Читать книгу The Golden Age of Murder - Stephen Bach, Martin Edwards - Страница 21

On a cold, damp January morning in 1923, a terrified woman was dragged to the gallows at Holloway Prison. Even after a judge put on the black cap at the end of a calamitous trial and sentenced her to death, Edith Thompson never believed she would really hang. Her morale only collapsed when the date was fixed for her execution. On that final morning, when no last-minute reprieve arrived, she started to sob and scream. She was injected with a cocktail of drugs to calm her, and given a large measure of brandy and a cigarette. The hangman strapped her wrists, and his assistant tied her skirt and ankles, but it took four men to manhandle her outside into the drizzle, and then into the shelter of a brick shed. The scaffold stood waiting for her.

Edith was put in a wooden bosun’s chair, so the noose could be tied around her neck. She was barely conscious as a white hood was placed over her head. After the trapdoor opened and she fell, her underclothes were drenched with blood. Lurid rumours claimed that her ‘insides’ fell out. The bleeding was so severe that the authorities insisted that any woman to be hanged subsequently must wear canvas pants. One possibility is that Edith suffered a haemorrhage, another that she was pregnant.

Edith Thompson’s name was on everyone’s lips. She had become notorious as the ‘Messalina of Ilford’, a scandalous modern successor to the predatory and sexually insatiable wife of the Emperor Claudius. Yet Edith’s beginnings could not have been more ordinary, and the events leading to her death were more like a blend of crime passionnel and black farce than a story of calculated and cold-blooded cruelty.

Born on Christmas Day, six months after Sayers, Edith Graydon was a pretty, vivacious Londoner. Her father was a clerk with a profitable sideline as a dancing teacher. One of his pupils, a neighbour in Leytonstone, was Alfred Hitchcock. Despite his physical bulk, the young Hitchcock was surprisingly nimble. He knew the Graydon family, and formed a lasting friendship with Edith’s younger sister Avis.

Dancing and acting were Edith’s favourite pastimes. Her imagination was fired by a touch of drama and romance, but she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and became head buyer for a milliner’s. Edith met Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, when she was fifteen. After a six-year courtship they married and settled down in Ilford. Their life was comfortable, but lacked glamour and excitement, and Edith craved both. There was nothing dowdy or old-before-her-time about her. She bobbed her hair, wore calf-length sleeveless dresses and spoke French.

When she was twenty-six, she took a fancy to Frederick Bywaters, an eighteen-year-old ship’s laundry steward who had previously courted Avis. Handsome and widely travelled, Bywaters was not staid and set in his ways, like Percy. The three of them, and Avis, went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, and Percy suggested that Bywaters stay with them in Ilford in between voyages. Before long Edith was skipping work for breakfast in bed with the lodger, but Percy discovered that they were having an affair. He refused Bywaters’ demand to allow Edith a divorce, and threw the lad out of the house.

Undeterred, Edith and Bywaters kept seeing each other. When he went back to sea, she sent him dozens of intimate letters. She claimed that she had tried to poison Percy, grinding up broken glass from light bulbs and feeding the shards to him, mixed up with mashed potato. Begging Bywaters to ‘do something desperate’, she sent him press cuttings with accounts of poisonings, and said she had become pregnant by him, but had carried out an abortion herself. All this was probably fantasy rather than fact. Unfortunately for Edith, Bywaters could not bring himself to throw away the letters, and became obsessed by the idea of having her for himself.

Late at night on 4 October 1922, he waited in the darkness for Edith and Percy as they came home from a trip to the Criterion Theatre, and pounced on Percy, stabbing him repeatedly. Panic-stricken, Edith called out, ‘Oh don’t! Oh don’t!’, but her cries made no difference. Bywaters had done something desperate, just as her letters had asked. He fled, and Percy died at the scene. When the police questioned Edith, she became hysterical and insisted that a stranger had attacked her husband. But she was a poor liar. Her affair was soon uncovered, and so were the incriminating letters.

Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were both charged with murder. At the trial, Bywaters said he had only meant to injure Percy, and that Edith was not involved. Against her lawyers’ advice, she gave evidence in her own defence, and her naïve answers when questioned destroyed her credibility. The judge’s summing-up oozed stern Victorian moralism, and the couple were sentenced to death. Their appeals failed, but public opinion, perverse as ever, swung from hatred for Edith to horror at her fate. A woman had not been hanged in Britain for sixteen years, and Bywaters never faltered in his insistence that she was innocent. A petition signed by a million people failed to persuade the Home Secretary to grant a reprieve. Edith and Bywaters were executed in separate prisons, Holloway and Pentonville, on the stroke of nine on 9 January.

Edith Thompson’s final moments tormented her hangman, John Ellis, a former hairdresser and newsagent from Rochdale. Britain’s chief executioner, Ellis hanged Doctor Crippen and Herbert Rowse Armstrong before descending into misery and alcoholism. Eight years after snapping Edith’s neck, he cut his own throat.

The Thompson–Bywaters case marked, in George Orwell’s phrase, the end of an ‘Elizabethan Age’ of English murder. The more talented detective novelists realized that, whilst their fictional mysteries were bound to be very different from real-life cases, they could and should learn from what had happened to people who did kill others in the real world.

Anthony Berkeley was appalled by Edith Thompson’s fate. So was Alfred Hitchcock, who toyed with the idea of filming her life story. Unlike Berkeley, he decided to steer clear, perhaps because of his continuing friendship with Edith’s sister, although some aspects of Stage Fright echo the case.

For Berkeley, the outcome of the trial showed that the British legal system was more fallible than the general public fondly believed. He devoted several of his novels to subversive attacks on conventional justice, yet he was no-one’s idea of a bleeding heart. His sympathy for Edith was driven at least in part by his scorn for the prevailing sexual mores. He had no time for people who condemned adultery.

In Berkeley, wit, charm and flair warred with demons. He loved to confound people’s expectations. The contradictions of his personality infuriated many of his contemporaries. He was the most vociferous advocate of the need for the detective novel to focus on the motivation for murder rather than mere puzzles. Yet the complexities of his own psychological make-up would baffle the most expert profiler.

Unlike almost everyone else, he never felt overawed by Sayers’ intellect and strength of character. He was cheeky enough to put her into one of his most celebrated novels, and tease her about Lord Peter Wimsey. In the long run, his temper tantrums drove Sayers to despair. Yet Agatha Christie wrote about him – not just for publication, but in her private notebook – with unqualified admiration.

Berkeley loved hiding behind the masks he presented to the outside world. One of his literary disguises was so successful that it prompted lengthy – and often wild – speculation in the national press, as well as in two novels by other writers. In later years, the concealment took physical form. Ailing and asthmatic, he would ‘disconcert anybody carrying on a conversation with him by suddenly placing a mask over his face, pumping away at little rubber ball and then taking deep breaths’. Julian Symons, a post-war President of the Detection Club, was one of the disconcerted, believing that Berkeley’s ‘ruddy-faced geniality’ concealed a disturbingly shy and secretive character. He was an obsessive by nature, whose eccentricities (which included a fruitless campaign against King Edward VIII’s marriage to Wallis Simpson) persisted to the end of his life. His will instructed his trustees to make sure that he really was dead. He was terrified of being buried alive.

For all his strange behaviour, Berkeley’s contribution to detective fiction was dazzling. ‘Detection and crime at its wittiest’, Agatha Christie said. ‘All his stories are amusing, intriguing, and he is a master of the final twist.’ His influence can also be detected in the plotting of Christie novels such as Murder on the Orient Express.

His real name was Anthony Berkeley Cox. Born in the same year as Sayers and Edith Thompson, he was the son of a doctor who invented a form of X-ray machine enabling the detection of shrapnel in wounded patients. Sybil Iles, his mother, claimed descent from the seventeenth-century Earl of Monmouth, and from a smuggler called Francis Iles. The family inheritance included two properties in Watford: Monmouth House and The Platts. Sybil was a strong-minded intellectual who studied at Oxford before women’s colleges were formally admitted to the university. A head teacher prior to her marriage, she had published a novel called The School of Life. Berkeley found her powerful and intimidating, and the complexities of their relationship probably explain his schizophrenic attitude towards women – adoring and hurtful by turns.

Berkeley had a younger sister, Cynthia, and a brother, Stephen. An Edwardian photograph shows all three of them posed together in the style of the period. Berkeley seems pensive, with a hint of a suppressed smile, as if enjoying a private joke. He attended Sherborne School before reading Classics at University College, Oxford, and was a contemporary of Sayers, although their paths seem not to have crossed. Yet in a family of high achievers, Berkeley felt overshadowed by his gifted siblings. He took a miserable third-class degree, whereas Stephen won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, and Cynthia achieved a doctorate in music. Stephen became a prominent mathematician, while Cynthia enjoyed success as a musician as well as notoriety because she lived with a man to whom she wasn’t married.

Unlike Sayers, whose letters are now held in hundreds of folders at an American university archive, and Christie, who wrote an (admittedly selective) autobiography, Berkeley cultivated an air of mystery. It appealed to his sense of humour to fob off anyone who sought biographical information, whilst hiding clues to his personal life in plain sight by putting them into his detective stories. His darkest secret was concealed in a book with a title borrowed from the judge’s remarks in Thompson–Bywaters case, but its catastrophic failure marked the end of his career as a novelist.

It is naïve to assume that crime stories routinely reveal secrets about their creators’ personalities. Detective novelists specialize in misdirection. But Berkeley’s mother had fictionalized aspects of her own life in her novel, and he took the same approach to astonishing extremes. For Berkeley, fiction gave a licence to say the unsayable. His skill was such that none of his contemporaries had a clue about how much his novels owed to his private passions.

Alan Littlewood, the hapless protagonist of As for the Woman, is a self-portrait, and Alan’s family bears a close resemblance to Berkeley’s. Alan is an Oxford graduate, the oldest of three children, and feels inadequate in comparison to his sister, a musician, and his brother, a Cambridge scholar. Like Berkeley, he has literary ambitions; and as a teenager he publishes a romantic sonnet. Alan inadvertently overhears Mrs Littlewood, probably echoing Berkeley’s own mother, dismiss his poetry as ‘empty, pretentious nonsense’. Like Berkeley, he suffers from poor health, and an inferiority complex which is exacerbated by a sense that his powerful and intelligent mother finds him a disappointment. And like Berkeley, he finds women both fascinating and frightening. Alan lusts after a married woman, who encourages his devotion, but proves unworthy of it. Was this strange and disastrous relationship based on an early episode in Berkeley’s love life – or is there another interpretation?

Berkeley’s sense of humour was acute but idiosyncratic. Julian Symons recalled that when, inexplicably, a rusty nail appeared in Berkeley’s soup at a literary luncheon, he could not tell whether it had been put there by a careless cook, by a fellow guest Berkeley had insulted, or by Berkeley himself: ‘With Anthony Berkeley Cox, such a joke was possible.’ Even when relatively young, Berkeley relished playing the grumpy old man, and liked to give the impression that he was a misanthrope. Perhaps he used this as a cover to hide his compulsive womanizing. The glamorous Christianna Brand, who joined the Detection Club after the Second World War, and certainly caught Berkeley’s eye, said he once confided that there was ‘not one soul in the world he did not cordially dislike’. Thin-skinned and quick to take offence, he was a rich man who earned a reputation for stinginess. Legend has it that the reason why books signed by Berkeley are rare is because he charged for giving his autograph.

Yet he showed kindness and generosity to little-known writers, inspired loyalty in those who worked for him, and was renowned as a genial host. Christianna Brand judged him ‘an excellent companion, clever, erudite and very well read’, and Symons said he was ‘particularly sympathetic to the young’. When he published a fiercely opinionated book about England’s social and political ills, some of his arguments were not merely perceptive and enlightened, but decades ahead of their time. He argued in favour of equal pay for women, a minimum wage, fairer rents and worker participation on company boards. He also forecast the creation of a League of European Nations.

When the First World War broke out, Berkeley joined up, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He was gassed while serving in France, and also wounded by shrapnel before being invalided out of the army. Bouts of ill-health contributed to the uncertainty of his temperament throughout the rest of his life. In the reckless whirl of wartime, he married Margaret Farrar while on leave in 1917. He was twenty-one, she was just nineteen. They were too young, but what was the point of thinking long-term? Soldiers did not know whether they would ever come back from their next tour of duty. Nor did their lovers.

In peacetime, the marriage ran into difficulties, and eventually they divorced. Margaret (known as Peggy to those close to her) remarried, but Berkeley stayed on surprisingly good terms with her. When he died, decades after their divorce, she received a legacy under his will. The image he liked to cultivate of a tight-fisted misanthrope was not the whole story.

Not long after Berkeley and Margaret split up, he put his own views into the mouth of his (unmarried) detective, Roger Sheringham: ‘I never think a first marriage ought to count, do you? One’s so busy learning how to be married at all that one can hardly help acquiring a kind of resentment against one’s partner in error. And once resentment has crept in, the thing’s finished.’ This is the best evidence we have about why the marriage collapsed.

Like so many other men returning to Britain after serving on the Front, Berkeley found it hard to adjust. He dabbled in activities ranging from farming, property management, and what he described as ‘social work’ (although he was scarcely a conventional do-gooder), to ‘work in a Government office’ (given his contempt for bureaucrats, that job was presumably short-lived). Keen on shooting, he became a good enough marksman to compete at Bisley, but amateur theatricals appealed to him even more, because they afforded a chance to assume a different personality. When his two-act comic opera, The Family Witch was performed in Watford, he played the Major-Domo, and Margaret designed the women’s costumes.

Berkeley contributed scores of humorous sketches to Punch and other periodicals. These included a Conan Doyle spoof written in the style of Wodehouse. He also wrote a series of sketches featuring a small girl, some of which were collected as Brenda Entertains, and a comic fantasy with elements of ‘biological science fiction’, The Professor on Paws, in which part of a dead scientist’s brain is transplanted into a kitten. He had a facility for catching on to what was currently popular, and detective fiction caught his fancy at a time when, as M. R. James said (drawing a contrast with the ghost story), ‘The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there.’

His first detective novel, The Layton Court Mystery, was published anonymously. The cover said the book was written by ‘?’. Berkeley wrote it ‘for pure amusement, just to see if I could,’ but it sold twenty times better than his earlier books. A country house mystery, it introduced the breezy nosy parker Roger Sheringham and his sidekick Alec Grierson. Berkeley made Sheringham rude and vain, ‘an offensive person, founded on an offensive person I once knew, because in my original innocence I thought it would be amusing to have an offensive detective’. This may explain why Sheringham is portrayed as anti-Semitic. Berkeley developed a taste for taking revenge through fiction that became an addiction.

Yet Sheringham bears an uncanny resemblance to his creator. The son of a doctor, from whom he has inherited a love of puzzles, he is educated at public school and Oxford before military service. He writes successful novels and also for the newspapers. Berkeley was talking about himself and people he knew when he said in a biographical note about Roger: ‘Privately, he had quite a poor opinion of his own books, combined with a horror of ever becoming like some of the people with whom his new work brought him into contact: authors who take their own work with such deadly seriousness, talk about it all the time and consider themselves geniuses.’

Roger comes up with a plausible explanation of who shot the blackmailer Victor Stanworth – only to find that he is wrong. This becomes a familiar pattern for Sheringham, the most fallible of ‘great’ detectives. When he does discover the truth, he helps the culprit to escape punishment, and this thwarting of conventional justice became his trademark. As Berkeley said, Sheringham’s self-confidence was limitless and he was ‘never afraid of taking grave decisions, and often quite illegal ones, when he thinks that pure justice can be served better in this way than by twelve possibly stupid jurymen’. The striking twist in this novel concerns the murderer’s identity. Months later, Agatha Christie used a similar ploy in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but took it a stage further.

An odd connection arose between Berkeley and Christie when, in March 1926, he serialized The Wintringham Mystery in the Daily Mirror. The newspaper offered a total of £500 in prizes to readers who provided the best answers to questions about the story: how did Stella disappear, and who caused her disappearance and why? When the prize winners were announced, one of the runners-up was Colonel Archie Christie, who was awarded five pounds. Presumably Agatha either helped her husband to solve the puzzle or entered the competition under his name. She had already won prize money for solving a previous newspaper mystery competition, but given her growing celebrity, may have been reluctant to enter as herself. Even better, the incident gave her the idea for a novel she wrote a few years later. The plot depends upon one character winning a competition prize under someone else’s name.

Sheringham’s second outing came in The Wychford Poisoning Case. At first, it was again published anonymously. Long after writing the book, Berkeley urged a correspondent to throw his copy into the incinerator, saying, ‘I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages.’ Yet the story offers clues to his own bizarre psychological make-up.

Spanking and sado-masochistic scenes crop up several times in Berkeley’s work. When the mother of Alec Grierson’s girlfriend Sheila Purefoy says that Sheila and most of her friends deserve a good spanking, Roger heartily agrees that a public spanker ought to be appointed. In a chapter accurately titled ‘Mostly Irrelevant’, Alec spanks Sheila in the presence of her father, who genially remarks, ‘Don’t mind me.’ A few chapters later, it is Roger’s turn to inflict discipline on Sheila, with a rolled-up magazine. Berkeley’s interest in spanking was matched by his loathing of bureaucrats, and a few years later he argued in O England! that ‘The President of the Metropolitan Water Board ought to be spanked publicly on Tower Green’ because of the Board’s failure to deal with water shortages.

Roger Sheringham is at his worst when he rants about women: ‘Most women are potential devils … They live entirely by their emotions … they are fundamentally incapable of reason and their one idea in life is to appear attractive to men.’ Yet Sheringham adds, ‘A man without his woman is only half an entity and … a woman … can … turn his life, however drab, into something really rather staggeringly wonderful.’ When Alec Grierson asks why Roger remains a bachelor, the answer is that ‘the right woman in my case … happens unfortunately to be married to someone else.’

Sheringham has few qualms about adultery. Attitudes were changing rapidly in the post-war era, and novels were becoming franker in their treatment of sex. Berkeley took advantage of this, and Sheringham was almost certainly expressing his creator’s opinions. The central mystery of Berkeley’s life is which particular married woman he thought, at that time, was the right woman for him.

Berkeley subtitled the novel ‘An Essay in Criminology’, and he based the plot on a classic Victorian poisoning puzzle. At the age of nineteen, Florence Chandler, a southern belle from Alabama with gold ringlets and large violet eyes, had a shipboard romance with an Englishman called James Maybrick. He was twenty-three years older, a portly man with a fondness for eating arsenic as an aphrodisiac. More appealingly, Maybrick had made a small fortune as a cotton broker, and Florence agreed to marry him. After settling into Battlecrease House, Maybrick’s home in the suburbs of Liverpool, she gave birth to a son and a daughter, but discovered that her husband had several mistresses, including one who had borne him five children. He also had a vile temper and an unshakeable belief that adultery was acceptable for husbands but not wives. When she had the temerity to take a lover of her own, he was so infuriated that he ripped her dress and blacked her eye.

Gloomy, gothic Battlecrease House made a suitably sinister setting for a macabre domestic mystery populated by a cast of inquisitive servants and members of a family hostile to the young American interloper. Florence bought flypapers from a chemist, and soaked them in bowls to extract arsenic from them – to use as a facial cream, she said. Her husband succumbed to a severe gastric illness, and when the children’s nanny intercepted compromising letters between Florence and her lover, she alerted Maybrick’s brother. The next day, a nurse saw Florence tampering with a bottle of meat juice in her husband’s bedroom; within twenty-four hours, he was dead. Florence was convicted of his murder, even thought there was doubt about whether arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. She fell victim to a fit of popular moral outrage fuelled by the Press, and a hostile summing-up from a judge, who was committed to an asylum two years later, after his sanity finally gave way.

Locked in the condemned cell in Walton Gaol, Florence had the excruciating experience of listening to workmen hammering in the prison yard as they assembled the gallows on which she was to hang. In a bizarre twist of fortune, the death sentence was belatedly replaced with life imprisonment for ‘administering and attempting to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder’. Since this was a crime for which she never stood trial, she suffered from the most outrageous compromise in British legal history, serving fifteen years before her release. She fled back to the United States under an assumed name, where she lived to a ripe old age in a squalid cabin in Connecticut. She only had her cats for company, but no doubt she felt safer with them than in the sinister household at Battlecrease House. Decades after her death, a diary was published purporting to amount to a confession by her late husband that he was Jack the Ripper.

The Maybrick mystery, and its multiple interpretations, fascinated Berkeley and also a new friend of his. This was Elizabeth Delafield, a stylish and often poignant novelist widely regarded as a twentieth-century Jane Austen. He dedicated the novel to her, saying it grew out of ‘those long criminological discussions of ours’. He hoped that Delafield would ‘recognise the attempt I have made to substitute for the materialism of the usual crime-puzzle of fiction those psychological values which are … the basis of the universal interest in the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life. In other words, I have tried to write what might be described as a psychological detective story.’

The psychological puzzle of the relationship between Berkeley and E. M. Delafield is the great untold story of the Golden Age. Born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (her pen name was a jokey version of de la Pasture), Delafield was the daughter of a count whose family fled to England to escape the French revolution and of a novelist. At nineteen, she made a beautiful debutante, but was too tall for most of her dancing partners. She joined a French religious order based in Belgium, but a life of chastity as a Bride of Heaven was not for her. After leaving the convent, she worked in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war, published her first novel, and married Major Paul Dashwood, an engineer and third son of a baronet.

The couple had two children, and after three years in Malaya, they moved to Kentisbeare in Devon, where Dashwood acted as land agent for a large estate. Delafield became a pillar of the community, and a doyenne of the Women’s Institute. She was appointed as Cullompton’s first female Justice of the Peace, causing one elderly magistrate to resign from the bench in protest at this invasion of male territory. Like Berkeley, she wrote under a pseudonym, but they had much more in common than that. Each hid deep-rooted feelings of inferiority beneath a veneer of sophistication. They shared a taste for irony, an acute sense of humour, and a risky delight in turning their private lives into fiction.

Delafield and Berkeley talked long into the night about the hanging of Edith Thompson, and Florence Maybrick’s narrow escape from the rope. They regarded both women as victims of a hypocritical morality that punished them for having sex outside marriage. Delafield empathized with their craving for excitement, although unlike Edith and Florence she did not make the mistake of writing letters revealing her intimate secrets. Today, she is never considered as a crime writer, but she was the first author to base a novel on the Thompson–Bywaters case, years before Sayers, Berkeley and the rest. Messalina of the Suburbs appeared just a year after the double execution.

Berkeley’s interest in married women was not confined to Delafield. He nursed a hopeless passion for a budding actress called Hilary Reynolds, but unfortunately she was the wife of his brother, Stephen Cox. She had starred in the West End under the name Hilary Brough, but she and Stephen emigrated briefly to Canada, returning when she became pregnant. By the time their daughter was born, the marriage was on the rocks, and Hilary decided to return to the stage. A brief reunion with Stephen resulted in another pregnancy, and Hilary abandoned her career in the theatre. She and Stephen stayed together until the end of the Thirties for the sake of their son and daughter.

Brenda’s elder sister in Brenda Entertains is a fictional counterpart of Hilary, an early example of Berkeley’s penchant for populating his books with women who appealed to him. Stephen discovered Berkeley’s interest in his wife, and for years he and Hilary broke off contact with Berkeley. Berkeley’s interest in Hilary did not go unnoticed by Delafield, whose No One Now Will Know features the seduction of a sister-in-law.

Berkeley was undaunted. He began to dream of another dangerous liaison, this time with Helen Peters, a gentle and attractive woman. Once again, there was a stumbling block which would have deterred any other writer, no matter how lustful. Not only was Helen married, her husband was Berkeley’s literary agent.

The storyline of The Wintringham Mystery resurfaced in revised form as a novel entitled Cicely Disappears. Berkeley borrowed the names of his Watford properties for a new pseudonym, A. Monmouth Platts, and gave repeated nods and winks to Delafield. One character is named Cullompton, another Kentisbeare, while the heroine marries someone who takes a job as a land agent, like Paul Dashwood. The changes to the story and author’s name may have been designed to evade an agreement that he should not publish the original without the newspaper’s consent. The novel is flimsy, but for Berkeley, its publication represented a shrewd bit of business.

A scene in Mr Priestley’s Problem takes place at a cocktail party where two people discover a shared fascination in criminology, as Berkeley and Delafield had done. The story is a Wodehousian romp in which a group of pranksters trick a naïve man into thinking that he has shot and killed a supposed blackmailer. Berkeley was a member of the Gnats, an amateur dramatic group based in Watford, and wrote the libretto and music for several musicals, including two which reached the London stage – a comic opera, and a stage version of Mr Priestley’s Problem.

Priestley is handcuffed to an attractive woman during the story. Did Alfred Hitchcock read the book or see the play? The situation bears an uncanny resemblance to the scene in Hitchcock’s version of The 39 Steps in which Robert Donat is handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. There was a touch of sado-masochism in Hitchcock, as there was in Berkeley. For both men, the scenario was a sexual turn-on.

The Vane Mystery saw Berkeley playing with the conventions of the genre. Sherlock Holmes’ superiority over Inspector Lestrade led to innumerable stories contrasting incompetent professional policemen with gifted amateurs, but in this book, Sheringham is humiliated by Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard, who prefers evidence to psychology, believing that ‘No good detective ought to have too much imagination.’ As if unable to help himself, Berkeley not only gave his own name to Sheringham’s amiable cousin, but audaciously named two key characters with guilty secrets after the two people who stood in the way of a relationship with Helen Peters. They were his wife Margaret, and Helen’s husband. Given such effrontery, to dedicate the book to his parents-in-law was hardly an olive branch.

Unabashed by his humiliation, Sheringham triumphs over Moresby, now promoted to Chief Inspector, in The Silk Stocking Murders. The title illustrates Berkeley’s knack of gaining attention for his detective novels. The first two had been published anonymously, to create a frisson of mystery, and now he calculated that silk stockings, suggestive of sex and suspense, would capture people’s attention. As so often in his literary career, he was ahead of his time, creating a serial killer before the term ‘serial killer’ was invented. Again, he borrowed from a real life crime – the strangling six years earlier of Lilian Othen, a prostitute who worked in the West End under the name Lily Ray. One evening, she picked up a young petty crook called Anthony Castor in Regent Street. He had been drinking heavily, and after going for a late-night walk on the Embankment, they took a tram ride back to her flat in Brixton. During a quarrel, he seized her by the throat, and squeezed until she was dead. He then took off one of her silk stockings and tied it around her neck to make it seem that she had killed herself. But in the early hours of the morning, a policeman saw him trying to break into a shop, and he admitted at once that he had killed a girl. ‘I didn’t think it was so easy to kill anyone,’ he said. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude.

Berkeley’s killer adopts Castor’s modus operandi. An aspiring actress, a chorus girl, and a diplomat’s daughter are found dead in quick succession, hanged with silk stockings. Roger deduces that they have been murdered by a sex maniac who seeks out victims whose deaths he can twist into apparent suicides. Berkeley dedicated the book to ‘A. B. Cox, who kindly wrote it for me in his spare time.’ He even inscribed a copy ‘To A. B. Cox from the Author’ and kept it himself. A sign of a split personality, perhaps, or one more example of his weird sense of humour.

In July 1928, he wrote a letter – in French, for some reason – to his agent, A. D. Peters about a play he was writing, and sent ‘Mes salutations à la belle Hélène.’ This is the first known record of his interest in Helen Peters (who was not French but Scottish, the daughter of MacGregor of Glengyle, a distant descendant of Rob Roy). Perhaps Helen was flattered. For all his faults, women found Berkeley attractive. He was rather like those handsome cads who so often crop up in Golden Age novels, and cannot be trusted with other men’s wives. Years later, Clarice Dickson Carr, wife of American detective author John, recalled that Berkeley was ‘very good looking in an English film star way’. And he did not lack stamina. As the Twenties drew to a close, in addition to writing prolifically and pursuing his amorous adventures, he was busily laying the foundations of the Detection Club.