Crimes of the century... a top 100 whodunits

The Story Of Classic Crime In 100 Books Martin Edwards British Library €35

There’s Murder by Burial and Murder by Experts, Murder Intended and Murder Included, Murder of the Only Witness, Murder of a Snob and Murder of an MP. There’s Murder in Japan, in Chelsea, in Piccadilly and in St John’s Wood; Murder in the Basement, in the Maze, in the Moor and in the Museum; Murder for Christmas, Murder for Pleasure and Murder Gone Mad.

And, as if murder wasn’t enough, there’s also death galore: Death in Captivity, Death in the Dark, Death in the Dusk, Death in High Heels, Death in the Wet, Death of a Banker, Death of a Bovver Boy, Death of a Ghost, Death of a Shadow, Death of My Aunt, Death of the British Home Secretary… the list goes on and on. And on. And on.

It seems we like nothing better than to relax by an open fire reading all about homely people in tweeds being bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Now the crime writer Martin Edwards (The Arsenic Labyrinth, The Coffin Trail, The Dungeon House) has had the neat idea of producing a sort of extended menu of murderous treats for those for whom no library is complete without a discreet pile of corpses beside the French windows.

In his introduction, he says that he has chosen 100 crime novels from the first half of the 20th century, but in fact he mentions hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more in passing. He is nothing if not encyclopaedic. Like Mr Memory in The 39 Steps, he seems incapable of mentioning one fact without mentioning a dozen more.

This meant that it was only a matter of minutes before I found myself stumbling around, lost in a blizzard of detail. On the first page of Chapter One, the author pays tribute to Baroness Orczy’s detective Patrick Mulligan, ‘an Irish solicitor with dingy offices in Finsbury Square’, who, he tells us, was a pioneering example of the solicitor-detective ‘further developed by HC Bailey in his books about Joshua Clunk, and by Anthony Gilbert (a pen-name of Lucy Malleson) in her long series featuring Arthur Crook’. Can anyone absorb such density of detail?

In my experience, people who love crime novels gallop through them at a breathtaking rate. They think nothing of reading two or three a week, or even, with the wind behind them, one a day. There was a boy with glasses at my school who claimed to have read every Agatha Christie, and he wasn’t yet 12. Martin Edwards is clearly made of the same stuff. You’re not elected both Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and President of the Detection Club without knowing where 10,000 bodies are buried, who murdered each of them, and why.

No one could doubt the extent of Edwards’s knowledge. He writes about countryside murders, holiday murders, shooting-party murders and murders by serial killers with equal expertise. No stone remains unturned, no book unread, in his quest for the next murder, wherever it may occur. A fairly typical paragraph goes: ‘Golf and murder coincided regularly in the novels of Herbert Adams. Adams’s titles played relentless variations on his favourite theme: The Body In The Bunker (1935), Death Off The Fairway (1936) and the Nineteenth Hole Mystery (1939). Death Is No Sportsman by Cyril Hare is an angling mystery, as are Ngaio Marsh’s Scales Of Justice (1935) and Bleeding Hooks (1940) by the lesscelebrated Harriet Rutland, a pen-name used by Olive Shinwell for three quietly accomplished detective novels.’

As he rootles around in all this undergrowth, from time to time Edwards stumbles across some very interesting information. For instance, he tells the extraordinary true story of the Rev Dr Elliott Speer, the enlightened principal of Mount Hermon School for Boys in Northfield, Massachusetts, who was shot dead in September 1934 through the open window of his study. The murder has never been solved, but by chance Dr Speer had recently lent a novel called The Public School Murder to the school’s dean, Thomas Elder, who had been passed over for his job. In this novel, a headmaster is shot dead through the open window of his study.

Another case in which fiction intruded upon real life occurred in 1929, when a Bayswater landlord called James Starr cut the throat of his girlfriend, a cabaret performer called Sybil da Costa. One of Starr’s tenants was the author William Plomer, who then turned the story into a novel called The Case Is Altered. In this novel, Plomer suggests that James Starr murdered Sybil da Costa because he suspected her of having an affair with Plomer.

I was interested, too, in the tale of the one-time Daily Mail journalist Edgar Wallace, who set up his own business in order to publish his first crime novel, The Four Just Men.

He then launched it with a huge advertising campaign, and offered prizes totalling £500 to readers who managed to crack the mystery. Alas for poor Wallace, a vast number of correct solutions arrived, and he only avoided bankruptcy by bor-

rowing money from his employer. The Story Of Classic Crime In 100

Books is peppered with the names of obscure authors, many of whom – Clinton H Stagg, R Austin Freeman, Leonard Gribble – sound as though they have been made up for satirical purposes. And what of Henry Wade, author of Dead Man’s Folly, whose real name was in fact Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, and who served as High Sheriff and Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, and whose crime stories doubled as conservative tracts against taxing the wealthy?

Introducing his book, Edwards promises not to give the game away with spoilers because ‘most readers, like me, prefer not to have their surprises anticipated’. Fair enough, but this makes his book peculiarly frustrating to read, with the detective introduced, the crime laid out, the suspects all lined up, and then – nothing!

It’s as if one was offered a succession of sweets, and just as you had finished unwrapping them, each one of them was snatched away before you had a chance to taste it.

Instead of saying whodunit, Edwards abruptly ends most of his synopses with a dutiful pat-on-theback, reminiscent of a headmaster’s tired comments in the second hour of a school prizegiving. Thus, ‘subtle touches of plotting as well as characterisation lift The Skeleton Key out of the ordinary ’, and, of Francis Durbridge, ‘as a writer of breathless mysteries with multiple twists he had few peers’. I wonder, too, whether he isn’t rather overgenerous to most of the authors he mentions. For all the ingenuity in their plotting, most of them are wooden in their characterisation and dot-joining in their prose. He mentions Agatha Christie’s sense of humour at least twice, arguing that it is a ‘routinely under-rated feature of her writing’, but one would need a microscope to notice it.

He is also devoted to the absurdly irritating Hercule Poirot: ‘the little Belgian ranks second only to Holmes in the pantheon of Great Detectives’. Can this be true? And he believes that Christie’s popularity is in large part due to her ‘acute insight into the way people the world over behave’, whereas it must surely depend on the opposite: her ability to create simple stereotypes, and then, without warning, to turn those stereotypes around.

Thus, in the final chapter, the gold-digging actress becomes the devoted mother, the timid spinster becomes the homicidal poisoner and the trusty doctor becomes the seething monster hell-bent on revenge.

Is this really ‘the way people the world over behave’? No: it is the way people in Agatha Christie books behave, no more and no less.

As someone once said, to guess the villain in her books, you’d have to be a complete dimwit.