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BY MARTIN EDWARDS

THE DETECTION CLUB was established in 1930 thanks to the initiative and drive of Anthony Berkeley, who wanted to create a social network of the leading detective novelists of the day. Berkeley was fascinated by criminology, as were many of his colleagues, and discussion about real life murder cases was a feature of Detection Club meetings. The prospect of playing detective themselves enthralled Club members, and they loved to discover and debate new angles on famous crimes, whether or not they had officially been “solved”.

The Club funded its dinners, and the cost of renting premises at 31 Gerrard Street, Soho, through ventures such as the “round-robin” mysteries Behind the Screen and The Scoop, and the collectively produced novels The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman. The Club’s leading lights were restless innovators in their fiction, and they liked to avoid repeating themselves. Given their shared interest in true crime (one illustration among many is the fact that the macabre Crumbles bungalow murder of 1924 provided raw material for The Scoop), it was almost inevitable that they should decided to put together a book of essays about intriguing cases. The highly successful result was The Anatomy of Murder, published in 1936.

Nobody is named as editor of the book, but it seems that Helen Simpson took on the job of liaising with the publishers and collating the essays, as well as writing one herself. The short Foreword reflects an ambitious approach characteristic of the Club’s projects. The writers were not content simply to recount the facts of their cases. They aimed to add value by including new information, making use of modern investigative techniques, or by seeking to examine the psychology of the characters in the story.

In “Death of Henry Kinder”, Simpson re-examined a nineteenth century case in which “the assassin had at one time some notion of dressing the part, and purchased a red Crimean shirt, on which bloodstains would not be conspicuous; but the crime itself was committed … in the ordinary sombre undress of a dentist.” Kinder lived in Sydney, and the essay begins with a short discussion about crime in Australia. Helen de Guerry Simpson was herself born in Sydney in 1897, 32 years after Kinder met his end. Her father was a solicitor, her grandfather a French marquis, and after her parents separated, she and her mother moved to Europe. She attended Oxford University, and was a co-founder of the Oxford Women’s Dramatic Society, but was sent down for breaking university rules which banned male and female students from acting together. She became a prolific author, producing poetry, plays, translations and short stories as well as novels such as Acquittal, and contributed dialogue to Hitchcock’s film Sabotage. In 1927 she married fellow Australian Denis Browne, a surgeon whose uncle wrote Robbery under Arms, using the pen-name Rolf Boldrewood, name-checked in the first sentence of “Death of Henry Kinder”.

Simpson’s major contribution to detective fiction was the three books she co-wrote with Clemence Dane, also a Detection Club member. The first, Enter Sir John, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder! Writing solo, she produced in 1931 an unusual and eccentric crime novel, Vantage Striker (re-titled The Prime Minister is Dead when published in the US), and achieved both commercial success and literary acclaim with her non-criminous novel Boomerang in 1932. Sarabande for Dead Lovers and Under Capricorn were filmed, the former by Ealing Studios and the latter by Hitchcock. Simpson’s talents and interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging, and included riding, music, cooking and collecting antiques. She was adopted as Liberal Parliamentary candidate for the Isle of Wight in 1938, but cancer cut her life short, much to the distress of her close friend, Dorothy L. Sayers, who said, “I have never met anybody who equalled her in vivid personality and in the intense interest she brought into her contacts with people and things”.

Just as an essay about a killing in the Antipodes opened the book, so “A New Zealand Tragedy” by Freeman Wills Crofts closed it. Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) was an Irish-born railway engineer who beguiled a long illness by writing a detective novel. The Cask, which appeared in 1920, made much more of a splash than Agatha Christie’s debut novel, published at about the same time, and launched a long career. Crofts’ speciality was meticulous investigation, and his principal detective, Inspector French, was unequalled in the art of dismantling seemingly unbreakable alibis. Crofts’ mastery of detail equipped him perfectly for the analysis of real life crime, and he took as his subject the Lakey murder case of 1933. The key elements of the story are worthy of Inspector French: “detective work of an extremely high order, involving persevering research, precise observation and deduction, magnificent team work and the use of the latest scientific methods.” Crofts’ concludes his account with the observation that: “Real life stories have an atmosphere of sordidness and evil which is happily absent from almost all detective novels.” Suffice to say that times and tastes in fiction have changed a good deal since those words were written.

The Kinder and Lakey cases are today little discussed, but the second essay in the book—which again has a connection with Sydney—tackled a murder that ranks as a classic, and was explored in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a best-seller which has spawned a television series. John Rhode, another good friend of Sayers, was ideally qualified to write “Constance Kent”, as he had previously been responsible for The Case of Constance Kent, an entry in the Famous Trials series. Rhode’s real name was Cecil John Street (1884–1965) and after a varied career encompassing distinguished service in the army, working as an electrical engineer, and writing non-fiction books about international affairs, he turned to detective fiction with aplomb, producing well in excess of one hundred novels, many of them featuring the irascible armchair detective Dr. Priestley.

Months after his book about Constance Kent appeared, Rhode received an anonymous letter from Sydney, challenging some of his statements about the case. He believed it had been written by Constance herself, but a handwriting “expert” disagreed. Not until further research took place in the Seventies was Rhode’s theory vindicated. “The Sydney document” helped to shape Rhode’s essay in The Anatomy of Murder, as he explored Constance’s “elusive personality”. Here he shows rather more interest in criminal psychology than he did in many of his novels, where the emphasis is on ingenious methods of murder—howdunit, rather than whydunit. Rhode donated the original letter to the Detection Club’s library, although depressingly this unique item of criminal history, like the Club’s Minute Book, seems to have gone astray during the Second World War, and has never turned up since.

The Constance Kent case so intrigued Sayers that she indulged in some private sleuthing of her own, annotating her copy of Rhode’s book about the trial with her thoughts on aspects of the mystery. When Rhode discussed the “nerve” of the murderer, she referred back to the case that inspired The Scoop, pointing out that Patrick Mahon invited a woman back to the bungalow where he had killed Emily Kaye the night before, and slept with her there, with his victim’s corpse in the next room.

Margaret Cole (1893–1980) tackled an equally celebrated Victorian mystery, “The Case of Adelaide Bartlett”, concerning a woman whose husband died of chloroform poisoning after the couple had become involved in a ménage-a-trois with a vicar. The essay appeared under Margaret’s name alone, although all her detective novels appeared as joint productions with her husband Douglas, better known as the left-wing economist G.D.H. Cole, and also a founder member of the Detection Club. By the mid-Thirties, Douglas was in poor health, and although he continued to write with feverish productivity, his wife came to take a much greater interest in the Detection Club than he did. Margaret was a feisty radical, whose views on politics and society were very different from Sayers—who, along with Anthony Berkeley, was the prime mover of the Club’s activities—but she enjoyed the social side of their get-togethers. She also shared with Douglas a fondness and admiration for G.K. Chesterton, first President of the Detection Club, who died a few weeks before The Anatomy of Murder was published.

Margaret Cole’s contribution to this book was her most significant venture into the field of true crime, but the Bartlett mystery has exerted a lasting appeal for detective novelists. The ingredients of sex, death and a puzzle are irresistible, and Hitchcock thought about turning the story into a film, Raymond Chandler said the events in the case were “relatively simple to tell, but completely goofy”, and in 1980, one of Chesterton’s successors as Club President, Julian Symons, factionalised the story in Sweet Adelaide, a novel offering a clever explanation of the conundrum at the heart of the case.

Ernest Robertson Punshon (1872–1956) was perhaps the least renowned contributor to The Anatomy of Murder, both at the time of publication and today, yet he was a talented writer who finally hit his stride in his sixties after a long literary apprenticeship. In his fifteenth novel, Information Received, published in 1934, he introduced the young police constable Bobby Owen, and Owen progressed up the ranks in a long series of books which often articulated distinctive and radical views on politics and society. “Business as Usual: an Impression of the Landru case” considers the criminal career of Henri Landru, a serial killer convicted of eleven murders. The essay is adorned with touches that illustrate why Sayers—a discerning but often acerbic critic—used to enthuse about his writing. An encomium from her review of Information Received adorned the covers of many of Punshon’s later books, and although there is something of the curate’s egg about Punshon’s work, at his best he was, as Sayers insisted, a writer of distinction.

Sayers’ interest in true crime is apparent in several of her novels, above all in The Documents in the Case, published in 1930, and written in collaboration with another Detection Club member, Robert Eustace. The story is influenced by the controversial case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, lovers who were tried for the murder of Thompson’s husband. Nowadays, the hanging of Edith Thompson is widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice, but Sayers lacked sympathy for Edith, and helps to explain why the characterisation in the book is not of the same high standard as the scientific concept underpinning the mystery and the epistolary style which Sayers adapted from a novelist whom she much admired, Wilkie Collins. In “The Murder of Julia Wallace”, however, Sayers showed much deeper understanding of the central character in the drama, an insurance agent accused of battering his wife to death in their Liverpool home.

She argued that the mystery “provides for the detective novelist an unrivalled field for speculation.” If Wallace was guilty, “then he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels; and if he was innocent, then the real murderer was still more typically the classic villain of fiction.” At a time when detective novelists, with Anthony Berkeley in the vanguard, were setting up multiple possible solutions to fictional crimes, Sayers suggested that such ingenuity was not as unrealistic as it might seem. In the Wallace case, there was “no single incident which is not susceptible of at least two interpretations, according to whether one considers that the prisoner was, in fact, an innocent man caught in a trap or a guilty man pretending to have been caught in a trap.” These are compelling ingredients for a novelist, and the Wallace story has provided plot material for numerous detective novels—Sayers noted two early examples in the bibliography she appended to her essay. Two more came from the pen of the industrious Rhode: Vegetable Duck appeared in 1944 and The Telephone Call four years later. Much later, elements of the case informed P.D. James’ The Skull Beneath the Skin and The Murder Room.

For Sayers, character and psychology were crucial to a proper analysis of whether or not Julia Wallace was murdered by her husband: “Though a man apparently well-balanced may give way to a sudden murderous frenzy, and may even combine that frenzy with a surprising amount of coolness and coming, it is rare for him to show no premonitory or subsequent symptoms of mental disturbance. This was one of the psychological difficulties in the way of the prosecution against Wallace.… The mind is indeed peculiar and the thoughts of the heart hidden. It is hopeless to explain the murder of Julia Wallace as the result of a momentary frenzy, whether Wallace was the criminal or another.”

Guarded though her conclusions were, it seemed that they were vindicated by research undertaken years after her death. True crime expert Jonathan Goodman and journalist Roger Wilkes made a convincing case that one of Wallace’s work colleagues committed the murder. The Wallace case has, however, never ceased to entrance crime writers. Margery Allingham wrote a short essay about the case, “The Compassionate Machine”, which surfaced recently, although it was unpublished during her lifetime. Chandler considered writing about the case for the American Weekly; he called it “The Impossible Murder … the nonpareil of murder cases”, but decided not to go ahead because “it has been done to a turn by Dorothy Sayers”—evidence that he read The Anatomy of Murder, and was impressed. He made detailed notes about the circumstances surrounding the death of Julia Wallace, and concluded that it “will always be unbeatable”. As if to prove his point, during the past few years, doubts have surfaced again about Wallace’s innocence, and P.D. James, a long-standing member of the Detection Club, recently contributed a thoughtful article to the Sunday Times Magazine which came to a very different conclusion from Sayers. The continuing swirl of speculation about Julia Wallace’s murder demonstrates the lasting appeal of classic true crime cases—they are open to endless reinterpretation.

Sayers had a complicated friendship with the founder of the Detection Club, Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971). He wrote most of his novels under the name Anthony Berkeley, but also earned a distinct reputation with ironic studies of criminal psychology published under the pseudonym Francis Iles, had a good deal in common with Sayers. Like her, he was talented and highly intelligent, but he was also a difficult and troubled man. At first their relations were cordial, and Sayers worked closely with Berkeley in establishing the Detection Club on a firm footing. As time passed, however, the two forceful personalities clashed more than once—not least when Berkeley complained about Sayers’ delay in producing her contribution to The Anatomy of Murder, although this was due not to laziness on her part (far from it) but rather her relentless perfectionism.

“The Rattenbury Case” appeared under the Iles name. Perhaps this was an exercise in “branding”, since his work as Iles was generally more serious and substantial than most of the books which appeared under his real name, or as by Berkeley. Under both his pen-names, he often drew on classic cases for his fiction. The death of James Maybrick in Victorian Liverpool, for instance, inspired the second Berkeley book, The Wychford Poisoning Case, the Armstrong and Palmer cases influenced the first two Iles books, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact, and the Thompson-Bywaters case, which preoccupied him for years, supplied both plot elements and even the title of the third and final Iles book, As for the Woman.

Berkeley had long been disgusted by the hanging of Edith Thompson, and was struck by the similarities between her story and that of Alma Rattenbury. He argued—controversially, but not implausibly—that “if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.” For Berkeley, studying real life murder cases had an enduring appeal: “nothing outside fiction so effectually knocks down the front wall of a house and exposes its occupants in the details of their strange lives as does a trial for murder.” His essay is, by some distance, the longest in the book. Discussing the case gave him a chance to mount a hobby horse—the hypocrisy of English society about adultery: “To say that respect cannot exist between a man and woman whose relations are legally improper is just as silly as to say that respect invariably exists between married couples.”

Taken together, the stories told in The Anatomy of Murder represent a significant contribution to our understanding of the cases discussed, and their interest has scarcely diminished as a result of the passage of time. Many collections of essays about famous murder cases appeared during the twentieth century, but few match the quality of those in this book. The Detection Club’s members were novelists first and foremost, but The Anatomy of Murder reveals, most pleasingly, that they possessed at least some of the detective instincts and skills of their fictional heroes and heroines.