account of the Club’s early days was supplied by John Rhode’s Foreword to an earlier Club anthology, Detection Medley.
In other respects, Mary Fitt … was as reticent as Berkeley
Even so, she was persuaded by Picture Post to be photographed on her hands and knees, peering through a magnifying glass at a Greek vase.
The novel was an expansion of ‘The Avenging Chance’
Curiously, the story appears to have been published after the novel. A latter-day Berkeley might come up with multiple explanations for this little mystery. Perhaps he realized the strength of his short story’s plot, and delayed its publication until he had exploited it more fully, and more lucratively, through the novel.
On 27 December 1929, Berkeley wrote to G. K. Chesterton
No original correspondence relating to the early days of the Detection Club remains in the Club’s possession; while the Minute Book has apparently not been seen since the Second World War. The Club’s archive is, at the time of writing, in the process of development. I have gleaned information about the correspondence mentioned in this book from a wide variety of sources, in particular the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton, from Arthur Robinson, Tony Medawar, George Locke, Douglas G. Greene and Curtis Evans, as well as from occasional sales of material on www.abebooks.com.
‘Plotting a Detective Story’
See Tony Medawar, ‘Plotting a Detective Story – Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley’, CADS 51, April 2007.
four members collaborated in a fundraising event for a hospital charity on 31 May 1932
A fifth collaborator was Captain Alan Thomas (1896–1969). His The Death of Laurence Vining (1928) was a well-regarded ‘impossible crime’ novel, and he later became editor of The Listener. Death of the Home Secretary (1932) is one of a host of Golden Age mysteries in which politicians meet an untimely end.
‘The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one,’ Sayers proclaimed in her essay introducing the first volume of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. She knew more than most people about self-torment. Keeping her son’s existence secret was a constant strain, and on one occasion before she married Mac her self-discipline snapped. She confided in a total stranger, a woman with a boy of ten who had just divorced her husband, and who envied Sayers because nobody else was laying claim to her son. Sayers told John Cournos that contemplating someone else’s misfortune made her feel better, but she still wanted to find a man ‘to help me to handle the kid later on’. Mac never offered such help.
The self-torment she was talking about was the way that people love to be teased by a mystery. To trace the roots of detective fiction, she delved into ancient texts like a gumshoe determined to leave no stone unturned. Her hunt for early forerunners of the detective story yielded some unlikely suspects. Analysis of evidence featured in the Apocrypha, the fabrication of false clues appeared in Herodotus, and psychological detection underpinned the story of Rhampsinitus. Sayers was stretching to prove her point, but not as far as it might seem. Nine years after her anthology appeared, the murderer in John Dickson Carr’s To Wake the Dead relied on an intricate scheme echoing the story of Rhampsinitus.
Why had detective fiction not developed sooner? The Jews, ‘with their strongly moral preoccupation’ were, Sayers felt, well suited to create detective stories. So were the Romans, with their taste for logic and law-making. She identified elements of detection in one of the Grimms’ tales, and in an Indian folk-tale. Yet although stories about crime had flourished for centuries, the detective story could not thrive until the wider public sympathized more with the forces of law and order than the law-breakers.
Sayers argued that the ground rules for the genre were set forever in the United States, in the 1840s, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote five seminal tales of mystery and imagination. First came ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, a ‘locked room’ story. A woman and her daughter are found savagely murdered inside a locked room. The central puzzle, borrowed by hundreds of Poe’s successors was – how could the murderer have got in and out?
Poe created a gifted and eccentric amateur sleuth, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, the first of fiction’s Great Detectives. Dupin’s cases were told by an unnamed chronicler, setting the template for Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and dozens of less celebrated pairings, in which admiring sidekicks ranging from the obtuse to the sophisticated recount the exploits of amateur sleuths who almost always outsmart the professional police. The neat twist in ‘The Purloined Letter’ was that the solution was so obvious that everyone overlooked it. Chesterton’s ‘The Invisible Man’ was the most famous of many later stories using this trick of a clue hidden in plain sight. Even more influential was ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’, in which Dupin plays the ‘armchair detective’. This was the very first detective story based on a criminal puzzle from real life.
Marie Roget was the fictional counterpart of Mary Rogers. She worked in a New York tobacconist’s, and her ‘raven tresses’, womanly figure and tantalising smile inspired young male customers to poetry and earned her the sobriquet ‘the beautiful cigar girl’. Among Mary’s admirers was a young lawyer called Alfred Crommelin. She rejected his advances, and became engaged to Daniel Payne, a cork cutter. Subsequently, she left a note at Crommelin’s apartment, hinting at a reconciliation. When he did not reply, she sent him a series of letters, and asked for money. Shortly afterwards, on 23 July 1841, she disappeared. This was not the first time she had vanished without explanation; the same thing had happened three years earlier.
A few days after she went missing, a group of young men decided to escape the steamy heat of the city by walking out to Sybil’s Cave at Hoboken. They noticed clothes floating in the shallow waters of the North River, and thought someone had fallen in. Finding a wooden scull nearby, they rowed over to the bobbing objects, to discover the body of a young woman, whose long black hair rippled in the water like seaweed. A slip of cloth was knotted around her neck. One report said, ‘Her forehead and face appeared to have been battered and butchered, to a mummy.’
The remains were identified as Mary’s. A popular theory was that she had been killed by a gang, although Payne and Crommelin also came under the microscope. The plot thickened when some of her garments were found close to a tavern run by a Mrs Frederica Loss. Daniel Payne committed suicide, and Frederica Loss was shot by one of her sons, but the precise details of Mary Rogers’ death were never established. Mrs Loss supplemented her income with work as an abortionist, and Mary’s death probably followed a termination that went wrong.
Poe hinted at the truth in his story (transplanted to Dupin’s home turf in Paris) as well as offering a more imaginative alternative theory. Sayers was impressed by his efforts at solving a real-life mystery, and by Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘splendid efforts’ on behalf of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, wrongly accused men who benefited from his work as an amateur detective. Detection Club members were keen to follow the lead given by Poe and Conan Doyle – none more so than Sayers herself.
Poe showed how to transform a real-life case into detective fiction, and a generation later Wilkie Collins followed his example in The Moonstone. He borrowed details from the Constance Kent case, and based Inspector Cuff on the real-life Inspector Whicher. For
