against—Chief Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard.
In some senses, Anthony Berkeley was Roger Sheringham; at the very least the two have much in common. Roger, like his creator, was the son of a doctor and ‘born in a small English provincial town’. Both went to public school and then to Oxford, where Berkeley achieved a Third in Classics and Roger a Second in Classics and History. Both served in the First World War: Berkeley was invalided out of the army with his health permanently impaired, while Roger was ‘wounded twice, not very seriously’. Roger became a bestseller with his first novel, as did Berkeley, and both men spoke disparagingly of their own fiction while being intolerant of others’ criticism. Against this background, Berkeley’s comment that Sheringham was ‘founded on an offensive person I once knew’ is likely to have been an example of the writer’s often-noted peculiar sense of humour.
Humour, and above all ingenuity, are the hallmark of Berkeley’s crime fiction. While many of his contemporaries concentrated on finding ever more improbable means of dispatching victims and ever more implausible means of establishing an alibi, Berkeley focused on turning established conventions of the crime and mystery genre upside down. Thus the explanation of the locked room in Berkeley’s first Sheringham mystery, The Layton Court Mystery (1925), is absurdly straightforward. In another novel, the official detective is right while the amateur sleuth is wrong. In another, the last person known to have seen the victim alive is, after all, the murderer. Above all, facts uncovered by any of Berkeley’s detectives are almost always capable of more than one explanation and the first deductions they draw are rarely entirely correct. In this respect, Berkeley clearly took some of his inspiration from certain historical crimes, particularly those whose solution has never been clear-cut and where the facts, such as there are, routinely offer more than one possible explanation. The Silk Stocking Murders (1928) is one such title, inspired by the murder in 1925 of a young woman in London by a one-legged man; The Wychford Poisoning Case, which has also been reissued in this Detective Club series, is another.
In all, Roger Sheringham appears in ten novel-length mysteries—one of which Berkeley dedicated to himself—and Sheringham is also mentioned in passing in two other novels, The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and Trial and Error (1937). Perhaps the best-known of the Sheringham novels is The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) which, again, is based on a real-life crime. This was the attempt in November 1922 by a disgruntled horticulturist to murder the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, by sending him a package of Walnut Whips, laced with either arsenic or strychnine. The poisoning with which Cox’s novel is concerned is investigated not only by the police but by Sheringham and the other members of ‘The Crimes Circle’, a private dining club of criminologists. Each member of the Circle advances a plausible explanation of the poisoning but one by one the solutions fall, including—to the reader’s surprise—the solution proposed by Sheringham. Eventually the mystery is solved by Ambrose Chitterwick, an unassuming and aspergic amateur sleuth whose hobbies include philately and horticulture—tweaking the nose of anyone who remembered that it was a horticulturist who made the attempt to poison Sir William Horwood. As well as being a superb puzzle, with multiple solutions, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is fascinating for the links between the fictional ‘Crimes Circle’ and the Detection Club, which Berkeley had founded as a dining club for crime writers in 1929—the same year that The Poisoned Chocolates Case was published. The Detection Club, at least initially, comprised ‘authors of detective stories which rely more upon genuine detective merit than upon melodramatic thrills’, though that definition has been significantly stretched more than once over the nearly 90 years of the Club’s existence. Over the years, Cox would collaborate with members of the Detection Club on various fundraising ventures, including four round-robin mysteries beginning with The Floating Admiral (1931), whose entertaining sequel—The Sinking Admiral—was published by Collins Crime Club in 2016. And in 2016, playing Berkeley in a posthumous game of detective chess, Martin Edwards, the current President of the Detection Club, proposed a wholly plausible additional solution to the Poisoned Chocolates mystery in a British Library reprint.
But Berkeley eventually tired of playing games with detective stories and, though Sheringham would go on to appear in a few recently discovered wartime propaganda pieces, some shorter fiction and even a radio play, the last novel in which he appeared was published in 1934, less than ten years after his debut in The Layton Court Mystery. But Berkeley did not abandon crime fiction altogether. On the contrary, he decided to take crime fiction in what was then a radically new direction. For this new approach, Berkeley decided to use the name of one of his mother’s ancestors, a smuggler called Francis Iles. And, for three years, the real identity of Francis Iles was kept a secret. With Malice Aforethought, the first Iles novel, Berkeley broke the mould. At a stroke, he broadened the range—and respectability—of crime and detective fiction. Though the novel in part derives from an early short story and, while it could also be regarded as a variant of the inverted mystery popularised by Richard Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke stories, Malice Aforethought is a much more complex proposition. For the first time Berkeley achieved what he had tried to do many times before: he focused on psychology. In Malice Aforethought it is the psychology of the murderer; and in the second Iles title, Before the Fact, it is the psychology of the victim. Characteristically, both are based on real-life crimes.
In all, three novels were published as by Francis Iles, with the third—As for the Woman (1939)—less successful than it might have been had it been presented as non-genre fiction, perhaps under yet another pseudonym. While a fourth ‘Francis Iles’ title was planned and even announced, Berkeley had published his last novel.
A few short stories appeared from time to time and, in the late 1950s, he completed two volumes of limericks, which were published under his own name. Berkeley also wrote some radio plays for the BBC, including one that, though credited to Anthony Berkeley, included two songs ‘by Anthony B. Cox’—and was introduced on its original broadcast by none other than Francis Iles!
In all, Anthony Berkeley published 24 books in a little over 14 years. He was also a prolific contributor to periodicals under his various names, authoring over 300 stories, sketches and articles; and he also reviewed crime fiction and other books up until shortly before his death in 1971.
To Agatha Christie, Berkeley was ‘Detection and crime at its wittiest—all his stories are amusing, intriguing and he is a master of the final twist, the surprise denouement.’ Dorothy L. Sayers also admired Berkeley and has Harriet Vane, in the Lord Peter Wimsey novel Have His Carcase (1932), describe the ‘twistiness’ of what she calls the Roger Sheringham method—‘You prove elaborately and in detail that A did the murder; then you give the story one final shake, twist it round a fresh corner, and find that the real murderer is B.’ The last word can be left to the mystery novelist Christianna Brand, a friend and near neighbour of Berkeley’s in London, who when reminiscing about the early years of the Detection Club commented: ‘Sometimes I have thought he was really the cleverest of all of us.’
TONY MEDAWAR
September 2016
ROGER SHERINGHAM halted before the little box just inside the entrance of The Daily Courier’s enormous building behind Fleet Street. Its occupant, alert for unauthorised intruders endeavouring to slip past him, nodded kindly.
‘Only one for you this morning, sir,’ he said, and produced a letter.
With another nod, which he strove to make as condescending as the porter’s (and failed), Roger passed into the lift and was hoisted smoothly into the upper regions. The letter in his hand, he made his way through mazy, stone-floored passages into the dark little room set apart for his own use. Roger Sheringham, whose real business in life was that of a best-selling novelist, had stipulated when he consented to join The Daily Courier as criminological