the pen name Oliver Fleming. He would later write variously as Anthony Lawless, Martin Porlock, W.J. Stewart and Warren Stewart. The first book under his own name however was The Rasp, which was published by Collins in 1924 and introduced his main series protagonist, gentleman detective and scholar Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn. The Rasp was an immediate success and was later made into a film. Other crime novels followed in rapid succession. In 1931 MacDonald published no fewer than seven: four under his own name, two as Lawless and one as Porlock. In the same year he moved to Hollywood with his new wife, the author F. Ruth Howard, and started a career as a screenwriter, both adapting his own work and writing original film scripts. These last included contributions to popular series such as Charlie Chan and Mr Moto. He also adapted Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Agatha Christie’s short story ‘Philomel Cottage’ (as Love from a Stranger).
Though MacDonald maintained the flow of crime fiction novels during the 1930s, film work and later television increasingly dominated his output. He did however win two Edgar Allan Poe Awards for his short stories in the ’50s and his final Gethryn novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, published in 1959, is arguably the finest that he ever wrote.
What characterises MacDonald’s output, in addition to the remarkable speed with which he produced it, is its inventiveness. At the same time that Agatha Christie was experimenting with storyline, producing one classic plot after another, MacDonald was consciously experimenting with the form of the detective novel. The Maze (1932), another of his best works, dispenses with a detective almost completely. The reader is presented with transcripts of the evidence given by witnesses at a coroner’s court. Only at the very end does Anthony Gethryn appear to confirm or refute the reader’s solution. Rynox (1930) begins with an epilogue, ends with a prologue and is interrupted by a series of sardonic comments from the author—MacDonald acting as a sort of Greek chorus in his own book, foreshadowing future developments. ‘All is not well’ we are told ‘with RYNOX. RYNOX is at that point where one injudicious move, one failure of judgment, one coincidental piece of bad luck will wreck it …’ Like most Greek choruses, he’s spot on. There is a metafictional side to his work as well. Having, in another book, discovered a body in the study, Gethryn remarks to the policeman: ‘Ever read detective stories, Boyd? They’re always killed in their studies. Always! Ever notice that?’ MacDonald also uses humour well and produces some lovely quotable lines. One of my favourites (from Adrian Messenger) is: ‘That winter, like all California winters, was unusual.’
The other side of the coin of this remarkable flow of witty and innovative books was however a tendency to ignore detail in a way that less brilliant, more conventional writers would never have dared to do. Julian Symons described MacDonald as ‘a restless but careless experimenter’. There are times when you feel that MacDonald is so caught up in his own cleverness that he misses, or can’t be bothered with, the obvious. On at least one occasion the reader is left wondering why it didn’t occur to the police to look for fingerprints, which would have shortened their investigations by a couple of hundred pages. But the pace is such that it probably doesn’t occur to the reader either until long after they have finished the book.
Murder Gone Mad, the third of MacDonald’s books to be republished in this series, encapsulates many of the strengths outlined above. It is one of the earliest books to make use of the serial killer. (It also incidentally anticipates the invention of CCTV as a means of detecting crime.) It works splendidly as a ‘fair play’ detective story. But at the same time it is a very clever satire on the British class system. Holmdale, the scene of the murders, is a new town, painfully conscious of its image. It does not like to be referred to as ‘Holmdale Garden City’, with the lower middle class undertones that the name carries, and certainly does not like the bad publicity created by a series of grizzly murders. The killer seems determined to lower the tone of things still further, their invoice-like communications to the police, one following each killing, smacking very much of ‘trade’:
My Reference ONE
R.I.P.
Lionel Frederick Colby,
died Friday 23rd November
THE BUTCHER
When a report is produced by the police examining the murders to date, the victims are listed under ‘clerical class’, ‘leisured class’, ‘labouring class’ and ‘skilled workman class’—a fairly nuanced series of distinctions. But, the police report concludes, the murderer ‘must belong to the clerical or governing class’ to have the opportunity to mix with all classes of the community—a member of the working classes simply wouldn’t have the contacts. When Dr Reade is suspected, somebody who knows him protests: ‘Blasted rot, my dear fellow! What I mean: a chap, a decent chap like Reade, the sort of chap who’s always good for a hand of Bridge and that sort of thing; the sort of chap one has dinner with and all that … he can’t possibly be this Butcher.’ But, of course, we all know that he or any of the citizens of Holmdale could be the killer. MacDonald also anticipates Nancy Mitford’s popularisation of U and non-U language by putting the word ‘lounge’ firmly in quotation marks.
All classes are however united in their horror at the unremitting succession of killings. ‘Is our city to be another Düsseldorf?’ asks the local paper, somewhat enigmatically—not just lower middle class then but, worse still, German?
The Düsseldorf references are almost certainly inspired by the case of Peter Kürten, the so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf or Düsseldorf Monster, who during the 1920s murdered at least nine people, mainly (like The Butcher) by stabbing, and who was executed the year Murder Gone Mad was published. It took the German police over a year to catch him—something that does not impress the British officers seeking the Holmdale murderer, though initially they do little better than their Düsseldorf counterparts—perhaps because Gethryn is, we learn, injured and unavailable. This time it is Superintendent Arnold Pike, a character from earlier books, who leads the investigation and eventually makes the arrest under what prove to be trying circumstances. Thus it all ends in precisely the way a detective story is supposed to end, with the reader having been given a fair chance to guess which suspect Pike will apprehend at the conclusion.
Murder Gone Mad, originally published in MacDonald’s annus mirabilis of 1931, is one of his most successful, most satisfying books. John Dickson Carr listed it as one of the ten best detective novels ever written. Its reprinting in the revived Detective Club series will hopefully introduce it to a new generation of crime fans and help re-establish MacDonald’s reputation as one of the most original and most readable writers of the Golden Age.
L.C. TYLER
September 2016
I
THERE had been a fall of snow in the afternoon. A light, white mantle still covered the fields upon either side of the line. The gaunt hedges which crowned the walls of the cutting before Holmdale station were traceries of white and black.
The station-master came out on to the platform from his little overheated room. He shivered and blew upon his hands. The ringing click-clock of the ‘down’ signal arm dropping came hard to his ears on the cold air.
‘Harris!’ called the station-master. ‘Six-thirty’s coming!’
A porter came out from behind the bookstall. He was thrusting behind a large and crimson ear a recently pinched-out end of a cigarette.
The six-thirty came in with much hissing of steam and a whistling grind of brakes. The six-thirty reached the whole length of Holmdale’s long platform. The six-thirty looked like a row of gaily-lighted, densely-populated little houses. The six-thirty’s engine, for some reason known only to itself and its attendants, let off steam in a continuous and teeth-grating shriek. The doors of the six-thirty all along the six-thirty’s flank began to swing open. Holmdale was the six-thirty’s first stop since leaving St Pancras, now forty miles and forty-five minutes behind it.