All language subtitles for A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley - S01E03 - The Golden Age HDTV-720p

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.