devotion. Beard’s suspicions were not aroused when she turned up at his house with a box of chocolates as a present for his wife, but when his wife became sick after eating them, belatedly he put two and two together. However, Emily Beard recovered, and Beard said nothing to the police.
Christiana blamed Mrs Beard’s illness on a confectioner called Maynard, and set about acquiring supplies of strychnine from a local dentist, telling him that she meant to poison stray cats. She paid a number of boys to buy chocolate creams from Maynard’s shop, and duly laced them with strychnine, before leaving them around the town. One set of poisoned creams was returned to Maynard’s, and subsequently eaten by Sidney Barker, the four-year-old nephew of the man who bought them. Sidney died, and at his inquest, Christiana testified that she too had fallen ill after eating chocolates bought from Maynard’s. A verdict of accidental death was recorded, prompting Christiana to step up her campaign against the luckless scapegoat. She sent Sidney’s parents a series of anonymous letters blaming Maynard for the boy’s death, and gave arsenic-laced fruit and cake to a handful of local people, including the dentist who supplied the strychnine and Emily Beard. At last Dr Beard contacted the police, and showed them Christiana’s letters, although he always denied having had a sexual relationship with her. Christiana was tried at the Old Bailey for Sidney’s murder.
The Press loves nothing better than a sensational murder, and the journalists deduced homicidal tendencies from Christiana’s appearance in the dock: ‘Short of stature, attired in sombre velvet, bareheaded, with a certain self-possessed demureness in her bearing … a rather careworn, hard-featured woman … The character of the face lies in the lower features. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long and convex; … chin straight, long, and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive, and animal in its development.’
Christiana was found guilty and sentenced to death. She tried to avoid the gallows by claiming that she was pregnant, a lie easily disproved, but the Home Secretary granted a reprieve on the ground of her insanity. She was sent to Broadmoor, where she made a memorable entrance, complete with rouged cheeks and an enormous wig. Thriving on her celebrity and self-image as a femme fatale, she remained incarcerated until her death, thirty-five years later.
Even before The Poisoned Chocolates Case appeared, Ronald Knox’s The Footsteps at the Lock hinted that Berkeley’s dinner parties might develop into a formal club. Knox’s story opens wittily with an account of two cousins who detest each other and are rival heirs to a fortune. They take a canoe trip together, and when one of them disappears, the other is the obvious suspect. The Indescribable Insurance Company calls in the amiable Miles Bredon to investigate. In the course of his enquiries, Bredon encounters an American called Erasmus Quirk, who says he is ‘a member of the Detective Club of America; and it was his duty to write up a detective mystery of some kind before the fall, as a condition of his membership’. Quirk, however, is not what he seems.
The pleasure of Berkeley’s dinners prompted Agatha Christie to add to her series of short stories parodying celebrated fictional detectives. ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ sees the Beresfords tackling a puzzle in the manner of Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French. She amalgamated the stories into Partners in Crime, which poked gentle fun at the detectives of twelve other writers, including eight founder members of the Detection Club, as well as Poirot. By an odd coincidence, given Conan Doyle’s interest in her disappearance, the Sherlock Holmes spoof story, written two years before she was discovered in Harrogate, was ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’. The lady in question had disappeared simply to indulge in a slimming cure.
On 27 December 1929, Berkeley wrote to G. K. Chesterton describing plans for the Club. The tone of the letter blended charm, dynamism, and impatience: ‘I do hope you will join. A club of the kind I have in mind would be quite incomplete without the creator of “Father Brown”, and one who has evolved such a very original turn to the detective story as you have … I want if possible to get things going for a first meeting in about the middle of January.’
He kept up the momentum. By 4 January 1930, a list of twelve ‘members to date’ was typed, along with a list of twenty-one writers invited to be the original members. Eight proposed Rules of the Club were sent to Chesterton, and the number of Rules grew to a dozen within days. Gathering members took time, and the Rules kept evolving. By the time the final version of the Rules and Constitution came into force, twenty-eight people had been elected to membership, although two were described as Associate Members.
With Sayers’ enthusiastic support, Berkeley asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to become Honorary President. Conan Doyle was the obvious choice, having created the most famous of all fictional characters, although like Douglas Cole he regarded his work in the genre as less ‘important’ than some of his other writing. The best Holmes stories belong to the nineteenth century, but Conan Doyle was still writing detective stories in the Golden Age. By now, though, his health was poor, and he could not accept Berkeley’s invitation.
Chesterton ranked second only to Conan Doyle in the pantheon of detective story writers, and he duly agreed to become President of the Detection Club. A committee was formed, and Berkeley became Honorary Secretary. He also awarded himself the title of ‘First Freeman’. This was a jokey way of distinguishing himself from R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts, although eventually the title’s supposed significance became a source of friction when Berkeley claimed it allowed him special privileges.
That lay far in the future. In the meantime, half a dozen members responded to an invitation from the BBC’s Talks Department to collaborate on a detective story for radio. Already, the Detection Club had earned a mention in the Daily Mirror’s gossip column – alongside snippets about horse racing and Gracie Fields’ holiday in Italy – as a dining club for writers whose stories ‘rely more upon genuine detective merit than upon melodramatic thrills’. Sayers probably fed the snippet to the newspaper. She was determined to make the public aware of the Club, and its meritocratic ethos.
The first episode of Behind the Screen aired on 14 June 1930, trumpeted in The Listener as a ‘co-operative effort on the part of six members of the well-known Detection Club’, a phrase that showed how effective Sayers’ promotional efforts had been in a short space of time. Ronald Knox brought the story to what the BBC called ‘a nerve-shattering and brain-racking conclusion’ on 19 July. Four days later, as a postscript to the serial, the BBC broadcast a conversation between Sayers and Berkeley on the subject of ‘Plotting a Detective Story’. As The Radio Times explained: ‘Miss Sayers will come to the microphone with a theme for a mystery story, Mr Berkeley with a new method of murder. They will endeavour to combine the two to form a plot for a story.’
Detection Club membership meant writers were no longer isolated when publishers annoyed them, and Sayers organized a rebuke to Collins, which launched a ‘Crime Club’ imprint for its detective fiction list, with a hooded gunman logo. Collins announced that ‘the sole and only object of the Crime Club is to help its members by suggesting the best and most entertaining detective novels of the day’. The books were supposedly chosen by a ‘panel of experts’. This was a shrewd public relations ploy, but the Crime Club was not a club in any meaningful sense. Fans’ addresses simply constituted a database for the despatch of quarterly newsletters about forthcoming titles. Detection Club members who were not published by Collins fumed at the implication that their books did not rank with the best. Sayers and Berkeley flexed their muscles with a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, signed by eight Club members. With icy understatement, they said: ‘We wish … to raise our eyebrows at a method of advertisement which is likely to mislead the public.’ Collective pressure made more impact than a moan from a single author, and although the Collins Crime Club flourished for more than half a century, its publicity became less provocative.
Arthur Conan Doyle died on 7 July 1930, and Sayers spotted an opportunity to promote the new Club. Shamelessly, she told Berkeley: ‘Old Conan Doyle chose this moment to pop off the books.
