No sooner had I finished Gaudy Night than I had to go back and devour every syllable of their courtship, from Strong Poison on. And when that was done, I went on to the rest of Sayers’ oeuvre, from Whose Body to Nine Tailors. But there was always something a little off, for me, about where Sayers left the newly married Peter and Harriet at the end of Busman’s Honeymoon. Dramatic and moving it might be, but the fact that she never wrote about them again – except fleetingly in a short story called ‘Tallboys’ – left them stranded in an unbearably sad place. For years, I couldn’t bring myself to read that book again, though all the others were read until the pages turned yellow and split from the spine. Then came Jill Paton Walsh. Using an unfinished manuscript found in the safe of Sayers’ agent, she wrote Thrones and Dominations, which brought Peter and Harriet back from their interrupted honeymoon to the London of George V’s death. And then, with Presumption of Death, on into wartime and family life. Finally, having seen their marriage unfold as I hoped and imagined when I first read Gaudy Night, I was at last able to return to Busman’s Honeymoon and appreciate the raw honesty of that ending for what it was. Josephine Tey arrived via my other favourite literary conduit, my uncle. He lent me a copy of Daughter of Time, Tey’s novel about the death of the Princes in the Tower. The book opens with Tey’s regular detective, Alan Grant stuck in a hospital bed. Out of boredom, he becomes fascinated by the question of Richard III’s guilt or innocence and with the help of a couple of friends, begins to investigate as if it were any other cold case. (If this sounds familiar, it might be because it’s the book that inspired Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead, where Morse, laid up in hospital, tries to solve a hundred year old drowning.) The book turned me into something of a Richard III obsessive, and I’m not the only one. In 1990, the Crime Writers’ Association voted Daughter of Time the greatest crime novel of all time, and five years later, it came fourth in a similar poll by the Mystery Writers of America. But it is Tey’s Brat Farrar that has stayed in my head ever since I first read it. Brat Farrar has elements of the classic French tale, Martin Guerre, where a stranger turns up professing to be a long lost family member and appears to pass every test to prove who he is. Like most of Tey’s books, it’s not constructed as a traditional whodunit. We know from the start that the man claiming to be Patrick Ashby is not who he says he is, but a lookalike called Brat Farrar. We might expect the plot to turn on whether the imposter will be unmasked before he succeeds in swindling Patrick’s twin out of his rightful inheritance, but Tey subverts our expectations. Slowly, layer by layer, she peels back family secrets until we discover what really happened to the thirteen year old Patrick, and who Brat Farrar really is. What made the story stick in my mind was the subtle psychology of Tey’s unearthing of the truth. The book tests the limits of what people will do or condone, and judges them in that light. Yet there are problematic elements to Tey’s writing. She clearly believes that criminals are born not made, and nowhere is the consequence of this line of thinking demonstrated more disturbingly than in The Franchise Affair. The Franchise Affair is based on a historical case of a young girl who claims to have been abducted and held hostage in a lonely house. She can describe things about it in minute detail and the women accused of holding her seem to have no defence against her accusations. The only way the two women can clear themselves is to prove where the girl, who was only 15 at the time, really was when she was supposedly locked away in their attic. In some ways, Tey’s novel seems highly contemporary. One of the turning points of the story, for instance, is a vicious tabloid newspaper campaign that demonises the accused women and beatifies their supposed victim. But if it were set in 2013, the true story of what happened to the girl would unquestionably be treated as a case of child abduction and sexual exploitation. Tey, writing 60 years earlier, has no qualms in laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the girl. That
14 | Random Stuff
yawning gulf in attitude comes as a shock and makes it a difficult book to read. After Sayers and Tey, in my discovery of the Golden Agers, came Margery Allingham. Allingham’s detective, like Sayers’, is an aristocratic amateur. Albert Campion may, in fact, have begun life as a parody of Peter Wimsey, but Allingham was not the sort of writer to be content with pastiche. Over 17 novels, Campion became very much his own person. Like Wimsey, he wooed and wedded his wife over the course of several books, and like Wimsey, his bride was his intellectual equal – in his case the young aircraft engineer, Lady Amanda Fitton. But unlike the Wimseys, their story continued through the war and into marriage and children. Allingham has a finely-honed gift for description and characterisation. How’s this for a paragraph that brings three individuals to life in as many sentences? The door shuddering open had admitted three excited people. Two of them, both male, were almost beside themselves with the joyous adventure of getting home through London in a real peasouper. One of these was six and the other was sixty. The third of the party, who was pale and a little breathless from the responsibility of controlling the others, was a girl. She was eight. Or this sentence for capturing the feel of a grand but run-down old house: It reminded him of his school days, since all the architectural features seemed several sizes larger than he personally required. Allingham’s characters can tend toward the wildly eccentric (never more so than the Palindone family in More Work for the Undertaker). But they are never two dimensional. As for her regular cast, from Campion’s manservant, Lugg – an ex-burglar as unlike Wimsey’s Bunter as you’d find in a whole pantheon of literary servants – to the three generations of policemen Campion has dealings with – Oates, Yeo and the delightful Charlie Luke, with his unconscious gift for impersonation – they will twine themselves round your heart. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Allingham isn’t afraid to explore London’s criminal underbelly. Her tour de force, The Tiger in the Smoke, begins in the London fog, with a young war widow cruelly induced to believe her husband may be alive after all. But the ‘tiger’ of the title is Jack Havoc, a murderer out of jail and loose again on the streets of London. Havoc is vicious, violent, described by Oates as, “A truly wicked man. In all my experience, I’ve only met three... I can’t describe it, but you’ll recognise it if you see it. It’s like seeing death for the first time.” And then there’s Tiddy Doll with his gang of petty criminals – Fagin to Havoc’s Bill Sikes. The Tiger in the Smoke is a short book – a mere 224 pages to Gaudy Night’s 564. But Allingham uses this intense thriller to explore the boundaries between madness and evil. It’s a book years ahead of its time. It’s true that the language of these queens of the Golden Age can seem flowery and self-consciously literary. Compared to the unrelenting violence that has become commonplace, you’d describe them as ‘cosy’. And yes, at times they reflect the prejudices of their age. (How, I wonder, will future generations judge today’s glib association of ‘Islamic’ with ‘terrorism?’ Every age has its own blind spots...) Yet what all three did was show that crime fiction could be so much more than either sensationalism or mental puzzles. They showed that beautiful writing, complex characters and psychological depth had as much a place in detective novels as in literary fiction. And they paved the way for the convention busting books of modern British crime writing.