Those Golden Age Detectives

Elizabeth Zelvin

In the Golden Age of detective fiction, several British mystery writers, all women, reigned more or less co-supreme: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and, writing a bit later, New Zealand-born Ngaio Marsh.

Let’s take Christie first and get her out of the way, because her mysteries differ from those of the others in several respects. For one thing, the world she portrays is rather middlebrow. Hercule Poirot, one of her enduring detectives, is an eccentric Belgian, played for laughs, who stands outside the parade of English society. He has no personal life and no genuine emotions apart from a mild compassion for some of the victims of the crimes he solves and an occasional burst of vanity. The other, that unlikely sleuth, Miss Marple, is a middle-class resident of a village in which society consists of such stock characters as the vicar, the doctor and the squire—hardly elevated enough to be invited to dinner, say, at Downton Abbey, unless no other company is expected.

In Christie’s mysteries, the puzzle is all. If her plots seem clichéd to today’s readers, it’s because the twists that were fresh and original in her work have spawned so many imitators. I doubt that anyone would call her stories character driven. The Poirot and Miss Marple series have no arc; their characters are unchanging and eternal.

On the other hand, Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, and Marsh’s Detective Chief Inspector (later Superintendent and Chief Superintendent) Roderick Alleyn have a lot in common. Lord Peter is the brother of the Duke of Devon; Campion is the pseudonymous scion of a family of unnamed but elevated rank, perhaps a ducal younger son himself. Alleyn is the younger brother of a rather stuffy baronet, Sir George. All of them mingle freely with characters across a broad spectrum of society. None of them are snobs in the conventional sense. Yet inherent in the value system and lifestyle of all three is the peculiarly English concept of being “a gentleman.”

At its best, being a gentleman implies unassailable integrity, and that, certainly, is common to all three sleuths. A sense of chivalry and/or noblesse oblige (without hairsplitting over the difference) is deeply ingrained in them by their upbringing. They solve crimes to right wrongs—as well as, in the case of Campion and Lord Peter, because it’s fun.

However, these sleuthing gentlemen take for granted an entitlement based on class. As today’s viewers of Downton Abbey are constantly reminded, traditional British class structure took some direct hits during World War I and crumbled gently thereafter during the decades in which our detectives operated. But gentlemen still knew who they were and recognized the boundaries between their class and others’. In Downton Abbey, Bates was Lord Grantham’s batman in the War, as Bunter was Lord Peter’s. In civilian life, the lords expect to be dressed, groomed, and waited on, and the intelligent and loyal far-more-than-valets cheerfully provide these services. Campion’s “man,” the cheerfully irreverent Cockney ex-burglar Lugg, is similarly both servant and sidekick. Instead of a devoted lifelong servant, Alleyn has Detective Sergeant (later Inspector) Fox.

Class distinctions carry over from the detectives’ private life to their investigations. When a murder is committed, the gentleman sleuths interview the gentry, while Fox, Lugg, and Bunter make themselves at home in the servants’ hall, chatting up the cook, the butler, and the whole roster down to the youngest tweeny, speaking the vernacular over cozy cups of tea.

In spite of these iconic characteristics, all three of these great detectives demonstrate personal growth in the course of the series—Lord Peter the most, as he evolves from silly-ass-about-town in the early books to a character of such depth, complexity, and sensitivity that it is widely believed that his creator, Sayers herself, fell in love with him.

All find partners outside the rigid social boundaries of birth. Alleyn marries Troy, an acclaimed artist; Lord Peter, a mystery writer, a doctor’s daughter he first meets when she is on trial for murder; and Campion, Lady Amanda Fitton, an aristocrat, to be sure, but one who is happiest messing about with airplanes as an aeronautics expert. Their marriages draw all three sleuths into a growing maturity that lifts their investigations far above the realm of mere puzzle.

The Staying Power of Classic Mysteries

Elizabeth Zelvin

While many admirable mysteries are being written today—and a fair number of the people writing them are friends of mine—few of them have the staying power of some of the classic mysteries, whether from the Golden Age of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie or the equally beloved reign of Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey in the Fifties. Not only do I get great pleasure out of re-reading those I can get my hands on, but I remember memorable lines from some of these authors’ books for decades after the last time I saw them in print.

In Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison, Lord Peter Wimsey first sees Harriet Vane during her trial for murder and saves her from the gallows after a mistrial gives him time to find the real killer. I don’t have to google or open the book to recall Harriet’s goodbye when he takes his leave after visiting her in prison:

“I am always at home,” the prisoner said gravely.

Harriet is down on men and uncomfortable with gratitude and dependence, so she leads Lord Peter a dance for several books after finally accepting his proposal at the end of Gaudy Night (with dignity and in Latin). I don’t have to look it up to tell you that Harriet says at one point, If I ever marry you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.” Another scene that remains vivid for me, though I can’t quote it verbatim, is the one in which the unknown, malicious villain destroys the exquisite chess set that Peter has given Harriet. She’s devastated, and Peter tells her her reaction is precious to him because she says, “You gave them to me, and they were beautiful,” rather than, “They were beautiful, and you gave them to me,” valuing the giving above the gift itself. I believe the evolution of Lord Peter’s and Harriet’s relationship and the deepening of their characterizations to sustain it mark the beginning of the character-driven mystery novel. And it’s character, along with language, not puzzle or plot, that makes me savor, revisit, and never forget a book I’ve read.

I did have to google the exact wording of a line from Agatha Christie that I remembered as referring to moldy bread as “practically penicillin.” The passage, from Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, was even more delicious, so to speak, than I remembered:

“I didn’t get to that pudding in time. It had boiled dry. I think it’s really all right—just a little scorched, perhaps. In case it tasted rather nasty, I thought I would open a bottle of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays that that doesn’t matter. It’s really rather good for you—practically penicillin.”

Then there’s Ngaio Marsh’s Troy, her detective Roderick Alleyn’s wife, taking a river cruise in A Clutch of Constables. Troy’s impulsive decision to take this trip, sparked by an appealing ad, has made me believe in the romance of such voyages ever since I first read the passage in which she tells herself, “For five days, I step out of time.” What an evocative and unforgettable line!

Among Josephine Tey’s wonderful books, my favorite is Brat Farrar, about an appealing foundling who undertakes an impersonation and ends up falling in love with a family and finding his sense of belonging in their home and way of life. Given enough time on a desert island with nothing to read, I could probably reconstruct the whole book from memory.

This is not to deny that some current writers and their characters achieve that kind of power over our imaginations. I’ve never forgotten how moving it is when Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder speaks up in an AA meeting and says, “I’m an alcoholic” for the first time in Eight Million Ways to Die (1982). Granted, the topic of recovery is of particular interest to me as an alcoholism treatment professional and author of my own mystery series featuring a recovering alcoholic protagonist. But Block’s series, and that scene in particular, made me care so much about Scudder that I was thrilled when Block finally wrote his love letter to AA almost thirty years later, in this year’s A Drop of the Hard Stuff, set at the end of Scudder’s first year of sobriety.

Which of the mysteries you’re reading now have that kind of power over your imagination? What scenes or lines will you never forget, even ten or twenty years after the last reading?

Mysteries and the Social Order

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been reading my way through as many of Margaret Frazer’s Dame Frevisse medieval mysteries as I can get my hands on, and it’s gotten me thinking about the social order as depicted in the microcosm of mysteries. Frazer’s work is based on sound research and a fine empathic imagination. Her characters are very much rooted in their 15th century English world. Dame Frevisse, for example, having embraced the life of a cloistered Benedictine nun from a desire to spend her time with God, is not thrilled when she’s sent out into the world on some errand or another—in the course of which she inevitably solves a murder—but unhappy with the interruption of the cloister’s orderly schedule of prayer and downright irritated at being surrounded by so many people talking. A lesser writer would make her take more pleasure in the temporary freedom.

From the Middle Ages, my mind leaped to the Golden Age of mystery. In the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, class is innate and unchanging. A lord is a lord and a servant is a servant. Bunter and Lugg are happy to spend their lives serving Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion respectively. The police talk very differently to the housemaid than they do to the lady of the manor. In the work of Ngaio Marsh and Patricia Wentworth, who were writing through the 1950s, the social order remains more or less inviolate. Almost every character’s intelligence matches his or her social class. Wentworth’s Miss Silver books are the coziest of cozies, but they don’t lack for emotional depth and character development—within limits. Even Miss Silver talks differently to the housemaid, who never surprises her by being unexpectedly intuitive or well-read. In Wentworth’s world, young women are invariably either good girls, bad girls, or silly girls. A decade later, Patricia Moyes’s Henry and Emmy Tibbett are solidly middle class and anti-snob. After all, they live in Chelsea. But the English village is still a village, where the Chief Constable dines with the titled and landowning families, the doctor dines with the vicar, and the housemaid is still not too bright.

Growing up on English novels, I suspended disbelief about this perfectly ordered world over many years of reading. Now, when I reread old favorites as I love to do—most recently, Marsh’s A Clutch of Constables and Moyes’s Murder Fantastical—I have to work at not being distracted by the complacent snobbery woven into the fabric of these otherwise delightful reads. Some classic American mysteries resemble English novels in this respect. Elizabeth Daly’s Henry Gamadge books come to mind. Gamadge is undeniably a gentleman, and he inhabits a New York in which the Social Register matters, however impoverished and dysfunctional the old families may be. But America is at heart egalitarian. I suspect it was a lot easier for American writers to give up a world in which everyone knew his or her place.

The archetypal value of manners in the broadest sense, manners as essential to culture—the subtext of the sociological assumptions of the kind of fiction I’m talking about—seems to be that what separates the high from the low is whether the person in question knows which fork to use when at a formal dinner. It’s a persistent belief that this is important. I seem to remember that in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts as the Cinderella-like prostitute was embarrassed over the matter of forks. What I’m embarrassed about is how many years it took before it occurred to me to wonder who could possibly respect or care about a bunch of people who judge others by how they use their forks.