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By Curt Evans
In part 1 of this essay I noted that the received wisdom in mystery fiction is wrong: far from being dominated by four “Crime Queens” in the UK and hardboiled novelists in the United States, the Golden Age of mystery fiction (approximately the period between the two world wars) included an impressive roster of highly successful male writers in the UK and a like number of hugely influential traditional-puzzle writers in the United States. In this half of the essay I examine several UK male writers unfairly dismissed as “humdrums.”
“Humdrum” Golden Age detective novelists have been disparaged with that word because ostensibly they cared only about the puzzle in their mystery works and nothing whatsoever about character, setting, or theme. This assertion is untrue about all these authors, and particularly so in the case of G. D. H. Cole and the man who wrote under the name of Henry Wade.
It is true that the greatest detective-writing gifts of Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, John Street, and J. J. Connington were their technical skills, which placed them among the most popular British detective novelists of the Golden Age, however disregarded they may be today by all but informed Golden Age enthusiasts and book collectors, but this by no means establishes that their writings were devoid of other important elements of successful fiction.
Crime King Crofts
Freeman Wills Crofts
As mentioned in part 1, appearing at the inception of the Golden Age (1920) with Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles was another crime novel, Freeman Wills Crofts’ massive murder opus The Cask, which at the time was considered the more notable achievement of the two tales, surprising as this fact may seem to many today.
Although during his career as a detective novelist (which extended nearly forty years, from 1920 to 1957) critics never dubbed Crofts (or any other man) a “Crime King,” the Anglo-Irish railway engineer-turned-novelist was from the early 1920s on acknowledged as the king of the “unbreakable alibi” mystery, in which the murderer has an alibi for the crime that seems airtight but nevertheless is ultimately punctured by the intrepid detective.
The Cask, the first of Crofts’ unbreakable-alibi tales, was remarkable in its day for both the complexity of its mystery and the clarity with which that mystery is investigated and explicated. It was also remarkably popular, selling 100,000 copies by 1932. Additional tales such as The Ponson Case (1921), The Groote Park Murder (1923), Sir John Magill’s Last Journey (1930), and The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933) are, like The Cask, location-alibi stories of great ingenuity, although their mathematical flavor tends to be rather too dry for many in the modern-day mystery readership.
Crofts, however, was not a one-trick alibi pony as has often been suggested. Other clever devices flavor tales such as Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924), Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927), Death on the Way (1932), and Crime at Guidford (1935). In addition, Crofts was a notable exponent of the inverted mystery (in which we see the murderer committing the crime and the question becomes how—or whether—he or she will be caught) in such works as The 12:30 from Croydon and Mystery on Southampton Water (both 1934).
In contrast with Agatha Christie, whose signature investigator during the Golden Age was the dapper Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, and her sisters in crime Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh, who all introduced charming detectives of exquisite, aristocratic backgrounds, Crofts’ investigators, of whom Inspector (later Superintendant) French became the most important, were all plain (very plain) bourgeois coppers. Their detailed doings in works such as The Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’ (1936) arguably have a greater air of everyday realism, even though Crofts himself had no background in police work.
(Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn was, rather improbably, a policeman too, but he otherwise bore a quite strong likeness to Sayers’ and Allingham’s gents. Instead of interviewing servants below-stairs, for example, he hobnobbed with the smarter set above, leaving such grim duties to an admiring underling, one Sergeant Fox—whom he tended, with rather annoying preciosity, to call “Br’er Fox” and “my Foxkin”— a character comparable to Wimsey’s Bunter and Campion’s Lugg.)
The contemporary mystery author P. D. James has speculated that much of the appeal of mystery tales by Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh inheres in their sophisticated, aristocratic trappings, which she is sure attracted people living out drab middle-class lives in the 1920s and 1930s (“travelling home to mortgaged metroland,” as James puts it). Yet some readers (and not just later figures such as Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson who famously despised the Crime Queens’ gentleman detectives) preferred Crofts’ penny-plain policemen and the author’s resolutely no-nonsense concentration on the mystery problem. Crofts was one of the few British detective novelists even modestly praised by Chandler.
Crofts’ early detective novels did much to create the rage for detective fiction in the first half of the 1920s. The complexity of his plots made his books especially appealing to intellectuals, many of whom had previously looked down on the “mystery thriller” as a relatively low form of reading entertainment. Margaret Cole, wife of the prominent Socialist academic G. D. H. Cole, later recalled that her husband was inspired to write his first detective novel, The Brooklyn Murders (1923), by reading Crofts. Margaret Cole soon herself joined in the fun.
“Before his invention, mine eyes dazzle,” declared one intellectual critic, an Oxford graduate in the classics, no less, of Crofts. High-culture priest T. S. Eliot, an avid detective fiction reader in the 1920s, similarly held Crofts in high esteem, classing him and his somewhat similarly named brother in crime, R. Austin Freeman, as the greatest living detective novelists. Eliot explicitly graded both men above Agatha Christie—and he did not mention Sayers at all.
The Influential, Praiseworthy R. Austin Freeman
Pioneering mystery writer R. Austin Freeman
Though he is mentioned in some genre surveys for works published before the advent of the Golden Age, R. Austin Freeman is another major male mystery writer active during the entire Golden Age who is much underappreciated today.
Although Freeman’s first detective novel, The Red Thumb Mark, appeared in 1907, well before the beginning of the Golden Age, Freeman, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, continued writing mystery fiction until the year before his death in 1943. Between 1922 and 1938, Freeman published fifteen detective novels and three collections of detective short stories, all but one detailing exploits of his then-famous detective (and the greatest rival of Sherlock Holmes), medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke. Two more Thorndyke novels appeared in 1940 and 1942, outside the proper span of the Golden Age.
Freeman’s Thorndyke tales brought science and forensic medicine into the detective fiction genre in a masterful way. Compared to Thorndyke, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is far less credible on scientific matters. P. D. James claims that the Golden Age detective novelists “had very little knowledge and even less apparent interest in forensic medicine”—a far too sweeping statement, evidently based mostly on her assessments of the Crime Queens, which does a grave injustice to Freeman, perhaps the single most important progenitor of the use of forensic medicine in detective fiction.
Writing in the mid-1950s of her admiration for Freeman’s detective novels and stories, novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith, an avid fan of the man’s work, praised his “extraordinary lucidity and directness” and “the width of his interests, among which . . . medicine predominated.”
Though some of Freeman’s best works, such as The Eye of Osiris (1911) and the short-story collections John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) and The Singing Bone (1912), were published before the Golden Age began, Freeman produced many superb Golden Age works, including the three later short story collections Dr. Thorndyke’s Casebook (1923), The Puzzle Lock (1925), and The Magic Casket (1927) and novels such as The Cat’s Eye (1923), The Shadow of the Wolf (1925), As a Thief in the Night (1928), Mr. Pottermack Oversight (1930), The Penrose Mystery (1936), and The Stoneware Monkey (1938).
Freeman’s story collection The Singing Bone has been credited with creating the inverted mystery, and the later novels Wolf and Oversight are fine examples of that form.
Street—Master of Murder Means
Mystery writer Cecil John Charles Street, aka John Rhode, Miles Burton
Freeman was an influential figure within the genre, referenced with some frequency by younger authors (including Christie and Sayers), and he produced two very notable disciples among the individuals who began writing mystery fiction in the 1920s: Cecil John Charles Street (who authored his genre work primarily under the names John Rhode and Miles Burton) and Alfred Walter Stewart (who wrote as J. J. Connington). Several of Street’s detective novels clearly were influenced by Freeman short stories, and Connington explicitly pronounced Freeman the greatest living practitioner of the mystery form and said he owed Freeman his greatest debt as an author. Following in Freeman’s footsteps, Street and Connington both became popular and esteemed detective novelists during the Golden Age.
Under the punning pseudonym “John Rhode,” John Street began publishing mysteries in 1924. Forty years old at this time, Street had already lived an interesting life, with activities including employment as a stockholder in and electrical engineer for an early English power company, service in World War I as a decorated army artillerist, and a postwar stint as an intelligence officer in Ireland during the notorious Black and Tan War. (He rose to the rank of Major and was often known afterward as “Major Street”).
In The Paddington Mystery (1925), Street introduced his most famous series detective, Dr. Lancelot Priestley, an acerbic, disputatious math professor with a passion for solving problems and proving authority utterly, desperately wrong, be it in the form of rival professors or the police. With considerable technical ingenuity at his disposal, Street in his “John Rhode” guise won an admiring readership for mysteries with complex plots and ingenious murder methods. If Crofts was the Alibi King, Street was mystery’s Master of Murder Means. One impressed reviewer memorably dubbed Street “Public Brain Tester No. 1.” Declared another: “Most serious detective-story connoisseurs would never miss reading any of his stories.”
Street’s mind for murder problems was so fecund that to help channel his creativity he introduced two other pseudonyms, the most important of which was Miles Burton, under which name Street introduced Desmond Merrion, a somewhat flippant gentleman-amateur detective more in the mold of Lord Peter Wimsey. This series, which started off with thrillers but soon settled down into classical detection, won considerable praise throughout the Golden Age as well.
Under these two pseudonyms and another, minor, one, Cecil Waye, the awesomely prolific Street produced 143 crime novels (mostly tales of detection), over sixty of which appeared between 1924 and 1939.
So many detective novels did Street author that it is challenging to list a comparatively small number of highlights, but notable ones from the Golden Age include the following: The Ellerby Case (1927), a thrillerish tale which manages to credibly employ a purple hedgehog as an instrument of death; The Murders in Praed Street (1928), an early serial-killer tale; The House on Tollard Ridge and The Davidson Case (both 1929); the witchcraft thriller The Secret of High Eldersham (1930); The Motor Rally Mystery, The Claverton Mystery, and The Venner Crime (all from 1933); Poison for One and Shot at Dawn (both from 1934); The Corpse in the Car (1935) and Mystery at Olympia (both from 1935); the Crofts-like railway mystery Death in the Tunnel (1936); another ingenious serial murderer tale, Death on the Board (1937); and two locked-room mysteries—Invisible Weapons (1938) and Death Leaves No Card (1939).
In addition to the ingenuity of their plots, Street’s novels are striking for their informed depictions of the business world and their often admiring portrayals of scientifically and technically oriented individuals, whatever their social class. To some readers, Street’s tales offer a refreshing break from the sophisticated, arts-oriented milieus frequently found in works of the Crime Queens, particularly Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh.
Street himself came from a wealthy gentry background on his mother’s side of the family, and he enjoyed private means, yet he was fascinated with the capacity of applied science to improve human life, and as a result he sought useful employment as the electrical engineer of the power company in which he had invested. Throughout his life, Street retained great respect for men willing to dirty their hands in beneficent physical endeavors.
Connington and Cole
Mystery Writer J. J. Connington
Like John Street, Alfred Walter Stewart had a professional scientific background. A prominent chemistry professor originally from Scotland who taught for many years at Queen’s University, Belfast, Stewart began his career as a novelist with a notable apocalyptic science-fiction thriller, Nordenholt’s Million (1923). It was the first of the many books he would publish under the pseudonym J. J. Connington. Three years later, using the same pen name, Stewart published the first of his two-dozen detective novels, nineteen of which appeared during the Golden Age.
In seventeen of these tales, Connington employed as his investigator Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, a strikingly dry and acerbic individual reflecting the author’s own mordant worldview. Connington’s mystery tales are well-constructed works, and although they revolve less consistently around alibi-busting (Crofts) or clever murder means (Street), they nevertheless often involve interesting points of science. By 1927, no less a critic than T. S. Eliot welcomed Connington to “the front rank of detective story writers.”
Indicative of Connington’s intellectual respectability within the mystery field, a 1929 reviewer of his The Case with Nine Solutions declared that the author’s “particular strength lies in his respect for the reader’s intelligence. . . . [P]iece after piece [of the solution to the mystery] is added till the reader shuts the book with a mind satisfied and replete.”
Besides the much-praised Case with Nine Solutions, other notable Golden Age murder tales by Connington include Murder in the Maze (1927), The Sweepstake Murders (1931), The Castleford Conundrum (1932), The Ha-Ha Case (1934), In Whose Dim Shadow (1935), and A Minor Operation (1937). Additionally, Nordenholt’s Million offers a remarkably chilling read even today (arguably more so today, in fact).
The two remaining men most often classified as “Humdrum” detective novelists, G. D. H. Cole and Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher (Henry Wade), are so classified without any foundation, in my view. G. D. H. Cole quickly evolved into more of a crime fiction satirist, and Wade followed in Dorothy L. Sayers’ path by trying to transform the detective story into a novel of serious purpose, an effort for which he is grievously under-acknowledged.
Though he was less technically sophisticated a detective novelist than Crofts, Freeman, Street or Connington, G. D. H. Cole became another prominent British mystery writer in the 1920s. Inspired by the first three detective novels of Crofts, Cole as mentioned above published his own such tale, The Brooklyn Murders, essentially a Crofts pastiche, in 1923. Cole was an Oxford professor and one of England’s most important and active Socialist intellectuals over four decades (1920s-1950s), and the writing of detective novels became a minor (if fairly lucrative) pastime for him as well as his wife, the Socialist writer Margaret Cole.
Mystery author G. D. H. Cole
G. D. H. Cole would write eighteen detective novels, all but two of which appeared in the traditionally defined Golden Age period (Margaret Cole herself separately wrote ten tales; yet even though the two actually composed their mystery novels separately, after The Brooklyn Murders both their names were signed to each mystery and the husband and wife today are still referred to as co-authors of all the books after the first). Douglas Cole’s primary contribution to the field of detective fiction (and that of his wife) was bringing to the detective novel a satirical touch, often influenced by a leftist world view. In books like The Death of a Millionaire (1925), The Blatchington Tangle (1926) and Big Business Murder (1935) Cole launch squibs at the conservative political and business establishments, while in other books he pokes fun at country gentry (The Affair at Aliquid, 1933), batters the bourgeoisie (The Brothers Sackville, 1936), annoys academia (Disgrace to the College, 1937) and ridicules the Anglican Church (Double Blackmail, 1939). Although Dorothy L. Sayers for one was outraged about the scorn aimed at the gentry in The Affair at Aliquid, often Cole books met with high praise in many quarters. One prominent (and left-wing) mystery reviewer, for example, deemed The Brothers Sackville “brilliant in many ways, full of amusing characters and neat situations.”
Wade, the Insightful Aristocrat
Almost all the “Humdrum” detective novels of Crofts, Freeman, Street, Connington, and Cole were published in the United States as well as Great Britain, indicating that despite any perceived Britishness (the methodical detection of the first four men and the satire of the latter), they were able to find an American audience between the wars. The one man yet to be discussed, Henry Wade, had a less successful record of American publication, confounding as he did expectations of what a Golden Age British mystery writer should be. Even today, Wade continues to confound those expectations, resulting in a greatly undeserved neglect of his work.
Whereas much praise is heaped on Crime Queens Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh for helping to transform the detective story into, as P. D. James has put it, novels of “social realism and serious purpose” and writers of academic monographs weightily analyze their books’ treatments of issues related to gender, class, and race, Wade, whose own genre novels came to have as much “social realism and serious purpose” as any of those by the Crime Queens, bafflingly remains ignored. It may well be the case that Wade’s novels became too real and too serious for modern readers schooled to expect the lighter novel of manners style of the Crime Queens.
To some extent, Wade’s true name—Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher—and his title, baronet, have probably hindered any attempt to rehabilitate his literary reputation. After all, so the thought might run, what could a baronet with a hyphenated handle have known about “social realism and serious purpose”? Yet in truth Wade was not some feckless, idle aristocrat but instead a man who had served his country with distinction in World War I, suffering two wounds and receiving the French Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Order, afterward returning home and becoming extensively involved in county administration in Buckinghamshire.
Unlike most Golden Age British mystery writers who, however impeccably of aristocratic lineage their fictional detectives may have been, themselves came from solidly bourgeois origins, Wade was truly of the gentry and knew county ways down to the ground. Very few of Wade’s contemporaries wrote with his authority on country gentry, local politics, and the police.
Like his favorite detective novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers, Wade in his own writing career moved away from writing “mere puzzles” toward crime novels in the modern sense, novels using murder stories to illustrate, in a serious way, character, setting, and theme. However, from his very first novel, The Verdict of You All (1926), the author showed considerable originality in conveying a decidedly unromantic view of life, one influenced by his experience of the madness of World War I and the conflict’s unsatisfactory outcome. In his writing, Wade evinces a deeply pessimistic vision of the world, a vision that tends only to darken over the years. (Ironically, the modern crime writer Henry Wade most resembles is P. D. James, who apparently has never read him.)
Wade is especially notable for his ability to face without flinching the failings in his own class that were leading irrevocably to a drastic diminution of its power. Whereas the Crime Queens, particularly Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh, have with some justification been accused of a tendency to romanticize the landed gentry, Wade knew his own people too well to do that.
Notable early books conveying Wade’s ironic, often pessimistic, view of life that are also good puzzles are The Missing Partners (1928), The Duke of York’s Steps (1929), The Dying Alderman (1930), and No Friendly Drop (1931). Over the course of the 1930s, Wade downplayed the puzzle in favor of deeper treatments of character, setting, and theme. Two of his best works from this decade in the “crime novel” vein are Mist on the Saltings (1933) and The High Sheriff (1937), both of which are essentially tragedies. Also of the first order is Heir Presumptive (1935), an inverted tale in Wade’s most darkly ironic style which depicts an amoral man bumping off the relatives standing in the way of his attainment of a baronetcy, and Bury Him Darkly (1936), a pioneering “police procedural” (a tale portraying realistic police investigation of crime).
Wade’s best police procedural (and one of his finest works), Lonely Magdalen (1940), stands just outside the traditionally delineated Golden Age period. Wade also wrote some fine short crime tales, including a series about a common policeman that he gathered into the collection Here Comes the Copper (1938).
Rich, Varied History Goes Untold
People interested in the true, surpassingly rich and varied history of the Golden Age (and not merely the stripped-down version constructed in many modern genre surveys), as well as those who just like a good mystery, are advised to seek out some of Great Britain’s forgotten Kings of Crime. Unfortunately, their genre works are mostly available only in pricey older editions on the used book market and are thus inaccessible to many. Because of this inaccessibility, academic publishers in turn seem loath to publish scholarly studies of these authors. (I speak from personal experience.)
Thus we are faced with a truly vicious circle where unjustly neglected British Golden Age detective novelists (often, though certainly not always, male) must remain unjustly neglected in the future because they have been unjustly neglected in the past, and where we will continue to be told that four British women—the Crime Queens—dominated the entire British Golden Age, because the Golden Age in Britain is to be defined entirely as the span of years in which these women were dominant.
Curt Evans is a mystery fiction scholar and analyst.
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