How to beat the boys in the Golden Age of Crime
It is never safe to say that the book is closed on a writer’s reputation. Until fairly recently I thought that one of the most depressing books I owned was an encyclopedia of 20th-century crime and mystery writers that meticulously lists thousands of out-of-print novels by dozens of forgotten authors. But in the past few years many of those authors, especially the pioneers who flourished during the so-called Golden Age of Crime between the two world wars, have defied the last rites and stormed the bestseller lists. The detective stories written during the Golden Age soothed a public traumatised by one major conflict and terrified by the prospect of another. Their clockwork plots made violent death explicable and logical, in stark contrast to the casual slaughter of the trenches; by the end of the book, justice would prevail, order would be restored and the murderer dispatched. Wit was prized over profundity, ingenuity of plot over depth of characterisation. Today’s crime novelists are more ambitious; but one can see why, in our fractious times, so many readers are opting for the soothing simplicities of the Golden Age. One author who has been successfully resurrected is Lucy Malleson (1899-1973), who wrote some 70 mysteries, most of them under the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert, but she also moonlighted as Lucy Egerton, Sylvia Denys Hooke, J Kilmeny Keith and Anne Meredith. In 2017, her novel Portrait of a Murderer (1933) was reissued under the British Library’s Crime Classics imprint, and has outsold the original edition by some distance. The time seems ripe, then, for this reissue of Three-a-Penny, a memoir that Malleson published, aged 40, in the early months of the Second World War. Out of print for more than half a century, it has just been serialised on Radio 4, and is both a fascinating account of how a middle-class family was affected by the social upheavals caused by the Great War and a highly appealing self-portrait of a woman determined to make her mark in a profession dominated by men. The book begins in the entertaining, if not very original, territory of a child’s-eye view of the strange behaviour of grown-ups, but really takes off when, as a teenager, Malleson decides that she wants to write, in defiance of her stockbroker father (“Write! Under my roof! Never!”). The outbreak of war leads to the closure of the Stock Exchange, making her father unemployed, and the family has to dispose of its servants (“Do you mean you will have to open doors to tradesmen?” she asks her mother. “We will hope it doesn’t come to that,” is the reply.) Malleson muffed a scholarship exam and had to go out to work, although still practically a child (she admitted that at this time she found the prospect of being trafficked as a white slave, based on her reading of lurid novels, more genuinely terrifying than the war). She trained as a secretary, going without lunch for two weeks to save up for a decent pen, and worked for the Coal Association and the Red Cross. She writes superbly about how a world turned topsy-turvy by war remained the wrong way up long after the conflict, as returning servicemen struggled to get jobs. She did social work for a time and there is a whole chapter describing daily life in the East End slums, a marvellous, unpatronising mixture of the pathetic and the comic. And when she was not working, she wrote. Sacrificing friendships, romance and her original lofty literary ambitions, she eventually got into print as a writer of detective stories. Her early attempts came before Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers were in their pomp; writing crime stories was still thought to be an unsuitable job for a woman, so she submitted her work under masculine pseudonyms. When the publisher asked for an author photograph of “Anthony Gilbert”, she sent one of herself disguised in beard and wig. Malleson was, to use the trade euphemism, a “midlist” author, selling enough books to keep herself under contract but never close to joining Christie and Sayers in the ranks of the bestsellers. (Reflecting on one novel that wowed the critics and failed to sell, she observed: “I was one of those unhappy authors who can please everyone except the public.”) There was, in other words, no clamour for details about the life of Lucy Malleson, but she took the view that the nuts and bolts of being a professional writer fascinated the public enough to justify the memoir. The title comes from a remark made to her by Dorothy Sayers: “Although authors are three-a-penny to us, they are quite exciting to other people.” One cannot imagine the autobiography of Malleson’s 21st-century equivalent finding a publisher today. Modern novelists let in too much daylight on their magic; their constant appearances at literary festivals, and endless uploadings of photos of their Postit-strewn desks as they labour on their Work In Progress, have robbed them of their mystique. But more to the point, no publisher today would back a memoir in which the author deals so summarily with setbacks and tragedies, refusing to wallow in gloom or self-pity. It is the antithesis of an ostentatiously soul-searching autobiography such as Will Self ’s Will: Three-a-Penny is a book you read because you are charmed by the author and enjoy her company. There are very funny selfdeprecating riffs, such as an imagined conversation with “Anthony Gilbert”, in which he pours scorn on her unlucrative attempts to write more serious fiction (“Who pays the rent and settles the grocer’s bill? … It’s as bad as being your husband.”). Perhaps the most heartening parts are her hymns to the joys of being a writer, even a not especially successful one. It ends on a hopeful note, as she contemplates the possibility of some of her books being filmed; but although some did become films in the Forties, she never became a household name. She died in 1973, at the age of 74, writing detective stories in prolific numbers to the end, and one wonders whether she still felt then that she had made the right choice in life. Did she retain enough optimism to allow her to believe that her books might still be enjoyed nearly half a century after her death? You finish this book fervently hoping so. Reading it feels, to a rare degree, like making a wise and funny new friend.