A Very British Murder (32 page)

She is saying, in other words, what Jane Austen had said more than a hundred years earlier: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort.’

You could call this an admirable philosophy for life.

‘In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.’

Raymond Chandler

IN 1941, AS
the popularity of the detective story continued to wane, Philip Van Doren Stern, the American author of the story that inspired the film
It’s A Wonderful Life
, made the case for change. ‘The whole genre needs overhauling, a return to first principles,’ he claimed. ‘Writers need to know more about life and less about death.’ And, indeed, for quite a long time by then, an alternative way of proceeding had been unfolding on his side of the Atlantic.

By complete contrast to the suave British sleuth, his American counterpart was tough. So-called ‘hard-boiled’ detectives made their first appearance in cheap, ‘pulp’ magazines, known as this because they were made from wood pulp, or recycled paper. They reflected the values of their unregulated, competitive Wild West society. ‘Many people have their little peculiarities,’ says a
character called Race Williams, as hard-boiled as they come. ‘Mine was holding a loaded gun in my hand while I slept.’ Race uses his gun fairly frequently, because – as he explains – ‘you can’t make a hamburger without grinding up a little meat’. Usually a private eye rather than a policeman, the hard-boiled detective speaks his own language. ‘Tell your moll to hand over the mazuma’ (money), he might say, or ‘Close your yap, bo, or I squirt metal’. He might call a black person ‘dark meat’, a car a ‘bucket’, or advise you to avoid wearing a ‘Chicago overcoat’ (a coffin).

The magazine
Black Mask
, founded in 1920, was the home of many of these characters. Its editor, Joseph T. Shaw, demanded that his writers tell simple, violent stories, without unnecessary description or affectation. And yet the action had to be motivated by character, and the ‘hard-boiled’ detective is flawed and fallible in a way that would be quite out of place in British crime fiction.

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), one of the
Black Mask
writers, and a Marxist, had even worked as a detective himself, for eight years, with America’s famous Pinkerton agency. Another
Black Mask
writer was Raymond Chandler, who lived in London as a teenager. Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, the best-known ‘hard-boiled’ detective, explained that there were no ‘hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish’ to be found providing arcane means of death in his stories. He thought that stories like his ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse’.

Chandler, who’d started out in the oil industry before being fired from his job in 1932, described how he came to end up as a writer:

Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away … this was in the great days of the
Black Mask
(if I may call them great days) and it struck me that the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect.

So he decided to try his hand at the genre, producing his classic story, the 18,000-word
The Big Sleep
, over a five-month period, and selling it for a mere $180. But ‘after that I never looked back,’ he claimed, ‘although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.’

In
The Big Sleep
, Philip Marlowe tells his story in the first person, with the laconic, punchy, cynical language familiar to the ear from noir films:

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

And …

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

And …

‘How do you feel?’ It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

The Big Sleep
is such a short novel, with short sharp punchy scenes, that reading it seems like watching a film, and Chandler himself explains that the people trying to write his sort of detective story ‘had the same point of view as film makers’. When he first went to Hollywood, he recalled, ‘a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn’t make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat’.

Chandler set out to prove him wrong. All but one of his novels ended up as feature films, and some of them were made into several different versions of the same story.

The simplicity of Chandler’s prose disguises deep, complex questions of life and death, and in Britain the most notable example of the same sort of thing was
Brighton Rock
(1938). Here again the fate of the soul is the motivating force beneath Graham Greene’s story of the dirty Brighton underworld.

Greene (1904–91) suffered from bipolar disorder, lived a rootless existence all over the world and described himself as ‘profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life’. So, too, are his characters.
Brighton Rock
has an anti-hero, a violent gangster who nevertheless believes in God. The detective is a blowsy, immoral but kindly woman called Ida. But it’s not clear that Greene admires her godless kindness more than the gangster Pinkie’s cruel belief. J. M. Coetzee points out Greene’s indebtedness to the movies,
noting that Greene was also the
Spectator
’s film critic, and that his novels were like screenplays in their ‘preference of observation from outside without commentary, tight cutting from scene to scene, equal emphasis for the significant and the non-significant’. Greene himself described how he imagined scenes as he wrote them, recreating in his mind the ‘moving eye of the cine-camera … I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements’.

As well as seeing the world in this novel way, Greene was far from seeing good and bad as two extremes, as they had been in Mayhem Parva, and was fond of quoting Robert Browning:

Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things,

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist …

Complexity rather than simplicity was the power and the glory of his work.

WHILE ALFRED HITCHCOCK
(1899–1980) had little time for the writings of Graham Greene, the British films that he made before the Second World War also stand at the antithesis of the Golden Age. Hitchcock had some experience of real-life murder and retribution while growing up in Leytonstone with his strict, Catholic family. A blonde young lady was discovered dead in his neighbourhood; she had been poisoned. Edith Thompson, who would hang for murder in the celebrated Thompson–Bywaters case, was actually a customer at his family’s fruit and veg shop. And
one day, the shy, fat young boy was sent with a note by his father to the police station. The letter requested that Alfred Hitchcock be locked up, as a punishment, in the cells for a few minutes. ‘That’s what we do to naughty boys,’ the policeman said. Hitchcock later admitted that this experience affected him powerfully.

Hitchcock loved reading about true crime in the newspapers, and after moving to Hollywood in 1939 he kept a series of bound volumes of
Notable British Trials
in the sitting room of his home in Bel Air. His favourite murder of all was the Thompson–Bywaters case, because of his personal connection to it. Edith Thompson was a buyer for a millinery firm, and lived with her husband in Ilford. With a career and income of her own, she felt secure enough to risk an adulterous relationship. At the age of 26, she had started an affair with Freddy Bywaters, an 18-year-old serving in the merchant navy. One night in 1922, Edith and her husband were walking home from the theatre when an assailant jumped out at them. Edith’s husband was attacked and killed. Distraught, Edith accused Freddy Bywaters. But when her illicit relationship with him was exposed, Edith was charged alongside him for murder. It was considered that she had made common purpose with her lover to kill her husband.

The trial was reported with a good deal of sensationalism, and Edith did not help herself by giving inconsistent and unhelpful evidence. And yet, a huge popular movement started to save her from the gallows. There was no evidence that she had planned the murder, and witnesses heard her crying ‘Don’t, don’t!’ during the attack. On top of that, she was referred to in court as ‘the adulteress’, and was forced to be tried alongside Bywaters rather than being judged on her own.

A large segment of public opinion thought that these were rather Victorian assumptions to build into the justice system. Edith’s adultery or immorality did not automatically mean that she was guilty of murder, and if there was no evidence that she had prior knowledge of the attack, why should she share a dock with the killer? She was, however, found guilty, and hanged at Holloway Prison in 1923.

The moral ambivalence of Edith Thompson, her composure, and her unknowable inner life all attracted Hitchcock. When he began to direct films, the behaviour of cool women under pressure formed a theme. So did murder. Yet only one of his films,
Murder!
(1930), is a classic whodunit in the mould of the Golden Age. In it, an actress is found sitting shocked, motionless and apparently red-handed next to the body of a murder victim. The story involves the slow realization, by a member of the jury at her trial, that she was in fact innocent.

Yet the slowly unfolding solution of a mystery like this was a format that Hitchcock found too limiting. He was much more likely to use a murder as what in film parlance is called the ‘MacGuffin’, a means of kicking off a series of events in which bystanders are forced to reveal something about themselves. Hitchcock himself described a MacGuffin as ‘the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.’ What the MacGuffin might be is essentially unimportant. Hitchcock actually stated as much in an interview:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says ‘What’s that package up there
in the baggage rack?’, and the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’, the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands’ …

By then, the story has started. ‘So you see,’ Hitchcock concluded, ‘a MacGuffin is nothing at all.’ Murder, then, is essentially peripheral to Hitchcock’s work.

Like Agatha Christie, Hitchcock did not depict actual murder or blood. In fact he couldn’t, because the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (usually known as The Hays Code) had tried to clean up the image of the cinema by censoring the violence and sex that could be seen on screen. Yet Hitchcock built up a condition of suspense in his viewer even more effectively by allowing them simply to imagine the bloodshed he could not show them.

His first big success,
The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog
(1927), a silent film, already sowed the seeds of the classic Hitchcock films to come. It was based on a successful novel, loosely inspired by a ‘Jack the Ripper’-like serial killer, and the opening scenes of gaslights glowing through the fog along the Thames Embankment have a powerful echo of the ‘Ripper’ panic of 1888. The very first scene in
The Lodger
shows the face of a blonde woman screaming in terror, while the captions repeatedly hammer us with the words of her mysterious killer: ‘To-Night Golden Curls’. A series of blonde women have been murdered. But we see no more of her, or the killer. The emphasis is all upon the effects of murder, its ripples, and what happens to the witnesses, passers-by and to Londoners as a
whole. Next, the woman who discovered the body is seen panicking, being reassured and being questioned greedily by a crowd.