Study (Toledo: Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1977).
Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords
Charles Parker mentions to Wimsey the real-life precedent of Earl Ferrers, the last peer to be hanged, in 1760 (for the murder of his land steward). The novel achieved a strange form of notoriety in 1962, as one of the library books mischievously vandalised by the playwright Joe Orton and his lover and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell; the pair were sent to prison for malicious damage to the property of Islington Public Library.
George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses)
In ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Horizon, October 1944. Drawing a contrast with the stories about Holmes, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, and Dr John Thorndyke, Orwell argues that: ‘Since 1918 … a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited.’ A modern perspective is supplied in Jake Kerridge, ‘Does Crime Writing Have a Misogynistic Heart?’, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2014. Thanks to the success of the Carrados stories, Ernest Brammah Smith (1864–1942), who wrote as Ernest Bramah, was an obvious candidate for membership of the Detection Club, but although he corresponded amiably with Sayers, probably his natural reclusiveness led him to decline the chance to join.
under the new imprint of Victor Gollancz
Details about Gollancz’s life and career are drawn from Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Victor Gollancz: a Biography (London: Gollancz, 1987).
influenced by Wright and Wrong
The seminal essays were Willard Huntington Wright’s ‘Detective Story’ in Scribners, November 1926, and E. M. Wrong’s ‘Introduction’ to Crime and Detection (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).
Conversations about a Hanged Woman
On a cold, damp January morning in 1923, a terrified woman was dragged to the gallows at Holloway Prison. Even after a judge put on the black cap at the end of a calamitous trial and sentenced her to death, Edith Thompson never believed she would really hang. Her morale only collapsed when the date was fixed for her execution. On that final morning, when no last-minute reprieve arrived, she started to sob and scream. She was injected with a cocktail of drugs to calm her, and given a large measure of brandy and a cigarette. The hangman strapped her wrists, and his assistant tied her skirt and ankles, but it took four men to manhandle her outside into the drizzle, and then into the shelter of a brick shed. The scaffold stood waiting for her.
Edith was put in a wooden bosun’s chair, so the noose could be tied around her neck. She was barely conscious as a white hood was placed over her head. After the trapdoor opened and she fell, her underclothes were drenched with blood. Lurid rumours claimed that her ‘insides’ fell out. The bleeding was so severe that the authorities insisted that any woman to be hanged subsequently must wear canvas pants. One possibility is that Edith suffered a haemorrhage, another that she was pregnant.
Edith Thompson’s name was on everyone’s lips. She had become notorious as the ‘Messalina of Ilford’, a scandalous modern successor to the predatory and sexually insatiable wife of the Emperor Claudius. Yet Edith’s beginnings could not have been more ordinary, and the events leading to her death were more like a blend of crime passionnel and black farce than a story of calculated and cold-blooded cruelty.
Born on Christmas Day, six months after Sayers, Edith Graydon was a pretty, vivacious Londoner. Her father was a clerk with a profitable sideline as a dancing teacher. One of his pupils, a neighbour in Leytonstone, was Alfred Hitchcock. Despite his physical bulk, the young Hitchcock was surprisingly nimble. He knew the Graydon family, and formed a lasting friendship with Edith’s younger sister Avis.
Dancing and acting were Edith’s favourite pastimes. Her imagination was fired by a touch of drama and romance, but she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and became head buyer for a milliner’s. Edith met Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, when she was fifteen. After a six-year courtship they married and settled down in Ilford. Their life was comfortable, but lacked glamour and excitement, and Edith craved both. There was nothing dowdy or old-before-her-time about her. She bobbed her hair, wore calf-length sleeveless dresses and spoke French.
When she was twenty-six, she took a fancy to Frederick Bywaters, an eighteen-year-old ship’s laundry steward who had previously courted Avis. Handsome and widely travelled, Bywaters was not staid and set in his ways, like Percy. The three of them, and Avis, went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, and Percy suggested that Bywaters stay with them in Ilford in between voyages. Before long Edith was skipping work for breakfast in bed with the lodger, but Percy discovered that they were having an affair. He refused Bywaters’ demand to allow Edith a divorce, and threw the lad out of the house.
Undeterred, Edith and Bywaters kept seeing each other. When he went back to sea, she sent him dozens of intimate letters. She claimed that she had tried to poison Percy, grinding up broken glass from light bulbs and feeding the shards to him, mixed up with mashed potato. Begging Bywaters to ‘do something desperate’, she sent him press cuttings with accounts of poisonings, and said she had become pregnant by him, but had carried out an abortion herself. All this was probably fantasy rather than fact. Unfortunately for Edith, Bywaters could not bring himself to throw away the letters, and became obsessed by the idea of having her for himself.
Late at night on 4 October 1922, he waited in the darkness for Edith and Percy as they came home from a trip to the Criterion Theatre, and pounced on Percy, stabbing him repeatedly. Panic-stricken, Edith called out, ‘Oh don’t! Oh don’t!’, but her cries made no difference. Bywaters had done something desperate, just as her letters had asked. He fled, and Percy died at the scene. When the police questioned Edith, she became hysterical and insisted that a stranger had attacked her husband. But she was a poor liar. Her affair was soon uncovered, and so were the incriminating letters.
Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were both charged with murder. At the trial, Bywaters said he had only meant to injure Percy, and that Edith was not involved. Against her lawyers’ advice, she gave evidence in her own defence, and her naïve answers when questioned destroyed her credibility. The judge’s summing-up oozed stern Victorian moralism, and the couple were sentenced to death. Their appeals failed, but public opinion, perverse as ever, swung from hatred for Edith to horror at her fate. A woman had not been hanged in Britain for sixteen years, and Bywaters never faltered in his insistence that she was innocent. A petition signed by a million people failed to persuade the Home Secretary to grant a reprieve. Edith and Bywaters were executed in separate prisons, Holloway and Pentonville, on the stroke of nine on 9 January.
Edith Thompson’s final moments tormented her hangman, John Ellis, a former hairdresser and newsagent from Rochdale. Britain’s chief executioner, Ellis hanged Doctor Crippen and Herbert Rowse Armstrong before descending into misery and alcoholism. Eight years after snapping Edith’s neck, he cut his own throat.
The Thompson–Bywaters case marked, in George Orwell’s phrase, the end of an ‘Elizabethan Age’ of English murder. The more talented detective novelists realized that, whilst their fictional mysteries were bound to be very different from real-life cases, they could and should learn from what had happened to people who did kill others in the real world.
Anthony Berkeley was appalled by Edith Thompson’s fate. So was
