was an Irish-born railway engineer who beguiled a long illness by writing a detective novel. The Cask, which appeared in 1920, made much more of a splash than Agatha Christie’s debut novel, published at about the same time, and launched a long career. Crofts’ speciality was meticulous investigation, and his principal detective, Inspector French, was unequalled in the art of dismantling seemingly unbreakable alibis. Crofts’ mastery of detail equipped him perfectly for the analysis of real life crime, and he took as his subject the Lakey murder case of 1933. The key elements of the story are worthy of Inspector French: “detective work of an extremely high order, involving persevering research, precise observation and deduction, magnificent team work and the use of the latest scientific methods.” Crofts’ concludes his account with the observation that: “Real life stories have an atmosphere of sordidness and evil which is happily absent from almost all detective novels.” Suffice to say that times and tastes in fiction have changed a good deal since those words were written.
The Kinder and Lakey cases are today little discussed, but the second essay in the book—which again has a connection with Sydney—tackled a murder that ranks as a classic, and was explored in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a best-seller which has spawned a television series. John Rhode, another good friend of Sayers, was ideally qualified to write “Constance Kent”, as he had previously been responsible for The Case of Constance Kent, an entry in the Famous Trials series. Rhode’s real name was Cecil John Street (1884–1965) and after a varied career encompassing distinguished service in the army, working as an electrical engineer, and writing non-fiction books about international affairs, he turned to detective fiction with aplomb, producing well in excess of one hundred novels, many of them featuring the irascible armchair detective Dr. Priestley.
Months after his book about Constance Kent appeared, Rhode received an anonymous letter from Sydney, challenging some of his statements about the case. He believed it had been written by Constance herself, but a handwriting “expert” disagreed. Not until further research took place in the Seventies was Rhode’s theory vindicated. “The Sydney document” helped to shape Rhode’s essay in The Anatomy of Murder, as he explored Constance’s “elusive personality”. Here he shows rather more interest in criminal psychology than he did in many of his novels, where the emphasis is on ingenious methods of murder—howdunit, rather than whydunit. Rhode donated the original letter to the Detection Club’s library, although depressingly this unique item of criminal history, like the Club’s Minute Book, seems to have gone astray during the Second World War, and has never turned up since.
The Constance Kent case so intrigued Sayers that she indulged in some private sleuthing of her own, annotating her copy of Rhode’s book about the trial with her thoughts on aspects of the mystery. When Rhode discussed the “nerve” of the murderer, she referred back to the case that inspired The Scoop, pointing out that Patrick Mahon invited a woman back to the bungalow where he had killed Emily Kaye the night before, and slept with her there, with his victim’s corpse in the next room.
Margaret Cole (1893–1980) tackled an equally celebrated Victorian mystery, “The Case of Adelaide Bartlett”, concerning a woman whose husband died of chloroform poisoning after the couple had become involved in a ménage-a-trois with a vicar. The essay appeared under Margaret’s name alone, although all her detective novels appeared as joint productions with her husband Douglas, better known as the left-wing economist G.D.H. Cole, and also a founder member of the Detection Club. By the mid-Thirties, Douglas was in poor health, and although he continued to write with feverish productivity, his wife came to take a much greater interest in the Detection Club than he did. Margaret was a feisty radical, whose views on politics and society were very different from Sayers—who, along with Anthony Berkeley, was the prime mover of the Club’s activities—but she enjoyed the social side of their get-togethers. She also shared with Douglas a fondness and admiration for G.K. Chesterton, first President of the Detection Club, who died a few weeks before The Anatomy of Murder was published.
Margaret Cole’s contribution to this book was her most significant venture into the field of true crime, but the Bartlett mystery has exerted a lasting appeal for detective novelists. The ingredients of sex, death and a puzzle are irresistible, and Hitchcock thought about turning the story into a film, Raymond Chandler said the events in the case were “relatively simple to tell, but completely goofy”, and in 1980, one of Chesterton’s successors as Club President, Julian Symons, factionalised the story in Sweet Adelaide, a novel offering a clever explanation of the conundrum at the heart of the case.
Ernest Robertson Punshon (1872–1956) was perhaps the least renowned contributor to The Anatomy of Murder, both at the time of publication and today, yet he was a talented writer who finally hit his stride in his sixties after a long literary apprenticeship. In his fifteenth novel, Information Received, published in 1934, he introduced the young police constable Bobby Owen, and Owen progressed up the ranks in a long series of books which often articulated distinctive and radical views on politics and society. “Business as Usual: an Impression of the Landru case” considers the criminal career of Henri Landru, a serial killer convicted of eleven murders. The essay is adorned with touches that illustrate why Sayers—a discerning but often acerbic critic—used to enthuse about his writing. An encomium from her review of Information Received adorned the covers of many of Punshon’s later books, and although there is something of the curate’s egg about Punshon’s work, at his best he was, as Sayers insisted, a writer of distinction.
Sayers’ interest in true crime is apparent in several of her novels, above all in The Documents in the Case, published in 1930, and written in collaboration with another Detection Club member, Robert Eustace. The story is influenced by the controversial case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, lovers who were tried for the murder of Thompson’s husband. Nowadays, the hanging of Edith Thompson is widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice, but Sayers lacked sympathy for Edith, and helps to explain why the characterisation in the book is not of the same high standard as the scientific concept underpinning the mystery and the epistolary style which Sayers adapted from a novelist whom she much admired, Wilkie Collins. In “The Murder of Julia Wallace”, however, Sayers showed much deeper understanding of the central character in the drama, an insurance agent accused of battering his wife to death in their Liverpool home.
She argued that the mystery “provides for the detective novelist an unrivalled field for speculation.” If Wallace was guilty, “then he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels; and if he was innocent, then the real murderer was still more typically the classic villain of fiction.” At a time when detective novelists, with Anthony Berkeley in the vanguard, were setting up multiple possible solutions to fictional crimes, Sayers suggested that such ingenuity was not as unrealistic as it might seem. In the Wallace case, there was “no single incident which is not susceptible of at least two interpretations, according to whether one considers that the prisoner was, in fact, an innocent man caught in a trap or a guilty man pretending to have been caught in a trap.” These are compelling ingredients for a novelist, and the Wallace story has provided plot material for numerous detective novels—Sayers noted two early examples in the bibliography she appended to her essay. Two more came from the pen of the industrious Rhode: Vegetable Duck appeared in 1944 and The Telephone Call four years later. Much later, elements of the case informed P.D. James’ The Skull Beneath the Skin and The Murder Room.
For Sayers, character and psychology were crucial to a proper analysis of whether or not Julia Wallace was murdered by her husband: “Though a man apparently well-balanced may give way to a sudden murderous frenzy, and may even combine that frenzy with a surprising amount of coolness and coming, it is rare for him to show no premonitory or subsequent symptoms of mental disturbance. This was one of the psychological difficulties in the way of the prosecution against Wallace.… The mind is indeed peculiar and the thoughts of the heart hidden. It is hopeless to explain the murder of Julia Wallace as the result of a momentary frenzy, whether Wallace was the criminal or another.”
Guarded though her conclusions were, it seemed that they were vindicated by research undertaken years after her death. True crime expert Jonathan Goodman and journalist Roger Wilkes made a convincing