Talking About Detective Fiction (10 page)

For me
Gaudy Night
is one of the most successful marriages of the puzzle with the novel of social realism and serious purpose. It tells me, as a writer of today, that it is possible to construct a credible and enthralling mystery and marry it successfully to a theme of psychological subtlety, and this is perhaps the most important of Dorothy L. Sayers’s legacies to writers and readers. She wrote to her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne that
Gaudy Night
was not a detective story at all, but a novel of an almost entirely psychological kind with a mild detective interest. But here I must take issue with the author—a presumptuous and perhaps a dangerous thing to do. She did herself less than justice.
Gaudy Night
is a true detective story. We want to know who among a closed circle of suspects is responsible for the malicious disruption at Shrewsbury College, and the clues to the mystery are fairly, indeed plainly,
presented. I can still recall my first reading of the novel, when I was sixteen, and my self-disgust at my failure to identify the culprit when all the necessary information had been so carefully, if cunningly, provided.

Margery Allingham also portrayed aspects of the age in which she wrote, but was happy to range outside territory with which she was familiar.
Flowers for the Judge
deals with publishing;
Dancers in Mourning
with the frenetic world of the theatrical star; The Fashion in Shrouds with the ephemeral mystique of a high-fashion house. All provide a vivid picture of the community in which they are set. Her writing life was long (forty-five years) and apart from published articles, broadcasts and book reviews, she wrote twenty novels of crime and adventure between 1929 and 1966. The novels became increasingly sophisticated, concentrating more on character and milieu than on mystery, and in 1961 she wrote that the crime novel could be “a kind of reflection on society’s conscience.” This was to become increasingly true of detective fiction generally, but Allingham herself reflected rather than criticised the age in which her stories are set. She had considerable descriptive gifts, especially for places: the seedier squares of north-west London,
decaying post-war streets, the salt marshes of the Essex coast. Like Dorothy L. Sayers, she created an upper-class detective (in Albert Campion)—so grand, apparently, that the name of his mother can only be whispered—but one who developed psychological subtlety and, indeed, even changed his appearance as she found the original Campion inadequate to the widening scope of her creative art.

She is notable too for the creation of eccentrics who never degenerate into caricatures, except perhaps for Magersfontein Lugg, who, despite the occasional usefulness of skills developed in his criminal past, is a little too much the traditional stage comedy cockney to be convincing and who would surely be too unsuitable a manservant for even Campion to tolerate. One of the Allingham novels which, for me, best illustrates her talent is the cleverly named
More Work for the Undertaker
(Allingham was good at choosing titles), published in 1949. In this novel, set in one of the gloomier streets of post-war London, she combined the eccentric Palinode household with a vivid evocation of place and a strong and continually exciting narrative to produce what was recognised at the time as a distinguished detective story.

Ngaio Marsh has justified her own statement that “The mechanics of a detective story may be shamelessly contrived but the writing need not be.” It has been said that the formula for a successful detective story is 50 percent good detection, 25 percent character and 25 percent what the writer knows best. Ngaio Marsh, a New Zealander, made good use of her own distinguished career in the theatre by setting some of her most successful books, notably
Enter a Murderer, Opening Night
and
Death at the Dolphin
, in the world of drama, making excellent use of backstage intrigue and giving a lively account of the problems and mechanics of running a professional company of players in the years between the wars. She is less concerned with the psychology of her characters than is Margery Allingham, and the lengthy interrogations by her urbane detective, Superintendent Roderick Alleyn, have their longueurs, but both women are novelists, not merely fabricators of ingenious puzzles. Both sought, not always successfully, to reconcile the conventions of the classical detective story with the novel of social realism. But because Ngaio Marsh experienced Britain as a long-staying visitor who saw what she thought of as a second homeland through somewhat naïve and
uncritical eyes, she gives a less accurate, more idealised, nostalgic and regrettably sometimes snobbish picture of England than do her crime-writing contemporaries. I have most enjoyed the books set in her native New Zealand,
Vintage Murder
(1937),
Colour Scheme
(1943) and
Died in the Wool
(1945), where landscapes, characters and plot are interrelated and she brings the people and the soil of her native county vividly before us.

None of these women, of course, would have described herself as a social historian or as having a prime responsibility either to portray contemporary mores or to criticise the age in which she worked, and it is perhaps this detachment of purpose which makes these writers so reliable as historians of their age. They were of their time and wrote for their time and their stories give a clear and, indeed, a personal account of what it was like to live and work as an educated woman in the decades between the wars.

The 1914–18 war had, of course, very greatly advanced the cause of women’s emancipation. They gained the vote and already had the right to a university education but not to a degree until 1920, when in October of that year Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree. The professions were now open to
them, but their lives were still extraordinarily restricted compared with today. The mass slaughter of young men in the Great War had meant that there were three million so-called surplus women and very few opportunities open to them, since married men were given priority for jobs. Dorothy L. Sayers deals with this most tellingly, particularly in her treatment of Miss Climpson and her Cattery, a small group of spinsters employed by Lord Peter to assist his detective work. He explains their function to Inspector Parker in
Unnatural Death
.

Dorothy L. Sayers, among much in her books that is tendentious or over-romanticised, does deal realistically with the problem of the so-called superfluous women deprived of the hope of marriage by the slaughter of the 1914–18 war, women with intelligence, initiative and often with education, for whom society offered no real intellectual outlet. And those who did find intellectual satisfaction commonly achieved it at the sacrifice of emotional and sexual fulfilment. It is interesting and, I think, significant that there is no married don in
Gaudy Night
and only one married woman—and she a widow—Mrs. Goodwin, who is a member of the senior common room. Women in the Civil Service and teaching were required to resign on marriage, the supposition obviously being that now they had a man to support them they should direct their energies to the proper sphere of interest for their sex. I cannot think of a single detective story written by a woman in the 1930s which features a woman lawyer, a woman surgeon, a woman politician, or indeed a woman in any real position of political or economic power.

One notable exception to the way in which women were perceived as wives, mothers, useful little helpmeets such as stenographers and secretaries,
is Margery Allingham’s Lady Amanda Fit-ton. Another Allingham heroine who has a professional job is Val Ferris, Albert Campion’s sister, who has been unhappily married but now works singlemindedly to establish herself as a leading dress designer. She and the actress Georgia are in love with the same man, and the book
The Fashion in Shrouds
explores the emotional pressures on women who dedicate themselves to a career but also want fulfilment in their emotional lives, a problem which is also one of the themes of Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
. Val and Georgia are described in the novel as “two fine ladies of the modern world,” but both are aware of their inner dissatisfaction as they drive home alone to their bijoux, hard-earned houses. The novelist says: “Their several responsibilities are far heavier than most men’s and their abilities greater,” but their femininity—“femininity unprotected from itself”—is presented as “a weakness, not a strength.” And when Alan, Val’s future husband, proposes to her, he sets out his terms unambiguously. He wants to take “full responsibility” for Val, including financial responsibility, and expects in turn that she will yield to him “your independence, the enthusiasm which you give your career, your time and your thought.” She
does this almost with a sigh of relief. It is very difficult to imagine a modern writer of detective stories, particularly a woman, thinking that this is a satisfactory solution to Val’s dilemma. It is even more difficult to imagine a modern female reader tolerating such blatant misogyny.

Ngaio Marsh is also of her age in the ingenuity of her methods of murder, and surprisingly ruthless and robust in her despatch of victims. In
Died in the Wool
, set in a sheep station, Florence Rubrick is stunned and then suffocated in a bale of wool. The victim in
Off with His Head
is decapitated. In
Scales of Justice
, Colonel Carterette, after being struck on the temple, is killed by the point of a shooting-stick which the killer actually sits on to push it home. She knew too the importance to a novel of the heart-stopping moment when the body is discovered. In
Clutch of Constables
we share Troy’s horror as she looks down at the body of Hazel Rickerby-Carrick bobbing and bumping against the starboard side of the river steamer, “idiotically bloated, her mouth drawn into an outlandish rictus grinning through discoloured foam.” Death is never glamorised nor trivialised by Ngaio Marsh.

If Ngaio Marsh worked largely within the conventions of the detective novel of her age, in
which way did she transcend these conventions, and transcend them so successfully that her novels are still read with pleasure while so many of her contemporaries are only named in the reference books of crime? Firstly I suggest it lay in her power of characterisation, not only in the sensitive and attractive portrayal of Alleyn and his wife, Troy, but in the rich variety of characters who people her thirty-two novels. Her eccentrics are never caricatures. I remember particularly the president, The Boomer, in
Black as He’s Painted
, poor deluded Florence Rubrick in
Died in the Wool
, Nurse Kettle in
Scales of Justice
, the distinctive Maori Rua Te Kahu in
Colour Scheme
, the Lamprey family depicted in
A Surfeit of Lampreys
with love but with insight and honesty. It is because in a Ngaio Marsh novel we can believe in the people and enter for our comfort and entertainment into a real world inhabited by credible human beings, so that some critics, including Julian Symons, have deplored her need to introduce murder, a view which occasionally she appeared to share. She wrote of her characters:

It is indeed the set of people in a milieu which so powerfully attracts us as readers. Perhaps the most valid criticism of Ngaio Marsh is that she was too concerned with the details of the “whodunnitry.” The novels have great vitality and originality while the scene is being set and the characters assembled, but tend to sag in the middle, borne down by the weight of police interrogation and routine investigation. The distinction she drew between a novel and a detective story is, of course, one which finds little favour with crime writers today; we feel entitled to be judged as novelists, not as mere fabricators of mystery. But it was a distinction reaching back to the Victorians and was a view shared by other crime writers of her time, including, somewhat surprisingly, Dorothy L. Sayers at the start of her career.

And finally, but certainly not last, there is the
quality of her writing, particularly her descriptive powers. Sometimes it is a single word which reveals her mastery.
Singing in the Shrouds
begins with a description of the London docks, and the tall cranes are described as “pontifical,” an arresting and vivid image. H. R F. Keating, who includes
A Surfeit of Lampreys
in his collection of the hundred best crime novels ever written, instances one sentence from that novel, which describes the heroine, Roberta, arriving from New Zealand by boat in London. She looks out at the other ships at anchor in the early morning light, and, Ngaio Marsh writes, “Stewards, pallid in their undervests, leant out of portholes to stare.” The picture is arresting, original and certainly described from personal experience. But for me, perhaps not surprisingly, it is the New Zealand novels which include some of her best descriptive writing: her native country seen through an artist’s eyes and described with a writer’s voice.

Reading the best of Ngaio Marsh, I feel that there was always a dichotomy between her talent and the genre she chose. So why did she pursue it with such regularity, producing thirty-two novels in forty-eight years? They were quickly written, principally to supply a regular and sufficient income
for her to live and dress well, and to enable her to continue her main interest, which was the promotion of the theatre, particularly Shakespeare’s plays, in her native New Zealand. Marsh was a deeply reserved, indeed in some respects a private person, and she may well have felt that to extend the scope of her talent would be to betray aspects of her personality which she profoundly wished to remain secret. There was, too, the complication that she lived a double life. New Zealand was her birthplace and she wrote about it with affection, but her heart was in England and some of her happiest memories were when she took the long journey from the South Island to London. Her response to New Zealand was always ambivalent. She disliked and criticised the New Zealand accent, was uncertain in her literary portrayal of the Maoris, found her chief and most lasting friendship among a family of English aristocrats and retained a romantic view of the perfect English gentleman, a species to which, of course, her detective Roderick Alleyn belonged.