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The Floating Admiral ‘by Certain Members of the Detection Club’ was published in 1931, fairly early into the association’s existence. The ‘Certain Members’ who produced that original collaborative novel were, in alphabetical order: Anthony Berkeley, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, G. D. H. and M. Cole, Freeman Wills Crofts, Clemence Dane, Edgar Jepson, Milward Kennedy, Ronald A. Knox, John Rhode, Dorothy L. Sayers, Henry Wade and Canon Victor L. Whitechurch. Since that time the novel has appeared in many foreign editions and been republished twice, by Macmillan in 1981 and by HarperCollins in 2011. The royalties deriving from the book have done much to defray the expenses of the events for which the Detection Club exists, three congenial dinners a year.
Since I took over the Presidency in 2001 I have nurtured the desire to produce another volume ‘by Certain Members of the Detection Club’, partly again to help the association’s finances, but also because I thought it would be fun. The fact that you are reading this book now means that I have succeeded in my ambition.
Of course I owe that achievement to the goodwill, good humour, and literary skills of the other writers who agreed to collaborate on the novel. The Floating Admiral had fourteen contributors (if you count G. D. H. and M. Cole, a married couple who wrote together, as two), and The Sinking Admiral boasts exactly the same number.
There, though, the similarities between the two endeavours cease. In her introduction to the original volume, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: ‘Now, a word about the conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written. Here, the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection… Each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely “to make it more difficult”. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.’
Now there are a lot of reasons crime writers in the early twenty-first century could not write a collaborative novel by the same method as they could in the early 1930s, and one of the most important is the way in which the genre has changed in the intervening years. Though Dorothy L. Sayers and her band of collaborators had individual styles, they were all basically writing the same kind of book, the classic whodunit. So it was entirely possible to write a chapter, setting up a variety of clues that could be followed and elaborated, and pass on the literary baton to the next writer.
Nowadays that just won’t work because very few authors are actually writing traditional whodunits. Also, crime fiction is now a very broad church. The genre has divided up into a large number of subgenres. There are police procedurals, psychological thrillers, legal thrillers, forensic thrillers, financial thrillers, historical mysteries, and many more. All of these have skilful exponents and enthusiastic fans, but a book that continually jumped from one subgenre to the next would be unlikely to make a lot of sense.
So, early on in the planning for The Sinking Admiral, the decision was made to home in on the individual specialities of the contributing authors. If one of them was an expert in the world of high finance, then he or she should write the chapter about the shifty City financier. The same approach should be followed into the worlds of politics, publishing, journalism, the law, cookery, and so on. Some of the story threads – for instance, the ongoing police investigation – should be followed through by the same writer and interwoven into the rest of the text.
The resulting book, by comparison with The Floating Admiral, turned out therefore to be not so much a sequential game of dominoes as a jigsaw puzzle. And something of an editorial nightmare – enjoyable but complicated.
When everyone had made their main contribution and the book was complete but for its last two chapters, we held a Whodunit Dinner at the Groucho Club. For the contributors able to attend, two questions had to be answered that evening. One, who committed the appalling crimes outlined in the narrative? And two, who was going to write the chapters of the denouement? I am glad to say that both questions were answered with the collaborative ingenuity and geniality that has characterised the entire process of creating The Sinking Admiral.
The way the book was assembled of course offers its readers a second level of whodunitry. Not only will they be trying to identify the perpetrators of any crimes that might occur, they will also be faced with the puzzle of who wrote which bit of the book.
I hope they enjoy this double challenge. And I hope that some of the more acute mystery buffs among them will recognise a few moments of homage to The Floating Admiral and the history of the Detection Club.
In bringing The Sinking Admiral on the arduous journey to publication, I would like to thank David Brawn and Julia Wisdom of HarperCollins for their enthusiasm for the project, the Detection Club’s agent Georgia Glover of David Higham for her support, and particularly Corinne Hitching, the Club’s Assistant Secretary, for managing to take coherent notes from the complicated and frequently hilarious planning meetings between the contributors.
Now it’s over to you, the reader. Hope you enjoy it.
Simon Brett – President of the Detection Club 2001–2015
It’s amazing the attraction television has for ordinary people. Not watching the wretched box, but appearing on it. People seem prepared to undergo any kinds of humiliation for one brief moment of having their faces seen in the nation’s sitting rooms. And that situation’s got worse since the unrestricted spread of so-called ‘reality’ shows.
A demonstration of this syndrome was being acted out at the Admiral Byng pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell. It was a March Monday, one of those biting cold ones when it seemed that winter would never release its icy hold. The much-quoted view that in that part of Suffolk there was no protection from the cold winds off the Ural Mountains was wheeled out once again in many huddles around village fireplaces. It was a time of year when business at the Admiral Byng would normally have been even worse than usual, but on this particular March day the pub was heaving. And that was because word had got around Crabwell that a television documentary was being made there.
The programme was being fronted and produced by Ben Milne, a journalist in his early thirties, highly skilled in the business of turning cameras on people long enough for them to make fools of themselves. And then working on the footage in the editing suite to make them look even more stupid.
He had cut his teeth on an ITV series called Skeletons in the Cupboard, which tapped into the growing online enthusiasm for genealogy. But, unlike the previous, more benign BBC version of the show, whose high spot was always making the celebrity subject cry, Ben Milne’s programme basically tried to dig the dirt on the celebrity’s antecedents. Illegitimate births were gloated over, appearances in the Newgate Calendar, and transportations to
