a son with the journalist Nancy Spain. Allingham herself struggled with thyroid and weight problems and eventually died of breast cancer in 1966, aged 62.

*

So to the last of these four, Ngaio Marsh.

Her first novel, A Man Lay Dead, appeared in 1934 but Marsh had written it three years earlier, while running an interior decoration business in Knightsbridge. As I had started with the first novels by the other three, I started with this one. In some ways it is a disappointment. It is set, like far too many other such books, at a country-house weekend, and (like Christie’s The Secret Adversary) it involves a conspiracy by various sinister Russians. There’s also an aristocratic detective. It all seems rather hackneyed.

But there may be a reason for that. Marsh had just read a detective novel, and as it was a rainy Saturday, she decided to see if she could write one too. It was, it seems, just a jape to pass a wet weekend. Marsh later said that the book that inspired this prank was by either Christie or Sayers, but in fact A Man Lay Dead bears a striking resemblance to Allingham’s first, The Crime at Black Dudley, and perhaps that was the book that Marsh had just read. She may even have set out to write a parody.

Yet the characterization is stronger – Marsh’s detective, Roderick Alleyn, who would continue to feature in her books, comes to life better than Albert Campion. The victim is also believable. He is a man who has long played with fire, and is finally burnt – and at the end we see clearly why. We also see a tendency to kill the victim in ingenious ways. In future Ngaio Marsh books they would be murdered while life modelling or drowned in the mud of hot springs; in one case, the owner of a sheep farm turns up at auction in one of her own bales of wool. (The latter book bore the splendid title Died in the Wool.)

In later years, Marsh herself would dismiss A Man Lay Dead as implausible and the characters shallow. She may even have been surprised it was published. But Ngaio Marsh’s mischievous wet weekend had launched her on a new career.

Marsh had tried writing earlier, but had been dissatisfied with her own efforts. It hadn’t occurred to her before to try crime fiction. In 1934 she was already 39, and her life so far had been as a painter and then in the theatre. Also, unlike the other three, she was not from a privileged background; her father had been a bank clerk. There is another important difference; her books seem as quintessentially English as theirs, but although she spent long periods in England, she was born and eventually died in Christchurch (Ngaio is a Maori word for a type of flowering tree). In fact her relationship to England was ambivalent; she was quite at home there but also felt drawn back to New Zealand, and it was there that she would eventually spend most of her life. Yet, of her 33 books, only four would be set there.

One of these four was the book I read next – Colour Scheme (1943), set at a run-down hot springs on North Island. The resort is owned by a genteel, somewhat incompetent English couple who have spent most of their lives in India. The Englishman is in hock to an unpleasant local businessman who dies a very Marshian death; he is pushed, one night, into a pool of simmering mud – an event that elicits a blood-chilling scream from the victim and a visit, eventually, from Inspector Alleyn. The plot, like the mud, thickens as the motive is uncovered. Was it debt? Or the victim’s habit of thieving sacred Maori artifacts? Or even espionage – has someone been signalling to Japanese submarines in the bay? (This last was not fanciful; two or three Japanese submarines, and one German U-boat, did conduct operations in New Zealand waters.)

Colour Scheme seems different to other Golden Age fiction. It has been said that it shows Marsh as a progressive figure who did not much like the Empire and Commonwealth, and cared more than most New Zealanders of the time about Maori tradition and culture. The latter may be true. I’m not sure about the former. Marsh split her time between New Zealand and the UK and wrote about New Zealand for the Collins series The British Commonwealth in Pictures. As for Colour Scheme, I thought it inventive and well-constructed but a bit sinister, and found it hard to love some of the characters. Still, I wanted to read a third book, as I had for Christie, Allingham and Sayers. And I hit on the right one.

Artists in Crime was published in 1938 and was Marsh’s sixth detective novel (a lot of work in just four years). It opens as Alleyn nears the end of a long leave, which he has used to travel to New Zealand. He is now returning to England via the United States. The liner has called at Fiji. As it leaves Suva astern, Alleyn stumbles across an artist, Agatha Troy, who is painting the docks on an upper deck. Troy will become the love of his life. But she is not especially friendly. Then, back in the Home Counties, Alleyn is summoned to a murder at Troy’s country house, where she gives private courses for moneyed aspiring artists. A beautiful but unlikeable life model has been murdered in a most ingenious fashion (best not to give this away but as we have seen, Marsh often had great fun with this). Any of the artists could have been the murderer; so could Troy herself. What follows is a terrific yarn, with well-drawn characters, red herrings, random clues and finally a grisly, haunting climax in a dark, grimy prewar Brixton.

Ngaio Marsh in Sydney, 1949

Ngaio Marsh would eventually write over 30 detective novels, along with a number of shorter pieces and some non-fiction; late in life she would even write for TV. It’s quite an achievement for a woman whose first field was not fiction, or even writing, at all. She had been an art student when young, but was a competent painter rather than a really good one, and did not pursue it as a career. Her real love was the theatre. Unable to travel during the war years, she spent them in New Zealand and became a noted producer and director, especially of Shakespeare. The theatre plays a key role in several of her novels. She was enormous fun to work with, according to Ray Neumann, who designed the set for one of her productions in Christchurch in 1962, when she was in her late 60s. She also had style. Years later, Neumann would tell journalist Linda Herrick that Marsh “drove a black XK120 Jag with white sheepskin upholstery and she'd bring her lunch each day – chicken sandwiches, a bottle of lager and a cigar” (Linda Herrick, The Mystery of the Crime Writer, New Zealand Herald, August 23 2008).

But she was also very private. She had published an autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, in 1966 but it contained few personal revelations, and she destroyed all her papers before she died. One of her biographers, Joanne Drayton (Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, 2008), told Herrick that Marsh remained an enigma in some ways, and that she may have been hurt by the fact that her own country never quite accepted her the way Britain did. (She was a huge success in the UK, where she remains well-known). She may also have found theatre people more accepting of the fact that she was (probably) a lesbian – something she always denied; for most of her lifetime it was not acceptable, and besides she may understandably have thought it was her own business.

Marsh was also the only one of the four women from an ordinary background. Agatha Christie had been born wealthy, Allingham had connections in journalism and publishing, and Sayers’s father was the chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; she herself attended Somerville College. But Marsh was the daughter of a bank clerk from the other side of the world. All of these four women are interesting as individuals, but Marsh perhaps most of all – yet we’ll never know quite who she really was.

*

How did these four women find such a huge audience? They were, of course, good at what they did. But that cannot wholly explain their extraordinary success.

The answer lies in the publishing industry between the wars. It is explained by Colin Watson in his book on the phenomenon, Snobbery With Violence (as stated earlier, the phrase is Alan Bennett’s; it’s from Forty Years On). Watson grew up between the wars, became a journalist in Lincolnshire and published 12 detective novels of his own – with some success; the BBC adapted eight, four for TV and the rest for Radio 4. Snobbery With Violence was published in 1971 and has since been reissued as part of the excellent Faber Finds series.

Watson felt the popular fiction of the day gave an insight into the mentality of the inter-war years, during which he grew up; he was born in 1920. He quotes the 18th-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (herself a fascinating figure) as follows:

Perhaps you will say I should not take my ideas of the manners of the times from such trifling authors; but it is more truly to be found among them than from any historian; as they write merely to get money, they always fall into the notions that are most acceptable to the present taste.

This is exactly what Watson does in his book; define the interwar years by their reading interests and prejudices. It is most revealing.

Popular fiction was of course not new; neither was adventure or detection – Wilkie Collins set the ball rolling in the mid-19th century with books such as the splendid The Moonstone (1868), which still feels fresh and original today. Conan Doyle, who was still active in the 1920s, had published his first Sherlock Holmes in 1887. But between the wars a number of factors sent the number of books read to stratospheric new heights. Watson argues persuasively that the growth in commuting, by bus and train, gave middle-class men time to fill; in the meantime, middle-class women were at a stage where labour-saving devices were appearing in the home, yet domestic help was still widely available – giving them, too, far more time to read. Books had competition, of course; Watson says little about the alternatives, but there was the cinema and from 1922 BBC radio. But the cinema meant going out. Radios remained expensive (they did not become really cheap until the transistor radio arrived in the 1950s), and there was little choice of stations until after the war. BBC TV started in 1936 but only in London, and again, sets were very costly; by 1939 there were still just 10,000.

So people read. The number of books published a year was 12,500 in the early 1920s (Watson says just a quarter of these were reprints); by 1939 they had reached about 17,000. A reader would therefore have 180-210 new titles to choose from every week. And they were accessible; besides municipal libraries, one could pop into WH Smith or Boots, both of which ran lending libraries from many of their branches, to which one could subscribe for a modest fee. (Boots only closed its last such library in 1966.) And importantly, the vast majority of books were read for entertainment. As Watson puts it, this vast and mainly middle-class interwar audience “read for pleasure rather than for education, and to kill time, not ignorance (with which, in any case, they were not conscious of being burdened).”

Perhaps inevitably, this tsunami of adventure and detection was sometimes of doubtful quality. Watson gives the example of Sydney Horler, whose character Tiger Standish was a vehicle for many of Horler’s own opinions; these included a loathing of foreigners and a big dash of antisemitism. Reviewers such as Dorothy Sayers herself and Compton Mackenzie were unimpressed, but the public lapped it all up and Horler published nearly 160 novels. He did not, in any case, hold other authors in high esteem, saying that too many were being written by “half-witted Oxford undergraduates, man-obsessed old maids, homosexuals with polished periods, and pin-heads of all descriptions.”

Meanwhile rival H.C. McNeile, who wrote under the pseudonym “Sapper”, created his gentleman adventurer Bulldog Drummond, whose xenophobia and antisemitism matched his own. It did not bother his readers; McNeile sold 400,000 books between the wars. Neither were they troubled by the rabid racism in Sax Rohmer’s books, which featured his hero Nayland Smith and his adversary, the Oriental master criminal, Fu-Manchu. Watson quotes one passage: “At last they were truly face to face – the head of the great Yellow movement, and the man who fought on behalf of the entire White race…” It was nonsense but the public lapped it up; Rohmer published 13 Fu-Manchu books. They were also filmed; one – The Brides of Fu-Manchu – was released well into my lifetime and as a child I saw it in the cinema. Even more prolific was Edgar Wallace, author of the Sanders of the River series, which would have appealed to the imperialistic sentiments of the time. Wallace, who had been born in poverty, was at least a nice man; Daphne du Maurier, a family friend, records his kindness in her memoir, Myself When Young (1977). He also wrote the script for King Kong, though he died before it was made. Unlike most of the the others, he is still read to some extent. But his work has not aged well.

There were better writers, of course. Conan Doyle managed some late Sherlock Holmes stories in the 1920s. Many of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories also date from the inter-war period, although some were written before 1914. Chesterton wrote short stories, not novels, but they were substantial enough to be filmed in our own time, and have remained popular on TV. One should also note Scottish writer Elizabeth McKintosh, who published mostly as Josephine Tey, and is very highly regarded by some Golden Age enthusiasts. I have not discussed her here as her output was relatively small. As with Ngaio Marsh, her first love was the theatre, and she wrote at least as many plays; there were only eight detective novels. But their quality was high, and she should not be ignored.

Others included the distinguished left-wing economist G.D.H. Cole, whose chair at Oxford would later be filled by Isaiah Berlin. Cole produced a huge number of non-fiction books, articles and pamphlets with titles such as Guild Socialism – A Plan for Economic Democracy (1921) and Some Essentials of Socialist Propaganda (1932). For light relief, he found time to co-author 29 detective novels with his wife Margaret (in fact, each one had been written by either one or the other). But it is not clear whether anyone still reads them, and they seem mostly to be out of print. Others included “Nicholas Blake”, actually C. Day Lewis.

In the main, though, it’s the Big Four – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – whose work has survived, and is still enjoyed today, both in print and on TV. Why?

*

The main reason is that they were good. As we’ve seen, all four of them had the odd misfire, especially with their earliest books. But in general, if you have a dull wet weekend ahead or a long flight, you can just download an Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh and you’ll get almost Toyota-like quality control. Moreover, while modern readers would find the bigotry of the Fu-Manchu or Sapper books distasteful, these four are mostly free of it, at least in their books. As we have seen, Dorothy Sayers has been charged with antisemitism, though this has been debated; and there can be a certain whiff of prejudice in the way some characters are depicted in her books and Christie’s. In the main, however, these four do not reflect the racism and jingoism of the time. And although the books are entertainment, the best of them have plenty of character development and are good on motivation. In this respect Marsh’s Colour Scheme and Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke stood out for me; and as I said earlier, Sayers’s Whose Body? includes glimpses into the human condition that are terrifying.

By 1939 Dorothy Sayers had stopped writing detective fiction altogether (although she lived until 1957). But the others continued for much longer. Margery Allingham wrote until her death in 1966. Agatha Christie also went on nearly to the end and wrote her last book in 1973, when she was 83; but she had gone on too long – Postern of Fate, which featured the wretched Tommy and Tuppence, was apparently not very good and showed signs of cognitive decline. However, it wasn’t the last to appear; several works written much earlier, including the last Poirot, were published after her death in 1976, as was a well-received autobiography. The last detective novel by any of the four was Ngaio Marsh’s Light Thickens; she completed it in 1982 when she was 87, and died later that year. It was published posthumously. With Marsh’s death, the Golden Age of detective fiction was truly over.

But it had really ended in 1939, and certainly by 1945. As Orwell wrote, the horrors of the real world in that year were too much for it. P.D. James was right; although the Big Four’s best work will always be read, it would not be written now. The world (and policing, and forensics) has changed and the best writers reflect it. Neither should we regret that old world’s passing – as Colin Watson showed, vast numbers of books were sold but many were dire, and were steeped in the prejudices of their age. These four writers – and a few others, such as Josephine Tey and G. K. Chesterton – did deserve to survive. But they were outliers.

Who will be today’s?

I would like to thank Neil Monk for his very helpful 
comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

See also…

Original Crime

Detective fiction is not dead. Two recent crime novels that have been bestsellers - and deserve to be... A look at books by Richard Osman and Janice Hallett.

Crime on the Side

Crime writing is fun, but don’t give up the day job… A look at two cracking crime writers who were actually better known for other things – one a successful journalist, the other a Poet Laureate.

Read some of Mike's own fiction here.

Mike is now also on Substack at https://mikerobbinswrites.substack.com/

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books. Follow Mike on Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook.