City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery

i

THE FUNCTION DF SETT

ertain settings have long been a common element in British mystery and detective fiction: the quaint village; the country manor; the seaside resort; the streets of London. More than simply providing background, physical setting—in particular the city of London and the British seashore—takes on an added dimension, in a sense becoming a player in the mysteries, one that symbolizxs, intensifies, and illuminates aspects of the British mystery novel. This critical study examines 18 British mystery novels set in the city of London and 15 set by the sea. The novels span the twentieth century; among the authors whose works are included are Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, G.K. Chesterton and P.D. James. The book includes a short biography and listing of primary works of each author covered. Gillian Mary Hanson is a native of Sussex, England, and teaches English at the University of Houston Downtown. She is also the author of a number of books of literary criticism, and has written a mystery novel series set on the Texas Gulf Coast.

ISBN 0-7864-1844-3

CITY AND SHORE

CITY AND SHORE The Function of Setting in the British Mystery Gillian Mary Hanson

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hanson, Gillian Mary, 1943City and shore : the function of setting in the British mystery / Gillian Mary Hanson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7864-1844-3 (softcover : 50# alkaline paper)

@

1. Detective and mystery stories, English — History and criticism. 2. Great Britain — In literature. 3. Setting (Literature). I. Title. PR830.D4H36 2004

823'.08720922 - dc22

2004008622

British Library cataloguing data are available ©2004 Gillian Mary Hanson. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Background image of city ©2004 Photodisc; Foreground image of shore ©2004 PhotoSpin Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

"Location is the crossroads of circumstance" (Eudora Welty)

CONTENTS Preface Introduction

1 3

Part One: The City

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The Old Man in the Corner (1901-1905) by Emma Orczy The Club of Queer Trades (1905) by G. K. Chesterton The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G. K. Chesterton The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) by J. S. Fletcher Strong Poison (1930) by Dorothy Sayers Hangover Square (1942) by Patrick Hamilton The Ministry of Fear (1943) by Graham Greene Murder by Matchlight (1945) by E. C. R. Lorac Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) by R. T. Campbell More Work for the Undertaker (1949) by Margery Allingham The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) by Margery Allingham Tether's End (1958) by Margery Allingham The Port of London Murders (1958) by Josephine Bell At Bertram's Hotel (1965) by Agatha Christie The Glass Cage (1966) by Colin Wilson Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968) by H. R. F. Keating Black Out (1995) by John Lawton vu

13 18 24 28 35 39 43 47 54 58 63 69 75 79 86 90 95 100

Contents

Part Two: The Shore

105

The Blotting Book (1908) by E. F. Benson Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) by Francis Beeding The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) by Gladys Mitchell Have His Carcass (1932) by Dorothy Sayers, The Boomerang Clue (1933) by Agatha Christie, and A Shilling for Candles (1936) by Josephine Tey Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene NorM? (1941) by Agatha Christie Murder in Retrospect (1941) by Agatha Christie The West Pier (1951) by Patrick Hamilton The Singing Sands (1953) by Josephine Tey Unnatural Causes (1967) by P. D. James Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) by Peter Lovesey The Pier (1986) by Raynor Heppenstall Devices and Desires (1990) by P. D. James Conclusion

107 111 116

120 127 133 137 139 143 146 150 158 162 165

About the Authors Notes Bibliography Index

169 179 185 193

Vlll

PREFACE The popularity of the fictional mystery has grown rapidly since Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mystery of the Rue Morgue" was first published in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine in 1841, and it has generated an impressive amount of literary criticism that has developed proportionately with the genre. Critics have included in their essays some general discussion of the setting, usually focusing on such locales as the village or the enclosed space, but none has presented an in-depth examination that focuses solely on the function of setting. My approach in this work is to look at two very distinct settings: city and shore. Having grown up in a small seaside town on the south coast of England and later moved to London, I focus my discussion on the areas I know best: the shoreline of Great Britain and the city of London. I have chosen to discuss works with a rich variety of both topographical and metrological aspects that lend themselves with spectacular results to the mystery. My choice of primary works has been guided by two concerns: that I find writers whom the reader will recognize or enjoy, and that these writers use their settings in particular and significant ways. The time frame is the twentieth century; Part One, "The City," begins with Baroness d'Orczy's The Old Man in the Corner (1901) and ends with John Lawton's Black Out (1995), and Part Two, "The Shore," begins with E. F. Benson's The Blotting Book (1908) and ends with P. D. James's Devices and Desires (1990). Several of the works under discussion come from the Golden Age of detective fiction and a group of writers that includes Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha

Preface Christie — writers who truly set the stage for the fully developed mystery and elevated it to a serious literary genre. Throughout the study I have drawn ideas from several works of criticism in the mystery genre. David Lehman's fascinating book The Perfect Murder is a rich source of interpretation in an easy and logical approach to the mystery genre. Others studies include G. K. Chesterton's "A Defence of Detective Stories," and "On Detective Novels," W. H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage," C. S. Lewis's (writing as Nicolas Blake) "The Detective Story —Why?" and Dorothy Sayers's famous introduction to The Omnibus of Crime. I have also incorporated critics outside the genre whose ideas seem to lend themselves to interesting interpretations of the mystery setting; these works include Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, W. H. Auden's The Enchafed Flood, Jack Bickham's Setting, Jorge Luis Borges's Other Inquisitions, and David Danow's The Spirit of the Carnival. I feel fortunate to have benefited from a variety of help in this study —primarily, the indelible geographical circumstances of my own background as well as an early and consistent interest in the mystery. I also appreciate the graciousness of my department chairperson, Dr. William Gilbert, in allowing me to develop and teach a course in the mystery genre each year as part of my teaching curriculum at the University of Houston-Downtown. I would also like to thank the research librarians at the university, especially Anita Garza, and my students whose enthusiasm for this venture has been a source of inspiration. To all of these people I offer my deepest gratitude.

INTRODUCTION Various authors have recognized the functions of setting in the mystery genre; however, it is a subject that has not been examined in depth. In this book, I explore the influence of the setting on characterization and plot as it symbolizes, intensifies, and illuminates these aspects of the British mystery novel. The well-known British writer of the classic mystery, Dorothy Sayers, explains the background of the modern mystery as growing from the two different genres of detection and horror: "Both the detective story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin. All native folk-lore has its ghost tales ... from the Jewish Apocrypha, Herodotus, and the Aeneid. But, whereas the tale of horror has flourished in practically every age and country, the detective story has had a spasmodic history, appearing here and there in faint, tentative sketches and episodes, until it suddenly burst into magnificent flower in the middle of the last century "' Sayers goes on to say that it was Edgar Allan Poe who first "achieved the fusion of the distinct genres and created what we may call the story of mystery, as distinct from pure detection on the one hand and pure horror on the other."2 One aspect that has sprung from this union of detection and horror, resulting in the twentieth century mystery genre, is that of setting. Writer Jack M. Bickham discusses the importance of the setting: "Vivid, evocative physical description of setting can transport the reader into the story's universe. The reader may also derive an additional sense of involvement and satisfaction if he is given, as part of the setting, factual data which fascinates him and makes him feel as if he is learning some-

Introduction thing."3 Setting is used to reinforce the structural elements and divisions of the story by providing transitional links between stages, as well as by representing the psychological states of certain characters. Occasionally, characters also take on the condition of the setting and are actually manipulated by it. In an essay entitled "Where?" the well-known British mystery writer Elizabeth Lemarchand explains the importance of setting in the mystery: "I wonder why my books are so WHERE dominated.... I think the most likely explanation is that I first came to detective fiction in the Golden Age of the twenties and thirties, and have ever since been under the spell of the master craftsmen of the period such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft. It was their vivid portrayal of the settings in which their impeccable plots unfolded that made the whodunits of this time so absorbing to me. The action was intimately associated with and conditioned by the milieu in which it took place, and this gave it conviction."4 The setting fulfills another important function by providing a vital sense of reality, as the American mystery writer Willard Huntington Wright (pen-name of S. S. Van Dine) explains in his essay "The Great Detective Stories": "The setting of the detective story is, however, of great importance. The plot must appear to be an actual record of events springing from the terrain of its operations; and the plans and diagrams so often encountered in detective stories aid considerably in this effect."5 The setting of the natural landscape, along with the moods of nature, also creates in the mystery a necessary tension in terms of contrast. In "The Guilty Vicarage," a discussion of the prerequisites for the mystery story, W. H. Auden suggests that "nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder."6 And H. Douglass Thompson, in Masters of Mystery, agrees with this idea in his discussion of "the two main ingredients in the detective story — the problem and the setting: "The murder in a detective story should come unexpectedly; unexpectedly that is to those concerned. It should also be committed in the last place in the world you would expect it to be. Thus a murder in the grotesque place has additional virtue. It surprises, it amuses, it takes us by storm."7 Two locales used frequently by mystery writers are the city and the seashore. In these places, the setting is so powerful it often speaks for the character and mood. Here, even more than the country home or the

Introduction secluded village, the setting embraces the totality of the environment, and subjects and objects establish a symbolic basis through which objects assume functions much more significant than their outward appearances. While quite distinct in their topographical features, the settings of city and seashore in the mystery do share thematic aspects such as alienation and the carnivalesque. Alienation is often suggested in the form of the stranger who enters the established setting, frequently someone with whom the reader will align himself through a shared perspective in a confrontation with the unknown. In contrast to the theme of alienation, the carnival, states the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, represents "a new mode of interrelationships between individuals," and it enables "the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves."8 The carnivalesque with its attendant grotesques is used in the urban seaside setting to represent a pagan-like, sometimes mythic, aspect for holidaymakers, but, as it is used in the city setting, it can also represent a powerful theme of evil and moral decay, a distortion of truth and human values. The state of the weather as it reflects the human condition and the movement of the plot is an important aspect used in both types of settings. A natural event such as a storm breaking might occur and force the issue to crisis, compelling characters to confront those dangerous forces that have been developing beneath the surface. Fog depersonalizes and often signifies confusion, for as Auden says, "The degree of visibility equals the degree of conscious knowledge."9 Wind, Auden suggests, often signals imminent change brought about by outside forces: "The wind is always a force which the conscious will cannot control. It is always the good or bad of all movements of life."10 The wind can also take on human characteristics. Elias Canetti talks of the voice of the wind which "can whine or howl, and, loud or soft, there are few sounds of which it is not capable. Thus it affects men as something living...."11 Railway stations are also significant in both city and seaside settings. They represent order, a link between places. With their maps and timetables, what Auden calls "rituals of space and time" when he likens the detective story to the quest for the Holy Grail, they also suggest a relief from chaos, as well as a stage in the journey of the characters' lives. Public places like the railway station, restaurant, and pub are often contrasted with secluded places— the seedy boarding-house room, the private home, the deserted cul-de-sac — to represent the conflict between

Introduction truth and deceit. In the public place, characters are viewed as they would be seen, whereas in the private place, hidden facets of the characters, often psychological, are presented to the reader. The crowd is presented in these settings frequently as a Greek chorus against which the drama of the mystery is played out, as well as a kind of mass movement that contrasts with the solitary individual, often the murderer, in which he may hide himself. The London crowds, unlike the crowds of the seaside setting that follow the patterns of the waves as they gather and reform, "peaking" with each holiday season, lack that sense of false gaiety and have about them a sense of permanence and a purposeful, often sinister, air. Many mystery writers who use the city as setting choose London with its multi-layered historical aspects, its sense of secrecy, and its confusion of streets that in T. S. Eliot's words "follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent." G. K. Chesterton, several of whose books including The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Club of Queer Trades are set in London, talks of the poetry of London and its use in the mystery novel, likening the detective story set in London to the Iliad: Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the "Iliad." ... No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland.... Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney pots seems wildly and derisively signaling the meaning of the mystery. The realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than the countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actual a deliberate symbol —a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has a human hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.12

Introduction Perhaps two of the most important factors in the use as London as setting, both of which work in conjunction with character and plot, are the road, man-made and therefore controllable, and the weather, a natural force, therefore uncontrollable. The roads— whether deserted alleyways, fashionable mews, foggy cul-de-sacs, rain-drenched passageways, flowery lanes, elegant boulevards, or bustling thoroughfares; whether winding, straight, short or long, narrow or broad; whether opening into green secluded squares, spacious parks, or surprising us with a hidden view, a peek at the Brompton Oratory or a flash of the River Thamesare the paths along which the plot unfolds and are used by murderer, victim, and avenger alike; they are what makes the city what it is and what shapes the lives of those who live therein. These dense and winding London streets and all the drama of human life associated with them are the perfect setting for such aspects of the mystery as murder, chase, and discovery as each street becomes the link between the characters and the stages of the plot, and streets come together as neighborhoods that in turn represent the whole mood of the story. Margery Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is set in the seedy environs of Paddington and Notting Hill where she is able to explore the theme of evil amid the twisting back streets and rain-soaked squares. In Tether's End, Allingham uses the theatre district of central London to develop themes of the grotesque. J. S. Fletcher uses railway stations—terminals and undergrounds—for the setting of his mystery The Charing Cross Mystery, and H.R.F. Keating uses the racially explosive area of Notting Hill to explore a corresponding theme in Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock. E.C.R. Lorac's Murder by Matchlight, Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, and John Lawton's Black Out are all set during the wartime blackout. R. T. Campbell's Bodies in a Bookshop takes place in the book hunter's paradise around Tottenham Court Road, and the river and wharf district of East London is the setting for Josephine Bell's The Port of London Murders as it is for Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage. In this landscape of city streets and neighborhoods, the condition of the weather is crucial as it creates mood, sometimes becoming humanlike itself as we see in Tiger in the Smoke where the fog is so powerfully described throughout that it takes on the presence of evil itself, and the pounding rhythm of the rain in Tether's End becomes a drum roll announcing the beginning of the drama about to unfold. In many of the mysteries that use the London setting, it seems as if murder and thoughts

Introduction of murder flourish and grow in the fog and rain whereas the storm that breaks and brings about the wind of change often occurs as the mystery begins to be solved. In contrast to the changeless setting of the city with its sense of enclosure and age is the ever-changing setting of the seashore and all it represents in terms of truth and nature. "The Englishman's disasters," says Canetti, "have always been experienced at sea; his dead he has often had to imagine lying at the bottom of the sea; and thus the sea has offered him transformation and danger."13 With the mystery genre, certain aspects of the coastal setting are used in the deconstruction of the criminal mind, perhaps none so important as the sea itself in its representation of truth. Says the critic George Bahlke in his discussion of Auden's use of the sea as symbol: "[It] forms an analogue to the 'real situation.' ... It is that place where man completes the quest through purgation for knowledge of his true self."14 What the coastal setting does for certain characters in the mystery genre is bring out the truth in their natures and expose a psychological imbalance as it does for Pinkie Brown in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Other coastal features used symbolically by mystery writers include such man-made features as the seaside garden, the pier and the promenade. The seaside garden often suggests a place of safety and refuge with Edenic proportions which offers relief from chaos and pagan nature outside its walls. Of the seaside garden, Auden states: "It is like the city in that it is an enclosed place of safety ... a solitary or private place from which the general public are excluded and where the writ of law does not run. The primary idea with which the garden-island image is associated is, therefore, neither justice nor chastity but innocence; it is the earthly paradise where there is no conflict between natural desire and moral duty."15 This situation, however, is often reversed in the mystery when evil and murder or thoughts of such enter the garden as in Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps, Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect and Raynor Heppenstall's The Pier. The pier is often used to represent a link between land and shore — man and nature — a place where communication is possible both with the self and with others as described in Brighton Rock, Patrick Hamilton's The West Pier, and Peter Lovesey's Mad Hatter's Holiday. The use of the promenade, too, is common in many British mysteries whose writers use it as a kind of stage to introduce their

Introduction characters and bring them face-to-face with others as in Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands and Agatha Christie's N or M? including the above mentioned books. These landmarks are important for their individual symbolic aspects as well as the authors' use of them to develop certain themes endemic to the mystery novel such as the distortion of time (often in conjunction with the changing tides), the question of identity (often tied into the use of disguise or the idea of metamorphosis), the alien in the crowd, the theme of the carnival with its air of easy gaiety as opposed to the air of vicious intent of the murderer at large, the sense of ritual (often with religious overtones), and the gradual disclosure of moral decay. What follows is a look at the different ways the aforementioned writers and several others use the settings of city and shore as essential ingredients in their works. The bibliography includes further suggested works of criticism and mysteries in this field.

Part One

The City

The Old Man in theCorner (1901-1905) by Emma Orczy The detective story moves from end to beginning, backwards instead of forwards, starting with each crime and bringing the events up to the present through the investigation; in essence, working from effect to cause; in this, it departs from the traditional narrative form which moves from beginning to end. This is the case in Emma Orczy's collection of short stories, The Old Man in the Corner (1901-1905), which includes "The Fenchurch Street Mystery," "The Mysterious Death in Percy Street," The Lisson Grove Mystery," and "The Tremarn Case." Set in and around the West End's fog-shrouded streets with their gas lamps and flickering shadows, these stories are the first in the "armchair detection" sub-genre in which the sleuth unravels the crime solely by the powers of ratiocination, never visiting the murder site, examining the suspects. "I myself rather fancy the idea of a detective who shall be as undistinguished as a piece of blotting paper, absorbing the reactions of his subjects; a shallow mirror, in which we see reflected every feature of the crime; a pure cameraeye,"1 says writer Nicholas Blake, pseudonym for poet Cecil Day Lewis. These expectations may well be fulfilled by the figure of the shabbily dressed Old Man, Bill Owen, an insignificant looking, yet brilliant, character who sits in the corner of an ABC tearoom and toys with a piece of knotted string as he unravels the mysteries for the narrator, a young female journalist named Polly Burton. "I don't think I had ever seen anyone so

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Part One : The City pale, so thin, with such funny light-coloured hair, brushed very smoothly across the top of a very obviously bald crown" (4),* remarks Polly Burton as she listens to him explain his solutions to the murders. Interestingly, these stories break the conventions of detective mystery in that the Old Man admires the cleverness of the criminals described in them, who never get caught, and he even discloses his own identity and involvement in one of the crimes. Each story begins at the end and is related in flashbacks, opening and closing at the ABC teashop, an enclosed public space that suggests a place where the possibility of a revelation of truth against the background of the crowd exists; its parallel in these stories is another enclosed public place, Marylebone Police Court, where the Old Man often watches the criminal trials, which always result in a not guilty verdict for the accused, before settling in at the café to ponder the events and deliver his solution. Greed seems to be the motive for each of the murders, all of which also include an elaborated disguise made effective by the descriptions of streets and neighbors, railway stations and porters, and restaurants and waiters. "The Fenchurch Street Mystery" begins the collection. It involves a missing husband, switched identities, disguise, and murder and begins when a Mrs. Kershaw reports to the police the disappearance of her husband. The Old Man describes his interpretation of the mystery to the narrator: "'It was only on the 31st,' he resumed after a while, 'that a body, decomposed past all recognition, was found by two lightermen in the bottom of a disused barge. She had been moored at one time at the foot of one of those dark flights of steps which lead down between tall warehouses to the river in the East End of London..." (5). This site where the body has been hidden, below ground level, suggests deception as does the alley at the top of the steps, as the Old Man explains when he shows a photo of it to the narrator: "You will realize what a perfect place this alley is for the purpose of one man cutting another's throat in comfort, and without fear of detection" (5). The surrounding streets suggest confusion and despair, as one witness relates: "The place where I found myself was dismal and deserted. I could see no trace of cab or *This and subsequent quotations are from the collected edition ofOrczy's mystery stories: The Old Man in the Corner (New York: Dover Publications, 1980). Page references are to that edition.

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The Old Man in the Corner (1901-1905) omnibus. I retraced my steps and tried to find my way back to the station, only to find myself in worse and more deserted neighbourhoods. I became hopelessly lost and fogged I thus wandered on the dark and deserted streets..." (11). Disguise is a crucial aspect of this story: "What was so remarkable about him was that total absence of eyebrows and even eyelashes, which gave the face such a peculiar appearance" (6), says the Old Man of one of the characters who disguises himself in order to effect his crime. The theme is carried further on the platform of Fenchurch Street Railway Station as one of the porters explains what he saw: "In the midst of one of the densest fogs he ever remembered.... He was on the arrival platform and was hailed by a passenger.... He could see very little of him beyond an enormous black fur coat and a traveling cap of fur also" (7). Later in the story, Mr. Kershaw, posing as someone else, turns up in court under a heavy disguise, so heavy that his own wife doesn't recognize him when he takes the stand, and he effects yet another disguise in the refreshment room of the train station when he passes himself off as his business partner. In "The Mysterious Death in Percy Street," the plot also involves disguise in a setting which the old man explains to the young news reporter as one perfect for the mystery. The murder takes place at a house whose rooms are rented out for studios. Here, the landlady is found dead, dressed in a nightdress with her frozen cockatoo beside her. The window of the room is wide open and the floor half-covered with snow. As the story reverses from murder to revelation, it moves to the streets, where suspicions focus on a young man who had been keeping company with the deceased: "Mrs. Owen and Arthur Greenhill were seen by one of the glass workmen dining together at Gambia's Restaurant in Tottenham Court Road" (33). Here, also in the street, a woman who owns the sweet shop across the road from the studio says she saw Mrs. Owen cleaning her doorstep. Her face and shoulders were wrapped in a shawl, which turns out to be the disguise for the intruder. "The Lisson Grove Mystery" is the most gruesome in the collection and involves a daughter, who, along with her accomplice, murders and dismembers her father, a cripple who is confined to the apartment after losing his legs in a mining accident for which he is about to receive a large compensation. Disguising the body parts in a rug, the murderous pair drive away in a rented car after pretending to wave goodbye to the

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Part One : The City father, who, in fact, they have already killed. The discovery of the dismembered corpse is made by two boys near Wembley Park Station when they are playing in a small wood and come across three large parcels wrapped in oilcloth which contain parts of the body. Another station, St. Paneras, is noted in the mystery as the one that the daughter arrives at after returning from her trip to Edinburgh to establish an alibi for herself and her lover after the murder: "Three days later — that is to say, on Tuesday, November 24, Miss Amelia Dyke, residing at Lisson Grove Crescent, returned from Edinburgh.... She drove up from St. Paneras Station in a cab..." (96). Like the other mysteries, the account of the murder and its solution are described by the Old Man from the ABC tearoom, and it becomes clear that the streets provide an alibi for the murder: "Obviously, therefore, as his dead body was found twelve miles away, Wyatt, who was out of the Crescent at night, and in Euston Road by eleven, could not have done the deed" (97). The success of the murder hinges on the setting, for as the Old Man explains to the narrator, if the body had been discovered at an earlier time, the diabolical plot would have collapsed, but as one can be fairly certain that the wood would lie undisturbed in the winter cold for a few days, it was successful. "The Tremarn Case" also plays out in the streets of London, from Grovesnor Square to Exhibition Row, from Westminster to Shaftsbury Avenue, where: "in the midst of our much vaunted London streets, a crime ... has been committed.... [L]ast Monday evening two gentlemen, both in evening dress and wearing opera hats, hailed a hansom in Shaftsbury Avenue. It was about a quarter past eleven, and the night, if you remember, was a typical November one — dark, drizzly, and foggy..." (124). The cab takes the men to an address in Cromwell road: "He drove there as quickly as the fog would permit him" (124). One man gets out, telling the cabdriver to take the other to Westminster Chambers, Victoria Street, himself taking off in the direction of the Natural History Museum. The cabby discovers the man in the cab has been murdered, "stabbed through the neck from ear to ear with a long, sharp instrument, in shape like an antique stiletto" (125). It turns out that money, an inheritance for one nephew or another posing as a nephew, is again, the motive for murder, and their Uncle Tremarn uses a disguise to cover up past deeds. In all of these stories, streets, alleys and woods contrast with the 16

The Old Man in the Corner (1901-1905) enclosed settings of café, houses, and courthouse as the Old Man reconstructs the events leading to the murders, a process described by David Lehman: "The corpse, is, in effect, brought back to life as the complexities of his character slowly and steadily reassemble themselves in the detective's mind."2 The device of disguise unifies and promotes a carnivalesque reversal, as David Danow states, by the mask: "... the considerable role played by the mask in the carnivalized work of evoking illusion —the illusion of transformation or change" which "effect[s] ... transformations or reversals of fate and fortune."3 Each story in this collection employs some form of disguise or mask which is involved in the crime. The central character in "The Fenchurch Street Mystery" disguises himself as his business partner in order to kill him, and a double reversal takes place. In "The Mysterious Death in Percy Street," the disguise involves a change of gender as culprit disguises himself as his female victim. "The Lisson Grove Mystery" culprit disguises himself as his victim, and in "The Tremarn Case" the grieving Uncle disguises himself as someone posing as his nephew in order to cover up past crimes. To ensure that these murderers are able to establish a sound alibi and remain free, each of their disguises must be witnessed by the crowd — impartial onlookers who, from railway stations, public eateries, street corners, and other such public places, are called to testify on behalf of them.

17

The Club of Queer Trades (1905) by G. K. Chesterton Twisting streets and open spaces are also a key element in G.K. Chesterton's mystery The Club of Queer Trades (1905), a collection of six loosely connected stories, five of which are set in London. Here, "in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets [where] anything might happen...,"4 the author uses patterns of darkness and light that reflect the story's movement from a search for identity to a final recognition. The detective or policeman, says Chesterton in his essay "A Defence of Detective Stories," is a Romantic figure, a member of a "knight errantry,"5 a description which may certainly be applied to the trio of sleuths that appear in The Club of Queer Trades: the brothers, Basil and Rupert Grant, and Gulley Swinburne. The stories are linked by these three men and by a connection to the Club of Queer Trades; the main character of each story becomes eligible for membership in the club by his own particular adventure. Of the sleuths, Basil Grant is the most ingenious; given to intense retrospection followed by flashes of brilliant deduction, he has often been noted as a rival or, indeed, a superior character to Sherlock Holmes. He is an ex-judge who, ostensibly, became mad years earlier and now lives a life of semi-reclusive contentment in a "queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth"* in East London. *Quotations from The Club of Queer Trades (London: Penguin, 1984).

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The Club of Queer Trades (1905) His younger brother, Rupert, is a private detective and a poet who, according to Basil, gets his poetry right and his detection wrong. The third sleuth, Gulley Swinburne, is the narrator of the tales and is, as his name suggests, very gullible and easily "burned" or swindled. He is a cheerful, cherubic looking middle-aged man who injects a necessary note of credibility into these fantastic stories as he leads the reader through them. The building that houses Club of Queer Trades is situated "in a great édifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils" (7) that emphasizes the secret nature of the club, a place where "[t]he passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination ... and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream" (7). The person seeking membership must be engaged in novel employment, a unique and self-invented profession. The first of the tales, "The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown," involves the "Adventure and Romance Agency," a firm that specializes in making people's lives interesting by creating exciting and mysterious situations for them, and a case of mistaken identity. It begins in an alley that runs behind the back garden walls of row of large houses. The description sets the scene for the upcoming drama because it suggests in its ordinary, quiet appearance a sense of unreality "of being behind the scenes of a theatre" (12-13). The actual mystery takes place within a house, after the major climbs over the garden wall, at the gardener's invitation, and sees the garden flowers set in a bed to spell out: "DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN" (14). The gardener takes him inside the house where he meets a woman who, unbeknown to him, is an employee of the Romance and Adventure Agency. While he is asking her about the message, a "sudden rending cry" (15) calls out his name. He rushes outside and sees "what seems to be a decapitated head resting on the pavement" but is actually "the head of a man thrust through the coal-hole in the street" (16). He rushes back into the house and down to the coal-cellar where he is attacked by an unknown assailant who flees. The major does manage to hold on to the man's coat, and in the pocket, he finds a note with an address: "14 Tanner's Court, Fleet Street." When he steps out of the front garden at twilight, the street reflects the fantasy of what he is about to experience: "There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks" (15-16). He enlists the help of the three detectives. To solve the

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Part One : The City mystery of Major Brown's adventure, the men go to the address found in the pocket of the major's unknown assailant and find themselves in the West End at the Adventure and Romance Agency. Here, the head of the agency, a member of the Club of Queer Trades, explains that the mix-up occurred because the person who lived in the house before Major Brown, a Mr. Gurney-Brown, was a member of the agency whose clerk confused the names: "Thus you were hurled into the middle of another man's story" (26). Major Brown ends up marrying the young woman from the house, and the trio of sleuths solve their first mystery related to the Club of Queer Trades. The second story, "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation," also deals with the question of identity. It starts out in the dense streets of North London and moves to the open space of Berkeley Square in the West End. It opens with a panoramic view of North London as Gulley Swinburne sees it from the top of a tram, a "flying hill," where he is traveling with Basil Grant, and his description of the setting, the squalid landscape of North London's "narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice" (30-31), reflects the intent of their journey which is to create order from chaos. The central character in this mystery, the perpetrator of the crime, is first seen in a crowd, moving rapidly within the throng, and the idea of the crowd versus the individual is brought up and discussed in terms of good and evil, honesty versus deceit: "I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being themselves, that man was trying to be evil" (32). Grant and Swinburne decide to follow the man through gaslight and fog, broad roads and narrow alleys, until the twisting streets bring them suddenly to Berkley Square where their prey "swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an ill-lit alley" (33). Suddenly, they see his shadow illuminated by the flicker of a gas lamp before disappearing into the night. The follow him into the pools of darkness between the street lights and increasing fog "through a labyrinth of London lanes"(33-34). Another chase through the "dark and mazy streets" picks up after the two track the man to a house in Berkeley Square where his identity is made known. Confusion concerning this person's identity is reflected in the streets and the question of choice suggested by them: "We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths. 'Stop!' I shouted wildly to Grant. 'That's the wrong turning.' He ran on" (42). The man is finally

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The Club of Queer Trades (1905) caught and dragged into a "small court by the side street" where his identity is revealed and his secret "trade," which guarantees him membership in the Club of Queer Trades, is guessed by the discerning Basil. The most whimsical story, "The Singular Speculation of the HouseAgent," also involves a hunt for a mysterious man, a Lieutenant Keith. It leads the indefatigable trio through the mean streets of London and eventually to a public common, a vast open tract of land, and centers around a man who dresses as a big game hunter and seems to be constantly on the move as reflected by the description of the setting. Curiosity impels Basil to tail this man, and the others follow. They track him through several streets and finally wind up in the East End, at what is claimed to be a house agent's office, situated at the end of "the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that sterile district" (68). Here, their quarry has a brief meeting with the agent and leaves. The men confront the estate agent, who plays quietly with some lizards and a South American spider, but gives them no answers, and their frustration and confusion is reflected in the maze-like streets as they resume their journey: "We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three" (71). The story reaches its turning point as the truth, witnessed by the crowd—"The crowd was stirring very slightly" (72)— begins to emerge when the trio come upon Lieutenant Keith, bloody and battered, at the center of a brawl in which one man lies dead. Rupert is able to get the lieutenant's address from a policeman: "His address is: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey" (73). This vast tract of land called Buxton Common is where the denouement takes place in a setting that, even more intensely than the setting of the park, represents truth and the nature of the man who has made his home there in the tree tops: "His greatest virtue is that he always tells the literal truth" (79). Here, in the final scene, where the men crowd into the lieutenant's tiny tree-top home that swings amid the branches of the elms, nature, which was absent in the opening lines of the story in the description of the grim sterile streets, has now been restored just as goodness has prevailed over evil: "The wind of the night roared far below us, like the ocean at the foot of a lighthouse. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild sea" (82).

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Part One : The City Like the first story, the next, "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd," uses the setting of the garden to represent a different world and the idea of a new and different form of communication. It involves the delightful Professor Chadd, who, with his ever present umbrella, a symbol of sanity, is a regular habitué of the British Museum and its environs: "He was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald head.... He went to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella" (86). He is a friend of Basil Grant, who knows him for his theory on language—"the theory that language was complete in certain individuals and was picked up by others simply by watching them" (101) — and lives in Shepherd's Bush with his three spinster sisters. After receiving a telegram from one of the sisters—"Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous"—Basil and Gulley travel from Lambeth to Shepherd's Bush, crossing the river Thames as the mystery approaches, passing the landmarks of Westminster and Trafalgar Square, religion and war, order and chaos, that further the theme of communication, before they open the Chadds' garden gate and let themselves into another world: "Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke" (91). In the garden, they are confronted with Professor Chadd, executing a strange dance, which is witnessed by his bewildered doctor who tries to reason him out of his odd behavior. The controlled aspect of the garden contrasts with the seemingly chaotic behavior of its owner: "The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness to the prodigy" (94). Basil Grant understands the situation immediately and joins in the "madness," symbolically placing his hat on the professor's bald head to mark the communication between the two of them before joining him in a dance, a sailor's hornpipe — in effect entering his world of seeming eccentricity. The story ends in the garden after Basil has explained to the others Professor Chadd's determination to communicate his new "language." The final story in the collection, "The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady," relates an adventure generated by Rupert Grant's "genuine romantic interest in the life of London" (103), and there is a strong fairytale aspect to it. It begins in the early evening; the opening street scene

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The Club of Queer Trades (1905) in the West End, with the soft yellow of the barely discernible gas lights creating a glow against the blue twilight, sets the Romantic tone for what is to follow. On Rupert's whim, Rupert and Gulley follow a milkman who leaves behind him a trail of spilt milk. Rupert follows him down some basement steps in a downward movement that marks his submergence into the mystery about to begin. In the basement, he finds what seems to be a woman held captive, and he takes Gulley back down to listen. They enlist the help of Basil, meeting him at the Gloucester Road Tube Station. Tube stations, or subways, unlike basement areas in detective fiction which are often used to suggest a sense of evil and entrapment, often signify the beginning of an intellectual search. Here, they explain the situation to Basil, drawing him into the investigation. After rescuing the woman, the men search for the Club of Queer Trades, where her identity is revealed by none other than Basil Grant; it turns out that he is the president of the club and the woman one of his ex-clients from his days as a judge. What Jorge Luis Borges says about Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries may also apply to the mysteries described here : each "presents a mystery, proposes explanations of a demoniacal or magical sort, and then replaces them at the end with solutions of this world."6 All of the stories contain a search, often dangerous, taken by these three men, and the most difficult is the one they embark upon to find the mysterious Club of Queer Trades that concludes the final story. In that story's movement from darkness to light — the subterranean to the open — as the exploration of cellars and underground passageways deepens, the journey reflects the major function of the settings, which is to accentuate the basic pattern of the mystery, the movement from confusion to discovery.

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The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad "I had to fight hard to keep at arm's length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story,"7 says Joseph Conrad in his introduction to The Secret Agent (1907). The story is set in London and is based on a real-life event that took place in 1894 when what some consider the first international terrorist attack took place — the attempted bombing of the Greenwich Observatory. A casual remark made to Conrad after the event, "Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards"8—became the basis for the book. Mr. Verloc is the secret agent of the title, a double agent who works for a foreign embassy and reports his activities to Scotland Yard. His cover is in his business and in his involvement with a group of malcontents, would-be anarchists whose activities, mostly braggadocio, he reports to Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard. Similar to the business conducted through the bookshop in R. T. Campbell's Bodies in a Bookshop, Verloc's business is dealing in pornographic materials and reflects the deceptive nature of his life as a double agent. Both business and anarchist group are conducted from his house in a sordid area of London, Brett Street, Soho, where the surroundings are an extension of the nefarious activities that take place within: "The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in

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The Secret Agent (1907) large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London"

(1).* The group, FP (Future of the Proletariat), is made up of half-hearted anarchists whose schemes and plotting Verloc reports to Chief Inspector Heat. Like the anarchists in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursdayy each of these men has a specific personality; all represent the carnivalesque reversal in their ideal of overthrowing the complacent liberal government, in their grotesque appearances, and in their disassociation with their surroundings. Russian agent Comrade Ossipon, "the Doctor"; Michaelis, "the Apsotle," who writes a book about his anarchism while he is in prison; Professor X, whose physically deformity suggests his mental state — he straps explosives to his body and gives Verloc the bomb to blow up Greenwich Park; and the terrorist, Karl Yundt, who in his old age has resorted to verbal onslaughts against the government. Each one of these men's aberrations is suggested through the landscape; for instance, the description of the deserted nighttime streets devoid of humanity reflects the nature of Comrade Ossipon himself: "His robust form was seen that night in distant parts of the enormous town slumbering monstrously on a carpet of mud under a veil of raw mist. It was seen crossing the streets without life and sound, or diminishing in the interminable straight perspectives of shadowy houses bordering empty roadways lined by strings of gas lamps. He walked through Squares, Places, Ovals, Commons, through monotonous streets with unknown names where the dust of humanity settles inert and hopeless out of the stream of life" (138-9). The story begins when Verloc is summonsed to the embassy at an early hour, and the streets reflect the subversiveness that he is about to engage in as his footsteps take him from "open thoroughfares" to a "private street": "Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr. Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, into the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms. .. .Mr. Verloc marched now along a street which could with every proprietary be described as private" (7-8). At the embassy, he is instructed to bomb Greenwich Observatory and thereby create an event so chaotic that "the very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing * Quotations from The Secret Agent (New York: Dover, 2001.)

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Part One : The City Cross Station will know something of it" (21), one that it will shatter England's liberal complacence and force the government to partake seriously in an international conference for "the suppression of political crime." The rest of the story is related in flashbacks which begin as Professor X carries his bomb through the busy streets where the unsuspecting crowds intensify the professor's isolation and magnify the nature of his activity as well as the sense of drama, all of which is reflected in the streets: Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated on his power.... He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all around him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous, like locusts, industrious ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps ... he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and dusky alley paved withflagstones.On one side the low brick houses had in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable decay —empty shells awaiting demolition [51]. In the alley, he runs into Inspector Heat, and, as good and evil come faceto-face, the setting is subdued thorough the presence of what Heat represents in terms of order versus chaos: "The blended noises of the enormous town sank down to an inarticulate low murmur" (52). The bomb is passed on to Verloc, who, after a series of deceptions to his wife, Winnie, arranged for her mentally slow brother, Stevie, whom Winnie idolizes and protects, to place the bomb at Greenwich Observatory. However, Stevie trips over a tree root just as he is about to deliver the deadly item, and he is blown to bits. All that remains for identification is the collar of his coat on which Winnie has sewn a label with his name and address for fear he should lose himself in London's busy streets. When the bomb explodes, the weather reflects the confusion in the plan and in the motive behind it, and the policeman at the scene reports: "He had seen something like a heavy flash of lighting in the fog. At that time he was standing at the door of the King William Street Lodge talking to the keeper. ...He ran between the trees towards

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The Secret Agent (1907) the Observatory" (54). The fog also affects Inspector Heat, who begins his investigation with few clues: "Starting immediately to begin his investigation on the spot, he swallowed a good deal of raw, unwholesome fog in the park" (54). The next day the newspaper reports, "Bomb in Greenwich Park.... Foggy morning.... Effects of explosion felt as far as Romney Road and Park Place unlovely and unfriendly to man" (44). Good and evil are again reflected, here in Romney Road that leads to Romney Marsh in the south, a haunt for pirates, and Park Place, symbol of peace and order. Windows may suggest the possibility of a new perspective as well as a new stage in the plot as they do in Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel. In The Secret Agent, they are used to mark the turning points in both Winnie Verloc's and Agent Verloc's lives. When Verloc thinks about the unfortunate twist of fate that led to Stevie's death, he gazes from the window of his house into a familiar yet now unreal world, one as bleak as the actions which have alienated him from society and his wife: ".. .a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stone, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man" (35). When Winnie learns of her husband's part in Stevie's death, stricken by grief and outraged by her husband's callousness, she murders him and rushes to the window: "Mrs. Verloc was a free woman. She had thrown open the window of the bedroom either with the intention of screaming Murder! Help! Or of throwing herself out.... The street, silent and deserted from end to end, repelled her by taking sides with that man who was so certain of his impunity.... Her instinct of self-preservation recoiled from the depth of the fall into that sort of slimy, deep trench. Mrs. Verloc closed the window..." (161). In fear of the gallows, Winnie rushes into the streets intending to drown herself in the River Thames. She is stopped by the Russian agent, Count Ossipon, whose help she enlists to escape to the Continent. They board a Channel train, but Ossipon becomes afraid of Winnie's mental state and of what he hears has taken place. He deserts her before the train begins its journey, taking Verloc's savings with him. Winnie ends up throwing herself into the sea. Despair, deceit, and confusion, the central themes of the story, are figured in the settings of seedy alleys and lanes, sordid houses and shady businesses, just as the crowds and the busy thoroughfares suggest the successful disclosure of duplicity by truth. 27

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G. K. Chesterton The central image in another of G.K. Chesterton's enthralling mysteries, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), is, like Josephine Bell's The Port of London Murders and Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage, the River Thames; it works in conjunction with the streets to intensify the changing psychological states of the characters. Purported to be the only eschatological detective novel in the world, The Man Who Was Thursday is "the most thrilling book that I have ever read," says Kingsley Amis in his introduction to it: The plot concerns spying, terrorism, an anarchist plot and a secret New Detective Corps organized to overthrow it.... When I first read of the phantasmorgoric suburbs of Saffron Park the strange lurid sunset that fell upon the garden there on an evening when "the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit"; and the two poets who argued about revolution and murder — how am I to put it? I was not merely hooked, I was bowled over.9 The word "hooked" that Amis uses here is a reflection of the somnambulistic quality of the mystery, itself subtitled "A Nightmare," to which, right from the beginning, the reader becomes addicted, drawn to the strange, dreamlike tale. Into this plot are woven the themes of the carnivalesque, the chase, the question of identity, the idea of good versus evil, and such aspects as crowds, gardens, open spaces versus twisting streets, and patterns of light and dark.

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The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) A garden scene opens the mystery in the suburbs of "Saffron Park" where Gabriel Syme, a member of Scotland Yard's New Detective Corps, who, like P. D. James' series detective Adam Dalgleish, is also a poet, has gone to listen to another poet, an anarchist named Lucien Gregory. This scene suggests Tennyson's nightmarish island of "The Lotos-Eaters" where the saffron blooms of the lotus blossoms produce a narcosis in those who eat them. And it is from this garden that the narrator, Syme, leaves on his strange journey. The setting is dramatic, imbued with a sense of foreboding that sets the mood for what is to follow: "When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment empty. Then he realized (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a living silence than a dead one" (16).* Syme leaves this "end of the world," as he calls it, at the invitation of the poet Gregory. From Saffron Park, Chiswick, he is ferried down the River Thames to Charing Cross, from west to east, from heaven to his own particular hell, similar to Reade's journey in Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage, moving symbolically from one side of the riverbank to the other as he crosses the border into this dangerous new territory. Syme is taken to the headquarters of the Central Anarchist Council, which is comprised of seven men, each named after a day of the week, all of whom claim to be anarchists. The headquarters is in a pub with a room that lowers itself into a cellar complete with passages that lead up to a steel chamber, the central hub and arsenal of the council. In this secret, subterranean setting, the fantasy begins when Gregory leads Syme down a series of twisting passageways and into a small, metallined room. Just before the rest of the group arrive, Gregory and Syme disclose their identities to each other but are "checkmated" because, as Syme explains: "I can't tell the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists I'm a policeman" (29). And when the anarchists do turn up a few minutes later, because Syme tells them he is a Sabatarian, they mistakenly think he has been sent by their leader, Sunday, to observe them, so he is quickly elected to replace the defunct member, Thursday. Syme explains that he is a "Sabatarian," and his mission is to make sure the rest of the members of the club properly respect this day. With his new identity as Thursday, he returns to the river, and, again, the setting ^Quotations from The Man Who Was Thursday (London: Penguin, 1986).

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Part One : The City is dramatic. The sense of carnivalesque suggests the reversal of order as he passes along a passage that brings him to the river where the setting, like the "The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown" in The Club of Queer Trades, is reminiscent of a stage and suggests the drama about to unfold. The sense of fantasy is intensified as Syme boards a boat which reminds him of "a baby dragon with one red eye" (39). Through the river, the past is brought into the present as Syme reflects on his career as a detective and his determination to topple the anarchist club. He thinks about the time when he became a member of the New Detective Corps and inducted another member masquerading as a policeman. The setting at that time was the Thames Embankment, a place of retrospect and revelation. From here, the policeman took Syme to Scotland Yard, also on the embankment, where he was made a member of the New Detective Corps: "He walked on the Embankment one under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored" (42-43). After a description of Syme's past induction into the New Detective Corp, the story returns to the present, and the moon and sun are reversed to foreshadow the inversion of death and life that Syme has avowed to effect in his disclosure of the anarchist council who pose a threat to the world of ordered existence. The new world born out of this feat is described in his boarding the tugboat on the river, and the crucial theme of the streets is introduced to become a major part of the plot as he feels as if he is stepping into a new and strangely non-human world where the bright light from the moon gives one the impression of "a dead daylight" (49). This fantastic river journey through the city comes to an end as they draw past Westminster, symbol of justice and order. The new day breaks, and Syme is animated into his new life, a cycle suggested by the comparison of the Embankment steps to the mythic aspects of an Egyptian palace and by the movement from west (Chiswick) to east, the city. He is then led by another guide to a restaurant in Leicester Square where the ringleaders of the council meet for an extended breakfast each Sunday morning. Here, Syme is taken over by a new, sinisterlooking guide. The "foreign" look of the familiar square predicts the strangeness of the men Syme is about to meet as he enters the pale sun30

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

light of Leicester Square from a narrow street, and, much like his emergence into the mystery, he feels "the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world" (54). The sense of foreignness and enclosure suggested by the idea of the square has its contrast in the very public nature of the meetings, held from a balcony overlooking the public where these six men "who had sworn to destroy the world" (61) conduct their plans. Like the band of grotesqueries in Margery Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke, they are a carnivalesque group. Including Syme's guide, "Monday" with his twisted mouth, aspects of the grotesque are present in all the members who meet here, from the incredibly obese president, "Sunday," to "Tuesday," the man with the "sad eyes of a Russian serf," the incongruity between whose body and head suggests the abnormal — a mix of the bizarre and the alien. Wednesday, with his dark beard and "crimson lips," has about him a "rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe." And Friday, appropriately named Professor de Worms, is "in the last dissolution of senile decay.... It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off" (59-60). Finally, there is Saturday, who, unlike the other grotesques, does not manifest any physical aberrations, but whose dark glasses seem more fearful than the others' almost humorous appearances and make him seem to Syme corpse-like and unfathomable. It is snowing when Syme enters upon a chase after breakfasting with the group. There are two chases in this book as there are in Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage. As in all mysteries, these chases not only create suspense and a sense of unity within the story but also represent a pursuit for order and justice. The twist here is that Syme is the pursued, being chased by the improbable Professor de Worms, who follows him with increasing speed across London, from Leicester Square to Soho to Covent Garden to Fleet Street, from Fleet Street to Ludgate Circus and around St. Paul's Cathedral, along Cheapside and finally to the river where, in a pub, the two come face to face as each shares his true identity with the other. Each stage of the chase represents a stage of recognition, beginning with Syme's question when he notices de Worms in the restaurant in Soho where he has stopped for lunch: "Can that old

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Part One : The City corpse be following me?" (74). From here on, the snow increases as the chase accelerates and reflects Syme's growing confusion: "He set off at a smart pace, twisting and twirling his stick, in the direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began to darken" (75). Reaching Fleet Street, traditionally a center of media communication, he stops at a teashop, and de Worms magically appears. Horrified, Syme rushes out into the street and catches a passing bus, but as soon as he sees de Worms is also a passenger, he jumps off and runs into an enclosed space for safety. The streets reflect his panic and confusion as he flees into one of the small courtyards off of Fleet Street and runs through the "labyrinth of little streets" (76) as he tries to evade his pursuer, turning and doubling back through the tangle of lanes and alleys. At the heart of these alleyways, Syme finds himself trapped in Red Lion Square, and from here the footsteps of his pursuer, which had until now been mu°ed by the deep layer of snow that had fallen, sound their uneven gait on the cobblestones. The chase continues, and snowy streets, in a dramatic reflection of Syme's inner chaos, suddenly open out at Ludgate Circus where St. Paul's Cathedral stands in the background as a representative of order and control—civilization. The landscape now takes on images of danger, death, and decay that reflect, for Syme, the nature of his pursuer as well as the society to which he belongs: "He really looked as if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous street he had been threading" (78). Then Syme sees the orb and cross of St. Paul's Cathedral, "symbol of faith and human valour," and the order and humanity they represent generates in him a similar feeling. From here on, Syme loses his fear and is able to assert himself, and as de Worms, with the "head of lecturer on the body of a harlequin," emerges from the alleys behind him, the chase picks up again with a certain vengeance on Syme's part and ends up in a pub by the river, several miles east from where Syme first landed. The type of pub he flees to suggests danger and the "foreign" territory he is about to explore: "This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill, round St. Paul's Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the nightmares he had ever known" (78-79). This pub is similar to the club by the docks where Sundheim takes Reade in Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage, and Reade discovers the true nature of Sundheim. Here, too, 32

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

important disclosures have been made by the time the two leave the pub. Syme is beginning to get a grasp on the situation, and the streets and snow reflect this change as the men move towards the river: "...they went out together into the dark streets by the docks. The small streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen world" (87). Another stage in the journey is marked when de Worms points across "the dim river flecked with flame," like Dante's, where the two must go the following morning to meet up with a third man, Dr. Bull. Overnight they sleep at an inn on the East India Dock Road. Here, "Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his outrageous tale" (88-89), and both men work out a secret system of communication they can share during the upcoming meeting. Then, in the "pale and tragic dawn lifting itself laboriously over London," the two "made their way across the river, which under the grey and glowing light looked as desolate as Acheron" (97), to new discoveries. Shortly after the confrontation with the third man, the story moves to France, then returns to the balcony at Leicester Square where a second, quite different chase takes place. This chase, encircling a different area of central London, lacks the solitary sinister and menacing aspects of the first. It takes place during the day, and with attendant crowds has about it a carnival air. By taxi-cabs, Syme and others chase the president of the council, the enormous Sunday, across London in a northwesterly direction up the Edgeware Road and into the zoo where, amid screaming crowds, the president kidnaps an elephant to continue his flight and sits aloft "with all the placidity of a sultan, goading the animal to a furious speed with some sharp object in his hand" (159). From the zoo, the chase continues down Albany Street and into the busy environs of Baker Street: "Through street after street, through district after district, went the prodigy of the flying elephant, calling crowds to every window, and driving traffic left and right" (161). The chase ends in Earl's Court at the Exhibition where "the enormous Wheel of Earl's Court stood up in the sky" (161). From within the "enormous crowd" the president rises and disappears into the sky in a hot air balloon. Odyssey-like, this fantastic chase has circled central London, and similarly Syme's own larger journey resumes its cyclic form as the story returns him across 33

Part One : The City the river to the suburbs to the final revelation — that what Syme has been through was a terrible nightmare born out of his concern over good and evil, and chaos and order, in relation to human behavior. In his essay "On Detective Novels," Chesterton states: "The story is like a drama of masks "10 Chesterton develops this idea in all of his detective fiction, but perhaps most profoundly in The Man Who Was Thursday where the grotesqueries of the Central Anarchist Council, along with the use of the topological features, strengthen the contrast between the bizarre and the normal to further his goal of creating order from chaos.

34

The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) by J. S. Fletcher Also involving two chases across the city is J. S. Fletcher's The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) which uses railway stations, both the Underground and terminals, as the focal points from which to project themes of time, identity, romance, and murder in the forms of poisoning, blackmail, kidnapping, and disguise. The focus is Charing Cross Station, London's main railway terminal that serves the southeast of England, where a corpse has been discovered as the first of several coincidences that will occur in the story. Other important locations in this book are the Temple, touchstone of law and order, to which the young barrister, Hetherwick, and his friend, Matherfield, return as different stages of the mystery are revealed to them, and the restaurant, where plans are made and emotions disclosed. A sense of enclosure is reflected the murder site of the Underground, which is also used as a setting where subconscious ideas are brought to light as well as a transitory device that connects stages in the plot. Houses also represent this element in the story. The hotel where the first victim's granddaughter, one of the main characters who aids Hetherwick in unraveling the mystery and becomes his romantic counterpart, is staying is contrasted with the slum tenement where the second murder victim is found, and the house where two women are held captive is a secret place made almost inaccessible by a walled garden. The story starts out on a fortuitous note as Hetherwick, by "a frac-

35

Part One : The City tion of a second" catches the tube at Sloane Square Underground Station to return to his room at the Temple after spending the evening with friends at Cadogan Gardens. At the St. James Park stop, two men, both with strangely discolored fingers, get in the compartment, and, soon after the train pulls away from the Westminster stop, one of the men falls back against his seat and dies— later found out to be poisoned. The train pulls in at Charing Cross, and, here, the second man disappears, ostensibly to find a doctor, but he doesn't return, and Hetherwick is left with a corpse and a mystery on his hands that he is determined to solve. It is found that the victim is a Mr. Hannaford, staying with his lovely granddaughter, Rhona, at a private hotel in the Strand, the West End. Hetherwick goes to meet her, and he remembers that he had seen her earlier at the Temple; thus, through the setting, she is associated with law and order, and the role she is to play as one of her grandfather's avengers, as well as the romantic interest, is established: "Hetherwick recognized this girl. He had seen her only the previous afternoon, in Fountain Court, in company with a man whom he knew slightly —Kenthwaite, a fellow-barrister.... And the girl attracted him then" (17). After leaving the hotel, Hetherwick and the policeman who accompanied him there, along with Mather field, walk along the Embankment, "speculating on the cause of Hannaford's sudden death," and by the river, they come to a realization that is marked by the striking of the clocks from nearby Fleet Street, center of media communication. The investigation is set to begin as Hetherwick and the police-inspector leave the hotel and walk up the street: "'Seems to me,' exclaimed Matherfield, suddenly, 'seems to me, Mr. Hetherwick, this is—murder!' 'You mean poison?' said Hetherwick" (16 ). Just as tomb-like images are evoked by the tube station where the secret, evil activity of murder takes place at night, so the bustling atmosphere of the great terminus of Victoria Station, with its vaulted glass roof that lets in light, is used as a daytime site where the rituals of meeting, observation, and discovery that moves the characters toward truth concerning the murder take place. One such meeting is witnessed by a Mr. Ledbitter whose "'habit,' he said, [was] 'to travel every evening from Victoria to Sutton by the 7.20 train.' As a rule he arrived at Victoria just before seven, and took a cup of tea in the refreshment room" (40). Here, he observes a meeting between a man whom he is sure is the missing 36

The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) man in the murder, the victim's companion whose photo was in the newspapers, and another man: "When I approached the bookstall, to buy some evening papers, the man I had seen in the refreshment room was standing close by. He was looking about him, but chiefly at the entrances to the big space between the offices and the platforms" (41). And it is this "other man," as Ledbitter describes him, who brings in the element of disguise and the question of identity: "...he wore an unusually large pair of blue spectacles, which completely veiled his eyes, and to end with, his throat and chin were swathed in a heavy white mu°er which covered the lower part of his face as well. Between the rim of his hat and the collar of his coat it was all mu°er and spectacles!" (42). It is also at Victoria Station that Matherfield tells Hetherwick the address of the chemist who interviewed the missing man as a prospective employee and who was, in turn, able to provide the address of this man who is found there fatally poisoned. This location, another enclosed space, reflects the evil of the murder committed therein when Matherfield tells Hetherwick of his discovery there: "Fligwood's Rents is a slum street — only a man who is very low down in the world would ever dream of renting a room there. It's a sort of alley or court on the right hand side of Gray's Inn Road, going up — some half-dozen houses on each side, let off in tenements.... And to cut things short we forced the door, and found the dead man in his bed!" (102). Another location reflective of the sordidness of murder is the nightclub, "Vivian's," where a bank note found in the dead man's wallet leads back to the club that now becomes a focal point in the passing of information for blackmail. Like the tenement, it is an enclosed place: "Candlewick Passage, unfamiliar to Hetherwick until that evening, proved to be one of the many narrow alleys that open out of St. Martin's Lane in the neighbourhood of the theatres. It wore a very commonplace, not to say, shabby complexion, and there was nothing in its atmosphere to suggest adventure or romance" (144). As its nearby location to the theatre district suggests, the "unmasking" of the murderer begins at this point when Hetherwick and Mathersfield follow a woman they think is Lady Riversreade, but who is really her twin sister, as she is leaving the club. From a taxicab the two men follow the woman past Trafalgar Square, up Edgeware Road, into Harrow Road, past Paddington Green and the Town Hall and into St. Mary's Terrace. Here, she disappears into 37

Part One : The City a block of flats and does not emerge until the next morning when she is followed by Mathersfield to Paddington Station and on to Waterloo, from where she goes to Southampton to buy a ticket for New York. It is at Waterloo—appropriately enough, on the other side of the river — where the murderer, the man who had also earlier on kidnapped Lady Riversreade and Rhona, is finally caught. The mystery returns to the setting of the railway station filled with crowds of commuters who witness the final restoration of order as the chaos and confusion of murder suggested by the underground setting of the tube station at the beginning of the mystery is now replaced by the above ground setting under the vast vaulted glass roof of the huge terminus.

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Strong Poison (1930) by Dorothy Sayers Courthouse, chemist shop, prison, and typing bureau in Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison (1930) are linked by sleuth, victim, and accused to streets, courts, passageways and embankment to create a sense of seclusion and enclosure. The story, which takes place in and around Bloomsbury, concerns the defense of Harriet Vane, who is accused of poisoning her ex-lover, Phillip Boyes, by Lord Peter Wimsey. Drawing from "The Craft of Detective Fiction," a handwritten manuscript by Dorothy Sayers, writer Robert Allen Papinchak explains the six criteria Sayers calls for in the fictional detective: "The detective must have a situation that provides him access to the police, must be available at any time, must have wide-ranging knowledge, must be physically fit, must have an equal amount of leisure time and money, must have a character rich for development and not be too old, so that he can be developed gradually in a series of books."" Wimsey fulfills these criteria; like Sherlock Holmes and the Old Man in the Corner, he is an eccentric sleuth who says, "I try to reason out a case for the love of the thing," and he stands apart from the police. He is unpaid and works solely out of interest in solving the murder, inescapably impelled to search for the truth. He also fulfills the role of the sleuth described by Lehman: "The ambiguous person of the detective is interposed between the criminal and the police, those old antagonists, and suddenly there appears to be a detached, independent point of view with which we can identify ourselves— beyond

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Part One : The City cop and robber, beyond good and evil. Not the loser but the outsider. Not the winner but the stranger. The exception, the loner."12 Wimsey first sees Vane when she appears in court and is instantly attracted to her; he visits her in prison, falls in love with her, and proposes marriage, thus setting the pace for the following Wimsey-Vane mystery novels. The story begins in the confines of a central London courthouse, a place which suggests the possible emergence of truth in the light of public inquiry, where a sense of fate along with law and order prevails as past, present, and future come together witnessed by the all-important crowd. Here, the focus is on the accused as the events of the crime are judged by the jury and mediated by the judge, promulgating and intensifying such emotions as fear, anger, hope, and despair in the case against Vane. The mention of street and square introduced by the judge raise the importance of the two locales in the plot: "Harriet Vane left Miss Marriot's house and took a small flat of her own in Doughty Street, while Philip Boyes ... accepted the invitation of his cousin, Mr. Norman Urquhart, to stay in the latter's house in Woburn Square" (7).* The trial results in a hung jury with three members believing in Harriet's innocence. One of these is Miss Climpson, the elderly spinster detective who first appeared in Unnatural Death. The enclosed space next introduced is the chemist shop which is a place of specialized knowledge, usually put to good, sometimes to evil, through the type of service it offers. It suggests the potential for life or death and elicits feelings of mystery and awe. "Harriet Vane entered the chemist's shop kept by Mr. Brown in Southampton Row and purchased two ounces of commercial arsenic, saying that she needed it to destroy rats" (8). Later, this action leads to the streets and the discovery of a death, the central theme of the story, as the judge explains the circumstances surrounding the arsenic poisoning of the murder victim: "It is suggested by the defence that Phillip Boyes may have taken the arsenic himself at some time between leaving Harriet Vane's flat and hailing the taxi in Guilford Street" (23). Another enclosed space, Holloway Prison, links the chemist shop with the secretarial office run by Miss Climpson. Holloway Prison, a woman's prison, is not in the genteel squares and streets of Bloomsbury ^Quotations from Strong Poison (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

40

Strong Poison (1930)

but in a desolate area of north London, where Wimsey meets Vane faceto-face and falls in love with her. As a place of forced incarceration, it combines dull routine and limited movement with violence, repression, and self-reflection, all of which are suggested by Wimsey's movements when he leaves as his elation is harnessed by the reality of the situation: "He walked down the dingy street with a feeling of being almost lightheaded. He paused before a shop window to get a surreptitious view of his own reflection. 'One month—four weeks—thirty-one days. There isn't much time. And I don't know where to begin'" (48). Like the streets that become the site for personal revelation, the turning point in Wimsey's self-understanding takes place on the Embankment, a place of revelation, a stage: "As the taxi lurched along the rainy Embankment, he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement—"(89). The enclosed setting that follows Holloway Prison is Miss Climpson's establishment, "ostensibly a typing bureau," but with a direct line from Miss Climpson's office to Scotland Yard. It suggests a different sort of enclosure with its sense of communication, busy work, intense relationships, cheerful routine, intrigue and subterfuge. The women who work here are alone in life. Most of them are elderly, some whose husbands have left them, some widows, and other who are not married; they are, in a sense, emotionally free and find their protector in Lord Peter Wimsey, who funds the agency and refers to the place as his "cattery," often selecting women as plants to help in his sleuthing. For instance, Miss Murchison is placed as a seemingly innocuous secretary in the office of a solicitor, a Mr. Urquart, cousin of the victim whose actions in the case seem to Wimsey to be very suspicious. Before this event takes place, the story moves from west to east when Wimsey takes Miss Murchison to the East End, to the house of a reformed burgular who gives her a set of "picklocks," so that she can open the door of Urquart's office: ".. .the taxi drew up at the entrance to a narrow court.... Wimsey steered his companion down the dirty alleyway" (141). After the meeting, "Miss Murchison found herself walking up the Whitechapel Road, with a bunch of picklocks in her pocket and some surprising items of knowledge in her mind" (148). Street and alleyway, court and tube 41

Part One : The City station, reflect the ideas of concealment and Miss Murchison's plans to use the keys and get her hands on a crucial affidavit as she waits until the head clerk, Mr. Pond, leaves for the day. "His steps pattered through the entrance, sounded again loudly as he passed the window, and died away in the direction of Brownlow Street. Miss Murchison continued typing till she calculated that he was safely on the tube at Chancery Lane" (152). But, like the reversal of the plot about to take place, Mr. Pond returns: '"How you startled me, Mr. Pond. I thought you had gone.' 'So I had,' said Mr. Pond, 'but when I got to the Underground I found I had left a little parcel behind me'" (153). The streets outside the typing bureau reflect the danger and subterfuge taking place within: "His footsteps pattered down the passage, sounded again more loudly beneath the window and for the second time died away in the direction of Brownlow Street" (155). And as Miss Murchinson listens at the window the idea of order soon to be restored is suggested in the figure of a policeman: "Was it her agitated fancy, or was that a sturdy form in dark blue emerging from Hand Court?" (157). Miss Murchison is charged with finding a crucial document that is locked away is Urquart's office. When she leaves the office in Bedford Row in the early evening, she passes through the enclosure of Hand Court and walks into the open street of Holburn. In another reversal that reflects this stage in the plot, she doubles back and comes again into Bedford Row. Here, she conceals her presence and watches Mr. Pond leave and begin his walk to Chauncery Underground Station. The coast now clear, Miss Murchison dives back into the office and retrieves the document and paves the way for the denouement. Writer Bruce Merry discusses Sayers' use of London as a setting: "Dorothy Sayers feels London as a grey, cushioning mass of prestige, politics and protection.... Sayers seems deliberately to cultivate the fertile danger of lower-class, peasant, extra-London settings [where] the slashing and killing of the victim ... is dark and broodingly violent."13 In this work, each of the settings represents a specific aspect of the mystery. Surrounded by London's lively thoroughfares, the enclosed sites of criminal court, chemist shop, prison, and typing bureau connect the settings of streets, alleys and courtyards with the drama of the mystery, and each represents specific stages in the plot, offering the possibility of a carnivalesque reversion that, in turn, reflects the nature of the sleuth in his search for truth. 42

Hangover Square (1942) by Patrick Hamilton Railway stations, namely London's Victoria Station and Brighton Station, the great terminus on the south coast, are key elements in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (1942). The two settings of city and shore in this novel as well as the painful emergence into reality of the central character, George Harvey Bone, who suffers from schizophrenia, are represented in the movements from Brighton to London: "The wheels and track clicked out the familiar and unmistakable rhythm — the sly, gentle, suggestive rhythm, unlike any of its others, of a train entering a major London terminus, and he was filled with unease and foreboding, as he always was by this sound. Thought and warmth must give place to action in cold streets— reality, buses, tubes, booking-offices, life again, electric-lit London, endless terrors" (23). Unlike the traditional Aristotelian mystery, which calls for retribution and a restoration of order, Hangover Square is, like Graham Greene's Brighton Rock> a psychological thriller. In London, Bone is controlled by his ne'er-do-well friends and the grim circumstances surrounding his sad life; in Brighton, by the sea, Bone escapes inward to his fantasy world. Bone's movements between city and coast are marked by railway stations. In London, he gets involved with a small group of losers, professional parasites who spend their days eking out an existence in their sordid flats in Earl's Court — Hangover Square — and their nights pub-crawling in the environs of this seedy neighborhood. Bone falls in

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Part One : The City love with one member of this group, a shallow self-serving woman, Netta Longford, who is an aspiring film actress. She exploits and humiliates Bone; although she is involved with another man, Peter, the "blond fascist," she derives pleasure from Bone's tormented love for her. The rational part of Bone loves Netta and humbly suffers her treatment, but the dark side of him decides to end the torment by killing her, and this creates the tension in the story. The story starts out at Hunstanton, a small coastal town where George Bone is spending Christmas with his only living relative —an aunt, whose property he hopes to inherit one day. The first time we see Bone slip into his dark side, it is here, on the coast, near the cliffs that presage the dangerous fall into his silent world. When Bone emerges from his private, secret world, he resumes his walk and passes a pier whose description reflects the shaky return to sanity that he has just accomplished, and the waves of humanity in which he will eventually drown: "The little pier, completely deserted, jutted out into the sea, its silhouette shaking against the grey waves, as though it trembled with cold but intended to stay where it was to demonstrate some principle" (8-9). Sanity returns to him just before Bone leaves Hunstanton where, at the railway station, the next stage of his journey is marked, and the water imagery is present again: "It was like bursting up into fresh air after swimming gravely for a long time in silent, green depths; the first thing of which he was aware was the terrific sustained hissing noise coming from the engine which was to take him back to London.... There was the sea. This was a seaside town on the east coast. It was all right; it was clear in his head again" (10-11). He returns to the conscious world of sanity and truth, as the final image of the sea suggests, and the empty sea front reflects his suffering: "He listened to the gentle purring of the sea, and waited for the train to start, his red face and beer-shot eyes assuming an expression of innocent vacancy and misery" (12). As the train takes him back to his sordid life of booze and humiliation at the hands of his "friends" in London, he relives this, his most recent journey into his quiet aquatic world, and the image of cliff and sea are present: "When did it start, anyway? How long had he been "under"?.... It must have been when he was walking along the cliff. Yes, he was sure of it. He could see himself. He could almost hear it happening in his head, as he walked along the cliff and looked out towards 44

Hangover Square (1942) the sea. Snap" (14). When his train draws into London, the platform becomes a stage on which life must be entered, and Bone panics, seemingly addressing both selves as the image of the swimming bath and the reality of the station combine : "Oh, dear! — here we were — here was the platform under the huge roof— hollow, hellish echoing noises as in a swimming bath, and the porters lined up for the attack — no getting out of it now! Foreboding gave place almost to panic" (23). But he is reassured by the city outside whose lights are "shining out with brilliant friendliness like bottles in a chemist's shop" although "chemist" suggests a sickness that is soon to be proved as Bone becomes a voyeur when he goes to Earl's Court and stands in the street outside Netta's apartment house looking up at her windows. Part Six moves to Brighton where the sea signals a movement into his dark world : "He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that the dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst torn clouds of rain" (171). As he moves along the front, the setting reflects his state of mind, and he tries to articulate his situation, moving deeper and deeper into his own self until he loses all sense of outward reality. His personal odyssey is matched by the topography he traverses on this important journey that marks the turning point from where he makes his decision to murder Netta. As he walks from Brighton to Portslade, Bone plans his double murder, and the King Edward Peace statue that he notices marks his own private war. This long walk is similar to the one he takes when he returns to London and compares the sordidness of the scenery with Netta herself, and the "aura that she once gave off— that appalling field of magnetic influence — no longer irradiated from her flat ... but was spread out into the entire hateful neighbourhood" (234). Here, in London, Netta falsely promises Bone she will meet him in Brighton and become his lover, but hope turns to dust and Brighton a place of disillusion when she doesn't turn up. This broken promise marks the nadir in Bone's life. The description of the train and its entry into the tawdry Mecca of Brighton foreshadows the tragedy, and the poster advertising a dramatic farce that greets him as he disembarks seems a cruel pun of his own life. While he waits for Netta in Brighton, he realizes that she has fooled him again. He returns to London and drowns Netta in her bathtub and kills "the blond fascist," Peter, by clubbing him with a golf club as war is declared over the radio by Neville 45

Part One : The City Chamberlain. With thread purchased from an Earl's Court draper, he winds a huge net over the rooms of Netta's flat, a net that not only suggests the net wound around him by Netta, but also the net of madness from which his own mind finds it more and more difficult to escape, and the entrapment of the streets that surround him. The weary Bone now make his last journey. In a dreamlike state, he walks from London to the suburb of Maidenhead, which represents for Bone the unachievable ideal and the future. As we learn earlier, it is also, for him, a place of safety, relief and sanity: "Maidenhead! Tonight! Peace! A thrill ran through him such as he had never quite felt before" (195). But when he finally reaches the town, his ideals turn into an unacceptable reality, so, alone and confused, Bone rents a shabby room and takes his life because "[o]f course, if Maidenhead let him down there was only one thing he could do, because that would be the end of all things" (305). Railway stations serve as the links between the physical stages of the story as well as the stages in Bone's mental anguish as his schizophrenia intensifies.

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The Ministry of Fear (1943) by Graham Greene Notions of guilt, betrayal, deceptions, the puzzling search for meaning and for self-knowledge dominate The Ministry of Fear (1943) much of which is drawn from Greene's own experiences in the Secret Service: "In the winter of 1941 I found myself on a small Elder-Demster cargo ship in the North Atlantic, part of a slow convoy bound by a roundabout route for West Africa. I had been recruited into the Secret Service, commonly known as M. I. 6. or S. I. S., by my sister Elisabeth."14 The Ministry of Fear is, Greene says, "my favourite among what I call my 'entertainments.'"15 The story is set in London during the Blitz of World War II when life became the stuff for thrillers, and, like John Lawton's Blackout and E. C. R. Lorac's Murder by Matchlighu it involves all the key elements of an urban thriller along with the added drama of the blackout, bombings, and the heightened tension of a city under invasion. Greene describes his connection with the setting: I think too the atmosphere of the blitz is well conveyed.... In those days London had been a cluster of villages— one hardly ever wandered to distant places like Hampstead, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, though some people would go for a quiet weekend to St. John's Wood. My own village was bounded on the south by New Oxford Street, on the north by Euston Road, on the East by Gordon Square, on the west by Gower Street. The author of The Napoleon of Notting Hill [Chesterton] would have loved those days, and so in a sense did I.... While I wrote the Ministry of 47

Part One : The City Fear far away in West Africa, a little of the love crept, I think, into the book.16 All of central London is involved in this work as the story moves from Bloomsbury to Chancery Lane, from Camden Hill to Hyde Park Corner, from Paddington to Chelsea, and finally ends up in Battersea. Bridges, the Chelsea Embankment, railway stations, twisting streets, busy thoroughfares, parks and open boulevards are all as vital to the plot as the central character, lonely, gentle, and depressed Arthur Rowe, who enabled his sick wife to die in a mercy killing for which he spent twenty years in prison. With the idea of imprisonment comes the question of escape. Although Rowe has been let out of prison he is still very much imprisoned by the past. He desperately wants to "escape" his guilt, and in this sense, as well as in the mystery line itself, Rowe may be seen, paradoxically, as an escapist who is searching for the truth. David Lehman discusses this aspect of the book: ...a portrait of the escapist is, then, a person with a past who fears damnation. The narrative is his purgatory.... [It] is a parable of conscience and mercy set in a London that remains in significant ways unchanged from the urban Edwardian fairyland that Chesterton invokes and praised in The Club of Queer Trades and the Father Brown stories. The Ministry of Fear designates a purely metaphorical zone, a sinister funhouse of mirrors and illusions, where a charity bazaar may be the front for a spy ring and a cake ... their chosen vehicle for smuggling secrets—.17 There is also a sense of the carnivalesque throughout this work. The setting for the carnival is the street and marketplace, and in the mystery genre, the idea of the square, a place of public enclosure compared to the streets as places of public movement, both of which offer free congress, is intensified and is also central to the theme of the literary carnivalesque. In The Spirit of the Carnival, David Danow explains: The carnivalesque employs the familiar topoi of the marketplace (plaza) as setting, the sense of feast (fiesta), of music and celebration, the drawing of an immense crowd, resulting in general hilarity and excitement.... The role of the marketplace or central squarefiguresinherently as a prin-

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The Ministry of Fear (1943) cipal feature of the carnivalesque. As such, the primary role inspires further consideration of a "poetics of the street" in acknowledgment of that place where virtually anything can happen, and often does happen. The street is a real life stage upon which the most unexpected drama may be enacted, including the drama of carnival. On the individual plane, the street is where, potentially, one's fortune and destiny are ultimately played out. As part of the public domain, the street is also the stage for public demonstration.18 The mystery begins on a note of carnivalesque reversal when Rowe, who is out for a walk, quite spontaneously drops in on a fete in progress in Bloomsbury Square where the idea of a psychological imprisonment is suggested: "There was something about a fete which drew Arthur Rowe irresistible, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock knock of wooden balls against coconuts" (11).* When Rowe decides pass through the gate and into the square where the fete is taking place, the action also marks his entry into a series of terrifying events: "He couldn't believe that when he had passed the gate and reached the grass under the plane trees nothing would happen, though now it wasn't a girl he wanted or a magic ring, but something far less likely — to mislay the events of the past twenty years. His heart beat and the band played... " (13). Here, the carnivalesque elements of the fete suggest the reversal that is about to take place and, as we later find out, the inversion of the norm, for this carnival is not the site of innocent enjoyment but rather a place where a group of conspirators, part of the Fifth Column, traitors to the crown, have disguised themselves to continue their activities. The group includes an unctuous clergyman who is, ironically, running a gambling booth, an old woman in charge of the treasure hunt, and a fortune teller. The treasure hunt suggests the chase that Rowe is about to engage upon across London with a very different treasure at its conclusion, and the suggestion of the fortune-teller's booth as a lavatory reflects the sordid nature of the traitor masquerading as a fortune-teller. Rowe wins a fruit cake in a ra°e, the weight of which he correctly guesses because the fortune-teller has whispered the numbers to him thinking, mistakenly, that he is her contact. Inside the cake is a note which is crucial to the traitors' plans. Rowe takes the cake home, ^Quotations from The Ministry of Fear (New York: Penguin, 1978). 49

Part One : The City and the chase begins as members of the Fifth Column try to retrieve the note in a series of episodes of escalating violence that is paralleled by Rowe's own search for the missing years. Eventually the two merge for Rowe as both become a search for truth. These episodes begin when a stranger visits Rowe in his room after he has won the cake and tries to poison him. The next morning his rooming house is bombed, and Rowe escapes and goes to a seedy detective agency to find out who is behind the attempt on his life and why. His next step in this discovery is to go to the war relief office, which has been in charge of the fete where he won the cake. Here he meets the woman he is to fall in love with, Anna Hilfe, and her brother, Willi, who runs it. Willi takes Rowe to the fortune-teller's house, ostensibly to help him find out about the attempt on his life. During a séance held there, the man sitting next to Rowe is stabbed to death with Rowe's knife, so Rowe is led to believe. Rowe panics and hides out in a hotel which is bombed; he wakes up in a nursing home, suffering from amnesia that has blotted out all of his adult memories. While he is here, he witnesses some events that convince him to escape, which he does, going to Scotland Yard to confess the murder of the man at the séance. The police hand him over to counter-intelligence who tell him the murder was a fraud staged to drive him into hiding, and the nursing home is a front for Fifth Column activities. Rowe also learns the secret about the cake — that it contains a secret film of British documents taken by Nazi agents. He also discovers that Willi is actually the head of the Fifth Columnists. Rowe chases him and confronts him in the washroom of a railway station where Willi shoots himself after he explains to Rowe the final part of his slowly returning memory, which is that he killed his wife to put her out of pain. Rowe remembers, and suffers, once more, the guilt which he was temporarily relieved of through his involvement in the mystery. The idea of the streets reflecting the desolation that Rowe feels inside and the gaps in his memory that he tries so desperately to fill is suggested in the description of streets round Bloomsbury Square which sets the mood of the story and reflects the same sense of loss that Matthew Arnold expressed in the last lines of "Dover Beach": "the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingled beach" (11). In Campden Hill, Rowe attends the séance at the house of Mrs. Bellair, the fortune-teller, where he has been invited by the traitors in the

50

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

hopes of getting back the cake and its secret message; the house is old and in disrepair and stands in a run-down garden with broken statuary. When he rings the doorbell a sense of death pervades the scene: "...you seemed to hear the sound pursuing the human inhabitants into back rooms as though what was left of life had ebbed up the passageways" (51). During the séance, the city intrudes as a warning that murder is about to take place: "Very far away a taxi-horn cried through an empty world" (57). Rowe's crucial odyssey, one that will forever change him as well as uncover the truth about the Fifth Column and the meaning behind the Ministry of Fear, begins when he goes underground at the advice of a treacherous couple from the group who have masqueraded as his friends: "Rowe was exhausted and frightened; he had made tracks half across London while the nightly raid got under way" (51). And the streets he passes through as well, and the faces he sees, reflect his own mental exhaustion: "An umbrella shop was burning at the corner of Oxford Street; in Wardour Street he walked through a cloud of grit; a man with a grey dusty face leaned against a wall" (63). He finds a flop house and, there, as he dreams of his mother, the streets, again, are used as metaphors for his own psychic disintegration and his loss of innocence, and the past history of London, which is suggested in the historic buildings, seems to merge with his own past: "I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St. Clement's—the bells of St. Clement's. They've smashed that — St. James, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime..." (65). Public eating houses usually suggest places where the characters come to some kind of terms, either with their inner conflicts or with the truth, as we have seen in several works including Emma Orczy's The Old Man in the Corner, whose eponymous hero unravels his own theories of London crimes in another ABC café, but the ABC cafe in Clapham High Street that Rowe visits is devastated by war and offers no such aspect: "Boards had taken the place of windows and the top floor had gone" (69). But a short while later, Rowe is at another eatery, a Lyons in Oxford Street which is quite different, untouched by the bombing. Here, Rowe makes a decision: to get in touch with an old acquaintance, Henry. This crucial decision marks a transition in the story as Rowe crosses the river

51

Part One : The City to the south side of London: He catches a bus from Piccadilly which takes him on a strange odyssey through the war ravaged streets of London which he likens to a battle line: "It was an odd front line that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of peace. Battersea, Holborn, the East End, the front line curled in and out of them..." (81). When he reaches Henry's house in Battersea, a new perspective is offered him: "The stairs were at the back of the flats looking towards Chelsea, and as you climbed above the second floor and your view lifted, the war came back into sight. Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks, and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn't been any slums" (81). This new perspective is strengthened by carnivalesque note of reversal as Rowe watches a funeral procession attended by Henry that "moved like a little dark trickle towards the river" (86). Like the café, the Embankment becomes a site for retrospection where Rowe considers suicide: "He walked along the embankment towards Chelsea Bridge; the tide was low and the seagulls walked delicately on the mud" (87). But it is also a place of revelation, for, at this point in the story, another stage, linked by the bridge, is about to unfold. He meets a stranger, Mr. Fullove, himself a Beckett-like character with rotting teeth who puts breadcrumbs on the top of his old hat for the birds, a figure who seems familiar and who leads him into yet another carnivalesque scene. His name, his occupation as a buyer and seller of old books on landscaping, and the sense of history linked with it as well his ignorance of "present time," all suggest a sense of renewal, of hope, a recovery of the past, a link with nature, which he fulfills when he takes Rowe into the countryside, a trip which offers Rowe yet another perspective. Rowe's meeting with Fullove represents kind of carnivalesque reversal, for at this point in the story Rowe decides to become actively involved in finding out what is happening; he becomes a searcher rather than a victim: "I'm not afraid. I only want to know " From now on, Rowe's life takes on a purpose as he actively investigates the criminal minds and actions of the Fifth Column. "By an act of imagination," says David Lehman, "the sleuth becomes the culprit's double, and his reconstruction of the crime is like the recollection of a repressed trauma during a psychoanalytic session."19 Rowe's search turns into an odyssey through London which comes to a close as he returns from Battersea to Paddington. In an interview 52

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

for Newsweek, mystery writer P. D. James says "setting and theme must be as one,"20 and in this work the undercurrents of deceit, desolation, and decay that the streets suggest parallels not only with the confusion brought about by Rowe's amnesia but also with the paranoia and perfidy of the Fifth Column. The plot moves through a series of carnivalesque reversals linked by bridges from places of secrecy, such as Mrs. Bellair's house and the detective agency, to places of revelation such as the Embankment and cafés, towards a final disclosure of truth.

53

Murder by Matchlight (1945) by E. C. R. Lorac Park and rooming-house are the settings used by E. C. R. Lorac in Murder by Matchlight (1945) which also takes place during the blackouts of World War II. The story begins when Bruce Maillag, an analytical chemist, is sitting on a bench in Regent's Park one cold and rainy November evening: "Standing in the darkness of war-time London on a moonless night, Bruce Maillag conjured up the shout of the park-keepers in peace-time: 'All Out! All Out!' Ghostly echoes of their call seemed to come to him now from the blackness beyond the lake. It was a very dark night" (5).* Bruce Maillag watches as a stranger draws near through the shadows and disappears beneath the footbridge. Almost immediately, another stranger appears on the bridge and stops to light a match, the flame of which throws into dramatic relief a grotesque face peering into the darkness beyond his own. Darkness falls again as the match dies, and Maillag hears a thud and the sound of a body falling on the ground. Starting from only one clue — a set of bicycle tracks that end halfway across the bridge's footpath — Chief Inspector Macdonald from Scotland Yard is brought in to find out the identity and solve the murder of "the man on the bridge" amid related themes of disguise, illusion and the carnivalesque, and, in his quest for the truth, he mingles with scientists, vaudeville actors, and doctors. After Macdonald views the corpse in the morgue, he is intrigued, for " [sjomething about John Ward ^Quotations taken from Murder by Matchlight (New York: Dover, 1988).

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Murder by Matchlight (1945) interested the Chief Inspector." When he goes back to the scene of the murder in Regent's Park, the streets reflect the mystery, the dormant evil that will soon be exposed, and as death is suggested by the image of the shroud that covers the city, so truth is suggested in the image of the church and the open space in front of it: "The night was immensely dark and the streets were deserted; the buses were no longer running and not a single car was in sight as the Chief Inspector crossed the wide roadway opposite Marylebone Parish Church. London was silent, with a silence which had no quality of peacefulness: in its shroud of darkness the place seemed tense, uneasy, as though waiting for the first banshee howl of sirens which seemed a fitting accompaniment to the listening darkness" (21). The park becomes a place where truths emerge through public revelations. Twice, Inspector Macdonald returns here to reenact the murder scene as it was related to him by Bruce Maillag, once with the help of a Civil Defense man who is bicycling past and the second time with three of his own men and Maillag. In the misty darkness, the matchlight and the flashing torch give the scene a film-like quality similar to Margery Allingham's London settings. When Macdonald goes to an address in Notting Hill Gate that is found on the dead man's identification card, the streets reflect the inspector's retrospection and the grim nature of his business just as the description of them intensifies the sense of mystery through images of darkness and death "slashed" by the traffic lights: "[He] was soon driving westwards along the empty darkness of Marylebone Road — a darkness slashed by the incredible brightness of the traffic lights shining out at the road junctions ahead. Belfort Grove had the same quality as every other London street in the blackout: it seemed completely blank and dead, as though it were impossible that cheerful normal human beings could live and move behind the dead façade of blackened houses" (26). The people who live in this house in Notting Hill are carnivalesque figures, connected in various ways to stage and film, as actors, illusionists, and vaudevillians such as Mr. and Mrs. Rameses, who are conjurors and illusionists; the playwright, Mr. Carrington; and a chorus girl named Odette. Together, they reflect the sense of surrealism that has been developing throughout. Some of them play crucial roles in helping Macdonald solve the mystery and, in doing so, represent the carnivalesque reversal at this stage in the plot. Macdonald is intent on establishing the 55

Part One : The City real identity of the dead man. He learns, by going to John Ward's previous residence, now bombed, that the dead man had actually taken the identity card of a victim of the bombing and was masquerading under his name. Concurrently, the change of setting, from North West London, Notting Hill, over the river to South East, Camberwell, reflects this switch in identity. Railway stations are also used as places of communication and revelation in this work. At St. Paneras, Maillag recognizes a voice he heard in the park on the night of the murder as that of a Doctor Ross Lane, who was walking his dog and asked to help at the scene. Dr. Lane says, when Maillag brings him up to date with what's been happening concerning the mystery: " The whole thing has too much of what the youngsters of to-day call 'pattern-making' in it. The story begins with a telephone conversation overheard in St. Paneras Station: it goes on with the murder of a man unknown to any other of the participants. The next installment is a chance meeting between two of the witness, previously unknown to one another, also in the purlieus of St. Paneras Station'" (46). In terms of plot and understanding the movements of the victim, the station is also important, as Macdonald says: "why did a man who lived in the Notting Hill district go to St. Paneras Station to put a telephone call through at 10.30 in the morning?" (65). And in establishing the real identity of this victim, Macdonald questions the film script writer, Carrington, an acquaintance of the dead man whose acknowledgment that he knew the coincidence of the man's real name arising takes place at a station and who tells him he went to Padding Station snack bar where he fell into conversation with two men: "Has it ever occurred to you that you get told some marvelous stories at railway stations? There's something about a station and a train journey which makes a certain type confidential to a degree" (71-72). The beginning of the denouement is announced by an air raid siren as Macdonald goes back to Notting Hill with Constable Booker in a type of epic journey similar to the ones described in Chesterton's mysteries. It marks a return to the truth to be found at the rooming-house as it moves from east to west, "along Bircage Walk, past Buckingham Palace and up Constitution Hill" where "it seemed that they were alone in the world — not a car on the road and nothing to break the blackness save the blur of a searchlight hazed by the London mist" (107-8). At Marble 56

Murder by Matchlight (1945) Arch they move into the Bayswater Road and become lost in "the dark maze of streets near Notting Hill before arriving at the rooming-house as the wail of the air raid sirens begins "in hideous cacophony" (107-8). Here, during the air raid, Mr. Rameses tells them that his mask and trick bicycle were stolen by Carrington, the scriptwriter, who is also a tenant in the house. With this information, Inspector Macdonald is able to pin the murder on Carrington who stole these items to hide his identity and footprints when he killed his victim in the park. Like Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and John Lawton's Black Out, wartime London with its blackouts and sirens, lends a heightened sense of danger and contingency to the story in which the assumed safety of the house and park under bombing attacks is reversed, a reversal that reflects the inversion of murder from good to evil.

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Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) by R. T. Campbell A sense of enclosure represented through the streets and houses is the prevailing theme in R. T. Campbell's Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) where narrow streets, the back room of a small bookstore that deals in pornography, and a cellar reflect a similar kind of spiritual entrapment of those who deal in the printed materials that are found in these hidden places. The story begins when a young botanist named Max Boyle decides to visit just one more bookshop after a self-indulgent shopping spree among the bookshops around the Tottenham Court Road and finds himself outside "a curious little shop in a side-street" in an area he describes as "dismal bohemia" which introduces the idea of the carnivalesque that foreshadows the reversal of order and chaos about to unfold. Inside the bookstore, he finds in the back room, which has been locked from the outside, two dead men, the owner, Alan Leslie, and Cecil Baird, both ostensibly asphyxiated from the fumes of a small gas ring, although he notices that their heads have been bashed in and that the room is bolted from the outside. As the bodies are being removed from the bookstore, a crowd assembles and signifies the search for truth about to take place. What ensues is a hunt for the murderer of these two men. It is taken on by Max Boyle and his flat mate, John Stubbs, an elderly Scottish professor who is also a botanist, and Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop of Scotland Yard. As they follow the clues through the London bookshops and print emporia, taking the reader along with

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Bodies in a Bookshop (1946)

them, these men disclose a world of pornography, blackmail, and theft of rare books. The "wrongness" that is suggested in the opening lines that describe the bookshop as being on "the wrong side" of Tottenham Court Road foreshadows the discovery of the murder victims, and a sense of entrapment is suggested in Max's frantic search for help which leads him to an alley and a telephone: "I didn't know what to do. Then I remembered that, down one of the sides of the shop, there ran an alley, with its mouth in Charlotte Street. The Charlotte Street end being wider than that in Wesley Street, a thoughtful post-office had erected a public telephone. I ran down the alley" (11).* Alan Leslie's elderly niece comes to the scene of the murder. In her carnivalesque appearance, she represents peripeteia, a reversal of order, and appears regularly throughout the story as a reminder of this. A hint that Miss Wright might be holding the answer to the mystery is in her name as well as the key, the "chatelaine" that she wears, which is mentioned several times, and in the dead birds and artificial fauna displayed on her hat, which suggest a perversion of nature that is reflected in the pornography dealt in by her nephew: "It seemed to have been the recipient not only of a harvest offering, but of the morgue of the ornithological department of the Zoo—feathers of love birds and wings of ortlans disported themselves among bunches of artificial wheat, cherries and various flowers that never were seen on a wayside or in a woodland" (23). Chief Inspector Bishop looks through the bookstore for clues and discovers a batch of letters—all orders for pornographic and stolen books. The idea of blackmail as a reason for the murders comes to mind, and as the three men leave the bookstore the mention of madness and murder furthers the theme of reversal of order: "Since we were on the fringe, the lunatic fringe, of the sordid bohemia, I suggested we should go slumming and visit one of their pubs. I felt pretty doubtful about taking the old man anywhere. The last time I'd taken him out for an evening's quiet drinking we had walked straight into a murder" (29). When they meet up again, it is at Scotland Yard, overlooking the Thames Embankment, where Chief Inspector Bishop reflects on the situation * Quotations from Bodies in a Bookshop (New York: Dover, 1984). 59

Part One : The City and determines to find out about the bookseller's contacts who include three other men. The four of them, all involved in some form of printing, become the focus for the search for truth. The first one to be scrutinized is the bookseller, Ronald Hunter, who lives near Russell Square, another enclosed space. As the inspector and his assistants drive there to confront him, imminent change is signaled in the near collision and the conflict described between man and nature when the inspector spots a squirrel and draws the driver's attention to it. They stop at a public place, a restaurant, where Professor Stubbs explains the mystery: ".. .he also had a large postal business as a purveyor of pornographic literature and, we believe, was also a dealer in stolen books— not ordinary stolen books, mind you, but really rare stuff— Elizabethan Quartos, incunabula and so on"(35). From what is revealed at this public setting, the three are able to establish the innocence of the first suspect. The next stop for the three men is at another public place, the professor's club, where more truths come to light, one in the form of a phone call by Chief Inspector Bishop confirming Mr. Hunter's alibi. Other details concerning the murders as related by Bishop are explained in this setting before the three move on to question the next suspect, Mr. Henry Gray, the art dealer, in his offices in St. James' Street. Towards the end of the conversation, during which Gray explains his dealings with the dead bookseller, Mr. Ellis Read, another man on the suspect list, arrives. Just before his arrival, the carnivalesque is brought into the conversation as Gray mentions Alan Leslie's strangely attired niece, suggesting, again, a reversal of order: "Extraordinary old bird she was. With a hat like a haystack, an ostrich feather boa, and an umbrella with an enormous nobbly head clutched to her bosom" (51). Mr. Read's place of work is in a cellar in Marchmont Street. It seems as if each man's nature is reflected in his workplace, and the escalating sordidness of each intensifies the plot. After leaving Mr. Gray's premises, the trio moves on to the abode of the other link in the mystery, a man called Charles Hume, who is a fence for stolen books. This man turns out to be the real criminal, and the seedy area of Fulham and the World's End where he lives is reflective of his own sick nature: "Out beyond the World's End we turned up a narrow street and drew up outside a small bookshop" (58.) When the three men arrive and Mr. Hume responds to the callers, danger is marked 60

Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) by the noise of the doorbell ("a tinny bell jangled") and the carnivalesque by mention of Edward Lear and his "great book of parrots." Hume himself emerges from below ground level, maggot-like in appearance and nature, suggesting decay, and his skullcap a reminder of death. With his large round head covered with a black skull cap, his smooth face devoid of eyelashes and eyebrows, his appearance is reminiscent of Chesterton's grotesques in The Man Who Was Thursday. The next day, Max and Professor Stubbs travel to Streatham, to the home of the late Alan Leslie and his niece, Miss Wright, and the streets become shabbier as the search for the pornographic material gains momentum. On Allery Street, the houses "have an air of decayed gentility, faintly reminiscent of those shops where distressed gentlewomen sell the most appalling objects, made from indescribably hairy wool and sealing wax" (69). Here, the sense of decay is furthered in the rare pornographic literature Max finds hidden inside a volume with a piece of paper with the word "Hume" written in "Leslie's untidy hand" (70). Miss Wright makes another appearance when Max and Professor Stubbs go to Scotland Yard to meet with Chief Inspector Bishop. Like the impending chaos, her eccentric appearance has also become more pronounced, as Max observes: "I could have sworn that several more birds of the air and fruits of the field had come to rest on her hat since I had last seen her in it..." (89). While the men are there, Hume is brought in to the Yard for questioning, and, again, his worm-like appearance is mentioned as he avows he was only minding books for Alan Leslie: "He looked rather flabby, and not too clean for a man of about fifty odd. His face, as I have said, was as hairless as a baby's bottom" (99). It turns out that Hume hires a pickpocket, Bert Gorman, to steal rare books that Hume asks to look at in certain bookstores. Hume and later Gorman both confess to book thefts and are cleared of murder. The idea of the enclosed setting intensifies as the plot gathers speed, and the next stop is a cellar in Marchmont Street back in the West End where the circle begins its completion as the men confront a bookseller who is also mixed up in the ring: "We wandered up Marchmont Street. Near the top we found Ellis Read's cellar. We had to descend a narrow stone staircase into the basement" (116). From this subterranean setting Max is able to begin to understand the puzzle, and the denouement proceeds.

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Part One : The City An important final stage in the mystery occurs soon after and begins with a plunge into the Underground station at Leicester Square as Max suddenly decides to visit Miss Wright in Streatham. It is an impulsive decision, as Max admits: "It didn't occur to me until I was approaching her house that Miss Wright might not be in" (126). She is, though, and the description of the inside of her house is an extension of her own carnivalesque self which, in turn, reflects the reversal in the plot and the approach of the denouement. He rings the doorbell and hears the clanking of Miss Wright's chatelaine as she approaches. She leaves him alone in a room where the windows are draped with heavy curtains and the tables covered with glass domes under which rest stuffed birds and artificial fruit, all before magically reappearing. Upon his departure, Miss Wright makes Max a gift of some books that he had been interested in the day he discovered the bodies in the bookstore, and she gives him the key to the store so that he can pick them up. He returns the following day with Professor Stubbs to return the key to Miss Wright, and she explains how her uncle Alan Leslie was being blackmailed by Baird and shows the men the note : "It was nothing less than a signed confession that he [Alan Leslie] had been dealing in stolen books over a period of some years" (142). In contrast to the restaurant, park, and Embankment as places of revelation, an almost overpowering sense of claustrophobia permeates this mystery, from the gas-filled office in the bookstore at the beginning, to the book vendor's cellar, and the house in Streatham. Each site houses its own particular aberration, from traders in pornography, to the grotesque book vendor and carnivalesque figures like Miss Wright, all of whom suggest a perversion of nature compared to the pursuit of botany by the narrator.

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More Workfor the Undertaker (1949) by Margery Allingham Patterns of dark and light in street and park reflect themes of confusion and illumination in Margery Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker (1949) where the weather plays an important part in the plot development. No other mystery writer uses the changes of weather to advance and emphasize aspects of the plot as effectively or consistently as Margery Allingham. In this mystery the rain is a dominant motif and is used each time an understanding comes to light that moves the story towards its denouement. Crowds are also crucial here and represent a desire for truth, and Allingham's use of the carnivalesque is tied in with the question of identity. The story is set in fictitious Apron Street, in Bayswater, overlooking Hyde Park and involves murder, suicide, romance, gambling, and embezzlement. It concerns the Palinodes, a family of elderly eccentrics, intellectuals who have seen better times and now rent rooms in the large mansion Portminster Lodge which used to be their family home. After the suspicious deaths of two members, Ruth and Edward, the family now consists of three remaining elderly Palinodes, Lawrence, Evadne, and Jessica, and their young niece, Clytie White, who lives with them at Portminster Lodge. Also living at the house is an elderly but sprightly ex-actress, Renee Roper, who is old friend of Albert Campion, the story's amateur sleuth. Renee Roper bought the house from the Palinodes and now works for them as landlady and housekeeper. Two other people

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Part One : The City who live at Portminster Lodge are a retired major and a close friend of the housekeeper who is an ex-vaudevillian. Associated with the family are the charwoman, Mrs. Love, and Clytie's boyfriend, Mike Dunning. The sub-plot concerns an undertaker, Jas. Bowels, who lives on Apron Street with his son; the two of them are described as "a couple of provincial comics" (121).* They run an illegal business in smuggling wanted criminals out of the country, after doping them so that they take on a corpse-like appearance. The coffins they smuggle these criminals in are described as "conjuring cabinets" because of their intricate design. The head of the smuggling ring is the local bank manager, Henry James. He takes care of the Palinode family's finances and is aware of the great value of some shares, thought to be worthless, that Ruth held in a mining company. It turns out that he is slowly killing the Palinodes off in order to get his hands on these shares. He does this by poisoning the glass of sherry the family member traditionally drinks with him. The two plots are connected through the poisoning death of Ruth Palinode, a compulsive gambler who placed her bets with Jas. Bowels. The story opens with the crowd as Chief Inspector Stanilous Oates and Albert Campion make their way through the "main stream of bustling shoppers" in Kensington. The park, a place of revelation, is where they walk next, and it is here that Campion sees for the first time two members of the Palinode family. First, he catches sight of Miss Jessica Palinode, the third sister, whose appearance is similar to the eccentric Miss Wright's in Bodies in a Bookshop, sitting on a bench. The description of her suggests the carnivalesque and foreshadows the reversal of order soon to take place: Her small squat form was arrayed in an assortment of garments of varying length, and as she sat with her knees crossed she revealed a swag of multi-coloured hems festooned across a concertina'd stocking. At a distance her shoe appeared to be stuffed with grass. Wisps of it sprouted at every aperture, including one at the toe. It was warm in the sun but she wore across her shoulders something which might once have been a fur, and although her face was hidden Campion could see elf-locks peeping from under the yellowing folds of an ancient motoring veil of the button-on-top variety. Since she wore it over a roughly torn square of Quotations from More Work for the Undertaker (London: Penguin, 1963). 64

More Work for the Undertaker (1949) cardboard placed flat on her head the effect was eccentric and pathetic, in the way that little girls in fancy dress are sometimes so [15]. Stanilous Oates tells Campion who the woman is and then asks him to help in the mystery of Jessica Palinode's brother, Edward; he was assumed to have committed suicide, but the recent emergence of anonymous poison-pen letter suggests someone in the household might have poisoned him. After declining Inspector Oates' request, Campion takes off across the park and reaches the top of a rise from which his sweeping perspective, seen through his pocket telescope, is shared with the reader. His vision closes in on the distant figure of Jessica Palinode in much the same way he will soon focus on the mystery surrounding her family. As he watches her, two other characters from the mystery enter the scene, the niece Clytie White and her boyfriend, Mike, and are careful to avoid Miss Palinode. Campion is intrigued by what he has seen. As he leaves the park, the reader is left with the idea of truth which is suggested by the crowds: "He turned once more and walked over the tussocks to the carriageway and the gates, beneath whose squat arches he could see the confetti of the traffic strewing by. He was uneasy" (21). Soon after this incident, when he is almost on the verge of accepting the governership of a distant country, Campion changes his mind and decides to look into the Palinode case after reading a note sent to his cockney manservant, Magersfontein Lugg. The letter comes from Lugg's brother-in-law, the undertaker, Jas. Bowels, who has been charged with the exhumation of Edward Palinode's body. Campion moves into the Palinode home, and the first evening he goes to meet with his old friend, the housekeeper, in the basement. In this subterranean setting, he realizes with a strong sense of premonition how evil the idea of poisoning is when he listens to Renee explain the situation. The streets are a key element and function with the states of weather and the crowds to enhance and further the plot. The layout of Apron Street is crucial to the plot and characters alike. It is narrow, complete with a mews. A mews often represents a place where evil takes place; for instance, the serial killer in The Glass Cage lives in a London mews. Next to this mews live the undertaker and his son: "Their little house sat secret and smug as a tomb, and the arched entrance to the mews was a black yawn beside it" (217). Apron Mews is the place where Clytie's boyfriend, 65

Part One : The City Mike, comes close to death when he is knocked unconscious after discovering one of the criminals that Jas. Bowels is getting ready to smuggle out of the country hiding in a loft where he keeps his motorbike. At one end of Apron Street is a small theater that suggests the drama of the mystery and the theme of carnivalesque; at the other end stands the Palinode house, Portminster Lodge. Between are a wonderful collection of businesses including the undertaker's, the bank and a pub on one side and a grocer's, dairy, coal office, doctor's office, greengrocer's and chemist shop on the other. Each of these establishments has a function in the plot. When Campion begins to search for clues to unravel the mystery, the streets are described accordingly: "He came out into the misty sunlight of the autumn morning and stepped quietly out of the mews. The grey city, which has a strange preoccupation all its own, spread out around him like a gigantic jigsaw, pale and dirty and mysterious" (115). This is the last time we see sunshine. From now on it will rain, intensifying as the mystery deepens. It begins on another street, Barrow Road, that adjoins Apron Street when an attempt is made on Campion's life as he is beginning to solve the mystery of the poison-pen letters. When Campion decides to visit the Palinodes' lawyer, a man with the intriguing name of "Clot Drudge," he gains some insights in to the mystery: one, that Ruth Palinode was a gambler and, two, that what were worthless shares in a mining company have now become extremely valuable and present the crucial motive for murder. This enlightenment is symbolized by the rain as Campion leaves the lawyer's office: "Out in the Barrow Road it was raining in that curious secret way which is a London specialty. The tarred blocks of the road, worn into a thousand wrinkles, glistened like black water" (134). Just before the attempt is made on Campion's life, the rain changes to fog to signify confusion and entrapment, ideas which are also emphasized by the "web" of streets just before the driver of the truck tries to run him over: "Its sudden murderous swerve towards him astounded him, even as his instinctive leap saved his life" (135). This leap also symbolizes Campion's decision to leap into the heart of the mystery when, just an hour later, the rain increases and begins a steady downpour as Campion lets himself out of the safety of the garden at Portminster Lodge and through the gate to mark his emergence in the dark streets and the investigative stage of the mystery. 66

More Work for the Undertaker (1949) This begins with a death at the chemist shop where he finds the chemist dead from self-inflicted poison, and we are reminded of the chemist shop in Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison as a site where the mystery beings. Here, again, the combined possibilities of life and death -healing and poisoning —are suggested in the setting. Like the rain, a crowd gathers and intensifies each time the plot moves a stage towards revelation. Initially, they form outside Portminster Lodge as the news of the Palinode deaths is made public. Campion notices them as he enters Portminster Lodge after questioning the undertaker about his activities when "he turned up his collar and prepared to push through the small crowd of sightseers who had begun to collect outside the front gate of Portminster Lodge" (158). And when the downto-earth- cleaning lady, Mrs. Love, shows him the "solid, silent group which stood staring hopefully at the house," Campion realizes that she, like the crowd, represents a desire for truth. In the final stages before the chase, Miss Evadne throws a party, during which Lawrence Palinode almost dies through eating some poisoned food, the crowd becomes its most intense: "The crowd had grown to mounted police proportions" (203). And by the time the party ends, the crowd is just as intense, sensing an imminent disclosure: "A cold unrelenting rain poured down over lamplit Apron Street, but it thinned the crowd round Portminster Lodge very little" (216). Shortly after, just before the story moves to its final stage, the crowd "pressed forward in new excitement" (226). At this point, the two plots come together as themes of carnivalesque, street, rain, and crowd culminate in one of the best chases described in the British mystery. The chase begins when a large black coffin brake drawn by horses, more familiar in a Sherlock Holmes tale, emerges from the mews. Campion and the police follow in a police car through the streets of night-time rain-soaked London. The wind of change arises to mark the end of the chase as rain, houses, and city streets come together to reflect the mood of evil intent. It is the streets that finally force the coffin brake to stop in a narrow lane called "Rose Way": "The undertaker pulled up the moment he saw the danger. The road was too narrow for him to hope to turn..." (235). Bowels is captured and placed in the police car, and Campion and Inspector Yeo take over the horse-drawn coffin brake like avenging angels: "The wind, now full behind them, blew the oilskin rugs which they had thrown round their shoulders into 67

Part One : The City tall black wings" (236-37). Finally, the mystery solved, the weather changes accordingly as order is restored: "The rain had ceased and a clear sweet dawn was breaking..." (251). Dark streets, secret, mysterious mews along with a sense of gloom provided by the weather culminate in a chase, so thrilling it surpasses those described by G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday and the Club of Queer Trades and J. Lawton in Black Out to lead to the dramatic denouement, witnessed by the all-important crowd.

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The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) by Margery Allingham "[I]n a vivid setting atmosphere can become so palpable that it seems to assume an identity of its own,"21 writes Jack Bickham in Setting. This is certainly the case in what many readers, including this writer, consider to be the best mystery ever written, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952). "The Smoke" was a name given to central London before the days of pollution control because of the dense fog that often covered the city, and Margery Allingham uses the fog-shrouded streets of central London to evoke an unforgettable sense of evil reminiscent of Charles Dickens' description in Bleak House: "Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."22 Although this work is a mystery in that it uses the eccentric sleuth Campion and his manservant, Lugg, it contains elements that also classify it as a thriller and is reminiscent of the clear and dramatic delineation of good and evil that aligns it with other thrillers such as The Glass Cage and Brighton Rock. Well-known mystery writer P. D. James says of this work and of Allingham's mysteries in general: But for me her real power lies in her creation of eccentrics who are larger-than-life but always rooted in reality, in her use of the brilliantly described setting to evoke atmosphere and enhance plot, and in her moral authority. The Tiger in the Smoke is the story of a man-made hunt in fog69

Part One : The City shrouded London and with its contrasting characters of Jack Havoc, the murderer, and the gentle uncompromising Canon Avril, refutes the common assertion that the great absolutes of good and evil are necessary outside the range of the detective novelist.23 The neighborhood is Paddington and its environs where a vicious killer, Johnny Cash, who goes by the fitting pseudonym of Jack Havoc, roams the fog-bound streets with his gang of street musicians to find and kill his victims as he searches for a missing letter that will bring him to a promised treasure. The letter was written by Major Elingbrod, Havoc's ex-army officer who died in the war. Havoc assumes that the major's widow of five years, Meg Elingbrod, has the letter. He has known her since childhood because his mother, Mrs. Cash, the ghastly blackmailer and moneylender who preys on poor parishioners, rents a cottage belonging to the church from Meg's father, Canon Avril. In order to get his hands on the letter, Havoc sends the naive Meg a fake photo of her husband taken on a street in post-war London, assuming that she will meekly lead him to the letter. He has not reckoned, however, on the ineffable goodness of Canon Avril or the determination of Meg's fiancé, strong and stolid Geoffrey Levett, not to mention the involvement of Allingham's ubiquitous duo, Albert Campion and Inspector Charlie Luke. In the opening lines, London is described with cinematic qualities that take on the tones of a sepia photograph and set the mood for the entire story: "The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. The sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black, overprinted in grey and lightened with occasional slivers of bright fish colour as a policemen turned in his wet cape" (9).* As the rain is the recurring image that moves plot and character in Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker and Tether's End, here it is the fog. "Fog is marvellously evoked," says H. R. F. Keating of this work, "but it also plays a major part as a symbol of the shrouded mystery in which the earlier events occur."24 In this particular mystery, the fog represents more than confusion, for it takes on a life of its own. "Crouching in the taxi-cab" to *Quotations from The Tiger in the Smoke (London: Hogarth, 1987).

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The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) "smear sooty fingers" over the passengers, it seems almost to be a character in the story itself, or at least a manifestation of the evil generated by the killer, Havoc, and it carries this sense of evil with it throughout the streets: "The whiff of the tiger crept to him through the fog" (45). Covering all as it pours over London "like a bucketful of cold soup," it enters the very psyches of all who live in and walk the streets of the city. Under this impenetrable, amorphous fog, everything changes; people lose their identities and become "scurrying shadows"; automobiles come alive, with hissing tires and screaming brakes. Yet even as this fog impedes and confuses the masses, it enfolds the individual in secrecy, for it is through the fog that the killer, Havoc, moves like a poison in the vein, "an escaped convict berserk in a city, his wanton knife striking casually and recklessly in the mist" (64). And, like the rain, the fog intensifies before murder is discovered: "The fog was now at its worst, rolling up from the river dense as a featherbed. It hung between street lamp and street lamp in blinding and abominable folds, and since in that area the architecture is all much alike and the streets are arranged in a series of graceful curves in which it is easy to walk in a circle in sunlight, the mile from the rectory to Crumb Street might well have been a maze" (45). Jack Havoc's gang, a band of Felliniesque grotesqueries, ex-army men, that wander through the foggy streets as they play their hauntingly weird music, are like some awful parody of the joyous carnival. The sick mind of their leader is paralleled in the physical abnormalities of its members— the cripple who seems to fly between his crutches; the hysterical, huge-headed, harmonica-playing dwarf; the one-armed man with a flapping sleeve; the cross-eyed, cymbal-crashing hunchback; the masochistic albino and the shell-shocked brothers— and the song they play, "Waiting," "the ghost of a tune, not recognisable yet evocative and faintly alarming, like a half-remembered threat," seeps through the fog as a reminder of evil. Specific settings, enclosures within the vast unknown of the dark city represent aspects of the mystery. The opening scene takes place in a taxi on its way to Paddington Station as it carries young Meg Elingbrod, Albert Campion's cousin, through the streets to meet Campion and Inspector Luke where she is to identify the person in a blurred photo that was sent to her anonymously, a person about to turn up and claim

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Part One : The City himself to be her husband, presumed dead for the past five years. It is here, at the very public railway station, that all key elements of the mystery, including the street band, are introduced. As Meg leaves the taxi that has brought her and her fiancé, Geoffrey, to the station, truth is represented in the crowds which push her forward, and the idea of the carnivalesque reversal of order and chaos is suggested in the analogy of the railway arch to a theater, under which she enters the drama about to unfold. Meg meets up with Campion and Inspector Luke, and as they wait for the man in the photo to appear, the fog intensifies, and the atmosphere of the huge railway station suggests the excitement and thrill of the mystery: " The fog was thickening and the glass and iron roof was lost in its greasy drapery.... The tremendous air of suppressed excitement which is peculiar to all great railway stations was intensified by the mist..." (19). Suggestive of inner and outer communication, the Underground and telephones are described as Havoc's street gang appear with their music when Meg mistakenly identifies the petty crook, Duds Morrison, masquerading as her husband: "Away to their right was the other carriageway climbing bleakly into Crumb Street, and behind them was the tunnel to the Underground and the double row of telephone boxes" (20). Duds is arrested and taken to Crumb Street Police Station where the described perspective of "high walls which leaned together, their dark surfaces blank as cliffs" foreshadows imminent danger. From this point, the story moves from one site to the next. The fictional St. Peter's Square, Notting Hill, where Meg lives with her father the local rector, Canon Avril, Campion's uncle, is one center where goodness and order prevail, and the very nature of the fog reflects this: "The fog was thicker than ever in St. Petersgate Square, but there in its brown folds it hid no violence. Rather it was cosy, hardly cold, gentle, almost protective" (28). The pure goodness of Canon Avril who "asked so little of life that its frugal bounty amazed and delighted him" is as entirely convincing as the pure evil of Jack Havoc. Canon Avril leaves the secluded peace of St. Peter's Square when he, along with Campion and Inspector Luke, goes to investigate Havoc's first murder victim who is the man masquerading as Meg's husband at the railway station: "They've just picked up Duds in an alley off Crumb Street. He's what you might call thoroughly dead by all I can hear" (41). 72

The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) With the involvement of Canon Avril in the mystery, clothing is used to further the themes of identity and good versus evil in the description of the canon's attire and in the question of the jacket which the corpse is wearing. Canon Avril's coat is pawned each time one of his parishioners is in dire need. And when the three men reach the murder site, the jacket worn by the corpse is one that Canon Avril recognizes as one belonging to his dead son-in-law, Meg's husband. It is a vital key in tracing the killer, and it turns out that Havoc's mother, the evil moneylender, got the coat from Canon Avril's unwitting housekeeper. Told by the canon to put the jacket in the church jumble sale, the housekeeper used it, instead, as partial payment for her debt to Havoc's mother who had been intimidating her. Havoc wants the jacket to fool Meg into thinking that Duds is her husband so she will lead him to the letter that contains the whereabouts of the hidden treasure. It is just a mile from St. Peter's Square where the body of Duds Morrison showed up. As the three men hurry to the site the streets become more and more enclosed and menacing, leading them to a dark mews and an "alley's dark mouth" and finally to a hole, where the body lies: "Duds had died in a hole. In a narrow angle where two walls meet there was a space of perhaps a foot wide and eighteen inches deep, and into this the body was crammed in a sitting position, the legs drawn up, the chin on the breast. It seemed impossible that any human being should take up so little space" (47-48). Another enclosed setting is a hellish subterranean hideaway, the cellar under the fishmonger's shop where the gang live. It is located in a nearby marketplace whose "ramshackle stalls roofed with flapping tarpaulin and lit with naked bulbs" emits an energetic evil —the brightness of hell surrounded by shadows distorted by the fog. It is here that Geoffrey Levett, Meg's fiancé, is taken and bound and gagged when he is kidnapped by the street gang after embarking on his own search for the identity of the man in the photo. He follows Duds Morrison after he has been released from Crumb Street Police Station and forces him into a nearby pub in order to question him and find out some truths. The band, as always, is watching and its music intensifies as the two men talk: "...from the street the cacophony of the band of the band came even nearer" (70). Levett gives Duds some money and his address so that he will visit him and give him the "whole story" and "by now the band was immediately outside the door and the noise 73

Part One : The City was so great they could not hear themselves speak" (72). Scared witless, Duds rushes out into the fog and down the fatal alley where he will shortly be found dead, and the band kidnaps Levett and takes him in a wheel chair. The crowd image is presented again as Levett is rescued by Campion and his manservant, Lugg, masquerading as tax collectors who need to measure the cellar beneath the fishmonger's. When they first arrive at the marketplace the crowd, this time in the form of a queue outside the fishmonger's, is indifferent and the fog at its worst. But the crowd becomes focused and alert—"the passage became a sounding board for thundering feet as the crowd streamed into it" (156) —in its insistence on truth as it witnesses the forced entry into the cellar and the rescue of Levett. Carnival, the reversal of order, is suggested through Lugg's observation of the band of men in the cellar: "What a circus, eh? Musical menagerie and no error" (158). It turns out that the letter describing the whereabouts of the buried treasure has been in the hands of one of Canon Avril's tenants, an elderly newspaper reporter, retired, with whom Major Elingbrod had entrusted the letter before leaving for the war. It is addressed to the next man who would marry Meg and explains that the treasure is in an ice house on the French coast. Canon Avril unknowingly gives the location away when he meets Havoc in his church the night after the others have left for the treasure site. Here, as good confronts evil for the last time, the fog finally recedes and twisted walkways give way to open spaces as he makes his way to the church: "The fog was clearing rapidly and he could just discern the tulip tree in the square" (192). With the aid of his gang, Havoc gets to the address on the French coast where is cornered by Inspector Luke. With the realization that "he knew himself to be fallible" (224), he, like Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock, commits suicide by plunging into the sea "two-hundred feet below," and the "tiger" is reclaimed by nature.

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Tether's End (1958) by Margery Allingham In Margery Allingham's Tether's End (1958), city streets are also a major aspect of the plot, which concerns a missing bus, the unsolved murder of a pawnbroker, the murder of a solicitor, Matthew Phillipson, and the search for the murderer, Gerry Hawker, a ruthless and powerful killer. The question of identity is presented through this killer who goes by two aliases, one he uses when he kills, the other when he is with friends. Rain is a strong motif, changing in intensity with the shifts in the plots and the moods of the characters right from the start: "The spring rain was fortuitous but it was an enormous help. It turned out to be one of those settled downpours which, in London, seems to involve more actual water than anywhere else, and there become a penetrating and absorbing irritant guaranteed to keep the mind of the passerby on himself and his discomforts" (1).* The story starts out in an enclosed space, a cul-de-sac named Goff's Place in Soho, and moves to a small private museum, Tether's End, in Garden Green, west London. This museum sets the theme of the carnivalesque, and it is here that the climax of the mystery takes place. It is full of old curios, from huge armchairs made out of elephant and giraffe carcasses to a large diorama which houses the two dummies found in the bus in Goff's Place. Here, the suspect is linked to the elderly proprietor, Polly Tassie, an old friend of his who is also his future victim. *Quotations from Tether's End (New York: Bantam, 1990). 75

Part One : The City Staying with is her young and innocent niece, Annabelle, who has come up from the countryside. She, along with a family friend, Richard Waterfield, who becomes her fiancé, will be drawn into the mystery as good battles with evil. The mystery comes to an end in the murderer's lair, Rolf's Dump, a wasteland of broken machine parts that spreads over a square mile of the far East End, near Regent's Canal and Tooley Street. This hideous site symbolizes the sickness of the murderer who is "a shocking and dreadful thing, equally horrible with any other deadly creature moving subtly in the dark places of an unsuspecting world" (5). Mention of Rolf's Dump appears early in the story and recurs throughout as a malignant theme that finally draws the reader to the horror and evil of the place itself. The murderer is tracked across London by Allingham's duo of sleuths, Albert Campion and Inspector Charlie Luke. The opening scene begins late on a lonely, rainy night in Goff's Place where a trail of blood leads from the murdered pawnbroker's stairs to this enclosed place. Here, the major elements of the story—rain, murder, disguise, secrecy, and deceit —are introduced. Goff's Place lies behind the Duke of Grafton's Theatre, a building which sets the mood of drama and the carnivalesque. A small single-decker bus carrying only an elderly couple who turn out to be dummies dressed in dated clothing is driven into the cul-de-sac: "The driver swung the bus neatly into the Goff's Place entry and turned into the tiny cobbled place behind the theatre. The Place was a minute cul-de-sac, an air shaft shared by the Duke of Grafton's and the three tall houses whose back doors and fire escapes gave on to it. These were shops and faced the other way on to Deban Street, Soho, which runs nearly but not quite parallel with the avenue" (2). The key to solving the mystery lies in these strange passengers. The driver of the bus is the killer. He has come to Goff's Place to kill a pawnbroker whose shop abuts it. Like the figures in the bus, his appearance also evokes the grotesque: "His peaked cap cast a shadow which was a dark as an eye mask over the upper part of his face..." (3). The murder of the pawnbroker goes unsolved for eight months; then Inspector Luke and Albert Campion take the case. The theme of the chase is introduced through Inspector Luke's excitement as he looks at a street map of Garden Green, not far from his own territory of Paddington: "It was not in the same manor but it was on the way there 76

Tether's End (1958) and as he stood tracing the streets which crossed and re-crossed in little loops and squares without pattern or shape, he felt the thrill of catching wind of the enemy" (157). Now, the hunt moves from Goff's Place to Garden Green and Tether's End Museum where the trail for the murderer picks up. Albert Campion asks Inspector Luke to describe this neighborhood to him, and, as he listens, he, too, feels the thrill of the chase. When Annabelle accepts the invitation to live with Aunt Tassie, Richard Waterfield meets up with her in a small park just in front of the museum in Garden Green. Here, Annabelle shows Richard the letter of invitation, which was actually for Anabelle's sister who is getting married. So, fortuitously, Annabelle comes up to London in her sister's place. Richard waits outside while she goes to the house adjoining Tether's End museum to meet her aunt. While he is waiting to see if Annabelle changes her mind, he sees Gerry Hawker, the killer, emerge. Hawker has been visiting his friend, Pollie Tassie. Richard notices he has a key to the house and is perturbed to think of Annabelle in the house with a strange man. He decides to follow him, and what he discovers en route brings him to the hideous Rolf's Dump, Hawker's lair: "Are you sure you want to go there?" questions a policeman when Richard asks him how to get there. "I'm afraid I must" (97-98), Richard replies. His nighttime odyssey takes two and a half hours: "The journey proved formidable. He had travelled by a series of buses far into the East End of the city and had finished up at last in bright moonlight in a strange flat no-man's land which appeared to consist of wide acres of condemned slum houses, relieved here and there by the huge towers of the blocks of new council dwellings, all very modern and impressive against a limpid sky" (98). This wasteland is described in cinematic images that reflect the sordid mind of the murderer and represent the post war disenchantment suffered by many of this time, for there is moonlight here but no delight, and like the moonlight in Chesterton's dramatic scene in The Man Who Was Thursday, it seems unnatural in its brightness, spotlighting skeletons of old cars, broken down machinery and all the other sad detritus of people's lives. At the dump Richard discovers the bus with the dummies hidden in the back of the killer's shed placed beside each other with moldering clothes and a curious light in the woman's glass eyes that frightens him. He runs outside and into the arms of Inspector Luke. The police take 77

Part One : The City over and the description of the bus as it is seen from Campion's point of view suggests the carnivalesque: "Mr. Campion, who was standing next to Charlie Luke in the darkness, watching the proceedings, thought he had never seen anything so macabre in his life, yet all the horror was implied and not actual" (127). After leaving the dump, Richard walks through the streets and becomes lost in thought before he alerts Annabelle to danger and the rain begins to intensify again as the story unwinds: "It was a long stroll through the deserted late-night streets but he was deeply preoccupied and did not notice it.... As the moon sank, the clouds thickened and there was a promise of rain in the air by the time he reached the corner of the park" (139). The wind of change arises as Richard returns to Tether's End Museum, and as the story comes to an end and revelation of the murderer is close at hand, the storm breaks, the rain beating a heavy tattoo of danger on the roof and gutter: "By now it was raining hard in the city way, which to Annabelle's country ears was extraordinary noisy, the water drumming on the roofs and gurgling in pipes and gullies" (175). The importance of meteorological events to enhance the story are discussed by Janet Perez and Wendy Aycock in Climate and Literature; they point out that the weather is used to "foreshadow or reinforce mood" and is "not used sentimentally but to underscore the oppressive situations of characters."25 In Tether's End, against a background of city dump, cul-de-sac, and dark streets, along with the carnivalesque features of the museum and the strange bus in which the dummies are transported, the rain, like the fog in The Tiger in the Smoke> is a powerful presence, its noise increasing as the drama unfolds.

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The Port of London Murders (1958) by Josephine Bell The river, says the well-known novelist H. E. Bates, "is a living thing, with its own defined and complex character, its own idiosyncrasies and with something very like its own soul The river triumphs. And, since it is not only indestructible but a thing of destruction itself, it also terrifies."26 Central to many of the mysteries set in London is the tidal River Thames. It creates a sense of continuity and linkage. It offers perspective, and its embankment is used in the mystery in ways which often correspond with the function of the promenade in the seaside urban setting. In Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens used the River Thames not only to represent the commerce of London but also as a metaphor for life, and Josephine Bell uses the River Thames to the same effects in her mystery The Port of London Murders (1958) —as the central trope that connects crucial elements of the plot. Set in the docklands of southeast London, the story begins with a panoramic view described in Odysseylike terms as it is seen from a ship sailing up the river. As the ship comes to dock with its illegal cargo of heroin, the perspective narrows to the river and the city, drawing the reader into the picture, and the vision of drowning that these unknown sailors suffer foreshadows the events to unfold. Murder, heroin smuggling, romance, denial, and betrayal are tied in to the river and the seedy streets that surround it. In contrast to the river as it represents truth and movement, Fripp Street, Barton Street,

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Part One : The City and Wood Wharf, where much of the action takes place, suggest confusion, decay, and entrapment. As we have seen, the streets, London streets in particular, are a very important aspect of the urban mystery setting, reflecting, as they do, the lives and moods of those who live and walk in them. According to literary critic Robert J. Casey, "The city [London] itself is a gray and mysterious place whose streets have not been mapped since Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Its dank lanes, around the corner from the pub and mews, have never been plumbed, its thick fogs are filled with lost pedestrians, lorries, trams, hansom cabs, and screams."27 Like the river, the streets are first presented from a stranger's perspective that draws the reader into the setting: "The main road going east from Rotherhithe Tunnel is like any other of the South London thoroughfares. It is broad dreary and dirty ... [where] the river stretches and a new world begins" (12-13)/ The characters who live in these streets also reflect this pattern of good versus evil. There is the young woman, June Harvey, a natural, innocent beauty flowering amid the slums. She lives with her family — her father, a tugboat captain; her younger brother, Les, who is fourteen; and her mother. There is also Harry, with whom June eventually falls in love. Like June's father, he also makes a legal living on the river. Each of these characters has some hand in the discovery and termination of the smuggling, which is tied into the murders. Captain Harvey accidentally collides with the ship and its contraband of heroin because of dense fog, and some of the cargo falls in the river. Young Les discovers some of these cases on the river. It is later discovered that each case holds layers of rubber, and hidden between each layer are nightgowns, the piping borders of which are filled with heroin. June Harvey works at a lingerie shop in the West End. Unbeknown to her, it is the front for the heroin smuggling ring, and one of the drug pushers gives June a nightie, which is later used as evidence. Representing the evil of the mystery is Gordon Longford, a drug peddler who tries to romance June. The conflict between good and evil is intensified by the relationship between Longford and June, who meet at the lingerie shop when Longford is collecting some of the drugs he deals. Longford is drawn to the innocence and natural beauty of June, who is both fascinated and repelled by this Quotations from The Port of London Murders (London and New York: Macmillan, 1958).

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The Port of London Murders (1958) man. The leaders of the drug ring, Mr. Holman and his aging mistress, Martha Kemp, who runs the lingerie shop where June works, also represent evil, but possibly the most hedonistic of these people is the heroin supplier, Dr. Kemp, whose job as a physician suggests the possibility for infinite good and trust turned to evil and exploitation. On a small "beach" by the river's edge, a dangerous edge, the characters who play a main part in the discovery of the drug smuggling operation are dramatically introduced when a near drowning takes place in an event that anticipates the actual drowning of Gordon Longford in the closing scenes. Here, June's young brother, Les, ignoring the dangerous current, as he is to ignore the metaphorical dangerous waters when he pursues the mystery of the packing crates he is soon to find, wades too far out. He is drawn under by the sweep of a passing tug, and Harry Read saves him, but he breaks his wrist in doing so. This scene begins the actual drama of the mystery that becomes a conflict between evil and good. The plot involves three murders. The first murder victim is an elderly broken-down heroin addict, Mary Holland, who is poisoned by her doctor, Dr. Ellis, when he substitutes Lysol for the tea in her cup. Already fed up with her pestering him for more of the drug—"Another one of them! There would never be an end to it, and he was helpless, bound by his own need" (52-53) —he kills her after she discovers that he, too, is an addict. Later, he commits suicide by injecting himself with an overdose of morphine when the body of an investigating policeman, Sergeant Chandler, whom he murders with the help of an accomplice, Gordon Longford, is discovered. The two bludgeon Sergeant Chandler to death when Chandler realizes how Mary Holland died, and they brick him in the wall of a house on Cripp Street. The body is discovered when one of the workmen who is demolishing the house thinks he's found a bird's nest. Through works such as The Tiger in the Smoke and Tether's End, it becomes clear that the weather can be a crucial element in the mystery genre. Novelist David Lodge writes about its importance: "We all know that weather affects our moods. The novelist is in the happy position of being able to invent whatever weather is appropriate to the mood he or she wants to evoke.... Used with intelligence and discretion it is a rhetorical device capable of moving and powerful effects, without which fiction 81

Part One : The City would be much the poorer."28 It is interesting to note that those British mysteries written before the Clean Air Legislation of the fifties and sixties use the fog in relation to the plot much more intensely than later mysteries. Up until this time, fog was often so dense that people were afraid to go out. For the mystery writer fog was the perfect symbol for confusion and concealment, which in dispersion gave way to understanding. In this mystery, when Longford takes June to Richmond Park where he forces himself on her, fog is used as an indication that little is possible in the way of communication between these two. The author uses the fog again later in the mystery when all of London is preparing for Guy Fawkes Night, a time of ritual and celebration, fireworks and burnt effigies, in praise of the victory of order over anarchy. As this event nears, the mystery intensifies along with the fog: "The fog held and thickened. Londoners went to bed on that Sunday night coughing and spluttering in spite of closed windows, and on Monday morning, Guy Fawkes Day, awoke to find the same acrid yellow blanket enfolding them and blotting out the world. It was the thickest on the river and along the river front. In Fripp Street and Wood Wharf it was not possible to see the width of the pavement" (40). And when Captain Harvey collides with some "derelict" barges (barges that have broken loose) which are carrying the packing cases filled with layers of rubber that conceal the nighties, it is the fog that causes this incident, so beginning the mystery that eventually leads to enlightenment, or, metaphorically, a way out of the fog: "The confusion at all times when tugs are sorting out and collecting their charges is great, but on this day, augmented by the fog, it was greater than ever..." (47). With the description of the Guy Fawkes celebration, and later the New Year's celebration, is introduced the theme of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that carnival is used as a metaphor for periods of cessation or reversal of order in society, a time of counter culture.29 In the mystery, we may also say that carnival announces the situation. The coming of the carnival represents the expression of the mystery and crime involved and the passing of carnival represents a return to order. Closely related to the theme of carnival is the crowd. In the absence of the carnival, the crowd represents normalcy —the safe group contrasted against the lonely individual, the outsider. We see this use in the opening description where the ship of strangers comes up the 82

The Port of London Murders (1958) Thames past the "solid flow of pedestrians" during rush hour. Words like "solid" and "pedestrian" suggest safety and routine. At the time of the carnival, however, the crowd and individual become unified. Often the criminal loses himself in the crowd to escape detection. Writer Jeremy Hawthorn explains: "There is no clear distinction between actors and spectators, and during the period of the carnival it embraces all the people and there is no life outside it."30 Each time a carnivalesque event occurs in this mystery, such as the Guy Fawkes and New Year's celebrations, it is followed by a singular, depressing incident that is tied into murder. For instance, after the Guy Fawkes description, with all its aspects of vitality, color and joy, comes the visit of Sergeant Chandler to Dr. Ellis to begin his inquiry into the death of Mary Holland that will soon lead to his own murder. The description of Dr. Ellis' sordid office on nearby Barton Street, its drab paintworks, old magazines, and failing plant, seems to reflect the miasma of the doctor's own life. The journey, or quest, is another important aspect of the mystery, often reflecting the stages or elements of the plot itself. Unlike the chase, it is more personal, a quest for self-truth as well as an understanding of the situation. The quest is a quest for life whereas the chase suggests death, the kill. In The Port of London Murders, this quest for truth is undertaken by young Les and two of his friends. Fog gives way to rain, confusion to enlightenment, when, twelve days after Guy Fawkes Day, Les and his friends make a discovery on the river, and the danger that attends it is reflected in the condition of the streets: "The intense cold which had accompanied and followed Guy Fawkes Day fog gave place twelve days later to an unseasonable mildness and a fine drizzling rain. The streets, so recently a menace from the thin coat of ice covering them each morning, now betrayed the passer-by in a series of greasy mudslides that were equally dangerous to the high heel and the rubber sole" (117). On the reaches of Saw Mill Wharf, Les finds a box, and, along with his two friends, he journeys across London to deliver it to the police, eschewing the local police station for the one where he knows some of the policemen from his near-drowning in the river. Taking on heroic proportions, this modern-day Odyssey across the mean streets of London's East End, at the end of which the boys find "a quiet red-brick building standing behind iron railing" and "discover a passage at the side, with a distant view of the river beyond," is an important part of 83

Part One : The City the mystery because it marks first stage of the final revelation. It begins as they cross the river using Rotherhithe Tunnel and emerge the other side at Wapping Wall. Rotherhithe Tunnel is a subterranean walkway that runs under the river. As the sea often represents a plunge into the subconscious, a journey inward, so in the London setting does a subterranean locale such as a tube station, a cellar, a basement, or in this mystery, a tunnel. Les's journey also takes on all the aspects of the mystery itself—danger, versus safety, malfeasance versus good, and the suffering individual in the indifferent crowd. The contraband box represents for these boys, Les in particular, the burden of proof and the bringing of ills to justice so that order may be eventually restored. In the concluding chapter, all elements of carnival, fog, rain, crowd and individual come together through the river. It is now New Year's Eve; another ritual, one that is to save a life, is about to begin, and the rain is falling heavily. We are returned to the river and the "final pageant" where goodness prevails over evil. The individual in the crowd is represented by June as she passes through the busy streets of the West End to find that the lingerie shop where she works is closed. She returns home and spends the evening alone, listening to the radio, her mother having taken Les to the yearly pantomime the West End and her father working on the river. Here, late at night, she is attacked by Longford. Harry arrives and intervenes and becomes a target for Longford's gun. The noise of the crowd celebrating the sudden advent of the new year comes over the radio and, for a vital moment, distracts Longford, so murder is diverted by crowd and ritual: "Sirens from land and from every ship on the river, foghorns, bells, guns, drums, hooters, rockets, combined in wild barbaric sounds to welcome in the New Year" (212). Longford flees, and when he, and all he represents in terms of evil, meets his death by drowning in the dark waters of the River Thames, this joyful celebration of humanity's unity in the victory of good over evil extends to London itself because it is the river that becomes the avenger: "So Gordon Longford went down through the muddy water gasping and struggling, to choke out his life in the slime of the river bed. He died there like a rat in a flooded river" (219). Elias Canetti says about the river and its symbolism: "The most striking thing about the river is its direction. It moves between unmoving banks, and these render its flux continuously apparent.... It stands 84

The Port of London Murders (1958) for processions; the people watching from pavements are like trees on river-banks... ."31 The mystery of the port of London murders within the story ends on the river's edge, on a note of panoramic proportions. "But the water of London's river spun in the pools and flowed away ... past the wharfs and the factories, the cranes, the houses, the walls and beaches, the fettered ships at their moorings, the heavy, loaded barges, the docks and warehouses and rubbish dumps and old forgotten workings, past the low banks and the little hills, to the wide, gull-haunted reaches, sands, and the sea" (219).

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At Bertram's Hotel (1965) by Agatha Christie Often in the mystery novel the setting suggests a clear delineation of the public and the private sites to enhance and intensify specific themes. David Lehman comments on this in Perfect Murder: "More and more realism can be incorporated into the setting, and has been — in all these case, a realistic milieu, captured with a fidelity to detail, gives the whodunit the veneer of the comedy of manners.... In this world of fixed limits and closely defined relationships, society is seen to consist of closed circles, some of which overlap; and it's a characteristic of the closed setting that serves as a backdrop for motive."32 These enclosed settings are even more effective when placed within the streets and alleys of the urban setting, where "deep crime"33 as Edgar Allan Poe says, may occur. Interiors and exteriors: hotel vestibules, restaurants, houses, clubs, and law offices contrast with bridges, squares, streets, and cul-de-sacs in Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel (1965), set in Mayfair, an exclusive area of London. "Another day — and who knew what it might bring forth?" (41) is the understatement uttered by Miss Marple as she begins her two-week vacation at this hotel where the supposed gentility of the neighborhood and hotel comes as a stark contrast to the murder, embezzlement, and abduction that take place in the novel. The hotel contains a select group of semi-permanent guests whose characters are intensified through the confines of the setting and who, in a way, reflect the nature

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At Bertram's Hotel (1965) of the hotel itself, which, restored after the Blitz, "looked precisely as it had looked in 1939 —dignified, unostentatious, and quietly expensive" (1). But it is not the same, for, like its guests, behind its genteel, renovated façade corruption exists, and as Miss Marple finally is forced to admit, "Even at Bertram's ... interesting things could happen..." (21). Particular features of the hotel have symbolic functions in the plot. The vestibule, for instance, becomes a kind of stage upon which guests, murderers, policemen and Miss Marple cross, observe, and are observed by others. The front door acts as a threshold as characters move from the enclosed setting of the vestibule to the disclosure of the streets. For example, when the delightfully muddle-headed Canon Pennyfather, who is one of the key characters, steps across the vestibule and through the doors to begin his dangerous journey into abduction and deceit, he holds up the traffic in Pond Street after walking through the front door and keeping his taxi waiting while deciding where to go. His decision to go to the British Museum begins his involvement in the mystery. And Miss Marple anticipates her morning's activities from the safety of her hotel room before "passing through the swing doors" (59) and into the dangerous streets wondering whether to walk to Piccadilly or ride a bus to Kensington or yet another to the West End. Like Canon Pennyfather, her decision will also draw her into the plot because she ends up going to the Army & Navy Stores where sees Lady Sedgwick dining with her lover. Windows, like doors, represent thresholds and stages in the plot. When Lady Sedgwick recognizes the commissionaire of the hotel as a person who plays a crucial role in her past, she opens the window and leans out in an action which eventually leads to the revelation of a subterfuge between mother and daughter. As W.H. Auden, writing as Nicholas Blake, states that "crime carries within itself the seed of retribution; some fatal flaw (or saving grace) in human nature impels a wrong-doer to betray himself,"34 so at the end of the novel Lady Sedgwick reveals she is the wrongdoer and smashes a window to escape down the drainpipe and her race car which she fatally crashes. Windows and doors combine to strengthen the significance of interior and exterior and suggest the crossing of the threshold of consciousness as another character, Elvira Blake, is about to practice deceit and criminal act as she passes through the door of her accomplice's house: "The Honorable Elvira Blake pushed her way through the front door of 180 Onslow 87

Part One : The City Square, which her friend Bridget had rushed down to open for her, having been watching through the window" (55). When the act takes place in Bond Street, enclosed settings and open streets come together in one dangerous act: "Outside the old established business of Bollard and Whitley in Bond Street the two girls made their final arrangements" (58). "Bridget crossed to the other side of Bond Street and Elvira pushed open the doors of Messrs. Bollard and Whitley, old established jewelers and watchmakers. Inside there was a beautiful and hushed atmosphere" (59). In contrast, a few minutes later in the street: "Outside there was the squealing of brakes and a girl's loud scream. Inevitably the eyes of everyone in the shop turned towards the windows of the shop giving on to Bond Street" (61). The eating place, be it a workman's café or a stylish restaurant, is nearly always a site for revelation in the mystery genre whether personal or shared, private or public. For Miss Marple the revelation comes in the form of a truth which emerges at the Army & Navy Stores as Miss Marple makes a discovery when she is in the restaurant ordering lunch: "How extraordinary coincidence was!" (64) she thinks as she sees Bess Sedgwick with her lover, the race car driver. The scene is repeated in another restaurant, this time in Battersea Park where Miss Marple sees the same man with Bess Sedgwick's daughter: She takes a bus over Battersea Bridge (symbolic) and ends up in the restaurant at Battersea Park where she sees the car driver with, not Lady Sedgwick, but her daughter, Elvira Blake, in a romantic interlude. "Yes, this girl was in love" (106), thinks Miss Marple. This is a crucial stage in the story because Miss Marple decides to enter into the intrigue, and the move is marked by the gate she passes through: "Miss Marple passed through the small gate in the fence that led to the sidewalk of the park" (106). At the end of the mystery, Miss Marple passes through another gate at Paddington Station where she is met by Chief Inspector Davy, who reveals a truth to her as he leads her through the turnstile: "Bertram's Hotel is to all intents and purposes the headquarters of one of the best and biggest crime syndicates that's been known for years" (232). The enclosed space of the restaurant also becomes a site of revelation and decision for Canon Pennyfather when he begins the first stage of his dangerous journey that brings him close to death: "On the evening of November 19 Canon Pennyfather had finished an early dinner 88

At Bertram's Hotel (1965) at the Athenaeum. He picked up a taxi in Pall Mall, and was driven to the air terminal in Kensington" (67). And shortly after he realizes at the terminal that he has mixed up the day and lost his plane, he meanders along the Cromwell Road and enters an Indian restaurant. Here he discovers that he has taken his room key with him and realizes he can return to his hotel room, a decision which almost brings him to death because here he is attacked. On the way back to Bertram's Hotel, he stops at a movie theater to see a film with the significant title of Walls of Jericho. When the film ends he walks into the streets dazzled by the bright lights, and in a reversal that foreshadows his abduction that will take place when he returns to the hotel, he catches a bus going in the wrong direction. The open streets suggest a comforting sense of the past as well as a very real danger. For Miss Marple, before she becomes involved in solving the mystery it is the former, but with the mention of the Underground there is a foreshadowing of the subconscious shortly becoming involved. She buys an Underground transport map along with a bus guide, one of what W. H. Auden calls "rituals of time and space,"35 which give her a sense of direction and order, in contrast to the streets, which involve fog, dead end streets and basement areas, all suggestive of confusion, danger, and entrapment that slowly takes over as the mystery comes to its final revelation. "Close confines, much as they maybe wished for, ... have a habit of turning into torture chambers or scenes of murder,"36 says Lehman. As Chief Inspector Davy turns up a cul-de-sac he remarks how thick the fog has become; the noises of the traffic is muted, and buses have stopped running. A little later this same area becomes the site for murder: "A sharp report, louder than the former one, came from outside. It was followed by a scream and another report. ...The screaming —a woman's—was piercing the mist with a note of terror. Chief Inspector Davy raced down Pond Street in the direction of the screams" (177). The murder weapon is found in a basement area that is part of Bertram's hotel, and the false sense of security and well-being suggested by the hotel soon turns malevolent as sinister events unfold. The sense of enclosure intensifies as the mystery, along with the fog, thickens around the sites and does not lift until the final disclosure, marked by the piercing shriek of a police whistle that penetrates the fog, brings order out of chaos.

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The Glass Cage (1966) by Colin Wilson The River Thames is the controlling image in Colin Wilson's spinechilling book The Glass Cage (1966), as it is in Josephine Bell's The Port of London Murders. This mystery, which opens and closes with the theme of the crowd as it is used to represent a departure and a return to normality, is a psychological thriller which concerns the search for a serial killer named "the Thames murderer," who, like George Harvey Bone of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, suffers from schizophrenia. He leaves his dismembered victims, ten in all, at sites around the River Thames with quotations from William Blake scrawled near them. Early in the story, the central figure, Damon Reade, seeks an understanding of the murderer through the river: "Once I'd seen why he writes the quotations, I suddenly understood about the river too. It's this same split personality. The water represents purity, washing himself free of guilt"

(126). The first part of the book is short and takes place in the rural north of England, at the home of Damon Reade, who is a well-known scholar of Blake himself and receives many letters from other Blake admirers, one of which, it is hoped, might lead to the murderer. It begins on a fortuitous note as Reade, on the way home from a visit to the "Druidic circle of stones near Keswick" (47), decides, on a whim, to take the letters to a local "wizard" who identifies one which he believes was written by the murderer. Intrigued, Reade goes to London himself to find the person

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The Glass Cage (1966) and discovers an inferno of brutality and bestiality beyond his imagination. The actual mystery begins in part two of the book and marks an important stage in the plot as well as in Reade's life. The hellish story opens as Reade disembarks from his train at Euston Station into the "intolerable heat" that makes him "dizzy," then plunges into an Underground station and takes a tube train to find his old school friend, Kit Butler, with whom he is going to stay in Notting Hill. On arrival, the description of the deserted Portobello Road, whose strange silence is so unlike its usual hustle and bustle of teeming crowds, sets the stage for the drama about to unfold. Likewise, description of the attic room Reade rents in the boarding house with its sticky linoleum, grimy upholstery, and slick mattress foreshadows the sordid events about to take place. In The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard Lutwack writes, "There is a reciprocal relationship between place and motion as they are represented in literature. Frequent movement between places is always a popular motif because journeys at least promise life and action, while remaining in a place necessarily diminshes the opportunity for change and increases the need for description."37 The main action in The Glass Cage is generated through two journeys that the men take. Just before the men begin their first odyssey, a journey of discovery that encompasses the murder sites as it moves from west to east down the river, from Putney to Whitechapel, the crowd image is a reminder of the truth that will emerge by the end of the story: "As they walked through the crowds of the Portobello Road, Butler said, 'And you mean to tell me that you came to London because this old witch told you that letter was by a murderer?'" (65). The two men walk the streets that the murderer has walked, and the escalating sordidness suggests a kind of mental exhaustion that is paralleled by the descriptive details which also gradually intensify as they turn right and right again as if in a maze, from Wandsworth Bridge further and further into the mean streets where houses are being torn down and the smell of gas from the gasworks, reminiscent of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, permeates the air. This site is close to the river: "Do you know the place where the body was found?" asks Butler of a workman and is shown a place near the gates of a pier that faces Wandsworth Bridge where "there were, in fact, a few brown smears on the pavement, but they were small and almost indistinguishable" (74). The next murder site is Welfare Road, Putney, "a row of small semi-

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Part One : The City detached modern houses with front gardens" ending in "[a] piece of waste ground, separated from the road by a barbed-wire fence" (75) with the river behind, where the presence of murder is still just a suggestion, an unseen hint. The journey culminates in a horrible image of burning flesh at the last site the men visit, which is across the river in Chelsea. Here, outside a factory in Salamanca Place, the idea of murder now becomes a horrifying reality as the "timekeeper" at the factory gates, the gates of hell, tells them: "They say bits of the body had been boiled or roasted, so I don't suppose they'd be much blood, any more than on a Sunday joint" (76). Sickened, the men give up at this point and return to the Albert Embankment where Reade's comment, "I've got an irritating feeling that something's eluding me" (77), predicts the next journey he will take. Reade comes to the conclusion that, statistically, it is possible that the murderer could have tried to commit suicide, and given his modus operandiy it is possible that he chose a riparian ending for himself, too. Reade theorizes that a man who has tried to drown himself might have been pulled out of the river and hospitalized. The next night, they visit hospitals in the area and, eventually, at a hospital in Fulham, discover the identity of the man, now discharged, who was brought in after an attempted drowning. The name of the patient, Gaylord Sundheim, Reade recognizes as that of a Blake scholar, an American who published some work on the poet. It turns out that the Sundheim just released from the hospital is the son of the scholar and shares his name. The hospital also gives Reade and Butler Sundheim's address in Edwardes Square, which is in a mews, an enclosed space, off Holland Park Avenue. It is raining when the turning point of the mystery occurs as Reade goes there to confront the man: "It was raining heavily by the time the car turned into Holland Park Avenue The entrance to the mews lay to the left of them. A small archway led into a cobbled yard, with lock-up garages on either side" (116-7). The theme of the chase is introduced as Reade, along with three friends, watches Sundheim leave his house and then follows him as he walks down Kensington High Street, across Holland Park, to Campden Hill Road. By now the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. They reach the carnival atmosphere of Portobello Road with its many market stalls and street activities that suggest a reversal of order. "They had crossed into the Portobello Road and the crowds made it 92

The Glass Cage (1966) difficult to see for more than a few yards" (151). Here, in one of the many antique shops, they see Sundheim purchase a Chinese vase but are unable to establish his identity as the owner of the shop tells them he knows the man only by sight. On the pretext that he is interested in works on Blake written by Sundheim's father, Reade sets up a meeting with Sundheim the next day. The wind of change has arisen, and it is nighttime and raining: "It was five minutes to seven when he climbed off the bus in Kensington High Street. The weather had changed: it had started to rain. In Edwardes Square, the wind shook heavy drops from the branches of the trees to his head" (199). The other place the murderer lives is in Limehouse in the East End, and these two very distinct sites represent his two states of mind. The day after his meeting with Sundheim, Reade decides to return home to the north, but as he is about the enter the tube station, Sundheim intercepts him and takes him on his second odyssey — one that will reveal the ghastly truth — which leads to Sundheim's Limehouse dwelling that overlooks the river. The odyssey, like the first, moves from west to east and is a journey of discovery with Dantesque aspects of a trip through hell. It begins at a subterranean setting, Notting Hill tube station, where the two meet to begin the journey that leaves civilization behind as they travel into the depravity of Sundheim's mind. With Sundheim driving, they travel from Notting Hill to Marble Arch, Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. The further east they travel, the more of his dark side Sundheim reveals. The narrow streets reflect the meanness— the self-serving aspects of murder — as the two draw closer to the center of Sundheim's vile activities. Rain marks the beginning of the trip on which are raised questions concerning death, truth and communication that are imaged in landmarks of St. Paul's Cathedral, St. Martin's Church and Fleet Street as they drive to the East End. Now the journey moves towards a heart of darkness through the dangerous urban jungle, and the drumming of the heavy rain intensifies this feeling: "The rain that was falling steadily was almost a fine mist. When Sundheim turned off the car headlights, they were in total darkness. For a moment Reade felt nervous..." (171). The place where they have stopped, on this unpaved road, is at a dockside pub where humanity at its most bestial is presented and where, witnessed by Reade, Sundheim sexually brutalizes a prostitute and gets into a vicious brawl as his evil side emerges. 93

Part One : The City They move on to the final hell, the home of the murderer who quotes lines from Blake as he leads Reade to "157A Narrow Street, Limehouse," Jack the Ripper territory, to his flat above the slaughterhouse: "They had turned into a narrower street They had stopped beside two large wooden doors. The street ahead was lit by only one lamp and was deserted. There was a hooting of tugs from the river..." (184). And as the tugs from the river sound a warning of danger, Reade realizes the ghastly appropriateness and necessity of the setting: "...below him was the slaughterhouse that Sundheim used as a garage. A ladder ran down the wall. The outside of the door was covered with metal. Doors at the far end of the slaughterhouse opened onto the river, and men were unloading carcasses of meat from a boat" (186). When Reade leaves this intensely enclosed setting that holds its vile secrets behind metal doors, where only the river knows the truth, he hails a taxi which swings back around, like the story itself, to take Reade through the busy streets and back to sanity where the normality of the crowds takes over and brings him relief: "As they went through Algate, he found himself staring with mild surprise at the people going about their business; it seemed strange that everything should look so normal. Then his own excitement subsided and the fatigue came back.... He experienced a sense of relief. It was out of his hands" (190). In the closing scene, Reade is asked by the police to help them flush out Sundheim, who has returned to his house in Edwardes Mews, where he is holed up and firing a gun at anyone who approaches him. Reade goes there and gets into the house by kicking in the front door. He talks Sundheim into surrendering to the police, and the crowds outside witness the return to order.

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Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968) by H. R. R Keating H. R. F. Keating's mystery Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968) is set in Notting Hill, close to the setting of Margery Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker. Here, too, the streets enhance the ideas of evil and entrapment in contrast to the park as a place of disclosure, and the rain suggests impending revelation. When Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police arrives in London to attend a police seminar on international drug smuggling, he is inveigled into searching for a missing girl, nicknamed "the Peacock," who is a distant cousin of his wife and the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Battore, his wife's relatives with whom he is staying at the Tagore House Restaurant on Hyde Park Terrace in Bayswater. He is told by Mr. Battore, who meets him at the airport: "And, Cousin, you do not know London. It is a dangerous place, an evil and wicked place" (15). This is something Inspector Ghote is soon to find out as he sets out to "hunt the Peacock." Much of the mystery surrounding the missing girl, and Ghote's search for her involves an area not described in travel brochures: the seedy, dangerous and very colorful nearby area of Portobello Road in Notting Hill, known for its criminal element. As he wanders the streets of this neighborhood, Ghote comes to find a very different London from the idealized vision of the gracious cultivated city that he brought with

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Part One : The City him from Bombay, and through his eyes, the eyes of a stranger, the reader, too, sees London in a different light. Reality brings Ghote face to face with drug dealing, racism, and human brutality, all of which culminate in a fearsome trio of thugs, the Smith brothers and their virago mother. However, what disturbs Ghote most is what he sees as an absence of moral values and life motivation, an apathy that exists both sides of the law —a disinterest for life, which is reflected in the passive clouds when he first steps off the plane: "Above, grey clouds, huge and ragged, but somehow cool and unmenacing as they never were at home, were moving majestically across the low dome of the sky" (95). It is a miasma that he sees has a°icted all, including the relatives he is staying with, and he finally takes back with him to India a very different picture of his beloved England than the one he started out with. This change is marked by his reaction to the real London and begins on the very first morning of his visit when his journey to the Tower of London is marked by a plunge into the subterranean — the subconscious— that is witnessed by the crowds: "Cautiously he made his way down to the Tube platform. The train, when he got into it, was immensely crowded, but the mass of people seemed infinitely more orderly than those of the similar morning rush in Bombay" (47). Ghote's recognition of the passive, controlled aspect of the crowds is followed by a walk to the Tower, and, as he passes along the ancient streets, he brings past into present through his evocations, from London Wall, to Wormwood Street, crossing to Bishop's Gate, along Houndsditch, whose names evoke for him a "crowded and tumultuous past" and connect him with the crowds he now makes his way through. When he reaches the Tower, itself symbolic of history and order as well as murder and war, he is surprised that it does not look like the pictures of it he has seen. He views it from a "little public garden opposite" and finds the sight almost unbearable. History comes alive for him, and he experiences a kind of epiphany that will afford him the energy to surmount the problems ahead, as suggested by his observation when he leaves: ".. .he found suddenly that he was overwhelmed almost to drowning point, it seemed, by a totally unexpected and desperately acute attack of home-sickness"

(51). After much harassment by Mrs. Battore, Ghote reluctantly agrees to look into the disappearance of the Peacock between attending police 96

Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968) seminars on international drug smuggling held in the city. His cousin is convinced that the Peacock has been abducted by a famous pop singer, Johnny Bull, who is also an opium addict and has his drug smuggled in to London from Bombay inside a harmonium. Mrs. Battore insists that Ghote call on the singer and question him. But first Ghote pays a visit to the nearby Robin's Nest Cafe, where he meets the Smith brothers. He becomes convinced that these louts are responsible for the disappearance of the Peacock and sets about trying to prove it. But after several days, during which he is forced to come to terms with some self-truths as well as with this real London rather than his idealized one, Ghote realizes that it is his own cousin, Mr. Tagore, who has killed the Peacock because she knew of his addiction to opium and his fear of his aggressive wife and was blackmailing him. Ghote ends up solving both the mystery of the missing Peacock, whose body he discovers is buried in the back yard of the Tagore House Restaurant, and the mystery of how illegal drugs are entering the country. The streets lead Ghote further and further into a new view of London and reflect his confusion as he picks up the trail of the missing Peacock at the Robin's Nest Café on the Portobello Road: "The street looked narrow, deserted and a little ominous in front of him, its shabby-looking houses dwarfed by the distant skyline pricked out by scattered patches of light He turned into the narrow street in front of him. Perhaps before long he would learn something to lead him to whoever it was who had killed her. He began walking slowly forward..." (105). The ironically named Robin's Nest Cafe is a hangout for drug dealers and pimps. This irony is furthered by the kind of communication that goes in here compared to the use of the cafe or restaurant as a place where truths are made public. Even its one customer does not actually read his newspaper but rather hides behind it. The interior is described in nightmarish colors—tablecloths in the colors of madness, patterned with circles that reflect the dreary circuits of these people's lives— and green shelf paper covered with yellow bells that will never peal, suggesting a lack of communication and a sense of spiritual sickness that involves the lives of those who frequent this hell. Words like "buried" and "pinned" used in the description enforce this feeling of death in life where the plastic tablecloths of red with yellow circles, the paper bells of yellow on green that are pinned to the shelves, and, perhaps the biggest 97

Part One : The City irony, the live robin, "huddled and morose" in its cage on top of the juke box, are a sickening reminder of the absence of nature's healing powers and the death of the spirit as represented by the wild bird caged. As Ghote leaves the cafe and follows Pete Smith and his "slinking black dog" to his home in the heart of this neighborhood, he is faced with racist remarks from some local youths, and the truth of these unsavory aspects of a heretofore idealized society is thrust upon him as the mystery now begins to accelerate. This turning point is marked by a cinema and its suggestion of escape or illusion, which Pete Smith stops to stare at, and a corresponding change in the landscape where the crumbling porticoes and peeling paint of the houses suggest yet more sordid reality. When Ghote passes a square, which, in its description of wire fencing and faded grass, evokes the trapped and desperate lives of the Smiths, he finds it very unlike the traditional green oasis, and this enforces the theme of ailing nature: "He passed a garden square on his left. But it was very different from the one near Marble Arch with its trim rectangle of lawn and elegant drooping plane trees. This was a long, broad strip of overgrown grass, tall and pale brown under the light of the street lamps. It was entirely surrounded by a high wire-mesh fence, so that it looked almost as if it was being desperately protected against a prowling savage life outside" (126). The streets get meaner and meaner until Pete Smith, trailed by Ghote, reaches his home, the hub of his criminal activities. It is a mews, marked by an archway, and the dramatic description ushers in a new understanding for Ghote: "At the far end of a short length of cobbled lane, which was glistening slightly in the faint light coming from the street behind, Pete was standing at the top of a low flight of stone steps in front of a battered-looking, almost paintless door of a small, dark house" (127-8). From the center of this maze of streets that symbolize the heart of the evil, Ghote begins to unravel the mystery, and his imminent understanding of it is announced by the rain that begins as he surveys the comings and goings of the Smith trio across from the archway where he first followed Pete home. The stage is also marked by Ghote's shiver and the changes wrought upon him by nature which, like the idea of England, seems almost to turn against him and cause him harm as it spears and stings him with harsh rain and what he thinks is snow but is actually hail. Hail and snow become suggestive of evil and good, reality 98

Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968) and illusion: "And then it began to rain. The cloud that was blotting out the sun was greyer than the ones that had preceded it and from it long spearing drops of cold rain fell in a rapid crescendo But then the stinging force with which he was being lashed at from above made him realize that this was not in fact snow at all. It was only hail" (171). For Ghote, the final revelation takes place in Holland Park, which he reaches by walking up Kensington High Street, and his perception of the two streets, the reality of Portobello Road and the illusionary aspects of Kensington High Street with its facades of expensive shops that offer unattainable yet desirable wares, brings him to this point. Just hours before he leaves to return to Bombay, here, in the park, where he is able to order his thoughts, he discovers the solution to the mystery and reaches a truth concerning his own perceptions. He realizes that pure beauty or goodness is an unattainable ideal, that evil and goodness go hand-in-hand, as suggested by the description of the park's scenery and the contrast of the birds described therein.

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Black Out (1995) by John Lawton "A visit to the city of crime fiction tends to be either a tour of hell or a trip to some enchanted Circe's lair," says David Lehman, "where men, led by their lusts, turn into swine A vast metaphor for moral turbulence and social disorder, the modern city is conceived to be a barren place populated by phantoms, shadows, rootless hordes, and sundry agents of destruction: the city envisioned in the most famous of all modern poetic nightmares, the city as 'The Waste Land.'"38 This sentiment is echoed more prosaically by Detective Inspector Onions in John Lawton's Black Out (1995): "Bodies on the streets of London is always our turf" (90). The story, like Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and E. C. R. Lorac's Murder by Matchlight, takes place during the last days of WWII when the city is under invasion from the German Luftwaffe. The central character, Detective Sergeant Frederick Troy, is assigned by Scotland Yard to investigate the macabre appearance of several body parts, the result of murder rather than bombing, in London's East End. Troy comes into contact with a cast of villains and heroes when his investigation leads him into a world of intrigue and horror, and he uncovers a series of murders that point to a mentally deranged American OSS agent, Major Wayne. In the mystery genre, the nighttime hours are often used to foster murderous activities when the perpetrator thrives in anonymity, and as the title suggests, this is a murder mystery filled with darkness, not a slow natural darkness but a sudden grim artificially that

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Black Out (1995) falls with the swiftness of a guillotine as Londoners follow the orders of the government blackout and block any visible sign of light in house or street to escape bombardment. Dark streets, shadowy squares, and the claustrophobic Underground where people go to shelter from the danger above, all contrast with the relative safety of daytime. Into this setting, themes of innocence and evil, parallels of darkness and light, are intensified when a group of children playing on a bombsite discover the first body part, a severed arm. The story begins and ends in the East End of London, where the bombing is the most intense, and moves through the streets of central London as Sergeant Troy tracks the brutal killer. Through the two areas of East End and West End, the two kinds of crime, blue collar and white collar, are described, and echo David Lehman's statement concerning the expectations of the mystery plot: "To fulfill our expectations, the plot must leave no sector of society untouched, untainted by a criminal environment whose circumference keeps widening and whose center lies at the heart of the city's intricate maze. No murder occurs in isolation. Everyone is implicated; no one is safe."39 The opening scene sets the mood for evil and its discovery as destruction and reconstruction is reflected in the setting, in the bombed streets of Stepney, "blasted into a sprawling mass of jagged, undulating rubble" but now covered in a mantle of weeds and vines like a "wild garden" (3), which parallels the idea of detection itself. In this place, innocence and evil are contrasted when a group of children at play discover a human arm. This begins the mystery as murder and discovery promote the investigation and the two stories of past and present emerge. As Troy enters the story, the description of the streets around him heralds the war between good and evil that is foreshadowed in the opening scene: "He turned south at Ludgate Circus and drove slowly down New Bridge Street. Eight years a policeman, five almost entirely spent on murder cases had led him to define all human relations in terms of conflict. The craters of Blackfriars and Puddledock yawned on his right. There had been a woman in '38 who had put a knitting needle through the eye of a faithless husband. Upper Thames Street and the blitzed arches of Cannon Street station passed overhead" (5). In this bleak landscape of the East End an ominous reminder of constant danger presents itself in the gas works which are liable, like murder, to erupt at any given

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Part One : The City time: "All over London, gas-holders sat squat on the skyline like gigantic gibuses" (27). And indeed, danger makes itself plain with as the discovery of the second murder victim in Trafalgar Square: an American who walked out of the comfort and security of the pub into the dark streets "and was found half an hour later by the bobby on the beat with his throat cut to ribbons" (29). A sense of energy and communication is also reflected in the streets and contrasts with the solitary life-negating aspects of murder as Troy walks home after returning to the first murder scene in Stepney, from east to west. Here all aspects of life are described through the cinema, café, theatre, and crowds when he walks up Regent's Street, a busy shopping thoroughfare, and into Piccadilly Circus where he sees lines of people outside the movie theatres and hears voices from a café, "and the same sense of life and release oozed from the other end of the social scale through the blacked-out windows of the Lyon's Corner House" (41-2). But as he enters his own street, a secret enclosed space, he separates himself from this scene and once more assumes his role that parallels that of the isolated murderer: "Troy crossed Leicester Square to Wyndam's Theatre, over into St. Martin's Lane via the alley at the back, and turned into the entrance of Goodwins Court — a gate so strait Sidney Greenstreet could not have passed — to the small house in which he lived since leaving Stepney" (41-2). Discussing the "reciprocal relationship between place and motion as they are represented in literature," Leonard Lutwack states: "Frequent movement between places is always a popular motif because journeys at least promise life and action, while remaining in a place necessarily diminishes the opportunity for change and increases the need for description."40 In the mystery, this movement is often represented through the motive of the chase. Fundamentally, all detective novels are narratives of pursuit because in its search for permanent truth the investigation involves archetypal aspects and may involve few or many dangers and include one or more chases which in themselves may be at times reversed so that the prey becomes the hunter and vice versa. With the overall theme of pursuit, each chase becomes a single narrative, the details of which become crucial stages in the plot, and the reader becomes psychologically involved as the sequences of the chase unfold. The chases in this book involve two subjects— Lady Diana Brack, the woman Troy

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Black Out (1995) has fallen in love with, who is involved with treason, and Major Wayne, the American OSS agent —and are connected by streets, gardens and squares which intesifiy the sense of enclosure. One begins in Kensington Gardens, where the Lady Brack passes the afternoon, and ends in Tedworth Square (now turned into allotment gardens), where she meets an accomplice, the owner of a large pig: "She spoke to no one until we got into the square just north of Tite Street. It's all down to allotment now. She had a few words with an old feller who's raising a pig there" (99). Signifying both choice and confusion, the second chase begins at an intersection at nightfall. Troy crosses Royal Hospital Road and stops on the corner of Christchurch Street to look for the killer. He, too, ends up in Tedworth Square, "hedged in with a tangle of barbed wire and boards" (113). He meets the man with the pig who directs him to Sloane Square —"He followed the old man's hint and set off in the direction of Sloane Square"—where his prey slips into the Underground station. "Troy saw him go into the Underground station. The District line rose so near the surface that the train had been blacked out to meet ARP regulations.... The darkness outside was infinitely preferable to the dim, muggy interior of the train. It was like stepping into a circle of hell" (114-5). Here, he is injured in an air raid. Another chase takes place during the day and begins at another square, St. James's Square in the West End, where Troy watches Lady Diana: ".. .she moved rapidly in and out of the shadows.... She walked into Lower Regent Street and he lost sight of her. Seconds later she reappeared walking quickly back towards him..." (123). Yet another chase begins at the intersection — the corner of Tite Street and the Chelsea Embankment — and moves east. This intersection, too, along with the thick fog, suggests the confusion that intensifies before the denouement: "Wayne's cab turned into Chelsea Bridge Road. The traffic was light at this time of night but the mist that had wafted off the river now seemed to have the makings of a London pea-souper, and the two cabs in tandem moved slowly up Sloane Street to emerge in Knightsbridge. The smog took on the characteristic yellow hue of a killing cloud" (137). A sense of malign envelopment intensifies as another detective takes a taxi to a murder scene: "Wildeve was no longer sure where they were in the tangles streets of the city.... [H]e soon lost all sense of geography as the cab cut a zig-zag course across the small streets of Marylebone to the north of Marble Arch.... 'Do you

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Part One : The City know where we are?' 'Manchester Square, guv'nor.' That I will swear to." As Wildeve is about to step out of his cab to investigate the crime scene, he is killed: "He was dead before he hit the leather. A yellow tongue of creeping smog curled in through the open door to lick the corpse" (138). The final chase takes place in the East End, returning Troy to the start of the mystery after first moving to a subterranean link between the two distinct areas of the London Underground — District and Circle. Each of these chases results in a discovery which acts as a turning point in the story. The circle of horror is complete; setting and theme, like prey and hunter, come together. Troy kills Wayne, and life prevails like the vines and flowers that cover the bombed site where their desperate fight takes place.

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Part Two

The Shore

The Blotting Book (1908) by E. F. Benson "Without the atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and cowardice, the repetitious plot" the setting in the mystery becomes "meaningless and insipid,"1 claims Jack Bickham in Setting. The same could apply to E. F. Benson's thriller The Blotting Book (1908), set in the resort town of Brighton and the surrounding South Downs. In his introduction to the book, Stephen Knight calls it a "psychodrama" and states, "The story sets itself out, and the mystery is revealed, through the narrative's delicate approach to the characters' inner demons."2 Like Brighton Rock, The West Pier, and Mad Hatter's Holiday, the story takes place during the carnivalesque Whitsuntide Bank Holiday. The Downs represent freedom, a loss of inhibitions, in contrast to the spiritual despair suggested by the town. These aspects of civilization and nature are represented through the two main characters, Morris Assheton, a wealthy, but, as the first syllable in his surname suggests, stupid young man whose fortune has been embezzled from under his nose by the crafty old family lawyer, Mr. Taynton, who is "tainted" by greed and deceit. The idea of the reversal of order through the use of the carnivalesque is represented in the time of the year and in the character of Mr. Taynton. He presents himself as utterly trustworthy and is trusted by his clients, a mild-mannered caring person who turns out to be a ruthless murderer and a thief, and "any analysis of Mr. Taynton's character may seem almost grotesque" (61).* Taynton is, in turn, blackmailed by his business partner, Godfrey

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Part Two : The Shore Wells, whom Taynton eventually murders as his scheme is in danger of being disclosed. Taynton then tries to pin the blame on his trustee, Morris, but, unable to so, resorts to suicide. The drama opens on Morris Assheton's twenty-second birthday, at the home of Morris's mother, Mrs. Assheton, a wealthy widow who lives in Sussex Square, on the front. Here, Taynton falsely tells Morris that his trust fund is doing well and that he would like him to look at the books, knowing that the young man will have no interest in doing so. Morris drops a bombshell when he tells Taynton that he is thinking of getting married. Taynton is horrified because he knows the terms of Morris' trust state that he can take control of his money when he reaches twenty-five or immediately upon marriage. If this happens, Taynton's theft will be exposed. For Taynton, the landscape of the sea and front offer a sense of ritual that masks the chaos of his life, and as he walks home, westward, after learning of this news, the wind of change starts up with an ominous "whisper" as the drama begins. He reaches the West Pier and decides to drop in on his partner Mills, whose apartment overlooks the sea, and here, next to the sea, both men reveal their vile characters as they plot to stop Morris's marriage so that the disclosure of the embezzled trust fund will not come about. They do this by maligning Morris's character and making sure that his fiancée, Madge Templeton, and her family, who live in Falmer, a small village which is part of the Downs, find out about it. After he discovers the lies about told about him, Morris confronts Taynton, who denies knowledge of it. The promenade is the setting for recognition as Morris returns home along the sea front and remembers that he is going to buy a birthday present, a blotting book, for his mother. This blotting book becomes the key element in finally proving the guilt of Taynton in the murder of his business partner: "Morris walked quickly back along the sea front toward Sussex Square, and remembered as he went that he had not yet bought any gift for his mother on her birthday. There was something, too, which she had casually said a day or two ago that she wanted, what was it? Ah, yes, a new blotting-book for her writing-table in the drawing-room" (95). Downs and cliffs also make up the landscape of this story. Morris goes to the Downs to think about who could have maligned his character ^Quotations from The Blotting Book (London: Hogarth, 1987).

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The Blotting Book (1908) and caused the breakup in his relationship with his fiancée, and it is here that his anger emerges: "He walked over the strip of velvety down grass to the edge of the white cliffs, and there he sat down. The sea below him whispered and crawled, above the sun was the sole tenant of the sky, and east and west the down was empty of passengers" (100). He sits on the dangerous edge of the cliff as he gains a new perspective of life. He becomes purely instinctual, close to losing his reason, and, like Pinkie in Brighton Rock, he suffers an impotent rage at the forces of circumstance: "Morris's hands clutched at the short down grass, tearing it up and scattering it. He was helpless, too, unless he took the law into his own hands.... He wanted to smash the jaw bone that had formed these lies.... There was danger and death abroad on the calm hot summer afternoon" (104-5). The condition of the weather intensifies along with Morris's anger and the strengthening of tension in the plot: "For the heat of the past week had been piling itself up, like the heaped waters of flood, and this afternoon was intense in its heat, its stillness and sultriness. It had been sunless all day, and all day the blanket of clouds that beset the sky had been gathering themselves into blacker and more ill-omened density" (105). It turns out that Taynton kills his business partner, Mills. To cover his gambling debts, Mills has been blackmailing Taynton over the embezzled trust fund, claiming that he knew nothing of the scheme and can disprove Taynton's assertions to the contrary as no letters concerning the situation were ever exchanged between them. During a violent thunderstorm, Taynton murders Mills on the Downs, a place where inhibitions are forgotten, and points the finger at Morris. He arranges a meeting with Mills, who covers the London end of their business. Knowing that his partner leaves the train from London at Falmer in order to walk on to Brighton across the Downs, Taynton makes sure the arrival of his train coincides with Morris's visit to Falmer to see his fiancée. When he plans this, he leaves the house to walk along the front, and the setting again reflects his evil intent as he finally makes his decision and goes to the Downs to meet the train and murder his partner: ".. .his face was still overshadowed and overclouded. Overclouded too was the sky.... Dreadful forces, forces of ruin and murder and disgrace, were abroad in the world of men" (115). Meanwhile, the realization of the switched security bonds and the exploitation of his own trust and his ensuing violent

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Part Two : The Shore anger mark a change in Morris. Out on the Downs, he has learned something about human nature, and when he returns, exhausted, to his mother's house in Brighton, at the end of the same storm in which Taynton murders Mills, the description of the landscape, the soft rain, and the rhythmic plash of the waves beneath his window suggest this change in him: "Nature, too, it seemed, was exhausted by that convulsion of the elements that had turned the evening into a clamorous hell of fire and riot, and now from very weariness she was weeping herself to sleep" (130). From this sleep, Morris awakens a new man. When he goes from his bed to the window, the perspective offered by the horizon is a reflection of his own coming into being, and, as before, the landscape reflects this rebirth as he looks into the new morning and realizes : "All that riot and hurly-burly of thunder, the bull's eye flashing lightning, the perpendicular rain were things of the past..." (138-9). Morris is accused of the murder and picked up by the police from his mother's house. From here, in the face of his imminent incarceration, he takes a final look at the sea and the freedom it offers: "...above illimitable blue stretched from horizon to horizon, behind was the free fresh sea" (209). But during his trial for murder at the county town of Lewes, the truth is discovered through the pages of the blotting book which bear the imprint of a forged letter written by Taynton, as the counsel for the case explains. Realizing that he will soon be accused of the murder, Taynton returns to Brighton where, like Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock and Jack Havock in The Tiger in the Smoke, he commits suicide. Thunderstorms, calm weather, the sea, and the South Downs reflect the emotional changes in these characters and mark the reversal in the plot.

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Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) by Francis Beeding Praised by Vincent Starrett, the author of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, as being "[o]ne of the ten greatest detective novels of all times"3 is Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931). The mystery concerns a series of murders involving romance, madness, disguise, and embezzlement in the small town of Eastrepps on the east coast. Here, six murders take place on or near the cliffs, which, as the landscape of danger, become a recurring motif throughout the story, always darkly in the background and tied in with the characters' actions. Each character who moves within this setting has a special relationship with it. Robert Eldridge is a one-time embezzler who is sentenced to death and killed for the murders, his motive for the killings believed to be in his list of people from Eastrepps who have been involved in investing and losing their small fortunes with him. After a fifteen-year absence abroad he has returned to live in Eastrepps under an assumed identity. Another character, Alistair Rockingham, is a madman from an aristocratic family. Both these men move in the shadows of the night, fearful of recognition. Rockingham suffers from some kind of metamorphic sickness and transforms into a vicious, dog-like figure during his periods of insanity, dropping on all fours, snarling and barking. The story begins with a train journey from London as one of the characters, Robert Eldridge, is on his way to Eastrepps for his regular Wednesday night tryst with the innocent Margaret Withers, with whom

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Part Two : The Shore he has been having a six-month affair. He travels from London to Eastrepps on Wednesday nights to spend them with Margaret, then returns to London, undetected, the following morning. Margaret, a married woman separated from her abusive husband, John Withers, a crook, and trying to get a divorce, cannot be discovered having an affair or she'll not only be unable to get the divorce but will also lose custody of her small daughter. Another character, Dick Coldfoot, is Margaret's cousin, and he has been blackmailing her, threatening to tell her estranged husband about her affair with Eldridge. The first of the murder victims is Mary Hewitt, who, along with her brother James, lives on a cliff. The description of their house and garden foreshadow the danger about to unfold: "The windows looked upon a small garden which consisted mostly of lawn. The roses in the flower-beds, though carefully tended, wore a stricken look, for the house faced the sea, which could be heard from time to time mumbling the sandstone cliffs upon which the house was built" (18).* And the description of the sickly sea reinforces the mood set by the description of the house: "Far away to the right, to be just seen if you craned your neck from the window, the sun was sinking into the grey waters" (18). The murder of Miss Hewitt is committed, as all the murders are, on a Wednesday evening at 10:30 after she has spent some time on the lovely garden of her friend: "she would go, as her custom was, to see her friend, Mrs. Dampier, on the way home by the cliff" (24). Danger is signified by cliff edge and wood, which is on the point of falling into the sea, in the setting for Miss Hewitt's murder: "But first she had to go through Coatt's Spinney, a little wood of stunted oak trees, the unpleasant little wood. Some day it would drop into the sea, and already half the trees had been strangled by the cruel winds that swept down upon them from the north..." (27). During that same evening, Rockingham escapes from the house where he is kept locked up at night. He follows a young woman who is walking by the cliffs, a Miss Taplow, who lives with her parents on East Cliff Road and whose uncle lost a lot of money through Eldridge's embezzlement schemes: "He moved off in swift but decorous pursuit. It was a pity she walked so fast, but in any case he could barely speak to her until she was near the cliff road. It was safer there — ^Quotations from Death Walks in Eastrepps (New York: Dover, 1980).

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Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) not so many houses" (63). That same evening, Inspector Protheroe discovers the body as he is walking home to his house on the East Cliff after a long day of investigation at the police station. The third murder victim, a local fisherman called Masters who had claimed to have caught sight of Miss Hewitt's murderer, is also murdered on the cliffs, as Colonel Hewitt explains to the newspaper reporter Ferris: "Masters was killed on the zigzag path that runs down the cliff over there" (105). The madman, Rockingham, is arrested for the murders, but is released when the fourth victim, Mrs. Dampier, is found murdered. The morning before she is killed, the carnivalesque reversal of order is introduced when she sees a group of minstrels as she is shopping that morning: "A disconsolate quintet of minstrels—three men with blackened faces carrying banjoes in cases, followed by two girls in crumpled white pierrot dresses, passed as she was speaking" (109). Her remark foreshadows her own upcoming death: "the bus will be starting in five minutes, and I don't want to miss it" (109). And when she gets home and goes to her lovely garden to reflect on what has been happening in Eastrepps, she feels safe and away from the storm, but the reversal of order is presents in her thoughts concerning the police who are trying to solve the murder: "...they must move about, haggard in the hot sunshine, tracking down the Evil, as one enterprising paper had named it, while the frightened trippers fled in scores and minstrels played their jazz on the deserted sands, and no one ventured to stir abroad after nightfall"

(109). However, Mrs. Dampier is murdered in her own Edenic setting. It happens when she hears a disturbance outside the garden door and upon opening it witnesses the murder of the president of the golf club and is killed herself because of this. What makes the murder seem so much more horrible and the murderer all the more sinister and intractable is that the killing takes place in Mrs. Dampier's self-made Eden, her oasis from the world: "A man was trying to enter her garden.... Opposite her stood a dark figure. His eyes burned in a swarthy face and about his chin was a black beard. His arm was raised. Something gleamed in the lamplight" (140). The crowds retreat because of the growing number of unsolved murders, and the town empties mid-season, taking on a sinister air which intensifies the atmosphere of apprehension and dread by those

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Part Two : The Shore who are left behind — but " [t]he visitors would be coming back, and the minstrels again perform before audiences free of care on the sands" (139). The newspaper reporter, William Ferris, is associated with truth and with the crowd in its insistence for truth. He is first introduced after the initial murder, and his position as observer continues throughout the story. Ferris, who, like Moscrop in Peter Lovesey's Mad Hatter's Holiday, is on holiday and an observer of human nature, watches the crowds as they pass by, and, like Hale in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, works for a newspaper. He is an outsider and a professional and his vision of the town is such. He follows the story of the murders closely and reports each incident. He is the voice of truth and, because he eventually understands who the murderer really is, he too is killed. His strangely prophetic statement when he walks the nighttime streets just before he is murdered reflects this: "Churchstreet was deserted, though this was no time for a seaside town at the height of the season to have gone to bed. 'Truly,' thought Ferris, 'a city of the dead'" (163). He becomes the final murder victim, and just before he is killed, the imminent reversal of order is suggested through the group of vaudevillians ("The East Coast Revellers") that he meets on his final lonely walk as they leave the theater. Although, at first, he follows the story with no concern for his own safety, his new understanding makes him afraid. He is the only murder victim who, through his sense of the environment, knows, like Hale in Brighton Rock, that he is going to die, and the stage — the front — is set for the drama: "He stood alone in this little town, facing the grey sea Here was the sea. He had come by narrow streets to the short esplanade that stretched broadly away under the lamps to the limit of East Cliff and the common that separated Eastrepps from West Runton" ( 167). Ferris is killed, as are the other five victims, by the unassuming police sergeant, Ruddock, whose unmarried mother, also from Eastrepps, it turns out, was another victim of Eldridge's embezzlement schemes, and lost her small savings to him and lived in poverty before she died. Because of his illegitimacy, Ruddock lived an unhappy childhood in Eastrepps and vowed to return and make the town notice him: "I realised that the only success or triumph that could ever mean anything to me must be witnessed by those who had avoided or pitied me" (263). "Why not create both the case and its solution?" he asks himself (265), and this he does. Recognizing Eldridge as the man Selby who had

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Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) embezzled so many people's small savings fifteen years ago, he goes through his mother's papers and finds "an old and tattered list which she had compiled in her own handwriting from the various sources of the shareholders of Anaconda Ltd. at the time of the crash." (266). The people on the list still living in Eastrepps he kills, making sure each the time of each murder would coincide with Eldridge's Wednesday night visits to Margaret. He copies the list out on his typewriter and hides it in Eldridge's London office before suggesting to Scotland Yard that they search it. The list points the finger at Eldridge as the murderer, and after a sensational trial, he is executed. For his help in identifying the "Eastrepps Evil," Ruddock is promoted to a position at Scotland Yard, and it seems his plan has paid off. But after the execution of Eldridge, Margaret, knowing that Eldridge was innocent because he was with her at the times of the murders, goes over the evidence, including the list and Ruddock's typed report of the case. Because of the violet ink and the lettering, she is able to match the two documents and Ruddock is arrested for the murders. Order is restored, murder relegated to the newspaper and justice recorded as the story ends as Miss Scarlett hurries home along the sea front to read her newspaper which announces the execution of Ruddock. The season is over, as is the horror. The ritual of tea takes precedence over the ritual of death as the little town settles in for the winter.

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The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) by Gladys Mitchell On her use of place, Gladys Mitchell writes: "My vocational [writing] interests are governed by British Ordnance Survey Maps, as definite, real setting is usually necessary to the formation of my plots."4 Cliffs, as well as coves, secret passages, tidal sweeps, and stone quarries, are an important part of the setting in Gladys Mitchell's whimsical and delightful book The Saltmarsh Murders (1932). These coastal features are used to incorporate such goings-on as incest, unwanted pregnancy, pornography, religion, murder, and insanity that take place in the village of Saltmarsh on the Dorset coast. In their introduction to the Hogarth edition, Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan liken this mystery to Stella Gibbons' dark comedy Cold Comfort Farm (1932): The village of Saltmarsh, where Gladys Mitchell's clergyman-narrator has his first unfortunate curacy, is peculiarly prone to disturbance. It is a place where the vicar may be taken for a goat and tethered to a stake in the ancient pound, while his wife remains in a state of outrage over various licentious goings-on. In certain respects it bears a resemblance to the Cold Comfort hamlet of Howling. Adultery, high jinks, horseplay, an illegitimate birth, a hidden baby, rumours of infanticide, exhibitions of lunacy, a couple of murders, a lost corpse, an illicit trade in pornography, even a spot of incest all keep things lively for Gladys Mitchell's benighted villagers before Mrs. Bradley gets to the bottom of things.5

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The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) The ancient, crone-like Mrs. Bradley, who, in later books, becomes Dame Beatrice, is a psychologist. She appears in many of Gladys Mitchell's mysteries and is described by the narrator as "smallish, thin and shriveled, and she had a yellow face with sharp black eyes, like a witch, and yellow, claw-like hands" ( 2 4 ) / The story is told in first person by the young curate, Noel Wells, who lives with the Reverend Belvedere Coutts; his wife, a strangely suppressed woman; their young nephew, William; and their niece, Daphne, who is engaged to Noel Wells. Upon Mrs. Coutts' discovery that her husband, the Reverend, is the father of the baby her housemaid is carrying, the peaceful village explodes. The theme of the carnivalesque is signified by the time of year that the mystery takes place, during August Bank Holiday, amid the preparations for the yearly fete held at the Manor House, home of the local nobs, the Kingston-Foxes, where Mrs. Bradley is staying. The stages of the story escalate along with the preparation for this fete and culminate with the first murder, which takes place on the evening of the fete. Not everyone is involved with the preparations, for someone murders Meg Tossick, the vicar's pregnant housemaid, who has been taken in by the couple who run the local pub, Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, who turn out to be incestuous siblings. At first, it is assumed that Meg's boyfriend, Candy, is the murderer, but it turns out to be the enraged vicar's wife, Mrs. Coutts, who has tumbled to the fact that her husband is the father of the baby. Mentally unbalanced, she also decides to kill any other young women who seem to be living promiscuously. This includes the girlfriend, Cora, of a Mr. Burt who lives in a bungalow by the beach and smuggles pornographic books. The mad Mrs. Coutts, whom Miss Bradley describes her in her notebook, also tries to strangle Daphne, her niece by marriage. The isolated setting of the Bungalow, home of Mr. Burt, his girlfriend, Cora, and their American manservant, Washington, is a crucial site in the mystery and in solving the murders: "It was situated above the Saltmarsh stone quarries, a lonely and a dangerous, and, according to the villagers, a haunted locality..." (32). Its setting offers a very real and thematic presence of danger to the story. The mystery beings when the narrator, Noel Wells, is summoned to pick up the vicar's nephew, ^Quotations from The Saltmarsh Murders (London: Hogarth Press, 1984).

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Part Two : The Shore William. The setting foreshadows the dangers about to unfold and symbolizes significant aspects of the mystery. It is reached by a path that runs along the cliffs. On one side of the cliffs, quarries have been excavated; the other side descends to the sea. Noel learns from William that one of the locals, a Mr. Gatty, has been murdered, according to what Mrs. Gatty has told the boy. But it turns out that Mr. Gatty has been locked, temporarily, in the church crypt by Mr. Burt. Like Mrs. Coutts, Mrs. Gatty is also mad, but whereas the vicar's wife suppresses her madness, Mrs. Gatty flaunts hers and revels in it. "Interesting contrast in mental defectiveness," comments Mrs. Bradley in her notebook on the two women.6 The Bungalow is reached by a precipitous footpath that eventually leads down to the beach and the cove. On the night of the murder, Reverend Coutts is kidnapped after he goes to this cove to swim and is assaulted and taken to the village green where he is tied up: "With the idea of getting away from the fete, the raucous music of the roundabouts and all that, he walked up towards the stone quarries and down to the beach by Saltmarsh Cove. He walked fast, and was pretty tired when he reached the cove, so he sat on a bit of rock and gazed at the sea and decided it was a good chance for a swim ... the tide was almost out" (84-5). It is here, in the sea, that the Reverend discovers that there is smuggling going on: he sees "a lantern swung rhythmically three times out at sea" and is knocked unconscious and removed from the beach by two assailants. The smuggled goods turn out to be pornographic books: ".. .when we did go to patrol the sea-shore, we were not only on the track of the men who had attacked the vicar but, as we thought, on the track of the man who killed Meg Tossick" (90). Danger is represented through the landscape again when Noel and Mrs Bradley go to the Bungalow on the cliffs. It is at this point in the story, with the winds of change blowing, that the plot starts to unfold as Mrs. Bradley makes Mr. Burt promise to cease his smuggling activities: "I quaked and was in anguish as we mounted the rough track. Heavy clouds raced across the sky, driven by the same strong wind as was almost blowing us backwards down the hill. The quarries were silent and deserted. The workings were no longer used, and the deep holes were supposed to be fenced in. It occurred to me with horrible clearness just how simple it would be for a man like Burt to throw us over the edge where the fences had rotted away" (111).

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The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) Pivotal to the solution of the murders is a secret passage that runs between the Bungalow and the village inn and leads to the cove. It is used as a means to murder and escape, as well as a place of sexual assignations, and may also be seen as part of the underworld of the subconscious, as Mrs. Bradley detects: "I think Cora walked as far as the Cove ... dived into the Cove, followed the passage — (whose entrance at the Cove end is so cleverly concealed that I spent two long hours there with a powerful electric torch before I located it) — reached the transverse to the Bungalow, went along the transverse to the Bungalow, and was actually in or under the Bungalow when she was murdered" (213). It is in this same underground passage, a place of secrecy, that Cora meets her illicit lover while Mr. Burt, her boyfriend, is away on business: "Their passage was their secret way, the Cove their meeting place" (264). And Mrs. Bradley goes on to explain that the passage is also used by the murderer as a route by which he can drag his victim's body to the sea: ".. .they got Meg Tossick's body to the sea along the passage" (269). The final explanation is delivered by Mrs. Bradley, and it is just such a combination of elements and setting that she describes that make the resolution of this mystery dependent upon its use of the coastal landscape as she explains that the tide which carries flotsam from Saltmarsh Cave down the coast to an area (spit) is called "Dead Man's." From here the body, she concludes, as it has not been found, must have been washed out to sea. Throughout the mystery, cliffs, treacherous paths, tides, deceit, coves and passages are all used to enhance the evil intent behind the murders.

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Have His Carcass (1932) by Dorothy Sayers,

The Boomerang Clue (1933) by Agatha Christie,

and A Shilling for Candles (1936) by Josephine Tey Three remarkable mysteries, each written in the 1930s, within just a few years of each other, use the coastal setting in their opening and closing scenes rather than throughout the entire stories: Have His Carcass (1932), The Boomerang Clue (1933) and A Shilling for Candles (1936). The settings in each are described so powerfully and are so crucial to the plots that it is worth looking at them alone. The first of these is Dorothy Sayers' Have His Carcass (1932), which uses the cliff and beach and involves finding out the identity of the corpse. Harriet Vane, the mystery writer who appears in other mysteries by this author, is the amateur sleuth. While on a walking along the west coast, she stops on the cliff road between the fictitious towns of Lesston Hoe and Wilvercombe and goes down to the beach to eat her lunch. She falls asleep and is awakened at two in the afternoon by a sharp cry. She discovers, a little further down the beach, the body of a young man stretched out on a

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Have His Carcass (1932); The Boomerang Clue (1933); A Shilling (1936) large rock, "Flat-Iron Rock," with his throat deeply slashed. She photographs the corpse and goes to fetch the police. By the time she and they return, the tide has presumably washed the body out to sea. Only her photos remain as proof of the murder. She sets about to solve the mystery along with her friend, Lord Peter Wimsey. The coastal road that Harriet walks along before her gruesome discovery offers a perspective of the surrounding landscape of cliffs and beach and describes a conflict between the vertical and horizontal that foreshadows the oncoming conflict between good and evil: "The coast-road ran pleasantly at the top of a low range of cliffs, from which she could look down upon the long yellow stretch of the beach, broken here and there by scattered rocks, which rose successively, glistening in the sunlight, from the reluctant and withdrawing tide" (10).* A key element in solving the mystery of the disappearance of the body hinges on the tide. When Harriet stops for lunch, the tide is almost out and it is noon. As she climbs down to the beach the drama about to begin is represented again by the opposing perspectives of long beach stretched before her and the towering cliffs beside her: "The tide was nearly out now, and the wet beach shimmered golden and silvery in the lazy moonlight.... She found herself in a small cove, comfortably screened from the wind by an outstanding mass of cliff..." (11). The wind that signifies change marks, for Harriet, a new stage in her life. When she awakens from her sleep in the snug, womblike little cove and is faced with the open beach, she marks this stage by "determining to walk out to the wet sand" and leave her footprints on it. She "capers" along the sand in a "burst of energy" that moves her along the beach towards her discovery of death. She sees a large rock along the beach with what she thinks is a man asleep on it and decides to let the incoming tide wake him up, but curiosity impels her to move in closer: The rock lay tilted like a gigantic wedge of cake, its base standing steeply up to seaward, its surface sloping gently back to where its apex entered the sand. Harriet climbed up over its smooth, dry surface till she stood almost directly over the man. He did not move at all.... She bent over and gently lifted the man's head.... Indeed, if the head did not come off in Harriet's hands, it was only because the spine was intact, for the larynx and ^Quotations from Have His Carcass (New York: Avon, 1968); The Boomerang Clue (New York: Berkley, 1984); and A Shilling for Candles (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

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Part Two : The Shore all the great vessels of the neck had been severed "to the hause bone," and a frightful stream, bright red and glistening, was running over the surface of the rock and dripping into a little hollow below... [14]. On the deserted beach, with the tide beginning to turn, the only life in sight is a fishing-boat far out to sea. It turns out much later in the story that this boat brought the murdered man to the beach. But, for now, Harriet is left with some puzzling questions and only one track of footprints except her own stretching before her in the wet sand. She finds an "open cut-throat razor" pushed into a sandy crevice by the body as the tide "was coming in inexorably" and "[t]he wind, too, had hauled around to the south-west and was strengthening every moment. It looked as though the beauty of the day would not last" (19). As this crucial opening chapter ends, the elements of the landscape combine to reflect the drama, and Harriet's final action is tied into the setting as she now reverses her journey by climbing back up the cliff to seek justice: The day was certainly clouding over and the wind getting up. Looking out beyond the rock, she saw a line of little swirls and eddies, which broke from time to time into angry-looking spurts of foam, as though breaking about the tops of hidden rocks. The waves everywhere were showing feathers of foam, and dull yellow streaks reflected the gathering-cloud masses further out to sea. The fishing-boat was almost out of sight, making for Wilverton. Not quite sure whether she had done the right thing or wrong, Harriet gathered up her belongings, including the shoes, hat, razor, cigarette-case and handkerchief, and started to scramble up the face of the cliff [20]. After contacting the police, Harriet takes a room "overlooking the esplanade" in the hotel of a nearby town. Here, she is joined by Lord Peter Wimsey, and together they work on solving the mystery. During their search for the truth, they return to the beach at what becomes the turning point in the story. Amid the symbolic aspects of the setting and galvanized by the forces of nature that swirl around them, an idea emerges that involves the question of the tides: Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey sat side-by-side on the beach, looking out towards the Devil's Flat-iron. The fresh salt wind blew

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Have His Carcass (1932); The Boomerang Clue (1933); A Shilling (1936) strongly in from the sea, ru°ing Harriet's dark hair. The weather was fine, but the sunshine came only in brilliant bursts, as the driven clouds rolled tumultuously across the bellowing vault of the sky. Over the Grinders, the sea broke in furious patches of white. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and the tide was at its lowest, but even so, the Flat-iron was hardly uncovered, and the Atlantic waves, roaring in, made a heavy breach against its foot. A basket of food lay between the pair, not yet unpacked. Wimsey was drawing plans in the damp sand.... "Stop a minute. How about the tide? When was low water on Thursday?" [81-82]. The symbolic gesture of Harriet and Wimsey discarding their clothes and entering the sea where "the water was cold and the wind icy" (86), and the discovery of a ring embedded in Flat-iron Rock that was used to tie up the fishing boat, marks the stage from which the mystery unfolds. The setting for Agatha Christie's The Boomerang Clue (1933) is the small seaside town of Marchbolt on the Welsh coast where murder takes place on the cliff edge. As in Have His Carcass, everything evolves from the opening scene where the victim, whose dying words are "Why didn't they ask Evans?" is found by Christie's amateur sleuth, Bobby Jones, when he is playing golf on the cliff top with the local doctor, Dr. Thomas. The confusion that leads up to this discovery is reflected in the description of the landscape: "He peered out to the right. It was a difficult light. The sun was on the point of setting, and looking straight into it, it was hard to see anything distinctly. Also there was a slight mist rising from the sea. The edge of the cliff was a few hundred yards away" (20). Imminent danger is suggested in the nearby cliff edge and the change of perspective as Bobby's view changes from a horizontal one at the game of golf to a downward view along the face of the cliffs that parallels a corresponding plunge into the subconscious, and immediately following this description of Bobby's search for his lost golf ball, the dying man is discovered below: "Far below the sea sparkled, but not every ball was lost in its depths. The drop was sheer at the top, but below it shelved gradually.... Some forty feet below was a dark heap of something that looked like old clothes. The Doctor caught his breath. "By Jove!" he said. Somebody's fallen over the cliff. We must get down to him" (3). The sea mist, as it represents confusion and that loss of "conscious

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Part Two : The Shore knowledge" that leads to unsuspected danger, is a recurring image in the question of murder or accident concerning the fate of the victim. It is, at first, assumed that the victim met his death through being lost in it: "I suppose he wasn't familiar with the path and when the mist came up he walked over the edge" (4). "Fatal Accident in Sea Mist" (14) is how the incident is recorded in the local paper, and when Dr. Thomas describes the "accident" to the court of inquest, it is the mist that he focuses upon as the cause: "There was a mist rising from the sea, and at that particular point the path turns abruptly inland. Owing to the mist the deceased may not have noticed the danger and walked straight on — in which case two steps would take him over the edge" (18). From the opening scene with its landscape of cliffs, sea mist and sea, and the reconstruction of the victim's death by Bobby Jones and his partner, Lady Frances Derwent, the mystery evolves as these two attempt to discover the identity of the dead man and the reason for his murder. Glyne Gap, a remote location on the south coast of England between St. Leonard's-on-sea and Eastbourne, is the setting for Josephine Tey's A Shilling for Candles (1936). Like The Boomerang Clue and Have His Carcass, the key elements of cliff, beach, sea, the discovery of the body of a woman who turns out to be a famous actress and the question of identity are all presented in the crucial opening scene as William Potticary's ritual morning cliff top walk is disrupted when he sees below the body of a swimmer lying on the beach. It is early morning, and the sea is static, suggestive of the lifelessness of the body on the beach. The contrasting perspectives of cliff face and supine shore are marked by a screaming gull which breaks the peaceful silence to warn of the impending chaos as it swoops down from the cliff to the body on the beach: "It was a little after seven on a summer morning, and William Potticary was taking his accustomed way over the short down grass of the clifftop. Beyond his elbow, two hundred feet below, lay the Channel, very still and shining like a milky opal.... A sea-gull flashed suddenly above the cliff-top, and dropped screaming from sight to join its wheeling comrades below The white line of the gently creaming surf was broken by a patch of verdigris green" (1-2). As Potticary nears the corpse on the beach, which is likened to the sand: "Her arms and legs were as brown as the sand"—the energy of the tide contrasts with the stillness of the body, and the sense of beauty and evil that surrounds the young woman

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Have His Carcass (1932); The Boomerang Clue (1933); A Shilling (1936) is represented in the description of the shore, which itself seems to take on human characteristics: It was difficult going on the beach. The large white pebbles slid maliciously under his feet, and the rare patches of sand, being about tide level, were soft and yielding. But presently he was within the cloud of gulls, enveloped by their beating wings and their wild crying.... A wave washed over her feet and sucked itself away, through the scarlet-tipped toes. Potticary, although the tide in another minute would be yards away, pulled the inanimate heap a little higher up on the beach, beyond the reach of the sea's impudence [3]. The riddle of the woman's identity, emphasized by her lack of clothes except a swimming suit, is the reason her death is at first attributed to suicide and the landscape, as the coast guard explains: "Course it's a suicide. What do we have cliffs for?" (4). When it is ascertained that had she thrown herself off the clifftop she would have landed on the beach, it is suggested that "she walked into the sea till she drowned" (5). This suggestion of a loss of identity through a loss of clothes is introduced in this opening scene on the beach and is developed throughout the story. Here, the question of the missing clothes is first addressed by Potticary, who says "that she had left them below high-water mark and that they were now somewhere at sea" (7), and is followed through when a towel belonging to the woman is found in her car parked above on the cliff road: "The sergeant produced it: a brilliant object in green and yellow. 'Funny she didn't take it to the beach with her,' he said" (11). And in the discovery of the murderer, everything hinges on discovery of a missing button from a man's coat found in the car, as Inspector Grant, who is brought down from Scotland Yard to solve the mystery, explains to his colleague: "Well, but for that button coming off no one would ever have suspected anything. She'd have been found drowned after going to bathe in the early morning —all quite natural. No footsteps, no weapon, no signs of violence. Very neat." "Yes. It's neat." "You don't sound very enthusiastic about it." "It's the coat. If you were going to drown a woman in the sea, would you wear an overcoat to do it?" [41].

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Part Two : The Shore The opening scene constitutes the crucial setting for murder, for as Inspector Grant explains as he becomes involved with the crime: "It was an ideal setting: a lonely beach in the early morning, with the mist just rising. Too perfect a chance to let go to waste" (78). In each of these three works, coastal features such as the cliffs, the tide, and the beach serve to intensify the plots by suggesting a sense of danger and mystery.

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Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene "In its pace, its use of dramatic and real time, exploitation of the pursuit motif in several variations, and its exceptional use of place, Greene has created a brilliant work, perhaps his best,"7 says critic R. H. Miller of Brighton Rock (1938) in which Graham Greene uses Brighton and its environs to develop themes such as moral corruption and alienation as well as such aspects of the mystery as the carnivalesque, the motif of the chase, and the distortion of time. "Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as a error of judgment," says Greene. "The first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story...." 8 These fifty pages which comprise part one of the book introduce the four main characters: Pinkie Brown, his girlfriend, Rose, Ada Arnold, and Fred Hale. The story concerns a gang of thugs who run a protection racket. The leader is the young juvenile delinquent, Pinkie Brown, about whom Greene writes: The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans—doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of a fallen angel about them, a morality which once belonged to another place. The outlaw of justice always keeps in his heart the sense of justice outraged—his crimes have an excuse and yet he is pursued by the Others. The Others have committed worse crimes and flourish. The world is full of Others who wear the masks of Success, of a Happy Family. Whatever crime he may have been driven to commit the child who doesn't grow up remains the great champion of justice.9

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Part Two : The Shore Terry Eagleton describes the setting in relation to Pinkie Brown: "Brighton, a seedy, flashy, candy-floss world, is seen by the novel with a coldly dehumanizing perception which parallels Pinkie's own responses.... Pinkie's view of experience is time and again confirmed by the novel itself; his revolted rejection of life is underpinned by the book's mood and imagery, which remorselessly elaborates the selective sorditities of Brighton to the status of the entire human condition."10 The story, which involves murder, retribution, and exploitation, takes place during the religious festival of Whitsuntide. Pinkie, who reminds one of a younger Jack Havoc, the cold-blooded killer in Margery Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke, has recently become the leader of a motley crew of gang members. He inherited the gang from his mentor, Kite, who was previously murdered by a racketeer named Colleoni after being betrayed by Fred Hale, another gang member. An account of Kite's death is presented in Greene's previous book, A Gun for Sale (1936). Pinkie avenges Kite's murder by choking Fred Hale with a stick of Brighton rock, causing him to suffer a fatal heart attack. This rock, similar to salt water taffy, is a cylindrical length of hard pink candy and as much a part of the urban seaside resorts as the crowds. It is imprinted with the name of the town throughout its core; hence, whenever a piece is broken off, the name appears. It is a symbol of continuity and, in Brighton Rock, is used as both a murder weapon and a wedding present. Pinkie gives Rose a stick of rock from the same box from which he selected a stick to choke Hale. Greene chose it for his title both because of its connection with the circumstances of Hale's death, and because of its use, by Ida, as a simile to explain the unchanging nature of the human heart. When Rose, in defense of her relationship with the criminal, Pinkie, says that people change, Ida's response is, "Oh, no they don't.... I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock, bite it all the way down. That's human nature" (198)/ Pinkie's efforts are spent in trying to cover up the murder, which leads to yet another murder, the death of an elderly member of the gang named Spicer who is suffering from nerves and is about to disclose Pinkie's murder of Hale to the police. The main theme concerns Ida Arnold's efforts to reveal Pinkie's murder of her friend, Fred Hale, and bring him to justice while at the ^Quotations from Brighton Rock (London: Penguin, 1988).

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Brighton Rock (1938) same time protecting the innocent and gullible Rose from a dangerous relationship with Pinkie. Ida, with her overwhelming sense of right and wrong, places herself in the role of the avenger. Greene explains Ida's popularity in terms of her understanding of ordinary people; her physical presence; her joie de vivre; and her sentimentality. All these characterisitcs make her attractive. She is generous in every respect, and mixes common sense with commonplace superstition. In this, she is a kind of representative of the people, and of the popular worldview. Many readers will see things as Ida does; most will admire the courage with which she responds to what she sees as her duty to Fred. Fred Hale, Pinkie's first victim, is a third-rate journalist, a "sentry go," which is a job associated with the urban seaside setting and described by Greene: During the summer season in England certain popular newspapers organize treasure hunts at the seaside. They publish the photograph of a reporter and print his itinerary at the particular town he is visiting. Anyone who, while carrying a copy of the paper, addresses him, usually under some fantastic name, in a set form of words, receives a money prize; he also distributes along his route cards which can be exchanged for smaller prizes. Next day in the paper the reporter describes the chase. Of course, the character of Hale is not drawn from that of any actual newspaperman." The first appearance of Hale in the novel introduces the idea of the chase, the carnival air and the carnivalesque reversal of innocence and evil as well as the solitary individual within the crowd: Hale knew before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong — belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen's road standing on the tops of the little trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing,flowergardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky [5].

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Part Two : The Shore In the novel, Brighton serves as a metaphorical device for depicting the eternal realities of heaven and hell, for its close identification with Pinkie, and for its carnivalesque atmosphere. The crowds of visitors represent the norm whereas the criminal mind, such as Hale's, sees the crowd in an almost non-human light —Hale likens the crowd to a "twisted piece of wire" uncoiling "endlessly past him" along the front. The front, often called the "promenade," "parade" or "strand," is a significant feature of the urban coastal setting. Man-made, it runs beside the natural shoreline thereby suggesting the two extremes of the world of nature and the world of man. It is often used in fiction as a place of exposure, like a stage upon which the characters are introduced and their psychological states revealed. John Walton explains the history of this unique coastal characteristic: At many resorts it was obvious that some sort of bulwark was needed against the high tides, floods, and storms. As a result sea-walls were constructed and it is interesting that even they came to be utilized for pleasure, for they provide a firm roadway for walking or riding along. Gradually the seaside promenade, like the piers, became a feature of the resorts.... Defending the seashore by walls and promenades was a inevitable consequence of the growth of seaside towns and meant that visitors were increasingly subjected to an urban environment, though one which, by being perched on the water's edge, seemed quite different from the inland towns.12 "All roads lead to the Front,"13 says Greene, and he uses this setting for Rose and Pinkie when they express their ideas on good and evil as they run down to the parade during a thunderstorm: He gripped her arm and pushed her out into the dark dripping street. He turned up the collar of his jacket and ran as the lightning flapped and the thunder filled the air. They ran from doorway to doorway until they were back on the parade in one of the empty glass shelters.... "Of course there's hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier. "And heaven, too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on [52], Later, when Pinkie takes one of his gang members to help him intimidate a criminal acquaintance, the two of them walk along the

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Brighton Rock (1938) Front, and Pinkie's spiritual malaise is echoed in the grinding retreat of the sea and the striking, once again, of the town clock: "The rain had stopped; it was low tide and the shallow edge of the sea scraped far out at the rim of the shingle. A clock struck midnight" (55). After the pair have carried out their brutal threat, they return to Pinkie's dreary room where, from the window, the image—"the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea"— reflects Pinkie's own growing paranoia stretching to the murky waters beneath the pier. The elements of time and the imagination, represented in the following passage by the monoliths and the moon, are now placed in a broader, more universal, historical context that provides a counterpoint to Pinkie's own deepening journey inward: "The light went out and the moon went on like a lamp outside, slanting across the roofs, laying like the shadow of clouds across the downs, illuminating the white empty stands of the racecourse above Whitehawk Bottom like the monoliths of Stonehenge, shining across the tide which drove up from Boulogne and washed against the piles of the Palace Pier" (60). The Front is also the setting used by Pinkie after he has killed Spicer, and he explains to his side-kick, Dallow, that the only way he can keep Rose quiet about his involvement in the murder of Hale is by marrying her: "There were only two people who could hang us, Spicer and the girl. I've killed Spicer and I'm marrying the girl" (130). As he speaks, he sees an old man on the beach, and the images of decay that surround the man reflect his own situation of despair just as the screaming gulls mark the beginning of his resolution in the murderous alternative that comes to him for Rose: "An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it is his sack and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half vulture and half dove" (130-1). Another crucial and well-known feature of the coastal resort setting the pier. It is described by Cyril Bainbridge: "Turbulent and colourful: carefree gaiety contrasting with grim, sad battles against economic, social and meteorological elements.... The pier became a half-mile or a mile of temptation to those who were lured into its arcades. The click

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Part Two : The Shore of the ratchet mechanism of the turnstile was the key providing entry into a cast-iron springboard which led to a world of mystery, and excitement and daring unmatched."14 Its symbolic use in literature may be understood in terms of Canetti's discussion of the enclosed space and crowds: "The first to be noticed about it is that it has a boundary. It establishes itself by accepting its limitation. It creates a space for itself which it will fill.... The entrances to this space are limited in number, and only these entrances can be used; the boundary is respected where it consists of stone, of solid wall, or of some special act of acceptance, or entrance fee."15 The pier is a major recurring symbol throughout Brighton Rock as is the place where nature reflects most intensely Pinkie's emotions: "The water washed around the piles at the end of the pier, dark poison-bottle green, mottled with seaweed, and the salt wind smarted on his lips" (22), the sea "grinding in his guts like the tide at the piles below" (23). The sea itself works as a kind of mirror, reflecting the feelings of the main characters in the mystery. For Ida the sea suggests love and romance: "It was the time of near-darkness and of the evening mist from the Channel and of love" (146). For Pinkie, the sea represents the opposite — it has no romance. When he takes Rose to the end of the pier and threatens her with the acid so that she will keep her secret about his involvement in Hale's murder, the sea, along with the lightning, seems to be more like part of the hell which lies about him. The sea is, in its archetypal sense, like the stick of Brighton rock, a symbol of continuity as Rose understands it, but it, too, is an agent of death — Pinkie eventually drowns in the sea, and, along with pier and promenade, music and crowds, it is an integral part of the urban seaside setting which Graham Greene uses in Brighton Rock to develop the sense of drama and the carnivalesque.

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N or Ml (1941) by Agatha Christie Agatha Christie's N or M? (1941) is also set on the south coast of England, in Leahampton, a resort town, smaller than Brighton. In this seaside town, a mystery that involves murder and espionage, in the form of German spies— the "fifth column"— disguised as English people, takes place and is solved through the help of Christie's pair of amateur sleuths Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Before taking on the job, they are briefed by Mr. Grant of Intelligence who explains to them the meaning of N or M which are the code names of two German agents working for Hitler to establish a fifth column in certain countries, one of which is England. Farquhar, the agent sent to ferret out N and M, has disappeared, so Tommy and Tuppence Beresford go to Leahampton, a resort town on the south coast, to expose the two spies. Much of the action, except the actual murder which takes place on a cliff edge on the Downs as does the murder in The Blotting Book and Pinkie's death in Brighton Rock, involves the inhabitants of two houses situated next door to each other on a cliff: Sans Souci, "an inconspicuous sort of place, a boarding-house at a seaside resort" (14)* which is thought to be the headquarters of the Fifth Column, and Smugglers' Rest, with its private cove and secret cave that it is named after, home of the genial Major Haydock, who ' Quotations from N or M? (New York: Dell, 1969).

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Part Two : The Shore turns out to be quite the opposite of the ardent golfer and denouncer of anything "un-British" that he appears to be; he is, in fact, the German spy, N. As it is in Mad Hatter's Holiday, disguise is also a theme and is used by several characters in the story. Both the Beresfords stay at Sans Souci incognito— Tommy as the gentle widower, Mr. Meadowes, and Tuppence as the amorous widow, Mrs. Blenkensop. Another disguise affected later by Tuppence is that of a German spy disguised as a nurse. Mrs. Sprot, a guest at the boarding-house with her little girl, Betty, is also living there under an assumed character and turns out to be the German spy, M. Mr. Grant disguises himself as a fisherman and holds clandestine meetings with Tommy and Tuppence Beresford at the end of the local pier. This pier is quite unlike the flashy, noisy West Pier of Brighton Rock, The West Pier, and Mad Hatter's Holiday; it is, rather, a reflection of the town and the ominous feelings prevalent in the months that preceded Germany's air attack of the coast: "The old pier was at the extreme end of the promenade It was a flimsy and weather-worn affair with a few moribund penny-in-the-slot machines placed at far distant intervals. There was no one on it but some children running up and down and screaming in voices that matched quite accurately the screaming of the gulls, and one solitary man sitting on the end fishing" (39). The promenade and beach, most public places, are where the Beresfords meet in order to exchange information. The first of these meetings takes place early in the story and serves also to introduce three characters who play a part in the espionage: On the following morning Tommy rose early and strolled down to the front. He walked briskly to the pier as was returning along the esplanade when he spied a familiar figure coming in the other direction. Tommy raised his hat. "Good morning," he said pleasantly. "Er — Mrs. Blenkensop, isn't it?"... Tommy gripped her arm suddenly. "Look," he said. "Look ahead of you." By the corner of one of the shelters a young man stood talking to a girl. They were both very earnest, very wrapped up in what they were saying.... At the end of the promenade he encountered Major Bletchley. The lat134

Nor M? (1941) ter peered at him suspiciously and then grunted out, "Good morning" [19,22,23]. Later on, the front is used as a place of communication by the Beresfords where they meet to exchange information, for "[t]hey had agreed never to attempt to communicate with each other under the roof of Sans Souci" (81). Another meeting between the Beresfords takes place on the beach where the open space provides little chance of being overheard and of their disguises being discovered: "The beach around them was empty. She herself leaned against a breakwater, Tommy sat above her, on the breakwater itself, from which post he could see anyone who approached along the esplanade" (52). And when Tuppence seeks privacy in order to read letters from her children, she, like Moscrop in Mad Hatter's Holiday when he reads the newspaper, goes to the beach: "It was a grey morning with the wind blowing coldly from the sea. Tuppence was alone at the far end of the beach" (68). The landscape of the Downs is used in the kidnapping of little Betty Sprot by her real mother who is desperate to get her back. This scene becomes the turning point of the story. And it is here, on the Downs, where nature offers a release of inhibitions and the opportunity for revelation, and where, as in Brighton Rock and The Blotting Booky death occurs: She was standing now at the very edge of the cliff.... [S]he held the child and looked from time to time at the drop below —not a yard from where she stood.... But at that moment a shot rang out. The woman swayed and fell, the child still clasped in her arms.... Tuppence said: "Thank God! It was a near thing!" And she looked down at the sheer drop to the sea below and shuddered (107-8). Mrs. Sprot kills the real mother of Betty, an innocent refugee whom some have been associating with the enemy because of her foreign accent. She allowed Mrs. Sprot to adopt her baby because she couldn't support her, and Mrs. Sprot uses the little girl as a cover-up for her real character, but as Tuppence explains in her summing up, the murder scene on the cliff made her realize who the woman really was: "If it had been her child, she couldnt have risked that shot for a minute. It meant that Betty 135

Part Two : The Shore wasn't her child. And that's why she had to absolutely shoot the other woman" (183). The coastal setting of cliffs emphasizes the danger involved in espionage, the main theme of the mystery, a theme developed by the use of disguise, and public places such as the beach, pier, and promenade contrast with the confinement and observation suggested by the two cliff-top houses.

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Murder in Retrospect (1941) by Agatha Christie The seaside garden is the focal point of Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect (1941) set on the Devonshire coast. It involves themes of murder by poison, retribution, and the distortion of time which are reflected in the very specific layout of the landscape and the images within. "But where is that you take me? This is the seashore ahead of us!" exclaims Hercule Poirot, Christie's famous sleuth, when he agrees to take on the case of Carla Lemarchant and her search for the truth about the past. Brought up in Canada by relatives and soon to be married, Carla has found out that her mother, convicted of the murder of her artist husband, died in prison fifteen years earlier. She sets out to disprove her mother's guilt. Also involved in the mystery is Carla's father, the wellknown painter Amyas Crale who was painting the portrait of a young heiress, just one of the several women he was involved with, when his wife was sent to prison. And as Poirot digs deeper into the past, he discovers that perhaps someone else is responsible for the murder. The drama takes place between two houses, both on the edge of the sea; the first, Alderbury, which represents the present, is where most of the guests are staying, and the second, Handcross Manor, representing the past, is separated from it by an inlet which leads down to the ocean. This inlet, rather like the river Lethe, must be crossed in order to get from one house to the other-from past to present: "Camel Creek, they call it, runs right inland — looks almost like a river mouth, but it isn't —

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Part Two : The Shore it's just the sea" (94)/ A number of plateaus, connects by various paths, lead down from the house, Alderbury, to the sea, each one representing a stage in the murder. The plateau closest to the sea is the "battery garden" which contains a war memorial: "Mr. Crale had been painting in a small enclosed garden, known as the Battery Garden, from the fact that it overlooked the sea, and had some miniature cannon placed in embattlements. It was situated about four minutes' walk from the house" (40). It is in this garden that the murder is committed. It is enclosed by a wall with a connecting door and represents a separate world, a world closest to nature — to inner emotions— to chaos and disorder where, as Auden says, man creates his own laws.16 This battery garden, as it overlooks the sea, is also a place of creativity. It is here that the artist, Amyas Crale, paints his revealing portrait of a woman, Eisa Dittisham, against the background of the sea. It is a place of truth, a truth the artist makes clear through his work as the eyes of the woman in the portrait blaze the knowledge from the canvas that she has just poisoned him, her lover, in a murder for which Carla's mother was mistakenly convicted and sent to prison for sixteen years. The second plateau contains table and chairs. It is a point of observation and offers a crucial perspective, for, unlike the first plateau beneath it, it is not enclosed. It is the halfway mark between the house and the garden. As Carla slowly discovers the truth about the murder with the help of Poirot, each plateau and the action that takes place on it may also be seen as a step back into the past toward the final revelation that her mother was innocent of the murder.

^Quotations from Murder in Retrospect (New York: Dell, 1942).

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The West Pier (1951) by Patrick Hamilton The resort town of Brighton is, again, the setting for Patrick Hamilton's The West Pier, a psychological thriller which, says Graham Greene, is the best book written about Brighton.17 It is the first in a series that feature the criminal Ralph Gorse, who makes his career by defrauding innocent weak women. Like Brighton Rock, it takes place during the Whitsun holiday, a time of carnivalesque reversal, and concerns five characters—three adolescent boys on break from school and two local girls. The crime focus on two of these characters, Ralph Gorse, the perpetrator, and Esther Downes, the victim, whose names connect them with the surrounding landscape, the gorse covered South Downs. When Gorse introduces himself to Esther she remarks on this: "It's Gorse — isn't it? Like what you see on the Downs?" What unfolds from this point is Gorse's cunning ensnarement of Esther which results in his theft of her small savings. Gorse, like Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock, is a predator and Esther, like Rose, is the guileless prey. Both girls serve the holidaymakers— Rose as a waitress, and Esther as a salesgirl for the local candy, a reminder of the setting and atmosphere of Greene's book: "She worked and served at the counter in a sweet shop — a rather large and low pink and white sweet shop — particularly pink and white because it specialized in Brighton Rock — and popular in the season because it was situated in the Queen's Road. Swarming day-trippers, arriving at Brighton Station,

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Part Two : The Shore and desiring to reach the sea as soon as possible, were then, as they are now, compelled to use the Queen's Road" (75).* The West Pier of the title is the same one that is described in Brighton Rock; in this work it is referred to as a "sexual battleship" and is the meeting place for all five characters throughout the story: The Pier was intimately and intricately connected with the entire ritual of "getting off." Indeed, without the Pier, "getting off" would have been to some minds inconceivable, or at any rate a totally different thing. The Pier was at once the object and arena of "getting off" and usually the first subtle excuse made by the male for having been so bold as to "get off" was his saying that he thought it might be "nice" to go on the Pier. An invitation to go on the Pier was like an invitation to dance, it almost conferred upon "getting off" an air of respectability. And so now these three young men, by going on the Pier themselves, had, as it were, established their independence doubly—firstly by the act itself, and secondly by proving that they were in no way anxious to avail themselves of any excuse [47]. The pier represents a separate world, one free from the constraints of the shore, a site where social boundaries between the middle-class young men and the working class girls dissipate along with sexual inhibitions. For instance, Esther's downfall, which includes her loss of innocence as her involvement with Gorse progresses, begins with her own choice, a decision to go on to the pier with her friend, Gertrude, in search of the young men they have early met walking along the promenade: "The two girls found a place.... With their backs to the sea they were looking at the passers-by and enjoying the music wafting from the Concert Hall.... Absorbed perhaps by the music, and the passing people, and the faint soothing sounds of the sea beneath, Esther and Gertrude were caught unawares ... [Esther] turned with absurd haste and looked down at the sea..." (53). The promenade is an important feature of this story. It is where Gorse and Esther first catch sight of each other, and later when the two share their first date they arrange to meet by the West Pier and walk along the front to the meet at the Hotel Métropole. This becomes a regQuotations from The West Pier (London: Penguin, 1986).

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The West Pier (1951) ular occurrence, and it is at the hotel, the public place, that Gorse, with hints of marriage, slowly draws Esther into his plan for taking her money. After these meetings, the two often spend some time on the West Pier, where Gorse kisses her. Esther's reaction is much the same as Pinkie's is when he first kisses Rose: "This, although she submitted, she greatly disliked" (99). While she spends some of her time with Gorse's friend, Ryan, it is Gorse who attracts and fascinates her. Like the crooked solicitors in E. F. Benson's The Blotting Book, the jealous Gorse writes anonymous notes maligning his friend's character and sends them to Esther. She tells her mother, who "knew that a great deal took place on the Brighton Front, and the West Pier," about them, but not that she has already lent Gorse two pounds during one of their meetings at the Hotel Métropole. Gorse continues writing the anonymous letters; his goal is now to get at the sixty-eight pounds and fifteen shillings that amount to Esther's entire savings. His hints of marriage and the gift of a purse ease the way as Gorse induces Esther into putting fifteen pounds of her savings into buying a car with him. The car is one he has borrowed for the evening and parked outside the Hotel Métropole for this purpose. To convince her, he takes her for a drive on the Downs. They drive towards Devil's Dyke, the same place Moscrop spotted Dr. Prothero before the denouement in Peter Lovesey's Mad Hatter's Holiday, and here, on the Downs, Esther loses her inhibitions and freely chooses to go in with Gorse in buying the car which brings about the final scenes of the story: "He took Esther to the back of Hove, and then into the Dyke. As they sped along the country road, Esther, exhilarated by the air as well as all else besides, said: 'You know, I wish you would let me have a share in this'" (194). In the hotel, Gorse tells Esther that he needs another sixty-five pounds to buy the car because his allowance won't be in until Monday, and the owner of the car will not hold the car past the weekend, and, in fact, if he doesn't come up with the money, they will loose the fifteen pounds deposit made on it. Esther is horrified at first with the idea of parting with all of her savings, but she finally agrees. As in Brighton Rock, the breakup of the two "lovers" takes place outside of Brighton; here it is the small seaside village of Shoreham where Grose drives Esther and deserts her in a tearoom after borrowing the last of her money to pay for their tea — which he doesn't. The waitress lends her the money to get

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Part Two : The Shore home after Esther leaves the purse Gorse bought her as security. Humiliated and wiser, she returns to Brighton and reality, symbolized by the crowds, to where "[t]he West Pier, which brought them all together, wore its own peculiar air of indifference about their departure. This battleship — this sex battleship — was on this Sunday evening more crowded that usual. The Sunday evening was one its best, and the season was at it peak" (252). The physical site of pier and promenade are the main features in The West Pier, and the story of innocence and deceit is reflected in the natural setting of the South Downs and the resort of Brighton.

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The Singing Sands (1953) by Josephine Tey Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands (1953) uses the seaside setting at the end of the mystery. It concerns the murder of a man known only as "B Seven" and is set on the Scottish coast, on a remote and sparsely populated island in the Outer Hebrides called "Cladda." The mystery begins, as do Brighton Rock, The West Pier, and Death Walks in Eastrepps, at a railway station — the link between order and impending chaos. A dead body is found in a train compartment, "B Seven," by Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard, who, close to a nervous breakdown and suffering from claustrophobia himself, has taken the train to begin his rest cure in Scotland. From the opening, Grant's spiritual and psychological malaise is tied into the plot and, like the plot, is resolved through the use of the coastal setting. Thinking the death no more than an unfortunate accident involving too much alcohol and an accidental fall against the compartment fittings, Grant leaves the train after checking the body, but he absentmindedly picks up the dead man's newspaper on the way out and finds a cryptic poem written alongside the newsprint: "The beasts that talk/ The streams that stand/The stones that walk/The singing sand..." (27).* Grant later finds out that the lines refer to a hidden city in Arabia, "Wabar," to which the young man in the compartment was hired to fly his murderer, an evil explorer named Heron Lloyd who had recently discovered the "Shangri-La" on his travels. To keep the young *Quotations from The Singing Sands (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

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Part Two : The Shore pilot quiet, Lloyd lures him into the train compartment and kills him by knocking him on the head; then, unaware of the scribbled lines that Inspector Grant will read in the margin of the newspaper, he leaves the train before Grant gets in and returns to London. Searching for some understanding of the cryptic lines, Grant discovers that the Singing Sands refer to a place on the western shore of a Scottish island. According to local legend, these sands guard the "Land of the Young"—eternity, and the island of Cadda where Grant eventually goes to unravel the mystery of the dead man and the poem he has left behind. When he first comes across them, they unfold before him like the revelation he will soon experience: "And then, suddenly, the wind smelt salt.... There was nothing else in all the world but the green torn sea and the sands These were the singing sands" (86-7). The local priest, Reverend MacKay, later describes this magical aspect of where the lighthouse seems to float in the sky and the hill takes on the shape of a giant mushroom and the rocks begin to move. When Grant arrives on the island, the locals are presented through the use of the sea front which is also used as a stage for what is about to unfold in Grant's private and in his professional life. Signifying this imminent change, a wind arises that eventually turns into gale force at the peak of the story and does not abate until his business with the Singing Sands is finished. The peak, or turning point, of the story, which is also the turning point in Grant's own crisis, is closely tied in with the landscape and is signaled by the coming together of all the coastal elements of wind, sea, mist, horizon as the mystery of nature unfolds with the plot as he walks along the "flat grey road" (58) buffeted by the wind. Grant's own state of mind, reflected in this description of "flat grey desolation," changes along with the discovery of the Singing Sands, a discovery that alters the focus of his perspective dramatically: He came on it without warning.... There had been no visible reason why the long levels of grassy land should not go on forever to the horizon; it was all part of the flat grey endless world of bog. He had been prepared to go on walking to the horizon, so that he was startled to find that the horizon was ten miles out at sea.... The green water, dirty and ragged, roared on to the beach and broke in a flash of white that was vicious. To the right and left, as far as the eye could see, were the long lines of breaking water and the pale sands [86-7]. 144

The Singing Sands (1953) It is after this point that Grant seems no longer to suffer from claustrophobia; he has been healed through his interaction with the sea and coast: "And that night he fell asleep without looking at the wallpaper and without remembering the closed window at all" (88). Grant's final perspective of the horizon is, like his inner perspective, a clear one. The mist of confusion clears, and, in his newly born self, he feels like the first man on earth: "There was no mist ... and as he went upward the seas opened under him.... From the top he had the whole Hebredean world at his feet He sat there and considered it, the barren, water-logged universe, and it seemed to him the ultimate in desolation. A world halfemerged from chaos, formless and void" (89-91). When the plane arrives to take Grant back to the mainland from where he will travel on back to London, he compares the coastal setting and its world of natural energy with the world of man and machines, and, for a moment, he panics as he is forced to make the necessary transition from one to the other: "Being picked up from the sands on the sea-ward fringe of the world by a casual-alighting bird was as near as one would ever come to the freesoaring of man's original vision. The great bird idled to them along the sand, and for a moment Grant panicked.... But here, on the open sand ... and the crying of the gulls and the smell of the sea, it was a thing one could take or leave. There was no compulsion to be afraid of" (100). Cured now of his claustrophobia and all it represented in terms of spiritual malaise through the power of the coastal setting, Grant realizes at the end of his short flight that "[i]t was a beautiful world He had gone out to look for B Seven and had found himself" (102-3). Here, as in E. F. Benson's The Blotting Book, the landscape heals and restores. It is tied into the murder by the riddle of the Singing Sands that border the most distant shore of this island and to Inspector Grant's own personal spiritual re-awakening, for familiarity with the place is often not as important as the personal revelation a place might offer; for instance, when the knight in Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," says upon reaching "the round squat tower": "This was the place!" it is this revelation of self rather that the discovery of the physical place that is so important.

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Unnatural Causes (1967) by P. D. James When she was asked how she got her ideas P. D. James responded: "Something sparks off the creative imagination; a character, a place, an original idea for the murder itself. With me it's often the setting; a desolate stretch of coast, an old sinister house, an atmospheric part of London, a closed community such as a Nurses Home, a village, a forensic science laboratory."18 Sands and beaches, again, comprise the setting for discovery in P. D. James's Unnatural Causes (1967) where the idea that man is subject to the elements of nature as much as his own terrifying emotions is emphasized throughout the mystery. The story takes place on Monksmere Head, a rural promontory on the coast of Suffolk, home to a group of second-rate writers, where Adam Dalgliesh, James's series detective who, like G. K. Chesterton's Gabriel Syme, is also a poet and from Scotland Yard, goes to spend a ten-day holiday with his Aunt Jane at her cottage, "Pentlands." Upon his arrival, Dalgliesh hears of a horrible discovery: in the bottom of a small boat by the edge of the sea has been found a member of the local literary group, Maurice Seaton, dead with both hands hacked off. Other members of this group of "secondrate" writers include Celia Calthrop, who produces a romantic novel every six months; Latham, a drama critic; Justin Bryce, editor of both a literary journal that reviews books that "nobody wants to read" and a conservative political journal; Digby Seaton, Maurice's half-brother; and Maurice Seaton's secretary, Sylvia Kedge. Later in the story, the second

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Unnatural Causes (1967) murder victim, Digby Seaton, is also discovered dead on the beach. At that time a violent storm sweeps over the headland, which is invaded by the sea, and floods the cottage of Sylvia Kedge. She climbs to the roof and is swept to her death by the storm, leaving behind a taped confession stating that she and Digby killed Maurice before she, then, killed Digby. The North Sea is the controlling element throughout, beginning as the corpse, a middle aged man whose hands have been severed, floats in a small boat with "paintwork faded and peeling," which "drifted like a discarded toy on an empty sea" (7),* a reminder of Coleridege's ship that floated "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." For Dalgliesh, like Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant, the coastal landscape offers a renewal and a sense not only of the past but also a sense of peace, safety, of being part of the universe, and he, too, experiences this in the form of a revelation much like the one Grant experiences when he first comes across the Singing Sands: "Now the track wound uphill as suddenly the whole of the headland lay before him, stretching purple and golden to the cliffs and shining sea.... Beyond it lay the sea, streaked with purple, azure and brown, and to the south the mist-hung marshes of the bird reserve added their gentler greens and blues" (16-17). The horizon as it represents perception in understanding the mystery is significant. This walk over the headland that Dalgliesh takes in order to clear up the confusion he finds in the murder case is reflected in the haziness of the horizon, his view of which begins and ends his walk: "He opened his eyes and saw, framed by the window, a translucent oblong of blue light with only the faintest hairline separating the sea and the sky..." (66). And on his return the horizon is "a haze of blue which could have been sea or sky" (70). For Dalgliesh, along with the mystery of murder is paralleled the mystery of self, as it is with Inspector Grant. The turning point in his own psyche takes place just before he leaves for a trip to London in order to check on some aspects of the case. Through the seascape, like the waves before they reach the shores of conscious reality, he is about to realize a new sense of self when he walks at night "along the edge of the cliff" and "the clouds moved from the face of the moon and the night became visible, a thing of forms and ^Quotations from Unnatural Causes (New York: Warner, 1987).

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Part Two : The Shore shadows heavy with mystery and pungent with the sea" (127). And when the landscape, in the form of the dangerous cliff edge, moves in as Dalgliesh gets closer to his own self-revelation, a seabird sounds the start of the journey inward, and the wind of change arises. Suddenly he is confronted with death, but it is not death in the form of nihilistic murder but a more universal, cyclic kind of death in the form of an old grave, the remaining one of several that had been swept away by the tides over the years. From its inscription, Dalgliesh learns that the grave dates from 1786 and this type of death becomes, for him, symbolic of his necessary death before coming alive rather than the brutal type of death he deals with every day in his work. After his visit to London, the new Dalgliesh returns to the headland with a different perception. Now, he comes to it as an outsider — a stranger. And, as did Inspector Grant on the island of Cadda in The Singing Sands after his self-revelation, he, like Caliban, views the seascape with melancholy: "The leaping sea was white capped to the horizon, a brown-grey waste of heaving water.... The tide was coming in fast. It was a lonely shore, empty and desolate, like the last fringes of the world.... Here was nothing but sea, sky, and marshland.... Dalgliesh loved this emptiness, this fusion of sea and sky. But today the place held no peace for him. He saw it suddenly with new eyes, a shore alien, eerie, utterly desolate" (191-2). Footprints play a major role in terms of identity and discovery in this story as they do in Dorothy Sayers' Have His Carcass where the footprints on the beaches are made by and lead to the murder victim. Here, they lead Dalgliesh across the sand to a secluded hide amid the sea grasses where the second murder victim has crawled to die: "Now, suddenly, his brain awoke to the significance of the signs which his trained senses had subconsciously noted: the single line of male footprints leading from the sand dusted lane to the hide entrance, a trace on the wind of a sick stench which had nothing to do with the smell of earth or grasses" (196). The final scene returns the story to the landscape of the beginning in a violent storm that reflects the emotions of all of those who knew the two murder victims, now gathered at Aunt Jane's cottage to wait out the weather: "The wind was alternately howling and moaning across the headland and a fast running tide was thundering up the beach driving the shingle in ridges before it. From time to time a fitful moon cast its dead light over Monksmere so that the storm became visible and he 148

Unnatural Causes (1967)

could see, from the cottage windows, the stunted trees writhing and struggling as if in agony and the whole wilderness of sea lying white and turbulent under the sky" (208). After the night has passed, Dalgliesh, "poised on the very edge of chaos," ventures across the headland to the home of the disabled Sylvia Kedge, on the edge of the sea: "It was hopeless to try and swim against this tide. The cottage lights were still on as he gained the door and braced his back against it. The sea was boiling round his ankles..." (220). It is a journey in which he risks his life but in doing so finds the answer to the mystery, and its violent ending is matched by the violence of the weather, in which everything submits to the purgation of the sea.

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Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) by Peter Lovesey Brighton during the holiday season is again the setting, this time for Peter Lovesey's Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973), where themes similar to those used in the preceding mysteries—the crowd, the pier, the sea, the stranger in the crowd, the sea front — are used to represent crucial aspects of the mystery. The year is 1882, when Albert Moscrop, an optician by trade and a voyeur by inclination, vacations in Brighton. His days are spent in viewing the crowds through his telescope and binoculars, most often from the pier. He catches a glimpse of the beautiful Zena Prothero, and falls in love with her. So begins the Orpheus-like search and chase around the city and the coast, a chase that involves mystery and madness, infidelity and mistaken identity, and a macabre murder in which the disclosure of each character's imperfections and perversities in the story comes to represent the scattered parts of the dismembered murder victim. And, in a reversal of order, rather than afford them any kind of peaceful réintégration of self or regeneration of spirit which is what one expects from a holiday by the sea, what the setting does for these characters is just the opposite: it brings out the truths about their natures. The veneer of civility is stripped away through their interactions with the coastal setting, and what is left is the psychological imbalance suffered by each. Each character's involvement in the mystery depends on his or her involvement with the coastal setting. Moscrop's involvement begins on the pier, from where he first sees through his

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Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) binoculars Zena Prothero far away on the beach, then moves to the beach where he briefly kidnaps Zena's young son in order to get an introduction, on to the promenade where he follows the Prothero family, then to the edge of town and the cliffs, where he spies on Dr. Prothero's meeting with his wife, and finally back to the pier where the whole mystery is finally disclosed. Zena Prothero, whose bedroom overlooks the sea, spends most of her time in the sea and on the promenade. "I find the sea irresistible," she says (60)/ Her stepson, Guy, spends much of his time swimming in the sea — it represents his instinctual nature that overcomes him in fits of madness when certain crimes take place; whereas Dr. Prothero, who tries to cover up his son's madness, never goes to the sea; he swims only in the artificial sea of the indoor aquarium. Moscrop, the outsider, moves between these characters and their actions, observing them through his spyglass. It is through his perception that the story comes to the reader. The story begins with Albert Moscro arriving at Brighton Railway Station and breathing the sea air: "Ah! There it was, unmistakably. A whiff of sea air among the conflicting odours of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway" (1). The crowds are present from the start and become an important theme throughout as well as a "promising sight" for Moscrop, the voyeur, who is looking for a particular kind of subject which will not be found in the working class crowds returning home but in the upper and middle classes who will be arriving this late in the season: "The signs were promising enough. As the train steamed into the terminus the crowds on the platform were three and four deep.... Clerks and shop-assistants and their families returning to the fogs of the Metropolis after a week at the 'briny'" (2). As Moscrop decides to walk rather than take a taxi down Queen's Road, the main artery which feeds the hordes of eager visitors from the trains directly down to the sea front, he realizes that "[t]here was no turning back." He arrives at the sea front where the breeze announces impending change as Moscrop stands with his bag of telescopic lenses and views a perspective of sea before turning his sights inward to the mystery. The crowds, in their representation of a desire for truth, move Moscrop to the West Pier where he will become involved with the mys*Quotations from Mad Hatter's Holiday (New York: Harper & Row, 1990)

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Part Two : The Shore tery. Here, the noise of the gunshots from the shooting range signals the start of the mystery, and the whole description foreshadows the danger and excitement about to unfold as Moscro passes through the turnstile into the drama and a new, exciting world: "As he passed inside, he was careful to hold his bag at chest height. Once through, he strode the wooden causeway with a springy step. What better two-pennyworth existed than these three hundred and seventy yards, projecting audaciously across beach and foam and shallows to the deeper water, indifferent to the power that surged and sucked beneath?" (5). Perspective and pier are crucial elements in the story; for instance, on the West Pier, Moscrop most indulges in his voyeuristic passion, and from the vantage point of the pier things are made clear, and Moscrop is able to create order from chaos through a new perspective. From an isolated spot on the pier head, Moscrop views his world through his powerful telescope, encompassing all elements from horizon to sea to beach, with the music of the band playing behind him. The music affects Moscrop deeply as it does Pinkie in Brighton Rock and Esther in The West Pier. And when the music stops, Moscrop's world begins to change; instinct takes over from reason as the noise of the music is replaced by the slapping of the sea: "With one faculty increasingly involved in the life below him, the others had become dissociated with what was happening on the pier.... It was like being a°icted suddenly with deafness. His concentration was going" (12-13). Still moving within the crowds, "enjoying the drumming of hundreds of sets of shoe-leather on the wooden flooring, more musical than the strains of the band ahead" (21), Moscrop reaches the end of the pier to the background music of the band. Here, he takes out his binoculars and scans the beach. The band music stops and is replace with an uncanny silence as Moscrop focuses upon the figure of Zena Prothero, who is walking up the beach. Moscrop falls in love with her as he sees her in this distant world, and it seems as if, for a while, time stands still. Elias Canetti states: "The dense coherence of the waves is something which men in a crowd know well."19 Here, on the West Pier, we understand those words when the carefree scene becomes ominous as crowd and sea become one. The theme of time, or distortion of it, often associated with the pier, is introduced as Moscrop is shaken out of his distant world by the loud blast of the pier's cannon that marks mid-day and is suggestive of

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Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) the war about to ensue and the disruption of the natural order of things. Moscrop decides leave the pier to follow a boy whom he sees with Zena Prothero, and he ends up at the public aquarium and witnesses an argument between the members of the Prothero family. Returning to the pier, Moscrop watches what seems to be the illicit affair Zena is having with this young boy. He goes to the beach where he hatches a plan to kidnap Zena's baby in order to meet Zena and find out exactly what is going on. Here, on the beach, he decides to do more than observe; he decides to get involved, and from this point in the mystery there is, again, no turning back for Moscrop; he has become immersed in the story. Just before he kidnaps the toddler, the theme of carnival is introduced to announce the impeding reversal of order: "From the right, a minstrel band was progressing up the beach with banjo, bones and harmonium," and Moscrop, "[w]ith the casual air of a practiced criminal," entices the boy by offering him a telescope: "Moscrop had pulled the telescope open to its fullest extent and then closed it. The child paused. Moscrop smiled, and repeated the action. Farther down the beach, the black-faced minstrels were catching everyone's eye" (55). The minstrels close in and distract the attention of Mrs. Prothero: "One of the blackfaced singers was approaching Mrs. Prothero with hat extended, jingling the coins inside" and as the minstrels "range in front of Mrs. Prothero, serenading her," Moscrop entices the little boy off with the promise of buying him some sweets. After "about fifteen minutes" he returns the boy to his mother, claiming to have found him wandering on the front, for which she is, as he hoped, grateful. Moscrop has accomplished what he had set out to do—get an introduction and get on the best side of Zena Prothero. He ends his meeting with Zena Prothero on a note of prediction: "One never knows what will happen on a beach, does one" (64). The dangerous and secretive nature of the mystery is reflected in the landscape when Moscrop follows Dr. Prothero after meeting him in the "Brill's Gentlemen's Swimming Bath" on East Street the following morning. Moscrop trails Prothero along the front when he leaves the baths, and the pier cannon fires to mark the next stage of the mystery as the chase pick up: "By then his quarry was outside and crossing East Street. He followed him warily, down to the front, turning right into the King's Road. The cannon on the West Pier fired. The doctor did what 153

Part Two : The Shore scores of other men were doing at that moment: checked his watch" (74). After dining briefly in a restaurant while Moscrop waits outside, hidden from view, Prothero resumes his walk along the front stopping to view the sweep of beach through a telescope and checking his watch again by the aquarium clock. Moscrop follows Prothero along the sea front until he reaches the cliff wall, the very edge of life and death. He witnesses a strangely unreal, dreamlike, almost cinematic occurrence that takes place between Prothero and a strange woman, who eventually turns out to be his wife. It begins in the "brilliant afternoon sunshine" when he sees what reminds him of a "psychic manifestation" as five women dressed in black emerge from "an arched entrance to a subterranean tunnel" (80). This tunnel represents the start of Moscrop's psychological search for understanding and motivation regarding the mystery of the Prothero family and is the type of peripheral place discussed by Leonard Lutwack in The Role of Place in Literature: "The peripheral place may sometimes be distinguished by its formlessness. The earth's inhabitable surface has a relatively constant form because it is so well known, but the mountains, caves and jungles appall because of their unfamiliarity and incapability to support human life."20 Convinced that Prothero is having an affair and enraged that Zena Prothero should be treated so, Moscrop continues to follow the family and makes a point of striking up a friendship with their maid, Bridget, to find out more. He tells her about the strange meeting he witnessed and she admonishes him, "Don't tell her the truth about her husband, sir. God knows what will happen if you do" (98-99). That same evening, Moscrop chooses to walk, alone, along the front and comes to an understanding of self through the sea. He reaches a sense of peace he has not felt before through the elemental rhythm of the waves and of time which are "synchronised with some small pulse in his brain" (99). And the scene he comes across with its image of death brought about by the exegesis of justice in the form of gallows prepares him for what is about to follow. In this scene, the reversal of order is emphasized in that what is going on is a preparation for the celebration festivities for the following day: "There must have been a dozen men in a working-party sinking stakes into the shingle near the water's edge. Farther along, he made out a line of uprights jutting starkly against the glittering luminosity of the water. Some were twice as tall as the men and had cross-pieces fixed 154

Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) with diagonal struts. If this had not been Brighton — and in the season — he would have sworn he was looking at a row of gibbets" (100). The turning point in the story takes place during the victory firework celebration when Lovesey's series investigating policeman, Sergeant Cribb, is introduced. The murder has taken place on the beach the night before, during the firework display for the victory celebration. The two detectives from "M" Division, London, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, travel by train from London to Brighton to investigate murder that has been committed, and the disbelieving Constable Thackeray makes the comment "Murder's got nothing to do with donkey-rides and sandcastles and — er —," to which Sergeant Cribb responds "Punch and Judy? ...Murder's got everything to do with the seaside. All that's curious is that there isn't more of it" (106). Cribb quite correctly associates Punch and Judy with marital violence and murder before going on to direct Thackeray in his inquiries, and we get a different perspective of the inspector's more realistic view of the pier, quite unlike Moscrop's. Like the omniscient view given of the pier in Brighton Rock, Cribb sees in it a reflection of the underside of human nature: "I'm beginning to understand what attracts a murderer to a seaside resort" (145). Thackeray asks his chief what makes people commit murder at the seaside, and Cribb's answer is simple: "Obvious reason. Place is full of strangers right through the summer. Irregular behavior isn't noticed. People tend to be more conversational on holiday, too. Chance of making casual acquaintances" (108). All of these aspects that Cribb mentions are a part of this mystery. The men from Scotland Yard have been called in because a human hand has been discovered in the crocodile cavern at the aquarium. Upon inspection of this lady's right hand they find sand beneath the fingernails and fish scales clinging to the severed wrist. Cribb ascertains that the hand was severed by a sharp cleaver or knife used for cutting fish and that the operation took place on the beach. The search for the rest of the body moves to the fish market area, and there they turn up various parts of the body, except the head, wrapped in brown paper packages and buried in the sand. The beach is deserted at this time because the crowds, as usual, become part of the scene at the crime, their curiosity a voice of truth: "They were all at the fish market, watching the comings and goings of the police, or filing through the Aquarium for a peep at the crocodile 155

Part Two : The Shore tank. The public at large had an insatiably morbid curiosity —so long as events did not touch them personally" (124). Moscrop reads of these horrifying events in the morning newspaper when he is sitting on the beach: where the "disjecta membra" were found. The beach is a place of revelation. Not only are the body parts discovered on the beach, but Moscrop, too, decides to reveal what he thinks he knows of the murder and the victim to the police. He makes this decision on the beach, close to the pier, and the locale is emphasized when he picks up a stone, one "that seemed to prevail in the shingle near the West Pier" and he "rested it against his cheek and tried to decide what he should do" (123). Moscrop also reaches some self-truths about his voyeurism here, alone on the beach, as well as his responsibility in revealing his involvement with the Protheros to the police: "Who would have thought a fortnight previously that he would today be sitting on a beach actually wanting to be alone, when crowds—the exciting, inspiriting crowds he had never been able to resist —were massing in other parts of the town, a short walk away?" (125). After explaining to Cribb that he's sure the dismembered body is Zena Prothero and that her husband has killed her in order to have an affair, Moscrop goes to sit on the seawall across from Prothero's hotel, and here he waits for Prothero to emerge so that he may follow him, and it is not long before the chase begins. Dr. Prothero leaves the hotel, and Moscrop follows him through the town, past library, town hall and the Victoria fountain, all suggestive of civilization, and far out of the town up onto the "one of the highest points of the South Downs" (152). This is the same spot, "seven hundred feet above sea level," the old Roman camp, suggestive of time and war that Taynton climbs up to in The Blotting Book. It offers Moscrop a clear perspective: "He completed the final ascent to the ancient wind-swept hill-camp forming the summit of the Downs at this point and sat to recover his breath in a clump of long ur-grass the sheep had left. The range of vision on every side was now so vast and the panorama so intricately varied that it could well take an hour's work with the binoculars to isolate a single moving figure" (157). He sees Prothero in the distance, waving a handkerchief at someone who, Moscrop is astonished to discover on the way back down when he comes face-to-face with her, is Zena Prothero, who has not been murdered but has returned home to Dorking with the younger son whom 156

Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973) Moscrop had briefly kidnapped earlier. Moscrop persuades her to meet with the police and she agrees. In the morning she takes the steamer to Brighton where it docks at the end of the West Pier. On board, she agrees to meet with Cribb, and as they walk the ship's deck, the one facing the horizon, another revelation in the plot unfolds, as Cribb tells Zena Prothero that her maid, Bridget, is the murder victim. The denouement occurs in a public place, a cafe, next to the railway station to which Dr. Prothero and Cribb are heading after the inquest. It turns out that the maid was murdered by Prothero's older teenage asthmatic son, Guy, who has a criminal record of psychopathic behavior that his father has tried to hide. Prothero knows who has killed the maid in Brighton. It is he who dismembers the body in the hopes of covering up yet another ghastly deed committed by his son. All of these assaults took place in seaside resorts, and Prothero, who knows that his son's condition is worsening and his crimes will escalate accordingly, poisons him with a drug that makes it seem as if the boy has died from a violent attack of asthma before he could kill anyone else. The mystery ends with Prothero's confession to Cribb, and the two men leave for the station as Cribb says: "'I think we'd better move in the direction of station.' Prothero raised his eyebrows questioningly. 'Railway — or police?' To which Cribb replies, "'I think we've just time to catch that 4.23'" (219). True to the urban resort setting, pier, promenade, beach and crowds all combine in this mystery to create a carnivalesque atmosphere along with the series of reversals that mark the changes in the plot.

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The Pier (1986) by Raynor Heppenstall Also set in a small seaside resort town on the south coast is The Pier (1986) by Raynor Heppenstall, whom the writer and critic C. P. Snow calls "the master of English letters."21 The pier and the seaside garden are key features in this psychological thriller: "The whole length of the pier is four hundred and fifty paces, short for a pier if you think of those of Brighton, Southend or Blackpool. At the landward end there is a ticket office to the left, with no turnstile, but to the right a turnstile only, which presumably counts people leaving the pier" (8-9). Similar to Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square with its schizophrenic central character, Harvey Bone, this story, too, has a deranged narrator, the elderly Mr. Altha, who tells the reader he is a well-known writer. Both men end up killing, by premeditation, the person or persons who are making their lives unbearable. Mr. Altha, along with his older sister, lives in retirement in a small house bought for this purpose. At first all seems well, but after a few peaceful months, the adjoining house is bought and filled with the Porringers, an extended family of working-class adults and their noisy children. Over a period of almost four years, the intrusive clamor from the Porringer house increases and reaches an unbearable pitch. Mr. Altha decides to write a novel in which a man murders his rowdy neighbors. Gradually the draft takes shape and becomes more and more believable until fact and fiction are indistinguishable. Paradoxically, Mr. Altha describes the intense normality of the setting with such compulsive

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The Pier (1986) detailing that it suggests a certain madness on his part. It begins when Mr. Altha enters the story via the pier which marks the departure point from the world of sanity to one of madness. He is arriving from France, where he has been covering a murder trial and now returns to commit his planned mass murder of the Porringer family. The pier marks the beginning and the end of the story as the place where Mr. Altha arrives and departs. Like the sea, the movement of the story, which is told to us through Mr. Altha's journal entries, reflects the pattern of his mind as it begins on the shore, gathers and crests with the act of murder, then disperses, leaving the narrator alone on the shore. Mr. Altha becomes an outsider —a situation described by writer Gavin Lambert: "When an extraordinary accident happens to someone he becomes, instantly, the outsider. He is placed in a situation where he either rejects everyday beliefs or assumptions or they cease to be helpful. The whole ordinary world is a long cry away. The accident transforms him into an archetypal character — murderer, victim, spy, hunted man —whose predicament is a metaphor for isolation."22 In the opening scene, Mr. Altha describes the little town in detail as he disembarks from the small boat onto the pier. This pier represents a link between Mr. Altha and his inner world as well as the link between civilization and nature. The types of tickets issued, for the general crowds, for the fishermen, and for the old and young, at the entrance to the pier in order to pass through the turnstile suggest the degrees of involvement with life in nature. The pier offers a perspective of the town through which Mr. Altha is able to create a sort of order that he can deal with, and we are reminded of Moscrop who enjoys the same kind of view from the West Pier in Mad Hatter's Holiday. Mr. Altha returns to the pier for perspective at various times during his narrative. The pier also represents not only the necessary perspective needed by Mr. Altha both as a writer and a madman but also the link between life and death as it is suggested by the words "connected" and "suicide." And this idea of death in the form of suicide — being in control of one's own destiny —is tied in, again, with the pier: "Those who commit suicide must be impulsive people, even if they use sleeping-pills and not one of the more heroic methods ... drowning by other means or climbing down from the end of a pier" (90). The lower end of Mr. Altha's pier, the dangerous part that juts out farthest into the deep sea, is closed when later on in the story Mr. Altha and his sister walk there from their house. Death is suggested in 159

Part Two : The Shore the purchase of ticket, and when the two leave the pier they, like the dead, are counted when they depart from life, as is the case with Mr. Altha at the end of the story: "...whereas there was no turnstile outside the ticket office, there was one at the exit, so that, if the day's visitors were mechanically counted, it would be going off and not coming on to the pier" (122). The story comes to a turning point when Mr. Altha goes to the pier again and sees that the lower deck, the most dangerous part of the pier, is now open, and, like the paddle steamer that draws up, soon to reembark on its "three-and-a-half-hour trip along the coast and some notorious shoals some miles out to sea," he, too, plans to negotiate the difficult waters of his own escape. This turning point is marked by a loud noise — the snap of a mooring cable as it breaks away from the pier as Mr. Altha's own mind snaps upon entering the world of murder and chaos: "On Tuesday, April 25, I took another look at the pier.... No sooner had the Waverley tied up than a sound like a pistol shot indicated the snapping of a long hawster from the bows to the lower deck of the pier, but this was quickly replaced" (129). By this time fact and fiction have become almost indistinguishable as Altha plots his novel and his escape. He describes his lack of physical balance which reflects his mental imbalance: "I had not much thought till then how my man from the sea would reach the lower deck of the pier from, presumably, a small boat in the sea, by some form of iron ladder I supposed. Far less I had thought of that platform or steps above it as the place where a real-life Jean-Paul Richard would pull his boat in and I myself step perilously off, where also I should have to rejoin him before dusk, with my sense of balance and my stick no mean feat" (129). Besides the pier, the other important site in this story is the seaside garden created by Mr. Altha. For him, his garden represents a different world. It is his own intensely personal creation, and, like the turnstiled pier, access to it is limited by means of two gates which he insists on keeping shut. In his journal, much is made of these gates. Set in the sixfoot wall that encircles the garden, we are told, the stalwart one is "not more than two or three feet broad and in height somewhat shorter than myself, except for the twin curlicues in the middle, which rise a little under six feet" (13) and the other "connects the house with the street wall" and is "kept bolted on the garden side and can therefore only be passed through if one goes out of the conservatory door and unbolts it.

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The Pier (1986) It is a flimsy gate" (25-26). "I never had a garden of my own," explains Mr. Altha. Now, in his garden he is a god. In total control, he destroys, replants, and lights bonfires with a kind of impersonal detachment. But when his involvement with his garden slowly begins to diminish as the idea of murder germinates in his mind, this control gives way to chaos: "The fact was that I had somehow lost interest in my garden I could no longer attempt to make a real garden of it. I would simply concern myself with growing bits of this and that here and there" (87). Mr. Porringer, the patriarch of the noisy family that has moved in next door, also has a garden which he works in along with his son-in-law. But there is a difference, for instead of trying to control nature as Mr. Altha does with his incessant pruning and burning, these men are artisans. They build a patio, a carport, and walls with a rowdy indifference that exacerbates Mr. Altha's already suffering nerves. Respites for Mr. Altha from the Porringer clan do occur, but not in his garden. They take place away from the house when he and his sister visit certain landmarks in the town, often involving social events held on or near the front. After these excursions into the company of others, i.e. the crowd, each small relief restores a certain amount of normalcy to Mr. Altha's tortured life through his interactions with others before he returns to the mayhem of his house and his ailing garden, infringed upon by the noisy Porringers. The returns to this deepening and increasingly dangerous emotional entanglement, this swirling vortex of frustration that will climax in mass murder, are often marked by a noise: the chiming of the maritime clock on the naval hospital, situated on the front, or the booming of a fog horn out to sea. The final pages of Mr. Altha's journal are written in the present tense. After he murders his neighbors, he walks back along the front to the pier. From the pier he will escape the country, breaking the link forever. He will not return, as his lie to the ticket collector confirms when he step onto the pier: "The woman at the ticket office says: 'We close at six, you know.' 'That's all right,' I say. 'I only want to walk along and back'" (189). Mr. Altha has gone for good and will not be counted among those coming off the pier. The pier and the seaside garden as it represents a type of order or control, a world separate from the chaotic world of harsh reality where its maker is a kind of god able to live as he or she chooses, are the coastal features used to convey the psychological aspects of the main character in this mystery.

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Devices and Desires (1990) by P. D. James Sea, tide and beach are again a major part of the setting in P. D. James' Devices and Desires (1990). The remote Norfolk headland of Larksoken on the southeast coast is the location where Adam Dalgliesh, now commander of New Scotland Yard, drives down from London to tidy up the affairs of his recently deceased elderly aunt, the same Aunt Jane as in Unnatural Causes, and finds more than the quiet stay he had anticipated when he is involved in the investigation of a series of bizarre murders. The story opens as Dalgliesh drives onto the headland, and aspects of the landscape such as cliffs, pill boxes, ruined abbey, mill, and nuclear power plant are described which represent major themes that occur throughout the story: He was driving now across the open headland toward the fringe of fir trees which bordered the North Sea.... To his right the ground rose gently towards the southern cliffs. He could see the dark mouth of the concrete pillbox, undemolished since the war, and as seemingly indestructible as the great hulks of wave-battered concrete, remnants of the old fortifications which lay half-submerged in the sand along part of the beach. To the north the broken arches and stumps of the ruined Benedictine abbey gleamed golden in the afternoon sun against the crinkled blue of the sea. Breasting a small ridge, he glimpsed for the first time at the topsail of Larksoken Mill and beyond it, against the skyline, the great grey bulk of Larksoken Nuclear Power Station [19].

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Devices and Desires (1990) Past and present are represented in the windmill and the nuclear power station, each with its very different link with water, and a loss of faith concerning these characters may be seen in the ruined abbey. The pillbox and the concrete blocks in the sand introduce the idea of war in preparation for the chaos about to ensue. All of these landmarks, set against the timeless background of the sea, appear as constants throughout the story. This view ends on a note of battle that foreshadows Dalgliesh's role in the murders, and with an image of nature turning against herself as man himself does in the story. Each of the characters in the mystery has his or her own particular relationship with the setting. Blaney, the artist, who Dalgliesh later thinks of as "bereft and incarcerated in that cluttered cottage behind that great dyke of shingle, listening night after night to the never-ceasing moaning of the tide" (29), lives with his four children at Scudder's Cottage. As with the artists, Amyas, in Murder in Retrospect and Mr. Altha in The Pier, this man's world is represented by the seaside garden: "a flowering wilderness which had one been a garden" (26). Here also, as in Murder in Retrospect, there is a particular painting of a woman against the background of the sea and the very landscape of the story that was first described through the eyes of Dalgliesh, "the Victorian rectory, the ruined abbey, the half-demolished pillbox, the crippled trees, the small white mill like a child's toy and, gaunt in a flaming evening sky, the stark outline of the power station" (26-7). Another person who lives on the headland is Neil Pascoe, the antinuclearist whose small caravan is situated on the beach: "From the caravan on the very edge of the sea he could see Larksoken Power Station stark against the skyline as uncompromising as his own will to oppose it, a symbol and a threat" (35). For Neil, in his losing battle against the power station, the sea brings solace: "It was thus, when the weight of anxiety about his failed ambitions, his uncertain future became too heavy, that he would find his peace, standing motionless to watch the veined curve of the poised wave, the tumult of crashing foam breaking over his feet, the wide intersecting arches washing over the smooth sand as the wave retreated to leave its tenuous lip of foam" (39). The sea has a different effect on Alex Mair, head of the nuclear power station. From his office window he sees both danger and beauty in the sea beneath: "But this is what he liked, the wide expanse of turbulent sea, browny 163

Part Two : The Shore grey, white laced under a limitless sky, windows which he could open so that, at a touch of his hand, that faint continuous boom like distant thunder would instantaneously pour into his office in a roar of crashing billows" (58). The secret relationship between Alex Muir and Amy, Neil Pascoe's girlfriend, takes place only by the sea. It is here that Alex admits that "[n]o lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide" (120), and it is here that he is able to free himself of his inhibitions for a short while: "But, lying beside her, listening to the susurration of the tide and looking up at the sky through a haze of grasses, he was filled, not with post-coital sadness, but with an agreeable languor" (118). And, for Dalgliesh, the coastal setting also offers a release of inhibitions and a brief return to childhood innocence as the motion of sliding down suggests as he slides down the slope: "Suddenly he had a childish impulse to feel the sea washing over his feet.... The water, after the first sting of cold, was almost blood-warm, and he splashed vigorously along the fringe of waves, pausing from time to time to look back at his footprints as he had as a child" (154). In this story, the inescapable fact of man's mortality is present in the series of murders that take place. With the theme of the distortion of time, past becomes present as the power station is likened to a castle and the abbey is set against the ceaseless, ever- moving tide: "But if it were an ancient castle standing there against the skyline, if what we looked out at tomorrow morning was a row of turrets, we'd probably be saying how beautiful it is. ... They turned simultaneously from contemplating the glittering lights and looked south to the decaying symbol of a very different power. Before them, at the edge of the cliff, crumbling against the skyline like a child's sandcastle rendered amorphous by the advancing tide, was the ruined Benedictine abbey. He could just make out the great empty arch of the east window and beyond it the shimmer of the North Sea..." (88-89). Footprints made in the sand lead to the solution of the murders as they are in Have His Carcass and Devices and Desires. Also half buried in the sand are the fortifications, wartime artifacts to hinder invasion, which become a foreshadowing of the murder victim Dalgliesh is about to discover whose body is likened to the landscape around it as is the victim's body in A Shilling for Candles.

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CONCLUSION 'Books, however, speak only to those who are able to read them" (David Lehman)

As we have seen through an examination of the books mentioned here, the setting in the mystery genre often includes several important well-known topographical features, both man made and natural, such as streets, squares, parks, river, sea, embankment and promenade, south downs and city commons to incorporate such themes as the carnivalesque, with its parallel components of crowd and individual, the chase, the turning point, and the disclosure of truth. "The structure of events and themes is ... supported and paralleled by the arrangement of places in a narrative. Plot is a narrative of the physical environment as well as the pattern of its events,"1 says Leonard Lutwack. Accordingly, specific events that take place within the mystery story are often attended by such metrological events such as rain, fog, and wind to further the sense of fear, confusion, and change. All of these aspects describe what Jack M. Bickham in Setting lists as six "additional contributions" that go beyond the tradition expectations of the setting: "intensification of reader involvement; enhancement of story unity; tightening of plot structure and/or intensification of suspense; motivation or explanation of character; clarification of theme; excitement of the reader's own imagination...."2 A fundamental feature of all mysteries is the street. Through various descriptions of the street within their narratives, mystery writers can

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Conclusion suggest mood, link parts of the plot, and define and contrast sites within the story. For instance, a cul-de-sac and a mews suggest entrapment, possibly deceit, even death; twisting alleys certainly intensify the sense of mystery whereas broad boulevards and bustling thoroughfares suggest life and normalcy. In such works as More Work for the Undertaker, The Tiger in the Smoke, and Tether's End, Margery Allingham uses the streets of London to these effects as does G. K. Chesterton in The Club of Queer Trades and The Man Who Was Thursday, but all mysteries set in cities such as London necessarily depend on the streets for the development of plot and mood. Streets open out into squares, just as rivers flow into seas, and squares function in the mystery much in the same way —a place where characters often come face-to-face with the truth, other characters, or personal revelations. Squares, connected to streets, offer a contrast, often in the form of a carnivalesque reversal. In G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, for instance, Symes first sees the members of the Anarchist Club in a square. Squares may be quiet and offer refuge or they may be noisy and filled with crowds such as bustling Leicester Square in John Lawton's Black Out, which reminds Troy of the normality of life. Squares are often connected to the chase, as they are in G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday as well as in Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage, and in this respect they may represent a stage in the plot which contains a brief flash of recognition before resuming the streets. Unlike the squares, in that they are large, are the parks, with more natural aspects. Although not as open and uncultivated as the common, they do suggest freedom, places of meditation and introspection, as in Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock, as well as places of observation such as the opening scene in More Work for the Undertaker. Still connected, but less structured than the square, they offer the possibility of freedom, both physical and intellectual, with the reminder of the inevitable return to the streets surrounding them. The common, usually a vast tract of mainly uncultivated land on the urban fringes, is a place where one can forget the impingement of the streets and of law and order, and enjoy a real sense of freedom. But without the control of the streets, and the safety of the crowd, they also suggest a certain kind of danger for the solitary individual as well a sense of reversal, clearly seen in G. K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades when the three sleuths track down their prey to the common and find him living a strange life amid the treetops. 166

Conclusion The river, says Elias Canetti, "is the symbol of a movement which is still under control, before the eruption and the discharge; it contains the threat of these rather than their actuality."3 This sense of threat, of imminent eruption, parallels the form of the mystery —its threat of evil in the form of murder and its explosion of truth in its denouement. Many mysteries set in London use the Thames to this effect as we have seen in G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Josephine Bell's The Port of London Murders, and Colin Wilson's The Glass Cage. In these works, as in others, the river not only connects stages in the plot but also brings characters together and transports them to specific sites within the story. The sea offers a sense of continuity and of change in the mystery; in this, it juxtaposes the aspects of good and evil. The sea, says Canetti, "is changeable in its emotions; it can soothe or threaten or break out in storms. But it is always there.... There is no single human being who can be, as it were, excluded from it [A] 11 life flows into it and it contains all life."4 Ida in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock understands the continuity suggested by the sea whereas for Pinkie the sea threatens fearful change. Closely associated with river is the embankment, which finds its counterpart in the urban seaside setting and promenade and its association with the sea. In the city mystery, the embankment often serves as a place of inner revelation as it does for John Lawton's Inspector Troy in Black Out and Graham Green's Arthur Row in The Ministry of Fear. The seaside promenade, however, often becomes a site for outward revelation, sometimes in the form of a confrontation with others. Pinkie and Rose's argument takes place on the front in Brighton Rock, and in Patrick Hamilton's The West Pier the promenade is where Gorse and his friends meet up with the young women. Both embankment and promenade are sites where ideas concerning the mystery in its insistence for truth emerge. Rain and smog in the city setting are often used in ways similar to the usage of wind and fog in the seaside setting. Both smog and fog suggest confusion, mystery; they generate fear and enhance the sense of drama. Margery Allingham's use of smog in The Tiger in the Smoke is crucial to the plot and mood of the story; similarly, her use of the rain in Tether's End, seems so powerful as to almost become a character in the story in its own right. The sea mist or fog in Francis Beeding's Death 167

Conclusion Walks in Eastrepps is a cloak behind which lurks the menace of the deranged killer. The wind, according to W. H. Auden writing in The Enchaféd Flood, signifies change. In the mystery genre, the wind of change often precedes the turning point or the denouement. In its insistence for truth, as well as in its representation of the normal day-to-day existence, the crowd is an important part of both the city and the seaside setting. The presence of the crowd may be overtly stated as it is in such mystery novels as Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smokey G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, and Peter Lovesey's Mad Hatter's Holiday, or it may be implied through the general milieu of the work. Of the crowd Elias Canetti says, It may seem, at first sight, that they [crowds] are not important enough to warrant detailed examination. But it will be seen that, through them, the crowd itself can be approached in a new and profitable way. They shed a natural light on it, which it would be foolish to exclude."5 Mystery writers use these elements described above to present the reader with the perfect murder, which in David Lehman's terms "must entertain us before it does anything else."b How each writer utilizes the settings of city and shore in the mystery genre to effect the "objective correlative"—that is, the relationship between what is described in a particular work and the emotions and understanding generated in the reader through those descriptions— is a mark of his or her genius, and is certainly intensified by the interaction between human behavior and the specific sites used in these extraordinary milieus for murder.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Margery Allingham 1904-1966 Like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham is recognized as one of the key writers of the Golden Age of detective fiction. She wrote more than thirty novels and short story collections and is famous for her mysteries that feature the series sleuth Albert Campion. She published her first mystery when she was nineteen and wrote steadily over the next forty-three years. The major theme of many of her mysteries, the struggle between good and evil, is clearly developed in those mysteries which use the thriller format such as The Tiger in the Smoke, where the killer is known from the beginning and the focus lies in finding him and understanding his motivation. Allingham presents her most powerful descriptions of evil through her antagonists, Jack Havoc and Gerry Hawker, in Tiger in the Smoke and Tether's End. Her most recognized works include The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), Hide My Eyes (1958; published in the United States as Tether's End), and More Work for the Undertaker (1948), all three of which are set in the streets of London and demonstrate the author's unforgettable sense of place. Tiger in the Smoke was made into a film in 1956.

Francis Beeding 1885-1951 & 1898-1951 Francis Beeding is the pen name of two writers, John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders, who collaborated on thirty-one 169

About the Authors novels between 1925 and 1946. These include espionage novels, political novels, and mysteries. Two of these writers' most popular mysteries are Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) and The House of Dr. Edwardes (1927), made famous through its film version, Spellbound.

Josephine Bell 1897-1997 Josephine Bell is the pen name of Doris Bell Ball, under which she wrote nineteen novels and forty-five mystery novels as well as criticism in the mystery genre, radio plays, short stories, and series for women's magazines. Much of her work as a physician both in hospitals and private practice is reflected in her works including her first, Murder in Hospital, (1937). Among her most well-known works which portray her strengths in characterization and use of setting are Death in Retirement (1956), Double Doom (1958), and The Port of London Murders (1938). Along with the latter, one of her most highly praised books is Death at Half-Term (1939; published in the United States as Curtain Call for A Corpse, 1965).

E. F. Benson 1867-1940 Edward Frederic Benson wrote sixty-nine books, which include autobiographies, biographies, horror fiction, novels, plays, and mystery fiction. His "Lucia" novels have been adapted for television films and have been shown on British and American television. According to one critic, Benson's The Blotting Book was "one of the progenitors of ... British mystery."1

R. T. Campbell 1914-1978 R. T. Campbell is the pen name of Ruthven Todd, who wrote a number of collections of poems, children's stories, works of criticism and novels. In 1947, Todd moved to the United States where he remained for the rest of his life. Between 1950 and 1956 he was a visiting professor at SUNY — Buffalo. He is well-known for his critical works on William Blake and for his detective novels which include Unholy Dying (1945), Take Thee a Sharp Knife (1946), Adventure with a Goat (1946), Bodies in

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About the Authors a Bookshop (1946), The Death Cap (1946), Death for Madame (1946), and Swing Low, Sweet Death (1946), and Loser's Choice (1953).

G. K. Chesterton 1874-1936 Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a journalist, an essayist, a poet, a broadcaster, and a critic of religion, politics, and literature, but what he remains famous for in modern times is his detective stories, including The Club of Queer Trades (1905) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and his detective series that features the Roman catholic priest Father Brown. Chesterton is famous for his uses of paradox, and one of his "mysteries," a collection of loosely connected whimsical tales entitled The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, demonstrates the author's capricious humor as well as his optimism in the human spirit. During nearly thirty-one years of writing, Chesterton published almost one hundred books, contributed to another two hundred, gave many lectures, and wrote thousands of articles and poems for several journals. Chesterton still commands a large reading audience. He was a staunch defender of detective fiction and wrote several essays on the genre; two of the most widely read are "A Defence of Detective Stories" and "How to Write a Detective Story."

Agatha Christie 1890-1976 Arguably the most famous writer of detective fiction, Agatha Christie established her reputation with her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). In all, Christie wrote seventy-nine novels and short story collections and more than a dozen plays including Afternoon at the Seaside ( 1962) and The Mousetrap which opened in London in 1952, the longest running play in the history of the theatre. One of Christie's most well-known mystery novels is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which does not follow the traditional rule of detective fiction, that of furnishing the reader with all of the clues needed to identify the murderer. Nearly all of her villains are drawn from traditional society rather than the criminal classes. Her two most famous sleuths are Hercule Poirot, made famous through the application of his "little grey cells," and Miss Jane Marple with her acute powers of observation.

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About the Authors

Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 Joseph Conrad was born the son of a Polish nobleman; he became a British citizen in 1886. His novels are varied in subject matter and include adventure stories such as Almayer's Folly (1895), The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897) and The Secret Agent (1907—considered the first espionage novel featuring a double agent), as well as Nostromo (1904), Under Western Eyes (1911—which, like The Secret Agent, features a double agent), Chance (1914), and Lord Jim (1900), all of which explore the question of morality. In 1924, Conrad published a non-fiction work, The Nature of Crime, in collaboration with Ford Maddox Ford. Conrad comments on The Secret Agent, "The inception of The Secret Agent followed immediately on a two years' period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel, Nostromo, with its far-off Latin-American atmosphere, and the profoundly personal Mirror of the Sea.... Then while I was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of The Secret Agent— I mean the tale —came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don't remember now."2 Alfred Hitchcock's film version of this novel came out in 1936 under the title Sabotage (U.S. title: A Woman Alone).

J. S. Fletcher 1863-1935 Joseph Smith Fletcher from Yorkshire was a journalist, historian, and mystery writer. He wrote seventeen mystery novels, most of which are no longer read although in the 1920s he was very popular in both the U.S. and Great Britain and well known for his development of urban realism. A reviewer of the day wrote in the New York Times: "Each one is an ingenious, cleverly constructed tale, distinctive in plot and incidents and written with as much zest and freshness as if it were his first. The type of mental equipment that can produce each year three or more complicated plots, each dressed out with multitudinous thrilling incidents, will always be a marvel to those who do not possess it."3 According to mystery writer H. R. F. Keating, Fletcher's two best mystery novels are The Middle Temple Murder and the Charing Cross Mystery.*

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About the Authors

Graham Greene 1904-1991 Graham Greene is generally acknowledged by critics and general readers alike to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His works include travel writing, plays, essays, a three-part autobiography, novels, and thrillers which he modestly described "entertainments" but which were soon realized to be works which elevated the thriller to the level of serious fiction. Greene's most popular thrillers include Stamboul Train (1932; published in the United States as Orient Express though not be confused with Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express), It's a Battlefield (1934), England Made Me (1935; published in the United States as The Shipwrecked), A Gun for Sale (1936; published in the United States as This Gun for Hire and the prequel to Brighton Rock), Brighton Rock (1938), The Confidential Agent (1939), and The Ministry of Fear (1943). In his autobiography Ways of Escape, Greene discusses his attempts to change the outdated aspects of the thriller genre which he saw as no longer serving the modern age: "More than the dialogue and the situation had dated; the moral climate was no longer that of my boyhood. Patriotism had lost its appeal, even for a schoolboy.... [I]t was difficult, during the years of the Depression, to believe in the high purposes of the City of London and the British Constitution.... It was no longer a Buchan world."4

Patrick Hamilton 1904-1962 (Anthony) (Walter) Patrick Hamilton published fifteen novels and seven plays. Of his novel Hangover Square (1941), one critic writes: "Grim and powerful, this work is possibly the most valid fictional treatment and psychological study of the criminally insane."5 The plays Rope (1929) and Gas Light (1938) were adapted for film; the novels in the Gorse trilogy — The West Pier (1951), Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), and The Unknown Assailant (1955) — were made into a mini-series for British television in the 1990s and introduced American audiences to Hamilton's work. Hamilton's crime novels often include characters whose lives have taken a downward path with poverty, alcoholism, homelessness and who have turned to prostitution, theft and murder. The Times Literary Supplement of September 1951 describes these characters as "the

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About the Authors faithless, the uprooted, the lonely souls."6 Hamilton died of alcoholism in September 1962 at the age of fifty-eight.

P. D. James 1920Phyllis Dorothy James is considered one of the finest mystery writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, having written fifteen novels, only one of which {Children of Men, 1992) is not a mystery. Other than Innocent Blood (1980) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), the poetdetective Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh appears in all of James' works including A Mind to Murder (1963), Unnatural Causes (1967), A Taste for Death (1986), Devices and Desires (1989), Original Sin (1994), and A Certain Justice (1997). Another work, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), features the young female amateur detective Cordelia Gray. Many of her works have been made into successful television adaptations.

H. R. F. Keating 1926Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating writes a popular detective series featuring Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay police who is described in the Times Literary Supplement as "a man much like ourselves only more so: diffident, misdoubting his own powers, often sadly muddled by the unaccountable happenings assailing him. But at the same time he is endowed with a dim saving obstinacy and occasionalflashesof anger."7 In an interview, Keating explains why he and Ghote are so much alike: "All right, he's Indian and he's a slight figure physically, though tough enough, and I'm not. I'm British and we're miles apart in many ways, but inside him is a lot of me."8 Keating has written more than thirty-six mystery novels as well as several non-mystery novels, plays, and two collections of short stories and is also an editor and contributor to twenty or more collection in the mystery criticism genre. His latest works which feature Inspector Ghote include A Detective under Fire (2003) and A Detective in Love (2003).

John Lawton 1949The New York Times Book Review describes John Lawton as "an elegant writer" whose "plotting is logical," and whose "backgrounds are haunting."9 A BBC filmmaker, Lawton has written five mystery novels 174

About the Authors to date: Black Out (1995), Old Flames (1997), A Little White Death (1998), Rip Tide (2002), and Sweet Sunday (2002).

E. C. R. Lorac 1894-1958 E. C. R. Lorac was one of the pen names used by Edith Caroline Rivett. In all, Rivett wrote seventy-one mysteries, forty-eight under the pen name E. C. R. Lorac, many of which feature Chief Inspector Robert MacDonald of the London Metropolitan Police. These include Murder on the Burrows (1931), Death on the Oxford Road (1933), Murder in St. Johns Wood (1934), Murder by Matchlight (1945), Murder in the Mill-Race (1952), and The Double Turn (1956). Using another pen name, Carol Carnac, Rivett wrote another twenty-three mysteries featuring Inspector Julian Rivers including the well-known Upstairs, Downstairs (1950).

Peter Lovesey 1936Peter Harmer Lovesey has written twenty-five novels in the mystery genre. Including nine crime novels, his mysteries feature two sleuths, Sergeant Cribb of the Victorian mysteries and Peter Diamond of the contemporary mysteries. Lovesey has also written several collections of short stories, three works of nonfiction, as well as three thrillers under the pen name of Peter Lear and has contributed to more than eighty anthologies. In his Victorian mysteries, Lovesey's vivid description of historical details is outstanding; one critic comments that Lovesey's readers "revel in the author's obvious love for the etiquette, finery, and hypocrisy of the Victorian times, and his modern police procedural novels featuring Peter Diamond demonstrate that he is equally adept and entertaining in this area also."10 All eight of the Sergeant Cribb novels were adapted for British and American television. "The aim of my writing," says Lovesey, " is to entertain and involve the reader. If successful, then I can be subversive, suggesting ironies, springing surprises, and now and then chilling the blood."11

Gladys Mitchell 1901-1983 Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell wrote mysteries, children's fiction and novels. She is included among the Golden Age mystery writers. 175

About the Authors Mitchell's mysteries are noted for their eccentric characters, strange plots, and humor as well as an impressive use of setting. An interviewer once remarked, "You are, as a novelist, a specialist in eccentric behavior. Do your characters 'take over' and strike out on their own, or are you always fully in control of them?" She answers: "No, I am never in control of my characters. They do and say things I never intended."12 Her series sleuth is Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, a psychologist and amateur detective described by critics as "repellently attractive" and "the most fascinating and maddening female sleuth ever created." Mitchell published seventy-six mystery novels, including two collaborations, among which The Saltmarsh Murders (1932), Death at the Opera (1934), Laurels Are Poison (1942), Sunset over Soho (1943), The Rising of the Moon (1945), Watsons Choice (1951), and Spotted Hemlock (1958 ) are considered her best. Of these, The Saltmarsh Murders stands out and has been described in the New York Times as a "most unusual combination of horror, fun, and honest-to-goodness brainwork," with an author "adept in the delineation of eccentric characters ... the possessor of a keen sense of humor as well the ability to concoct a puzzling mystery yarn."13 Critics are often divided on her work; some claim that her plots and character development are often barely credible, but Patricia Craig, editor of critical works in the genre, states: "... she refused to differentiate between comedy and tragedy, and this is one reason why her books are so memorable. But Mitchell's basic traits are all her own: she is a writer who can absorb influences without being overwhelmed by them."14

Emma Orczy 1865-1947 The daughter of Baron Felix D'Orczy, a composer, Baroness Emmuska D'Orczy was born in Hungary and moved to London in 1880 to study art. She wrote romantic novels and detective stories beginning with the Old Man in the Corner detective stories in 1901. In 1905, Orczy published her first and most famous novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Along with the Old Man in the Corner series, she wrote another series of detective fiction which featured Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk as the "Head of the Female Department of Scotland Yard." This series is collected in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910). Her other mystery related works include another collection, The Man in Grey (1918), set in the days of Napoleon and fea176

About the Authors turing Monsieur Ferdinand, a secret agent, and Skin o' My Tooth (1928), stories which feature an unscrupulous lawyer. A series of British films based on The Old Man in the Corner came out in 1924.

Dorothy Sayers 1893-1957 Dorothy Sayers was part of the Golden Age of detective fiction, which includes such elements as the emergence of a new kind of writer, the preeminence of women writers, and a new style of writing that had little in common with mid-Victorian detective fiction writers such as Conan Doyle. A longer type of detective novel now emerged, filled with twists and turns of intricate details and plots. Sayers was one of the original writers of this Golden Age along with her friend and rival mystery writer, Agatha Christie. Sayers wrote sixteen mystery novels, all of which are still widely read, and five collections of mystery stories. Lord Peter Wimsey is Sayers' amateur sleuth in her mystery novels, four of which — Clouds of Witness (1926), The Unpleasantness at theBellona Club (1928), The Nine Tailors (1934), and Murder Must Advertise (1933) —were serialized for British and American television. Like Chesterton, Sayers wrote many critical essays about the mystery genre including her much read introduction to the three-volume Great Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror. Writer Howard Haycraft wrote concerning Dorothy Sayers' mysteries: "No single trend in the English detective story of the 1920s was more significant than its approach to the literary standards of the legitimate novel. And no author illustrates this trend better than Dorothy Sayers, who has been called by some critics the greatest living writer in the form. Whether or not the reader agrees with this verdict he cannot, unless he is both obtuse and ungrateful, dispute her preeminence as one of the most brilliant and prescient artists the genre has yet produced."15

Josephine Tey 1896-1952 Josephine Tey is known for her historical dramas and mystery novels for which she used both her own name and the pen name Gordon Daviot. These include The Man in the Queue (1929), The Singing Sands (1952), A Shilling for Candles (1936, which was the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film Young and Innocent), Miss Pym Disposes (1946), Brat Farrar (1949), The Franchise Affair (1948), and The Daughter of Time (1951). 177

About the Authors The Man in the Queue and A Shilling for Candles are the two most closely associated with the Golden Age mysteries. In each of these works, the unknown victim is presented in the open chapter and the rest of the work describes the search for the murderer. Mystery critic Anthony Boucher describes Tey's detective, Inspector Grant, as ahead of his time in that he bore all of the traits of a post modern man.16 Another critic comments, "If any one characteristic most distinguished Miss Tey's work it was her power to evoke character, atmosphere, mores by conversation."17

Colin Wilson 1931Colin Wilson has written a wide variety of works which include plays, psychological thrillers, mysteries, science-fiction stories, spy stories, and diary confessions. His first book, The Outsider, which focuses on the alienation of the human being, is now a classic text, along with Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). In the latter work he rejects traditional existentialism, with its focus on the hopelessness of the human situation, in favor of "the new existentialism," which does not allow the inevitability of despair but offers some kind of hope, however slight, for man's predicament. Known primarily for these and other philosophical works, Wilson states concerning fiction: "If I were to prescribe a rule, that all future philosophers would have to obey, it would be this: that no idea shall be expressed that cannot be expressed in terms of human beings in a novel — and perfectly ordinary human beings at that — not Peacockian brain-boxes. If an idea cannot be expressed in terms of people, it is a sure sign it is irrelevant to the real problem of life."18 Wilson calls all of his mysteries "crime novels" in which the reader plays an active role. John Weigel writes: "He treats crime, for example, philosophically and aesthetically. His killers are artists, and his detectives humanists. The 'solution' is generally predictable because it is both logical and psychological. Wilson intends that killers, detectives, and readers all experience an epiphany. The victims, of course, are beyond redemption."19 In all, Wilson has written 107 books; these include almost twenty crime novels, mostly psychological thrillers, among which The Glass Cage (1966) and The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974) are probably the best known.

178

NOTES Introduction 1. Dorothy Sayers (ed.), The Omnibus of Crime (Garden City: Doubleday, 1929), 9-10. 2. Ibid. 3. Jack M. Bickham, Setting (Cincinnati OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1994), 4. 4. Elizabeth Lemarchand, "Where?" in Murderess Ink, ed. Dilys Winn (New York: Bell, 1981), 262. 5. Willard Huntington Wright, "The Great Detective Stories," in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 38. 6. W. H. Auden, "The Guilty Vicarage," in The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 1948; United States edition, New York: Random House, 1962), 15. 7. H. Douglass Thompson, Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story (Philadelphia: R. West, 1978), 151. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 123. 9. W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1949), 74. 10. Ibid., 75. 11. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 86. 12. G. K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Detective Stories," in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 4-5. 13. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 172. 14. George Bahlke, The Later Auden (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 94. 15. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood, 21.

179

Notes — The City

The City 1. Nicholas Blake, "The Detective Story — Why?" in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 404. 2. David Lehman, The Perfect Murder (New York: Free Press, 1989), 10. 3. David Danow, The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 53, 54. 4. G. K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Detective Stories," in The Art of the Mystery Storyy ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992). 5. Ibid. 6. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 82. 7. Joseph Conrad, introduction to The Secret Agent (Garden City: Doubleday, 1926). 8. Ibid. 9. Kingsley Amis, introduction to The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesteron (1986 Penguin edition). 10. G. K. Chesterton, "On Detective Novels," Generally Speaking (London: Methuen, 1928), 6. 11. Robert Allen Papinchak, "Dorothy Sayers," in Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, 2 vols., ed. Robin W. Winks (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998). 12. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 142. 13. In Bernard Benstock, ed., Art in Crime Writing: Essays on Detective Fiction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 30. 14. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 97. 15. Ibid., 97. 16. Ibid. y 5, 10. 17. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 189, 190. 18. Danow, The Spirit of the Carnival, 19, 20. 19. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 27. 20. Interview with P.D. James, filed by Tony Clifton, Newsweek, Sept 18,1986. 21. Jack Bickham, Setting (Cincinnati OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1994), 5. 22. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853). 23. P. D. James, quoted in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 276 (Detroit:

Gale, 2003), 217-228. 24. H. R. F. Keating, Crime and Mystery 100 Best Books (New York: Carroll & Graf) 103. 25. Janet Perez and Wendy Aycock, Climate and Literature: Reflections of Environment (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999), 3. 26. H. E. Bates, Down the River (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), 9, 40.

180

Notes—The Shore 27. Robert J. Casey, "Oh, England! Full of Sin," in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 349. 28. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 85. 29. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 423. 30. Jeremy Hawthorne, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 17. 31. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 83. 32. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 109. 33. Ibid., 72. 34. Blake, "The Detective Story —Why?" 404. 35. W. H. Auden, "The Guilty Vicarage," in The Dyers Hand, 151. 36. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 75. 37. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 59. 38. Lehman, The Perfect Murder, 118. 39. Ibid., 27. 40. Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature, 59.

The Shore 1. Jack Bickham, Setting (Cincinnati OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1994), 5. 2. Stephen Knight, introduction to The Blotting Book by E. F. Benson (1987 Hogarth Press edition). 3. Quoted by Vincent Starrett on back cover of Death Walks in Eastrepps (Dover edition, 1980). 4. "Gladys Mitchell," entry in Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981). 5. Patricia Craig, introduction to The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell (1984 Hogarth Press edition). 6. Gladys Mitchell, appendix to The Saltmarsh Murders (1984 Hogarth Press edition). 7. R. H. Miller, Understanding Graham Greene (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 51. 8. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 77, 80. 9. Ibid., 75. 10. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigres (New York: Schocken Books, 1970),

131, 132. 11. Graham Greene, "Note to American Readers," in Brighton Rock (1970 Penguin edition).

181

Notes — Conclusion 12. John Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 5. 13. Graham Greene, back cover of The West Pier (1986 Penguin edition). 14. Cyril Bainbridge, Pavilions on the Sea: A History of the Seaside Pier (London: Hale, 1986), 21. 15. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 74. 16. W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (reprint edition, New York: Random House, 1967), 20. 17. Graham Greene, back cover of The West Pier. 18. H. R. F. Keating, interview with P. D. James in Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction, éd. H. R. F. Keating (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982). 19. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 80. 20. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 46. 21. C. P. Snow, back cover of The Pier (1986 Allison & Busby edition). 22. Gavin Lambert, "The Dangerous Edge," in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall,

1980), 50. Conclusion 1. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 4. 2. Jack Bickham, Setting (Cincinnati OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1994), 3. 3. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 84. 4. Ibid., 61. 5. Ibid., 75. 6. David Lehman, The Perfect Murder (New York: Free Press, 1989), 41.

About the Authors 1. Washington Post Book World, June 28, 1987. 2. Author's note, The Secret Agent, vi. 3. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 70: British Mystery Writers,

1860-1919, 135-142. 4. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980),

72. 5. Times Literary Supplement, September 1951. 6. Ibid.

182

Notes—About the Authors 7. J. I. M. Stewart, Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 1966, 20. 8. Clues Journal, Fall/Winter 1983. 9. New York Times, May 28, 1995, 13. 10. St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. Jay P. Pederson (Detroit MI: St. James Press, 1996), 660. 11. Interview with Peter Lovesey, The Armchair Detective, Summer 1981. 12. B. A. Pike, The Armchair Detective 9, no. 4 (1976): 250-260. 13. New York Times, April 30, 1933, 10. 14. Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement, October 29, 1982. 15. Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: 1941; 2nd revised edition, 1984), 135-42. 16. Anthony Boucher, New York Times, Sept. 16, 1953. 17. New Republic, Sept. 20, 1954. 18. Colin Wilson, Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (New York: Dutton, 1958), 58. 19. John A. Weigel, "Colin Wilson: Overview," Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., ed. Susan Windisch Brown (New York: St. James Press, 1996), 1058-1061.

183

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works Allingham, Margery. More Work for the Undertaker. London: William Heinemann, 1949. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1963. . Tether's End. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Reprint, New York: Bantam,

1990. _. The Tiger in the Smoke. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. Reprint, London: Hogarth, 1987. Beeding, Francis. Death Walks in Eastrepps. New York: The Mystery League. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1980. Bell, Josephine. The Port of London Murders. London: Longmans, 1938. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1958. Benson, E. F. The Blotting Book. London: William Heinemann, 1908. Reprint, London: Hogarth, 1987. Campbell, R. T. Bodies in a Bookshop. London: J. Westhouse, 1946. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1984. Chesterton, G. K. The Club of Queer Trades. London: Simpkin, 1908. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1984. . The Man Who Was Thursday. London: Simpkin, 1908. Reprint, London: Penguin,1986. Christie, Agatha. At Bertram's Hotel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. . The Boomerang Clue. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1935. Reprint, New York: Berkley, 1984. _. Murder in Retrospect. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942. Reprint, New York: Dell, 1942. _. N or M? London: Collins, 1941. Reprint, New York: Dell, 1969. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. 1907; Reprint, New York: Dover, 2001. 185

Bibliography Fletcher, J. S. The Charing Cross Mystery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock. London: William Heinemann, 1938. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1988. . The Ministry of Fear. London: William Heineman, 1973. Hamilton, Patrick. Hangover Square. New York: H. Wolff, 1942. . The West Pier. London: Constable, 1951. Reprint, London: Penguin,1986. Heppenstall, Raynor. The Pier. London: Allison & Busby, 1986. James, P. D. Devices and Desires. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. . Unnatural Causes. New York: Scribner's, 1967. Reprint, New York: Warner, 1987. Keating, H. R. F. Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock. New York: Dutton, 1968. Lawton, John. Black Out. New York: Viking, 1995. Lorac, E. C. R. Murder by Matchlight. London: Collins. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1988. Lovesey, Peter. Mad Hatter's Holiday. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973. Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Mitchell, Gladys. The Saltmarsh Murders. London: Victor Gollancz. Reprint, London: Hogarth,1984. Orczy, Emma. The Old Man in the Corner. New York: Dover, 1980. Sayers, Dorothy. Have His Carcass. London: Gollancz, 1932. Reprint, New York: Avon, 1968. . Strong Poison. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Tey, Josephine. A Shilling for Candles. London: Methuen, 1936. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1988. . The Singing Sands. London: Davies, 1952. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1988. Wilson, Colin. The Glass Cage. New York: Random House, 1966.

Further Readings in the London Setting Allingham, Margery. Flowers for the Judge, 1966. Babson, Marian. The Lord Mayor of Death, 1977. Bentley, E. C. Trent's Last Case, 1941. Berkeley, Anthony. The Piccadilly Murder, 1930. . The Poisoned Chocolates Case, 1929. Butler, Gwendoline. The Dull Dead, 1958. Also all the "Inspector Coffin" mysteries. Bruton, Eric. The Laughing Policeman, 1963, and all in this series. Carr, John Dickson. The Bride of Newgate, 1950. . The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933. Chesterton, G. K. The Ball and Cross, 1909. . The Napoleon ofNotting Hill, 1904. 186

Bibliography Creasey, John. The Masters of Bow Street, 1974. Christie, Agatha. The Secret Adversary, 1922. . The Secret of Chimneys, 1953. Crispin, Edmund. Frequent Hearses, 1950. Crofts, Freeman Wills. The Box Office Murders, 1929. Davison, Lionel. The Chelsea Murders, 1978. Ellis, Peter. City of Gold and Shadows, 1973. Felix, Charles. The Duke of York Steps, 1929. Fletcher, J. S. The Middle Temple Murder, 1919. Fraser, Antonia. Quiet as a Nun, 1977. Gilbert, Michael. Death Has Deep Roots, 1951. . Smallbone Deceased, 1950. Hume, Fergus W. The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, 1880. Innes, Michael. From London Far, 1962. James, P. D. The Skull Beneath the Skin, 1982. .An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1972. Leo, Bruce. Death in Albert Park, 1964. Marsh, Ngaio. Black as He's Painted, 1974. . Killer Dolphin, 1966. . Light Thickens, 1982. . A Surfeit of Lampreys, 1941. . A Wreath for Rivera, 1949. Mason, A. E. W. The House in Lordship Lane, 1946. Meade, Mrs. L. T. The Sorceress of the Strand, 1922. Milne, A. A. The Red House Mystery, 1922. Mitchell, Gladys. Watson's Choice, 1955. Mortimer, John. Rumpole of the Old Bailey, 1981. Moyes, Patricia. Who is Simon Warwick? 1978. Nash, Simon. Dead of a Counterplot, 1962. Sayers, Dorothy. Clouds of Witness, 1927. . The Unpleasantness at the Belladonna Club, 1928. Symons, Julian. The Black Heath Poisonings, 1978. Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time, 1951. . The Man in the Queue, 1953. Yorke, Margaret. Cast for Death, 1976.

Further Readings in the Coastal Setting Allingham, Margery. The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, 1955. Anderson, J. R. L. Death in the Channel, 1976. Anthony, Peter. The Woman in the Wardrobe, n.d. Barnard, Robert. Death of a Perfect Mother, 1981.

187

Bibliography Bruce, Leo. Our Jubilee Is Death, 1959. . Such Is Death, 1963. Buchan, John. The Thirty-nine Steps, 1916. Burford, Delannoy. The Margate Murder Mystery, 1902. Burley, W. J. Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin, 1986. . Wycliffes Wild Goose Chase, 1982. Burton, Miles. The Chinese Puzzle, 1957. . Death at Low Tide, 1948. Cannan, Joanna. All Is Discovered, 1962. Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands, 1903. Christie, Agatha. Evil under the Sun, 1969. Crofts, Freeman Wills. The Cheyne Mystery, 1926. . Crime on the Solent, n. d. . Double Death, 1932. . Mystery in the English Channel, 1931. Curtis, Peter. The DeviVs Own, 1960. Dewhurst, Eileen. Curtain Fall, 1977. Fletcher, J. S. The Great Brighton Mystery, 1925. . The Middle Temple Murder, 1919. Fraser, Antonia. Cool Repentance, 1982. Garve, Andrew. The Cuckoo Line Affair, 1953. . A Very Quiet Place, 1967. Hall, Robert Lee. The King Edward Plot, 1980. Hart, Roy. Seascape with Dead Figures, 1987. Gash, Jonathan. Pearlhanger, 1985. Hastings, Macdonald. Cork in Bottle, n. d. Hough, S. B. Dear Daughter Dead, n. d. Hunter, Alan. Gently Between the Tides, 1982 (and all the Superintendent Gently mysteries). Innes, Michael. Death in the Morning, n. d. . Death on a Quiet Day, n. d. James, P. D. The Black Tower, 1975. . Death of an Expert Witness, 1977. Kitchin, G. H. B. Death of His Uncle, 1939. Lowden, Desmond. Sunspot, 1981. MacDonald, Phillip. The Pofferry Riddle, n.d. McGuire, Paul. Murder by the Law, n. d. Moyes, Patricia. Down among the Dead Men, 1979. Nichols, Beverly. Death to Slow Music, n. d. Perry, Richie, Grand Slam, 1980. Rees, Arthur. The Shrieking Pit, 1920. Rhode, John. Murder at Derivale, n. d.

188

Bibliography Snow, C. P. Death under Sail, 1959. Swinnerton, Frank. The Woman from Sicily, 1957. Symons, Julian. Death's Darkest Face, 1990. Warner, Mignon. The Girl Who Was Clairvoyant, 1982. Watson, Colin. All the "Flaxborough" mysteries. Wilson, Colin. Necessary Doubt, 1964.

Works of Criticism Auden, W. H. The Enchafêd Flood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1949. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1967. . "The Guilty Vicarage." In The Dyer's Hand. London: Faber and Faber, 1948; United States edition, New York: Random House, 1962. Bahlke, George W. The Later Auden. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

1970. Bakerman, Jane S., éd., And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of Mystery. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963. . Rabelais and His World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. Bargainnier, Earl F., ed. 10 Women of Mystery. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Barzun, Jacques. The Delights of Detection. New York: Criterion, 1961. Barzun, Jacques, and Wendy Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. Bates, H. E. Down the River. London: Victor Gollancz, 1987. Benstock, Bernard, ed. Art in Crime Writing: Essays on Detective Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Bickham, Jack M. Setting: How to Create and Sustain a Sharp Sense of Time and Place in Your Fiction. Cincinnati OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1994. Binyon, T. J. "Murder Will Out": The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Blake, Nicholas. "The Detective Story —Why?" In The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Burack, A. S., ed. Writing Detective and Mystery Fiction. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1967. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. New York: Continuum, 1981. Casey, Robert. "Oh, England! Full of Sin." In The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1982. Chesterton, G. K. "A Defence of Detective Stories." In The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. 189

Bibliography _. "On Detective Novels." Generally Speaking. London: Methuen, 1928. Danow, David. The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Dove, George N. "The Criticism of Detective Fiction." The Popular Culture Scholar 1 (Winter 1977): 1-7. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Emigres. New York: Schocken, 1970. Greene, Graham. Ways of Escape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Grossvogelt, David. Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univerity Press, 1979. Hawthorne, Jeremy. A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. . Studying the Novel. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story. New York: Carroll & Graf,

1992. , ed. Murder for Pleasure. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984. Keating, H. R. F. Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. . Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1987. . Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness unto Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941. Reprint, New York: Anchor, 1954. Lambert, Gavin. "The Dangerous Edge." In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980. Lehman, David. The Perfect Murder. New York: Free Press, 1989. Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992. Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Martin, Richard. Ink in Her Blood: The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Ailingham. Michigan: UMI, 1988. Miller, R. H. Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Murch, A. E. The Development of the Detective Novel. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1958. Oleksiw, Susan. A Reader's Guide to the Classic British Mystery. New York: Mysterious, 1988. Papinchak, Robert Allen. "Dorothy Sayres." In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage. 2 vols. Ed. Robin W. Winks. New York: Scribner's, 1998. Penzler, Otto, ed. The Great Detectives. New York: Penguin, 1979. Pike, B. A. Campion's Career: A Study of the Novels of Margery Allingham. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987.

190

Bibliography Sayers, Dorothy. Introduction. The Omnibus of Crime. Ed. Dorothy Sayers. New York: Garden City, 1929. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. New York: Viking, 1985. . The Detective Story in Britain. London: Longmans, Green, 1962. . Great Detectives. New York: Abrams, 1981. . Mortal Consequences. New York: Schocken, 1973. Van Dine, S. S. Introduction. The World's Greatest Detective Stories. New York: Cornwall, 1927. Walker, Ronald G., and June M. Frazer, eds. The Cunning Craft. Illinois: Yeast Printing, 1990. White, Allon. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Wilson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence. New York: St. Martin's, 1971. Wilson, Edmund. "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?" The New Yorker, Oct. 1944: 76. Winks, Robin W, ed. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980. . Modus Operandi, An Excursion into Detective Fiction. Boston: Godine, n.d. Winn, Dilys, ed. Murder Ink. New York: Workman, 1977. . Murderess Ink. New York: Bell, 1981. Wright, Willard Huntington. "The Great Detective Stories." In The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992.

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INDEX Chesterton, G. K. 6, 18 "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" 145 Christie, Agatha 8,9,86 Climate and Literature 78 The Club of Queer Trades 6,18-23, 48, 68, 166 Cold Comfort Farm 116 Conrad, Joseph 24 "The Craft of Detective Fiction" 39 crowds 9, 20, 21, 67, 113, 130, 150, 151, 168 Crowds and Power 30-31

ABC tearoom 13,14, 51 the alien 9 alienation 5 Allingham, Margery 7, 63 The Art of Fiction 81-82 At Bertram's Hotel 27, 86 Auden, W. H. 4, 5, 8, 89 Bahlke, George 8 Bainbridge, Cyril 131 Bakhtin, Mikhail 5 , 8 2 Beeding, Francis 8, 111 Bell, Josephine 7 Benson, E. F. 107 Bickham, Jack 3 Black Out 7, 47, 57, 68, 100-104, 167 Blake, Nicholas 13 Bleak House 69 The Blotting Book 107, 133, 135, 141, 145 Bodies in a Bookshop 7, 2 4 , 58-62, 64 The Boomerang Clue 120,123-124 Borges, Jorge Luis 23 Brighton Rock 8, 43, 74, 107, 110, 114, 127-132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 143, 152, 168 The British Seaside 130

"The Dangerous Edge" 159 Danow, David 17 Death Walks in Eastrepps 8, 111-115, 143 "A Defence of Detective Stories" 18 Devices and Desires 162-164 Dickens, Charles 69, 79 disguise 17 Dombey and Son 79 "The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady" 2 2 - 2 3 Eliot, T. S. 6 The Enchafed Flood 168

Campbell, R. T. 7, 24 Canetti, Elias 5, 8, 30, 152 carnival/ carnivalesque 9, 30, 49, 82, 130, 139, 157 The Charing Cross Mystery 7, 35 the chase 32

Father Brown mysteries 23 "The Fenchurch Street Mystery" 13, 14 Fletcher, J. S. 7 fog 5, 8

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Index the front 130, 131

The Ministry of Fear 7, 47-53, 57, 91,

The Glass Cage 7, 28, 29, 31, 65, 167 Greene, Graham 7, 43, 47-48 grotesques 61 "The Guilty Vicarage" 4, 89 A Gun for Sale 128

mistaken identity 19, 30 Mitchell, Gladys 116 More Work for the Undertaker 63-68, 95, 166 Murder by Matchlight 7, 47, 54-57,

Hamilton, Patrick 8, 43 Hangover Square 43-46, 90, 158 Have His Carcass 120-123, 148, 164 Hawthorn, Jeremy 83 Heppenstall, Raynor 8 Holloway Prison 40, 41 Holmes, Sherlock 18, 39, 67

Murder in Retrospect 8, 137-8 "The Mysterious Death in Percy Street" 13, 15

100, 167

100

NorM? 9, 133-136 The Napoleon ofNotting Hill 6 the North Sea 147 "Note to American Readers" 129 "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd" 2 2

identity, question of 9 The Iliad 6 Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock 7, 95-99, 166

The Old Man in the Corner 13-17, 51 "On Detective Novels" 34 Orczy, Emma 13

James, P. D. 29, 53, 69-70, 146 Keating, H. R. F. 7, 70, 95 Knight, Stephen 107

"The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation" 20-21 Papinchak, Robert Allen 39 the parade 130 Pavilions on the Sea 131-132 The Perfect Murder 17, 39-40, 48, 52,

Lambert, Gavin 159 Lawton, John 7, 100 Lehman, David 17, 89 Lemarchand, Elizabeth 4 Lewis, Cecil Day 13 "The Lisson Grove Mystery" 13, 15 Lodge, David 81 Lorac, E. C. R 7 "The Lotos-Eaters" 29 Lovesey, Peter 8 "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" 6 Lutwack, Leonard 91

89, 100, 101, 165 The Pier 8, 158-161 the pier 8, 131-2, 140, 152, 157, 159 The Port of London Murders 7, 28, 79-85, 90, 167 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 111 the promenade 8, 130, 134, 140, 157 the psychological thriller 43 public common 21 the quest 83

Mad Hatter's Holiday 8, 107, 114, 134, 135, 141, 159, 168 The Man Who Was Thursday 6, 2 5 , 28-34, 61, 68, 77, 166-168 the mask 17 Masters of Mystery 4 Merry, Bruce 42 Miller, R. H. 127

Rabelais and His World 82 railway stations 5, 14, 46, 56 ritual 9 river, as a symbol 84-85 River Thames 27, 28, 29, 30, 79, 84 The Role of Place in Literature 91, 102, 165

194

Index Thompson, Douglass H. 4 The Tiger in the Smoke 7, 69-74, 78, 81, 101, 128,166-168 time, distortion of 9, 152 "The Treemarn Case" 13, 16 "The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown" 19-20 the tube station 2 3 , 62, 72, 104

Rotherhithe Tunnel 79 The Saltmarsh Murders 116-119 the seaside garden 160, 161 The Secret Agent 2 4 - 2 7 Setting 3,165, 168 A Shilling for Candles 120, 124-126, 164 The Singing Sands 9, 143-145, 148 "The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent" 21 the smoke 69 the South Downs 107, 110, 139, 142 The Spirit of the Carnival 17, 48-49 the strand 130 the subway 23

Understanding Graham Greene 127 Unnatural Causes 146-149 Van Dine, S. S. 4 Walton, John 130 "The Waste Land" 100 Ways of Escape 127 The West Pier 8, 107, 134, 139-142, 143,152,167 Wilson, Colin 7,90 wind 5, 8

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 29, 162 Tether's End 7, 75-78, 81, 166-167 Tey, Jospehine 9, 120, 143 Thames Embankment 30, 62

195