DETECTIVE FICTION

Margery Allingham

Tiger In The Smoke (1952) was her most noted work.

Location: 91 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3PS. Her London pied- -terre. (purple, orange)

The Margery Allingham Society

The Margery Allingham Society was founded in 1998.

Website: https://margeryallingham.org.uk

Sexton Blake

The character of Sexton Blake was created by Harry Blyth. He first appeared in Halfpenny Marvel magazine. Blyth sold the rights to the character. Over 4000 stories were to be written by 200 authors.

Website: https://sextonblake.com

G.K. Chesteron

G.K. Chesterton wrote the Father Brown novels.

Location: 11 Warwick Gardens, W14 8PH (orange, brown)

Website: www.chesterton.org (The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

Agatha Christie

During the Second World Christie worked at University College Hospital in the dispensary. She learned a lot about poisons.

Some crime writers dislike Christie s fiction because of her cold worldview. She was quite prepared to kill schoolgirls and was the crime to depict a serial killer.

Location: 47 Campden Street, W8 7ET. Christie s home from 1930 to 1934. (blue, purple)

22 Cresswell Place, SW10 9RB (blue, turquoise)

The Cruciform Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6AU (purple, turquoise)

5 Northwick Terrace, NW8 8JJ. Her home in about 1918.

58 Sheffield Terrace, W8 7NA (blue, orange)

Website: www.agathachristie.com

Class

Josephine Tey was a leading detective fiction author of the post-1945 era. In her novel The Franchise Affair (1948) it is easy to discern who are the good people and who are the bad by their class status and their deportment. The former have nice, middle-class manners.

See Also: CLASS Middle-Class

Website: www.josephinetey.net

Wilkie Collins

In 1860 Constance Kent murdered her younger brother at the family home in Wiltshire.¹ The fratricide became known as the Murder at Road Hill House. It was investigated by Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard s Detective Branch.² The case inspired the novelist Wilkie Collins s to write The Moonstone (1860).

Location: 17 Hanover Terrace, The Regent s Park, NW1 4RJ (orange, pink)

12 Harley Street, W1N 1AA (orange, purple)

Website: https://wilkiecollinssociety.org

¹. Changes to county boundaries that were made in 1974-5 led to the property now being in Somerset.

². In 1842 Jonathan Whicher had joined the Detective Branch as one of its eight original officers.

The Detection Club

The Detection Club was an exclusive gathering of crime writers. It was founded in 1930 by Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1971). As a writer, his most noticeable achievement was Malice Aforethought (1931), which he wrote under the pseudonym Francis Iles. The book employed the criminal's viewpoint.

Charles Dickens

The creation of the Metropolitan Police s detective department in 1842 has led to it being possible to make a case for the character of Mr Nadgett, in Charles Dickens s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), being the first proper private detective in English literature.

Jonathan Whicher became the model for Collins s character Sergeant Cuff. The Road Hill House inquiry also informed Charles Dickens s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).

Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853) was based upon Inspector Charles Frederick Field (1805-1874).

Location: The Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, WC1N 2LX (red, yellow)

See Also: CHARLES DICKENS

Website: https://dickenssociety.org www.dickensfellowship.org

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett named Marlowe after one of the boarding houses at Dulwich College.

No male role model at home. Therefore, imbibed the public-school ethos.

Website: www.dulwich.org.uk/senior-school/co-curricular/day-houses/a-short-history

P.D. James

Phyllis James (1920-2014) grew up in Cambridge. She met her husband Connor Bantry White while she was working in the Festival Theatre. They married and had two daughters. He had qualified as a doctor. In 1944 he went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He succumbed to schizophrenia and was unable to work. To provide for their children she became a hospital administrator for the Department of Health. She had long harboured a wish to become a writer. She had long been an assiduous note taker. As she neared the age of forty, she decided to do something about this desire. She opted for crime fiction because its highly structured form appealed to her temperament. She regarded the work as being a trial run for a proper literary novel.

James s had a mutual friend with Sayers in the person of the Italian language scholar Barbara Reynolds (1914-2014). It was Reynolds, who completed Sayers s translation of Dante s The Divine Comedy.

James sent the manuscript of Cover Her Face to Faber. It introduced Adam Dalgleigh, who became her principal character. The name was derived from a former English teacher of hers. It appealed to Charles Monteith and was published in 1962. The publishing house s only previous crime had been Cyril Hare, who had died in 1958. She continued in her job. Her husband died in 1964. Four years later she joined the Home Office. Within the department she was exposed to a wealth of information about forensic science and crime.

She was a committed Anglican and her work contained a strand of morality. She always plotted each novel in advance. With this structure in place, she then wrote the manuscript out of sequence. The different parts were then placed in sequential order.

Shroud of A Nightingale (1971) is regarded as being her first distinctive novel. Its prose was of a literary quality. Her style utilised the conventions of the golden era detective fiction, while also containing a large element of dark psychology. She once declared that she was happy to leave the pleasant murders to Agatha Christie.

Innocent Blood (1980) addressed morality rather than mystery. The book established her in the front rank of British crime writers. She felt able to resign from the civil service. She was to play an active role in public life. Among her contributions was serving a governor of the B.B.C.. She developed a second protagonist, Cordelia Gray, in An Unsuitable Job For A Woman (1972). While both A Taste For Death (1986) and Devices and Desires (1989) were crime novels, they were also works of literary fiction. Kingsley Amis once described James s style as Iris Murdoch with murders .

In 1991 she was made a life peer. The Children of Men (1992) was a work of apocalyptic fiction. The Private Patient (2008) was her final Dalgleigh novel. Her last book, Death Comes To Pemberley (2011), combined detective fiction with her love of Jane Austen s novels.

Location: 58 Holland Park Avenue, W11 3QY (purple, brown)

Website: https://pdjames.co.uk

Pseudonymous

Literary writers who have written detective fiction pseudonymously. Cecil Day Lewis wrote as Nicholas Blake and Julian Barnes as Dan Kavanagh.

Ruth Rendell

Ruth Graseman (1930-2015) was born into an Anglo-Danish family in South Woodford. She was an only child and her parents marriage was unhappy. Her background made her feel something on an outsider. She attended Loughton County High School for Girls. She left school at eighteen and became a reporter on the Chigwell Times. At the age of twenty she married Donald Rendell (d.1999), a fellow journalist whom she had met when they had been covering the same inquest. She resigned from the publication after it had published her account of a local tennis club s annual dinner. She had not gone to the event. During it, the after-dinner speaker had had a fatal heart attack while speaking.

While looking after her pre-school son, Rendell endeavoured to become a novelist. She tried a number of different genres and styles. She completed at least six novels before From Doom With Death (1964), a mystery, was published. It featured Inspector Reginald Wexford. He proved to be her principal character. Wexford s character was based in part upon her own teacher father, whom she had idolised as a child. This proved to be the first of her Wexford series. Over them he grew both tetchier and more accepting. The novels that featured him were set in Kingsmarkham, a fictional Mid-Sussex town.

With To Fear A Painted Devil (1965), her second novel, Rendell started what became a second strand of non-Wexford, standalone books. These were tough, blood-spattered psychological thrillers. There was often a character social or sexual obsession that stemmed from a misfortune than an individual had experienced during childhood. When exposed to emotional stress these would lead to violence.

Rendell s novels reflected the social changes that were being discussed more openly. The issues that they incorporated included domestic violence, female genital mutilation, paedophilia, racial tensions, sexual frustration, and transvestism. Her interest in the psychology of her characters meant that her novels tended to be whydunnits rather than just whodunnits . She was not inclined to write gore. She did not engage in research and had little interest in either crime or criminals. She was not an enthusiastic reader of crime fiction preferring contemporary and Victorian novels. She had a taste for complex and even confusing plots.

Rendell regarded Agatha Christie as having been a poor writer. She herself furnished a bridge between the Golden Age of detective fiction and the more urban style that it emerged subsequently. Many of her readers found her books to be depressing. She found this response hard to understand.

Rendell s career built slowly. She established a relationship with the publishing house Hutchinson. During the 1970s she began to become widely known. She developed the confidence to push her genre s boundaries. The first sentence of A Judgement In Stone (1977) broke nearly every rule of crime fiction. In the 1980s she began to receive awards. She used her material success to try to help young writers establish themselves. She aided the career of Jeanette Winterson. At one juncture Rendell considered giving Wexford a son-in-law who wrote post-Modern novels that had no characters.

In 1986 Rendell launched her Barbara Vine pseudonym with A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986). (Vine was her middle name.) The Vine novels tended to be more subtle and less violent than her others. The often contained a phobia. Her own personal neuroses included a fear that she might lose her ability to write. She had a fourth strand to her output - short stories. She was to have seven volumes of these published.

In the 1990s the themes of family misunderstandings and consequences of kept secrets and past crimes became more prominent in Rendell s novels.

In 1987 the Wexford novels started to be televised in a series that starred the actor George Baker (1931-2011). The series ended in 2000. By then 48 shows had been made. She regarded contemporary society as being essentially amoral. This chimed with the filmmaker Claude Chabrol who filmed A Judgement In Stone as La Ceremonie (1995) and The Bridesmaid as La Demoiselle d Honneur (2004). Live Flesh (1986) was made into a movie (1997) that was directed by Pedro Almod var. Claude Miller shot Tree of Hands as Alias Betty (2001).

She nursed her husband Donald through a final illness. He died in 1999. Her later novels were marked by a deep pessimism. Over time Wexford s character changed subtly. He became a more tolerant person. No Man s Nightingale (2013) was her final and 24^th novel to feature the police officer.

Rendell was open about being politically left-wing and used her wealth to give to charities. In 1997 she was made a Labour life peer. Polar bears were her favourite animals. She had them incorporated into her coat of arms. In the Lords she was responsible for the introduction of a Bill that became the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2003. She was a conscientious participant in the Lords s proceedings. Her work there being informed by her Christian Socialism. Her fondness for the chamber informed her Barbara Vine novel The Blood Doctor (2002).

Sax Rohmer

In the 18^thC Britons had admired China in an admiring. In the 19^thC commercial interests led to the waging of the Opium Wars. The Boxer Rebellion had an unnerving impact upon Western views of the Middle. Paradoxically, imperialist oppressors came to regard the Chinese as being the mirror image.

Arthur Sarsfield was of Irish descent. He secured a position in the London branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. He tried to develop a secondary career as a writer. He freelanced for newspapers. While doing so he developed spurious expertise about Limehouse and its Chinese community. In parallel he was writing songs and patter for music hall artistes. At the time, jingoism that expressed disdain for the other played well in the halls. The elements of Ward s writing combined to enable him to compose stories that featured Dr Fu Manchu, an oriental arch-villain. The author assumed the pseudonym, Sax Rohmer. The first of them was published in 1913. Fu s opponent was Nayland Smith, a Scotland Yard detective. The tales were narrated by his Dr Watson-like associate Dr Petrie.

The last of the Fu Manchu stories appeared in the 1950s.

Website: www.philsp.com

Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers s work in advertising prompted her to regard herself as a brand. Therefore, she was insistent that the L should be used.

While working as an advertising copywriter, Sayers had a sexual relationship with Bill White, a car salesman. She became pregnant by him. His wife helped keep the pregnancy secret and facilitated the delivery. The child was named John Anthony Fleming. He was raised as Sayers s nephew.

Jill Paton Walsh (1937-2020) was commissioned to continue the Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Location: 24 Great James Street, WC1N 3ES (purple, blue)

The Dorothy L. Sayers Society

The Dorothy L. Sayers Society was set up in the early 1970s at the prompting of the actor Peter Carmichael (1923-1997). He had played Wimsey on television. He was prompted to act by hearing that the local authority was planning to demolish Sayers s former home in Witham, Essex.

Website: www.sayers.org.uk

Women

In 2007 it was the case that Britain had the only crime writing reading nation that was dominated by women. The publishing industry was able to draw on the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaimo Marsh, and Margery Allingham.

David Backhouse 2024