Original subtitles

Murder is the darkest and most despicable of crimes, and yet we're

it in real life and in fiction. And that's because every murder tells a good

story. This was certainly true at the start of the 20th century, when

press barons were demanding a murder a day for the pleasure of their newspaper

readers.

And even more so in the two decades between the wars, when there was a

Explosion of crime in the novels of the golden age of detective fiction.

The very best of it, written by women.

These authors perfected the art of the whodunit with all the usual cast of

suspects. They turned the murder mystery into something cerebral, something tidy

and domesticated.

Rather like solving a crossword puzzle. And they made armchair detectives out of

all of us.

My investigation into the Golden Age begins with a real crime, the first

notorious killing of the 20th century.

In July 1910, Britain was gripped by the progress of a huge manhunt. It was on a

scale that hadn't been seen since the search for Jack the Ripper.

The fugitive was Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, and he was wanted for the

the mutilation of his wife, Cora.

Together with his mistress, Ethel Leneve, Dr Crippen had fled from London.

Handbills had been posted everywhere and distributed to the police throughout

the world.

Everyone was talking about this case.

The Home Secretary himself, a certain Winston Churchill, had authorised a

worth £20 ,000 in today's money for their capture.

So where were Dr. Crippen and his lover Ethel Leneve?

In fact, they'd already left the country. They were temporarily holed up

hotel in Belgium, but they planned to head for North America.

Henry Kendall was the captain of a steamship heading across the Atlantic to

Canada. and a couple of his passengers had aroused his suspicions.

The SS Montreux had only been at sea for one day when Captain Kendall noticed

the father and son behaving strangely on deck.

He thought that it was very odd that they squeezed each other's hands

immoderately, as he put it, and that they would sometimes disappear behind

lifeboats. The two of them were travelling as Mr and Master Robinson.

What happened next was just like a detective novel, with the captain

part of Sherlock Holmes.

Captain Kendall decided to carry out an experiment to try to confirm his

suspicions that he had Dr. Crippen on board.

He took a newspaper photograph of Crippen, and using chalk, he whitens out

doctor's moustache.

And then he blackened out the frames of his spectacles.

And yes, it was like a photo fit. Without his moustache and his

Crippen clearly was the mysterious passenger Mr Robinson.

Captain Kendall also had access to a piece of pioneering technology that

speed up the process of 20th century crime investigations.

It was the Marconi wireless.

But the transmitter only had a range of 150 miles.

When the captain made his breakthrough, his ship was already 130 miles away from

the nearest receiver. He had 20 miles left to get the message out.

Rushing along the lower deck to the wireless room, Kendall handed the

the message that would electrify the world.

It read, have strong suspicions that Crippen, London cellar murderer and

accomplice are amongst saloon passengers.

Moustache taken off, growing beard, accomplice dressed as boy, voice,

and build undoubtedly a girl.

But would the method get through in time?

So what exactly were the events that had led up to this extraordinary situation?

Dr Crippen, an American who dabbled in cheap patent medicines and dentistry,

been living what seemed like a pretty conventional life in a North London

His wife Cora was a would -be music hall artiste.

But the marriage was troubled.

and Crippen had begun an affair with his young secretary, Ethel Leneve.

On 19 January 1910, Crippen visited the chemist to order five grains

of hyosine hydrobromide, an enormous dosage of a deadly poison.

He signed the poison register, as he was required to, with the words, for

homeopathic purposes.

On the 31st of January, the Crippens held a little party at home.

Later, Crippen would claim that had been followed by a terrible row between him

and his wife.

Cora had said that she was leaving him the very next day.

Whatever really happened that night, the guests at that party were the last

people to see Cora Crippen alive.

To explain Cora's absence, Crippen claimed that she'd gone back to America.

And then he said that she'd died out there.

Growing suspicious, Cora's friends now paid a visit to New Scotland Yard.

The case was taken up by Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew, a veteran of the

Ripper murders.

He was a member of the Yard's newly formed Murder Squad.

Its members prided themselves on their prowess and their skill in disguises.

However unconvincing.

Chief Inspector Dew searched Crippen's house, but everything seemed fine.

Yet Dew wasn't quite satisfied.

He came back three days later for another look to discover that Crippen

disappeared. My quarry had gone, Dew said, and the manner of his going

at guilt.

The house where this block of flats now stands held a strange attraction for

Dew.

That sinister cellar, he wrote, seems to draw me to it.

With his sergeant, Dew began to work away at the brick floor and then to

the earth beneath.

Suddenly there came the most nauseating stench, so bad that Dew and his men had

to rush out to the garden for fresh air.

Fortifying themselves with brandy, they returned to the cellar and soon made a

grim discovery.

There, in a shallow grave, lay a limbless, headless torso.

What kind of a person could have done this?

Surely not the slight and seemingly gentle Dr. Crippen.

This story caused a frenzy of excitement, all stoked up by lurid

the popular press.

Inspector's View was now under enormous pressure to catch the killer.

And then that famous telegram arrived from the mid -Atlantic.

Chief Inspector's View now hatched an ingenious plan to catch a faster ship to

overtake the Montrose before it reached Canada and to arrest Crippen on board.

And the press were hard on his heels.

Word had leaked out about what was happening on the SS Montrose.

Newspaper readers could now follow Dew's pursuit as he closed in on his suspects

at the rate of three and a half miles per hour.

This story had it all. As well as gruesome murder, there was illicit

a chase across the Atlantic.

And best of all, Crippen and the Leaves didn't even know that the police were on

to them, although every newspaper reader in Britain did.

Without his knowledge, Dr Crippen had become the most famous murderer in the

world.

Dew attempted to evade the journalists by disguising himself as a harbour

in order to board the Montreux.

But it was no good.

Reporters were there to capture the moment when Dew finally greeted his

with the words, Good morning, Dr. Crippen.

Press photographers called everything that happened next.

The crowd waiting at Liverpool Docks.

Dew escorting Crippen off the boat.

The anticipation outside Bow Street's Magistrates' Court for the committal of

Crippen and Lanise.

Some journalists found ingenious ways of taking prohibited photographs in the

court.

The press had made the couple into a highly marketable commodity.

This was a very modern murder.

Bizarre offers now began to come in.

If they were acquitted, Crippen would get £1 ,000 a week for a 20 -week tour.

Leneve would receive £200 a week for a performance including a musical sketch

entitled Caught by Wireless.

On the 18th of October, the trial of Dr Crippen began here at the Old Bailey.

From the start it was clear this was going to be a huge spectacle.

4 ,000 people applied for tickets.

The court had to issue special half -day passes so that double the normal number

could get in.

In the words of the Daily Mail's reporter, the crowd begged, pleaded,

and argued for seats in the public gallery.

Inside there was even more chaos. There was a rowdy atmosphere, like a music

hall. People were shouting, blue tickets that way, red tickets up here.

The trial ended on Saturday the 22nd of October.

The jury took only 27 minutes to find Crippen guilty of willful murder.

He was sentenced to death.

Lelieve, at a separate trial, was acquitted, and she lost no time in

her side of the story.

A publicity shot showed her infamous disguise as a boy.

But Leneve's fame was short -lived.

It was Crippen himself who would be immortalised.

Even during his trial, sculptors at Madame Tussauds had been preparing a wax

figure based on those snatched court photographs.

Now, within days of the passing of Crippen's death sentence, Tussauds

their new addition to the Chamber of Horrors.

And over 100 years later, he's still on show.

So here is Dr. Crippen, on display to the public before he's even met the

hangman. And in the 1912 catalogue to the Chamber of Horrors, he takes his

amongst the greats. He's on the same page as his fellow doctor, William

the Poisoner, and opposite the 19th century's most famous murderess, Maria

Manning. But he's also placed above them, because all the rest have a

description of their crimes, not Dr Crippen. Everyone knows exactly who he

And a contemporary journalist described this place, the Chamber of Horrors, as

being the holiest of holies. These are the people that everybody wanted to see.

What does that say about the Edwardians?

Six years after Crippen's death, a young woman was beginning her own lifelong

fascination with poison.

During the Great War, she was doing her bit by training as a hospital drug

dispenser.

At a chemist's shop in her native Torquay, she watched the head pharmacist

skillfully mixing medicines.

She was transfixed as he added the final ingredient.

a substance that could be poisonous.

The young woman's name was Agatha Christie.

One day the head pharmacist showed her something that he always carried in his

pocket. It was a black lump of curare, poison.

If that gets into your bloodstream, he said, it'll paralyse you and kill you.

She asked him why he carried it around, and he gave a very striking answer.

Well, my dear, he said, it makes me feel powerful.

With the pharmacist's rather sinister boast in her mind, Christie began to

conceive of the idea of writing a detective story.

Naturally, it would involve a death by poisoning.

But she had to decide who would die and who would do it and where and

why.

Agatha's sister, Madge, had challenged her to compose a murder mystery in which

the clever reader, armed with all the same clues as the detective, could spot

the murderer.

Christy spent four years... polishing what would become her first novel,

tweaking the plot and the characters.

Finally, to finish it off, she came back to her home county of Devon, and she

spent two weeks all by herself staying at this remote country house hotel in

Dartmoor. The result would be The Mysterious Affair at Style.

In what was to become her lifelong habit, Christy took herself off on long

solitary walks to think up the dialogue.

The mysterious affair at Stiles wasn't exactly an overnight success.

Numerous publishers turned it down. Imagine them kicking themselves later

But it did sell respectably and it set the mould for the golden age to follow.

It had everything. A country house setting, a closed circle of suspects.

There were things like maps.

To help you, there was even a reproduced fragment of somebody's will.

And most importantly, it introduced a new detective, who is the antithesis of

Sherlock Holmes.

He was a fastidious little Belgian called Hercule Poirot.

As a foreigner, Poirot stood outside the rigid British class structure, which

most of the Golden Age detectives belonged to.

This made him a disinterested observer, but also a trusted confidant.

He'd go on to utilise his little grey cells in 33 novels, one play and over 50

short stories.

And Chrissie would follow Poirot with another seemingly harmless amateur

detective, the village busybody Miss Jane Marple.

The puzzles that Christy invented for her two best -loved sleuths were

fiendishly difficult to solve.

To find out how she devised her plots, I've come to meet her grandson, Matthew

Pritchard, at Christy's rural retreat on the Dart Estuary in Devon.

First of all, there's a family heirloom to discover.

Tell me about this ancient -looking machine you've got here.

Some years, in fact, after she died, we came across that machine in an old box.

She used to dictate her work in the 1960s to a dictaphone and then send it

to be typed.

So can we hear the actual voice of Agatha Christie?

We'll do our best.

Thoughts come to one at such odd moments when you are walking along the street.

from examining a hat shop of particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes

into your head and you think, well, that would be a very neat way of covering up

the crime so that nobody would get it too soon.

Of course, all the practical details are still to work out.

The people have to seep slowly into your consciousness.

But at any rate, you do jot it down in an exercise book.

But what I invariably do is to lose the exercise books.

I usually have about half a dozen on hand, here and there, and I used to make

little notes in them for ideas that had struck me, or sometimes some particular

poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that one reads about in the

paper.

This one's a school story, likely opening gambit, first day of summer

That's right, that's...

Cat among the pigeons.

Who's going to get it, the girl, the games mistress or the maid?

I think the games mistress got it, as far as I remember.

Plastic acid.

And what does that say? Stabbed through eye with hat pin.

Well, there you go.

Here's a genuine doodle.

Here, for instance, is...

Probably the most concise and accurate description of what a detective story is

like. Who, why, when, how, where, which?

Can't get simpler than that, can you? Easy, anyone could do this.

In 1926, Agatha Christie brought out what many regard as her most audacious

detective novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

This is her description of how the body is discovered.

Ackroyd was sitting as I'd left him in the armchair before the fire.

His head had fallen sideways, and clearly visible just below the collar of

coat was a shining piece of twisted metalwork.

Parker and I advanced till we stood over the recumbent figure.

I heard the butler draw in his breath with a sharp hiss.

Stabbed from behind, he murmured.

Horrible.

He wiped his moist brow with his handkerchief, then stretched out a

hand towards the hilt of the dagger.

You mustn't touch that, I said sharply. Go at once to the telephone and ring up

the police station.

Now there are a couple of reasons why this is absolute classic Agatha

Firstly, there's the bloodlessness of it. We have a dead body, we have a

weapon, but a man is just sitting in a chair, and the dagger itself is

as just a shining piece of twisted metalwork.

And secondly, it's utterly, utterly simple and straightforward, but at the

time, very, very clever indeed.

Because really, we have here an unreliable narrator.

And he goes on to tell us about a little something that he does. I did what

little had to be done.

And only at the very end of the book do you discover that at that point he was

hiding a dictaphone in his bag. He was getting rid of a vital clue, a clue that

would reveal that in this case the narrator is the murderer.

The murder of Roger Aykroyd was a genuine tour de force as far as

stories were concerned.

She was accused of cheating, too.

But I think the important thing was that it was original and people loved

talking about it. And I think that was probably the moment when she stopped

being an ordinary crime writer and became one that was universally

Although she was an intensely private woman, Christie knew her readers very

well.

This is an essay that Agatha Christie wrote in the 1930s, answering the

question, what kind of people read detective stories and why?

And he says it's the busy people, the workers of the world.

That's because a detective story gives them complete relaxation, an escape from

the realism of everyday life.

She says it has the tonic value of a puzzle. It sharpens your wits. It makes

mentally alert.

And the ethical background, she says, is usually sound.

Rarely is the criminal the hero of the book. Society unites to hunt him down.

And the reader can have all the fun of the chase without moving from a

comfortable armchair.

These busy people, these workers of the world, as Christie calls them, were keen

to devour detective stories in all sorts of formats.

Railway stations with their branches of WH Smith sold cheap mystery magazines as

well as the latest whodunnits.

These novels were formulaic. They were often very snobbish, but they were a

cracking good read.

By the late 1920s, Christie and other writers of the Golden Age were meeting

for informal dinners.

They decided to form an exclusive society, the Detection Club.

It had its own rules and regulations.

To join, both then and now, you had to undergo a curious initiation.

The current master of ceremonies is Simon Brecht.

What mean these lights, these reminders of our mortality?

Lucy Worsley, is it your firm desire to become a member of the Detection Club?

That is my desire.

You seek a great honor, but must also accept a great responsibility.

For I must charge you that in all your writings, henceforward and forever, your

characters will well and truly try to resolve the many issues with which you

be pleased to confront them, using only their native wits, and not resorting

to divine revelation, excessive sanguinity, lucky guesses, mumbo -jumbo,

-pokery, coincidence, or act of God.

Do you so promise?

I do.

Will you honour the Queen's English?

I will.

Lucy Worsley, will you place your hand upon Eric's skull? Oh, yes, please.

Can I?

Well, Lucy Worsley, do you solemnly swear to observe faithfully those

promises which you have made for as long as you are a member of this club?

I do.

And I'm afraid that's as far as we can go.

Because you're basically not a crime writer.

Very fine writer. I'm touching Eric, though. I know you're touching Eric.

done some lovely historical stuff, but it doesn't count. That is very

disappointing. Well, there you go.

I shall switch Eric off in a fit of pique. Ah.

Pick that, Eric.

I think there's always been an element of playfulness in crime writing.

Certainly the famous examples of the 1930s and 1920s, indeed, Agatha Christie

and all those, they were kind of... playing a game with this, you know,

mystery game, really.

And in a sense, the murder was the first thing that happened there. But a murder

in Agatha Christie land is not, you know, it's not like sort of brains and

splattered all over the walls.

It's quite decorously done.

And so it does become almost a parlour game, really, to guess who was the

murderer. But I think there was something in the zeitgeist. I mean, I

no coincidence that that was also the period when the crossword developed.

You know, that was just the period that people got interested in crosswords.

And a lot of crime novels of the Golden Age are quite light crosswords.

Before I left, Simon agreed to share one final secret about the club's most

treasured artefact.

There is one secret about Eric which I will tell you, that he has been examined

by...

medical experts.

Yes. And there is a strong belief that actually it's Erica.

No way.

Yes. Apparently it's a female skull, but don't tell anyone.

The person who dreamt up Eric, or Erica, and one of the founding members of the

Detection Club was Dorothy L. Sayers.

Of all the Golden Age novelists, she is my absolute favourite.

In my opinion, Dorothy L. Sayers isn't just the best of the Golden Age

story writers. She's a great novelist, full stop.

She had a very big brain. She did well at Somerville College in Oxford.

Then she moved to London, and in the 1920s, she was working as a copywriter

an advertising agency.

She came up with famous jingles like Guinness is good for you.

And later she recreated this competitive world of the office in one of her

detective stories, Murder Must Advertise.

Hers was a very different life to Agatha Christie's.

She was a brilliant young Oxford scholar and then a struggling writer in

Bohemian London.

She fell in love with a man who refused to marry her.

Then, by a different relationship, she gave birth in secret to an illegitimate

child. She never felt able publicly to acknowledge her son.

And yet, out of these troubled years would come great literary success.

In her debut novel, Whose Body?, Sayers introduced Lord Peter Whimsey, a dashing

aristocratic detective, and like Dorothy herself, an Oxford graduate.

She gave Lord Peter all the money and assurance and easy success that she

have liked for herself.

It was Lord Peter, though, who would lead her out of her difficulties into

financial security and a career as a full -time novelist.

At Somerville, which is Sayers' old college in Oxford, I met the critic and

fellow Sayers fan, Charlotte Higgins, to talk about Lord Peter.

Now then, here we have the first appearance in a short story magazine of

rather foolish -looking gentleman called Lord Peter Whimsey. I mean, he looks

like your sort of typical aristocratic, goofy fool with a monocle, upper -class

twit, really.

But, of course, behind that, it becomes very clear that Lord Peter Whimsey,

that's just the sort of surface of him. He's actually a kind of much rather

deeper character than that.

And you get strongly running through all the books this sense of damage that

happened because of the war.

So in modern terms, we would say that he had post -traumatic stress injury.

We have glancing accounts of him having somehow had another breakdown in the

past, of him still going through periods where he wakes in the night and

screams.

He has these appalling nightmares.

And that's one of the reasons that he has this extremely close relationship

his... His valet Bunter, the estimable Bunter. Who was his Batman in the

trenches. Exactly so, exactly so. It makes him bearable, doesn't it? Because

lot of people think, oh, Lord Peter Wimsey, ridiculous snob, we don't like

story, but...

As it says here, he is not nearly so foolish as he looks.

Yes. That's what makes her different, and in my opinion, better than Agatha

Christie, because you don't see any of that in Agatha Christie. Everything in

the garden is lovely, really, isn't it? This is really good quality stuff. This

is proper prose.

A lot of the other writers of the Golden Age are quite...

quite sort of coy about describing actual scenes of violence and blood, but

Dorothy L. Sayers never holds back, does she? No, it's all done with chilling

detail, frankly. She doesn't hold back.

And I think, for me, part of that is just the sort of intellectual honesty of

it. You know, there is a sort of sense that, you know, if we take part in the

detection as a reader, you know, we're going to play that game along with the

characters, and just as they have to look death in the face, so do we.

Harriet's luck was in. It was a corpse.

Indubitably a corpse.

Indeed, if the head did not come off in Harriet's hands, it was only because the

spine was intact for the larynx and all the great vessels of the neck had been

severed to the bone and a frightful stream, bright red and glistening, was

running over the surface of the rock and dripping into a little hollow below.

Harriet put the head down again and felt suddenly sick.

The Harriet in this story is the bold and brilliant Harriet Vane. She's almost

the alter ego of her creator, Dorothy L. Sayers. Both of them studied at Oxford.

Both of them became detective novelists. And I love Harriet Vane. When I was

growing up, she made me want to be a girl detective, solving crimes and

wrongs and forging a very independent furrow through life.

Harriet first appears in the novel Strong Poison, and she's in the dock.

been accused of murder.

And who's going to save her but Lord Peter Whimsey?

During the course of his investigation, he falls in love with her. And Sayers

spends the next few novels building up and teasing us with their on -off, will

-they -won't -they relationship.

The whole thing culminates in her best book of all, which is Gordie Knight.

I think it's her best, because it's not just a detective story, but also a

remarkable manifesto for women's education and a commentary on the

that women faced in the 1930s. In this book, Thayer said herself that she'd

expressed the things that I had been wanting to say all my life.

The story begins with Harriet Bain attending the annual Gordie celebrations

her old Oxford College.

But the female scholars there are under persecution from a mystery misogynist.

And then we get 400 pages of the mystery itself, all set in this women's

college. But the book isn't really about the mystery, it's about the women.

Whether it's possible for them to combine independence and work with

life and husbands.

At the end of it all, Harriet decides to take the chance, to agree to marry Lord

Peter Whimsey. She realises that he's a good man who won't stifle her or cramp

her style.

And on the very last page, they have their first kiss, here in New College

and we see them closely and passionately embracing.

As a reader, if you've followed them through thousands of pages, you want to

yes, what took you so long?

With Gordie Knight.

Sayers thought that she'd exhausted the possibilities of the detective novels.

She now returned to more scholarly pursuits.

But even without Lord Peter and Harriet, the golden age would still continue.

Detective novels were now being published at the rate of 1 ,000 every

Yet nothing could beat a real -life whodunit.

In 1931, a new murder mystery got everybody talking, wanting to know the

solution.

There were alibis and clues and red herrings.

But this time it wasn't fiction. It happened in real life, here in

The central character in the story was tall and terrible and habitually dressed

in black.

He liked to recite Marcus Aurelius.

to conduct chemistry experiments in a back bedroom, and to practice his violin

at the window.

This may all sound rather familiar, but we're not talking about Sherlock Holmes.

He was a 52 -year -old insurance agent named William Herbert Wallace.

It all began in a chess club.

On the evening of Monday 19th January 1931, The mild -mannered Wallace had

arrived at the Liverpool Central Club when he was handed what would be our

clue.

It was a telephone message from a call received 25 minutes earlier.

The voice on the phone identified himself as Mr R .M. Qualtrough.

He wanted Wallace to visit him on insurance business at 7 .30 the

evening. At his home, 25 Menlove Gardens East.

Even though he seemed puzzled by the message, Wallace took out his small

prudential diary and made a note of Qualtrough's name and address.

He obviously decided to keep the appointment.

The next day, which was the 20th of January, Wallace had his tea. He got

together some papers for this business meeting with the unknown man, and he

goodbye to his wife.

Julia, right here at the back door of their house in Malverton Street.

And then he set off to this unknown address, Menlove Gardens East.

And so began Wallace's odd nocturnal journey.

Hold tight, please.

The tram conductor would later recall Wallace emphasising the fact that he was

stranger and repeatedly asking for directions.

And when he finally reached the right neighbourhood, Wallace said he was able

find Menlove Gardens north and south and west, but east simply didn't exist.

Wallace stopped to ask several people and so drew attention to himself.

But nobody was able to help him find the address or the mysterious Mr.

Qualtrough. Wallace headed home and he was seen by an eyewitness speaking to a

mystery man a few streets away from his house.

Was this an accomplice or was it simply a red herring?

When Wallace got back from his pointless search, he claimed that the door of his

house had been locked.

He waited around until his neighbours were passing, Mr and Mrs Johnson, and

he tried again and this time it opened.

It's almost as if he'd wanted witnesses to his going back into his house.

Wallace went inside.

On lighting the gas lamp in the kitchen, he noticed a small cabinet had been

broken into and that a piece of its door was lying on the floor.

He went upstairs, calling out his wife's name, but there was no sign of her.

In the front bedroom, the bedclothes had been pulled back.

He went back downstairs, and now he noticed that the parlour door was ajar.

He struck a match, held it aloft, and went in.

The scene which greeted him was ghastly.

There, lying across the rug in front of the fireplace, With the body of his wife

Julia, her head in a pool of blood, she'd been savagely attacked.

Wallace went to get his neighbours.

Come and look, she's been killed, he said.

And he showed a surprising lack of emotion as he knelt down by his dead

body. They finished her, he said. Look at the brains.

The murder baffled everybody.

But when Mr.

Qualtrough's mysterious telephone call was traced to a kiosk just 400 yards

from Wallace's house, people began to suspect that Qualtrough and Wallace were

one and the same person, and that the business of the appointment had been

nothing more than a very elaborate alibi.

The murder weapon wasn't found, and there was no motive.

But thence there were no other suspects.

So Wallace... was arrested.

On the 22nd of April, his trial opened here at St George's Hall in central

Liverpool. It drew massive attention.

As he sat through his trial, Wallace's behaviour counted against him. He was

impassive, cold.

He didn't visibly react when people mentioned his dead wife.

And he was heard to say that he felt that the jury members were rather

He also had the misfortune to fit most people's image of a murderer. He tended

to wear black, and he had little round spectacles like Dr. Crippen's.

On the other hand, though, Wallace's defense was pretty confident.

There was no killer piece of evidence against him.

That's why, after four days of trial and an hour's deliberation, there was a

gasp in court when the jury revealed that they thought he was guilty.

The date was set for Wallace's hanging.

But then came the final twist that turned the case of William Herbert

into a legal landmark.

In May 1931, the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned his conviction.

Basically, they said, the evidence was insufficient.

The jury had got it wrong.

So Wallace lived to tell his tale and to sell it, of course, to a Sunday

magazine.

under the bragging title of The Man They Did Not Hang.

The Wallace case is perhaps the ultimate whodunit, because it remains unsolved

to this day.

It provided wonderful fodder for speculation among the Golden Age writers

Dorothy L Sayers.

Capitalizing on this real -life mystery, they started to provide ingenious

fictionalized solutions to the case, transforming it from reality into myth.

It's no coincidence that the murder mystery reached a peak in popularity at

same time as a similar vogue for chess and for the crossword puzzle.

Britain now also saw an explosion of murder mystery games, the forerunners of

Cluedo.

This, for example, is the baffle book.

It's not a collection of stories. It's a set of 30 mysteries and detective

problems to be solved from given data.

Be your own detective, it says inside.

And you're put into all sorts of everyday situations like this. You're

with a duchess. The butler comes in with the tragic announcement that the master

has been found slain in the billiard room. An oriental dagger through his

What are you going to do?

Then there's the murder jigsaw. In this, it's only as you put in the very last

piece that you realise that this man isn't holding a musical instrument.

He's using a gun disguised as a clarinet to shoot the victim over here.

And top of the tree, we've got the murder dossier. This is full of all

evidence. We've got a cable and a police memo and testimony and crime scene

photographs, even a clue. Here's a bit of...

blood -stained curtain and here's a sample of somebody's hair and what

supposed to do is read through the whole thing come to your conclusion and only

then do you open the envelope at the back containing the solution all these

games and puzzles are jolly good fun but they do show how murder between the

walls had become sanitized and with that trivialized In real life, most murder

was driven by poverty, alcohol or abusive relationships. No sign of that

Nor the Great Depression or the rise of fascism.

And some people don't even like to use the name The Golden Age for this. They

think a more accurate name for this school of fiction would be snobbery with

violence.

If the classic whodunit seemed tired and out of touch, Then in 1938, the

novelist Graham Greene would attempt a strikingly different way of writing

murder and the visceral emotions that it releases.

Greene had begun writing novels influenced by the new American crime

like Datiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Their thrillers were the darker, grittier alternative to the cosy

the Golden Age.

Now Green set about creating his very own version, a British crime noir, in

which he would take murder and the murderer out of their genteel setting

place them in a shabby seaside resort.

Writing Rock, I really intended when I began writing it to be a detective

Then the character Pinky took hold.

And I realised that I was not going to write a detective story at all.

All that remained of a detective story was the original murder.

I wanted to make people believe that he was a sufficiently evil person almost to

justify the notion of hell.

Green was a Catholic.

Hence his preoccupation with evil.

And sin.

And guilt.

and redemption.

Even the cover blurb of Brighton Rock tells us that this is a new kind of

as it says here. In this book, murder is no parlour game, likely to be solved on

the last page, but an act of terrible and terrifying significance.

The emphasis is now off the detective and onto the murderer himself.

The hero, or the anti -hero, of Brighton Rock is a teenage gangster called

Pinky. He's rather clever and very violent. He seems to be in charge of

the criminals of Brighton.

Graham Greene says that he's like a child with haemophilia. Everyone who

him draws blood.

He grinned again, passing through the charge room.

But a bright spot of colour stood out on each cheekbone.

There was poison in his veins, though he grinned and bore it.

He'd been insulted. He was going to show the world. They thought because he was

only seventeen.

He jerked his narrow shoulders back at the memory that he'd killed his man.

And these bogeys who thought they were clever weren't clever enough to discover

that. He trailed the clouds of his own glory.

Hell lay about him in his infancy.

He was ready.

for more death.

And we're in a very different environment now, too.

The story of Brighton Rock takes place in tea rooms and pubs and amusement

arcades. The murder happens in a public toilet.

It's a long way away from the rarefied country houses of the classic Golden Age

detective novels.

Graham Greene loves taking us into the sleazy underbelly, behind the shiny

and the hotels of the Brighton seafront.

Brighton Rock points to the future, to the American -style thriller and the

brutal, psychological type of crime fiction that we read today. But it's

recognisable as a very British murder.

After all, what could be more British than a seaside pier?

Green's novel also taps into a deeper past and the dark obsessions we've

encountered.

Pinky's evil character is rooted in our fear of murder, but also our fascination

with the murderer.

Just like earlier entertainments, like ballads and broadsides and melodramas.

May this crime forever be a curse.

The same fears fed the imagination of Victorian writers like Charles Dickens

Wilkie Collins.

They turned the sensational crimes of their own day into great literature.

It's all added up to a significant strand of our national psyche.

And the very British relish for murder hasn't gone away.

Far from it. Just look at your television schedule.

It'll be packed with all kinds of gory stuff that you can hardly bear to watch.

And yet you do.

It seems that we still can't resist this guilty pleasure.