Getting the past in your sights – why I’ve turned to detective fiction

It’s nine months since I wrote this blog – a long enough period of gestation for any work of fiction… which indeed it has proved to be. After a year in which I moved to a different city, and started a new job, I finished my novel, Line of Sight, and delivered it to its publishers, Arbuthnot Books, two weeks ago. Since this is one of the new kind of publishers, which can get a book out and on the shelves in a matter of weeks, not months (or years) as is often the case with the ‘Big Six’, I have every hope of seeing the novel in a finished form by next spring. 2014, that is. Which is important, if only because the book’s background (although not its setting) is the First World War. Having started it four years ago, with this anniversary vaguely in mind, it seemed right that it should be out by then, even though bookshop shelves are already groaning with First World War histories, and reissues of all the novels – good, bad and indifferent – that have been written about that extraordinary, tormented time.

Line of Sight, as I’ve said, doesn’t really belong to this category, since it’s about the aftermath of the war, not the war itself. Set in 1927, it’s the story of Frederick Rowlands, a veteran of the Ypres battlefields, whose life has been irrevocably changed by what he went through. Now working as a telephonist for a firm of City solicitors, Fred is caught up in a situation outside his control, when he overhears a conversation between his employer, and former commanding officer, and the woman with whom both are more than a little in love. From this point on, things become increasingly convoluted, as Fred struggles to make sense of the lies and half-truths to which, as a professional ‘eavesdropper’, he is privy. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ‘Chinese Whispers’: things being half-heard, or misunderstood. As a switchboard operator, Fred ‘listens-in’ to others’ conversations as a matter of course: ‘All day their voices jabbered in his ears. Sometimes it was as if they were inside his head. Invading his very thoughts, his dreams, with their unending babble…’ That he doesn’t always get things right is no reflection on his intelligence, but says something about the way we’re all trying – as readers, as ‘interpreters’ of our experience – to understand the world from the often partial, or imperfect, information that comes our way.

That the novel had to be a detective story only became clear to me mid-way through the writing of Line of Sight. As soon as it did, a lot of other things fell into place. Detective fiction reached its zenith as an art-form in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ between the wars; although of course fine examples of the genre continued to be written – by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and others – well beyond the end of the Second World War. But for my purposes, it was the murder mysteries of the late 1920s and early 1930s which gave me the flavour of the times. And what strange times they were – certainly as far from the popular image of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ as Britain in the 1960s was from that of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. This was a world at once deeply conventional and – at least in some quarters – startlingly radical, politically, sexually and culturally. It was a time of high unemployment, with many factories once devoted to the making of munitions closing down at the end of the war, and tens of thousands of wounded and disabled men returning from the battlefields to find they were virtually unemployable. Across Europe, there were strikes in the coal, steel and shipbuilding industries. The General Strike of 1926 was only the culmination of a period of extreme social inequality and of violent unrest.

And yet this was also the era of the ‘Flapper’ – the epitome of carefree, cocktail-drinking, emancipated womanhood. Of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, in which the determinedly heartless Nina Blount remarks, ‘All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.’ Of Huxley’s Point Counter Point, in which the seducer, Spandrell, boasts of his technique in corrupting innocent girls: ‘They can be brought… to the most astonishing pitch of depravity’. Newspapers were full of articles in praise of – or denouncing – the ‘Modern Girl’. Then as now, ‘Society’ types (now called ‘celebrities’) were popular, with readers of the Times, the Telegraph and the Express avidly following the ‘decadent’ goings-on of what was known as the ‘Smart Set’.

It was a time, moreover, of literary, musical and artistic experimentation: of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land; of Schoenberg’s ‘String Quartet No. 3’ and Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. Picasso’s ‘Nude in an Armchair’ belongs to this period; as does Matisse’s ‘Yellow Odalisque’. Innovation seemed the order of the day. And yet, arguably, the art-form which seems to express the mood of the late-1920s most powerfully doesn’t fit within this ‘experimental’ category at all. Stylistically, in fact, it could not be more conventional. It abounds in ‘proper’ characters, and realistic description. There isn’t a whiff of ‘stream of consciousness’ about it. And yet (I would argue) it is not without its more radical aspect. I’m referring of course to the detective story.

The murder mystery, as it was more widely known at the time, had of course been popular for a good thirty years before the time of which I am writing – more, if one considers (as I do) works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to be the precursors of the modern detective story. Even if one leaves these aside, one would be foolish indeed to overlook the works of perhaps the greatest writer of detective stories of all time: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Without his Sherlock Holmes stories – still enjoying a remarkable success, even to this day – it is hard to imagine that Agatha Christie would have created Hercule Poirot, with his wonderfully effective ‘little grey cells’; or Dorothy Sayers the apparently effete, but brilliantly intelligent, Lord Peter Wimsey.

To the more obvious pleasures of reading these works can be added that of spotting the many direct and indirect references to the celebrated inhabitant of 221B Baker Street which are to be found throughout Christie’s and Sayers’s writings, as well as those of Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and other practitioners of the genre. In Christie’s very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Captain Hastings, newly invalided home from the Western Front, confesses to the beautiful Mary Cavendish his ‘secret hankering to be a detective’, to which she replies: ‘The real thing – Scotland Yard? Or Sherlock Holmes?’ Hastings then goes on to describe a man he has met in Belgium – ‘a very famous detective… a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever…’ – our first introduction to Christie’s most famous creation. The inference is clear: this is her ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and one every bit as eccentric in mien and methodical in approach as his violin-playing, cocaine-addicted predecessor.

The Great Detective also gets a name-check in the opening chapter of Whose Body? the first of Sayers’s novels to feature the divinely diffident Lord Peter Wimsey, who combines the silly-ass manner of Bertie Wooster with the ice-cold forensic brain of Jeeves. Lord Peter is on his way to a sale of first editions of mediaeval manuscripts (a little sideline of his) when he is told of a body in the bath. He at once assumes the role of detective – or, as he puts it: ‘Exit the amateur of first editions… enter Sherlock Holmes.’ And for the next few chapters, ‘Holmes’ enters into his role with gusto – visiting the scene of the crime, interrogating witnesses, speculating about various suspects… until the moment when speculation turns to certainty, and he knows he has his man.

It’s at this moment that what has been, up to now, a somewhat above-average intellectual puzzle, involving a dead body substituted for another dead body, a pair of pinc-nez, and a sleuth who pretends to be dim in order to allay the suspicions of those he suspects, becomes something altogether darker. Because, falling asleep, with the growing realization of the murderer’s identity in his head, Lord Peter has a nightmare. It’s one he has evidently had before: a memory he has tried, and failed, to suppress – and one he appears to share with Bunter, his faithful valet and former batman. It is of course a memory of the war, which devastated so many of their generation. It’s this shared experience of war that is the defining moment of the book, and – I would argue – of all the best detective novels of the period. The passage is worth quoting in full, if only to underline the point:

‘Hush! No, no – it’s the water,’ said Lord Peter, with chattering teeth; ‘it’s up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! Can’t you hear it? Tap, tap, tap – they’re mining us – but I don’t know where – I can’t hear – I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again – we must find it – we must stop it… Listen! Oh, my God! I can’t hear – I can’t hear anything for the noise of the guns. Can’t they stop the guns?’

Wimsey, like many ex-servicemen, has suffered a break-down, as a result of the horrors he has seen. His facetious manner and his seemingly frivolous attitude to murder mask a profound awareness of its consequences, not only for the victim’s family, but for the murderer who must be brought to justice. Like his fellow detective, Poirot, he takes no pleasure in sending a man to the gallows. Both have already seen more than their fair share of death to want to be the cause of it.

Paradoxical as it may seem, that a generation exposed to violent death on an industrial scale should have taken with such enthusiasm to the murder mystery, it is certainly the case that the genre enjoyed perhaps its greatest popularity between the wars. It may be no accident that the ‘Golden Age’ of the detective story exactly corresponds to that of the crossword puzzle. Both, of course, involve the interpretation of clues and the solving of riddles. Both, one might argue, impose a pattern upon formless – or indeed meaningless – experience, rendering it (temporarily) meaningful. At a time when – to put it at its most basic – people were finding it hard to comprehend what had happened to the world they had known, when millions had died in what had come to seem a futile struggle, the detective story offered simple, or relatively simple, moral choices. To put it another way, it restored death to its rightful place in the scheme of things. Faced with the impossibility of understanding why so many young men (and some women) had died for so little reason, readers of the ‘whodunit’ could take refuge in a more orderly, and rational, world.

In the classic detective story, the social order is overturned by an act of violence. The detective – representing society, without necessarily being an apologist for its iniquities – makes it his business to discover the perpetrator, exonerate the innocent, and thus restore the status quo. Far from being (as their detractors have implied) mere exercises in class-ridden ‘cosiness’, the thrillers of the inter-war years confronted the possibility of social breakdown. Murder, the ultimate act of nihilism, has to be punished, because not to do so would result in the overthrow of the moral order. It was an order which had, of course, already been destroyed, by the guns of the Somme and Passchendaele. But for the survivors of those conflicts, living ‘among the ruins’, as D.H. Lawrence put it, there was always the comfort of fiction.

‘As one looked out over the flat Essex country, lying so green and peaceful under the afternoon sun, it seemed almost impossible to believe that, not so very far away, a great war was running its appointed course. I felt I had suddenly strayed into another world. As we turned in at the lodge gates, John said:

“I’m afraid you’ll find it very quiet down here, Hastings.”

“My dear fellow, that’s just what I want.”’