true crime

In a recent post, I offered one reason why the detective story exploded into prominence when it did. But there are others.

Let’s set the stage first. In their witty, sardonic, and often insightful history of the years between the wars, The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge say that when the Great War ended “Sherlock Holmes stood alone,” that is, there were no other prominent detective series — an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Sexton Blake stories were being cranked out at a fearsome rate; Austin Freeman was making a name for himself; and Chesterton’s Father Brown was loved by a significant subset of readers. (One could add the shockingly prolific Edgar Wallace to this list, but most of his novels were thrillers of one kind or another rather than tales of detection as such.) But no detective commanded the universal public attention like Holmes, and there was no sign of the Boom that was quickly to come.

A decade later, Graves and Hodge note, popular reading was utterly dominated by the detective story. The addictiveness of the genre was widely noted, never more wittily than in Wodehouse’s 1931 story “Strychnine in the Soup,” which introduces us to such famous novels as Gore By the Gallon, Blood on the Banisters, and Severed Throats. Not only did it seem that everyone was reading detective stories, everyone was writing them. Poets like C. Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake) and academics like J. I. M. Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) got in on the game, and T. S. Eliot regularly reviewed detective stories in the Criterion. When Graves started work on I, Claudius he reflected that the British public loved “reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven I could tell about.”

Things moved quickly: Agatha Christie had written The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, but it was not published until 1920, the date usually fixed for the beginning of the Boom. In the same year Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask; then came A. A. Milne’s The Red House (1922), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body (written in 1921, published in 1923), and an ever-growing host of others.

How, and why, did this happen? In that recent post I described what I thought was one essential precondition, but the precondition was in place long before the boom occurred. It’s impossible to prove this point, but it seems to me likely that in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history, it was psychologically useful to make violent death ordinary again: to reduce its scope to the comprehensible. Killing could not be denied, but perhaps it could be to some extent controlled, or anyway retributed, through the workings of a generally honest and occasionally competent system of criminal investigation and punishment.

So we have in place a general social precondition for the rising popularity of the genre of detective fiction, and a widely shared psychological need that it fulfilled. But there was, I think, one more factor. If the British public liked reading about murders, as Graves said, that didn’t necessarily mean fictional murders. And I don’t think that the great Golden Age writers of detective fiction got their inspiration primarily from Conan Doyle or Chesterton, but rather from true crime stories they read about in the newspapers.

In her fine book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders writes about how modern police procedures arose in tandem with a series of highly-publicized Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper of course, but also Dr. Pritchard, Henry Wainwright, and, early in the century but famous throughout it, Burke and Hare. It’s hard to overstate how compelling these criminals and their foul deeds continued to be well into the twentieth century: in Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), there’s a significant mention of the Adolf Beck case, and her third, Unnatural Death (1927), begins with Lord Peter Wimsey offering his opinion on why Pritchard got caught.

And of course these cases continued past the Victorian era: at the time that the Boom began, the most talked-about case for the previous decade had been that of Dr. Crippen. But a new one would come to dominate the news just as the Boom was really getting under way: the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 — the execution of Edith Thompson in January 1923 being perhaps the most controversial event in the history of British murders. And as the genre grew, the murders kept coming: in 1931 the murder of Julia Wallace, in 1934 the Brighton Trunk Murders. The Wallace killing alone has prompted dozens of fictional retellings and even more attempts at guessing the identity of the murderer, and there has never been a more brilliantly written true-crime story than Sayers’s essay on the many puzzles surrounding that murder — it should be much more widely read than it is, but it’s not easy to find.

Indeed, as Martin Edwards has pointed out, Sayers is the Golden Age writer most openly influenced by real-life murder cases — but then, she was always one to show her work, that is, to wear her influences proudly on her sleeve. Many other stories of detection, or crime novels more generally, are strongly based on real cases — one of the most famous, and effective, of these being Ernest Raymond’s revisiting of the Crippen case from the perspective of the murderer(s), We, the Accused (1935).

These famous crimes kept getting re-described by novelists quite closely, or more loosely, because people just couldn’t commit interesting and puzzling murders fast enough to sate the public’s appetite for tales of violence; and that, I think, is the single most important cause of the Boom in tales of detection.

N.B. Just after posting this I realized that I have already done a version of it. Duh. But I’m working through these issues now in more detail.