it; less than three years later he was dead, at the age of 41. In the course of his short and often troubled life, however, he published fourteen novels, as well as non-fiction books, stage plays and radio plays.
Until recently, little was known about Henderson, and even less had been written about him and his work. Thanks to the diligent and invaluable research of Paul T. Harding, much information has come to light, and Henderson’s fragmentary archive has been presented to the University of Reading. Paul Harding has also edited an unpublished memoir written by Henderson; its title The Brink comes from the final sentence, which sums up the author’s bleak worldview: ‘There is always a chasm gaping at one’s feet, and although merry enough about it, most people finally get a little tired of hovering on the brink.’
Donald Landels Henderson was born in 1905; he had a twin sister, but their mother died four days after giving birth. Henderson’s twin, Janet, also died in childbirth, when she was 28. Their father re-married when the twins were four, and Henderson was to say, ‘I cannot pretend to have enjoyed anything very much about my childhood or adolescence.’ He was educated at public school, and under pressure from his businessman father he took up a career in farming. But agricultural life didn’t suit Henderson, and a stint as a publisher’s salesman brought only misery. He enjoyed better fortune working for a stockbroker, but he abandoned the City in his mid-twenties during a turbulent period when he suffered a nervous breakdown.
Since his teens, he had enjoyed acting, and had also dreamed of becoming a writer. He joined a touring repertory company, and married an actress called Janet Morrison, a single parent who later gave up her son for adoption. The marriage soon failed, and the couple separated, although they did not divorce for some years.
Henderson began to combine writing with his acting career, but this was a period of worldwide economic depression—‘the Slump’—and money was always short. Chapter titles in The Brink such as ‘Poverty Street’, ‘Another Failure’, ‘Disaster’, and ‘The Awfulness of Everything’ give unequivocal clues to his melancholy during much of the Thirties. He had parts in plays such as Rope by Patrick Hamilton, a writer with whose dark thrillers his own work is sometimes bracketed.
After a failed theatrical venture in London, ‘I was not in a fussy mood … I got a room in Surbiton … and in a fearful burst of enthusiasm I sat down and wrote three novels running, scarcely leaving myself time to think them out, so anxious was I to get farther and farther away from the brink of the precipice. The books in question were Teddington Tragedy, His Lordship the Judge and Murderer at Large, and they were published between October 1935 and October 1936. In his memoir, Henderson supplies little detail about the influences on his crime fiction, although he acknowledges that the nineteenth-century case of the serial killer William Palmer was an inspiration for Murderer at Large.
Henderson’s account in his memoir of his time in farming gives, perhaps unintentionally, a hint about the dark side of his mind: ‘There were a lot of rats on the farm and I enjoyed many a rat hunt with the dogs. Sometimes you didn’t need dogs … We were constantly rat trapping, at which I became really expert, and I know of few greater thrills, including getting a book accepted, than hurrying along next morning to see if you have caught anything and finding that two angry, terrified little eyes are staring at you murderously. Or even more than two.’ His account of the homicidal career of Erik Farmer (was the surname a nod to his previous profession?), the loathsome protagonist of Murderer at Large, is equally chilling.
Procession to Prison, a crime novel about a ‘trunk murderer’, appeared in 1937; it was well received, but thereafter Henderson ‘could sell nothing I wrote for fully two years … The irony of the literary life, as I have experienced it, seems to lie in the fact that, when you are all but down and out, you can write well, but your luck is never any good from the selling point of view. Poverty breeds more poverty.’ Henderson tramped the streets of London and Edinburgh looking for work ‘with my press cutting book under my arm’, but without success. He had lost his nerve as an actor, and seems—although the chronology of his memoir is vague—to have spent two summers camping out in the open. After a spell in hospital, he tried to put together a book of famous trials, but failed to interest a publisher in the project.
He had better luck with a comedy thriller play called The Secret Mind, but his attempts to enlist for military service were rebuffed, and he became an ambulance driver, only to be badly injured during the blitz in September 1940. The following year, deemed unfit even for work in civil defence, he started to write a new novel—Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper.
Henderson’s explanation in The Brink of the concept he had for the book was striking: ‘It was to be a religious novel, but because publishers and everyone were always so terrified of religion, or bitter about it, unless very delicately presented, I would also make it a murder novel, to help the sales. It had a magnificent plot—though I am bad at plots—and of course I should be told I had written a “detective” story because there happened to be a detective in it. But that didn’t matter, as long as I sold it. It would be, for a change, about a man who wanted to get caught, and hanged, because he was rather browned off about life in general … I broke my rule and started this book without knowing for certain what the end would be … I decided that there must be plenty of humour in the book, to take the edge off the sombre, brooding background … I wrote the book with fearful haste and enthusiasm … in about a week and a half, straight onto the typewriter.’
The book struggled at first to find a publisher, and after another spell of acting, Henderson joined the BBC. Finally, things began to look up. He again came across Rosemary (‘Roses’) Bridgwater, who had been his girlfriend many years earlier, and once he had secured a divorce from his first wife, they married and moved into a flat in Chelsea. The novel eventually sold both in Britain and the US, and attracted positive reviews. Not everyone, however, was as impressed as Raymond Chandler. In The Brink, Henderson quoted a letter sent to his publishers by someone from Edinburgh who signed themselves as ‘Lover of Clean-Minded Literature’ which began:
‘I have read Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper and paid 8/6d for it. With the exception of Mrs Agatha Christie and also Miss Anna Buchan, I will never again buy a book without first hearing it recommended by a friend. This book is the last word in filth and should never have been printed by you …’
For Henderson, though, the popularity of the book ‘made up to me for years of despair’. He wrote a new crime novel, Goodbye to Murder, in about ten days, and adapted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper for the stage. His wife gave birth to a son in January 1945, although a second son, born in December of the same year, died when only a few days old. The play of the book was staged in 1946, achieving critical success, and the film rights were sold. At this point, the manuscript of The Brink comes to a rather abrupt end. Henderson’s health was failing, and he died of lung cancer on 18 April 1947. Although Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper was televised live by the BBC in 1950, and again in 1957, inevitably his reputation began to fade.
Yet his writing, at its best, is distinctive enough to deserve reconsideration. The principal influences on his crime fiction are surely not Hammett, as Chandler suggested, but rather C. S. Forester, author of Payment Deferred (Henderson’s memoir mentions the homicidal protagonist, William Marble, in the context of a discussion about Charles Laughton, who played Marble in the stage and film versions of the book) and Francis Iles, author of Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. Forester and Iles wrote with a chilly irony that also runs through Henderson’s work, and that of other occasional crime novelists of the period, such as C. E. Vulliamy, Bruce Hamilton and Raymond Postgate. ‘I would not like to say where my fascination for murder and disturbed mental conditions came from,’ Henderson said. Whatever its origins, it resulted in his producing a handful of books as unorthodox as they are powerful.
MARTIN EDWARDS
July 2017