for worrying about how to pay their bills.
Detective stories offered readers pleasure at a time when they feared for the future. As the Wall Street Crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering end, writers prided themselves on coming up with fresh ways of disguising whodunit or howdunit, but the most gifted novelists itched to do more, to explore human relationships and the complications of psychology. The work of Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan, became influential. The social mores of the Thirties prevented novelists from writing graphic sex scenes, but strong sexual undercurrents are evident in many of the best detective stories of the Thirties, above all in the extraordinary final novels of Anthony Berkeley and Hugh Walpole. Increasingly, Detection Club members relished breaking the so-called ‘rules’ of their game. They experimented with the form of the novel, deploying untrustworthy narrators as well as unexpected culprits. Their books reflected social attitudes and political change, more than they intended, and more than critics have realized.
Three remarkable people became the Club’s leading lights. In the vanguard was Sayers, brilliant and idiosyncratic as any maverick detective. By her side stood Berkeley, crime fiction’s Jekyll and Hyde – suave and scintillating one minute, sardonic and sinister the next. And then there was Agatha Christie, a quiet, pleasant woman who was easy to read unless you wanted to know what was going on in her mind.
Christie’s legendary ingenuity with plot was matched by Berkeley’s biting cynicism about conventional justice and his obsession with criminal psychology. Sayers, a woman as forceful as she was erudite, believed the detective story could become something more than mere light entertainment. ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said shortly after its formation, ‘it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’
Appearances are deceptive. When we look at pictures of Christie and Sayers today, we usually see the women in their later years: respectable, well-upholstered, grandmotherly. The few published photographs of the publicity-hating Berkeley show a dapper fellow, wearing a trim moustache in his younger days, bald and pipe-smoking in later life. How tempting to fall into the trap of dismissing them as strait-laced middle-class English people. Yet in private, they led extraordinary lives and endured disastrous marriages. All three took secrets to the grave.
Their novels are often sneered at as ‘cosy’, and the claim that their characters were made from cardboard has become a lazy critical cliché. The very idea that detective fiction between the wars represented a ‘Golden Age’ seems like the misty-eyed nostalgia of an aged romantic hankering after a past that never existed. Many argue that the quality of crime fiction written today matches, or surpasses, that of any other period. But today’s writers often owe something to their predecessors, and the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularized, not by some genteel old lady or retired brigadier, but by John Strachey, a young Marxist who later became Minister of War in the post-war Labour government.
Strachey recognised that the best detective novels of the Thirties were exhilarating, innovative and unforgettable. They explored miscarriages of justice, forensic pathology and serial killings long before these topics became fashionable (and before the term ‘serial killer’ was invented). Many of the finest books defied stereotypes. The received wisdom is that Golden Age fiction set out to reassure readers by showing order restored to society, and plenty of orthodox novels did just that. But many of the finest bucked the trend, and ended on a note of uncertainty or paradox. In some, people were executed for crimes they did not commit; in others, murderers escaped unpunished. The climax of one of Berkeley’s novels was so shocking that when Alfred Hitchcock came to film it, even the legendary master of suspense, the man who would direct Psycho, lost his nerve. He substituted a final scene that was a feeble cop-out in comparison to Berkeley’s dark and horrific vision.
Sayers, Berkeley and Christie came to detective fiction young – in their late twenties and early thirties. All three were full of energy and imagination, fizzing with fresh ideas. Each was an obsessive risk-taker. The First World War changed them, as it changed Britain. After the bloodshed of the trenches, writers craved escapism just as much as their readers. Though their stories often seem as artificial as they are ingenious, Sayers, Christie and Berkeley were intent on transforming the genre. Along the way, they fought against personal catastrophes, and suffered spells of deep despair. The lonely nature of their work – no publicity tours, no fan conventions, no glitzy awards ceremonies – contributed to their torments. Thanks to Detection Club meetings, writers found new friends who shared their literary enthusiasms. Not only did members eat, drink and talk together – they wrote and broadcast together, raising money by collaborating on crime stories in unique cross-media initiatives. For Sayers and Christie in particular, the Detection Club became a lifeline.
Christie’s controversial eleven-day disappearance in 1926 is by far the most high profile of the numerous disasters that befell Club members, affecting their writing as well their lives. Much as they wanted to promote their books, they were determined to keep their personal lives out of the public gaze. Many hid their private agonies in a way impossible in the age of paparazzi and Press intrusion, and of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Beneath the façade of middle class respectability lay human stories as complex and enthralling as any fiction.
Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were fascinated by murder in real life. True crime stories influenced and inspired them. And they did much more than borrow plot elements from actual cases. There is a long tradition of mystery writers undertaking detective work for themselves – from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, to P. D. James’s re-evaluation of the murder of Julia Wallace, and Patricia Cornwell’s investment of two million dollars in her efforts to establish that Walter Sickert really was Jack the Ripper. Other than Conan Doyle, however, none have investigated real-life mysteries with the zeal of the Detection Club in the Thirties.
Anyone researching the Club must navigate a labyrinth of blind alleys and wrong turnings. The challenge is to unravel three sets of mysteries – about the books, the real-life murder puzzles, and the dark secrets of the writers’ personal lives. All are woven together in a tangled web.
The simpler riddles are literary. Who wrote the first serial killer mysteries? What game did Club members play with a superintendent from Scotland Yard? Who pioneered the novel of psychological suspense? How did Anthony Berkeley anticipate Lord of the Flies?
Trickier questions arise about real-life crimes. Did a young woman’s horrific death trigger Berkeley’s infatuation with a married magistrate? Why was Christie haunted by the drowning of the man who adapted her work for the stage? What convinced Sayers of the innocence of a man convicted of battering his wife to death with a poker? And what did she make of the blood-stained garment that supplied a vital clue in the murder investigated by the legendary Inspector Whicher?
Detection Club members seldom confessed to writing about themselves, or the increasingly fragile social order to which they belonged. Yet they scattered hints throughout their writing, just as their fictional culprits made mistakes that gave away their clever schemes. We can deduce more from reading between the lines of the books than the authors realized.
Which novelist wrote a secret diary in an unbreakable code? How did two famous writers conduct a forbidden love affair through hidden messages in their stories? Why did Sayers and Berkeley suddenly abandon detective fiction at the height of their fame? Clues, outlandish as any ever picked up by Poirot, lurk in the unlikeliest settings – an inscribed first edition, a unique form of shorthand, a murderous fantasy transformed into fiction, even the abdication of a king.
Christie once hinted she was guilty of ‘crimes unsuspected, not detected.’ Sayers found herself confronting a blackmailer. And Berkeley fantasized about murdering the man who stood between him and happiness. Searching for
