a series of economic earthquakes on a scale not seen for generations, uncanny parallels exist between our time and the years between the wars. This is the perfect moment for a cold case review of the Detection Club: to unmask the Golden Age writers and their work, against the backdrop of the extraordinary times in which they lived.
Notes to Chapter 1
In one account, she identified the setting for the ritual as Grosvenor House; in her biography, written in old age, she said it was the Dorchester.
The former version of events, referred to by Joanne Drayton, in Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, seems more reliable than Marsh’s later recollection in Black Beech and Honeydew. The ritual has been held at a variety of prestigious venues in central London over the years. By coincidence, it currently takes place at the Dorchester.
Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan
Freud ‘relished in particular Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express’: Paul Roazen, ‘Orwell, Freud and 1984’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1978.
‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said
In Christianna Brand’s Introduction to the 1979 edition of Sayers’ The Floating Admiral.
the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularised … by John Strachey
The first use of the term seems to be in Strachey’s ‘The Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, The Saturday Review, 7 January 1939. Another Marxist critic, Ernest Mandel, echoed Strachey forty-five years later in Delightful Murder: ‘The inter-war period was the golden age of the detective story.’ Over the years, there has been extensive debate about the distinction between ‘detective stories’, ‘crime novels’, and ‘mysteries’, but precise and satisfactory definitions of the differences between them have remained elusive. For the sake of simplicity, the terms are treated broadly as synonyms in this book.
One dark November day in 1923, Dorothy Leigh Sayers sat in her London office, rehearsing a lie until it sounded like the unvarnished truth. She excelled at playing with words, and making things up, whether in advertising copy or detective fiction. Now her imagination faced its sternest challenge. The daughter of a vicar and a devout Christian, she possessed fierce moral principles and an acute sense of sin, but she felt afraid and alone, and saw no alternative to deceiving the people she worked with. She hated what she was doing, but desperation drove her to bury her scruples.
She had invented a mysterious illness to justify taking eight weeks off work, hoping none of the men she reported to would enquire too closely into the medical problems of a valued female member of staff. This was the first step in an elaborate charade, designed with the same attention to detail she lavished on her fictional mysteries. Family and friends must be fooled as well.
Sayers worked for S. H. Benson Ltd, an advertising agency based in Kingsway Hall, close to the newspapers of Fleet Street, and ten minutes from her flat in Great James Street. Her room sat at the top of a steep and slippery spiral staircase made of iron which looked stylish, but was a death-trap for anyone unlucky enough to lose her footing. One day, she would turn that staircase into a fictional murder scene. Benson’s boasted an eclectic roster of clients, and had been quick to adopt fashionable American methods of ‘psychological’ and ‘scientific’ advertising. In her first published piece of copy, which she admitted was ‘a tissue of exaggeration’, Sayers extolled the virtues of ‘Sailor Savouries’. Soon she was rhapsodizing about ‘Lytup’ handbags and Colman’s Starch.
Innovative and industrious, Sayers was perfectly suited to her job. She liked the way the copywriters were collectively known as the ‘Literary Department’, and the buzz and gossip of office life reminded her of student days in the common rooms of Oxford. Philip Benson and his management team regarded her highly, and some thought Dorothy’s talents might one day take her all the way to the boardroom. Her colleagues regarded her as eccentric but gifted, an outspoken bluestocking with a startlingly earthy sense of humour. None of them knew she was nursing a secret which she dared not allow to leak out.
Disaster had struck at a time when life brimmed with exciting possibilities. Publishing her first detective novel fulfilled a long-held ambition, and although sales were modest, Benson’s had raised her salary to six pounds ten shillings a week, and promised a bonus. Even her troubled love life had taken a turn for the better. Although a man she adored had deserted her, a new lover turned up to offer the sexual satisfaction she craved. She nicknamed him ‘the Beast’.
But then the worst happened. With ‘the Beast’, she overcame her loathing of contraceptives, but despite her precautions, something went wrong, and she fell pregnant. When she broke the news to ‘the Beast’, he flounced out in a temper, pausing only to blurt out that he already had a wife and daughter. Sayers had slept with him on the rebound, and she dared not tell her friends about her humiliation. Confiding in her elderly, respectable parents, who were the embodiment of Victorian values, was equally unthinkable. Her father, an elderly vicar, would be horrified, while her mother had no time for babies. She had no confidence that Philip Benson would sympathize. Probably he would sack her. Money was tight, and she dared not risk being thrown out of work.
Overwhelmed by shame and misery, she thought about parting with the child to an orphanage or a charity for waifs and strays. Adoption was impossible; it would not become legal for another three years. In despair, she contemplated abortion, but quite apart from the fact that it was a crime, and highly dangerous, her religious faith made such a ‘solution’ unthinkable.
She had first encountered ‘the Beast’, alias Bill White, when he rented a small flat above hers. Seeking work in the motor trade, he had left his wife Beatrice and young daughter Valerie in an attic flat in Southbourne, near Bournemouth. He stained the wooden floor of Sayers’ sitting-room for her, and took her for trips on his motor-cycle. After teaching her fashionable dance-steps – the bunny-hug, the shimmy and the black bottom – he accompanied her to a dance at Benson’s, wearing a borrowed dinner jacket. Two lonely people, with not much in common, each craving a little fun. She lent him cash, and even introduced him to her parents. The fun stopped the moment she told him about the baby.
With a chilling mixture of cheek and selfishness, Bill asked his wife to help him wriggle out of this calamity. Shocked as she was, Beatrice White agreed, and met up with Sayers. It was an excruciating encounter. They were both tormented by distress and embarrassment, but they were also sensible and decent women whose only mistake had been to fall for an unworthy man. A problem needed to be solved – so what should they do?
They talked things over constructively, without wasting time on recriminations. The outcome was a pragmatic deal. Sayers promised not to see Bill again, and to have the child fostered. Beatrice arranged for Sayers to stay in a guest house at Southbourne, and for her brother, a doctor, to attend the birth at a nearby nursing home. Meanwhile, Beatrice moved into Sayers’ flat in Great James Street, and forwarded her post, so that Sayers could correspond from her London address. This meant she could keep everyone in the dark about the truth of her absence. She cobbled together an excuse to explain to her mother why she would not be home for Christmas. The baby was due to be born at around the turn of the year.
She
