Good blood
Robert Bernard Martin
Abe Burrows used to sing plaintively that he was walking down Memory Lane without a single thing to remember. Not so H. R. F. Keating, who apparently has total recall and certainly plenty of material on which to exercise it. In this glorious wallow in nostalgia he revives our memories of some 27 novelists who, as they say /7. 1930-1940, and of the appointments of civilised life about which they wrote so appealingly. Sudden death and the detec- tion of its causes were the matter of their books but we are less apt to remember the bodies and the identities of the victims than the choice Oriental rugs on which they lay as they spilled blood all over their velvet smoking-jackets (Savile Row, of course), or the bell-pulls with which the butler was summoned to the library to ring the police. Very classy stuff it all was.
The heady appeal of such settings was trickily compounded of simple love of a dream world that one knew didn't quite ex- ist and a niggling insistence that its descrip- tion should be accurate to the last marcel wave. Meticulousness in detail has always been the price demanded of crime novels in return for accepting improbable motivation and psychology. No one really thought that a large portion of the population habitually employed cooks-general, drank cocktails from hand-blown Venetian glasses, regard- ed upstart policemen through a cloud of Abdulla cigarette smoke, wore bust bodices of Valenciennes lace or boiled shirts, had fires and chamber-pots in the bedroom, and had to protect the women and kiddies from bolshies, oicks, or the even more insidiously offensive breed of persons who were simply not quite gentlemen. But it was fun to pre- tend for 350 or 400 pages. However, if the author slipped up in the slightest detail it totally undermined our trust in his omnis- cience., Literal accuracy was the foundation- stone of the well-made novel of detection. In the detailed and usually tedious explana- tion that occupied the last chapter, there were often page numbers in brackets as the detective outlined the commission of the crime, so that the doubting reader could refer back to be sure the author had been playing fair by not concealing evidence. One series of crime books I remember from my youth had a coupon inserted into the text at the place where the last vital clue had been given, and the reader who had manag- ed by then to solve the puzzle was invited to send in the coupon with his solution (and, of course, his sworn testimony that he had not peeped at later pages) so that he might receive a free copy of another book. A con- temporary advertisement of Van Wyck Mason's The Castle Island Case boasts that it contains Candid Camera Clues, 'one hun- dred and twenty-nine photographs in which the reader can see every important clue and development as they are unfolded by Roger Allenby, ace investigator.'
How we combed those pages for clues, and how much trivial information we un- wittingly absorbed in doing so. Since the merest slip in accuracy might be a deliberate tip-off as to how the murder was done, nothing escaped our scrutiny. English murder in that decade was apparently con- fined to the aristocracy and its hangers-on, so that we all became experts on such esoteric matters as the more peculiar titles in the peerage. Daughters of earls were thin on the ground in midwestern'America when I was growing up, but most of our band of conscientious readers could have told you that they were called Lady, while their young brothers qualified for no more than a distinctly inferior Honourable. At the time I supposed that Debrett was kept locked away near the prim knees of the at- tendants of the public library because its pages of racy inbreeding might be too much for the sensibilities of an Iowa adolescent, but I suspect now that it was simply because it was used so regularly by keen readers of crime fiction that it was in danger of being stolen.
Some details were even more interesting when inadequately understood. For a long time I assumed the worst of the drink known as gin-and-It, so often offered to debutantes, believing that the last word in its name was a covert reference to a foolproof aphrodisiac; it was a grievous disappointment to learn that it meant nothing more sinister that Italian vermouth.
But of such misunderstandings are na- tional attitudes born; there must be thousands and thousands of persons around the globe who believe, whatever the newspapers may say of -rail strikes, the Falklands, or Mr Benn, that most Englishmen would feel completely at home in the pages of Marjorie Allingham or Michael Innes or Dorothy L. Sayers (Keating reminds us how insistent she was on the middle initial. What did it stand for, or was it only a swank letter without further significance, as in the case of Harry S. Truman?). Come to think of it, Anthony Wedgwood Benn's name may partiallY prove their point.
Conversely, it has taken Britons most of the years since 1939, when No Orchids for Miss Blandish was published, to rid themselves of the idea that it was a literal transcription of American speech by the prolific James Hadley Chase — or Rene Brabazon Raymond, to give him his legal but improbable name. Reading the book now, one wonders how it fooled any one, or indeed whether Mr Raymond had ever been near the United States.
Actually, some American and English detective novels were remarkably similar in the 1930s. If it were not for the names of New York streets that pepper the pages of the novels of S. S. Van Dine, we might assume that they were set in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion. Van Dine's detective, Philo Vance, 'with his fine analytic mind and his remarkable flair for the subtleties of human psychology', moved in an ambience of valets, major-domos, private museums and art patrons, where white ties were as abutur dant as St Michael underwear is in England today. Only because he smoked Regie cigarettes instead of Abdullas could We guess his nationality.
Nicholas Blake, G. D. H. Cole, DorothY L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, even that forgotten (at least by me) lady whose pseudonym was E. C. R. Lorac: all are gone. A few prolific veterans remain, including Michael Innes, although even after a half century of writing about those top-drawer country houses and their denizens, he still gets wobbly in the knees when confronted with the murkier titles in the reaches of Burke or Debrett.
It is usually assumed that the Second World War finished off this cosy kind of novel, but the truth is that much of its par- ticular brand of romanticism merely put on a dirty mac and became the equally unreal, even more romantic world of Raymond Chandler and the private dick. If I were called upon to name a time for the effectual end of the mainstream detective novel 01 the 1930s, it would be the moment when Dashiell Hammett first gave a plain name to an understandable tumescence in, If memory serves, The Thin Man. Bust bodices didn't have a chance after that.
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