Ten years ago, in 2008, I was invited by the crime writer Simon Brett to be the after-dinner speaker at a gathering of The Detection Club. At the time, I was in a bit of demand on account of my bestselling book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003), so invitations of this sort weren’t uncommon, but this one was special, and I was very much alive to the honor. The Detection Club had been formed, between the wars, by a group of great Golden Age crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K Chesterton. It was a thrill to be asked. Simon was the current president (he served from 2000 to 2015), and I was his guest. The club had a solemn initiation ceremony for new members, which I would be allowed to witness. The dinner was to be held at the Middle Temple, in the Inns of Court. And on top of all this, I would be seated between Simon himself and the universally acknowledged doyenne of crime, Phyllis (or P.D.) James.
I have searched for the notes of the talk I gave that night. Nothing has come to light, which is probably a good thing. What I remember most clearly is that I broke my usual, rigid, oh-so-professional rule about not drinking wine with the meal—a decision which turned out to be good for my nerves, but not so good for the performance. Also, I have to admit that I got over-excited in a room full of famous writers. My lingering memory is of—during dinner—discussing the novels of Josephine Tey with P.D. James (we were both fans of Brat Farrar). And then, during the talk, trying to fix my by-now blurred and wandering gaze on Frances Fyfield, because she was generously smiling at me throughout. (Afterwards, she helped steer me home to Bloomsbury.)
But what did I say to the eminent writers assembled here? As I say, the evidence is thankfully lost. But it must have been something about the role of punctuation in mystery stories, because the only specific detail I can recall is of a far-fetched example I’d been struck by in the BBC TV series Jonathan Creek (written by David Renwick). In one of those plots, a mystery surrounded the impulsive suicide of a man who was hoping to divorce his wife. He had sent her a fax demanding her consent; she had sent one back with strange wording, which I seem to recall was: “NO ONE SHOULD SUFFER MORE”, which was her round-about way of saying yes.
So why—on seeing this fax coming out of the machine—did this man grab his car-keys in anguish, roar off in a sports-car, and crash it with fatal consequences? When Creek investigated, he uncovered the cause of the misunderstanding, and I think it’s fair to say you won’t have guessed it. A small insect had fallen onto the fax from a rotten beam, and created a different meaning and thereby a tragic outcome! What the man saw was “NO, ONE SHOULD SUFFER MORE” (with a fateful comma)! I mean, what are the chances? As I explained to the members and their guests, I would personally have preferred a semi-colon to a comma after “No”, but of course this would have required two small insects, of different shapes, to fall with perfect alignment onto that fax. And let’s face it, no self-respecting mystery writer would expect an audience’s credibility to stretch that far.
Ten years ago, I probably knew of the Detection Club mainly from the multi-authored books it had produced in the 1930s, such as The Floating Admiral (1931) and Ask a Policeman (1933). I had also very much enjoyed the book Bloody Murder (1972) written by one of the club’s eminent past presidents, Julian Symons—a history of crime writing that had introduced me in the 1970s to a number of brilliant Golden Age writers, in particular Anthony Berkeley (to whom I shall return). But before I was invited to the dinner, I had no idea of the traditions of the club. Newly elected members are initiated in the dark, for example. They are obliged to vow never to resort to “divine revelation, coincidence, feminine intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, or acts of God.” It’s fabulous. One of the officiating members bears a skull on a cushion (Eric the Skull), its eye sockets illuminated from within by a pair of red light-bulbs, on which the oaths are sworn. It is a solemn ritual, but at the same time highly tongue-in-cheek. And down the years, it has evidently existed in many different forms. In fact, Gavin Lyall once described the Detection Club, rather beautifully, as “a club whose strongest tradition seems to be the rewriting of its traditions.”
So how did the Detection Club originate? It seems that in the late 1920s, Berkeley came up with the idea of entertaining fellow crime writers to dinner. In Martin Edwards’s recent The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story (2016), there is a suggestion that one of the key reasons for having social evenings at this time was to cheer up Agatha Christie, who had suffered the betrayal of her first husband, and had then caused such an alarming and horrible hoo-ha in the press when she disappeared for 11 days. By 1930, the Detection Club was an entity sending letters to the Times Literary Supplement, and by 1932 it had rules and a list of members, and a president (Chesterton). Later in the decade, it took rooms in Gerrard Street, north of Leicester Square. It realized its aims quickly: to provide a convivial social milieu for crime writers, and use its influence to promote high standards. And the good news is, Agatha Christie did cheer up, so that was lovely.
Some of the writers in the first Detection Club membership are now very little known, and perhaps deserve to be, but someone who seems to have suffered unfairly at the hands of time is the aforementioned Anthony Berkeley (real full name, Anthony Berkeley Cox; alternate pen-name, Francis Iles). I have to admit I’m a bit of a bore about Berkeley. I am forever urging people to read his Iles titles Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932)—but perhaps the mad gleam in my eye puts them off. But I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. Both Julian Symons (in Bloody Murder) and Martin Edwards (in The Golden Age of Murder) seem determined to reinstate him among the top names, alongside Christie and Sayers—which is where he rightly stood at the time of the Detection Club’s foundation.
What is fascinating (and very modern) about him is the way he played games with the detective novel so early in the history of the genre—in fact, right from the start. He invented a self-confident detective who regularly got the solution wrong; he wrote books that saw the crime from the point of view of the criminal; he even wrote about a murder from the point of view of the victim who not only sees what is coming but lets it happen. His books under the pen-name Francis Iles are outstanding. Meanwhile his earlier title under the name Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) used the brilliantly clever device of a collection of crime writers each looking at the same set of evidence in a real case and coming up with multiple convincing (but wrong) solutions. In that book, he summed up a lot about the sleight-of-hand of crime writing when he wrote:
Artistic proof is…simply a matter of selection. If you know what to put in and what to leave out, you can prove anything you like, quite conclusively.
To a modern reader, all of this playful cleverness is very attractive. However, I suppose I have to mention, by way of balance, that a modern reader of Berkeley’s work will also find a quite disturbing attitude to women therein—in particular, to his obvious fondness for knocking them about. This caveman attitude was not unique to him at the time, of course. Wasn’t E.M Hull’s sado-masochistic The Sheik one of the biggest sellers of the 1920s? Doesn’t Noel Coward’s Eliot in Private Lives (1930) pronounce the general principle that certain women should be “struck regularly, like gongs”? As Martin Edwards argues quite reasonably in The Golden Age of Murder, it’s only to be expected that we’ll find abhorrent an unacceptable attitudes in books written 80 years ago—from homophobia to sexism; racism to antisemitism. “Equally,” Edwards adds, thoughtfully, “many successful books written today would have repelled readers in the Thirties.”
When the Detection Club took its premises in the 1930s, the rent was paid from the earnings of the famous “round-robin” books published under the Club’s name. But after a while, funds grew low, and the Second World War intervened, and Berkeley lost his groove, and others grew ill, and it was a while before the club was financially—or otherwise—back on its feet. Having been at first highly restrictive about membership (no thriller writers were allowed; only respectable “detective novelists”), the club eventually relaxed the qualification criteria, and now embraces thriller writers, espionage writers and the like. And now—well, nowadays the Detective Club is so extremely visible, thanks in major part to the handsome reissue of many Golden Age titles, that one can’t help wondering whether a small dedicated premises in Central London might once more be on the cards…?
I hope the talk I gave was all right, all those years ago at the Middle Temple. I dare not dwell on it too much. It’s likely that I mentioned a sign outside an apartment building that says “RESIDENTS REFUSE TO GO IN THE BINS”—because, as apostrophe-based crowd-pleasers go, that’s a good one. I probably also told them about the sign outside a family planning clinic that said “FAMILY PLANNING ADVICE: USE REAR ENTRANCE”— because this was another sure-fire hit. But I very much doubt that the writers went home inspired by my talk, feverishly wondering how to come up with an ingenious punctuation device in their next book equal to the improbable-insect-on-the-fax example. No, I fear I failed the Detection Club. I have a horrible feeling that, on that wonderful occasion ten years ago, the pleasure was all mine.
