Mon 21 Mar 2011
SOPHISTICATED MURDER? Two Novels by Anthony Berkley, by Curt Evans.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[8] Comments
TWO NOVELS BY ANTHONY BERKELEY
by Curt J. Evans
Anthony Berkeley Cox tends to be mostly remembered for the first two of his “sophisticated,” psychological “Francis Iles” novels, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932).
As for the more numerous crime novels Cox wrote under the name “Anthony Berkeley,” the great standouts traditionally have been The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a stunt story much praised by Julian Symons and others, and the clever criminal and judicial extravaganza Trial and Error (1937), in my opinion Cox’s magnum opus.
Little of the rest of Cox’s output gets much notice, though in my view some of it, particularly Top Storey Murder (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933) and Not to be Taken (1938), is excellent. However, there also are some extreme clunkers to be found, too!
Tellingly, when House of Stratus reprinted the Anthony Berkeley books some ten years ago, it excluded The Wychford Poisoning Case. The reason surely is the rampant sexism to be found in the tale.
Cox thought of himself as an incisive psychological novelist, but the psychological insights he offers in the Berkeley books through the utterances of his surrogate, the amateur detective Roger Sheringham, can be embarrassingly puerile, when not actually revolting.
Exhibit A in my case is The Wychford Poisoning Case, which Cox, as was his wont, rather grandiosely subtitled “An Essay in Criminology.”
The plot of the novel itself is unexceptional for Cox, following as it does a common pattern in the Berkeley tales, namely Roger Getting It All Wrong. This was the puckish Cox’s way of tweaking purist fans of the classical ratiocinative detective novel. However, after you have read a few Berkeleys you come to expect a “surprise twist” — which makes the twist, when it comes, something less than a surprise.
What is really interesting about Wychford is the utterly loopy sentiments expressed in it. Roger Sheringham’s thoughts on women in Wychford suggest that, when it comes to psychiatry, Roger would have made a better patient than practitioner.
Wychford mainly seems to be about Roger’s (and the author’s) extreme antipathy toward the modern woman of the 1920s, as embodied in the tale by the flippant flapper Sheila. ( “I’m simply revelling in all this!” she shouts at one point, “It’s fun being a detective.”
At various points Roger takes time to recommend the great need for modern women like Sheila to be spanked and to fume over these brazen females being so forward as to don male garments, pajamas. But Roger absolutely takes the cake with a jaw-droppingly misogynistic soliloquy on page 124:
Well! Now you know. Send the bill to Roger Sheringham. One has to wonder what the female writer E. M. Delafield, to whom Cox dedicated Wychford, made of all this.
This telling bit about Roger, an Oxford graduate and successful novelist (sound familiar?) appears in The Silk Stocking Murders:
Cox himself was married twice, though neither time successfully. He also was considered the most trying member of the Detection Club (see my forthcoming pamphlet in CADS).
In The Silk Stocking Murders (Exhibit B), the worst victims of Roger’s lamentable psychology are Jews, notoriously subjects of scorn in between-the-wars English writing (and hardly just in detective novels).
This tale promises interest as a crime story, with its four strangling murders (of women), but its narrative is plodding compared to that of the somewhat similar The ABC Murders (by Agatha Christie) and its resolution is just plain silly, in my estimation.
One of the lead characters in the tale is a Jewish financier named Pleydell. Cox actually takes pains to make clear that Pleydell is not one of those objectionable Jewish financiers, don’t you know — though his explanation is itself problematically patronizing:
The most cringeworthy moment in Silk Stocking comes when Roger and the pointedly named Anne Manners — the sympathetic (non-modern) female character in the tale — further anatomize Pleydell over tea:
“The real pure-blooded Jew, like Pleydell,” Roger told her, “is one of the best fellows in the world. It’s the hybrid Jew, the Russian, Polish and German variety, that’s let the race down so badly.”
“And yet he seems as reserved and unimpassioned as an Englishman,” Anne mused. “I should have thought that the pure-blooded Jew would have retained his Oriental emotionalism almost unimpaired.”
Roger could have kissed her for the slightly pedantic way she spoke, which, after a surfeit of hostesses and modernly slangy young women, he found altogether charming.
Most modern readers will probably find Anne (and Roger) altogether less than charming here.
Thriller writers like “Sapper” often get smartly rapped over the knuckles by indignant critics for obnoxious anti-Semitic elements in their writing, but with more “sophisticated” writers like Cox this sort of thing tends to get overlooked.
The teatime duologue between Anne and Roger that Cox subjects us to in Silk Stocking is a reminder than the anti-Semitism that plagued Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (with fatal results for millions in the 1940s) was hardly confined to the knuckle-dragging elements.
But just how sophisticated was Cox, really?
I get the feeling that Cox at some level recognized flaws within himself and thus made his ego projection, Roger Sheringham, frequently fall on his face in the Berkeley tales. Yet I sensed no indication in Wychford and Silk Stocking that Cox was satirizing (or disagreeing with) Roger’s views on women and Jews.
Moreover, although Roger (and Cox) love to prate about psychology, the “psychological” solution of the four murders in Silk Stocking is labored and unconvincing, an indication that, despite all the talk, Roger and his creator are mere dabblers in the psychological arts, often shamelessly winging it when it comes to expository solutions of crimes, even when Roger actually is meant by the author to be Getting It All Right.
SPOILER
The murderer in Silk Stocking turns out to be the seemingly sympathetic Jew, Pleydell. We are told by Roger that Pleydell was mad and that the first two in his series of four murders were “pure lust-murders” but that the third was a “vengeance-murder, or a megalomania-murder, if you like” and the fourth was a “murder committed with the sole motive of increasing the strength of the case against the man he loathed.”
With this surfeit of muddled motivations on the part of one mad murderer, the brilliant clarity of Agatha Christie’s solution to a series of killings in The ABC Murders is utterly lacking in The Silk Stocking Murders.
END SPOILER
I have the uneasy feeling that in his cases — even the ones he is actually meant to solve — Roger is just talking out of his hat. Call me unsophisticated, if you like.
March 21st, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I’ve always found Sheringham’s anti-semitism (and Sayers and Chesterton’s for that matter) more disturbing than the strain in Sapper. There is no attempt in Sapper to intellectualise the opinions or to somehow suggest they are justified by anything more than actual casual prejudice, where as you clearly show here Berkley tries to present Sheringham’s prejudice as somehow justified both against Jews and women.
Of course Sheringham is presented as such a dislikable figure I’m not sure we were actually supposed to agree with him, or instead judge him for what he was. Berkley was so busy subverting the idea of the great detective I was never quite sure whether to take him seriously or not.
Ironically his great innovation was to endlessly copy the key twist of E. C. Bentley’s TRENT’S LAST CASE.
I agree about the Isles books and TRIAL AND ERROR. I prefer the shorter version of POISONED CHOCOLATES to the novel length version — which for all its genius becomes tedious. I’m not a great fan of the type book where a group of long winded types all bore you silly producing multiple solutions to the crime. A book made up of nothing but the most tedious chapter in any mystery novel (in general — there are exceptions) is not my idea of entertainment.
But you do have to face reading Berkley that Sheringham is possibly the most annoying of the great detectives, and one you clearly wouldn’t want to spend any time with in real life. In Berkley’s case there are three masterpieces, one very near masterpiece, and a lot of misfires.
March 21st, 2011 at 10:45 pm
Curt
” The teatime duologue between Anne and Roger that Cox subjects us to in Silk Stocking is a reminder than the anti-Semitism that plagued Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (with fatal results for millions in the 1940s) was hardly confined to the knuckle-dragging elements.”
While I certainly can’t disagree with that statement, I would point out that despite the rampant anti-Semitism in popular fiction of the era that the weight of genocide against Jews was mostly a German and Russian phenomena. They did export it to some of their conquests, and found some collaborators, but you certainly can’t compare the casual racism of popular fiction in England to the actions of Hitler and Stalin.
Sapper, Berkeley, Sayers, and Chesterton may be distasteful today much the same way we are uncomfortable with the portrayal of blacks in many American works of the era (and Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and earlier the Irish), but it is painting with too broad a brush to go from Berkeley’s distasteful opinions to concentration camps and death camps.
In England Sapper may have had some fictional concentration camps a la the Boer War model for criminals — some of whom were Jews and Socialists, but such things never went farther than a single paragraph in a thriller. British Fascism and the American Bunds may have attracted some thugs and misguided clowns like Lindbergh, but they were never a serious force in American or British politics. They were never anything but a minor force in the West.
Hateful as all racial prejudice is, I do think we have to make a distinction between something largely passed over in a novel and the murder of millions of innocent people because of their faith or heritage.
Anti-Semitism is still fairly common in Europe — and their is no love lost for many immigrant groups in France and Germany where the Turks come in for a good deal of prejudice — but sad as that is, no one is being rounded up and put in camps to starve and be murdered.
That is not to say casual racism did not contribute the the crimes of the Holocaust, when you continually demean people as less than human it is much easier to behave in an inhuman way to them — but popular fiction was the least of all contributing factors, and it might even be noted that in those countries where there was a strong tradition of popular fiction — and particularly detective fiction — a generally well read populace was able to separate fiction from reality despite the actions of a handful of thugs.
There were other factors, economic and historic at work, but it is notable that neither Germany nor Russia had much in the way of a strong tradition of native popular fiction and in particular the detective story and thriller (what they had tended to be borrowed from the West even to having American and British heroes).
Perhaps in the West that vigorous tradition acted as a pressure valve so that the prejudice was voiced between the pages of books instead of by bully boys in the streets (some small amount of that happened in both England and the US, but it was a relatively small percentage of the populace).
It’s still distasteful, but it doesn’t rise to the same level of what happened in Germany and Russia and in their satellite states under their guns. There is no excuse for the racial prejudice in popular fiction, but in those countries with a strong tradition of popular fiction the crimes of German and Russian anti-Semitism were limited to the pages of books and the actions of a few almost universally frowned upon groups of thugs.
March 22nd, 2011 at 1:06 pm
I think reading in reading mystery and detective fiction we get a greater sense of history than we hardly ever did in the classroom. I don’t think I’m speaking only for myself, but it’s certainly true for me.
I can understand why certain books don’t get reprinted, or if they do, certain passages are altered or deleted altogether, but all in all, I am on the side of those that wish they didn’t. You can’t learn from the past if the past is kept a secret from you.
I’m with you, David, on the relative scale of events. Racism in mystery fiction is not at all comparable to what took place in Germany during World War II.
And I also agree when you say:
“That is not to say casual racism did not contribute the the crimes of the Holocaust, when you continually demean people as less than human it is much easier to behave in an inhuman way to them…”
This is where I think the history lesson comes in. Casual racism was not a cause of the Holocaust, but it was what made looking the other way a whole lot easier, both by individuals and by governments. We shouldn’t ever forget that.
March 22nd, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Steve
Good point.
But I do think in societies where there was a strong tradition of popular fiction and the detective novel being read by the middle class in particular it’s notable that prejudiced as people were, much as they may have looked the other way, their attitude to largely fascist movements and behavior was vastly different than in Germany and Italy.
Germany in particular was one of the lights of Western literacy, and yet unlike here or in England the average man didn’t read detective stories as much and there was little original German contribution to the genre.
Who knew that the detective story would prove to be one of the mainstay’s of the democratic principle?
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Although there was a great deal of casual anti-semitism in Britain and the USA before WWII, fascists were always in a minority. In 1936, 7000 supporters of fascist leader Oswald Mosley attempted to march through London’s East End, but found their way blocked by a quarter of a million opponents.
Against some of the anti-Jewish sentiment mentioned here, we must also remember that Wodehouse ridiculed Mosley as ‘Roderick Spode’ in CODE OF THE WOOSTERS. Equally, one of the top thriller writers of the time, Dennis Wheatley, had the character Simon Aron as a running hero. Aron was not only Jewish, he was also a financier, an aesthete, had a dislike of violence, and was generally the sort of character to irritate the hell out of Anthony Berkley!
March 23rd, 2011 at 8:04 pm
I’m not blaming Anne and Roger for the Holocaust (they never advocate killing Jews or even state discrimination against them–Cox tended toward libertarianism himself), but the mass stereotyping masquerading as highminded, judicious intellectualism they indulge in is something I find particularly repulsive (oh, it’s just all the Russian and Polish and German Jews you don’t like, okay). They really should know better, but they don’t.
Roger is interesting study. I’ve read all the AB books and I don’t see how one can avoid the conclusion that in many ways Roger IS Anthony Berkeley Cox. At the same time, Cox does satirize elements of Roger (mainly his pretensions as a great detective). But I think that the views Roger expresses (and the pretensions of intellectualism) do represent the author.
March 28th, 2020 at 12:48 pm
[…] Anthony Berkeley Cox tends to be mostly remembered for the first two of his “sophisticated,†psychological “Francis Iles†novels, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932). As for the more numerous crime novels Cox wrote under the name “Anthony Berkeley,†the great standouts traditionally have been The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a stunt story much praised by Julian Symons and others, and the clever criminal and judicial extravaganza Trial and Error (1937), in my opinion Cox’s magnum opus. Little of the rest of Cox’s output gets much notice, though in my view some of it, particularly Top Storey Murder (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933) and Not to be Taken (1938), is excellent. (Curt J. Evans) […]
February 26th, 2022 at 7:56 am
[…] Anthony Berkeley Cox tends to be mostly remembered for the first two of his “sophisticated,†psychological “Francis Iles†novels, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932). As for the more numerous crime novels Cox wrote under the name “Anthony Berkeley,†the great standouts traditionally have been The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a stunt story much praised by Julian Symons and others, and the clever criminal and judicial extravaganza Trial and Error (1937), in my opinion Cox’s magnum opus. Little of the rest of Cox’s output gets much notice, though in my view some of it, particularly Top Storey Murder (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933) and Not to be Taken (1938), is excellent. (Curt J. Evans) […]