Tag: Crime Fiction

Have his Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

This is one of the later novels by Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and was published in 1932. Detective novelist Harriet Vane is on a walking holiday in the west country when she discovers a dead body lying on a large rock on the beach. The corpse’s throat has been cut. She takes photographs and recovers some of the man’s possessions, but this remote spot is some distance from the nearest village. By the time the police have been summoned, the body has been washed out to sea.

Lord Peter arrives from London, where he has read about the case in the papers, and he and Harriet investigate the mystery together. They are able to find out the dead man’s identity and piece together the details of his life as a professional hotel dancer in the coastal resort of Wilvercombe. It appears that he had no reason to commit suicide; there is someone who had a reason for wanting him dead and so the case becomes a murder mystery. The two men encountered by Harriet on the shore, a hiker and a camper, become suspects and when the fatal razor is found it becomes a key piece of the puzzle.

There is something very appealing about stories of a man and woman investigating a crime together and this one brings to mind other detective duos such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple and Steve, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

I listened to a very good 1981 dramatization of this on BBC Radio 4 extra. Wimsey is played by Ian Carmichael and Harriet by Maria Aitken. In some ways, this has dated less than a TV adaptation from the same era might have done. On radio, there is none of that contrast between filmed exteriors and interior scenes shot on videotape that used to be the sign of a BBC TV drama series, for example.

Nonetheless, I don’t think a radio version made nowadays would come out quite like this. Ian Carmichael gives Wimsey a no-holds-barred, upper-class, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ accent and Maria Aitken gives Harriet a clipped, rather Noel Coward way of speaking. This is all to the good as it suits the characters and the story perfectly.

Ian Carmichael had played Wimsey on television in the 1970s and perfectly captures the feeling that his mannerisms are all an act. In the earlier stories one felt this was a defence against his memories of the great war. Here, as he confesses at one point, it is to hide his true feelings about Harriet. He is in love with her, but she wants to retain her independence and repeatedly turns down his proposals of marriage. This is all complicated by the fact that they only met when Harriet was on trial for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solved the case, found the real killer and secured her acquittal. She hates feeling obliged to be grateful to him.

The relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter extends over four novels in the series, but it isn’t really necessary to know that to enjoy Have his Carcase as a standalone mystery. Yes, there is the slight irritation of the constant deference shown by everyone to Wimsey, the constant “my lording” by all and sundry. You just have to accept that as a sign that the book was published in a different era.

The part that really matters, the well-constructed mystery, retains its freshness. It isn’t easy to guess the outcome, even today, and the solution is highly ingenious. It’s basically an “impossible crime” mystery with a small circle of suspects, but something about the seaside setting gives it a very different feel to a mystery set in a country house. This is clearly the North Devon coast, with Wilvercombe standing in for Ilfracombe. Both the setting and the various characters are rendered with greater realism than was usual for this sort of story in 1932.

Then there is Wimsey himself. Under the “silly ass” act, he is a very shrewd individual indeed with a great knowledge of people. He is a little like a serious version of Bertie Wooster. Ian Carmichael really did make the role his own, both on radio and television. After all, he had already played Wooster by the time he came to play Wimsey.       

Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles

The Good Reader1 Comment

“It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any positive steps in the matter” is the striking opening sentence of  Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles, published in 1931. It is one of the most memorable novels of the golden age of crime fiction.

It is an early example of a new kind of crime novel, where the identity of the criminal is known right from the beginning. It predates Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die by some years.

The suspense of the story is therefore not “whodunnit?” but more “how exactly will he go about it and will he get away with it?”. There is a darkly comic tone, and a realistic presentation of a believable world. This is definitely not a puzzle-plot detective story. Detectives do appear, but the would-be perpetrator is the central figure.

The 1920s social world of rigid class divisions is carefully evoked and slyly satirised. At the opening tennis party the real game being played is not the one on the court. “One does not have to listen to gossip in a place like Wyvern’s Cross. It inserts itself into the consciousness somehow, quite irrespective of the ears.”

In this small north Devonshire village, Dr Edmund Bickleigh is trapped in a loveless and sexless marriage to Julia. She comes from a decaying aristocratic family and only married him to escape the family home. He married her to improve his social status. She looks down on him and he has become the archetypal henpecked husband. Helped by his father, Bickleigh has risen from humble origins to qualify as a doctor. But the social conventions of this era judge a person not by what they have done, but by who they are.

He has many dalliances with local girls, to which Julia turns a blind eye. He is something of a fantasist, and when the wealthy Madeleine Cranmere comes to live in the village, believes he has met “the one”. Unfortunately, Madeleine is a self-dramatising fantasist herself. It is when Julia tells Edmund that Madeleine is merely playing with him and refuses him an amicable divorce that his thoughts turn to murder.

He ponders long and hard before he comes up with what seems like the perfect plan, that can never be detected as murder. We are shown how he puts this into operation in great detail. However, at the very moment when it seems he has succeeded, he makes a crucial mistake, seemingly unnoticed. This adds another layer of suspense to the rest of the novel. There are many surprises ahead before the end, both for the Doctor and the reader. The biggest twist of all is reserved for the very last page.

Bickleigh acts with chilling detachment towards his wife as his carries out his plan to make her a morphine addict. It is as if he is not responsible for her plight at all. For most of the time, he is able to hide the murderous rage inside himself, but it spills over when he hits Ivy, his trusting and innocent former girlfriend. As he drives away, he realises that he enjoyed doing it.

Dr Bickleigh is the main character and we see him from the inside, but the novel is written in the third person, so Francis Iles is also able to keep a critical distance from him. We watch both horrified and amused as Bickleigh retreats further into his fantasy vision of himself. He thinks he has been transformed from a downtrodden nonentity into a Nietzschean superman. He relishes the feeling that he holds the power of life and death over anyone who crosses him. It turns out that he is sadly mistaken. After all, this is subtitled “The story of a commonplace crime”.

There is hardly a sympathetic character in this novel. Even the solicitor who is the only one to suspect what Bickleigh has been getting up to is not really a very pleasant person. But the twists and turns and the horrible fascination we feel for the doctor himself, make it a really compelling read.

It was adapted for television by the BBC in 1979 with a career-best performance by the late Hywel Bennett as Bickleigh. This is much better in every way than the later ITV version.

 

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Surbiton Festival (4) XA

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)