rapidly in the post-war era, and novels were becoming franker in their treatment of sex. Berkeley took advantage of this, and Sheringham was almost certainly expressing his creator’s opinions. The central mystery of Berkeley’s life is which particular married woman he thought, at that time, was the right woman for him.
Berkeley subtitled the novel ‘An Essay in Criminology’, and he based the plot on a classic Victorian poisoning puzzle. At the age of nineteen, Florence Chandler, a southern belle from Alabama with gold ringlets and large violet eyes, had a shipboard romance with an Englishman called James Maybrick. He was twenty-three years older, a portly man with a fondness for eating arsenic as an aphrodisiac. More appealingly, Maybrick had made a small fortune as a cotton broker, and Florence agreed to marry him. After settling into Battlecrease House, Maybrick’s home in the suburbs of Liverpool, she gave birth to a son and a daughter, but discovered that her husband had several mistresses, including one who had borne him five children. He also had a vile temper and an unshakeable belief that adultery was acceptable for husbands but not wives. When she had the temerity to take a lover of her own, he was so infuriated that he ripped her dress and blacked her eye.
Gloomy, gothic Battlecrease House made a suitably sinister setting for a macabre domestic mystery populated by a cast of inquisitive servants and members of a family hostile to the young American interloper. Florence bought flypapers from a chemist, and soaked them in bowls to extract arsenic from them – to use as a facial cream, she said. Her husband succumbed to a severe gastric illness, and when the children’s nanny intercepted compromising letters between Florence and her lover, she alerted Maybrick’s brother. The next day, a nurse saw Florence tampering with a bottle of meat juice in her husband’s bedroom; within twenty-four hours, he was dead. Florence was convicted of his murder, even thought there was doubt about whether arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. She fell victim to a fit of popular moral outrage fuelled by the Press, and a hostile summing-up from a judge, who was committed to an asylum two years later, after his sanity finally gave way.
Locked in the condemned cell in Walton Gaol, Florence had the excruciating experience of listening to workmen hammering in the prison yard as they assembled the gallows on which she was to hang. In a bizarre twist of fortune, the death sentence was belatedly replaced with life imprisonment for ‘administering and attempting to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder’. Since this was a crime for which she never stood trial, she suffered from the most outrageous compromise in British legal history, serving fifteen years before her release. She fled back to the United States under an assumed name, where she lived to a ripe old age in a squalid cabin in Connecticut. She only had her cats for company, but no doubt she felt safer with them than in the sinister household at Battlecrease House. Decades after her death, a diary was published purporting to amount to a confession by her late husband that he was Jack the Ripper.
The Maybrick mystery, and its multiple interpretations, fascinated Berkeley and also a new friend of his. This was Elizabeth Delafield, a stylish and often poignant novelist widely regarded as a twentieth-century Jane Austen. He dedicated the novel to her, saying it grew out of ‘those long criminological discussions of ours’. He hoped that Delafield would ‘recognise the attempt I have made to substitute for the materialism of the usual crime-puzzle of fiction those psychological values which are … the basis of the universal interest in the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life. In other words, I have tried to write what might be described as a psychological detective story.’
The psychological puzzle of the relationship between Berkeley and E. M. Delafield is the great untold story of the Golden Age. Born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (her pen name was a jokey version of de la Pasture), Delafield was the daughter of a count whose family fled to England to escape the French revolution and of a novelist. At nineteen, she made a beautiful debutante, but was too tall for most of her dancing partners. She joined a French religious order based in Belgium, but a life of chastity as a Bride of Heaven was not for her. After leaving the convent, she worked in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war, published her first novel, and married Major Paul Dashwood, an engineer and third son of a baronet.
The couple had two children, and after three years in Malaya, they moved to Kentisbeare in Devon, where Dashwood acted as land agent for a large estate. Delafield became a pillar of the community, and a doyenne of the Women’s Institute. She was appointed as Cullompton’s first female Justice of the Peace, causing one elderly magistrate to resign from the bench in protest at this invasion of male territory. Like Berkeley, she wrote under a pseudonym, but they had much more in common than that. Each hid deep-rooted feelings of inferiority beneath a veneer of sophistication. They shared a taste for irony, an acute sense of humour, and a risky delight in turning their private lives into fiction.
Delafield and Berkeley talked long into the night about the hanging of Edith Thompson, and Florence Maybrick’s narrow escape from the rope. They regarded both women as victims of a hypocritical morality that punished them for having sex outside marriage. Delafield empathized with their craving for excitement, although unlike Edith and Florence she did not make the mistake of writing letters revealing her intimate secrets. Today, she is never considered as a crime writer, but she was the first author to base a novel on the Thompson–Bywaters case, years before Sayers, Berkeley and the rest. Messalina of the Suburbs appeared just a year after the double execution.
Berkeley’s interest in married women was not confined to Delafield. He nursed a hopeless passion for a budding actress called Hilary Reynolds, but unfortunately she was the wife of his brother, Stephen Cox. She had starred in the West End under the name Hilary Brough, but she and Stephen emigrated briefly to Canada, returning when she became pregnant. By the time their daughter was born, the marriage was on the rocks, and Hilary decided to return to the stage. A brief reunion with Stephen resulted in another pregnancy, and Hilary abandoned her career in the theatre. She and Stephen stayed together until the end of the Thirties for the sake of their son and daughter.
Brenda’s elder sister in Brenda Entertains is a fictional counterpart of Hilary, an early example of Berkeley’s penchant for populating his books with women who appealed to him. Stephen discovered Berkeley’s interest in his wife, and for years he and Hilary broke off contact with Berkeley. Berkeley’s interest in Hilary did not go unnoticed by Delafield, whose No One Now Will Know features the seduction of a sister-in-law.
Berkeley was undaunted. He began to dream of another dangerous liaison, this time with Helen Peters, a gentle and attractive woman. Once again, there was a stumbling block which would have deterred any other writer, no matter how lustful. Not only was Helen married, her husband was Berkeley’s literary agent.
The storyline of The Wintringham Mystery resurfaced in revised form as a novel entitled Cicely Disappears. Berkeley borrowed the names of his Watford properties for a new pseudonym, A. Monmouth Platts, and gave repeated nods and winks to Delafield. One character is named Cullompton, another Kentisbeare, while the heroine marries someone who takes a job as a land agent, like Paul Dashwood. The changes to the story and author’s name may have been designed to evade an agreement that he should not publish the original without the newspaper’s consent. The novel is flimsy, but for Berkeley, its publication represented a shrewd bit of business.
A scene in Mr Priestley’s Problem takes place at a cocktail party where two people discover a shared fascination in criminology, as Berkeley and Delafield had done. The story is a Wodehousian romp in which a group of pranksters trick a naïve man into thinking that he has shot and killed a supposed blackmailer. Berkeley was a member of the Gnats, an amateur dramatic group based in Watford, and wrote the libretto and music for several musicals, including two which reached the London stage – a comic opera, and a stage version of Mr Priestley’s Problem.
Priestley is handcuffed to an attractive woman during the story. Did Alfred Hitchcock read the book or see the play? The situation bears an uncanny resemblance to the scene in Hitchcock’s version of The 39 Steps in which Robert Donat is handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. There was a touch of sado-masochism in Hitchcock, as there was in Berkeley. For both men, the scenario was a sexual turn-on.
The Vane Mystery saw Berkeley playing with the conventions of the genre. Sherlock Holmes’ superiority over Inspector Lestrade