Stunned, the New Zealander found herself unable to speak. Her companion, familiar with the eccentric humour of crime writers, laughed like a hyena.
The visitor from New Zealand was Ngaio Marsh, who became one of her country’s most admired detective novelists, as well as a legendary theatre director. Her escort, Edmund Cork, was her literary agent, and he also represented Agatha Christie. The Orator who led the procession was Dorothy L. Sayers, and the bearer of the skull was another popular detective novelist, John Rhode. The satiric ritual followed a script so elaborate that Sayers, its author, thoughtfully supplied an explanatory diagram. The occasion was the installation of Edmund Clerihew Bentley as second President of the Detection Club.
Ngaio Marsh remembered that night for the rest of her life. Long after she returned home, she dined out on stories about what she had seen, embellishing details as time passed, and memory played tricks. 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. She also made conflicting claims about whether or not she met Agatha Christie that night. Detective novelists, like their characters, often make suspect witnesses and unreliable narrators.
Dorothy L. Sayers and John Rhode with Eric the Skull, photographed by Clarice Carr (by permission of Douglas G. Greene).
The Detection Club annual dinner, presided over by G.K. Chesterton.
The Detection Club was an elite social network of writers whose work earned a reputation for literary excellence, and exerted a profound long-term influence on storytelling in fiction, film and television. Their impact continues to be felt, not only in Britain but throughout the world, in the twenty-first century. Yet a mere thirty-nine members were elected between the Club’s inception in 1930 and the end of the Second World War. The process of selecting suitable candidates for membership was rigorous, sometimes bizarrely so. The founders wanted to ensure that members had produced work of ‘admitted merit’ – a code for excluding the likes of ‘Sapper’ and Sydney Horler, whose thrillers starring Bulldog Drummond and Tiger Standish earned a huge readership, but were crude and jingoistic.
Those thirty-nine men and women were as extraordinary an assortment of characters as the cast of Murder on the Orient Express. They included some of the country’s most famous authors of popular fiction: not only the creators of Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, but also authors better known for writing about the Scarlet Pimpernel or Winnie-the-Pooh. Detection Club members came from all walks of life. Several had fought in the First World War and suffered life-changing harm, some played a prominent part in British political life. Members ranged from right-wing Tory to red-blooded Marxist, and everything in between. The aristocracy was represented, along with the middle and working classes, and the Anglican and Catholic clergy.
The Club’s first President, G. K. Chesterton, is currently regarded as a potential candidate for canonisation by the Pope – even though today he is remembered less for his spirituality than his detective fiction. The lives of his colleagues, for all their surface respectability, were much less saintly. Several were promiscuous, two had unacknowledged children. Long before homosexual acts between men were decriminalized, there were gay and lesbian members, as well as a husband and wife literary duo – one of whom nursed a passion for a young man who eventually became leader of the Labour Party. And one cherished a secret fantasy about murdering a man who stood between him and the woman he adored.
The movers and shakers in the Detection Club were young writers who at first pretended to write according to a set of light-hearted ‘rules’. This symptomized the ‘play fever’ that swept through Britain after the First World War, when games as different as contract bridge and mah-jongg captured the popular imagination, and crossword puzzles were all the rage. After the loss of millions of lives in combat, and then during the Spanish flu epidemic, games offered escape from the horrors of wartime – as well as from the bleak realities of peace. Economic misery seemed never-ending. The national debt ballooned, and politicians imposed an age of austerity. Industrial output fell, and so did consumer spending. The cost of living soared, and so did unemployment. The threat of slashed wages for miners led to Britain’s one and only General Strike, and the ruling classes had to cling to wealth and power by their fingertips. The sun had not quite set on the British Empire, but this was the twilight of the imperial era. While Bright Young Things partied the night away, millions of ordinary people couldn’t sleep for worrying about how to pay their bills.
Detective stories offered readers pleasure at a time when they feared for the future. As the Wall Street Crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering end, writers prided themselves on coming up with fresh ways of disguising whodunit or howdunit, but the most gifted novelists itched to do more, to explore human relationships and the complications of psychology. The work of Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan, became influential. The social mores of the Thirties prevented novelists from writing graphic sex scenes, but strong sexual undercurrents are evident in many of the best detective stories of the Thirties, above all in the extraordinary final novels of Anthony Berkeley and Hugh Walpole. Increasingly, Detection Club members relished breaking the so-called ‘rules’ of their game. They experimented with the form of the novel, deploying untrustworthy narrators as well as unexpected culprits. Their books reflected social attitudes and political change, more than they intended, and more than critics have realized.
Three remarkable people became the Club’s leading lights. In the vanguard was Sayers, brilliant and idiosyncratic as any maverick detective. By her side stood Berkeley, crime fiction’s Jekyll and Hyde – suave and scintillating one minute, sardonic and sinister the next. And then there was Agatha Christie, a quiet, pleasant woman who was easy to read unless you wanted to know what was going on in her mind.
Christie’s legendary ingenuity with plot was matched by Berkeley’s biting cynicism about conventional justice and his obsession with criminal psychology. Sayers, a woman as forceful as she was erudite, believed the detective story could become something more than mere light entertainment. ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said shortly after its formation, ‘it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’
Appearances are deceptive. When we look at pictures of Christie and Sayers today, we usually see the women in their later years: respectable, well-upholstered, grandmotherly. The few published photographs of the publicity-hating Berkeley show a dapper fellow, wearing a trim moustache in his younger days, bald and pipe-smoking in later life. How tempting to fall into the trap of dismissing them as strait-laced middle-class English people. Yet in private, they led extraordinary lives and endured disastrous marriages. All three took secrets to the grave.
Their novels are often sneered at as ‘cosy’, and the claim that their characters were made from cardboard has become a lazy critical cliché. The very idea that detective fiction between the wars represented a ‘Golden Age’ seems like the misty-eyed nostalgia of an aged romantic hankering after a past that never existed. Many argue that the quality of crime fiction written today matches, or surpasses, that of any other period. But today’s writers often owe something to their predecessors, and the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularized, not by some genteel old lady or retired brigadier, but by John Strachey, a young Marxist who later became Minister of War in the post-war Labour government.
Strachey recognised that the best detective novels of the Thirties were exhilarating, innovative and unforgettable. They explored miscarriages of justice, forensic pathology and serial