I can still picture that afternoon among the crowds under the July sun. And I remember the excitement as a noisy helicopter circled overhead, coming in to land on a cleared patch of lawn before disgorging Margaret Rutherford, alias Miss Jane Marple. After much queuing, we squeezed into a showing of the film. Already I loved reading and writing stories, but this was my first exposure to Agatha Christie, and I was thrilled by the confection of clues and red herrings, suspects and surprises. I went home in a daze, dreaming that one day I would concoct a story that fascinated others as this light-hearted murder puzzle had fascinated me. I soon discovered the film bore little resemblance to the novel on which it was based, but that didn’t matter. I was hooked.
How fitting that my love of traditional detective fiction was inspired by a country house party in a village reminiscent of St Mary Mead. That evening, I took from a bookshelf a paperback copy of The Murder at the Vicarage, and my fate was sealed. I devoured every book Christie wrote, and tried to learn anything I could about the woman whose story-telling entranced me. In the mid-Sixties, with no internet, no social media, and not much of a celebrity culture (apart from Bardot and Margaret Rutherford, of course), finding out more about Christie proved surprisingly difficult. Eventually I moved on to other crime writers, ranging from past masters like Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley to Julian Symons, then at the cutting edge of the present. From Symons’ masterly study of the genre, Bloody Murder, I learned about the Detection Club, an elite but mysterious group of crime writers over which Sayers, Christie and Symons presided for nearly forty years.
Years later, I became a published detective novelist, writing books set in the here and now. A delightful moment came when a letter arrived out of the blue from Simon Brett, President of the Detection Club, explaining that the members had elected me by secret ballot to join their number. Subsequently, I was invited to become the Detection Club’s first Archivist.
The only snag was that there were no archives. Although the Detection Club once possessed a Minute Book, it has not been seen since the Blitz. Even the extensive Club library, packed with rare treasures, had been sold off.
At the time of writing, there seems little hope of ever recovering all the missing papers, in the absence of one of those lucky breaks from which fictional detectives so often benefit. But inevitably the loss of the Club’s records of its early days sharpened my curiosity. To a lover of detective stories, what more teasing challenge than to solve the mysteries of the people who formed the original Detection Club? I quickly discovered far more puzzles, especially about Christie and other early members of the Club, than I expected. I began to question my own assumptions, as well as those of critics whose judgements were often based on guesswork and prejudice.
My investigation sent me travelling around Britain, as I tracked down and interviewed relatives of former Detection Club members and other witnesses to the curious case of the Golden Age of murder. Some of the people I talked to joined in with the detective work, and the more I discovered, the more I came to believe that the story of the Club and its members demanded to be told. I explored remote libraries and dusty second bookshops, and badgered people in Australia, the United States, Japan and elsewhere in the hunt for answers. Sometimes memories proved maddeningly vague or erroneously definite. Biographies of Club members were packed with as many inconsistencies as the testimony of witnesses with something to hide.
I met with much kindness and generosity, often from those I shall never meet in person. One or two who knew secrets about the Detection Club did not want to be traced, or to recall past traumas, and this I understood. A couple of times, I reined in my curiosity when the quest risked becoming intrusive or hurtful – as Poirot recognises at the end of Murder on the Orient Express, sometimes the truth is not the only thing that matters. Exciting breakthroughs spurred me on, as when two clues, one in the form of an email address, and another discovered on my own bookshelves, led me to identify someone with personal knowledge of the dark side of one of my prime suspects.
Luck often played a part, as when I stumbled across Dorothy L. Sayers’ personal copy of the transcript of the murder trial described in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, with pages of detailed notes in her neat hand recording her own interpretation of the evidence. Authors’ inscriptions in rare novels supplied fresh leads, and even an apparent confession by Agatha Christie to ‘crimes unsuspected, not detected’. The chance acquisition of a signed book led to my learning of a secret diary written in a unique code.
Clues to extraordinary personal secrets were hidden in the writers’ work. I sifted through the evidence with an open mind, and as real-life detectives often find, I needed to use my imagination from time to time, to fill in the inevitable gaps. Studying the work of two writers over the course of a decade and a half of their lives helped to build a convincing picture of their doomed love affair, and to understand a strange relationship that changed their lives, but has eluded all previous literary critics and their biographers. Many of the finest Golden Age sleuths sometimes relied on intuition, and what was good enough for Father Brown and Miss Marple was good enough for me. In the end, I uncovered enough of the truth to round up the prime suspects for a suitable denouement in the final chapter.
How can one discuss detective stories without giving away the endings? Some reference books contain ‘spoiler alerts’, but these can result in a fragmented read. I’ve tried not to give too much away, although in the case of a few books, readers will be able to put the pieces together.
My respect for the earliest members of the Detection Club did not diminish as I spotted flaws in their detectives’ reasoning, or chanced upon curious and sometimes embarrassing incidents in their own lives. On the contrary, I came to respect their prowess in skating over thin ice, in fiction and in everyday life. They were writing during a dangerous period in our history, years when recovery from the shocking experience of one war became overshadowed by dread of another. At this distance of time, we can see that Detection Club members had much more to say about the world in which they lived than either they acknowledged or critics have appreciated. They entertained their readers royally, but there was more to their work than that.
Even the most gifted Golden Age detectives did not work in isolation, and my own investigation benefited enormously from the help and hard work of others. My profoundest thanks go to Christie, Sayers, Berkeley and all their colleagues, who have given me so much pleasure – not only in their writing, but in the puzzles they posed as I followed their trail. That trail reaches back to the long ago July afternoon when I was lucky enough to see Miss Marple make her improbable descent from the skies, and discover a new world which, from that day to this, I have found utterly spellbinding.
Notes
Even in a book of this length, it is impossible to explore in detail every issue touched on in the text. The notes provided at the end of each chapter, inevitably selective, seek to amplify some facets of the story of the Golden Age and its exponents, and to encourage further reading, research – and enjoyment.
Members of the Detection Club elected 1930–49
1930
G. K. Chesterton 1874–1936
H. C. Bailey 1878–1961
E. C. Bentley 1875–1956
Anthony Berkeley 1893–1971
Agatha Christie 1890–1976
G. D. H. Cole 1889–1959
M. Cole 1893–1980
J. J. Connington 1880–1947
Freeman Wills Crofts 1879–1957
Clemence Dane 1887–1965
Robert Eustace 1871–1943
R. Austin Freeman 1862–1943
Lord