Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction 3031298489, 9783031298486

Citation preview

CRIME FILES

Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction Lisa Hopkins

Crime Files Series Editor

Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the radio, on television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators a mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, from detective fiction to the gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation, is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication.

Lisa Hopkins

Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction

Lisa Hopkins Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield, UK

ISSN 2947-8340     ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic) Crime Files ISBN 978-3-031-29848-6    ISBN 978-3-031-29849-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ewing Galloway / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Fru and Ben Turton

Acknowledgements

This book was written during the various lockdowns of 2020, so Chris and Sam Hopkins were more invaluable than ever, but I’m also grateful to everyone who gave me a sense of human contact through email or Zoom, particularly Bev Chapman, Christy Bannister, Tina Beatty, Annaliese Connolly, Claire Jenkins, Ann Macaskill, Caty Murray, Niels Petersson, Amy Saunders, Kev Spence, Gillian Taylor, and Nicola Woodroofe at Sheffield Hallam University and Deborah Cartmell, Andrew Duxfield, Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Andrew Hiscock, and Domenico Lovascio in the wider world. Derek and Mary Grover, Val Hewson, Tom Rutter, and Bob White have all been partners in crime in one way or another and at various times, and I am indebted to the anonymous reader for an acute suggestion about eyes. The book is dedicated to my sister-in-law Fru and her husband Ben, with thanks for companionship, conversation, and trips to gardens.

vii

Contents

Part I Through a Glass Darkly   1 1 Introduction: What the Spectacled Detective Sees  3 2 Out of Focus: Ariadne Oliver 25 Part II Seeing the Unseen  49 3 Scouting Skills: Max Carrados, Sherlock Holmes’ Blind Rival 51 4 An Unseen Hook and an Invisible Line: Father Brown 71 Part III Seeing Through Glass  89 5 The Man with the Monocle: Lord Peter Wimsey 91 6 An Ass in Horn-Rims: Albert Campion111

ix

x 

Contents

Part IV Binocular Vision 137 7 Seeing Double: Inspector Alleyn139 8 The Double Vision of Dornford Yates159 9 Conclusion183 Index187

PART I

Through a Glass Darkly

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: What the Spectacled Detective Sees

The importance of vision is a ubiquitous concern in detective fiction. As Peter Messent notes of Paul Auster’s play on the term ‘private eye’, Auster … takes us from ‘I’ to ‘eye’ … from the physical presence of the detective subject to his vision (or eye): the way he sees the world and what that world reveals to the questing self, looking to uncover whatever mystery it holds. It is the seeing eye, indeed, that has become the very sign and signal of detection. So we recall the heightened vision of Sherlock Holmes as he used his magnifying glass. We remember, too, the iconic symbol of the major U.S. private detective agency, Pinkerton’s—the unblinking eye that ornaments its Chicago central office and the promise of endless watchfulness contained in the words etched beneath, ‘We never sleep.’ (Messent 2012: 61)

For many detectives of Golden Age English crime fiction, however, seeing is done through glass, to the extent that the image of a lens of some sort becomes almost synonymous with detection. In Ngaio Marsh’s Swing, Brother, Swing, the artist Agatha Troy produces a quickly drawn cartoon of her husband Detective Chief Inspector Alleyn and his sidekick Inspector Fox which represents them in the process of detecting, as a way of telling Alleyn that she understands that he has become involved with a case and that she will need to make her own way home. The cartoon shows Alleyn and Fox ‘on all fours inspecting, through a huge lens, a nest from which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_1

3

4 

L. HOPKINS

protruded the head of a foal, broadly winking’ (577). A lens as a form of shorthand for the process of detection can also be found in two other books by Marsh: in Surfeit of Lampreys Patch tells Alleyn, ‘When I came out Mike was looking in the playbox for that magnifying glass you gave him. We guessed it was a murder and he thought he’d like to do some private detection’ (118); in Scales of Justice, amateur artist Commander Syce illustrates an article about the individuality of trout scales with ‘a facetious picture of a roach with meerschaum and deerstalker hat examining through a lens the scales of a very tough-looking trout’ (595). Nor is the association confined to Marsh. In Margery Allingham’s Dancers in Mourning, Campion tells Linda Sutane, ‘if there was anything I could do, believe me, I should be wandering round your delightful garden, badgering your servants, leaping about from flower bed to flower bed with a reading glass, and generally behaving like the complete house-­ trained private tec’ (256); to be ‘a private tec’ is for Campion synonymous with the use of a glass. By the same token the narrator in Anthony Gilbert’s Death in Fancy Dress counts four people whose response to an invitation to a fancy dress party has been ‘to put on dressing gowns and carry magnifying glasses, as Sherlock Holmes’ (123), while in P.  G. Wodehouse’s Heavy Weather Sue Brown’s feeling that private detection is spying is countered by Monty Bodkin with ‘But with a magnifying-glass, remember … You don’t feel that it makes a difference if you do it with a magnifying-­glass?’ (85). The germ of the idea can be found as early as Edgar Allan Poe, although I do not discuss him here: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney observes that ‘The tales usually represent enigmas and their solutions in visual terms; therefore, in order to elucidate a mystery, Poe’s rudimentary investigating protagonists and brilliant detective heroes must rely on various techniques, devices, or mechanical aids to enhance their eyesight’ (Sweeney 2003: 3). Sweeney notes that ‘Poe’s tales and essays, in fact, show extensive familiarity with nineteenth-century technologies of visual perception, entertainment, surveillance, reproduction, and enlargement. Poe ponders the implications of a variety of optical devices: the camera and the daguerreotype; telescopes and microscopes; corrective lenses (including monocles, lorgnettes, spectacles, tinted lenses, and double eyeglasses); the panorama; and the kaleidoscope’ (Sweeney 2003: 4). As well as often using lenses, many fictional detectives also sport some form of eyewear. In Francis Duncan’s Murder Has a Motive, the amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine disappoints those who meet him because they are confronted with ‘an elderly, benevolent-looking ex-tobacconist, with

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

5

an old-fashioned pair of pince-nez balancing, by no more than the mercy of Providence, on the end of his nose, instead of with a strong-jawed, obvious sleuth, with manhunter stamped on his lean and hungry features’ (108), but if anything the pince-nez should confirm him as a detective rather than call it into doubt. Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey both wear monocles and Ellery Queen has ‘a rimless pince-nez’ which is said to sound ‘an incongruous note in so athletic a man’ (Queen 2015: 33), and Edgar Wallace’s Mr J. G. Reeder wears pince-nez even though he doesn’t need them. John Dickson Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell has ‘a pair of eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon’ (Till Death Do Us Part, 120) and Carr’s other series detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, has ‘big tortoise-shell spectacles’ (The Plague Court Murders, 159); in one of the Fell books, The Seat of the Scornful, Horace Ireton has a habit of repeatedly removing and replacing his spectacles (39) which neatly emblematises the tension between his public role as judge and his private role as father (and murderer). Albert Campion and Father Brown wear glasses, and each of Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson books begins with some sort of reference to his bifocals. In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville is ahead of his time in possessing a prototype pair of spectacles. The prevalence of eyewear among fictional detectives is all the more striking because many characters in these books register a profound distaste and sometimes even contempt for spectacles, and even more so for monocles and pince-nez. In Margot Bennett’s The Widow of Bath an obviously short-sighted waiter responds angrily to a challenge about his vision with ‘I do not wear glasses’ (13); in E. C. R. Lorac’s These Names Make Clues Miss Delareign is ‘as blind as a bat and too conceited to wear spectacles’ (64); in John Dickson Carr’s The Case of the Constant Suicides, Kathryn Campbell guesses that the hostile reviewer of her book must have ‘big double-lensed spectacles. And a nasty, dry, sneering way of talking’ (12). In Dornford Yates’ Gale Warning John Bagot refers to ‘Audrey’s barbarous spectacles’ (75), while in one of Yates’ short stories, ‘Letters Patent’, the characters go to Ascot and see ‘parasols and tail-coats and eye-­ glasses’ (The Best of Berry, 267), a grouping which implies that eyeglasses are accessories rather than essentials; in Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train the supposed Comte de la Roche similarly ascribes snob value to them when ‘Sticking an eyeglass in his eye, he looked coldly round the room’ (182). Despite Inspector Alleyn’s reliance on a lens, Ngaio Marsh’s books share this idea that eyewear is suspect, undesirable, or unattractive. In

6 

L. HOPKINS

Artists in Crime Basil Pilgrim says of Valmai Seacliff’s headaches ‘I want her to see an oculist, but she doesn’t like the idea of wearing glasses’ (567), and in another Marsh book, Final Curtain, details of eyewear are repeatedly used to skewer characters: Thomas Ancred ‘wore glasses and blinked behind them at Troy’ (237); his sister Pauline, ‘using a gesture that was Congrevian in its accomplishment, raised a pair of lorgnettes and stared through them at Miss Orrincourt’ (267); when their father Sir Henry Ancred wants to look at his portrait he ‘put his hand in his tunic and drew out a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez and there, in a moment, was Macbeth, with glasses perched on his nose’ (288); and the solicitor Mr Rattisbon wears pince-nez (325). The fact that Thomas blinks behind glasses brands him as ineffectual; Pauline’s use of two lorgnettes is affected; Sir Henry’s pince-nez are incongruous and Mr Rattisbon’s are an index of his inability to see beyond his own field, and when someone paints a pair of spectacles on Troy’s portrait of Sir Henry (313) it works to belittle the sitter as well as to deface the picture. Marsh makes similar use of eyewear in Clutch of Constables, where she dismisses the real Caley Bard as ‘a Dickensian little man: bald, bespectacled and irritated’ (205), and she goes even further in Death and the Dancing Footman, where Jonathan Royal’s ‘blind glasses’ (436) emblematise the total lack of emotional intelligence which leads him to take pleasure in assembling a group of people who hate each other. Other writers also use eyewear to label, diminish, or dismiss particular characters. In Georgette Heyer’s A Christmas Party (first published as Envious Casca, 1941), the unscrupulous businessman Edgar Mottisfont is characterised primarily by his glasses, first when ‘The weak grey eyes behind Mottisfont’s spectacles shifted’ (115) and then when he is alarmed to discover that Stephen knows about his gun-running: ‘“I was not aware that you were in Nathaniel’s confidence!” Mottisfont said, his eyes snapping behind their spectacles’ (228). Heyer is particularly given to using eyewear to present women as unattractive. In The Unfinished Clue Mrs Chudleigh ‘had not worn well, and did nothing now to improve her appearance. She wore pince-nez, despised face powder and curling-tongs, and had a genius for acquiring frocks made according to the last fashion but one’ (41); in Footsteps in the Dark ‘[t]he Vicar and his wife came to call at the Priory two days later. Mrs Pennythorne wore pince-nez and white kid gloves, and she told Celia that there was little society in the neighbourhood’ (19). A similar dislike for glasses on women is seen in Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop when Cadogan and Fen attempt to follow

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

7

the girl with the dog but find that ‘their way was barred by a plain but determined woman undergraduate, with spectacles and a slight squint’ (73). And as well as being unattractive glasses also make people vulnerable: in Crispin’s The Case of the Gilded Fly, when Robert Warner is shot on stage ‘they saw that even in the extremity of his pain he was groping for his glasses, which lay broken a little way out of his reach. It was oddly and terribly pathetic’ (191), and in Crispin’s Holy Disorders, when Fen is held at gunpoint by Harry James he notes, ‘The sweat was beginning to trickle down his cheeks, and his glasses were misting over—an added advantage, Fen thought, as he dare not attempt to wipe them’ (230). There are several reasons for this dislike of glasses. In the Dr Thorndyke story ‘The Moabite Cipher’, a character is described by the narrator as ‘a very typical Jew of the red-haired type [who] surveyed us thoughtfully through his gold-rimmed spectacles’ and by a neighbour as ‘a blooming Sheeny, with a carroty beard and gold gig-lamps!’ (154); here glasses seem to be seen both as an ostentatious way of displaying wealth and as dehumanising. In Patricia Wentworth’s The Brading Collection Edna Snagge thinks ‘[g]lasses always made you look older’ (127), and in Julian Symons’ The Belting Inheritance the heroine wears glasses at work because ‘people take you more seriously’ (124) even though without them ‘she looked five years younger and very appealing’ (181). In Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson books, the hero’s bifocals emblematise his double identity as portrait painter and secret agent but are also seen as inhibiting any attempts to become emotionally close to him, and this is in line with a common suspicion that glasses are worn not in order to see but in order not to be seen: in the Dr Thorndyke story ‘The Aluminium Dagger’ the doctor rightly suspects a disguise as soon as he hears that someone ‘wears a wig and spectacles’ (196), and in John Bude’s Death Knows no Calendar a character maintains a dual identity with the help of a ‘ridiculous monocle’ (341) in one persona and ‘blue-tinted spectacles’ (404) in the other. The idea that eyewear can provide a disguise is explored in many detective novels. In Georgette Heyer’s Behold, Here’s Poison, Randall Matthews’ attention is attracted by the presence of horn-rimmed sun-glasses in his uncle’s drawer (113) and he immediately guesses (correctly) that they have been used for disguise; later he himself wears ‘smoked spectacles’ to retrieve Gregory’s papers (201). In Death in the Clouds Poirot says, ‘It is so easy to be an American—here in Paris! A nasal voice—the chewing gum—the little goatee—the horn-rimmed spectacles—all the appurtenances of the stage American’ (160–1). In Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

8 

L. HOPKINS

Frankie adopts ‘pince-nez and an earnest frown’ to disguise herself (201) and Bobby says Bassington-ffrench’s impersonation of Dr Nicholson is ‘entirely voice and pince-nez’ (245). In The Mysterious Affair at Styles Poirot says of Alfred Inglethorp, ‘His clothes, his beard, the glasses which hide his eyes—those are the salient points about his personal appearance’ (154), and in The Labours of Hercules Poirot explains that ‘Winnie, the schoolgirl, with her fair plaits, her spectacles, her disfiguring dental plate— goes into the Toilette. She emerges a quarter of an hour later as—to use the words of Detective Inspector Hearn—“a flashy piece of goods”’ (312). In Ngaio Marsh’s Last Ditch ‘[d]ark glasses gave [Sydney Jones] a look of some dubious character on the Côte d’Azur’ (235); Troy thinks of them as a ‘huge silly-sinister pair of black spectacles’ (260), and when they fall off, ‘disclosing a pair of pale ineffectual eyes’, ‘[g]one was the mysterious Mr Jones’ (262). Glasses can also conceal or obfuscate in other ways: in Marsh’s Grave Mistake, the blackmailing Claude Carter has ‘furtive eyes behind heavy spectacles’ (486) and when Verity goes to visit Sybil Foster in the clinic she finds her wearing ‘enormous dark sunglasses’ (497) which mask the fact that her face has suddenly developed a strange and sinister immobility; soon afterwards Verity finds herself remembering a rhyme from her youth, ‘Auntie Maude’s mislaid her glasses and thinks the burglar’s making passes’ (500). Glasses can age these characters, lay them open to contempt, or partially or completely disguise them, but they do not help them to see. If spectacles are bad, though, other forms of eyewear are even worse. In Patricia Wentworth’s The Black Cabinet, Miss Tankerville ‘affected a pince-nez’ (13) which ‘fell with a clatter’ (18) as soon as she tries to look through it (Wentworth’s series detective, Miss Silver, is a rare exception to the detective’s use of eyewear: though she is sometimes described as wearing pince-nez pinned to her dress, we never see her use them;1 there is however a kind of spectacle-based metaphor lurking in Frank Abbott’s remark that ‘as far as Miss Maud Silver was concerned the human race was glass-fronted’ [Out of the Past 264]). In Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe we are told of Miss Sainsbury Seale that ‘her pince-nez were always dropping off’ (14), and they are also unbecoming: when Poirot looks at her he thinks, ‘Alas! Nearer fifty than forty. Pince-nez. Untidy yellow-green hair—unbecoming clothes—those depressing art greens!’ (26). In the Thorndyke story ‘31 New Inn’ the narrator Jervis opines that a man with one eye might ‘elect to wear spectacles rather than submit to the inconvenience and disfigurement of the single eyeglass’ (203). In

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

9

Marsh’s Death at the Bar the sensible Superintendent Harper wears spectacles (670) but the sexual predator Luke Watchman sports an eyeglass (772); in her Surfeit of Lampreys we hear of ‘poor Lord Charles with his eyeglass, his smile, and his vagueness’ (6). Glasses, after all, stay on; monocles and pince-nez may not, and typically brand their users as effete or affected. One of the many ironic touches in Georgette Heyer’s Detection Unlimited is that Miss Patterdale ‘wore suits of severe cut, cropped her grey locks extremely short, and screwed a monocle into one eye. But this was misleading: her sight really was irregular’ (11); the implication is that monocles are not usually worn as genuine aids to vision, and this is further inflected in Heyer’s A Blunt Instrument where Sally Drew wears a monocle and outrages Sergeant Hemingway by warning her sister not to answer questions without her solicitor present, leading him to remark, ‘Just about what that dame with the eyeglass would do! … In my young days women didn’t know anything about such things. I don’t believe in all this emancipation.’ It is as if Sally has used her monocle to acquire improper knowledge which women ought not to have. So why is eyewear so prominent amongst golden age detectives, and what does the spectacled detective see? Kimberly Maslin argues that ‘[d]etective fiction presents an ideal format in which to examine the author’s epistemic approach, since each story seeks to acquire knowledge under conditions of uncertainty’ (Maslin 2016: 107); the ways in which vision is cognitively controlled may be tellingly figured by the ways in which it is literally focused, and Katherine Voyles suggests that lenses have a fundamentally metaphorical force: [D]etective fiction, especially the late–nineteenth-century stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, dramatizes the strangeness of the detective’s sight. Nothing focuses the oddness of Sherlock Holmes’s way of seeing more sharply than his magnifying glass. The lens discloses the detective’s shifts between close­up and distanced vantages with the result that, as the epigraph shows, it is remarkably difficult for those who do not make those same visual shifts to track Holmes’s ‘train of thought.’ Shifting vantages bring into relief the tension between fiction’s focus on the detective’s own vantage and its impulse to align the detective’s sight with others. (Voyles 2017: 40)

Voyles also observes that at the time when Conan Doyle was writing, the magnifying glass, or lens, was both a specialist and a popular object’ (Voyles 2017: 41), and the proliferation and perfection of optical devices

10 

L. HOPKINS

is certainly a factor in the rise of the spectacled detective. The very fact that so many visual aids have become available, however, may also lead to a note of caution about the accuracy of what they show. The artist David Hockney has strikingly claimed that previous painters have used optical devices for centuries in ways that we are only just beginning to recognise, but in the catalogue to the 2022 Hockney exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Downing College in which this idea was explored, Martin Gayford, Martin Kemp and Jane Munro note that despite his conviction of the importance of lenses, Hockney ‘protests that photography will never replace painting, “because it is not real enough”’ (12). A similar scepticism about the accuracy of apparently objective representation finds expression in Golden Age writing: in Death in the Clouds Poirot says, ‘I feel that in this case mere ocular facts may be deceptive’ (118–19), and Chesterton’s Father Brown stories abound in instances where things which look real ought not to be trusted. A 1676 advertisement for glasses claimed some surprising powers for them: These are to give notice that Peter Pinchbelly Baker, dwelling in Light-loaf-­ Lane, intends, at the next Sessions to sell his share in a pair of Spectacles, which are made of substantial two inch Board, not to be worn upon the Nose, but the Neck and Wrists, through which a man may clearly see his faults, and his Enemies, and be made feelingly sensible of the swift flight of Goslings, Ducklings and Chickens, while they remain in the cloister of the Egg-shell; they are fit for all ages, from Eighteen to Threescore, and teach such as use them, the most difficult distinction between good and evil. (Evans and Read 2017: 26)

No visual aids worn by fictional detectives can match this range of affordances, and they certainly cannot show teach the distinction between good and evil; however they do show things in particular ways, and it is my contention in this book that detectives’ chosen forms of eyewear tell us something about their methods. Golden age detective fiction is extremely self-conscious about questions of method. Marsh in particular is fond of referring to, and sometimes parodying, earlier writers’ sleuths and their approaches to detection. In Artists in Crime Inspector Alleyn asks his mother how she knew they were going to make an arrest and she replies ‘You have just told me, my poor baby’ (694), sending up the classic fishing question by which detectives

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

11

pretend to greater knowledge than they possess in order to elicit information from their suspects. In Death in a White Tie there is a character called Evelyn Carrados, glancing at the name of Ernest Bramah’s famous blind detective, and Alleyn says Lord Robert Gospell is ‘very plump and wears a cloak and a sombrero like GKC’ (9), meaning G.  K. Chesterton, who wrote the Father Brown stories. In Death and the Dancing Footman there is a direct allusion to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon (474), and Off with His Head features Superintendent Yeo Carey and Camilla Campion, both names found in the works of Margery Allingham. In Grave Mistake the effigy of a long-dead Passcoigne is described as ‘looking startlingly like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ (572) and Nikolas Markos asks Verity ‘And what, my dear Preston-Watson, do you deduce? You know my methods’ (604), while in Photo-Finish Rupert Bartholomew is described as ‘look[ing] like an early illustration for a Sherlock Holmes story’ (137). Other authors are self-reflexive in different ways, including Sayers and Agatha Christie whose Harriet Vane and Ariadne Oliver comment on their authors’ own status as writers of detective stories, but all are aware that the creation of a fictional detective requires him to be endowed with a distinctive approach which may or may not be Sherlockian but will always be judged in the light of Conan Doyle’s great avatar, whose influence is often acknowledged by quoting (or misquoting) the legendary ‘You know my methods, Watson.’ Yes, we do know Holmes’ methods; if we are to interest ourselves in the exploits of other fictional detectives, we also need to have a clear sense of their methods. Implicit in any meditation on methods is the fact that almost all detection depends on looking. This is the fundamental difference between Holmes and Watson, who looks but does not see. Differences in ways of looking are particularly obvious amongst the earliest rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, for instance, establishes a complete contrast with Holmes by being blind. An unusual and interesting case of this is William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki in Carnacki the Ghost Finder, a psychic detective who recounts his adventures as after-­ dinner stories to the narrator and three other companions. David Stuart Davies notes, ‘There is something very Doylean and Sherlockian about the Carnacki stories, not the least being the fact that while some of his cases prove to have supernatural explanations, some prove to have rational solutions in which traditional detective methods … get to the root of the mystery. Indeed, on several occasions Carnacki whips out his trusty magnifying glass to examine a clue’ (9). Carnacki may use a ‘broom of hyssop’

12 

L. HOPKINS

(44) and an electric pentacle (45) on occasions, but in ‘The Thing Invisible’ it is comparison of two photographs that gives him the clue (30), and in ‘The House among the Laurels’ he first wishes that he had brought ‘a pair of smoked goggles, which I have sometimes used at these times’ (65) and then deduces the truth from something he sees on a photographic negative. He also studies photographs in ‘The Horse of the Invisible’, but on this occasion one of them does appear to reveal something supernatural, and that possibility is never dismissed (this was four years before the Cottingley Fairy photos deceived, amongst others, Arthur Conan Doyle), leading Carnacki to conclude that ‘Sometimes the camera sees things that would seem very strange to normal human eyesight’ (121); in ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ he uses ‘marine glasses’ (142) and in ‘The Hog’ a camera loaded with paper ribbon rather than film forms a sort of ‘colour organ’ (163). During his early life as a sailor Hope Hodgson ‘became interested in photography and created a darkroom on board ship’ (9), and his moral in these stories is that the camera never lies; it becomes an artificial aid to the human eye in something of the same way as glasses, with the significant difference that whereas eyewear sharpens the sight of an individual and is thus inherently subjective, the camera purports to be objective. The thing that all detectives are looking for is proof of one sort or another. In principle proof may seem an apparently simple concept, but in practice it is surprisingly hard to come by. In one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, the French detective Valentin is infuriated by the very idea of it: Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage. ‘Proof!’ he cried. ‘Good God! the man is looking for proof!’                         (24)

In Marsh’s Singing in the Shrouds, by contrast, Aubyn Dale displays a naïve faith in the power of proof when he is confident that even though he can provide no witness to his movements, ‘Must be some way of proving it. Because it’s true’ (422). But that is self-evidently untrue, and if it is hard to prove something which has happened, it is even harder to prove something which has not. In many golden age crime stories the best the detective can hope for is to trap the criminal into a confession, because while it is one thing to be confident about what has happened, it is quite another to have sufficient evidence for an arrest. This may well be

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

13

frustrating for the detective, but for readers it can be one of the principal charms of the genre. If they are drawn to stories in which character is to the fore, then the focus on proof raises the wider question of how we know things about other people; for those who prefer puzzle plots, the nature of proof is central to distinguishing between what we actually know about the crime and what we are teasingly led to think. Few explorations of the nature and problems of proof have been so subtle and probing as Shakespeare’s Othello, in which the hero clamours for ocular proof while the villain studies his psyche in order to manipulate appearances and deceive him. Othello is not just a story of a great tragic hero and a legendary villain, but also paradigmatic; Paul Cefalu, analysing ‘Othello’s seeming mindblindness’ (290), declares that Iago’s ‘challenge is the inescapable, generic problem of other minds’ (269), a dynamic which could also be seen as characterising the duel between criminal and detective. It is therefore not surprising that Othello is a recurrent presence in detective fiction. Sometimes there is a suggestive allusion to a handkerchief actually or possibly providing a crucial clue, as in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, Georgette Heyer’s A Christmas Party where Roydon tries to burn his bloodstained handkerchief in the incinerator (311), Patricia Wentworth’s The Silent Pool (221), Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (131), her Death on the Nile where Colonel Race jokes about ‘The Clue of the Blushing Handkerchief’ (239), or her ‘The Market Basing Mystery’, where Hastings is amazed that Poirot has deduced ‘[a]ll that from the one little clue of the handkerchief’ (321). Sometimes there is more sustained engagement with the play. In the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Cardboard Box’ Alec Fairbairn is described by the jealous husband as ‘a dashing, swaggering chap, smart and curled’ (49), and in ‘The Final Problem’ Holmes says to Watson of Moriarty, ‘you will find me a dangerous companion now. This man’s occupation is gone’ (262): ‘curled’ is Brabantio’s term for the young Venetians whom Desdemona has spurned in order to marry Othello, and Othello himself laments that his occupation is gone. The same phrase also crops up in Dornford Yates’ Gale Warning, where Mansel says of Plato, ‘if Barabbas goes down, his occupation is gone’ (44), while in Yates’ Fire Below Richard Chandos says of Lelia, ‘I think the truth is that I had the look of a hunted man and that, as Desdemona the Moor, she pitied me’ (119). In Christie’s Endless Night, when Michael Rogers discovers that Ellie has been to see his mother without telling him he remembers how he played Brabantio at school and quotes, ‘She has deceiv’d her father and may thee’ (164), and in Murder

14 

L. HOPKINS

in the Mews Poirot says, ‘A man has killed the woman he loved before now, mademoiselle’ (44). In The Labours of Hercules we have ‘The pity of it’ (95), and in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side when Mrs Bantry sees that there are no more weeds she thinks ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (208). The same phrase is also found in E. C. R. Lorac’s Post after Post-­ Mortem where Mrs Surray says of her perfect home ‘It’s so beautiful that my occupation has gone’ (21). There is a particular clutch of references to Othello in the work of Ngaio Marsh, who directed many Shakespearean productions in her native New Zealand. In Enter a Murderer Felix Gardener met Stephanie Vaughan when she played Desdemona (326); in Death in Ecstasy Alleyn apostrophises Father Garnette, ‘Oh excellent priest! Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee’ (164), quoting from a speech made by Othello to Desdemona; in Vintage Murder Mr Singleton says, ‘I played the Moor for six months to capacity business’ (432) and Singleton calls Dr Te Pokiha ‘Dark-visaged, like the Moor’ (434), immediately after which Alleyn makes a handkerchief disappear and reappear (435). In Final Curtain one of the characters is called Desdemona Ancred and when returning from New Zealand Alleyn tells Troy that ‘I even considered the advisability of quoting Othello on his arrival at Cyprus’ (347). In Opening Night, J. G. Darcey tells Alleyn that Clark Bennington ‘used the sort of generalization that Lear and Othello and Leontes use’ (147) about his wife; in Off with His Head Alleyn quotes, ‘Nothing extenuate … nor aught set down in malice’ (223), and in Dead Water Alleyn reads Miss Cost’s diary and thinks, ‘It is the Cause, it is the Cause, my soul’ (357), both quotations from Othello; and in Death at the Dolphin Peregrine says theatre people ‘try to think our way into Macbeth or Othello or a witch-hunt or an Inquisitor or a killer-doctor at Auschwitz’ (496). In Black As He’s Painted, ‘The Boomer had changed into a dressing-gown and looked like Othello in the last act’ (112); suggestively he is shortly afterwards described by the retired diplomat Mr Whipplestone as ‘on the whole a naïve person’ (118) and Alleyn concurs that ‘he cuts dead anything he doesn’t want to believe’ (118), implying that he is gullible in the same way as Othello is. In Photo-Finish Alleyn quotes Iago’s ‘[p]leasure and action make the time seem short’ (114) and in Light Thickens Sir Dougal Macdougal has previously played Othello (238). Marsh gives us a particularly sustained engagement with the play in Singing in the Shrouds. Tim Makepiece suggests that jealousy may sharpen perception and when Jemima objects that it didn’t sharpen Othello’s, he

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

15

replies, ‘But it did. It was his interpretation of what he saw that was at fault. He saw, with an immensely sharpened perception’ (295); he then goes on, ‘He saw Cassio, doing his sophisticated young Venetian act over Desdemona’s hand. He saw him at it again after he’d blotted his copy-­ book. He was pathologically aware of every gallantry that Cassio showed his wife’ (296). Mr Merryman believes Othello to be the greatest tragedy, which leads to a discussion of it (370), and it is a showing of the Orson Welles film of Othello on board ship which reveals Mr Merryman to be the man who has been strangling women. For Merryman, Othello is a play about a man who kills a woman, but for the book as a whole it is also, and more importantly, a play about how one reads evidence and how one arrives at an intellectual conviction of someone’s innocence or guilt. Othello can thus shed light on both individual characters and the general epistemological problem underpinning all detection, and it also implicitly comments on an element common to several of the series I consider here, which is the development of a love story and the effects which emotional involvement has on detective ability. As Peter Wimsey woos a reluctant Harriet Vane, as Inspector Alleyn worries about his profession giving Troy a disgust of him, and as Albert Campion finally becomes aware of Amanda, each undergoes a period of mental adjustment which makes them simultaneously both more vulnerable and more perceptive as the question of another person’s consciousness becomes a matter of urgent personal importance. There is a particularly suggestive use of Othello in Marsh’s Clutch of Constables, where Troy muses that some members of the police force ‘seemed to look upon the men and women they hunted with a kind of sardonic affection and would strike up what passed for friendships with them. Many of them, like Fox, were of a very kindly disposition yet, as Alleyn once said of them, if pity entered far into the hunter his occupation was gone’ (111). ‘His occupation was gone’ connects the police to Othello, but the idea of hunting introduces a different emphasis, and hunting too is something often referred to in detective fiction. In Death in the Clouds Poirot says to Jane Grey and Norman Gale ‘[a] fine evening for the chase, is it not?’ (197), and in The Murder on the Links Poirot, explaining to Hastings why he doesn’t do anything practical or physical, says that when Hastings hunted, ‘You did not descend from your horse and run along the ground smelling with your nose and uttering loud Ow Ows?’ (25); later in the book he teases Hastings that in Giraud ‘[a]t last you have seen the detective you admire—the human foxhound! Is it not so, my

16 

L. HOPKINS

friend?’ (81), and with the money he wins from his bet with Giraud Poirot buys himself ‘a magnificent model of a foxhound’ (316). In E. C. R. Lorac’s Post after Post-Mortem, Stanwood observes to Inspector Macdonald when the latter says he did originally have a case: ‘A case? … We’ll argue that in the hereafter, you the hunter and I the hunted’ (291). In Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain hunting is explicitly coupled with the use of lenses when we are told that Inspector Wilson’s living room does not look at all like that of a detective: ‘no relics of the chase suspended over the mantelpiece; no set of magnifying-glasses neatly dangling in a fretwork frame to the left of the fireplace’ (58–9). In the Dr Thorndyke story ‘A Case of Premeditation’, General O’Gorman used bloodhounds when he was governor of Portland prison, and still keeps them (44, 62), and the second part of the story is subtitled ‘Rival Sleuth-Hounds’ (61). In Michael Gilbert’s Smallbone Deceased John Cove, on the verge of discovering that a colleague is moonlighting, says ‘The hunt is up. From a view to a chase, from a chase to a kill. Yoicks and likewise Tallyho!’ (156). In Marsh’s Died in the Wool Cliff says he wasn’t interested in handing anyone over to justice because ‘I haven’t got the hunter’s nose’ (205). In Allingham’s The Mind Readers Campion facing Fred Arnold ‘felt like a hunter confronted by a new creature whose methods had not been studied and whose courage and intelligence were at least as great as his own’ (202–3), and in her Hide My Eyes Campion observes as they close in on Gerry Hawker, ‘I was thinking how amazingly like any other big game hunt it is, except that here one is spared any guilty feeling about being secretly on the side of the animal’ (205). In Dornford Yates’ Red in the Morning Mansel says, ‘I don’t want to lie low for the next three months. Neither do you, William—cub-­ hunting’s coming on’ (52), and in Perishable Goods Mansel uses a hunting metaphor when he says of the quest for Adèle that ‘[w]e may find; we may draw blank’ (30). I argue in several of the chapters in this book that detective fiction’s interest in hunting is connected to a pervasive concern with degeneration, the sinister reverse side of evolution. The eye is by way of being a test case for evolutionary theory—sceptics have argued that its design is so perfect that it must point to the existence of a ‘watchmaker God’, although Darwin had anticipated that objection in chapter 6 of The Origin of Species, ‘On Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication’—while an eye which does not focus properly without the assistance of a refracting lens might hint at degeneration. Ideas rooted in the debate about evolution often surface in detective fiction. In Agatha Christie’s Elephants can

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

17

Remember Poirot wonders if Mrs Burton-Cox is worried about her son marrying Celia ‘[b]ecause she may have inherited a predisposition to murder the man she marries—or something of that kind?’ (39); the idea that murder might be hereditary may seem an odd one, but bad heredity might provide a potential explanatory model for why some humans commit crimes against others, and a number of golden age detective stories register a concern that social mores are deteriorating. The supposed cure for this was the acquisition of ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ skills to counter the attenuating over-refinement induced by excessive civilisation, and such skills are given prominence in some crime fiction; Holmes’ tracking prowess comes into this category, and in the Father Brown story ‘The Arrow of Heaven’ the nephew of Hickory Crake, who fought ‘in the last Red Indian wars’ (362), says, ‘I remember the Red Indian tricks you used to teach me when I was a boy and liked to read Red Indian stories’ (363). An interest in hunting and an associated concern with the effects of evolutionary change is also a potential further cause of the general distaste for glasses, since they indicate less than perfect functioning in an important part of the body and are hardly compatible with the idea of the keen-eyed hunter. Although it may suggest that they are unfit specimens in evolutionary terms, the eyewear of detectives does however serve important narrative purposes. Glasses, monocles, and pince-nez all emblematise the inevitably specific and particular gaze which the detective turns on suspects, not to mention drawing attention to the significance often attached to eyes by writers and theorists from Sophocles to Freud. This book therefore focuses on the relationship between what detectives wear in front of their eyes and how, what, and when they detect, and argues that golden age detective fiction’s sustained interest in eyewear is an important tool for creating character. The use of glasses, a magnifying lens or a monocle establishes a sense that individual detectives have a method which is both consistently applied and different from that of their fictional predecessors, and it can also serve to add depth and resonance to specific scenes and to stories in general. The book is divided into four parts, the first being ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, of which this introduction forms the first chapter, and the second is ‘Out of Focus: Ariadne Oliver’. Although both Peter Ustinov and David Suchet wore pince-nez in their screen portrayals of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s original character uses no visual aids. In six of the Poirot books, however, he is accompanied by Mrs Ariadne Oliver, Christie’s playful metafictional projection of her own authorial persona, whose irritated

18 

L. HOPKINS

impatience with her Finnish detective Sven Hjerson parodies Christie’s own attitude to Poirot. Mrs Oliver, like Christie herself in later life, seems to wear glasses mainly for reading, but they nevertheless form an important part of both her own approach to solving mysteries and the books’ wider extradiegetic interest in methods of detection more generally. In particular, I explore the ways in which Cards on the Table, the book in which Christie introduces Mrs Oliver, is in a sense the author putting her own cards on the table and using her proxy self to give an insight into the tricks of the trade employed by her real self, not least since in The ABC Murders Poirot’s description of what he would consider a really interesting crime precisely predicts the plot of Cards on the Table (ABC 29). Mrs Oliver engagingly combines vagueness with sudden insights in ways which enable the books in which she appears to undertake a sustained investigation into the use and value of ocular proof. Towards the end of Cards on the Table the mystery seems to be suddenly cleared up when Mrs Lorrimer says that she witnessed the murder; in fact, however, Mrs Lorrimer has misinterpreted what she saw. Mrs Oliver by contrast relies on an inner eye rather than what she sees through her outsize glasses, and the ways in which her apparently unfocused perception ignores surfaces but reveals depths can help us understand some of the reasons why Christie’s own work, which can sometimes appear slight, has remained so suggestive and intriguing. Part II, ‘Seeing the Unseen’, begins with ‘Scouting Skills: Sherlock Holmes and his Blind Rival’. Sherlock Holmes, the first of the detectives considered here to use a lens, reaches his conclusions primarily by visual observation. But Holmes does not only look; he also uses his nose, in a way which evokes nineteenth-­century idealisation of the ‘primitive’ skills which had supposedly been possessed by earlier humans but were considered to be atrophying in overly sophisticated societies. Issues of evolution, atavism, and degeneration also inform Ernest Bramah’s series of short stories about the blind detective Max Carrados, and in both cases they foreground one of the most disturbing questions raised by evolutionary theory, which was whether the human body might be subject to change. Darwin argued that some mutations and adaptations might be advantageous; blindness might seem to be one which obviously is not, but Carrados values his blindness and considers that it does indeed confer an advantage on him, for the fact that he cannot see forces him to detect by the use of other senses, and his blindness also gives him greater spiritual insight. This chapter argues that Bramah’s stories acknowledge the

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

19

primacy of the Holmesian method of visual detection but also draw attention to its underlying assumptions and implications. The second chapter of Part II is ‘An Unseen Hook and an Invisible Line: Father Brown’. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown is persistently figured as visually handicapped. Sometimes he cannot see what is happening because he is so short and his view is blocked by the heads of others; he blinks excessively; and he wears glasses. In the first story he seems quite outclassed by the French detective Valentin, who stalks him as if he were a deer, but the relative positions of priest and detective are abruptly reversed when the rabidly atheist Valentin kills himself and the narrator speaks of ‘the blind face of the suicide’; now it is Valentin who cannot see, and Father Brown who looks on and presumably contemplates the fate of his departed soul. This is typical, for the fundamental condition of a Father Brown story is the importance of the unseen, and the heart of his method is thinking himself into the skin of the perpetrator. To detect in this way requires a focus on other people rather than on oneself—in the world of the Father Brown stories one of the worst crimes that can be committed is looking at oneself in the mirror—and there is also a recurrent central device on which many of the Father Brown stories depend: people are lured to look in one direction to distract their gaze from somewhere else. It is in his ability to detect visual misdirection that Father Brown’s method really lies, and he uses a lens of faith to do it. Part III, ‘Seeing Through Glass’, begins with ‘The Man with the Monocle: Lord Peter Wimsey’. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books are obsessed with visual aids. Whose Body, the first of the books, was originally intended to be called The Singular Adventure of the Man with the Golden Pince-Nez, and many characters in the books are introduced to the reader with descriptions of what they wear on their eyes (the first thing that anyone ever notices about Lord Peter himself is his monocle). Detection is always a visual act, and Wimsey is all eyes and sees everything. As well as perceiving things himself, Wimsey sometimes deliberately manipulates or controls how other people see. In this chapter I argue that Sayers’ interest in the physical facts and appurtenances of vision is ultimately a metaphor for focus of a more mental and spiritual kind, and that ways of seeing offer an opportunity for thinking about ways of writing, because Sayers used the metaphor of the single eye in connection with her yearning to write a ‘straight’ novel and also bestowed the same image on

20 

L. HOPKINS

Harriet Vane. By investing Wimsey with a monocle, Sayers comes as close to the single eye as she possibly can. The second chapter of Part III is ‘An Ass in Horn-rims: Albert Campion’. Campion takes some time to settle down as a character—when we first meet him in The Crime at Black Dudley he looks like a possible criminal—but the knock on the head which gives him amnesia at the start of Traitor’s Purse allows Allingham to give him a reset and establish him as a detective whose methods of deduction are based on intuition rather than logic. In the final novel Allingham completed, The Mind Readers, telepathy is real; well before that, Campion is already practising it. Although horn-rims are so important a part of his persona that Lugg threatens ‘I’ll ’ave a monument put up to you at the ’ead of the grave. A life-size image of yerself dressed as an angel—’orn-rimmed spectacles done in gold’, the part Campion’s spectacles play in his deductive method is not the one which might be expected, because they are a disguise both literally and metaphorically. With his glasses on Campion can conceal his resemblance to the family from whom he is estranged and pass for stupid, but what he cannot do is see. His glasses actually hinder his vision rather than helping it, and he succeeds because of the way he looks at things in a moral rather than a literal sense. One of the recurrent ideas in the books is the importance of a sense of proportion; proportion and perspective entail not distance and detachment but involvement and investment, and that is what Campion learns to develop behind the protective camouflage of his horn-rims. Part IV, ‘Binocular Vision’, begins with ‘Seeing Double: Inspector Alleyn’. Ngaio Marsh’s Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn does not wear any form of eyeglass, but he is never without a lens, which is why Troy sketches him holding one to show that she understands that he is on a case. A lens not only provides a focus but also enlarges, and in this it resembles two other aspects of Alleyn’s technique: his fondness for reconstructions of the crime, which allow particular moments to be pored over in detail, and the visual sensibility which first leads him into conversation with Troy on the wharf at Suva. Voyles suggests that ‘Figures of magnification and condensation within detective stories describe the way that the stories themselves are magnified and condensed’ (Voyles 2017: 41); in the case of Allingham, the magnifying effect of a lens also chimes well with the fact that while much detective fiction is interested in the quotidian (Miss Marple with her village parallels being an obvious example), the Alleyn books are drawn rather to rites, cults, longstanding customs, and

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

21

archetypes—all things which loom large and work on a scale which is anthropological rather than personal. The second chapter of Part IV is ‘The Double Vision of Dornford Yates’. Laura Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost contend that ‘British detective fiction … was, and is, good for thinking about the larger histories of gender, nation, race, and ideas’ (Mayhall and Prevost 2022: 9). Dornford Yates wrote in two apparently quite distinct genres, Ruritanian thrillers and Wodehousian comedy. Neither is detective fiction, but between them Yates’ two series of books investigate English nationalities and identities, with Ruritania commenting on England in something of the same way as New Zealand does in the books of Ngaio Marsh, and the Berry and Chandos books are further bound together by a shared and suggestive interest in binoculars, with obvious potential for metaphor. This chapter compares Yates to John Buchan and Eric Ambler in order to argue that while any excursion into any Ruritanian territory is always to some extent an excursion into the past, in Yates this develops into fully fledged nostalgia, complementing the increasingly backward glance of the Berry books but also offering an implicit critique of the condition of England. A recurrent concern of Ruritanian fiction is whether the fate of nations can be affected by the actions of one individual. Buchan, despite his general fetishisation of individual success, shows that Prince John of Evallonia could not have succeeded without help; Ambler, whose characters so often seek new territories where they can shake themselves free of bureaucracy, taxes, and inconvenient questions about the validity of their passports, offers in The Dark Frontier not only an entertaining parody of Ruritanian fiction but a serious investigation of the processes of historical change. I argue that Yates shares this interest in how history is made and that his two apparently disparate series of books offer between them a particular investigation of Englishness. In so doing, he helps to show that a focus on visual aids can allow detective fiction to investigate not only specific and particular crimes but also wider, more general and more weighty concerns.

Note 1. In The Brading Collection ‘A pair of eyeglasses were fastened to the left-hand side of her dress by a gold bar brooch set with seed pearls’ (143) and in Danger Point, Miss Silver has ‘double eyeglasses which she wore suspended by a fine black cord’ (9). In The Clock Strikes Twelve she wears ‘pince-nez which she occasionally required for reading’ (179); in Latter End we are

22 

L. HOPKINS

told that they are ‘only used … for fine print’ (74–5). Miss Marple too makes only occasional (and strategic) use of visual aids. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side Miss Marple regrets that ‘Even her new spectacles didn’t seem to do any good’ (14) and says of film magazines ‘Of course the print of these is rather small, but I can always use a magnifying glass’ (171). She does however make use of field-glasses: in The Murder at the Vicarage the Vicar says ‘Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account’ (26); later Miss Marple confirms this idea when she explains that she spotted Miss Cram because she had her glasses out to look at a bird (104).

References Allingham, Margery. Dancers in Mourning [1937]. New  York: Felony and Mayhem, 2008. ———. Hide My Eyes [1958]. London: Hogarth, 1985. ———. The Mind Readers [1965]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Bennett, Margot. The Widow of Bath [1952]. London: The British Library, 2021. Bude, John. Death Knows no Calendar [1942]. London: The British Library, 2020. Carr, John Dickson. The Case of the Constant Suicides [1941]. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2018. ———. The Plague Court Murders [1934]. New York: Penzler, 2020. ———. The Seat of the Scornful [1942]. London: The British Library, 2022. ———. Till Death Do Us Part [1944]. London: The British Library, 2021. Cefalu, Paul. ‘The Burdens of Mind Reading in Shakespeare’s Othello: A Cognitive and Psychoanalytic Approach to Iago’s Theory of Mind’. Shakespeare Quarterly 64.3 (Fall 2013): 265–294. Chesterton, G.  K. The Complete Father Brown Stories [1992]. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. Christie, Agatha. Death in the Clouds [1935]. London: HarperCollins, 2002a. ———. Death on the Nile [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2014a. ———. Elephants can Remember [1972]. London: HarperCollins, 2002b. ———. Endless Night [1967]. London: HarperCollins, 2017. ———. The Labours of Hercules [1947]. London: HarperCollins, 2014b. ———. ‘The Market Basing Mystery’. In Poirot’s Early Cases [1974]. London: HarperCollins, 2002c. 307–322. ———. Murder in the Mews [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2014c. ———. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926]. London: HarperCollins, 2002d. ———. The Murder on the Links [1923]. London: HarperCollins, 2002e. ———. The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1921]. London: HarperCollins, 2007. ———. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe [1940]. London: HarperCollins, 2002f.

1  INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE SPECTACLED DETECTIVE SEES 

23

Crispin, Edmund. The Case of the Gilded Fly [1944]. London: Vintage, 2009. ———. Holy Disorders [1946]. London: Vintage, 2007. ———. The Moving Toyshop [1946]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [1893]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Duncan, Francis. Murder Has a Motive [1947]. London: Vintage, 2016. Evans, Jennifer, and Sara Read. Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing 1540–1740. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Press, 2017. Gayford, Martin, Martin Kemp and Jane Munro, eds. ‘Introduction: the “Hockney thesis”’. In Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction. Ed. Martin Gayford, Martin Kemp and Jane Munro. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022. 11–17. Gilbert, Anthony. Death in Fancy Dress [1933]. London: British Library, 2019a. Gilbert, Michael. Smallbone Deceased [1939]. London: British Library, 2019b. Heyer, Georgette. Behold, Here’s Poison [1936]. London: Arrow, 2006a. ———. A Blunt Instrument [1938]. London: Arrow, 2006b. ———. A Christmas Party (Envious Casca), [1941]. London: Arrow, 2006c. ———. Detection Unlimited [1953]. London: Arrow, 2006d. ———. Footsteps in the Dark [1932]. London: Arrow, 2005. ———. The Unfinished Clue [1933]. London: Arrow, 2006e. Hodgson, W.  H. The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Ed. David Stuart Davies. London: Wordsworth, 2006. Lorac, E. C. R. These Names Make Clues [1937]. London: British Library, 2021. ———. These Names Make Clues. Post after Post-Mortem [1936]. London: The British Library, 2022. Marsh, Ngaio. Artists in Crime [1938]. London: HarperCollins, 2009a. ———. Death and the Dancing Footman [1942]. London: HarperCollins, 2009b. ———. Death in Ecstasy [1936]. London: HarperCollins, 2009c. ———. Death in a White Tie [1938]. London: HarperCollins, 2009d. ———. Died in the Wool [1945]. London: HarperCollins, 2009e. ———. Enter a Murderer [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2009f. ———. Final Curtain [1947]. London: HarperCollins, 2009g. ———. Overture to Death [1939]. London: HarperCollins, 2009h. ———. Scales of Justice [1955]. London: HarperCollins, 2009i. ———. Surfeit of Lampreys [1941]. London: HarperCollins, 2009j. ———. Swing, Brother, Swing [1949]. London: HarperCollins, 2009k. ———. Vintage Murder [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2009l. Maslin, Kimberley. ‘The Paradox of Miss Marple: Agatha Christie’s Epistemology’. Clues 341(Spring 2016): 105–115. Mayhall, Laura E.  Nym, and Elizabeth Prevost, eds. British Murder Mysteries, 1880–1965. New York: Palgrave, 2022. Melville, Alan. Quick Curtain [1934]. London: British Library, 2015.

24 

L. HOPKINS

Messent, Peter. The Crime Fiction Handbook. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2012. Queen, Ellery [1929]. The Roman Hat Mystery. New York: Mysterious Press, 2015. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, ‘The Magnifying Glass: Spectacular Distance in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” and Beyond’. Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 36 (2003): 3–17. Symons, Julian. The Belting Inheritance [1965]. London: British Library, 2018. Voyles, Katherine. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lens’. Clues 35.1 (spring 2017): 40–50. Wentworth, Patricia. The Black Cabinet [1925]. London: Dean Street Press, 2016. ———. The Brading Collection [1952]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006a. ———. The Clock Strikes Twelve [1945]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006b. ———. Danger Point [1942]. London: Coronet, 1984. ———. Latter End [1949]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006c. ———. Out of the Past [1951]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005. ———. The Silent Pool [1956]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006d. Wodehouse, P. G. Heavy Weather [1933]. London: Penguin, 1966. Yates, Dornford. The Best of Berry. Ed. Jack Adrian. London: J.  M. Dent and Sons, 1989. ———. Fire Below [1930]. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1988. ———. Gale Warning [1939]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001.

CHAPTER 2

Out of Focus: Ariadne Oliver

Although both Peter Ustinov and David Suchet wore pince-nez in their screen portrayals of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s original character uses no visual aids (Klages), remarking in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that ‘I use the old methods. I work only with the little grey cells’ (331) and revealing in the same book that although he possesses ‘a tiny pocket glass’ he uses it only for admiring his moustache (145). In six of the Poirot books, however, he has a sidekick who wears glasses: Mrs Ariadne Oliver, Christie’s playful metafictional projection of her own authorial persona, whose irritated impatience with her Finnish detective Sven Hjerson parodies Christie’s own attitude to Poirot, in a way which was doubly self-­ reflexive because parody was one of Christie’s favourite tools (Irena Księzo ̇ polska notes, for instance, the centrality of parody to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). Mrs Oliver, like Christie herself in later life, seems to wear glasses mainly for reading, but they nevertheless form an important part of both her own approach to solving mysteries and the books’ wider extradiegetic interest in methods of detection more generally. In one of the Mrs Oliver books, Third Girl, Poirot is content because he had finished his Magnum Opus, an analysis of great writers of detective fiction. He had dared to speak scathingly of Edgar Allan Poe, he had complained of the lack of method or order in the romantic outpourings of Wilkie

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_2

25

26 

L. HOPKINS

Collins, had lauded to the skies two American authors who were practically unknown, and had in various other ways given honour where honour was due and sternly withheld it where he considered it was not. (1)

Christie herself never wrote such a book, and even as she imagines Poirot doing so she is clearly being careful. The only authors she allows Poirot to criticise are both long since safely dead (Poe and Collins), the only ones he praises are discreetly nameless; there is nothing here that could have caused any ill feeling at the next meeting of the Detection Club. However in the character of Ariadne Oliver she comes close to offering an insight into her own methods, and in particular into the way ideas of ocular proof work in her books. In one of the Mrs Oliver books, Elephants can Remember, Poirot wonders what has prompted his old friend to visit him: ‘As Poirot knew well, it could be anything with Mrs Oliver. The most commonplace things or the most extraordinary things’ (33). In fact it is usually both, and at the same time: what seems commonplace on the surface suggests layers of underlying implication. In almost every Christie book there is a sense that everyone is or might be guilty of something, even if it is not the specific crime which Poirot or Miss Marple is investigating. Where Mrs Oliver is involved, that sense is heightened by three things, which operate both separately and in conjunction: her unfocused perception, which typically ignores surfaces but reveals depths, her passion for apples, and her strong affinity with girls. In this chapter I argue that these three apparently disparate things are in fact connected. Kimberly Maslin, arguing that ‘Christie not only uses Miss Marple to establish gossip and intuition as epistemologies but also lays out a standard for their public use, as well as an illustration of the integration of traditional and feminist epistemologies’ (106), notes, ‘According to traditional epistemology, gossip and intuition fall into the category of belief or opinion. To be established as truth, a belief or opinion must be subject to either internal or external justification. Conversely, both gossip and intuition challenge the dominance of traditional epistemology in several important ways’ (106). For Maslin it is central to the effect of the Miss Marple stories that in them ‘intuition is usually accurate. Acknowledging a disparity in traditional and feminist epistemologies, Christie is unambiguous on one point: the distinction between the two approaches is not that one constitutes reliable information and the other does not’ (109). It is not only the Marple stories in which feminine modes of knowing are validated, however, and Mrs Oliver is in some ways

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

27

an even more suggestive character than Miss Marple in this respect, for her twin associations with apples and girls, although never incriminating her personally, connect her to the biblical narrative of original sin and thus work to suggest that symbols and parables may provide clues just as valid as fingerprints and bloodstains. Taking her name from Ariadne, who provided Theseus with the thread which allowed him to escape from the labyrinth, Mrs Oliver is in herself a clue, and although she is invariably vague about external details, what she sees beneath the surface gives insight not only into specific crimes but into more general ways of thinking and knowing. The overriding impression created by Mrs Oliver is one of vagueness. In her introduction to The Seven Dials Mystery Val McDermid calls Mrs Oliver ‘Perhaps Christie’s funniest as well as her most self-referential character’ (The Seven Dials Mystery, 9), and one of the sources of the comedy is that Mrs Oliver can never explain anything. In Elephants can Remember we find Poirot musing on the fact that ‘[e]xtravagant praise of her books always upset her because, as she had once told him, she never knew the proper answers’ (34), and this is hilariously demonstrated in Mrs McGinty’s Dead when Robin Upward asks why Sven Hjerson is a vegetarian: ‘How do I know?’ said Mrs Oliver crossly. ‘How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen’. (201)

It is not surprising that one of the books in which Mrs Oliver appears, Hallowe’en Party, is dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse, because there are some moments of comedy in the Mrs Oliver stories which are indeed Wodehousian in quality. In Dead Man’s Folly Mrs Oliver, talking on the phone to Poirot, says, ‘Don’t let’s waste any more money asking each other if we’re there’ (216), and in the same book, ‘The inspector was slightly startled by the sight of Mrs Oliver. He had not expected anything so voluminous, so purple and in such a state of emotional disturbance’ (96). This willingness both to identify herself with Mrs Oliver and also simultaneously to laugh at her is typical of Christie’s authorial persona, as seen particularly in her quasi-autobiography Come, Tell Me How You Live, which recounts some of the archaeological expeditions on which she accompanied her second husband Max Mallowan. On the sites of digs Christie was no longer a celebrated novelist but an anonymous Englishwoman whose status as Mallowan’s wife brought

28 

L. HOPKINS

her the title of ‘Khatún’ (‘lady’), and at one point she records the foreman, Hamoudi, saying, ‘It is good to have the Khatún with us. All things make her laugh!’ (75). Christie did indeed wish to be seen as someone who was always ready to laugh, as is made abundantly apparent in the determinedly light-hearted tone of Come, Tell Me How You Live. Not every aspect of life on a dig was comfortable or congenial, but her attitude was one of invariable cheerfulness, perhaps because having lost her first husband Archie Christie to a woman he met while playing golf, she had learned the importance of a shared interest. Archie’s subsequent demand for a divorce had led to the biggest and most public crisis of Agatha Christie’s life, when she sparked a nationwide search by mysteriously disappearing before eventually being tracked down to Harrogate, and that notorious episode is slyly evoked in Cards on the Table when Mrs Oliver says, ‘I never trust the Welsh! I had a Welsh nurse and she took me to Harrogate one day and went home having forgotten all about me’ (129–130). This glances at the only explanation Christie ever offered for her disappearance, which was loss of memory, albeit deflected onto the long-ago nurse rather than sustained by Mrs Oliver herself. It thus confirms Mrs Oliver’s status as proxy for Christie, but it underlines that a keynote of this fictionalised self-portrayal will be reticence: what we learn about Christie from Mrs Oliver will be professional rather than personal. Françoise Grauby suggests that Mrs Oliver’s role shares the obliqueness of Mrs Oliver’s conversation: ‘As an expression of the writer at work, Mrs. Oliver points to those aspects of the craft that are privileged and those that are repressed. Omitting certain narratives about writing has consequences: by piecing together disparate elements, Christie provides a plausible “portrait of the artist” as an object to be observed and talked about. And yet, this conscious ploy to distance herself from her character does not exclude interactions and associations’ (117). For Grauby, Mrs Oliver is a figure whose apparent candour conceals as much as it reveals, and yet the ‘interactions and associations’ which accrue to her may make her a revealing figure in ways that her author did not perhaps consciously intend but which illustrate a fundamental characteristic of Christie’s writing. The central element of Agatha Christie’s self-presentation as Ariadne Oliver is an insistence that the craft of fiction-writing is not something to be taken too seriously. In The ABC Murders Hastings says ‘a second murder in a book often cheers things up’ (29), and this seemingly callous pronouncement is the underpinning premise of all Christie’s detective

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

29

fiction: the books are playful, artificial intellectual exercises whose puzzle-­ plots preclude any emotional investment or attempt to relate them to real life. They are also conditioned by generic rules and expectations and need to respond to developments in that genre. In The ABC Murders Poirot says, ‘In the midst of tragedy we start the comedy’ and adds ‘Murder, I have often noticed, is a great matchmaker’ (182); this is surely a glance at some of Christie’s fellow-writers, such as Dorothy L. Sayers whose Lord Peter Wimsey was clearly heading to the altar with Harriet Vane, or Patricia Wentworth whose works almost invariably feature a romance which sometimes develops at great speed. In The Thirteen Problems Sir Henry Clithering says the murder weapon was ‘[n]ot the secret arrow poison of the South American Indians!’ (189), a nod at the difficulty experienced by all writers of fiction in finding new ways to kill people, and in Cards on the Table Mrs Oliver observes that ‘I’m always getting tangled up in horticulture and things like that. People write to me and say I’ve got the wrong flowers all out together’ (183); this too reflects an experience common to writers of detective fiction, and indeed writers in general from at least the time of Jane Austen, whose brother chided her for a horticultural faux pas. And in Mrs McGinty’s Dead a neat metafictional revenge is taken when the murderer proves to be someone who is dramatising one of Mrs Oliver’s books in a way she doesn’t like. The most sustained insight into Mrs Oliver’s actual process of composition comes in The Pale Horse. When Mark Easterbrook goes to call on her, he finds her in the throes of trying to solve a plot difficulty: She threw me a brief uninterested glance and continued to prowl. Her eyes, unfocused, swept round the walls, glanced out of the window, and occasionally closed in what appeared to be a spasm of agony. ‘But why,’ demanded Mrs Oliver of the universe, ‘why doesn’t the idiot say at once that he saw the cockatoo? Why shouldn’t he? He couldn’t have helped seeing it! But if he does mention it, it ruins everything. There must be a way … there must be … (11)

Almost immediately afterwards Mrs Oliver is trying to solve a problem of characterisation: Monica … Monica? I believe the name’s wrong. Nancy? Would that be better? Joan? Everybody is always Joan. Anne is the same. Susan? I’ve had a Susan. Lucia? Lucia? Lucia? I believe I can see a Lucia. Red-haired. Polo-­ necked jumper … Black tights? Black stockings, anyway. (11)

30 

L. HOPKINS

In both these instances, the act of writing is linked to the act of seeing. In the first passage, Mrs Oliver’s own eyes may be unfocused in the sense that she is not looking at anything which is actually in the room, but she is seeing at a deeper level, and she is imagining how one of her characters must have seen. In the second, her engagement with the character is wholly visual: ‘I believe I can see a Lucia.’ It is this combination of an external failure to focus with a sharply defined internal vision which energises and enlivens the Mrs Oliver books, and it also enables them to undertake a sustained investigation into the use and value of ocular proof. In The Hollow Poirot almost echoes Ernest Bramah’s famous blind detective Max Carrados when he says ‘the eyes, Inspector Grange, are very unreliable witnesses’ (263), and certainly he himself soon relies on a very different kind of sense when he talks to Veronica Cray and ‘[t]he strong emotion that she was feeling communicated itself to him’ (292). Poirot first encounters Mrs Oliver in Cards on the Table, of which Martin Edwards observes, ‘This underestimated novel is a showcase for Christie’s skills’ (Edwards 2022: 155).1 For most of the book, four sleuths undertake elaborate investigations into four suspects without yielding much in the way of results. Towards the end, the mystery seems to be suddenly cleared up when Mrs Lorrimer says she knows Anne Meredith committed the crime because ‘I saw her’ (275). At this Poirot laughs, and then immediately apologises: ‘Pardon, madame,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘I could not help it. Here we argue and we reason! We ask questions! We invoke the psychology—and all the time there was an eye-witness of the crime.’ (277)

On the face of it, this is surely an absolute clincher: deduction, investigation, inference, all become instantly redundant in the face of something so incontrovertible as someone actually seeing what occurred. In Ngaio Marsh’s Final Curtain, for instance, Inspector Fox explains to Troy that they may not get a conviction because ‘[w]e haven’t got an eye-witness’ (489). In fact, however, the evidence of the eye-witness in Cards on the Table is misleading; Mrs Lorrimer certainly saw something, but it turns out not to be the murder itself but the moment when Anne Meredith discovered it. The actual murder was committed by Dr Roberts; so was the killing of Mrs Lorrimer herself, and to that too it appears that there is an eye-witness, in the shape of a window-cleaner (309). Again, though, what purports to be ocular proof is deceptive: the supposed window-cleaner is

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

31

an actor friend of Poirot’s, and could not possibly have seen what he says he saw (though it did happen). When the trick is revealed and Rhoda exclaims, ‘Nobody saw him?’ Poirot replies, ‘I saw … With the eyes of the mind one can see more than with the eye of the body. One leans back and closes the eyes’ (320), but this language of eyes serves only to underline the absence of any actual ocular proof. There is a similar ambiguity about eye-witness evidence in Hallowe’en Party, where Poirot tells Inspector Raglan, ‘It is possible that within twenty-four hours I shall have for you something that will more or less clinch matters’, and when asked to explain says, ‘[a]n eye-witness’ (302). This time it is true that someone did actually see the murder, but the person who did so passed the information to someone else who boasts that she herself was the eye-witness and is consequently murdered. In all these instances, the apparent incontrovertibility of eye-witness testimony is riddled and undermined. Mrs Oliver by contrast does not rely on ocular proof but on an inner eye, and even when she does see, she does not see clearly. Although they are not mentioned in Cards on the Table, we hear in the second book in which she appears, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, of ‘her massive glasses’ (202). As in so much golden age fiction, glasses get their usual bad rap in Christie, and in this book in particular: Superintendent Spence says James Bentley ‘wears glasses’ and ‘[c]an’t look you straight in the face’ (20); Poirot is sure that ‘if a girl’s claims to beauty depend principally on the loveliness of her eyes, then, no matter how short-sighted she is, she will take off her spectacles and learn to feel her way round even if outlines are blurred and distance hard to judge’ (152); and he also says of the photograph of Lily Gamboll as a child ‘Frankly, with those teeth and those spectacles she is hideously ugly’ (266). Glasses are also disliked and despised in other Mrs Oliver books. In Third Girl Sir Roderick Horsefield is outraged when his secretary Sonia offers him a pair of glasses: ‘Don’t want those damned things—I can see all right’ (46). He can’t, but he explains later to Poirot that ‘I don’t like glasses. I’ve never had glasses’ (159); his refusal to accept that he needs them now is clearly part of his wish to cling to the past, but Poirot sums Sir Roderick up as ‘half blind’ (282) and concludes that this is one reason why the fake Andrew Restarick is able to get away with his impersonation of Sir Roderick’s nephew. In the same book David Baker suggests to Norma Restarick that they should get married but adds, ‘You’ll have to say you’re over twenty-one. Roll up your hair, put on some spectacles or something. Make you look a bit older’ (86–7).

32 

L. HOPKINS

Glasses also feature in other Poirot books, and there too they are invariably portrayed negatively. In The Labours of Hercules we are told of Poirot that ‘[p]erfect physique was a thing he admired greatly. There were, he considered, too many rats in spectacles about’ (100). In After the Funeral we hear of ‘[a] vacuous faced young man with spectacles’ (247); in The Seven Dials Mystery we meet ‘Pongo, looking more serious and spectacled than ever’ (44); and in The Moving Finger Jerry Burton recounts how ‘[a] woman who was typing got up and came towards me. She had frizzy hair and simpered, but I found her more intelligent than the spectacled youth who had previously held sway in the outer office’ (130). In The Hollow Mrs Crabtree complains that since the death of John Christow ‘I’ve got that mealy-mouthed young fellow with the spectacles now’ (389) and in The Pale Horse Mark Easterbrook ‘had one interview with the Home Office psychologist. He was a quaint little cock robin of a man, rising up and down on his toes, with eyes twinkling through very thick lenses’ (226). In They Do It With Mirrors Mrs Van Rydock says, ‘You should see Lewis Serrocold’s eyes sparkle behind those thick glasses of his’ (15); at dinner at the Serrocolds’ ‘there were also two spectacled young men who held posts on the teaching side’ of whom we never hear any more (51) and finally ‘the young doctor bustled in, neat and spruce and rather inhuman-­ looking behind his pince nez’ (166). In And Then There Were None the judge uses his spectacles to commit suicide (316). Glasses are particularly unbecoming when worn by women. In Three Act Tragedy ‘Miss Wills was tall and thin, with a receding chin and very badly waved fair hair. She wore pince-nez, and was dressed in exceedingly limp green chiffon. Her voice was high and undistinguished’ (29). In Destination Unknown, where there is a strong contrast between dour female scientists and administrators and the completely unintellectual wives of male scientists, Miss Jennson is a ‘thin, dark, spectacled girl’ (184) and ‘[t]he Registry was presided over by a woman who looked like a strict nursery governess. Her hair was rolled together into a rather hideous bun and she wore very efficient-looking pince-nez’ (177). In The Labours of Hercules the Countess Rossakoff’s prospective daughter-in-law is ‘a severe-­ looking girl in a check coat and skirt. She wore horn-rimmed glasses’ (382), something which does not impress Poirot who ‘was not going to have his enjoyment spoiled by a spectacled little girl with boiled gooseberry eyes and a degree in psychology!’ (388). In The Moving Finger Dr Griffith says ‘Symmington was accused of illicit relations with his lady clerk—poor old Miss Ginch, who’s forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

33

like a rabbit’ (24). In They Came to Baghdad Mrs Cardew Trench says Edward’s office is ‘[f]ull of young women in slacks with unwashed necks and spectacles’ (129) and Mrs Clayton observes that Victoria is ‘not an archaeological type … They’re usually earnest girls with spectacles—and very often damp hands’ (200). If all glasses-wearers are damned female glasses-wearers are especially so, but nevertheless once Mrs Oliver has been established as someone who wears glasses she continues to be identified as such. In The Pale Horse she ‘fitted with some care her spectacle case into a lacquered box which already contained a Chinese fan’ (12) and later wonders ‘where on earth did I put my spectacles?’ (17); in Third Girl, aiming to disguise herself, she ‘took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose’ (82). The glasses which Mrs Oliver puts on to alter her appearance in Third Girl are reading glasses, and when she attempts to trail David Baker she finds them to be a hindrance rather than a help because they make everything out of focus. However this is in one sense completely apt, because the point of Mrs Oliver’s glasses is not what she actually uses them for but what they symbolise about her way of seeing. In one of the Mrs Oliver books, Hallowe’en Party, the youth Desmond Holland says of the pictures of future husbands which he and Nicholas Ransom have mocked up, ‘We kept ’em a bit out of focus, you know, so that they’d look more like spirit pictures, as you might say’ (217); the girls at the party are delighted with the results and none of them seems to notice that all the pictures represent the same two faces. Ariadne Oliver’s perceptions are similarly out of focus but similarly suggestive, echoing the deceptive simplicity of Christie’s own technique. In one of the Mrs Oliver books, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Superintendent Spence says to Poirot: ‘You look at things in—if you’ll pardon me for saying so—a funny sort of way’ (22). That may well be true, but it is nothing to the funniness of the way in which Mrs Oliver looks at things. Poirot himself has two main modes of vision, which he defines in Cards on the Table Poirot when he says of Major Despard: He has neither what I call the outward vision (seeing details all around you—what is called an observant person) nor the inner vision—concentration, the focusing of the mind on one object. He has a purposefully limited vision. He sees only what blends and harmonizes with the bent of his mind. (216)

34 

L. HOPKINS

The apparent candour of this theorisation of perception might serve to give it an extradiegetic flavour, and it does sum up pretty accurately how Poirot himself proceeds. There are times when he relies on what he describes as outward vision: in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, as Poirot thinks about the crime, ‘His visual memory conjured up the room he had been in a short time before’ (120). However elsewhere in Mrs McGinty’s Dead he is clearly using inner vision when he ‘stood there staring unseeingly in front of him’ as he realises something about the case (279), and he uses inner vision again in Hallowe’en Party when he says that the motives for the murders are ‘not complex really. But so simple that they are very difficult to see clearly’ (301). In Third Girl, where he laments that ‘I cannot see anything clearly. I see only a girl who said that she may have committed a murder!’ (172), he totally ignores an important visual clue in the shape of Mary Restarick’s wig: ‘To think that it was there, all the time, before my eyes, and I did not see it!’ (280). Instead he solves the crime through inner vision. First he ‘thought in a certain way peculiar to himself. It was the technique of a man who selected thoughts as one might select pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’ (183): The painfulness of his own feet in patent-leather shoes. He started there. Walking along a road set on this path by his good friend, Mrs Oliver. A stepmother. He saw himself with his hand on a gate. A woman who turned, a woman bending with her head cutting out the weak growth of a rose, turning and looking at him? What was there for him there? Nothing. (183)

Then at the end of the book he thinks ‘there was nothing more he could learn from outside. It must come from inside’ (241), and it duly does. The secretary Sonia may say that Norma Restarick ‘sees things that are not there’ (188), but so too does Poirot. Mrs Oliver regards herself as working entirely on the basis of inner vision. In Hallowe’en Party she says to Poirot, ‘Do you know what you sound like? … A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself’ (67). She is not completely right about Poirot; in Third Girl the narrator observes that ‘[h]e was not an intuitive person—but he did have feelings’ (226), and in Elephants can Remember he wants to go to the place where the Ravenscrofts died ‘[n]ot so much to see—to feel’ (254). But his level of feeling pales into insignificance beside Mrs Oliver’s. She is constantly leaping to conclusions and naming people as suspects on the basis of feelings, and in Third Girl we are told that ‘Mrs Oliver in her own opinion

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

35

was famous for her intuition. One intuition succeeded another with remarkable rapidity and Mrs Oliver always claimed the right to justify the particular intuition which turned out to be right!’ (170). Nevertheless she gets results. In Hallowe’en Party ‘Mrs Oliver had one of her useful intuitions’ and guesses correctly that Mrs Leaman had looked at the will (237), whose contents Mrs Oliver is then able to coax out of her. In Cards on the Table it is Mrs Oliver who is able to tell the others that ‘Anne Meredith was in the house when a woman took poison by mistake and died’ (211). In The Pale Horse it is Mrs Oliver who notices that all the victims found their hair coming out (236), and in Third Girl Poirot says ‘[a]ll, but all my good ideas were suggested to me by you’ (279). In Dead Man’s Folly Poirot tells Mrs Oliver ‘[y]ou are a sensitive person, Madame … You have always known more about this crime than you have realized yourself’ (216), and in Hallowe’en Party when Mrs Oliver says, ‘It doesn’t look the sort of house there’d be a murder in, does it?’, ‘Poirot thought again: What an unerring instinct she has!’ (66). Despite what she herself thinks, though, the main way in which Mrs Oliver detects is not so much through intuition as by listening to people. Christie is well aware that some people are likely to hear more than others: in The Pale Horse Mark Easterbrook says that ‘[e]xplaining things to Mrs Dane Calthrop was never difficult. She leaped to meet you’ (91), and in Third Girl we are told first that ‘Poirot had the capacity to attract confidences. It was as though when people were talking to him they hardly realised who it was they were talking to’ (41) and later that ‘For some reason, Poirot had always been a person it was easy to talk to’ (94). Mrs Oliver too is someone whom many people, particularly girls (a point I will develop later), find easy to talk to. In The Pale Horse it is to Mrs Oliver that Mark Easterbook turns first; in Elephants Can Remember everyone on whom she calls is delighted to see her, to offer her tea, and to reminisce to her; and in Cards on the Table Rhoda seeks her out to confide the secret of Anne Meredith’s past. Poirot may see with an inner eye, but for Mrs Oliver what she hears is almost always more important than what she sees. The repeated verbal confidences made to Mrs Oliver draw attention to the importance of speech—or ‘talk’—in Christie. I have written elsewhere about the obsession with ‘talk’ in the detective fiction of Patricia Wentworth (Hopkins 2020), who was Christie’s contemporary and whose Miss Silver has been suggested as an influence on Miss Marple. For Wentworth, ‘talk’ is gossip, which almost always about women and generally involves policing their behaviour. ‘Talk’ is vital in Christie too, but it works in more

36 

L. HOPKINS

general ways; it is not only and always gossip but can also represent oral tradition and community memory and can even, as Maslin suggests, function as a legitimate form of knowledge. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead Poirot thinks ‘[s]omeone, somewhere, had got to be made uneasy. Maude Williams would talk, and talk was like a stone in a pond, it made a ripple that went on spreading outwards’ (67). In Third Girl in particular language takes on almost a life of its own. First there is a small but telling incident in which Poirot responds to what has not been said rather than what has: ‘Poirot thought he knew what the broken form of the sentence meant. Restarick had been about to say “she may perhaps be dead”’ (215–16). Not long afterwards Poirot himself offers a picturesque example of his French-influenced ideolect:    ‘… Ah, things begin to pass themselves—’ He referred to increasing sounds of activities.    Poirot’s words struck Mrs Oliver as being much more exactly ­descriptive than English words would have been. (256–7)

Poirot’s words are English words, but Mrs Oliver hears the French construction underpinning them and paradoxically finds that their grammatical eccentricity enhances their expressiveness. Finally Inspector Neele invites Miss Jacobs to ‘tell me in your own words exactly what you saw and heard’ and she says, ‘I expect it will vary from what I said before … Things do, you know. One tries to make one’s description as accurate as possible, and so one uses more words’ (259). The overall implication is that words are deceptive and that meaning is plural, complex, and often best apprehended through an aural equivalent of the inner vision which can perceive what lies below the surface. In Come, Tell Me How You Live Christie recalls the strategies of obliqueness and indirection which her second husband Max Mallowan encountered on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East: The New Testament comes very near when I ask Max to repeat to me the gist of long conversations that he has with the Sheikh, for their exchanges consist almost entirely of parables—to illustrate your wishes or demands, you tell a story with a point to it, the other counters with another story which turns the tables, and so on. Nothing is ever couched in direct language. (194)

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

37

This is in many ways true of Christie’s own writing, and the mention of the New Testament is apposite because her apparently simple sentences are so often heavy with the sense of hidden significance and an always latent possibility of sin. In this context inaccuracy and vagueness are positively productive. In ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ Poirot laments, ‘How I miss my friend Hastings! He had such imagination. Such a romantic mind! It is true that he always imagined wrong—but that in itself was a guide’ (406); in Murder in Mesopotamia Dr Reilly says that if Nurse Leatheran ‘calls Hercule Poirot “Poirot” in one paragraph and “Mr Poirot” in the next, such a variation is both interesting and suggestive’ (10) and in Death in the Clouds Poirot asks Japp, ‘The wasp is not so much interesting as suggestive, eh?’ (43). Suggestive is in fact a key word for both Poirot and Christie. In The Hollow Poirot mentally contemplates, ‘Lady Angkatell, shadowy, elusive, unexpectedly and bewilderingly charming, with that deadly power of inconsequent suggestion’ (253). In The Pale Horse Mark Easterbook says to Mrs Dane Calthrop of the Pale Horse, ‘You’re making things come into focus’ (92), but her technique for doing so is in fact vagueness, as is the response she elicits from Easterbrook: she says, ‘The Pale Horse. That’s suggestive’ (93), and Easterbook recounts that when negotiating with the Pale Horse ‘I was purposely incoherent’ (172). In the same book Mrs Oliver explains that ‘[o]f course I often have a master criminal in my stories—people like it—but really he gets harder and harder to do. So long as one doesn’t know who he is, I can keep him impressive—but when it all comes out— he seems, somehow, so inadequate’ (69–70). Precision falters; suggestion is powerful, and Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow implicitly comments on Christie’s own technique when she says ‘there is only one thing to do if you want to clear a person from suspicion who is actually guilty. You must suggest guilt elsewhere but never localize it’ (374). Suggestive also has an opposite, significant, whose use covertly damns various characters: in Death on the Nile Mrs Otterbourne says, ‘I must give you a copy of Under the Fig Tree. I think you will find it significant’ (56) and in Sleeping Murder the Wests want to take Gwenda to a Russian play which they call ‘absolutely the most significant piece of drama for the last twenty years’ (32). To be significant is not only the opposite of being suggestive but also portentous and holds out a false promise of certainty which is in reality only a particularly pernicious form of blindness and self-­ deception. Far preferable in Christie’s eyes is the attitude of Poirot, who in Sad Cypress says at the end of his interview with Elinor Carlisle, ‘I shall

38 

L. HOPKINS

ask you—nothing. There are things I do not want to know …’ (242), where the ellipsis indicates that not only are there things that Poirot doesn’t want to know but also there are things that he doesn’t want to put into words. The difficulty, deceptiveness, and ambiguity of words is a recurrent theme in Christie’s writing. In Five Little Pigs Superintendent Hale says, ‘you never get two witnesses to remember a thing exactly alike’ (73); in After the Funeral Mr Entwhistle says of Miss Gilchrist, ‘she is the type of witness who often changes the actual words used, because she is convinced she is keeping to the sense of them’ (120); and in Partners in Crime Tuppence (in character as Roger Sheringham) says, ‘Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well, but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do’ (271–2). In 4.50 from Paddington the narrator observes that ‘[t]hough in speech Miss Marple was woolly and diffuse, in mind she was clear and sharp’ (34), and both qualities are illustrated when Inspector Craddock asks Miss Marple if she thinks she knows who the murdered woman was: ‘“It’s so difficult,” she said, “to put it the right way.” I mean, I don’t know who she was, but at the same time I’m fairly sure who she was, if you know what I mean’ (320). What she means is that she doesn’t know the woman’s name but is (rightly) confident that she must have been Dr Quimper’s wife, but the closest she can come to expressing that is a distinction between ‘who she was’ and ‘who she was’ which has no one fixed meaning and so could potentially suggest many. In The ABC Murders,    ‘Words!’ said Megan Barnard.    ‘Eh?’ Poirot looked at her inquiringly.    ‘What you’ve been saying. It’s just words. It doesn’t mean anything.’    She spoke with that kind of desperate intensity that I had come to ­associate with her personality.    ‘Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.’    ‘Well, I think it’s sense,’ said Mary Drower. ‘I do really, miss. It’s often when you’re talking over things that you seem to see your way clear. Your mind gets made up for you sometimes without your knowing how it happened. Talking leads to a lot of things one way and another.’ (170–1)

Despite her protest, Megan Bernard seems fundamentally to agree with this, because shortly afterwards she recalls her last meeting with her sister Betty and says, ‘I gave her a piece of my mind’ (173), a metaphor which simultaneously suggests both the lack of literal truth in the words of many

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

39

common English expressions and an unhampered ability to communicate one’s thoughts clearly and directly which transcends mere words. It is this ability to convey ideas despite words rather than because of them which Poirot particularly values in Hastings, as he explains in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: ‘At times, he has said something particularly foolish, and behold that foolish remark has revealed the truth to me!’ (326). But language cannot always achieve this level of communication, and it may be subject to two perils in particular. The first is what happens to speech when it is written down. Elsewhere in The ABC Murders Hastings is appalled to read the transcript of an interview he has given, and denies saying any of the things that are reported in the press, to which Poirot replies, ‘I know, Hastings—I know. The spoken word and the written— there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the original meaning’ (156). The second is that language changes over time, and this is something which has certainly affected Christie. In Hickory Dickory Dock Nigel says that Celia is ‘free, white, and twenty-one’, and when Mr Chandra Lal objects that it is ‘a most offensive remark’ Patricia says, ‘It’s just a—a kind of idiom. It doesn’t mean anything’ (91), to which Elizabeth Johnson replies, ‘Things are sometimes said that do not seem to mean anything but they may mean a good deal’ (91). Nigel’s remark is certainly likely to unsettle modern readers, as is the fact that the other students’ nickname for Elizabeth Johnson herself (who is black) is ‘Black Bess’, a name originally bestowed on a horse; along with the now suppressed original title of And Then There Were None and some passages of Come, Tell Me How You Live, this is an element of the text that more people than Mr Chandra Lal would now find ‘a most offensive remark’. Actually, however, such words were always already unsettling, even if not quite in the same way, for Patricia’s attempted explanation—‘It’s just a—a kind of idiom. It doesn’t mean anything’—raises a whole series of questions about what and how language means and whether there can in fact be any word, phrase, or expression that ‘doesn’t mean anything’. When Elizabeth Johnson ripostes that ‘[t]hings are sometimes said that do not seem to mean anything but they may mean a good deal’ (91), she lays bare an important aspect of Christie’s technique, which depends on a surface simplicity of vocabulary and sentence structure but smuggles in rich layers of suggestion and insinuation beneath them. In By the Pricking of My Thumbs the Vicar says, ‘I say things and I don’t really know what I mean by them. Most vexing’ (128–9); but though the vicar himself may not know, an astute listener may well draw

40 

L. HOPKINS

conclusions. A reader of Christie’s books is certainly likely to find many things lurking in them which are only delicately and vaguely hinted at. Poirot is well aware of the potential expressiveness of even the vaguest forms of language, and not averse to exploiting it: in Third Girl he says to the agent when he is investigating Louise Charpentier and pretending to be acting on behalf of her family, ‘“I wonder if possibly I could see the flat. Just in order to be able to say—” Poirot paused, not particularising what he wanted to be able to say’ (196). He also effectively theorises the expressive power of unstructured conversation when he says in The ABC Murders that there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide. A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away. (281)

In Cards on the Table too he says to Superintendent Battle, ‘Oh, my dear friend, it is impossible not to give oneself away—unless one never opens one’s mouth! Speech is the deadliest of revealers’ (217). But it is not Poirot but Mrs Oliver who really takes the decoding of speech to an art form, even if the most striking instance of her doing so is one that is in itself difficult for the reader to decode. In Elephants Can Remember Mrs Oliver tells Poirot that Julia Carstairs said, ‘Cancer it was!’ However, the reader has seen no evidence that Julia Carstairs did in fact say that (150) and it remains unclear whether Mrs Oliver is confused or exceptionally perceptive, or whether it is in fact Christie herself who has forgotten which speeches she has given to which characters. It is an odd and in many ways unsatisfactory fissure in the usually smooth surface of a Christie text, but it does encapsulate the perception-through-imperception which distinguishes Mrs Oliver: she listens to ‘talk’, and she takes things from it which are not apparent on the surface. In the case of women in particular, ‘talk’ is often about sex, and it is therefore no coincidence that Mrs Oliver is insistently associated with apples. In Hallowe’en Party Poirot muses that ‘Practically on every occasion that he had met Mrs Oliver, whether by appointment or accident, a motif of apples seemed to be introduced almost immediately’ (64). He means literal apples which she eats, but they also have symbolic overtones.

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

41

Poirot is prompted to think this because when Mrs Oliver emerges from the car a bag of apples falls from her lap, but later in Hallowe’en Party Desmond Holland feels that actual apples suggest the apple eaten by Eve: ‘What about the curate?’ said Desmond hopefully. ‘He might be a bit off his nut. You know, original sin perhaps, and all that, and the water and the apples and the things and then—’ (222); Desmond imagines that the vicar might have said, ‘“This is baptism,” and pushed her head in’ (223). Apples are also connected to sin when Dr Ferguson says to Poirot, ‘Ever had a bite at a nice red juicy apple and there, down by the core, something rather nasty rears itself up and wags its head at you? Plenty of human beings about like that. More than there used to be, I’d say nowadays’ (113). The idea that things have got worse is a recurring theme in the Mrs Oliver books. In Elephants can Remember Julia Carstairs tells Mrs Oliver that General Ravenscroft ‘had two revolvers in the house. These ex-­ military people so often do, don’t they? I mean, they feel safer what with everything that goes on nowadays’ (108). Later Mrs Carstairs agrees with what she takes to be Mrs Oliver’s suggestion that Edward Ravenscroft might have been responsible for his parents’ murder: ‘Oh, you mean the boy—yes, might be of course. You do hear very strange things. There was that boy who shot his father—that was somewhere near Newcastle, I think’ (111); not long afterwards Mrs Buckle says of the Ravencrofts’ return to England, ‘that, you must remember, was before people began getting all this violence idea. But look at what you read in the papers every day now’ (134). In Third Girl Miss Battersby has retired from teaching because ‘[t]imes change … One does not always like the ways they are changing’ (222). In particular Miss Battersby does not like modern parents, a common complaint in later Christie books where it is frequently lamented that parents have become lax and careless. Several characters voice the view that this is especially so where daughters are concerned, with the result that the sin of Eve—and other sins popularly associated particularly with women— may well be re-enacted. There is of course also suspicion of young men: in Hallowe’en Party Mrs Drake says ‘crimes are so often associated nowadays with the young’ (199) (though she herself is the criminal on this occasion) and Poirot thinks of the two young men ‘The percentage of murders committed by this age group had been increasing in the last few years’ (215). It is also true that the young think it is the old who are the problem. In Third Girl Norma Restarick feels she cannot consult Poirot because he is too old, and in Hallowe’en Party Nicholas Ransom says of Miss Whittaker

42 

L. HOPKINS

‘what age is she, do you think? Forty odd? Getting on for fifty—Women do go a bit queer at that age’ (222). The books in which Mrs Oliver appears are however particularly interested in girls, and there is a sense in which Mrs Oliver herself polices girls. In the last of Christie’s books to be published, Sleeping Murder, Mrs Fane says, ‘Girls can be so unsettling’ (171), and this is increasingly true as Christie’s oeuvre develops. In Cat Among the Pigeons, first published in 1959, the supposed Princess Shaista shocks the school staff by possessing a balcony bra (96), but this is in fact an indication that she is much older than she appears to be; in later books the girls are simply precocious. In Nemesis (1971), Professor Wanstead says that over the last twenty years ‘[g]irls are said to mature earlier. That is physically true, though in a deeper sense of the word, they mature late’ (201), and the name of a dead girl is heavy with meaning: ‘That girl. Can’t remember her last name now. Christian name was Hope or Faith or something like that. Verity, that was her name. Verity Hunter’ (218). It was in fact Verity Hunt, but the slip makes plain what is already implicit, which is that symbolic value accrues to girls: Verity means truth, and the story of dead Verity Hunt becomes a way of uncovering truth. Third Girl, as might be expected from the title, is particularly interested in the subject of girls, and everyone has an opinion. Miss Jacobs says, ‘It’s a sad world we live in nowadays—or so it seems to me. Girls study too hard in my opinion’ (259). Mrs Restarick says of Norma, ‘She’s a difficult girl. I suppose most girls are’, to which Poirot replies ‘Mothers and fathers have much less control over daughters nowadays. It is not as it used to be in the old good-fashioned days’ (sic) (37); later he observes, ‘Most girls nowadays have to endure criticism about their friends’ (97). Mrs Oliver herself says, ‘Sometimes one feels very upset about girls nowadays’ (76). The supposed Andrew Restarick says, ‘Girls are very independent. More so than when I left England fifteen years ago’ (134); later he calls Claudia Reece-Holland ‘as good as a man in some ways’ (219). Sir Roderick Horsefield says of Norma’s friends, ‘You never know which sex they are, which is embarrassing … But you turn them out of the house, and then you find out it’s Viscount Endersleigh or Lady Charlotte Marjoribanks’ (159). Sir Roderick seems to be implicitly contrasting the young people whom he finds so unsettling with those whom his ancestors would have encountered in previous centuries (though if he has read Christie’s contemporary Georgette Heyer he is failing to notice that books such as The Masqueraders and These Old Shades are by no means averse to a bit of

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

43

gender-bending). The overall impression in Third Girl is that girls have changed, and in many people’s opinion not for the better. Other Mrs Oliver books are also interested in girls. In Elephants can Remember Celia says that Mrs Oliver gave her ‘a particularly nice present when I was twenty-one’ and Mrs Oliver replies, ‘That’s the time when girls need some extra cash in hand … because there are so many things they want to do and have just then’ (77). In Hallowe’en Party there are several rather troubling girls: Joyce Reynolds pretends that other people’s memories are her own (and is killed as a result), Miranda Butler goes passively to what she thinks will be her death, and Mrs Goodbody says, ‘Knew a little girl once. Seven years old. Killed her little brother and sister. Twins they were. Five or six months old, no more. Stifled them in their prams’ (228). Little girls are meant to be socialised to nurture, but this one has killed children; Rowena Drake also kills children, and so too does Dorothea Jarrow in Elephants Can Remember. In all these cases women deviate from their socially prescribed role of caring to kill instead, and in two of the Mrs Oliver books their behaviour is specifically connected to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a play which features three weird sisters and has Lady Macbeth herself declaring that she would have been capable of killing her own child. In The Pale Horse Mark Easterbrook’s friend David says, I remember being sent once with a message to a doctor at a mental home and I was shown into a room to wait, and there was a nice elderly lady there, sipping a glass of milk. She made some conventional remark about the weather and then suddenly she leant forward and asked in a low voice: ‘Is it your poor child who’s buried there behind the fireplace?’ And then she nodded her head and said ‘12.10 exactly. It’s always at the same time every day. Pretend you don’t notice the blood’. (44)

The idea of the lost child clearly haunted Christie, for it occurs in two other books as well as The Pale Horse, and in both of them it is connected with milk, the fluid with which mothers nurture their children and which becomes in Macbeth a dangerously charged medium of which Macbeth, according to his wife, has an excess. In By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Mrs Lancaster, who lives in the same nursing home as Tommy’s aunt, asks the same question of Tuppence, and also enquires whether she would like ‘a glass of milk perhaps. It’s not poisoned today’ (37), and Sleeping Murder too has an offering of milk coupled with a question about children (111).

44 

L. HOPKINS

Sleeping Murder is ostensibly indebted only to The Duchess of Malfi, the play which reminds Gwenda of her stepmother, but the Duchess is not asleep when she is killed and the title actually points more closely to the murder of Duncan in Macbeth. By the Pricking of My Thumbs takes its title from Macbeth, as we are reminded when Tuppence says ‘By the pricking of my thumbs—Something evil this way comes’ (79), and at a later stage of the book Dr Murray says of Mrs Moody, ‘I will use the phrase that has always intrigued me in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. I have always wondered what Macbeth meant when he said of his wife, “She should have died hereafter”’ (207); as a result we have the template of Lady Macbeth firmly in mind when we learn that Mrs Lancaster thinks herself cursed because she had an abortion (338) and when she tries to give Tuppence milk which this time really is poisoned (340). Macbeth is also invoked in Third Girl. Norma Restarick, discovered with a knife in her hand over the dead body of David Baker, says, ‘The blood got on my hands from the knife … I went into the bathroom to wash it off’ (249); Miss Jacobs reports that she subsequently said, ‘But you can’t wash things like that off, can you?’ and Poirot suggests, ‘Out, damnèd spot, in fact?’ (260). Jem Bloomfield notes that ‘[i]n her latter decades, Agatha Christie wrote a loose trilogy of novels, in each of which a different character from Macbeth turns out to have committed the murder’ (23), but the point here is that Norma Restarick has not committed it. The apparent invitation to identify her with Lady Macbeth is a red herring in plot terms, but it is not so thematically, because although Norma can be exonerated of this specific crime she is implicated in the more general guilt which attaches to women since Eve’s first plucking of the apple. Both Mrs Oliver and the Christie method reach their apogee in Elephants can Remember. Several of Christie’s late books raise questions of memory, perhaps because she was feeling her own begin to fail. In Third Girl Chief Inspector Neele (whose name daringly hints at the time when Christie registered at a Harrogate hotel as Mrs Neele, the surname of Archie Christie’s mistress) says, ‘It’s this craze for memoirs. Nobody knows what indiscreet revelations are going to be made next’ (204), and in Sleeping Murder Gwenda is troubled by what she can and can’t remember: she recalls a maid putting a bow on a cat but has forgotten the existence of a stepmother and also that she had visited England before. In Elephants Can Remember, as the title suggests, memory is central, with Poirot’s question ‘So you will go à la recherche des éléphants?’ (49) playfully implying a Proustian metanarrative about how the mind works. At an

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

45

early stage of the book Mrs Oliver outlines her theory that unexpected pieces of information might be recoverable from certain people’s memories: ‘In fact, one does remember queer things, I mean there are a lot of things that I remember very well’ (48). But there are also other things that she remembers very badly, as when she says that General and Lady Ravenscroft ‘were both found shot … On the top of a cliff. I can’t remember if it was in Cornwall or in Corsica. Something like that’ (36). Later she adds that Celia ‘still lives in London. Or perhaps it’s Cambridge she lives in, or Oxford—I think she’s got a degree and either lectures here or teaches somewhere, or does something like that’ (38). Even Poirot uncharacteristically succumbs to this prevailing spirit of vagueness and refers to Desmond Burton-Cox as ‘the boy, or the young man, or whatever he is, whom [Celia] is thinking of marrying’ (40). In the days before same-sex marriage or changing one’s gender was even thought of, there were really only two possibilities: Desmond Burton-Cox might be a boy or he might be a young man, but there is no third alternative and the ‘whatever he is’ is merely a verbal curlicue which works to underline our sense that this is a novel in which nothing is really said but many things are suggested. It is this atmosphere of uncertainty and imprecision that one of Christie’s most unsettling stories unfolds. In most Christie books anyone might have done something, but here anyone might have done anything. At one point Mrs Oliver asks, ‘What do you really think, Julia?’ and Julia Carstairs replies, ‘Well, as I said dear, one wonders, you know. There were things said, but then there always are’ (109). Although Mrs Carstairs’ answer contains no definite information, it successfully conveys three things, and also implies a sequence and cause and effect of that sequence. In the middle of the sequence comes the fact that ‘[t]here were things said’. That might mean anything, but in the context of the society that Christie depicts, what it pretty clearly means is that there was speculation that either General or Lady Ravenscroft (or possibly both) was having an affair. Their characters and behaviour are thus presented as the first part of the sequence as we are invited to speculate whether one or both of them might have done anything to give rise to such a conjecture. At the same time, though, the rider that ‘there always are’ together with Mrs Carstairs’ prefacing remark that ‘one wonders, you know’ introduces the third term of the sequence, which is people’s willingness to think the worst of their neighbours. There was talk; Mrs Carstairs wonders, and her ‘you know’

46 

L. HOPKINS

draws Mrs Oliver too into the circle of gossip and speculation—and also, by implication, us. In this febrile atmosphere it almost ceases to matter who has done what, because the point is that everyone is potentially guilty. Eve took a bite from the apple and subsequently offered it to Adam, thus cursing all their offspring; Lady Macbeth fantasises about killing her child and goads Macbeth to actually kill a man who reminds her of her father; it seems in some ways an entirely natural part of the sequence that Mrs Oliver should say of Dorothea Jarrow, ‘I gathered she’d killed her own children or tried to kill her own children long ago, and then she’d been supposed to be cured or paroled or something and came out to Egypt, or Malaya or whatever it was’ (153). When it is suggested that a third person could have been involved in the deaths of her parents Celia asks, ‘Yes, but what does one mean by an outsider?’ (78); nobody in the novel attempts to answer that question, but the novel itself suggests that the ultimate outsider is also the ultimate insider, the dark core of self or the identical twin who is so similar on the outside but so completely different on the inside. Mrs Oliver may not see sharply and clearly and she may not detect crimes in the way that Poirot or Miss Marple do, but what she does detect is us, and for that purpose her out-of-focus vision shows her a very big picture because, as Poirot says in Five Little Pigs, ‘it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees’ (297).

Note 1. She had previously featured briefly in Parker Pyne Investigates and would also appear independently of Poirot in The Pale Horse.

References Bloomfield, Jem. ‘“Three Ordinary, Normal Old Women”: Agatha Christie’s Uses of Shakespeare’. Shakespeare 16.1 (2020): 23–39. Christie, Agatha. 4.50 from Paddington [1957]. London: HarperCollins, 2002a. ———. The ABC Murders [1936]. London: HarperCollins, 2007a. ———. After the Funeral [1953]. London: HarperCollins, 2001a. ———. And Then There Were None [1939]. London: HarperCollins, 2007b. ———. By the Pricking of My Thumbs [1968]. London: HarperCollins, 2001b. ———. Cards on the Table [1936]. London: HarperCollins, 2001c. ———. Cat Among the Pigeons [1959]. London: HarperCollins, 2002b.

2  OUT OF FOCUS: ARIADNE OLIVER 

47

———. Come, Tell Me How You Live [1946]. London: HarperCollins, 2015a. ———. Dead Man’s Folly [1956]. London: HarperCollins, 2014a. ———. Death in the Clouds [1935]. London: HarperCollins, 2002c. ———. Death on the Nile [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2014b. ———. Destination Unknown [1954]. London: HarperCollins, 2003a. ———. Elephants can Remember [1972]. London: HarperCollins, 2002d. ———. Five Little Pigs [1942]. London: HarperCollins, 2002e. ———. Hallowe’en Party [1969]. London: HarperCollins, 2001d. ———. Hickory Dickory Dock [1955]. London: HarperCollins, 2002f. ———. The Hollow [1946]. London: HarperCollins, 2002g. ———. ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, in Poirot’s Early Cases [1974] London: HarperCollins, 2002h. 385–412. ———. The Labours of Hercules [1947]. London: HarperCollins, 2003b. ———. The Listerdale Mystery [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2003c. ———. The Moving Finger [1942]. London: HarperCollins, 2002i. ———. Mrs McGinty’s Dead [1952]. London: HarperCollins, 2002j. ———. Murder in Mesopotamia [1936]. London: HarperCollins, 2001e. ———. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926]. London: HarperCollins, 2002k. ———. Nemesis [1971]. London: HarperCollins, 2001f. ———. The Pale Horse [1961]. London: HarperCollins, 2017a. ———. Parker Pyne Investigates [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2017b. ———. Partners in Crime [1929]. London: HarperCollins, 2001g. ———. Sad Cypress [1940]. London: HarperCollins, 2003d. ———. The Seven Dials Mystery [1929]. London: HarperCollins, 2001h. ———. Sleeping Murder. London: HarperCollins, 1976. ———. They Came to Baghdad [1951]. London: HarperCollins, 2003e. ———. They Do It With Mirrors [1952]. London: HarperCollins, 2002l. ———. Third Girl [1966]. London: HarperCollins, 2015b. ———. The Thirteen Problems [1932]. London: HarperCollins, 2002m. ———. Three Act Tragedy [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2002n. ———. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2017c. Edwards, Martin. The Life of Crime. London: Collins Crime Club, 2022. Grauby, Françoise. ‘“This isn’t a detective story, Mrs. Oliver”: the case of the fictitious author’. Clues 341 (Spring 2016): 116–25. Hopkins, Lisa. Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2020. Klages, Kelly. ‘Christie’s physical descriptions of Poirot: Branagh and Suchet’. Seven Storeys High. Online: https://poirotblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/christies-­ physical-­descriptions-­of-­poirot-­branagh-­and-­suchet/ Accessed 15.6.2021. Księzȯ polska, Irena. ‘Metafictional Agatha Christie: Self-Parody as the Perfect Crime’. Clues 34.1 (Spring 2016): 31–40. Maslin, Kimberly. ‘The Paradox of Miss Marple: Agatha Christie’s Epistemology’. Clues 34.1 (Spring 2016): 105–115.

PART II

Seeing the Unseen

CHAPTER 3

Scouting Skills: Max Carrados, Sherlock Holmes’ Blind Rival

When Sherlock Holmes burst on an astonished and admiring world, he reached his conclusions primarily by visual observation. Conan Doyle himself studied eye medicine in Vienna before attempting to establish a practice as an oculist (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes xii), and Katherine Voyles notes that ‘[i]n his nonfiction, Conan Doyle’s handling of a close­up view reflects his training in ophthalmology and his career as a popular author’ (Voyles 2017: 41; see also Sen and Honavar), while Michael Harrison observes that ‘Conan Doyle became interested in the notorious Mordaunt scandal of 1869. The case concerned a divorce action brought about by the birth of a son who suffered ophthalmia neonatorum: gonorrheal infection of the eyes’ (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes xx). The influence of this personal background can be felt everywhere in the Holmes stories. Holmes looks keenly and closely, often using a lens to supplement what he sees with the naked eye: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney notes that ‘[t]he magnifying glass first appeared in detective fiction as an investigative tool in 1887, when Arthur Conan Doyle introduced London consulting detective Sherlock Holmes in the novel A Study in Scarlet … From that moment on, the hand lens, just like the deerstalker cap and the meerschaum pipe, has been associated with Conan Doyle’s hero in the popular imagination’ (Sweeney 2003: 3). Holmes also sometimes uses other optical devices, as in ‘Silver Blaze’ where he says to Watson, ‘You would oblige me bringing with you your very excellent field-glass’ [3]), and he defines © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_3

51

52 

L. HOPKINS

the way he uses his eyes as the essential difference between himself and Watson, to whom he says in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘You see, but you do not observe’ (6); in ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ he develops this idea further when he says to Watson, ‘you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences’ (153). Holmes is also dismissive of the way in which the various Scotland Yard inspectors with whom he deals use their eyes: in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ he says to Watson, ‘I very clearly perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the right-hand side, and yet I question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as that’ (79). Finally he also knows how to read other people’s eyes: in ‘The Cardboard Box’ Holmes tells Watson that he has reconstructed his thought process by looking at ‘[y]our features, and especially your eyes’ (32). Holmes does not always see everything—in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ he admits, ‘I confess that I have been as blind as a mole’ (143)—but sight is his superpower. But Holmes, in some ways the epitome of sophistication with his violin-­ playing and his decadent use of cocaine, also has affinities with more basic instincts. Hilary A. Goldsmith argues that he ‘is firmly situated within the chain of evolution. He is frequently depicted as displaying animal features’ (Goldsmith 2010: 27); indeed she suggests that ‘the adventures of Sherlock Holmes may have aided the absorption and acceptance of Darwin’s theories into the popular culture of the late-Victorian era by presenting some of the more positive aspects of Darwin’s conclusions as to humankind’s place within nature’ (Goldsmith 2010: 20). Although one would never think of associating him with any form of outdoor exercise, in both ‘The Red-Headed League’ (52) and ‘A Case of Identity’ (74) Holmes has a hunting-crop to hand, and on a number of occasions he demonstrates the kind of ‘savage’ skills which degeneration theorists were increasingly recommending as an antidote to the supposedly emasculating effects of over-civilisation (it was enthusiasm for such skills which would eventually lead to the foundation of the Boy Scouts). In ‘The Crooked Man’ Watson refers to Holmes as being characterised by ‘that Red Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man’ (157), and when in ‘The Resident Patient’ Holmes himself says ‘there could be no question as to the superimposing of the footmarks’ (189) he might well seem to share the tracking skills of the native American. In ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ Watson observes that ‘[t]o Holmes, as I could see by his eager face and peering eyes, very many other things were

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

53

to be read upon the trampled grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent’ (93). Holmes does indeed often smell as well as look; later in the same story Watson notes that Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard, black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downwards, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whip-­ cord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him, that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or at the most provoked only a quick, impatient snarl in reply. (92)

Holmes snarls as an animal might do, but he has not degenerated, because he has not become less than human; rather he is drawing on a set of skills which date from an earlier period when humans might have been understood as being more closely in touch with nature but which do not in any way compromise his status as thinker and logician, and indeed ultimately serve to enhance it. Such skills certainly do not weaken him, as we see in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ when Holmes tells Watson that he has visited the opium den to look for ‘one of my natural enemies, or shall I say, my natural prey’ (129); he is not only a detective but a predator. This is one of a number of instances of the Holmes stories’ interest in questions pertaining to evolution, descent and atavism. These are not surprising topics to find covered in the work of Conan Doyle, who wrote a book in which dinosaurs survive on a distant plateau and who was personally suspected of involvement in the Piltdown Man hoax. In ‘The Five Orange Pips’ John Openshaw describes the story as ‘a hereditary matter’ (106) and Holmes notes that ‘Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone’ (116), alluding to the legendary French zoologist Georges Cuvier. In ‘The Copper Beeches’ Holmes declares that the disposition of a child is evidence about the character of the parents (298), again testifying to a reflex belief in the power of heredity and implicitly endorsing the Darwinian approach of deducing the past of a species by its present, and in ‘The Cardboard Box’ Holmes says, ‘As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear’ (43); Darwin’s On the

54 

L. HOPKINS

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection talks mainly about processes of speciation in dogs and pigeons, but what made it controversial was the implication in its final sentence that humans too had changed over time, and this insistence that ears are particularly variable would have been likely to suggest that, despite Watson’s insistence on his astonishing ignorance in many matters of common knowledge, Holmes was aware of Darwin and presumably agreed with him. Perhaps most suggestively, it is when ‘the conversation … came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes’ in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ that Holmes is moved to mention his brother Mycroft for the first time (193), suggesting that for him these are not abstract questions but considerations which he understands as bearing on his own family and identity. Concomitantly, as so often in writing responding to Darwinian theory, there is a sense of weakening faith. At the end of ‘The Cardboard Box’, there is a rare moment when Holmes broadens his attention from the particular to the general, and is moved to consider a metaphysical question: ‘What is the meaning of it, Watson?’ said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from the answer as ever.’ (52)

Holmes thinks there must be some purpose to the universe, but he cannot offer any firm suggestion about it. Several of the stories also show signs of some of the usual accompaniments to an interest in evolutionary discourse, such as a willingness to accept the precepts of the faux-science of phrenology. In ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ Brunton the butler is ‘a well-­ grown, handsome man, with a splendid forehead’ (118). In ‘The Yellow Face’, when the wife opens the locket ‘[t]here was a portrait within of a man, strikingly handsome and intelligent, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent’ (70); his intelligence is assumed to be as clearly visible in the shape of his head and general appearance as his African ancestry. In ‘The Final Problem’ Holmes explains that Moriarty ‘had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind’ (252) and Moriarty retaliates by saying to Holmes, ‘You have less frontal development than I should have expected’ (254). The influence and consequences of Darwinian theory hang heavy over all these remarks.

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

55

Perhaps the story that most neatly exemplifies the Darwinian background to Holmes’ methods of detection, and best helps us to understand the resulting implications, is ‘The Naval Treaty’. The idea of hunting, central to Darwin’s theory of how evolutionary change is driven because of the ways in which the process of adaptation might advantage both predators and prey, is mobilised when Percy Phelps says of his office, ‘A rat could not conceal himself either in the room or the corridor. There is no cover at all’ (221), and when the caretaker subsequently exhorts him, ‘don’t let yourself be drawn away upon a false scent, Mr Phelps’ (222). Holmes’ own powers are highlighted several times: first when, interrogating Phelps about the office, he asks, ‘No smell?’ (223); then again by Watson’s remark that Holmes ‘had, when he so willed it, the utter immobility of countenance of a Red Indian’ (235); and finally when Watson tells Percy Phelps, ‘I have noticed that when he is off the trail he generally says so. It is when he is on the scent, and is not quite absolutely sure yet that it is the right one, that he is most taciturn’ (241–2). All of these present Holmes as someone distinguished by exceptional tracking and scouting skills of the kind considered by Victorians to survive primarily among ‘savage’ Native American tribes, and Holmes himself reinforces this when he ‘crouched down among the bushes on the other side, and crawled from one to the other … until I had reached the clump of rhododendrons just opposite to your bedroom window’ (244) and again when he remarks that waiting for Joseph Harrison ‘has the sort of excitement about it that the sportsman feels when he lies beside the watercourse and waits for the big game’ (245). The stories’ rather nervous attitude to the question of faith is also touched on here and is neatly illustrated by Holmes’ gnomic assurance that ‘[t]here is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion … It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers’ (227); this is clearly a riff on the idea of the Watchmaker God, but the change from watches to flowers imports a flavour of evolutionary theory. Although much of the story takes place in and around a quiet bedroom in a secluded English house, that apparently sedate setting becomes the scene of the kind of scouting and hunting which we would normally associate with a much wilder landscape, and insofar as the garden outside the bedroom window takes on Edenic overtones they not only reassure us about beauty but also remind us of the original sin which makes Joseph Harrison’s betrayal only too credible. Even in a bedroom and a flowerbed, Holmes

56 

L. HOPKINS

needs to scrutinise everything he sees and to be aware of what lies behind respectable appearances. Holmes clearly values sight above all other faculties, as he implies when in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ he says that marrying Miss Turner is what young McCarthy ‘would give his very eyes to do’ (90). However in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ Holmes observes, ‘Surely your medical experience would tell you, Watson, that weakness in one limb is often compensated for by exceptional strength in the others’ (135). This is certainly so in the case of the detective who is in many ways the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados. There are several superficial correspondences between them. In ‘The Reigate Squire’ Holmes deliberately knocks a table over (147); in ‘The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage’ Carrados pretends to trip—‘In crossing the hall he stumbled over a mat and almost fell’ (62)—and in ‘The Virginiola Fraud’, ‘Halfway across the room he seemed to slip, plunged forward helplessly, and came to the floor, involved in a light table as he fell’ (205). Both sets of stories also foreground one of the most disturbing questions raised by evolutionary theory, which was whether the human body might be subject to change. Throughout On The Origin of Species Darwin is obsessed with what he calls monstrosities—he gives as examples ‘albinism, melanism, deficiency of tail or horns, or additional fingers and toes’ (209)—and cites the experiments of Geoffroy St Hilaire as showing that ‘unnatural treatment of the embryo causes monstrosities; and monstrosities cannot be separated by any clear line of distinction from mere variations’ (9). A monster—by which Darwin means any creature which differs in some way from its parents—is not something radically separate but on a continuum with the rest of its species, so that Darwin can say quite cheerfully of pigeons that ‘the breeds so often have a somewhat monstrous character’ (24). Monstrosity is not necessarily something to be frightened of, but might on the contrary be welcome: Darwin goes on to note that some deviations from the parent form may in fact confer an advantage, to the extent that the breeder, mimicking the process of natural selection, ‘often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form’ (66). Darwin talks mainly about pigeons and dogs, and only at the very end of On the Origin of Species does he even hint that what he says might also apply to humans. However intelligent readers were not slow to take the point and to speculate that the human form might represent not the peak of God’s carefully designed creation but an intermediate stage of development which was potentially still in flux. Fears about the sort of possible

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

57

changes that might await humanity were fed by the so-called New Women, whose aims were taken to imply a threat that there might also soon be new men; Jill Matus cites alarmed accounts of possibilities for acquiring the sexual characteristics of the opposite gender (32–3) and nervous speculation about breastfeeding men (35). New Women were prepared to envisage radical reshaping of the female form, with many hoping to eliminate menstruation altogether by means of vigorous exercise, and Lyn Pykett observes that this represented a conundrum in terms of evolutionary theory: ‘Within the terms of the model of biological evolution developed by Darwin and his followers, both the New Woman and the homosexual were represented either as freakish sports of nature—regressive or degenerative forms—or, conversely, as highly evolved types’ (24). The question of whether the New Woman movement was a good or a bad thing was perceived as urgent because women’s choices could shape the evolutionary future: for the Darwinian theorist Karl Pearson, ‘social evolution and race survival … depended on the proper ordering of sex relations and management of women’s reproductive lives’ (Walkowitz 138), because otherwise they might make improper choices and prefer inappropriate, weaker males to better breeding stock. Fear of such a possibility lies behind the various New Woman fictions in which a woman has the choice of two partners, most overtly and schematically, as Sally Ledger incisively discusses, in Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895), where the heroine rejects the man she loves, who has heart disease, for a fit one whom she does not, for the sake of her future children’s health (Ledger 34–5). The idea that human bodies might change was of particular interest to Bram Stoker, who was a friend of Conan Doyle and in whose Egyptological fantasy The Jewel of Seven Stars the unusual height and the seven fingers and toes of Queen Tera and of her cat speak loudly of evolutionary change to the fabric of both human and animal bodies. In imagining his mummy, Stoker may well have been influenced by the strong contemporary interest in the pathology of monstrosity and the fashion for preserving the remains of aberrant foetuses and corpses, as in Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Brown Hand’, where a doctor who has returned from India displays his collection of ‘bloated organs, gaping cysts, distorted bones, odious parasites—a singular exhibition of the products of India’ (49). So visible a deformity as the presence of extra fingers and toes was bound to excite special interest, not least because Robert Chambers, the initially anonymous author of the infamous proto-evolutionary Vestiges of Creation, had six fingers, as did several other members of his family (Desmond 1982:

58 

L. HOPKINS

44); the section on ‘Supernumerary fingers and toes’ in Thomas Annandale’s winning 1864 entry for the Royal College of Surgeons’ Jacksonian Prize ‘On the Malformations, Diseases, and Injuries of the Fingers and Toes, and their Surgical Treatment’ records a variety of such cases, starting with that of a young man aged nineteen in 1834, who had seven toes on his left foot and six on his right, and who had originally had fourteen fingers, though two of them were removed soon after he was born (Annandale 1865: 27). It is implicit in The Jewel of Seven Stars that this notable visible difference between the body of Queen Tera and those of the early twentieth-century men and women involved in her disinterment may be the result of evolutionary change, just as in Edward Bulwer-­ Lytton’s 1871 The Coming Race the females of the subterranean race, who are the stronger sex, have evolved very large thumbs and prominent nerves in the hand which effectively allow them powers of telekinesis (55). It was not only hands which were considered liable to change, however; potentially any aspect of the human body might do so, and confirmation was often sought from relics or representations of ancient bodies. A. Bowdoin Van Riper observes that ‘[p]olygenists, who argued that each race had descended from a separate set of ancestors … pointed to 4,000-year-old Egyptian art depicting Arabs and Ethiopians with recognizably modern facial features’ as evidence for their theory (4), while in the press, A frequently recurring observation was that the species portrayed in the ancient Egyptian pyramids were the same as those we meet at the present day. The pyramids were some four thousand years old, which was, on the traditional view, a very substantial proportion of the time granted for the present organic world as a whole. Now as there was no reason to suppose that the rate of change—if there had been any change—was slowing down, the conclusion was that no change could have occurred since the Creation. The Egyptian representation of the ibis, for instance, was exactly like the present bird. (Ellegard 1958: 224)

The physical features of ancient bodies therefore became the focus of anxious attention. Annandale discusses instances of supernumerary fingers and toes on historic skeletons (32), and Retha M.  Warnicke notes that ‘[a]mong the monstrous races described by Alexander the Great and Pliny were groups of hairy people who sometimes had six fingers and sometimes boars’ or dogs’ teeth’; she also cites II Samuel 21:20, ‘[a]nd there was yet

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

59

a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes’ (141). Rider Haggard was to make the point explicitly in his short story ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’: Scientists … tell us they know all that there is worth knowing about man, which, of course, includes woman. They trace him from his remotest origins; they show us how his bones changed and his shape modified, also how, under the influence of his needs and passions his intelligence developed from something very humble. (672)

In the bodies of Egyptians we may see evidence of change. To think of evolutionary progress is also to remember its darker side, degeneration, and to remember that not all monstrosities confer advantages. In ‘The Final Problem’, Holmes, like Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, actually alters in front of our eyes: The aged ecclesiastic had turned his face towards me. For an instant the wrinkles were smoothed away, the nose drew away from the chin, the lower lip ceased to protrude and the mouth to mumble, the dull eyes regained their fire, the drooping figure expanded. The next instant the whole frame collapsed again, and Holmes had gone as quickly as he had come. (259)

Holmes’ change is reversible; others are not. In the Max Carrados story ‘The Ingenious Mind of Mr Rigby Lacksome’, Rigby Lacksome explains his purchase of a skeleton by saying that he has a ‘theory that the English and American races, starting from a common stock, are diverging structurally’ (548). This obviously glances at general theories of evolutionary change, but it also has a more particular and immediate application in the context of the Carrados stories, because Max Carrados is blind.1 Blindness might seem a classic instance of a deviation from the norm which confers no advantage but is in fact a positive disadvantage, and yet Carrados himself regards his blindness as his superpower in the same way as sight is Sherlock Holmes’. The stories in which he appears are also heavily invested in the value of his blindness. On one level, indeed, they present themselves as a kind of advertisement for what blind people can achieve: the narrator says in his introduction to the second volume in which Carrados appears, ‘That the general condition of the blind is being raised, that they are, in the main, more capable and infinitely less dependent than at any period of the past, is undeniable, and these things are

60 

L. HOPKINS

plainly to the good’ (10), and in one story Carrados deliberately sets out to show someone whom he takes to be a fellow blind man that the condition need not be as limiting as the other apparently supposes. However, it is also worth noting that Carrados’ blindness is not hereditary but the result of a freak accident, because Carrados too is interested in evolution. He sounds like a Cuvier reconstructing an entire animal from a single bone when he declares that ‘in order to have an accurate knowledge of what a man will do on any occasion it is only necessary to study a single characteristic action of his’ (73); he comments of Dunstan Aynosforde’s madness that ‘[t]he ground has been preparing for generations’ (274) because of the family’s practice of cousin marriage; and his secretary Annesley Greatorex implicitly endorses evolution-based fears about New Women when he says of his suffragette sister Moya, ‘It’s a pretty grey outlook for England if these are a sample of the mothers of the coming generation’ (537). To present Carrados’ blindness as acquired rather than congenital deflects any suggestion of degeneration or bad heredity and allows him to figure human potential rather than human limitation. Most notable, however, are the metaphorical and indeed metaphysical connotations which accrue to blindness in the Carrados stories. Although Carrados detects primarily coins—and hence by implication currency and the economy—his strong aesthetic interest in them transcends the material, and indeed coins themselves are made to carry a spiritual as well as an economic weight when Carrados tells a vicar, ‘Our numismatic conversation has taken a strange turn, Mr Hosier. There is a text for you—Money at the root of everything!’ (391). Carrados may police lucre, but the stories in which he appears offer far stronger intimations of divinity than any case in which Sherlock Holmes is ever involved. In this context, blindness too takes on spiritual connotations, and becomes a metaphor for faith. Carrados is supported by a sidekick, Louis Carlyle, who performs some of the same functions as Holmes’ Watson. Although he is unlike Watson in that he is not a first-person narrator and often doesn’t appear at all, he is a constant throughout the series and echoes Watson in both a general self-satisfaction—we hear at one point of ‘the extremely good terms on which he stood with himself’ (72)—and in the ways he acts as a foil: when asked how he comes to know about the previous history of the coin forgery Carrados replies ‘You are a detective, Louis … How does one know these things? By using one’s eyes and putting two and two together’ (21), but Carlyle, like Watson, does not actually use his eyes. He can see, but he does not observe; Carrados cannot see, but he can perceive. It is also

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

61

suggestive that both Carlyle and Carrados have changed their names, Carlyle (previously Louis Calling) because he was disgraced and disbarred when an associate committed fraud, and Carrados (previously Max Wynn and known to his friends as ‘Winning’ Wynn) because he was left a substantial sum of money on condition that he took the name of Carrados. Winning and Calling are fitting names in both cases: the first time we see Carlyle he is quite literally calling on Carrados, and Winning (which we are regularly reminded of when Carrados encounters people who used to know him as Wynn) is particularly pertinent for a man who refuses to regard his loss of sight as a disability and whose stock in trade is a continual cheerfulness. When Carlyle’s niece Elsie Bellmark says she is sorry Carrados is blind he replies ‘So am I—occasionally’ (160), but when her husband remarks that Carrados is smiling Elsie explains that ‘it’s his normal expression’ (161), and on a later occasion Carrados says simply, ‘I am interested in everything’ (201). For him, blindness is not a barrier; indeed the compensatory development which Holmes mentions to Watson means that his loss of sight has enhanced his appreciation of some things such as music and scent. In the first of the stories Carlyle goes to visit Carrados without knowing his identity, in order to consult him as an expert on old coins, and introduces himself to the reader as someone who is accustomed to say of his own detective work that ‘It’s nothing more than using one’s eyes and putting two and two together’ (16). When he first walks into Carrados’ room he uses the typically ableist formula, ‘It’s very good of you to see me at this hour’ (16), and when Carrados identifies himself, explains his disability, and declares that he has always had a hankering to be a detective, Carlyle dismisses the idea out of hand, saying of the generic detective, ‘I don’t suppose there is any man who is more utterly dependent on his eyes’ (19). However Carrados soon puts him right, explaining that he was instantly able to recognise Carlyle as Calling because ‘I had no blundering, self-­ confident eyes to be hoodwinked’ (17). Carrados also attributes the instant resumption of their old friendly relationship to the fact of his blindness. When Calling confesses to him the fact of his disgrace, which he normally conceals, and then wonders why he has been so ready to do so, ‘“Blindness invites confidence,” replied Carrados. “We are out of the running—human rivalry ceases to exist”’ (18). It is perhaps also this sense of being removed from normal human relations which allows Carrados to think himself out of his own skin and into that of someone else, as when he exhorts himself, ‘Come, now, what would Rigby do?’ (546). In this

62 

L. HOPKINS

sense, blindness can figure the ideals of impartiality and impersonality which led the abstract image of Justice to be depicted blindfold above the Old Bailey. The blindness of Carrados is emphasised by the frequent use of sight-­ based metaphors, as we have already seen in the account of Carlyle’s first visit to Carrados. Sometimes there is an emphasis on the verb to see: in the Introduction, the narrator exclaims, ‘My dear Reader! [T]he very man I wished to see. I want to introduce rather a remarkable character to you— Max Carrados, whom you see approaching’ (7). On other occasions blindness is used in a metaphorical sense: in ‘The Secret of Dunstan’s Tower’ Tulloch suggests that the killing of a sheep ‘might be a blind’ (267) and in ‘The Secret of Headlam Height’, Carrados, masquerading as an American, perceives something, and ‘[f]or one concentrated moment he even forg[o]t his American citizenship in the blinding inspiration that cleft without warning, shapeless but at the same time essentially complete, into his mind’ (439). There is also a subtle variation in ‘The Ingenious Mind of Mr Rigby Lacksome’, where Carrados has an experience akin to sight when ‘[a] sudden light broke upon him’ (542). Carrados’ blindness is also counterpointed by his attendant, ‘the photographic-eyed Parkinson’ (23), who sees everything and remembers everything, but cannot classify what he sees or draw any conclusions from it. Carrados by contrast sees nothing but deduces everything, his only weakness (or perhaps one might say his blind spot) being his pride in his own accomplishments, for ‘Max Carrados was not so much concerned to scotch a plot before it came to fruition as to demonstrate—if only to himself—that his deductions had been correct’ (545). It is this intellectual pride which enables him to be captured in ‘The Missing Witness Sensation’: he cannot resist showing off to someone whom he believes to be a fellow but less confident blind man, and is thus entrapped. Since he cannot see, Carrados detects by the use of other senses. The first of these is touch. In the first story, Carrados shows Carlyle a bronze lion made by a blind sculptor, Vidal, and says that Vidal approached the task of making it by feeling a real lion: ‘He called it “seeing near”’ (20). Carrados, like Holmes, also uses smell. On one occasion he says to Carlyle, ‘If only you would not trust your dear, blundering eyes so implicitly you would get nearer that limit yourself,’ retorted Carrados. ‘The man carried a five-yard aura of spirit gum, emphasised by a warm, perspiring skin. That inevitably suggested one thing.’ (101)

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

63

He is also very reliant on hearing. During a thunderstorm he surprises Carlyle by claiming a kind of synaesthesia: ‘“One of the few things I regret missing,” remarked Carrados tranquilly; “but I hear a good deal of colour in it”’ (68). Elsewhere he observes that ‘“There is a slang injunction to “keep your eyes skinned.” That being out of my power, I habitually “keep my ears skinned.” You would be surprised to know how very little you hear, Louis, and how much you miss. In the last five minutes up there I have had three different newsboys’ account of this development’ (79). In ‘The Ingenious Mr. Spinola’ Copling says to Carrados that ‘What staggers me is that you can pick out a whisper when the room is full other louder sounds’ (372); in ‘The Secret of Headlam Height’, faced with a desperate, armed, and murderous German spy, Carrados uses his hearing to locate the man when he speaks and ‘fired … into the centre of the “Damn!”’ (454), hitting the target perfectly. He also uses another, even more surprising sense: in one story he assures Carlyle that ‘[e]very piece of paper contains at least four palpable clues … A smell, a taste, an appearance and a texture’ (383), and at one point he is even prepared to taste a potential poison. Finally there is presumably a response to a subtle change in temperature when ‘[w]ith the prescience so habitual with him that it had ceased to cause remark among his associates Carrados walked straight to the gas-bracket and touched the burner’ (325). These are ‘savage’ skills just as much as those of Holmes, and Carrados is also presented as tracking his prey in the same way as Holmes when we are told that ‘[i]t was the first mention of the absent Karl, for Carrados was too patient and wiry a tracker to risk the obliquest reference to his man until he knew the ground he stood on’ (433). There is also a certain amount of mileage to be had from what Carrados cannot perceive at all, and which therefore does not distract him. In the first story, he says to Carlyle, ‘I am told that Helene has so innocently angelic a face as to disarm suspicion, but I was incapable of being impressed and all that good material was thrown away’ (25). In ‘The Crime at the House in Culver Street’, ‘The whole of Mr Pridger’s eminently respectable appearance went for nothing, but a hundred other indications that he had never taken into account were signalling their message through subtler mediums’ (567). In a case which hinges on a stop-go railway signal which is made to appear green on both sides, Carrados says, ‘There are things that you can’t see with your eyes, Hutchins’ (35); those who can see the signal cannot imagine that its appearance might be deceptive. And his ultimate weapon is to level the playing field by plunging a room into

64 

L. HOPKINS

darkness. In ‘The Game Played in the Dark’, there is a passage which initially seems to highlight the disadvantage at which his blindness places him: Could he have seen, Carrados would have received the impression of a plainly, almost dowdily, dressed young woman of buxom figure. She wore a light veil, but it was ineffective in concealing the unattraction of the face beneath. The features were swart and the upper lip darkened with the more than incipient moustache of the southern brunette. Worse remained, for a disfiguring rash had assailed patches of her skin. As she entered she swept the room and its occupant with a quiet but comprehensive survey. (175)

This rare instance of a physical description of a character seems designed to remind us what Carrados is missing in being unable to see, but later in the same story he extinguishes the light (184) and thus has the advantage over the sighted people in the room. There is a rather similar moment in ‘The Curious Circumstance of the Two Left Shoes’, where the appearance of Mr Wich prompts a moment of visual recognition which must apparently elude and baffle Carrados: Myra alone appeared to have no interest in the passage, and her face was turned away, but her lips were tight pressed to hold back a cry of generous warning and her heart was thudding like an engine beat, for in a flash her eyes had followed Lapworth’s and in a flash had seen on her spruce guest’s extended foot a boot with identical pearl buttons, of which the upper one was missing. (522)

Again we are reminded of how many clues are denied to Carrados by his lack of vision. In the same story, though, we are given a rare insight into his thought processes: She must stand five feet five—possibly six. At that, with the tread she has, she will take a 4 ½ to 5. Yes, under any vigorous exercise she might reasonably split a pliant 3 ½. There were certainly two definable personal exudations about the other shoe, and associable with them syringa—that’s the girl—and cheiranthus—this one. (521)

Myra draws a deduction on the basis of what she can see, which is that the man with the missing boot button is guilty of a robbery, and it is superficially a reasonable conclusion; nevertheless she is mistaken, while

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

65

Carrados, who cannot see, successfully identifies Myra herself as the unconscious (because sleepwalking) criminal. Above all, Carrados’ blindness gives him greater spiritual insight. In one of the early stories Carlyle mutters to himself ‘I believe there is something positively uncanny about Max at times’ (51), and the reader too might well be led to conclude this. In ‘The Clever Mrs. Straithwaite’, Carrados turned his face from one to the other and by ear, and by even finer perceptions, he focussed them in his mind—the delicate, feather-headed beauty, with the heart of a cat and the irresponsibility of a kitten, eye and mouth already hardening under the stress of her frantic life, and, across the room, her debonair consort, whose lank pose and nonchalant attitude towards the situation Carrados had not yet categorised. (83–4)

On one occasion ‘Carrados laughed quietly to himself as he felt Margaret Hutchins’s startled and questioning eyes attempting to read his mind’ (38); on another ‘Carrados laid a light hand on his companion’s arm. Through some subtle perception he read Hulse’s mild surprise’ (191). When he contemplates possible solutions to the Rigby Lacksome case he thinks to himself, ‘It’s wrong, wrong, wrong … I should feel it down to my finger-ends if I was going right’ (544). What is at work in all these instances is something beyond either the rational or the sensual and apparently more akin to telepathy or empathy, except that it is rooted in the body rather than purely in the mind. Carrados does not talk about his technique; for instance, he ‘did not seek to explain that when he could no longer see the faces of men the power was gradually given to him of looking into their hearts, to which some in their turn—strong, free spirits—instinctively responded’ (142), one such spirit presumably being Madeline Whitmarsh, who thanks Carrados ‘for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly’ (145), in another telling example of the stories’ interest in using the language of blindness to stress Carrados’ powers of perception. But it is not only on the topic of human souls that he is reticent; ‘there were experiences among the finer perceptions that the blind man did not willingly discuss’ (204), and some of these are supernatural. Carrados figures the force of many of the sensations he experiences as rooted in the material when he explains to Mrs Bycourt that ‘[y]our dynamo, designed to transform mechanical force into electrical energy, has here in some obscure way also changed physical effect into psychological experience’ (599), but

66 

L. HOPKINS

some of his perceptions and responses clearly transcend the material. When Jim Tulloch shakes hands ‘[a]n extraordinary impulse swept over Carrados to drag his friend back into the house’ (417); Tulloch is in fact in danger of his life, although he is saved by what we are invited to consider as a genuine miracle. In one instance Carrados even seems to feel a presence from beyond the grave: ‘Even as he purchased the sheaf of lilies to lay on William Byles’s shroud, Carrados was not altogether free from an illusion of sharing a rather exquisite joke with that mordant individual’ (443). It is in the presence of the supernatural that the Carrados stories, and Carrados himself, differ most significantly from the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In ‘The Ghost at Massingham Mansions’ Carrados says, When I was a boy I used to be extraordinarily fond of ghost stories, I remember, but even while reading them I always had an uneasy suspicion that when it came to the necessary detail of explaining the mystery I should be defrauded with some subterfuge as ‘by an ingenious arrangement of hidden wires the artful Muggles had contrived,’ etc., or ‘an optical illusion effected by means of concealed mirrors revealed the modus operandi of the apparition.’ I thought that I had been swindled. (320)

He used to fear being deceived, and being led to mistake the mundane for supernatural; but perhaps because he is no longer capable of being deceived by an optical illusion, Carrados finds that now he is blind he experiences some genuine mystery. In ‘The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt’ the presence of the Bone Mound in which plague victims were buried gives two unrelated people nightmares (599), and in ‘The Eastern Mystery’, Carrados makes the case that Tulloch’s relic is one of the nails from the cross on which Jesus was crucified and then says, ‘We are Christians. No matter how unorthodox, no matter how non-committal our attitude may have grown, there is upon us the unconscious and hereditary influence of century after century of blind and implicit faith’ (426), finally surfacing the idea, which has been becoming increasingly clear, that blindness can be effectively equated with faith. This suggestion is further developed in ‘The Missing Witness Sensation’ when Carrados says to the man whom he supposes to be blind, ‘Seeing “through a glass, darkly”, said the Jewish tent-maker of old’ (608), a perfect image of imperfect physical sight being complemented by metaphysical perception. That is how Carrados himself sees, and his own blind faith is rewarded by much more

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

67

dramatic experiences and proofs than fall to Holmes’ share, and ultimately by a much more optimistic view of the world. But the Carrados stories not only interrogate the insistence on physical vision which underpins Holmes’ method of detection; they also foreshadow those of another detective who is sensitive to the invisible, for Carrados says, ‘Whenever I fail to get to sleep at night … I commit a murder, forgery, a robbery or what not, with all its ramifications’ (475). As we shall see in the next chapter, this is also how Father Brown detects and Chesterton’s stories too present physical sight as limited, partial, and imperfect.

Note 1. Carrados appeared in 1914, one year before Clinton H. Stagg’s Thornley Colton, who called himself a problemist because ‘I’m not a detective, for a detective arrests, and then tries to fix the guilt. I fix the guilt first’ (259). Like Carrados, Colton considers his blindness an advantage, for his brain ‘had never been tricked by seeing eyes’ (114) and ‘my other senses are abnormally developed to compensate the loss of sight’ (184); he also boasts that ‘I can read hands as a physiognomist reads faces’ because when he shakes hands ‘My long index finger always rests lightly on the keyboard of silence—the wrist’ (43) and calls his fingers ‘my ten eyes’ (88). However he is older than Carrados, has been blind from birth, and his eyes pain him, having to be swathed in alcohol-soaked bandages after exposure to bright light; as a consequence he always wears ‘smoke-glass, tortoise-shell library spectacles, which made of his eyes two great circles of dull brown [and] brought out the whiteness of his face strikingly’ (9).

References Annandale, Thomas. The Malformations, Diseases and Injuries of the Fingers and Toes. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1865. Bowdoin Van Riper, A. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bramah, Ernest. The Collected Max Carrados Investigations: the Cases of the Renowned Blind Edwardian Detective. Leonaur, 2013. Bulwer-Lytton, E. G. E. The Coming Race [1871]. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994a. ———. ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994b.

68 

L. HOPKINS

———. ‘The Brown Hand’. In The Best Supernatural Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1979. ———. ‘The Cardboard Box’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993a. ———. ‘A Case of Identity’. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994c. ———. ‘The Crooked Man’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993b. ———. ‘The Final Problem’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993c. ———. ‘The Greek Interpreter’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993d. ———. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993e. ———. ‘The Musgrave Ritual’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993f. ———. ‘The Naval Treaty’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993g. ———. ‘The Red-Headed League’. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994d. ———. ‘The Reigate Squire’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993h. ———. ‘The Resident Patient’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993i. ———. ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994e. ———. ‘Silver Blaze’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993j. ———. ‘The Yellow Face’. In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993k. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Introduced by Jeff Wallace. London: Wordsworth, 1998. Desmond, Adrian. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palentontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. London: Blond & Briggs, 1982. Ellegard, Alvar. Darwin and the General Reader. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1958. Goldsmith, Hilary A. ‘Darwin and the Detective: Aspects of the Darwinian Worldview and the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle’. Clues 28.2 (Fall 2010): 19–28. Haggard, H. Rider. ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’. The Strand Magazine 44 (1912), 672–685, and 45 (1913), 2–11 and 123–131.

3  SCOUTING SKILLS: MAX CARRADOS, SHERLOCK HOLMES’ BLIND RIVAL 

69

Ledger, Sally. ‘The New Woman and the crisis of Victorianism’. In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 22–44. Matus, Jill L. Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Sen, Mrittika, and Santosh Honavar, ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of a Literary Ophthalmologist’, Indian Journal of Ophthalmology, 69.12 (2021): 3394–3396. Stagg, Clinton H. The Problemist: The Complete Adventures of Thornley Colton, Blind Detective [1915, 1916]. Landisville, Penn.: Coachwhip Books, 2010. Stoker, Bram. The Jewel of Seven Stars [1903]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. ‘The Magnifying Glass: Spectacular Distance in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” and Beyond’. Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 36 (2003): 3–17. Voyles, Katherine. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lens’, Clues 35.1 (spring 2017): 40–50. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago, 1992. Warnicke, Retha M. ‘The physical deformities of Anne Boleyn and Richard III: myth and reality’. Parergon, new series 5 (1986): 135–153.

CHAPTER 4

An Unseen Hook and an Invisible Line: Father Brown

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown first appeared in print in 1911. Father J. Brown (we never discover what the initial stands for) is a Catholic priest serving first at Cobhole in Essex, then afterwards in London and, briefly, in South America—a career trajectory which might seem improbable, but then Father Brown is often improbable: Tuppence in Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime says, ‘It wasn’t a Father Brown problem … One needs a certain atmosphere from the start. One must be doing something quite ordinary, and then bizarre things begin to happen’ (Christie 1929: 146). He is often accompanied by a Frenchman who answers to Flambeau (though his real name is Duroc), who starts out as a master criminal but after being led to repentance by Father Brown turns his hand to detection, before retiring from that too. (Flambeau was not alone in turning to religion after encountering Father Brown; Alec Guinness converted to Catholicism after playing the role.) In ‘The Secret of Father Brown’ the narrator declares of Flambeau, ‘Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection’ (493), signalling a nervousness typical in crime fiction about the status of the detective and the justification for pursuing and exposing one’s fellow creatures; however, Chesterton has no such worries about Father Brown, who always acts only from the purest of motives and whose status as someone empowered to hear secrets in the confessional leaches out into his more mundane encounters. As a priest Father Brown inevitably lacks close personal ties (though © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_4

71

72 

L. HOPKINS

one story reveals the existence of a sister and a niece), but he is also devoid of weaknesses, such as Holmes’ fondness for cocaine, and even of idiosyncrasies and habits (unless we count the fact that he always carries an umbrella). The result may seem unappealing to some—perhaps many— readers: Dorothy L. Sayers went to a guest lecture given by Chesterton at Oxford and ‘was relieved that “his speaking had none of that aggressive and dogmatic quality which his writings are apt to assume when read aloud”’ (Brabazon 51), though that might perhaps say more about the personalities of people who choose to read him aloud (Evelyn Waugh’s Lady Marchmain comes to mind) than about Chesterton himself. Still, there can be no denying that Father Brown is almost aggressively moral in a way that most fictional detectives are not; he is also, however, an interesting study in the use of ocular proof. In the first of the Father Brown stories, ‘The Blue Cross’, the narrator says of Flambeau: ‘It was he who kept up an accountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope’ (18). This double use of visual aids, camera, and microscope together is indeed ingenious, but Flambeau is three times baffled and ultimately converted by a man who appears to the great French detective Valentin to have ‘eyes as empty as the North Sea’ and to belong to a group of ‘creatures, blind and helpless, like moles disinterred’ (18). This description is our first introduction to Father Brown, and it is carried through in a persistent figuring of him as visually handicapped in one way or another. Sometimes he cannot properly see what is happening because he is so short: in ‘The Flying Stars’ his view of the pantomime is obstructed by the head of Sir Leopold in front of him (71). He is also repeatedly described as someone characterised by excessive blinking. In ‘The Eye of Apollo’ we are told that ‘Father Brown could not look at anything without blinking’ (151); in ‘The Dagger with Wings’ we hear first that ‘Father Brown was blinking in his short-sighted way at the paper presented to him’ (443) and then later that ‘Father Brown was gazing into vacancy with his large grey eyes, which, when not blurred by his trick of blinking, were the one notable thing in his face’ (451); and in ‘The Mourner of Marne’ he says, ‘I can’t help blinking when I see light’ (618), although there is also a metaphorical meaning here because he has just understood something. Finally he is short-sighted: in ‘The Perishing of the Pendragons’ we are told for the first time that he wears spectacles (282), and they are mentioned repeatedly thereafter.

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

73

As so often in early detective fiction, spectacles in the Father Brown stories may well be sinister: although the genial Sir Aaron Armstrong sports ‘sparkling spectacles’ in ‘The Three Tools of Death’ (174), they are much more alarming on some other people who wear them. In ‘The Arrow of Heaven’ Father Brown is brought up short by the unexpected sight of some surprising eyewear because ‘had never seen America before, and more especially … he had never seen that sort of tortoiseshell spectacles before; for the fashion at this time had not spread to England. His first sensation was that of gazing at some goggling sea-monster with a faint suggestion of a diver’s helmet’ (359). Later in the same story the American lawyer Barnard Blake has a monocle (362) and in the suggestively titled ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’ the doctor uses a lens; however, none of these visual aids allow their wearers to see as clearly as the short-sighted, manically blinking Father Brown (193). Martin Edwards notes of Chesterton that ‘[c]heerfully provocative, he claimed that “The Christian church can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting that official detective—the State.” His faith led him to express scepticism about scientific detection and devices such as lie detectors. What mattered most was “knowledge of man and society”’ (Edwards 2022: 83). Father Brown, too, bases his assessment of situations on assessment of character rather than on external appearances or scientific evidence. Particularly striking in this respect is the contrast between Father Brown and Valentin, for Valentin, the detective in the first story, is himself the murderer in the second, at the end of which he commits suicide. Valentin is an ocular detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. In ‘The Blue Cross’ he sees Flambeau and Father Brown in the distance: ‘By the time he had substantially diminished the distance and magnified the two black figures in a vast microscope, he had perceived something else’ (27); the ‘something else’ proves to be the identity of Father Brown with the priest he noticed earlier, but it is deceptive because Valentin takes this insignificant-­looking priest to be a credulous and gullible person who is about to be robbed of a precious relic, whereas Father Brown has in fact already secreted the relic and is stringing the would-be thief along. The suggestion that Valentin is like Holmes is strengthened as he and the other detectives advance on Flambeau and Father Brown and find themselves having ‘to use the undignified attitudes of the deer-stalker, to crouch behind clumps of trees and even to crawl prostrate in deep grass’ (27–8); in illustrations and adaptations Holmes so often wears a deer-stalker that it has become virtually synonymous with him. But in ‘The Secret Garden’

74 

L. HOPKINS

the relative positions of priest and detective are abruptly reversed when Father Brown leads the assembled company in the discovery of Valentin’s body and explains to them that the legendary policeman has been driven to murder and suicide by his rabid anti-clericalism, which led him to murder a millionaire before he could make a will leaving his fortune to the Catholic church. As the shocked company look down at the body the narrator observes that ‘on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato’ (48); now it is Valentin who cannot see, and Father Brown who looks on and judges him. Father Brown himself reaches his conclusions by a variety of methods. At the beginning of ‘The Queer Feet’ the narrator tells us, ‘If … you were to meet a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the most singular stroke of his life, he would probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage’ (49); as the story unfolds, ‘for an instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats’ (53). Almost as if he were Max Carrados, he is consciously using other senses than sight here, and although the idea of smelling evil might seem to be metaphorical it is pulled back to reality by being connected to the smell of rats. It is also in ‘The Queer Feet’ that the narrator says of Father Brown, ‘His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million’ (54); this is neither seeing, nor smelling, nor hearing, but apparently an almost visceral form of intuition. Usually, however, Father Brown sees—except that he does not focus on what is actually there but perceives things through absence, through intuition, or through empathy. In ‘The Wrong Shape’, for instance, Father Brown says, ‘I have seen wicked things in a Turkey carpet’ (105), and explains, ‘When that Indian spoke to us …. I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe’ (109), which enables him to perceive that the man is a nihilist. This is not seeing in the sense of Sherlock Holmes’ close observation of visual detail but rather a kind of extra-sensory apprehension which reveals moral or spiritual rather than physical facts. It is true that Father Brown does sometimes observe in the normal sense: in ‘The Perishing of the Pendragons’ he realises that the tower is burned to deceive ships because it looks like a second light (290), and later reveals that he had appeared withdrawn earlier in the day because he was seasick—‘I felt simply horrible. But feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things’ (291). He also sometimes uses visual aids, as in ‘The Doom of the

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

75

Darnaways’, where he borrows a magnifying glass to look at the titles of the books in the portrait (472), and at other times too he seems to see simply what is there, as in ‘The Three Tools of Death’, where he observes the signs that Sir Aaron was thrown from a window and draws them to the attention of the detective (178). Other acts of seeing, however, are more complex and more loaded. In ‘The Sins of Prince Saradine’, a crucial visual experience seems at first to be a purely physical one: ‘Father Brown awoke tardily to a second truth. In the mirrors before him he could see the silent door standing open, and the silent Mr Paul standing in it’ (124); soon however, mystical overtones accrue to the episode when Father Brown says of the mirrors, ‘Confound this crystal palace! … One sees everything too many times. It’s like a dream’ (125), and later he imagines the house as ‘looking-glass land’ (128). A particularly telling example of the crossover between physical and moral vision comes in ‘The Eye of Apollo’, where real eyes and literal acts of seeing soon take on metaphorical overtones. Arriving to visit his friend Flambeau in new office premises, Father Brown notices that ‘one glaring object was erected outside the office just above Flambeau’s. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two of three of the office windows’ (147). The eye might suggest one of the symbols of Freemasonry, which both Father Brown and his creator would have perceived as a mortal enemy of Catholicism; in ‘The Duel of Dr Hirsch’ the Duc de Valognes assumes that an apparent outrage is due to ‘some plot of the Jews and Freemasons’ (221), and one imagines that Chesterton himself might well have been in sympathy with such a fear. Officially however the cult in ‘The Eye of Apollo’ is, as the title suggests, one of the sun, and the man who claims to be the New Priest of Apollo says he can look at the sun with his naked eyes; conversely his victim, a wealthy woman, is ashamed of the fact that she is blind, which she regards as a weakness. She first smashes the glasses worn by her sister, who suffers from the same hereditary eye condition, and then falls down the lift shaft because she cannot see that the lift is not there. She is literally blind, but she is also spiritually so because she has been misled by a false priest who has induced her to exacerbate her condition by staring at the sun on the grounds that it is a god, thus outraging natural law and—as Chesterton and Father Brown would have seen it— also committing blasphemy. It is because of the complexities attached to the idea of vision that the fundamental condition of a Father Brown story is the importance of the

76 

L. HOPKINS

unseen. One of the stories is called ‘The Vanishing of Vaudrey’ (563) and another, ‘The Vampire of the Village’, features a man who appears to have vanished (753). In ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’, ‘somehow that very fact of the head being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something dreadful to the sound that followed’ (460), and in ‘The Actor and the Alibi’ Father Brown explains how the murder was committed: ‘in the principal scene of The School for Scandal one of the principal performers remains for a considerable time on the stage, but is not seen’ (561). There is also a story called ‘The Invisible Man’ which is about a postman, who as Father Brown explains is psychologically invisible (76): everyone can see him but no one registers his presence. The idea of psychological invisibility recurs in ‘The Curse of the Golden Cross’, where the mad collector threatens the professor that ‘I may be in any form among those about you; but I shall be in that alone at which you have forgotten to look’ (422). Perhaps the most famous mention of invisibility, because it was later quoted in Brideshead Revisited, comes in ‘The Queer Feet’, where Father Brown says of the criminal, ‘I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread’ (60). On the face of it, Father Brown has let the criminal go, and the ostensible reason for his use of a fishing metaphor to explain his action is that it is a club called ‘The Twelve True Fishermen’ that has been subjected to a robbery; however, because the criminal is Flambeau (on one of his final outings before his final repentance and conversion), who Father Brown knows has been bred a Catholic, the priest is confident that the moral hook he has sunk into Flambeau’s soul will operate in the same way as the spiritual leadership exercised by the twelve disciples when Jesus declared them to be fishers of men. The hook may be unseen and the line invisible, but they will hold. Some of the stories are concerned not directly with invisibility but with the ways in which what is seen can be controlled and manipulated, sometimes with particular attention to the question of what can be seen from where, and sometimes by considering other forms of visual direction and misdirection. Omer Schwartz observes that in his biography of William Cobbett Chesterton ‘addresses the human ability to see reality through a veil, arguing that by “a weird mesmerism which it is not here necessary to analyse, what people read has a sort of magic power over their sight,” laying a “spell on their eyes, so that they see what they expect to see”’. He characterised Cobbett as ‘A “man without these magic spectacles” who “did not see what he expected to see, but what he saw”’ (Schwartz 2019:

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

77

66). The Father Brown stories are full of tensions between what and how characters expect to see and what is really there. In ‘The Actor and the Alibi’ Father Brown says ‘If you want to know what a lady is really like, don’t look at her; for she may be too clever for you. Don’t look at the men round her, for they may be too silly about her. But look at some other woman who is always near to her, and especially one who is under her. You will see in that mirror her real face’ (560). The particular woman whom he has in mind is fully visible, but her appearance is deceptive in that she is passing as a good wife and has in fact killed her husband; Father Brown extrapolates from that, but suggestively he does not cast all women as false in appearance but insinuates an understated but implicitly class-based distinction between a ‘lady’, who may deceive, and a ‘woman’ whose evidence will be more reliable. He mandates a similar kind of directed vision in ‘The Hammer of God’. The blacksmith says ‘I believe that One who walks invisible in every house defended the honour of mine’ (142), but Father Brown guesses that if the crime was committed by someone invisible the perpetrator must have been physically (and as it turns out psychologically) invisible rather than spiritually so; moreover, once he has identified the vicar as the criminal and realised that he must have been on the top of the church tower he reproves him, ‘Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from’ (144). On one level this is a literal remark, referring to the fact that the vicar has committed a crime from a height, but there is also an inevitable second layer of meaning in that the vicar has only been able to do this because he neglected to look up and fear the judgement of God. At the beginning of the fourth collection of Father Brown stories, The Secret of Father Brown, the priest himself offers a reluctant and tentative account of his methods. In ‘The Secret of Father Brown’, the first story in the collection and the one from which the book as a whole takes its name, an American named Grandison Chase visits Flambeau, now retired from detection, living in Spain, and calling himself by his real name of Duroc, at a time when Father Brown is staying with him. Chase, who has apparently read the previous Father Brown books, is delighted to be introduced to the man himself and keen to hear the secret of his success: ‘Dr Watson had to listen to some pretty exact expositions of Holmes’s method with its observation of material details. But nobody seems to have got onto any full account of your method, Father Brown, and I was informed you declined the offer to give a series of lectures in the States on the matter’ (495). This unprecedented excursion into the purportedly extradiegetic is

78 

L. HOPKINS

part of a growing self-consciousness on Chesterton’s part which has already resulted in a classic sleight-of-hand typical of the detective story as a genre in ‘The Purple Wig’, when the newspaper correspondent writes to his editor about what he has heard: ‘Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print, such as the story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog, or the thing that was done in the quarry’ (268). This listing of tales which cannot be told first occurs in the Sherlock Holmes stories (some of them have since been attempted as a form of fan fiction); Chase’s reference to Holmes’ ‘method’ as explained to Watson cements the sense that Chesterton conceives of his detective as a serious successor of Holmes, and invites the reader to assume that Father Brown too must have a method. Father Brown confirms that he declined an invitation to explain his own method, and remains reticent in the face of Mr Chase’s questions until he is informed that his supposed technique is being expounded by a member of ‘The Second Sight Sisterhood of Indianapolis’, at which point he cracks and electrifies the American by saying ‘You see, it was I who killed all those people’ (496). He insists that he is speaking literally—‘I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders’ (497)—but in fact it immediately becomes clear that what he means is that he saw the crimes in his mind’s eye, imaginatively reconstructing them by empathising with the perpetrators. In ‘The Queer Feet’ Father Brown says ‘I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if I were going to commit it’ (61). In ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ Father Brown says ‘I can’t prove it; but I can do more—I can see it’ (172). In the remaining stories which make up The Secret of Father Brown the priest proceeds to recount a number of examples of cases he has solved until in the final story of the volume, ‘The Secret of Flambeau’, we return to the Flambeau-Grandison Chase frame narrative and Father Brown elaborates further on his own method: ‘you contract your mind like the camera focus—the thing shapes and then sharpens—and then, suddenly, it comes!’ (626). However this, like the misleading declaration that he himself committed all the murders, is disingenuous, for although there may indeed be a degree of concentration and focusing involved in Father Brown’s processes of deduction, there are also several other things. One of the most important of those additional factors is faith, and the way this works is perhaps most tellingly illustrated in ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, in which an impatient millionaire dismisses new religions: ‘Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

79

when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them … from now on I only believe what I see’ (399). This looks like a classic Father Brown interest in invisibility and vanishing, but it proves to be a prelude to a sustained meditation on the amount of faith to be placed in visual evidence. In another story, ‘The Curse of the Golden Cross’, Father Brown says ‘I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, “I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable”’ (431), and this idea is interestingly riffed on in ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, where a surprising number of people prove ready to believe the impossible and only Father Brown is prepared to entertain the idea of the improbable (but true). Another millionaire, Mr Wynd, disappears from behind a locked door outside which Father Brown and several sceptical people are waiting. Because they did not see him come out through the door, all those sceptical people are willing to leap to the conclusion that his disappearance is miraculous, but Father Brown remembers the window, and deduces that Wynd, induced by a gunshot to stick his head out of the window, has had a noose slung round his neck and been hauled out by it. At the heart of ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’ is a question about whether we can trust what we see. This is a recurrent concern in the stories: in ‘The Duel of Dr Hirsch’ Father Brown says ‘I doubt every sight my eyes have seen since morning’ (220) and in ‘The Man with Two Beards’ Father Brown says ‘I’ve seen a good many things acted before my eyes that I didn’t believe in’ (527). In ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, Father Brown explains towards the beginning of the story that ‘I do really want to see Mr Wynd … I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to see him’ (408). This desire has arisen because in the street outside the millionaire’s apartment Father Brown has run into an Irishman whom he knows and has seen him fire a shot at a wall. The second millionaire, the secretary, and a pushy cold-caller all infer that the poor credulous priest believes that a shot fired in malice might, presumably through a form of sympathetic magic, have a real physical effect on its victim; the reader may also initially assume that, but by the end of the tale it seems more likely that Father Brown had already considered the possibilities of the millionaire looking out of the window. Later in the narrative Professor Vair seeks to persuade the three initially sceptical witnesses (now all converted to the idea of a miracle) that what they believe they have seen with their own eyes was in fact an optical illusion engineered by Father Brown with the aid of a dastardly set of tricks rooted in the deceptive practices of Catholicism: ‘Father

80 

L. HOPKINS

Brown’s religion has always understood the psychology of atmospheres, and knows how to appeal to everything simultaneously; even, for instance, to the sense of smell. It understands those curious effects produced by music on animals and human beings’ (409). The witnesses are unconvinced, but Professor Vair persists: ‘here we have a very powerful and persuasive personality bent upon fixing only one picture on your minds’ (409). He also maintains that ‘consciousness is not continuous’; there are ‘black flashes of blindness between the flashes of sight’ (409), and it must have been during a collective flash that the door of the millionaire’s room did actually open even though the witnesses are all sure that it did not. The witnesses are outraged by this suggestion, with one of them exclaiming ‘What the devil do they think is to happen to the world if nobody knows whether he’s seen anything or not?’ (410). Ironically, it is because they know from the natural evidence of their own eyes that the door did not open that they are prepared to accept instead that something supernatural occurred on the other side of it. Even more ironically, Father Brown himself, the man whose faith enjoins belief in miracles, never for a moment entertains the idea that this was one. In this sense his status as a priest, as so often in the stories, is a paradox: he is conditioned to believe in some things, but by the same token he is also conditioned not to believe in some other things. Chesterton is not afraid to include the preternatural: in ‘The Secret Garden’ the narrator says of Valentin (who is about to commit murder and suicide), ‘Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives’ (33), and in ‘The Worst Crime in the World’, ‘Father Brown looked round as under an advancing shadow of premonition’ (582). The stories are also obsessed with the sensibility and sensitivities of Celts and Gaels, such as O’Brien in ‘The Secret Garden’ and the Macnabs in ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’, and in ‘The Honour of Israel Gow’ we are told of Glengyle Castle that ‘there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lies more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men’ (90). O’Brien, the Macnabs, and the Ogilvies of Glengyle can all apprehend things through a second sight which defies rational explanation, and in ‘The Mourner of Marne’ Father Brown is even prepared to believe that God has intervened directly in a way which really is miraculous: he tells the supposed eye-witness ‘you were blinded—that you might not see … God had mercy on your innocence, and he turned your face away from that unnatural strife. He set a wall of sand and silence

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

81

between you and what really happened on that horrible red shore’ (622). At one point in ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’ there is a hint of the genuinely preternatural when Father Brown himself seems to move in a mysterious way—‘How long the fourth figure had stood there none of the earnest disputants could tell, but he had every appearance of waiting respectfully and even timidly for the opportunity to say something urgent’ (408)—and in ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’, The priest passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting psychic,’ he said. ‘I believe I’m quite dazzled with daylight up in that room and couldn’t see things straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there were something uncanny about Darnaway’s figure standing before that portrait.’ (467)

In ‘The Blue Cross’ too the narrator muses, ‘there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss’ (19); what is elfin is not necessarily divine, but it may be preternatural if not supernatural. More often, though, natural laws are obeyed in the Father Brown stories, and the evidence of one’s eyes is entirely to be trusted; it is just that one needs to make quite sure what exactly one is looking at. It is in precision vision that Father Brown’s method really lies. Even on occasions when he may appear to be vague there is in fact a logic to what and how he sees. In ‘The Secret Garden’ he exclaims ‘Will my head split— or will it see? I see half—I only see half’ (45), but this seeming incompleteness is in fact a form of completeness because the solution hinges on the fact that a decapitated head does not belong to the body next to which it lies. There is a similar underlying logic in ‘The Sins of Prince Saradine’ when he realises that ‘[t]he heavy brown eyes of Antonelli were the heavy brown eyes of Mrs Anthony; and in a flash he saw half the story’ (126): in guessing that Mrs Anthony is the mother of Antonelli he does literally guess at half his heredity. The central device on which many of the Father Brown stories depend is his ability to detect visual misdirection. In ‘The God of the Gongs’ Father Brown explains that the best tactic for remaining unseen is ‘[t]o make sure that everybody is looking at something else’ (302–3), and criminal after criminal tries to do exactly that. In the first of the stories, ‘The Blue Cross’, Valentin ‘remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once by a pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire; once by having to pay for an unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through a

82 

L. HOPKINS

telescope at a comet that might destroy the world’ (20). That idea of luring people to look in one direction to distract their gaze from somewhere else recurs repeatedly. In ‘The Queer Feet’ Father Brown says, ‘There is the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted into air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on one quite simple fact— some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men’s thoughts away from it’ (62); the explanation of the table proves to be that this is Flambeau at work again, this time pretending to be a waiter whenever he is visible to the guests and a gentleman whenever he is in sight of the other waiters, and successfully absconding with the silver because he is not the object of anyone’s attention—until, of course, he is detected and spoken to by Father Brown. In ‘The Arrow of Heaven’ Father Brown says Drage ‘wanted us to think the murders were miracles because … well, because he knew they weren’t’ (372), in ‘The Point of the Pin’ Father Brown guesses that Henry Sand ‘tried to lay the other trail that led to the river, simply and solely because it led away from the flats’ (734), and in ‘The Paradise of Thieves’ the supposed robber king declares that his stronghold ‘is something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable’ (206). There are also other reasons why people may sometimes not see clearly. It might be an issue of perspective: in ‘The Song of the Flying Fish’ Father Brown says, ‘A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself’ (544), and goes on to explain that I was saying that a man may be in the mood to look for something very distant, and not realise that is something very close, something very close to himself, perhaps something very like himself. It was a strange and outlandish thing that you saw when you looked down at this road. I suppose it never occurred to you to consider what he saw when he looked up at that balcony? (545)

Here Father Brown is not thinking of what he himself can see but of how and what others can see, and he does the same thing in ‘The Vampire of the Village’, where the supposed parson refuses to meet the woman his son loves; Father Brown deduces that ‘he didn’t really object to seeing her. He objected to her seeing him’ (766). There are also references to mesmerism, a form of psychological control which had been given prominence by a text often referred to in detective fiction, Gerald Du Maurier’s Trilby.1 Mesmerism in Trilby takes the form of convincing the eponymous

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

83

heroine that she can sing, but it can also be a way of deliberately controlling what people think they see: in ‘The Dagger with Wings’ Father Brown observes that the man who is passing as Aylmer ‘was leaning forward, and looking at him with a strange intensity that was almost like that of a mesmerist’ (448), and in ‘The Red Moon of Meru’ Hardcastle says, ‘I think we must exhaust the possibilities of mesmerism before we talk about magic’ (594); later he declares that the Indian rope trick ‘does not really happen, but the spectators are mesmerised into imagining that it happened. So we were all mesmerised into imagining this theft had happened’ (602). The supposed Aylmer (really John Strake in disguise) fails and Hardcastle is mistaken, but the idea of mesmerism is in itself one that fits in well with the Father Brown stories’ interest in visual misdirection. Almost equally prominent is an insistence on the importance of what is not seen. In ‘The Secret Garden’ the narrator says of Lord Galloway, ‘the instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing—he saw what was not there. He saw that Commandant O’Brien was absent, and that Lady Margaret was absent too’ (35). In ‘The Perishing of the Pendragons’ the sole surviving Spanish captive is said to have warned that ‘generation after generation the house of Pendragon should never see him or his, but should know by very certain signs that he and his vengeance were alive’ (279). For Chesterton, what is not seen is as important as what is, but it is extremely easy to be deceived. Lord Galloway leaps to the conclusion that because O’Brien is not in a particular room he must have been in the garden, committing murder there; his is a genuine mistake which he ultimately acknowledges, but the reigning Pendragon deliberately attempts to deceive as many people as he can into believing in an invisible attacker as a way of diverting attention from his plan to murder his nephew. In both cases absence functions as a form of misdirection. Father Brown himself, however, is particularly adept at detecting through absence. In ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ he says, ‘That’s all right, Flambeau, old man; I saw what I wanted. Or, rather, I didn’t see what I didn’t want’ (161); that is, he has not found any image of the sword in an unbroken state, and so is able to reconstruct a startling story of murder, betrayal, and vengeance. In ‘The Mirror of the Magistrate’ Father Brown deduces both the appearance of the murderer and the location of the victim, saying of the former, ‘I know what he looked like … I can almost see him as he came in at the front door, in the gleam of the hall lamp; his figure, his clothes, even his face!’ (512), and of the latter, ‘He was sitting in that bungalow. I read that lesson in the dark, at the

84 

L. HOPKINS

beginning, in red and golden stars across the garden’ (513), and later in the same story he says to the policeman, ‘We could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur Travers saw’ (515). All that Father Brown has to go on is a shattered mirror, and yet by thinking about who would have seen what in that mirror and considering the ways in which reflections may mislead he is able to solve the crime and successfully identify the most unlikely of culprits. In ‘The Quick One’ Father Brown infers the existence of a witness from the presence of a glass of whisky (653); in ‘The Green Man’ he says, ‘Almost every man … will play with anything shaped like a sword or a dagger, even if it is a paper-knife. That is why I thought it so odd when the lawyer didn’t’ (689); and in ‘The Point of the Pin’ he explains to Lord Stanes why the detectives are failing to solve the crime: ‘It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem’ (732). Father Brown himself can always see the problem, and therein lies the secret of his success. In ‘The Blast of the Book’, where a playful clerk tricks his employer into believing that a book can cause people to disappear and Father Brown exposes the fraud, Professor Openshaw says, ‘The more I learn, the more I fancy they lose by merely looking for appearances. Now if they’d look a little into Disappearances—’ (664); the professor is perfectly right, for in the Father Brown stories disappearances are indeed more significant than appearances. Father Brown also has an unerring ability to read faces. In ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’ he explains that the three tramps killed Mr Wynd because once, long ago, he summed up their personalities just by looking at them and ‘twenty years have not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult when he dared to know them at a glance’ (414), but he himself reads people’s faces all the time. In ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’ Father Brown, perceiving the explanation, exclaims, ‘Can’t you see it in the man’s face? Why, look at his eyes!’ (195). In ‘The Strange Crime of John Boulnois’, when he sees Mrs Boulnois ‘he looked at her and immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude”’ (323). In ‘The Actor and the Alibi’ he says of the murderess ‘I knew the sort of person she was five minutes after I clapped eyes on her’ (559) and in ‘The Scandal of Father Brown’ he explains that he knew by instinct that the romantic-looking man with whom the woman is eloping bore the unromantic name of Potter while the much less distinguished-looking person was a famous poet: ‘I knew it the moment I clapped eyes on both of them. But I verified it afterwards’ (640). Father Brown would presumably differentiate between himself and Wynd in this respect on the grounds that he himself

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

85

is right, and moreover is appraising people’s characters rather than determining their destinies: in ‘The Duel of Dr Hirsch’ he declares that ‘I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts’ (219), by which he means he apparently means that he can guess people’s behaviour from their characters, and in ‘The Mistake in the Machine’ he implicitly confirms this when he says, ‘Let it be granted … that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you what he didn’t do’ (248). In all these instances a focus on what is not seen and an instinctive, sight-based evaluation of character converge to inform his analysis. To analyse people in this way involves close study of them, and focusing on them rather than on oneself. In the world of the Father Brown stories, one of the worst crimes that can be committed is looking in the mirror. In ‘The Actor and the Alibi’ Father Brown calls the murderess ‘the sort of person who had looked in the mirror before looking out of the window, and it is the worst calamity of mortal life’ (559). In ‘The Mourner of Marne’ we are told of Maurice Marne, who turns out to be the murderer, that ‘his success had made him live in a house of mirrors’ (615). These are people who are concerned only with themselves; by contrast ‘The Man in the Passage’ ends with the judge asking why Father Brown was the only one of the three men to recognise his own reflection, to which the priest replies, ‘Really, my lord, I don’t know … unless it is because I don’t look at it so often’ (238). Here we might almost be back in the world of the morality play, with Self-Regard as a modern vice and Observation of Others as its counterbalancing virtue. But there are also other vices and virtues at work in the Father Brown stories. As a Catholic priest, Father Brown is of course celibate, and there is never any hint that he so much as thinks as about sex. The stories do, though. In ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’ the Australian heir, who has a game leg, ‘seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of Oedipus’ (461); the innocence of Oedipus consisted in not knowing his own identity, and thus failing to realise that the woman he had married and had children by was his own mother. The lurking suggestion of incest is confirmed shortly afterwards when the doctor says of the Darnaways, ‘If you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate whether you like it or not’ (469), and the idea of degeneration recurs (albeit ironically) in ‘The Green Man’ when Father Brown says of an honourable naval lieutenant, ‘Mr Rook is a monster … He is an anachronism, an atavism, a brute survival of the Stone Age’ (688). Mr Rook is a monster only in the strict Darwinian sense of differing from

86 

L. HOPKINS

others of his species; the clear implication is that humanity as a whole is deteriorating, and Mr Rook’s exceptionality may be welcome in moral terms but is odd in evolutionary ones. This fear of degeneration is something else the Father Brown stories share with Trilby, which as well as its obvious motif of mesmerism also has an interest in evolution: Little Billee is reading On the Origin of Species for the third time (174) and the vicar quarrels with him over this (189), and Little Billee, Taffy and the Laird discuss the marriage of l’Zouzou to an ugly American heiress in purely evolutionary terms and conclude that ‘She has no right to marry at all!’ (233). Against such a tendency to degenerate, and against human weakness in general, there is for Chesterton only one answer: religious faith. The surprise is for that for Father Brown faith is best demonstrated not by believing in miracles but by careful analysis of the ocular proof.

Note 1. Trilby features several times in Ngaio Marsh: Photo-Finish, Alleyn says Montague Reece is ‘Almost too good to be true. Like something out of Trilby’ (17); in her Tied up in Tinsel, Colonel Forrester says, ‘I saw Beerbohm Tree in Trilby … He died backwards over a table. It was awfully good’ (439); in Vintage Murder Bradley Vernon explains that ‘I was with Tree and afterwards with Du Maurier’ (352) and in Artists in Crime Cedric Malmsley ‘was almost an illustration for Trilby’ (598). Margery Allingham remembers the author of Trilby in Traitor’s Purse when Aubrey ‘had taken Amanda’s hand and was swinging it backwards and forwards in the careless inarticulate fashion which Gerald du Maurier used to use so effectively in so many of his scenes’ (49) and the stage adaptation of the book in Death of a Ghost in the Potters’ living room ‘The Chianti bottle and Roman shawl school of decoration now suggested less of the vie de Bohème than the set for an amateur production of Trilby’ (110).

References Allingham, Margery. Death of a Ghost [1934]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942. ———. Traitor’s Purse [1941]. London: J. M. Dent, 1985. Chesterton, G.  K. The Complete Father Brown Stories [1992]. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. Christie, Agatha. Partners in Crime [1929]. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Du Maurier, George. Trilby [1894]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Edwards, Martin. The Life of Crime. London: Collins Crime Club, 2022

4  AN UNSEEN HOOK AND AN INVISIBLE LINE: FATHER BROWN 

87

Marsh, Ngaio. Artists in Crime [1938]. London: HarperCollins, 2009a. ———. Photo-Finish [1980]. London: HarperCollins, 2009b. ———. Tied up in Tinsel [1971]. London: HarperCollins, 2009c. ———. Vintage Murder [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2009d. Schwartz, Omer. ‘The Social Role of Understanding in G.  K. Chesterton’s Detective Fiction’, Philosophy and Literature 43.1 (April 2019): 54–70.

PART III

Seeing Through Glass

CHAPTER 5

The Man with the Monocle: Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books are obsessed with visual aids. Whose Body, the first of the books, was originally intended to be called The Singular Adventure of the Man with the Golden Pince-Nez (Brabazon 87) because the body in the bath is wearing only a pair of pince-nez (11), and when Parker explains that Sir Reuben Levy had apparently left his house ‘in the middle of the night, disguised down to his skin, leaving behind his watch, purse, cheque-book, and—most important and mysterious of all—his spectacles, without which he can’t see a step, as he is extremely short-sighted’, Wimsey replies, ‘That is important’ (27); Mary McGlynn observes that Peter ‘can see through the parma violets and pince-nez’ (McGlynn 2019: 80) and is not deceived by them into thinking that the body in the bath is Sir Reuben, but he registers the significance of the eyewear which is not there. Many other characters in the books are also introduced to the reader with descriptions of what they wear on their eyes; there are frequent instances of imagery based on eyes; and interplay between people is often described in terms of how they look at each other rather than what they say. In this chapter I argue that Sayers’ interest in the physical facts and appurtenances of vision is ultimately a metaphor for focus of a more mental and spiritual kind, and that ways of seeing offer her an opportunity for thinking about ways of writing. The first thing that anyone ever notices about Lord Peter himself is his monocle. In the army his men called him ‘Winderpane’ (Gaudy Night © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_5

91

92 

L. HOPKINS

336); in ‘The Man with Copper Fingers’, Varden’s memory of Wimsey is that ‘[h]e had sleek, pale hair, and one of those rather stupid faces, with a long nose and a monocle’ (14–15), making him sound like a typical silly ass in the mould of Freddie in P. G. Wodehouse’s 1921 Jill the Reckless, who ‘groped for his eyeglass, which had fallen again. He regarded it a trifle sternly. He was fond of the little chap, but it was always doing that sort of thing’ (186). Reactions to Wimsey’s monocle vary. It is often seen as affected and effete: in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club one of the reasons Mrs Munns objects to Wimsey is that he has ‘a monocle, too, like that man we was reading about in the News of the World’ (186); in Have His Carcase Weldon asks, ‘What’s he want to wear that silly thing in his eye for?’ and Harriet, humouring him, says, ‘That’s just what I feel. It isn’t manly, is it?’ (234); in Murder Must Advertise Miss Parton when she and Miss Rossiter see Wimsey exclaims, ‘Look at the evening cloak and the gardenia, and, my dear, the monocle!’ (29). But the monocle is in fact deceptive, in ways understood by the doctor in ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, who says, ‘No use playing your bally-fool-with-­ an-eyeglass tricks on me, Wimsey’ (147). In Murder Must Advertise, when Willis follows ‘Bredon’ and Pamela to the house where drugs are on offer, ‘There was drink in oceans. There was dancing. There were what Mr Willis had heard described as orgies. And at the back of it all, he sensed something else, something that he did not quite understand; something that he was not precisely kept out of, but to which he simply had not the key’ (61). The partygoers who so baffle Willis include ‘a danseuse whose essential nakedness was enhanced and emphasised by the wearing of a top hat, a monocle and a pair of patent-leather boots’ (61). The monocle worn by the danseuse is a foolish accessory, but Wimsey, who switches between his own monocle and the glasses worn by his alter ego Bredon, possesses the key which Willis lacks and can see clearly in both societies. In the case of the danseuse, the monocle reveals inanity; in the case of Wimsey it conceals perspicuity. Moreover, the monocle has a practical use. Parker says of it, ‘My word, that’s a powerful lens’ (Whose Body, 32) and its power is proved when Wimsey examines the body in the bath: ‘Lord Peter, lifting the body quickly and cautiously, turned it over and inspected it with his head on one side, bringing his monocle into play with the air of the late Joseph Chamberlain inspecting a rare orchid’ (Whose Body 18). Sayers was forced to be coy about what he actually saw; in the first draft of the book both he and Parker instantly perceived that the dead man was uncircumcised and

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

93

so could not possibly be the Jewish Sir Reuben Levy, but the publisher would not allow this to be included and Wimsey is forced to fall back on noticing details such as flea bites and blisters which are incompatible with the life of a wealthy financier. Sayers does however sneak in a clue to her original intention: Sir Julian Freke writes in his confession that ‘I … put on Levy’s clothes … , not forgetting to take his spectacles, watch and other oddments’ (189). The old mantra that a man should check that he has his ‘testicles, spectacles, wallet and watch’ is obviously intended primarily to be comic, but if we remember it here it might well suggest an unexpected gloss for ‘other oddments’, and also hint at potentially Oedipal connotations for the books’ insistent references to eyes. This is only the first of many occasions in the books on which the monocle proves useful. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, for instance, Wimsey orders Bunter ‘give me the malacca with the foot-rule marked on it—and where’s my lens?’ (27), upon which ‘Bunter produced an innocent-looking monocle, which was, in reality, a powerful magnifier’ (28); later, handed General Fentiman’s shoes, ‘Wimsey turned them over and examined the soles very carefully, both with the lens and with the naked eye’ (51), and he assures George Fentiman that ‘[t]hat disgustin’ habit you have of smoking cigarettes down to the last millimetre would betray you anywhere. I’d only have to come on with a magnifyin’ glass and a pair of callipers to say “The criminal is my dear old friend George Fentiman. Arrest that man!”’ (6–7). In Strong Poison Blindfold Bill exhorts his fellow-worshippers, ‘let us not say, because this man wears a shiny eye-­ glass, that he is not a chosen vessel’ (159); he is right, because the monocle is as much a tool of Wimsey’s trade as skeleton keys were of Bill’s own former career as a burglar. Wimsey also uses other aids to vision. In Have His Carcase he is shown the razor used to kill Paul Alexis and ‘turned it over in his fingers, inspecting it carefully, first with the naked eye and secondly with a watchmaker’s lens’ (57), and later in the book Bunter produces field-glasses for Wimsey and Harriet to watch Umpelty fishing for the body (203). In ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, Wimsey says, ‘Doctor, we shall need your microscope’ (163) and in ‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face’ he lends his mirror to Miss Twitterton and ‘did not think it necessary to mention that the last time he had used that mirror it had been to examine the back teeth of a murdered man’ (245). He is always alert to the potential of mirrors: in Murder Must Advertise the supposed Mr Bredon says to Willis, ‘you really ought to take care, when you

94 

L. HOPKINS

are shadowing anybody, that they are not sitting opposite a mirror, or anything that will serve as a mirror’ (55). Nor is Wimsey alone in his use of visual aids; in Clouds of Witness Bunter, having just mentioned ‘his lordship’s big microscope he keeps up in town’ (67), himself produces a lens with which to examine Lady Mary’s skirt (68). This lens is in fact only one of the aids to vision employed by Bunter: in ‘The Article in Question’ Wimsey checks that Bunter has his ‘snapshot affair’ (30); in Whose Body, ‘the bathroom and the whole flat had been explored by the naked eye and the camera of the competent Bunter’ (41); and when he is offered a treat, ‘“There’s a Double Anastigmat with a set of supplementary lenses, my lord,” said Bunter, with a note almost of religious fervour’ (Whose Body, 21). Indeed when Bunter is first introduced in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club Bunter’s interest in cameras is almost the first thing we learn about him: Mr Murbles asks him, ‘Been doing any photography lately?’ (15) and Wimsey says to the secretary of the Bellona Club, ‘Don’t want a fuss made, but I’d like a few photographs of the place, just to look at it in absence and keep the lie of the land under my hawk-like optic, what?’ (37). In Have His Carcase Harriet too has progressed to a camera, with which she photographs the body of Paul Alexis before it is covered by the tide; like Wimsey and Bunter, she has learned to use the camera lens to support detection. As well as supporting detection, aids to vision also figure prominently in characterisation in the Wimsey stories. Time after time the first (and sometimes the only) thing we are told about newly introduced personages is what they wear in front of their eyes. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Murbles telling Wimsey about Lady Dormer is described as ‘leaning earnestly forward, and punctuating every sentence with sharp little jabs of his gold-mounted eye-glasses’ (20). In Five Red Herrings, the mystery bicycle-depositor ‘wore slightly tinted spectacles’ (84), the person who retrieves the bicycle is ‘wearing Crookes’ glasses’ (87), and Clarence Gordon cannot identify the man he saw because ‘he vore thpectacleth’ (204). In Strong Poison Philip Boyes’ father wears pince-nez (66) and Sylvia Marriot is ‘a pale, spectacled young woman in a Morris chair’ (100). In Have His Carcase Parker writes that Haviland Martin has a house in Cambridge ‘and makes his appearance there from time to time, dark spectacles and all’ (243). In Murder Must Advertise the supposed Bredon is described primarily in terms of eyewear—‘Miss Meteyard’s seen him. She says he’s like Bertie Wooster in horn-rims’ (10)—while Mr Garrett is introduced as ‘a bulky, dark youth in spectacles’ (9), which later prove a

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

95

handicap to him during the cricket match: Mr Tallboy ‘knew very well that Mr Garrett suffered from a certain timidity when facing fast bowlers. He knew, too, that Garrett had some justification, because he wore spectacles’ (251). Bredon’s glasses are of course partly intended to distinguish him from the monocle-wearing Wimsey: ‘In a taxi rolling south-west, Mr Bredon removed his spectacles, combed out his side-parting, stuck a monocle in his eye, and by the time he reached Piccadilly Circus was again Lord Peter Wimsey’ (90). Disambiguation of Wimsey and Bredon is also the purpose of the remark that the supposed Bredon makes of his supposed cousin, ‘He never even sees me in the street’ (31), but it is nevertheless suggestive; Wimsey and Bredon, we are to understand, may not look very different, but they see differently, and so are definitely two separate entities. However Bredon’s glasses also establish him as someone who can safely be disregarded, for despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Dorothy L.  Sayers herself wore glasses to correct short-sightedness and a squint (Hitchman 23), spectacles are consistently despised in the Wimsey books. At best, they damn their wearers as weaklings. In Clouds of Witness Wimsey at the American Embassy ‘damned the dinner, abandoned the polite, horn-rimmed secretaries, and leapt back into his taxi with a demand to be driven to Buckingham Palace’ (218). There he finds the ambassador, who can make decisions and is competent to help him; the secretaries in horn-­ rims, by contrast, may be polite but cannot actually achieve anything. In Unnatural Death, ‘The Misson door opened … displaying this undignified exhibition to the eyes of a lank young man in spectacles, who shook a long finger disapprovingly and said, “Now, you children,” without the slightest effect and apparently without the faintest expectation of producing any’ (147); once Wimsey and Parker are inside, they find that the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson wears ‘a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, the frames of which had at one time been broken and bound with wire’ (149). The lank young man is ineffectual in the same way as the horn-rimmed secretaries; the Rev. Hallelujah, who cannot even keep his glasses in one piece, is impercipient and is almost fatally deceived by the cheque which Mary Whittaker sends him. In The Nine Tailors when Wimsey shows him the cipher ‘[t]he Rector, his glasses sliding down his long nose with excitement, pored over the paper’ (202); the rector, like the Rev. Hallelujah, is virtuous but not well equipped to deal with the world. In Have His Carcase Harriet, about to telephone the police station about the body, ‘followed the grocer into the back room and watched him with impatience

96 

L. HOPKINS

as he put on his spectacles and struggled with the telephone directory’ (33). Harriet is in a hurry because she has a dead body to report; the spectacles make the grocer a hindrance to her. Later Henry Weldon describes Perkins as ‘a little pip-squeak of a fellow, in shorts, with horn-rimmed goggles on’ (253); when Perkins is interviewed in hospital he looks ridiculous ‘with his anxious and unshaven face surrounded with bandages, from which his large horn-rimmed glasses looked out with serio-comic effect’ (310), and all Mrs Moggeridge and Mrs Pollock can remember about him is that ‘The gentleman was wearing horn-rimmed spectacles’ (320). At other times glasses are positively sinister. In ‘The Learned Adventure of The Dragon’s Head’ the crooked Mr Wilberforce Pope wears ‘horn-­ rimmed spectacles’ (184) and the burglar (who is the more likeable character of the two) describes him as ‘a stout, fair party, wiv ’orn rims’ (191). In Have His Carcase the gate-keeper says that Henry Weldon in his disguise as Haviland Martin ‘Suffered from some trouble with his eyes, which obliged him to wear dark glasses, but a very nice gentleman for all that’ (139), though his little daughter hadn’t liked him because ‘his horrid black glasses had frightened her’ (140). Wimsey may say, ‘You’re a gay dog, Weldon. Young or old, they all go down before you, spectacles or no spectacles’ (263), implying that glasses reduce personal attractiveness but only in a way that can ultimately be surmounted, but in fact Henry Weldon’s dark glasses are an index of a dark soul. As so often in Golden Age fiction, glasses are particularly unbecoming when worn by women. In one short story, ‘Talboys’, the ghastly Miss Quirk ‘gazed in horror through her spectacles at Harriet’ (112), and in another, ‘The Bone of Contention’, Mrs Frobisher-Pym says that Martin Burdock ‘was practically engaged to the Delaprime girl—the one with glasses, you know’ (90); the implication is that although it may have been reprehensible of him to marry an entirely different girl, it was not incomprehensible given that the one he ought to have married wore glasses. In Gaudy Night, the tactless Miss Schuster-Slatt is ‘a dark, determined woman with large spectacles and rigidly groomed hair’ (29); her question about whether Wimsey ‘wear(s) that cute little eyeglass because of his sight, or is it part of an old English tradition?’ (30) strikes Harriet as impertinent and may well seem to the reader to show a lack of perception. Later the Dean tells Harriet ‘that’s Miss Hudson, in a red jumper, at the middle table. Black hair and horn rims’ (94). The horn-rims suggest that Miss Hudson is studious, but also that she has no other distinguishing features.

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

97

The only real use for spectacles is as a form of disguise. In Have His Carcase their effectiveness in this respect is explicitly discussed: He was short-sighted, didn’t you say, and wore glasses. Merryweather didn’t say anything about Bright’s wearing them. It may have been a disguise. They may have been quite plain glass—I didn’t examine them, à la Dr Thorndyke, to see whether they reflected a candle-flame upside-down or right way up. (109)

Later in the book Wimsey says of glasses as a disguise, ‘It’s astonishing what a difference it makes having the eyes concealed’ (261). In Unnatural Death, a District Messenger’s description of Mary Whittaker is that ‘she was tall and wore blue glasses and the usual cloak and bonnet’ (265); these conceal her individuality to such an extent that the man watching ‘Mrs Forrest’s’ flat mistakes Miss Climpson for Mary Whittaker because ‘she’s running the old blue-spectacle stunt again’ (272). In Five Red Herrings, Wimsey himself says, ‘this pair of spectacles will be a good aid to disguise. They’re Campbell’s, but happily they are just sun-glare glasses with plain lenses’ (264); later, ‘[w]ith a grunt of disgust he put on the tinted spectacles’ (272), and in so doing steps into anonymity. Glasses, it seems, can be relied on to deter observers from looking too closely at the face behind them. In view of this persistent focus on ways of seeing, it is unsurprising that in the Wimsey books detection is always a visual process and vital exchanges between characters are often conducted through looks rather than through speech. In Unnatural Death, Wimsey goes to meet Evelyn Cropper, née Gotobed, on her arrival from Canada after the murder of her sister Bertha. As they progress along the dock, Mrs Cropper gave a little exclamation and leaned forward as though something had caught her eye. ‘What is it, Mrs Cropper?’ said Lord Peter’s voice in her ear. ‘Did you think you recognised somebody?’ ‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. (105)

Although it is never explicitly confirmed, the reader can be in no doubt that what Mrs Cropper has seen is Mary Whittaker waiting for her, and Wimsey saw her see it, in a way which is recognised by Mrs Cropper as a feat of observation. Later on the train Wimsey says, ‘Now, look here, Mrs

98 

L. HOPKINS

Cropper, if it should be anybody you know, I’d rather on the whole she didn’t spot you watching her’ (106): Mrs Cropper is to look, but if at all possible she is not to be seen (with the clear implication that if she is seen, Wimsey will see the seeing). At the heart of the case lies a similar drama of watching without being watched: Evelyn Cropper recalls that when she and her sister were called to Miss Dawson’s bedroom by Mary Whittaker, ‘There was a screen by the head of the bed, so we couldn’t see Miss Dawson nor she us, but we could see her reflection quite well in a big looking-glass’ (111). The reason for this elaborate scene-setting is that Mary Whittaker has concealed a will, a document of which her aunt has a morbid horror, among the documents put out for her to sign; if Miss Dawson detected the presence of witnesses she might grow suspicious, but the will would not be valid unless the two girls actually saw her sign it. Later Bunter identifies ‘Mrs Forrest’ as Mary Whittaker by looking at a photograph of her fingerprints (268–70). At the heart of Unnatural Death lies the strange, enigmatic personality of the killer, who not only inflicts unnatural death but might seem to be unnatural in herself. Mary Whittaker says very little, and when she does talk it is more likely to be in her alternate persona of Mrs Forrest. We are offered no insight into her motive beyond the obvious inference of greed, and we have no idea whether she feels any regret or what she wants the money for. Her reaction to Lord Peter’s kiss, coupled with the devotion of Vera Findlater (and possibly the history of her two aunts), might hint at lesbianism, but it is only a hint; indeed Wimsey says ‘I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motives or clue’ (89). All we actually know about her is what her eyes do and say. ‘Mrs Forrest’s rather hard eyes appeared to sum up in a practised manner the difference between Parker’s seven-­ guinea “fashionable lounge-suiting …” and his “colleague’s” Savile Row outlines … Parker noted the glance’ (75); ‘Wimsey made a mental note that she was not as young as her bouffant apple-green frock made her appear. She was certainly nearing the thirties, and her eyes were mature and aware’ (75); ‘Mrs Forrest was visibly taken aback … her eyes took on an expression of something more than alarm—a kind of vicious fury, such as one may see in those of a cornered cat’ (77). When she asks if they suspect murder, A curious intent look came into her eyes. Parker could not place it, but Wimsey recognised it instantly. He had seen it last on the face of a great

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

99

financier as he took up his pen to sign a contract. Wimsey had been called to witness the signature, and had refused. It was a contract that ruined thousands of people. (78)

The next time he visits her, ‘Lord Peter became uncomfortably aware that she was watching him’ (172); ‘As he stepped into the hall he turned and looked at her. She stood in the middle of the room, watching him, and on her face was such a fury of fear and rage as turned his blood to water’ (175). Finally when Parker and Wimsey arrive in time to save Miss Climpson they look at Mary Whittaker and find that ‘the blue eyes were bleared with terror and fury’ (273). Miss Climpon is only in a state to be saved because of what and how she has seen. At the beginning of the book Wimsey introduces Parker to Miss Climpson with the explanation that ‘[s]he is my ears and tongue … and especially my nose’ (34); she is not really his eyes, for he has no need of a supplement in that respect, but she does have eyes of her own. When she first meets Mary Whittaker she thinks, This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ But meeting Mary Whittaker’s clear, light eyes under their well-shaped brows, she was struck by a sudden sense of familiarity. She had seen that look before, though the where and the when escaped her. (Unnatural Death, 52)

Miss Climpson’s crucial part in the detection of Mary Whittaker is played out in entirely visual terms: ‘And here it was—the tale that should have been told to none but God—lying open upon Mrs Budge’s round mahogany table under the eye of a fellow-mortal’ (249–50), although ‘To do Miss Climpson justice, she would probably have destroyed it instantly unread, if one sentence had not caught her eye’ (250). After reading it, she thinks that whenever she sees Mary Whittaker, ‘When she looked into those hard blue eyes, she would be wondering what sort of expression they had when the soul behind them was plotting—MURDER’ (251), and she realises what the explanation must be: Vera Findlater ‘had followed her, and seen’ (253). Determined to seek evidence, Miss Climpson thinks that ‘[u]gly, clumping shoes, a hat of virtuous ugliness, a shapeless coat and a pair of tinted glasses would disguise her sufficiently at a

100 

L. HOPKINS

distance’ (257), and ‘[s]uddenly, something which had been troubling Miss Climpson for weeks crystallised and became plain to her. The expression in Mary Whittaker’s eyes … It was the look which had once warned Wimsey and should have warned her’ (261). The realisation is late, but not too late, and is confirmed by the fact that as Wimsey sponges Miss Climpson’s head her eyes open (274). In this drama of looks and glances, Miss Climpson saw just in time. Other Wimsey stories also feature scenes of loaded looking. In Clouds of Witness, Sir Impey Biggs came across with determination, brutally switched on a reading-lamp right into Peter’s face, sat down opposite to him, and said: ‘Now, Wimsey, I want to know all you know’. ‘Do you, though?’ said Peter. He got up, disconnected the reading-lamp, and carried it away to a side-table. (75)

Wimsey, who did intelligence work in the war, is too old a hand to be caught by so old a trick as having the light shone on his face. But Sir Impey is not deterred: As [Sir Impey] put the question, he released the other’s eyes from his, and glanced down with finest cunning at Wimsey’s long, flexible mouth and nervous hands. When he glanced up again a second later he met the eyes passing, guarded and inscrutable, through all the changes expressive of surprised enlightenment; but by that time it was too late; he had seen a little line at the corner of the mouth fade out, and the fingers relax ever so slightly. The first movement had been one of relief. (77)

Wimsey can control his eyes, but Sir Impey knows that there are other places to look, and that hands and mouths can be as expressive as eyes. In this game of seeking and concealing information, Sir Impey wins. The short story ‘The Cave of Ali Baba’ is another drama of eyes and glances. The supposed footman ‘Rogers’ is told when being recruited that ‘[y]ou’ll be taken to Number One—he’ll see you, but you won’t see him’ (258); later he asks Jukes, ‘Do you mean to say you’ve got me watched?’ (259) and at the dance he is warned not to talk by someone whose ‘eyes gleamed sternly’ (266) behind their mask. Because of this rule of silence, the members of the society express their feelings almost entirely through looks: when he is exposed, ‘Rogers stepped forward. The concentrated fear and loathing of forty-eight pairs of eyes burned upon him’ (268);

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

101

when it is then announced that he ‘will receive Number 4 treatment’, ‘[t]he eyes expressed a wolfish satisfaction’ (270). Taken down to the cell to await this, Lord Peter—for it is of course he—occupies himself by using his eyes to memorise as much as possible of what he can see. In Murder Must Advertise, where Wimsey takes a job in a business which is entirely dependent on knowing what will catch the eye of the public, there are several scenes where the question of who sees what is all-­ important. In the build-up to the murder at the tube station, The man in the overcoat walked quietly down the street towards the Underground Station. He did not look back. A few yards behind him, P.C. Eagles sauntered casually along in his wake. His eyes were on his quarry. Neither of them saw a third man, who emerged from nowhere in particular and followed a few yards behind P.C. Eagles. No passer-by gave so much as a second glance to this little procession as it crossed Cromwell Road and debouched upon the station. (210)

Murder Must Advertise concludes with a series of particularly significant looks. First ‘Wimsey, on the point of leaving the shop, pulled up short. Mr Cummings, he noticed, had a pair of very sharp eyes behind his glasses’ (238). Then during the cricket match, Wimsey is struck on the elbow and instantly ‘forgot his caution and his role … and saw only the green turf and the Oval on a sunny day and the squat majesty of the gasworks’ (258), leading Mr Brotherhood to detect his identity: ‘I’ve been watching cricket, man and boy, for sixty years, and I’ve seen something very like it’ (260). Finally when Tallboy calls to see Lord Peter, ‘The manservant raked his questioner with a swift glance, which took in everything from his hunted eyes to his respectable middle-class boots’ (272), and once admitted Tallboy explains that Miss Meteyard guessed he had killed Dean because she once saw him look at Dean (280). As well as scenes which hinge on literal acts of looking, eye-based metaphors abound also abound in the books. Some vision-based images are purely figurative: in Strong Poison Wimsey says to Mrs Bulfinch, ‘I can only say that, if I had had the happiness to make your acquaintance before it was too late, it woud have been my lifetime’s ambition to wipe Mr Bulfinch’s eye’ (115); in Whose Body, Sir Julian promises to cure the traumatised Russian child ‘pour ses beaux yeux’ (165); in Unnatural Death, Bunter laments, ‘if your lordship will kindly excuse the expression, I was completely done in the eye’ (118) and Wimsey himself says, ‘It’s better to

102 

L. HOPKINS

lose a wager and see the light than walk in ignorance bloated with gold’ (123). In Have His Carcase Inspector Umpelty says of the Pollocks, ‘I always did think that lot was in it up to the eyes’ (351), and in Busman’s Honeymoon Bunter writes to his mother that Harriet ‘had no eyes for anyone but his lordship’ (13). Other examples of eye-based imagery work more directly to figure detection as an essentially visual process. In Five Red Herrings we read that ‘[a]t headquarters, meanwhile, the market in evidence was looking up. At least, as Wimsey observed to the Chief Constable, it was not looking up as much as looking about in all directions’ (90). The underlying visual idea in ‘looking up’ has become largely submerged; ‘looking about in all directions’ reanimates it. In the short story ‘Talboys’, Puffett tells Billy Maggs ‘’is lordship didn’t only cast one eye over the place’ before he cracked the crime (142), a metaphor which is also close to the literal truth given Wimsey’s dependence on the lens of his monocle. As Puffett’s image of casting an eye suggests, solving a case is typically imaged as seeing it more clearly. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, as Wimsey begins to understand what must have happened, ‘Illumination was flooding in on him in great waves’ (206). In Unnatural Death, ‘[a] light was slowly breaking in on Wimsey’ (270), and in Murder Must Advertise, when told that Willis was smitten with Pamela Dean, ‘“Oh, I see,” said Mr Bredon, much enlightened’ (40); later when Mr Tallboy makes a brilliant throw at cricket ‘Bredon’ says the reason he has changed colour is because of ‘[t]oo much light in my eyes’ (257), but actually what has happened is that he has connected Tallboy’s dexterity and accuracy with the qualities needed to use a catapult accurately enough to crack Victor Dean’s skull with a scarab. In Have His Carcase, ‘Then, suddenly, illumination came flooding, stabbing through the dark places of his mind like a searchlight’ (283). In Five Red Herrings, Wimsey examines Campbell’s satchel and ‘[r]ather from habit than with an eye to deduction, he made an inventory of its contents’ (20), but the metaphorical deductive eye soon becomes a literal one when he realises there is no flake white in the satchel. Other characters too may suddenly see things. In Clouds of Witness Bunter has ‘a frightened burst of enlightenment’ about the bog (190) and when Wimsey explains the blotting-paper Parker says, ‘Lord! Wimsey, we’ve been blind’ (215). In Five Red Herrings, ‘Sir Maxwell was a cautious man, but there was something guarded in Strachan’s tone which warned him that this was a lie, and a sudden illumination moved him to risk a bluff’ (184); in Strong Poison, ‘In a single moment of illumination,

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

103

Miss Climpson saw her plan complete and perfect in every detail’ (202). To solve is, in the Wimsey books, above all to see. It is particularly revelatory for the detective to see what is in someone’s eyes. In ‘The Learned Adventure of The Dragon’s Head’ the treasure is revealed by pressing one of the dragon’s eyes (201), and human characters are often described primarily in terms of their eyes. In Have His Carcase Perkins says he hasn’t noticed the tide because ‘I’m shortsighted’ (28); in Five Red Herrings, when Gilda Farren says, ‘I’m quite all right’, ‘Her worried and sleepless eyes belied her’ (55) and the Farrens’ maid tells Wimsey that ‘Mr. Farren had run out of the door cramming his hat over his eyes’ (57), suggesting a rage which is literally as well as figuratively blind. In Strong Poison Mrs Wrayburn’s nurse had ‘those curious large blue eyes which disconcert the beholder by their intense gaze, and are usually an index of some emotional instability’ (201). In ‘The Stolen Stomach’ Robert Ferguson has ‘slightly sodden eyes’ (209); in The Nine Tailors Wimsey says, ‘You can always tell an old lag by his eyes, Bunter’ (55); and the Dowager Duchess of Denver calls Sir Julian Freke ‘[s]o handsome, I always think … with that bush of hair and beard and those exciting eyes looking out of it’ (Whose Body, 100). Her perception is counterpointed by the comment made by Sir Julian Freke’s valet on his master—‘Nothing a man could rightly complain of, you understand, Mr Bunter, just nasty looks’ (Whose Body, 141)—and when Wimsey himself looks at Sir Julian he sees ‘[a] face beautiful, impassioned and inhuman; fanatical, compelling eyes … They were not the cool and kindly eyes of the family doctor, they were the brooding eyes of the inspired scientist, and they searched one through’ (166); it is at this point that Sir Julian, who begins to realise that Wimsey suspects his guilt, says to him, ‘Just come a little nearer to the light. I want to see your eyes’ (168). When Wimsey stops Sir Julian injecting him, the episode turns into a battle of the gaze: ‘The blue eyes did not waver; they burned down steadily upon the heavy white lids below them. Then these slowly lifted; the grey eyes met the blue—coldly, steadily—and held them’ (171). Even when actual detection is not involved, seeing is always a key act in the books. In ‘The Bone of Contention’ Plunkett is not well because ‘he’s seen something’ (93) and feels that ‘[n]obody as see what I’ve seed ever got the better of it’ (95); later Wimsey himself ‘looked along the road and saw’ (109), although, feeling that appearances must be deceptive, he resolves that ‘I’m going to see’ (110). In Whose Body, the Russian mother says her daughter ‘cannot forget, poor child, the things she has seen’

104 

L. HOPKINS

(165). In particular, Lord Peter always wants to know what witnesses saw or could have seen. In Unnatural Death, he has a brief telephone conversation with Inspector Sugg in the course of which he says, ‘Now, look here. You get hold of that gamekeeper fellow, and find out from him what he saw in the sand-pit’ (19); later he apostrophises the sea at the murder scene, ‘It’s all very well your chattering … Why can’t you say what you’ve seen?’ (232). In ‘The Bone of Contention’ Wimsey says to Frobisher-­ Pym, ‘let’s go down to the church and have a look at the place. I’d like to know how much he could really have seen from where he was standing’ (100). In Gaudy Night Harriet too ‘want[s] to find out whether Annie could really have seen what she said she saw’ (299), and in Busman’s Honeymoon the solution hinges on whether Joe Seldon really could see the clock. In the short story ‘Talboys’ Wimsey says, ‘I’ll lay you anything you like, you’ll find that the one peach that was left is hidden by the leaves from anybody looking down on it’ (128). In Have His Carcase there is a particularly instructive contrast between Wimsey and Weldon, who dismisses Harriet’s evidence about the blood as inaccurate in a way which he considers typical of women: ‘They see what they think they ought to see’ (281). Wimsey by contrast realises that the mare ‘was at the Flat-Iron, and she saw the murder done’ (349) and that the needle in Haviland Martin’s feed was not detected because ‘Nobody could positively see it when it was in place’ (383). In ‘The Haunted Policeman’ he solves a crime through a grasp of false perspective; when young O’Halloran explains that his uncle is a member of the Royal Academy of Art, Wimsey says ‘the light begins to break’ (106). As well as perceiving through perspective himself, Wimsey sometimes deliberately manipulates or controls how other people see. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club he tells Parker, ‘Cover up one eye, Charles—not yours, the portrait’s’ (199), and says to Ann Dorland, ‘Look here, you’ve been brooding about this and you’re seeing it all out of proportion’ (218). In Five Red Herrings he says to Gilda Farren of Farren’s jealousy, ‘now that I’ve put it to you in the right light, you can see that his attitude towards you is rather a compliment than otherwise’ (167), and in Murder Must Advertise he tells Dian de Momerie that he won’t come down from the tree because ‘I prefer to be looked up to’ (126). Later he tells the policeman who spots him outside her house, ‘Well, keep an eye open on Friday and Saturday nights, Moffatt’ (133) and adds, ‘Very glad to have seen you. And, by the way, you have not seen me’ (134); finally he advises Mr Tallboy, ‘Go home now … Go on foot, and not too fast. And

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

105

don’t look behind you’ (282). One of the Rules he sets down for ‘The Cattery’ is ‘[a]lways distrust the man who looks you straight in the eyes. He wants to prevent you from seeing something. Look for it’ (Strong Poison, 243); when Miss Murchison remembers this and acts on it she discovers the safe in which the evidence of Norman Urquhart’s guilt is concealed. Even when he is not doing this, Wimsey is always interested in how people can see as well as what they can, and so too are the books themselves. Five Red Herrings foregrounds the different points of view of different artists not only by having them comment on each other’s style and in some cases imitating each other but also by either focalising through them or imagining their perspectives. Campbell fantasises, ‘If Farren were to die, now, if one could take his bull-neck in one’s hands and squeeze it till his great staring blue eyes popped out like—he laughed—like bull’s eyes’ (14); Wimsey thinks that ‘Ferguson would probably have seen these marks, and having the artist’s eye and a remarkable visual memory, would no doubt be able to reproduce these things from memory’ (281). In Strong Poison, when Harriet tells him she has followed his career Wimsey says, ‘Well, that’s rather a good thing in a way, because you’ll understand that I’m not really such an ass as I’m looking at present’ (Strong Poison, 46), showing that he has grasped both how he appears to her and that she is the kind of woman whose judgement will be affected by evidence. In Whose Body he ‘picked up the mysterious pince-nez, looked at it, put it on his nose and looked through it’ (18), as if to get a glimpse of how its wearer saw the world. Wimsey is also interested more generally in the workings of other people’s imaginations. In ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, he asks Bunter what is wrong with the doctor’s theories, to which Bunter, showing the same kind of percipience as Wimsey himself, answers, ‘You wish me to reply, my lord, that he only sees the facts which fit into the theory’ (158). In ‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face’ Wimsey is able to imagine how a portrait painter looks at the face of a subject: ‘it’s like the way a gunner, say, looks at a landscape where he happens to be posted’ (249). Later in the same story he quotes from a Greek play and observes, ‘people say it means the dimpled surface of the waves in the sunlight—but how could Prometheus, bound upon his rock, have seen it?’ (251), and finally he imagines the murder by visualising the scene through Crowder’s eyes: ‘he saw the red stains smoke away like a faint mist in the brown-blueness of the tide’ (252). The only other character who comes

106 

L. HOPKINS

close to this level of perception is Dian de Momerie in Murder Must Advertise, who can not only ‘see the road unrolled before her like a map’ (124) but also finds herself ‘seeing something that I can’t make out. I’ve got it now. Straps. They are strapping his elbows and dropping a white bag over his head. The hanged man. There’s a hanging man in your thoughts’ (132). Dian, however, can see only the world of the mind; the material everyday one is shadowy and empty to her. Wimsey, by contrast, is all eyes and sees everything. In Unnatural Death he says to Parker ‘you will cast your eye, and your nose, upon this ham sandwich’ (67) and also jokes that ‘I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids)’ (208); later he observes, ‘I can’t help noticin’ things, though moribund’ (230). In Murder Must Advertise Parker says to Wimsey, ‘I thought you’d see the significance of the cigarette-papers’ and Wimsey replies, ‘I am not yet blind or mentally deficient’ (223) and shortly afterwards Mr Pym tells ‘Bredon’ that his Whifflets scheme ‘has Vision’ (227). Wimsey also consistently makes visual assessments of people: in Murder Must Advertise, when Tallboy’s mistress comes to the office Wimsey ‘entered briskly, and in the first glance his practised eye took in every detail about the young woman who sprang up to face him’ (182). Wimsey not only looks at things himself but also notices when other people look at him: as Mr Tallboy posts one of his ‘Smith’ letters ‘Bredon, idly watching him, was caught by his eye in the act’ (193). Indeed he appears to have eyes in the back of his head: ‘“The new Daimler Twin-Six,” said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it’ (Unnatural Death, 64), and in Murder Must Advertise, when Dian reaches for the wheel from behind him, ‘“Don’t do it,” he said, without turning his head’ (131). Above all, Wimsey’s imagination is resolutely visual. In ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, he visually recreates the kitchen in his mind until he realises what struck him (161) and says to Bunter ‘The bowl—visualise it—what was wrong?’ (162). In Five Red Herrings Wimsey says, ‘take the road between Gatehouse and Kirkcudbright. I could make a plan of that, here and now, with every corner, every house, practically every tree and gate on the road marked. Or if you drove me along it blindfold, I could recite to you exactly what we were passing at every moment’ (147). In Whose Body, ‘A vision passed through Lord Peter’s mind of Sir Reuben kept somewhere in custody till a financial crisis was over’ (66); later he finds himself ‘calling up and dismissing the mental picture of a gentleman of eighty with a game leg carrying a dead body over the roof of

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

107

a Battersea flat at midnight’ (84). Contemplating the problem, Wimsey ‘felt as though he were looking at a complicated riddle’ (127); then when Freke’s guilt dawns on him, ‘He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything …; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space’ (129), as he pictures ‘Levy in a welter of cold rain talking to a prostitute in the Battersea Park Road—a single ruddy hair—lint bandages’ (130). To prove his case, he adjures the medical student, ‘Turn back the pages of your drawing book in your mind’ (150); when the medical student obeys he is able to provide evidence that the corpse they were dissecting was that of Sir Reuben Levy. In the light of this insistence on ocular proof, it is unsurprising that throughout the Wimsey books there are recurrent references to Othello. In Five Red Herrings, Wimsey thinks that Gilda Farren’s is ‘the face of a woman who would see only what she wished to see—who would think that one could abolish evils from the world by pretending that they were not there. Such things, for instance, as jealousy or criticism of herself. A dangerous woman, because a stupid woman. Stupid and dangerous, like Desdemona’ (55–6). In Gaudy Night Miss Lydgate when she is faced with sinners finds it ‘impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago’ (20), and the plot of Harriet’s novel ’Twixt Wind and Water turns on a dropped handkerchief which makes the hero suspect infidelity (204). In The Nine Tailors Wimsey thinks, ‘Silence that dreadful bell!’ (102), a quotation from Othello, and in Clouds of Witness, the epigraph of the first chapter is from the play—‘O, who hath done this deed?’ (9)—and so too is that of chapter XVIII—‘Nobody; I myself; farewell’ (256); in between Denis Cathcart, when confronted with the allegation about cheating at cards, says to the Duke of Denver, ‘you must make up your mind. Nobody could disprove it’ (16), thus gesturing at the heart of Desdemona’s predicament. In Have His Carcase Mr Sullivan says ‘When my old father was runnin’ a repertory company it was actors he wanted— fellows who could be Iago one night and Brutus the next’ (306); when Harriet shows that Henry Weldon was not in Wilvercombe Wimsey says ‘O, now, for ever farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content! Farewell, Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (405); and here too ‘the police would be faced with the notorious difficulty of proving a negative’ (317). If Othello has a moral, it is surely that there are some things that cannot be seen or shown but must nevertheless be believed; Othello’s demand, ‘Give me the ocular proof’, is one which can never be satisfied, but nor can Iago’s

108 

L. HOPKINS

accusation against Desdemona be disproved. There is in fact no such thing as ocular proof in such a case; the only thing that can be done is to try to see in an intelligent and conscientious way. The idea of intelligent and conscientious seeing is one to which the Wimsey books are deeply committed. In The Nine Tailors in particular, seeing takes on a metaphysical and ultimately a moral dimension. When Mary Thoday says she has never seen the handwriting before, ‘Wimsey could have sworn that she had been going to say just the opposite. She was looking at—no, not at, but through and past him, with the face of someone who sees an incredible catastrophe approaching’ (212). Later James Thoday says of Deacon, ‘He’d died on his feet, and whatever it was, he’d seen it coming to him’ (271), and James Thoday also says of the tools he used on Deacon that ‘I didn’t care about taking them back into the church. All those gold angels with their eyes open in the darkness’ (273). Neither James nor Mary nor indeed Geoffrey Deacon are really seeing in the literal sense; James Thoday comes closest to doing so in that the gold angels are physically present, but their eyes are not observing him in the way he implies. Instead what his fear of them shows is his sense of being subject to divine judgement, and a related fear haunts Wimsey too, since his successful detection of criminals is often followed by a mood of depression and introspection in which he both judges himself and, by implication, invokes the idea of the divine judgement which Christians (of whom Dorothy L. Sayers was one) believe to await all humans after death. The reason for Wimsey’s post-detection uneasiness is that he can often see the point of the view of the criminal as well as of the victim (most notably in ‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face’, where he solves the crime but refrains from trying to convince the investigating detective that his solution is the true one). However his role of detective must almost always blind him to the plight of the criminal; Victoria Stewart observes that Wimsey ‘interpellat[es] both himself, and by extension Parker, and indeed the reader, into the position of the criminal wishing to escape detection and implying that the detective has to think like a criminal … The question here is how to think like a criminal while at the same time retaining a moral distance from his or her actions’ (Stewart 2017: 101). In this sense the monocle is a metaphor, figuring the way in which Wimsey must focus on only part of the picture, and it is so in other ways too. In Five Red Herrings Jock Graham says of the other artists: ‘the whole bunch of them have only got one gift between them that I lack, and that’s the single eye, more’s the pity’ (61). Sayers may have felt the same, for like

5  THE MAN WITH THE MONOCLE: LORD PETER WIMSEY 

109

many writers of detective novels she was ambivalent about her own craft; Janet Hitchman observes that if Sayers ‘had an ambition … it was to make the mystery story a thing of literary art, something which no don, philosopher or bishop would be ashamed to be found reading’ (88). Perhaps that may be one reason why she said of Gaudy Night, ‘It’s the book I wanted to write and I have written it’ (Hitchman 108), because the Senior Common Room of Shrewsbury College read and enjoy Harriet’s Robert Templeton novels and because the book achieves artistic unity in that, as Margaret Hannay observes, ‘the theme of integrity in one’s work is central both to the mystery and to the love story’ (Hannay xii). Nevertheless, even Gaudy Night did not satisfy Sayers. Hitchman notes, ‘She was, as the questionings in Gaudy Night show, becoming more and more conscience stricken about the ethical aspect of detective writing, and she was not absolutely sure that someone at some time might not get an idea for murder from one of her books’ (Hitchman 117). She also still yearned to write a ‘straight’ novel and she uses the metaphor of the single eye in connection with that. Harriet thinks that her books were ‘all right, as far as they went; as intellectual exercises, they were even brilliant. But there was something lacking about them; they read to her now as though they had been written with a mental reservation, a determination to keep her own opinions and personality out of view’ (Gaudy Night, 64). In contrast Harriet feels that ‘the scholar could account himself blessed: the single eye, directed to the object, not dimmed or distracted by private motes or beams’ (65), and she also remembers a quotation: ‘“If thine eye be single, the whole body is full of light”—but was it physically possible to have the singe eye? What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains? For them, stereoscopic vision was probably a necessity’ (74–5). The main plot of Gaudy Night is counterpointed by the adventures of Lord Saint-George, who has an accident which temporarily robs him of the use of one eye and who identifies Annie just by her eyes, and we also see much more of the mechanics of composition than ever before, first when Harriet struggles with the tone of her letter to Wimsey (180) and then when she writes some of her book on Lefanu (182–3). James Brabazon remarks on ‘the unifying theme in all Sayers’ work of the almost sacramental importance of man’s creative activity’ (xvi), but notes that she was never quite satisfied that Wimsey allowed her to achieve this: ‘She had doubts about almost every book she wrote about him’ (126). Investing him with a monocle might perhaps be seen as a way of suggesting that the single vision might after all be possible.

110 

L. HOPKINS

References Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography [1981]. London: Gollancz, 1988. Hannay, Margaret P. ‘Introduction’. In As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay. Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1979. xi–xvi. Hitchman, Janet. Such a Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers [1975]. London: NEL, 1976. McGlynn, Mary. ‘Parma violets and pince-nez: Dorothy Sayers’s Meritocracy’. Clues 37.2 (Fall, 2019): 71–82. Sayers, Dorothy L. ‘The Article in Question’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974a. ———. ‘The Bone of Contention’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974b. ———. Busman’s Honeymoon [1937]. London: NEL, 1974c. ———. ‘The Cave of Ali Baba’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974d. ———. Clouds of Witness [1926]. London: Four Square, 1962. ———. Five Red Herrings [1931]. London: Four Square, 1959a. ———. Gaudy Night [1935]. London: NEL, 1963a. ———. Have His Carcase [1932]. London: NEL, 1974e. ———. ‘The Learned Adventure of The Dragon’s Head’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974f. ———. Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974g. ———. ‘The Man with Copper Fingers’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974h. ———. Murder Must Advertise [1933]. London: FourSquare, 1959b. ———. The Nine Tailors [1934]. London: Four Square, 1959c. ———. ‘The Stolen Stomach’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974i. ———. Striding Folly [1972]. London: New English Library, 2003a. ———. Strong Poison [1930]. London: New English Library, 2003b. ———. ‘Talboys’. In Striding Folly [1972]. London: New English Library, 2003c. ———. Unnatural Death [1927]. London: FourSquare, 1964. ———. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club [1921]. London: FourSquare, 1963b. ———. ‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974j. ———. ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’. In Lord Peter Views the Body [1928]. London: NEL, 1974k. ———. Whose Body [1923]. London: Four Square, 1963c. Stewart, Victoria. Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Wodehouse, P. G. Jill the Reckless [1921]. London: Vintage, 1993.

CHAPTER 6

An Ass in Horn-Rims: Albert Campion

In Mystery Mile, the first proper Campion novel, Marlowe Lobbett visits Bottle Street and ‘Mr Campion advanced with great solemnity and gingerly removed a tiny piece of fluff from his visitor’s overcoat with his thumb and forefinger. “A police hair, my dear Watson,” he said’ (26). Eleven years later in Traitor’s Purse, the novel in which Margery Allingham effectively reinvents her hero, the idea of deduction from a single hair recurs, but it is used very differently: Campion ‘glanced towards the man with the filthy hands. This, then, this professional crook, this must be a hair on the hide of the Enemy, and, like the zoologists, from this one hair he must somehow reconstruct a whole beast’ (109). Campion’s comment to Marlowe Lobbett is flippant and self-parodying, and also an indication that having shifted rather uneasily from suspect to investigator during his first appearance in The Crime at Black Dudley, Campion has still not quite settled down in this second outing and hasn’t securely established what kind of detective he is. By the time of Traitor’s Purse he has developed a much clearer identity, but his creator does not seem to be entirely happy with it, for in the two books immediately preceding Traitor’s Purse she had experimented first, and not very happily, with turning him into a firstperson narrator (in The Case of the Late Pig) and secondly with producing a book in which neither he nor any other detective played a major role (Black Plumes, where the inspector who solves the crime is a comic supporting player). The knock on the head which gives Campion amnesia at © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_6

111

112 

L. HOPKINS

the start of Traitor’s Purse is not only a plot device but offers Allingham a way of reinventing him, and the metaphor of ‘a hair on the hide of the Enemy’ is part of that reinvention. In the first place, the idea of reconstructing an animal from its hair ‘like the zoologists’ chimes with a later passage in Traitor’s Purse, when Campion finds himself in a police cell after recovering the first part of his memory: ‘The instant he had seen Amanda it had come to him that something revolutionary, he was not at all sure that it was not evolutionary, must have taken place within him’ (173). A major driver of Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection was the work of anatomists such as Buffon and Cuvier who offered reconstructions of whole animals on the basis of bones, and were thus able to demonstrate that certain species had become extinct. Campion’s reference to zoologists supports the idea that he himself has evolved and also picks up on a concern repeatedly articulated in the books, which is the possibility of degeneration. In the mainstream Campion novel immediately preceding Traitor’s Purse (excluding the slight and uncharacteristic Case of the Late Pig), The Fashion in Shrouds, Sir Raymond Ramillies calls the African province he governs ‘the most damned degenerate hole in the entire creation’ (111); in Police at the Funeral, Uncle William says, ‘Once we old families start going downhill we go down pretty fast’ (174); and in Death of a Ghost Donna Beatrice asks Campion, ‘do you think that the trend of modern art shows degeneracy or a leaning towards the primitive?’ (103). In Dancers in Mourning Dr Bouverie asks the maid, ‘Are you a Mudd?’ and, when she confirms it, says, ‘Thought I recognised the shape of your skull’ (108), implying that her heredity has limited her intellectual potential, while in Coroner’s Pidgin Campion says of Lord Gonfalon, ‘Eight hundred years of solid loafing are behind him, and considered purely as the result, he’s logical. After that, the word doesn’t apply’ (155). In The China Governess, where the entire plot is driven by the question of whether Timothy Kinnit’s true parentage makes him unfit to marry and have children, Timothy himself frames the effect of his quest for origins in terms evoking the worst nightmare of evolutionary theory, the possibility that humans did not represent a pinnacle of development but might still be changing, perhaps beyond recognition: ‘I’m altering … I don’t know what I’m going to turn out to be’ (120). Degeneration, the bad twin of evolution, was an idea that still had traction as late as the nineteen fifties. When Old Harry sniffs a ploughshare in The Beckoning Lady, ‘It occurred to Mr. Campion, who was enjoying

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

113

himself despite his anxiety, that townspeople betray a superstitious attitude towards the sense of smell. It was as though, he reflected, they realised they had lost a valuable asset and felt nervous about it’ (147). In fact Old Harry is merely posing; pretending to establish when the ploughshare was moved, he ‘touched the worn place, laid his cheek against it, examined the corpse of a woodlouse he found among the matted roots, and finally ate a piece of the young grass from beside it’ (150), but actually he knows exactly how long ago it was moved because he happened to be watching at the time, and there is an equally comic tone to George Meredith’s protest ‘Think of the Race’ when Westy inveighs against love (181). In Traitor’s Purse, however, the idea of evolutionary change is harnessed in the service of presenting Campion himself (and by extension others of Allingham’s regular characters) as malleable and as potentially subject to external pressures. This is one of the reasons why Allingham is often recognised as being the first writer of detective fiction to achieve real distinction as a novelist, but it also adds to the sense of menace which is so powerful a factor in some of her best work (most notably The Tiger in the Smoke) by presenting not just people’s lives and possessions but also their character and moral sense as capable of deterioration. In the second place, the idea of imaginatively reconstructing a whole animal from a single hair cements Campion’s image as a detective whose methods of deduction are based on intuition rather than logic. In The Tiger in the Smoke Canon Avril thinks of telling Miss Warburton that his bedtime reading will be The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (185), and in Mystery Mile Campion says to Judge Lobbett, ‘I know enough to realize that it’s not revenge pure or simple they’re after you for … That’s patent from common or garden Holmic deduction’ (61), but the Judge knows that actually Campion is not like Holmes and replies ‘when I first saw you, Mr Campion, I thought you were the biggest goddam fool ever made; but I’m now beginning to wonder if you’re not some sort of telepathy expert’ (62). Later in Mystery Mile Mr Kettle says, ‘I ’ave the detective mind, sir … I form my theories and they work out in accordance’, and Campion says, ‘I must do that’ (116), but the reader has already begun to see that he does have methods and that they are different from those of Holmes, even if Campion himself likes to pretend that they are similar. In Police at the Funeral Campion puts on a deerstalker because he thinks it will give Joyce Blount a thrill (13), and while wearing it pretends to predict that the person coming down the alley will be ‘[a] lame man wearing number nine boots, smoking a cheroot and probably a chandler’s mate by profession’

114 

L. HOPKINS

(17); in fact it is Cousin George, and when Campion is therefore able to describe him later Uncle William is indeed deceived into thinking that he is performing the kind of feat associated with Holmes: ‘’Pon my soul, that’s marvellous … I’ve heard of you detective people—you know, about being able to tell whether a man a mile off is a plumber, or a market-­ gardener, without so much as a pair of field-glasses’ (51). Later in the story Great-aunt Caroline also shows an interest in what Campion’s method is: explaining how she knew William hadn’t killed Andrew by what hat he wore, she declares, ‘Since you have done so much deduction yourself, young man … my reasoning should appeal to you, simple as it is’ (227). In fact Campion thinks in very different ways from Holmes, and certainly not in the way that Uncle William supposes. In Patricia Wentworth’s 1925 The Black Cabinet Eliza Moffat says that the feelings of the hero are obvious to ‘anyone that’s got eyes and ears, and their seven senses’ (169). Campion may not possess all of the nine senses that Mrs Moffat apparently assumes to exist in total, but he certainly has a sixth one. When he accompanies the Faradays to morning service Mr Campion ‘was hardly aware of the proceedings in that great impersonal church. His mind was occupied by a theory so startling and terrifying that he dared hardly consider it. Ever since that moment in the night when he had awakened with the idea ready made in his mind and had lain piecing together the jig-saw fragments of the problem, the theory had fascinated him’ (173). The idea in question seems to be not so much something which Mr Campion has formulated as something which has taken possession of him, and this is of a piece with the detached, fragmented nature of his personality in the early books. It is established from the outset that Campion is estranged from his family, something which is slyly emphasised by a number of references to Walter Scott’s character Ivanhoe, who has been cast off by his father and fights in a tournament under the name ‘Desdichado’, the Disinherited One: we have a Wivenhow in The Fashion in Shrouds (97), where Sinclair is reading Ivanhoe (104), and a Stukeley-Wivenhoe in Sweet Danger, and in The China Governess Nanny Broome says she brought Timothy up on a story ‘about the knights riding in the courtyard, jousting and saving ladies and killing dragons and so on … All the kids have it now on telly … Do you ever see it? Ivanhoe’ (25). However, there is a sense in which Campion is estranged not only from his family but also from himself. The Case of the Late Pig seems to attempt to tackle this problem by its unique excursus into first-person narration, but if anything it exacerbates it. In theory, Campion can explain his method:

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

115

I am not one of those intellectual sleuths, I am afraid. My mind does not work like an adding machine, taking the facts in neatly one by one and doing the work as it goes along. I am more like the bloke with the sack and spiked stick. I collect all the odds and ends I can see and turn out the bag at the lunch hour. (35–6)

However there is an odd disconnect between his sensitivity at the dinner table when ‘I became aware of someone hating me’ (44) and his obtuseness when he is told that the vicar always comes in for a highball— ‘it was then that I had the whole case under my nose. Unfortunately, I only saw half of it’ (83)—and he seems not to know himself whether his gaucheness is deliberate or involuntary: ‘“Hello,” I said flatly, and added idiotically because I felt I ought to say something else: “Give us to drink, Ambrosia, and sweet Barm—.”’ To a certain extent this might be self-­ deprecation, as when he recounts that Whippet ‘stepped back into the doorway, and Effie followed him. With great presence of mind I put my foot in the jamb’ (67), but ultimately our incursion into Mr Campion’s psyche does not prove as rewarding or revealing as we might have hoped. Although we may not be sure of the reasons, however, it is certainly the case that the early Campion is only intermittently attuned to his own mental processes and emotionally illiterate. In Death of a Ghost, ‘Looking back upon the evening in the light of after events, Mr Campion frequently cursed himself for his lack of detachment. Seen in retrospect, after the tragedy, it seemed to him impossible that he could have spent so long in the very heart of the dormant volcano without hearing the rumblings of the eruption to come’ (29). This is an odd diagnosis, for it does not seem to be lack of detachment which prompts his failures of perception so much as lack of attention to his own instincts. When he does get a warning he disregards it: For the first time the young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles had an inkling of danger in the wind. It was nothing in the girl’s tone, of that he was certain; but a wave of alarm passed over him for no apparent reason. Mr Campion was not a person given to psychic experiences, and the phenomenon irritated him, so that he put it hastily from his mind. But the impression had been there and it had been very strong. (45)

He also leaps to a totally wrong conclusion: ‘He had no doubt in his mind concerning the author of the crime. He could see Linda now in his mind’s eye as she had turned from the window and come towards him’

116 

L. HOPKINS

(55). Not until ‘he looked down into her face, saw the agonized appeal in her eyes’ (60) is he convinced of her innocence. There is a marked contrast here with the way female characters in Death of a Ghost perceive things. In The Fashion in Shrouds Campion finds at the funeral that thinking of Val ‘reminded him of the uncanny accuracy of her guesses. Most women were alarming in that way, he reflected again. They muddled through to truth in the most dangerous and infuriating fashion’ (157), and this is abundantly borne out in Death of a Ghost. When Miss Cunninghame speculates that Mrs Potter seemed odd because she was about to be murdered, Oates ‘ignor[es] his informant’s somewhat confused deductions’ (139), but in fact Mrs Potter does seem to have had something like a premonition of her own death, for just before the telephone call which will cause it she finds that ‘[s]uddenly everything in the room became startlingly clear. She saw it as though she had never seen any of it before … Every piece of furniture, every picture, every drapery stood out clear from its neighbour’ (121). Belle Lafcadio also finds her perceptions affected by death: when she spots Mrs Potter’s body it ‘caught her eye, and her whole attention was focused upon it, as if its shape had been defined by thick black lines’ (122), and she subsequently finds that she sees herself differently too: ‘The small mirror over the sink shocked her with its reflection of a tottering, white-lipped old woman in a dishevelled bonnet of lawn’ (123). What Belle and Mrs Potter respond to is not so much what is objectively there as to the impression it makes on them. During the course of Death of a Ghost, however, Campion does start to trust his intuition. After visiting Max Fustian at his gallery and watching him trying to offload a fake Jan Steen, Mr Campion wandered off down Bond Street. His mind was uneasy. The affair of the Dacre drawings was odd and irritating, but he was aware that the root of the uncomfortable impression chipping at his mind lay not here. Rather, it was something that had happened during the last few minutes, something which his unconscious mind had seized and was trying to point out to him. (100)

The idea develops: Campion was thinking furiously. The idea which had been nibbling at the back of his mind ever since he had turned out of the Salmon Gallery and walked down Bond Street suddenly became clear, and its significance sent an unaccustomed thrill down his spine.

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

117

What he had noticed subconsciously was an unmistakable family likeness between Max’s story to the politician and his confession to Inspector Oates. (108)

That ‘unaccustomed thrill’ heralds a completely new sensibility as he begins to respond to atmosphere, leap to conclusions, and pick up on other people’s mental processes. Looking at Mr Potter he ‘noticed with growing concern, there was a new note in the general air of frustration and despair which was his general atmosphere; the high thin note of alarm’ (136). He is not only analysing the vibes given off by Mr Potter but isolating and identifying a change to them, and soon he pushes intuition even further, for ‘Mr Campion knew that Max Fustian had killed Mrs Potter as soon as he saw him that evening’ (145). He trusts this insight so much that he feels obliged to confide it to Oates: Campion was sitting up in his chair, staring ahead of him. Presently he took off his spectacles. ‘Look here, Stanislaus,’ he said, ‘I’d better tell you. Max Fustian killed Mrs Potter.’ (159–60)

Oates responds, ‘It’s mainly second sight, I suppose?’ (160), and the metaphor is an apt one because the confidence is heralded by a pointed disavowal of first sight, as Campion takes off his spectacles (something which is increasingly established as a sign that he is serious), and has also been preceded by a similar disclaimer of visual acuity: ‘“Ah,” said Mr Campion, and his eyes became foolish as the idea, which had been rankling in the back of his head ever since the tragedy, stood out in all its absurdity’ (141). From that point onwards Campion is governed entirely by instinct, which saves him even when he becomes incapacitated by the strange effects of the wine: when Fustian leads Campion down into the tube station ‘[i]n the doorway of the lift some inner sense warned him of impending danger’ (239) and on the platform ‘[h]is subconscious mind was struggling to tell him something, to warn him of something’ (240). Campion has left behind ‘Holmic deduction’ and is living on his nerves. In Flowers for the Judge he has come on still further. First Gina ‘spoke absently, and for the first time Mr Campion saw that the constraint in the atmosphere was not due to Miss Curley’s presence alone’ (17); then ‘[t]here was a moment’s awkward silence, and … Mr Campion, who was not in possession of the facts, perceived that he had made a gaffe’ (18). He

118 

L. HOPKINS

continues to read the characters of those involved until he eventually progresses to solving the crime: ‘Suddenly the thought which had been playing round the edges of his conscious mind so irritatingly for some time past came out into the open’ (125) and he rings up Miss Curley to ask about Tom Barnabas, whose apparently unrelated disappearance twenty years before proves to be a vital clue. The second breakthrough comes when Ritchie tells Campion of a quarrel over the manuscript of Gallivant, when ‘[a]n idea occurred to him and he looked up, a startled expression in his pale eyes’ (186), and finally when John Widdowson lures Campion into a trap, ‘That miraculous sense which is either second sight or the lightning calculation of the subconscious mind, which nothing escapes, arrested him, and, changing his mind on the instant, he pulled his gun and kicked the door open, police fashion’ (222); once again, that sixth sense saves his life, but it also confirms the identity of the criminal. In Police at the Funeral the intangible is again to the fore as Campion solves this crime too through a mix of social skills, cultural capital, and a reliance on the subconscious. Oates assures him that ‘[r]outine; that’s the only way to get anywhere. We all fall back on it in the end’ (165), but Oates himself implicitly admits that other kinds of method are needed when he complains of Marcus Featherstone, ‘He thinks he knows everything, and so he does pretty nearly—about books and dead languages— but has he the faintest idea of the mental process which resulted in the accused marrying the plaintiff in 1927 in Chiswick, when he had already married the first witness in 1903?’ (16). Oates also admits that ‘where I’m out of my depth is that I don’t see how these people’s minds work … Even the words they use don’t mean the same’ (81), a feeling which has not been helped by Campion using prior knowledge to deduce that ‘you sat there in a yellow brocade chair, looking uncomfortable, no doubt’ (78). Attention is further drawn to Campion’s methods by the strong contrast between him and Mr Cheetoo, who says ‘I am observant. I am also scientific. I formed many conclusions. The police did not value them’ (88), at which ‘Mr. Campion nodded affably and his pale eyes flickered behind his big spectacles. This was a type of witness that he recognised, and his heart leapt’ (88). Mr Cheetoo announces, ‘I measured ocularly the amount of rope on the body’ (90), but Campion only becomes interested when Mr Cheetoo says that Andrew’s coat was buttoned (91), because that leads him to guess that Andrew must have done that himself. When Joyce asks Campion ‘How do you guess what people are thinking?’ he replies disingenuously, ‘I was in the Income Tax Department for years’ (111), but it is

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

119

clear to the reader that what he is really doing is tuning into minds and responding to atmosphere, as when he wakes up in the night and ‘a feeling of apprehension seized him instantly’ (129). One reason why Campion might refuse to answer Joyce Blount’s question about how he guesses what people are thinking is that his approach sounds unimpressive when explained. In ‘The Black Tent’ Oates asks Campion, ‘How do you do it? Second sight or just plain guesswork?’ (89), and Jennifer Pelham asks, ‘How did you know?’, but ‘[r]ealising that to confess to the gift of divination is a weakness, Mr Campion did not reply directly’ (93). Eventually he has to produce some kind of answer when Oates wants to know how he decoded. ‘It’s written in the ink’: Campion sighed. ‘You’re an impossible person to have to explain thought-­ processes to,’ he said. ‘But if those words had been “it is written in the crystal” you’d have automatically thought of fortune-tellers, wouldn’t you? Well, then, the ink is sometimes synonymous with the crystal, and when there’s a terrified young girl in each situation, well, it sets you wondering. That’s all.’ Oates laughed explosively. ‘In fact, you guessed it. You picked a winning horse with a pin,’ he said. (96)

Oates does him an injustice though; Campion is doing something more than guessing, and he is doing it more boldly and more imaginatively every time we see him. Although he becomes notably more intuitive, one thing that does not change is about Campion is that he wears spectacles, possibly because Allingham first conceived of him as a parody of Wimsey. This is almost the first thing we are told about him when he makes his initial, tentative appearance in The Crime at Black Dudley, where George Abbershaw’s initial impression is of ‘the fresh-faced young man with tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell spectacles’ (11) and where later in the narrative ‘Abbershaw turned to where the young man with the tow-coloured hair and the unintelligent smile sat beaming at them through his glasses’ (77). In Mystery Mile, the first real Campion story, we are introduced to him as ‘a pale young man who seemed to be trying to hide behind his enormous spectacles’ (12); soon after he is ‘sitting bolt upright, staring at the stage through his heavy glasses’ (15), and from then on it is specified that the glasses are horn-rims, although in The

120 

L. HOPKINS

Tiger in the Smoke Campion ‘had changed his horn-rims for Health Service issue spectacles’ (153) when he goes to inspect the cellar where the gang are hanging out, presumably because he does not want to draw attention to himself. The horn-rims become so important a part of his persona that in Look to the Lady Lugg tells his employer ‘I’ll ’ave a monument put up to you at the ’ead of the grave. A life-size image of yerself dressed as an angel—’orn-rimmed spectacles done in gold’ (64). Campion’s spectacles play a part in his deductive method, but it is not the one which might be expected. They are a disguise both literally and metaphorically. In Look to the Lady Val Gyrth says to Campion, ‘When you took off your spectacles a moment ago … you reminded me of ….’ (36), and in Police at the Funeral Joyce ‘eyed Campion curiously. Without his spectacles his appearance had gained at least fifty per cent. in intelligence’ (106–7). With his glasses on Campion can both conceal his resemblance to the family from whom he is estranged and pass for stupid, which is an important part of his technique. In the early books it is not clear how far his appearance of foolishness is assumed. In The Crime at Black Dudley, Abbershaw glanced at the grandfather clock at the head of the staircase. It showed the hour at eight minutes past four. Mr Campion followed the direction of his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said foolishly. ‘I—I always get up early.’ (41)

Adopting an appearance of fatuousness could simply be deliberate misdirection. One reason why the villains in The Crime at Black Dudley are slow to suspect Campion’s real identity is Gideon’s confidence that ‘English detectives are a race apart. They are evident at the first glance’ (86); although Gideon does not specify how he imagines detectives to look, it is a safe assumption that it is not like Campion. As the series progresses, however, it becomes clear that the silly-ass manner is both deliberate and useful. In ‘The Case is Altered’ the narrator observes that Campion ‘had long-since mastered the difficult art of self-effacement’ (9), and in Dancers in Mourning the narrator observes that ‘[t]here was a certain vacuity in his expression which counteracted the pleasant angles of his face and lent his whole appearance an indefinable quality, so that those who knew him were apt to find him hard to recollect and impossible to describe’ (5). The foolish young man in horn-rims evades detection as successfully as if he were camouflaged.

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

121

What Campion’s spectacles do not do, however, is help him to see. In Flowers for the Judge Campion ‘had removed his spectacles, which somewhat obscured his vision when writing’ (60–1), and in Mystery Mile, as they leave the flat of Thos. Knapp’s mother on their mission to rescue Biddy, Campion removed his glasses. ‘I see so much better without them,’ he explained, and set about changing his shoes. (152)

In fact we learn in Hide My Eyes that his eyes ‘were unusually good in the dark’ (200). But the spectacles are a shell as well as a disguise. In ‘The Black Tent’, ‘As Mr Campion walked on down the street he blinked behind his spectacles’ (77) and in Mystery Mile he looks at Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories and ‘[a] title leaped up at him from the page. He put his hand over it and stared out into the darkness. His face was blank, his eyes dull behind his spectacles’ (200). In the first case he is making up his mind and in the second he is making a discovery, and on both occasions the spectacles help shut out the outside world and sharpen his inner vision. Campion’s relationship with his spectacles is cast into relief by the fact that is surrounded by other characters who sport aids to vision. In the earlier books these are often pince-nez. In Mystery Mile, on board the boat on which Campion meets the Lobbetts ‘a very golden-haired lady with pince-nez was playing the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody with a certain amount of acid gusto’ (13). In Look to the Lady, when asked if there will have to be an inquest on Lady Pethwick, ‘Doctor Cobden took out a pair of pince-nez and rubbed them contemplatively with an immense white handkerchief’ (69), and Mr Melchizadek uses a loupe to examine the fake chalice (128–9). In Sweet Danger Aunt Hatt has ‘a pair of golden pincenez on her nose’ (65), while in Flowers for the Judge Peter Rigget has ‘very shiny gold pince-nez’ (34); Mrs Tripper, who gives evidence about what time the car started and stopped, has ‘gold pince-nez looped to her ear with a small chain’ (90); and the foreman of the jury is ‘an elderly man with pince-nez and a bald head’ (191). Indeed Flowers for the Judge offers a wide assortment of eyewear: Miss Curley has ‘gold-rimmed spectacles’ (13), the Lord Chief Justice ‘was over seventy and forced from time to time to use eyeglasses’ (193), and Peter Rigget ‘permitted himself a sickly nervous smile which was rendered frankly horrific by the green light

122 

L. HOPKINS

reflected in his glasses’ (225). In Death of a Ghost Thomas Dacre ‘resembled a battered, careworn edition of the Apollo Belvedere in horn-rimmed spectacles’ (32); in Dancers in Mourning Major Bloom, who advises on how the bomb was constructed, ‘was tall and heavy, with lumbering movements and eyes which peered shortsightedly from behind truly terrible steel-rimmed glasses’ (229); and in The Fashion in Shrouds Sir Henry Portland-Smith ‘had taken off his spectacles and his cold but rather fine grey eyes had that pathetic, naked look which eyes which are normally hidden behind lenses achieve when the barrier is down’ (47), with the result that ‘Campion, meeting those old, chilly, naked eyes, was suddenly ashamed of himself for his smugness’ (47). In The Tiger in the Smoke Oates ‘looked indescribably mournful, his spectacles crooked on his sharp nose’ (62) and Tiddy Doll wears dark glasses because he is an albino (78), and in More Work for the Undertaker Lawrence Palinode is ‘a tall, shambling figure, wearing very strong spectacles’ (59). In Hide My Eyes the policeman patrolling Garden Green has reading glasses (37), the night watchman at Rolf’s Dump has ‘a pair of spectacles with the thickest of lenses’ (126), and when Charlie Luke says they will never know what made Gerry Hawker forget the wallet and thus incriminate himself, ‘Picot said nothing but sat down at the other desk and put on his spectacles’ (219). In The China Governess the old lady who dies of shock is attended by a neighbour who ‘peered up at them piteously through gaily decorated plastic spectacles’ (15), and in The Mind Readers Paggen Mayo ‘dignified his appearance with a pair of heavy chrome spectacles of original and rather eccentric design and certainly highly expensive workmanship’ (34), the spy who tries to abduct the children has ‘decorated spectacles’ (43), and Mr Rafael ‘put on a pair of spectacles which were almost horse-blinkers’ (240). The difference between all these characters and Campion is simple: they actually need the visual aids they employ, and that works to underline the fact that he does not. Only on rare occasions does Campion remove his spectacles, and then usually to signal serious intent. In Police at the Funeral, trying to persuade Great-Aunt Caroline to leave Socrates Close for her own safety, he ‘had removed his spectacles and all trace of his lackadaisical and inconsequential manner had vanished’ (178), and in Mystery Mile when he asks Kettle where Biddy is ‘[h]e had taken off his spectacles, and as he leaned across the table to the shivering man his eyes were bright and hard’ (129). In Look to the Lady,

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

123

Campion took off his spectacles and looked his visitor straight in the eyes. ‘Now, listen, Val Gyrth,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to believe me. I’m not nearly so ignorant of the position that the Gyrth Chalice holds in your family, and in the country, as you imagine. (34)

Later in the inn at Sanctuary Mr Campion prepares: ‘Left to himself he closed the door carefully, and sitting down at the table, he removed his spectacles and extracted two very significant objects from his suitcase, a small but wicked-looking rubber truncheon and an extremely serviceable Colt revolver’ (59–60). On this occasion there is no human audience to be convinced of his sincerity by the removal of his glasses, but perhaps he already guesses at a more-than-human guardian for the chalice, because images of preternatural ways of seeing are important in the book. Professor Carey explains, ‘There’s an old belief that if you leave the dead with their eyes wide open they watch you ever after’ (187); as he pursues Mrs Dick Campion ‘glanced up at the Tower across the wide lawn. The single red eye, a significant and silent witness to the thousand rumours concerning the Gyrths’ secret, glared down upon him’ (250); finally we learn that the Charter prescribes that the chalice shall be inspected ‘by the light of day that neither use or candle or lamp shall be needed to show the true state of the said vessel’ (270), and Campion and the Professor have to be blindfolded (271). Most notably, Professor Carey thinks that the guardian’s face ‘may be a very shocking sight’ (278). What is seen, how, when and where it is seen, and who sees it all matter in ways that hint at a more-than-­ human presence or presences. Aids to vision are also often used metaphorically in the Campion books, as in More Work for the Undertaker where Lawrence Palinode tells an anecdote of a relative who, on losing his spectacles, was invited by his wife to look in a mirror and discovered that he was wearing them (207–8); the story is used in the Palinode family as a parable about the importance of checking one’s assumptions. In Coroner’s Pidgin, Campion desperately attempts to interpret the behaviour of Johnny Carados, and uses glasses to do it. Talking about Susan being in love with Evers, Carados ‘sounded cheerful if not particularly at ease, and Campion took off his spectacles the better to see him’ (90). After the inquest, finally convinced of Carados’ innocence but now fearing that he has committed suicide, Campion goes out into the rain and ‘as he walked forward down the road, a mist settled on his spectacles’ (235). Meeting Carados alive, ‘Mr Campion took off his spectacles, and for the first time saw his companion clearly’ (237); on one

124 

L. HOPKINS

level the removal of his glasses means that Campion can see Carados in focus, but there is clearly also an implication that he finally understands his character and actions. There is a similar metaphorical force in The Fashion in Shrouds when Alan Dell surprises Val by his attitude to stories of people who have disappeared—‘It’s quite understandable, of course, but every time it crops up it gives one a jolt, a new vision, like putting on a pair of long-sighted spectacles’ (13)—and in The China Governess when Councillor Cornish says, ‘I feel it might help if this country sometimes ceased to consider the police either through motorists’ goggles or rose-­ coloured spectacles’ (139). Glasses are not simply an aid to physical vision but also emblematise a point of view. The idea that vision can be biased or constricting is underlined by a repeated motif in the Campion books of photographs doing damage. In Mystery Mile the newspaper report which reveals where Judge Lobbett is hidden begins ‘Our special photographer, with a long-distance camera, manages to catch a glimpse of archaeologists at work’ (173). In Look to the Lady Val Gyrth is appalled to see that the chalice has been photographed (27); in Sweet Danger Brett Savanake is never photographed (38); in The Fashion in Shrouds Georgia produces a photograph of Caroline Adamson wearing Val’s design (37) and we hear of a morning paper called the Range Finder (36) which emblematises the dangers to be feared from publicity, since range finders are found on weapons as well as on cameras. In Traitor’s Purse, when Amanda leaves him alone after dinner, Campion ‘knew what it was like now. It was like one of those trick films wherein familiar objects are photographed from an unfamiliar angle’ (53–4); he reaches for the language of photography to find a suitable analogy for the temporary amnesia which is crippling him. Most notably, in The Tiger in the Smoke faked photographs of Martin Elginbrodde are used to try to prevent Meg marrying again. It is partly because vision is limited, partial, and vulnerable to manipulation that Campion relies on other senses too. Sometimes he hears: in Look to the Lady, ‘Mr Campion wandered about the vicinity in a quiet, ineffectual fashion, his eyes vague and foolish behind his spectacles, but his ears alert’ (88) and when Penny tries to take the chalice to London Mr Campion sits down and waits until ‘his ears detected the sound for which he was listening’ (98). Our attention is also drawn to the importance of smell in The Beckoning Lady when Minnie doesn’t know how she can always tell when Tonker is lying but guesses that ‘[p]robably he smells differently. I was reading somewhere that everything is smell’ (134). Most often, though, Campion relies either on a combination of the five senses

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

125

or on that sixth sense which is not properly a sense at all but is typically conceptualised as one. It is in Traitor’s Purse that Campion discovers both how emotionally invested he is and how much his reasoning processes are intuitive and dependent on a variety of senses. He has already become tentatively and reluctantly emotionally involved in Dancers in Mourning, with mixed effects on his perceptive powers. He later feels that even before the first murder ‘the whole story was there, so clear to read if only he had been looking for it’ (17), but he was not looking for it and soon his mind is on other things: talking to Linda Sutane, ‘Campion was not conscious of the time. His carefully trained powers of observation were temporarily in abeyance. He had ceased to be an onlooker and was taking part’ (51). When he fails to mention the absence of blood on Chloe Pye’s body ‘[w]hat it did not occur to him to consider was his own unprecedented behaviour in the matter’ (73). His social and cultural knowledge continues to stand him in good stead, as when he examines the records found at the scene of Chloe Pye’s murder: ‘Trivial pieces like the “Etude” were frequently used, he knew, as fill-ups when a serious work did not divide into an even number of records, but if Miss Pye had been dancing to the Falla, which was a reasonable thing to do, he wondered why she had played through the “Etude” at all’ (76). He is also able to guess that the maid told Sarah that the dog would be destroyed (107), but in general his thought processes have been derailed because his emotions have been engaged. He advises the police to interview Sutane’s masseuse—‘She’s tough but she’s cracking. I’ve seen that for days’ (309)—but he still has not seen the biggest thing of all: As the little piece of the jigsaw dropped into place his mind jolted. A new thought clamoured at him. Sutane had not been there. Sutane had been out in the hall, rehearsing. He himself had not set eyes on the man before lunch. As he sat stiffly, his eyes fixed upon the middle distance, his brain seemed suddenly to turn over in his head. It was a definite physical experience and was comparable to the process which takes place when an expected train in the underground station appears from what is apparently the wrong tunnel and the mind slips over and adjusts the phenomenon by turning the universe other side out, substituting in one kaleidoscopic second east for west. (332)

He has been unable to see the solution before it is forced on him because he has been so conscious of coveting another man’s wife, which ironically turns out to be the same reason that Sutane has been shielding

126 

L. HOPKINS

the real criminal. Passion has blindsided him, and at this stage of his career passion is incompatible with reason. In The Fashion in Shrouds Campion is once again emotionally involved, this time because his sister is a suspect. He is also contrasted with Alan Dell, whose reactions are innocent to the point of rawness: when Dell is first introduced to Georgia ‘[h]e shook hands with her with unexpected gaucherie and stood blinking at her, suffering no doubt from that misapprehension so common to shy folk, that he was not quite so clearly visible to her as she was to him’ (28). Campion by contrast is emotionally on the qui vive, and responds sensitively to a range of different characters. His ‘involuntary thought on first meeting Sir Raymond Ramillies was that he would be a particularly nasty drunk’ (24), and when Ramillies and Ferdie Paul look at each other, ‘Mr Campion, who was watching them both, became aware for the first time that the undercurrent which he had been trying to define throughout the entire afternoon was an unusual, and in the circumstances incomprehensible, combination of alarm and excitement’ (33). At the funeral he ‘glanced at Dell again and picked up some of the other man’s thought; he recognized the pail-of-water-over-the-­­ head experience which Ramillies’s sudden death and Georgia’s sudden release must have been to him’ (158), and he tells Oates that he thinks Caroline Adamson was not alone when she rang him: ‘She hadn’t her entire mind on me’ (201). As Rex talks ‘Mr Campion, who was liable to moments of irrelevant observation, suddenly saw him objectively, a natty, demure little soul, only effeminate insomuch as sex shocked him for its ugliness and interested him because it shocked him’ (207), and he can also imagine the psychology of the woman who organised the blackmailing: ‘that particular type of mind which can see the sufferings of others and regard them without comprehension, seeing them only as an interesting spectacle’ (296). He is not, though, quite so perceptive when it comes to himself: Young Hennessy, sitting at a table with a duchess, an actor-manager and two complete strangers, made an importunate effort to attract his attention, and it was not until then that Campion, normally the most observant of men, glanced at Amanda and noticed that she had grown astonishingly good to look at. (77)

When she subsequently introduces him as her fiancé ‘Mr Campion received a mental thump between the shoulder-blades and saved himself

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

127

from blinking just in time’ (84). He is equally blind about his own sister. When he asks Val about the cachet blanc ‘[t]he icy quality in her voice did not warn him, as it might have done. There is nothing like the blood tie to render ordinary sympathetic comprehension void’ (137). It is no wonder that Lady Papendeik is unimpressed when Campion spots that she had deliberately arranged for Solly Bateman to distract Georgia: ‘“You detectives,” she said with good-humoured contempt. “What a lot you see”’ (86). Campion does see some things: when he looks at the body of Sir Raymond Ramillies, he ‘was curious to see the eyes and as he lifted one flaccid lid he was surprised to find the pupil almost normal. There were one or two other curious circumstances and he made a note of them’ (119). However this does not take him much further forward: ‘It was during the next twenty minutes that Mr Campion received the key to the entire story. At the time he did not recognize it, but afterwards, when he looked back, he saw that it was then that the shadowy wards were formed and spread out for him to recognize’ (122). He is learning, but to borrow a metaphor which will appear in Traitor’s Purse, he is still not firing on all cylinders. Traitor’s Purse takes these incipient powers of perception to a new level and in some ways births an entirely new character and arguably a new subgenre; Samantha Walton, noting that ‘on election to the British Detection Club, writers took an oath that bound them to write novels in which detectives ‘detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God’, argues that Allingham violates the spirit if not the letter of this oath, because ‘[i]n her wartime thriller Traitor’s Purse (1941), Allingham consciously refashions her detective as dependent, emotional, in contradistinction to both his old independent, logical, and authoritative self, and to the egotistic fifth-column Fascists he encounters during the case’ (Walton 2015: 239). Ironically Campion is now missing on all cylinders but one, but it proves to be the one that matters: sensitivity to people. He does retain some residual professional skills, as when he looks at Anscombe’s body and is able to deduce what the weapon must have been: ‘Campion could see the thing quite distinctly in his mind, a long thin murderous bludgeon bound with bicycle tape as like as not’ (44). Principally, though, he responds on an almost telepathic level to other people’s thoughts and feelings, foreshadowing The Mind Readers, Allingham’s last completed book, where ‘feels’ travel

128 

L. HOPKINS

more easily than words. Just after he has come round in the hospital he can tell that there are other people about because ‘[w]herever he was, whoever he was, drunk, mental, or dreaming, he was still wide enough to be able to tell a live building from an empty one’ (5). When he goes in for dinner at Aubrey’s he does not know who anyone is but he can pick up the tone of the gathering: ‘he walked into one of the few recognizable atmospheres of that nightmare evening. Intelligent academic formality, than which there is nothing more indestructible, closed over his head like a sea of glue’ (27). There is an interesting contrast with Lee Aubrey, who ‘quite openly thought for a moment or so … His thinking was obvious, almost pantomimic’ (78), and Aubrey is also unable to conceal his emotions: when Campion asks about a building ‘Lee frowned and the man at his side was aware of the wave of irritation which passed over him. It was a physical thing, as if his personal magnetism had been switched off and on again’ (80). Compared to Aubrey, Campion himself seems less like something that can be switched on and off than like a mass of twitching wires. When he asks Hutch a question he ‘felt rather than saw the man waver’ (91). When he thinks of the phrase ‘national importance’, ‘It was an amazing experience. He was remembering something not mentally but emotionally. The ghost of an emotional upheaval was returning to him. It was both terrifying and exhilarating’ (108). Later emotion again proves key to the recovery of memory: ‘Campion sat very still. It was coming. Behind the curtain hanging across his mind like an arras something of tremendous importance was trying to shine through. He could feel the emotion belonging to it. It was fear’ (157). Most of all, he responds to Amanda, whom he has previously taken entirely for granted. Now he thinks ‘[s]he was wonderfully easy to look at. That discovery struck him as new and surprising and he felt irritated with himself that it should be so’ (23); when he realises that he is not married to her, he thinks, ‘If he was a half-wit now, he seemed to have been a lunatic for some considerable time’ (26); and he is even able to imagine her thought processes when, looking at Aubrey, ‘Campion, sizing him up with his new child’s eyes, saw what Amanda liked in him and sized it up like a General inspecting enemy fortifications before the commencement of hostilities’ (76). As a result of this emotional awakening he reappraises both his identity and his situation. Faced with Lugg’s apparent dependence on him Campion is resentful, but does not blame his old friend and knave: ‘It was the original Campion’s own fault. The new Campion felt he had the grace to recognize that. He had a vision of a damned superior young man

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

129

who must always have been laughingly tolerant, gloriously sure of himself. The new Campion turned from him with loathing’ (115). The change in him is profound and lasting, so that by the time of The China Governess he finds the detachment of the Kinnits almost intolerable: ‘This purely mental approach to what was after all a most acutely emotional problem, at least for Timothy, was getting under his skin’ (139). The temporary but total loss of his intellectual self which he experiences in Traitor’s Purse has made him a better human being, and it has also made him a better detective. After Traitor’s Purse Allingham allows several years to elapse before we (or Amanda) see Campion again. When he does reappear in Coroner’s Pidgin, He had changed a little in the last three years; the sun had bleached his fair hair to whiteness, lending him a physical distinction he had never before possessed. There were new lines in his over-thin face and with their appearance some of his own misleading vacancy of expression had vanished. But nothing had altered the upward drift of his thin mouth nor the engaging astonishment which so often and so falsely appeared in his pale eyes. (1–2)

If Campion has not changed very much, though, postwar Britain has: Susan Shering tells Campion ‘there are so many different worlds, you see. We each have to live in two or three’ (61), and this is important because one of the things Campion polices is Englishness. This is established as early as The Crime at Black Dudley, where Von Faber cements his status as villainous foreigner by shooting a hound and threatening to run down the horses (159–160), and it becomes ever more apparent in the books that follow. The Palinodes in More Work for the Undertaker, Great-aunt Caroline in Police at the Funeral and the Kinnits in The China Governess all battle to keep the modern world at bay; Alison Kinnit speaks for them all when she says disparagingly, ‘I had no idea that old Mr. Stalkey had died and the sons would prove to be so inferior’ (132), mercilessly dismissing a new generation with a word which smacks of degeneration. Campion is not like the Kinnits, the Palinodes or Great-aunt Caroline, but he does understand them, and he too works to protect what he regards as important to England. The key unit of English identity in the Campion books is the house. An Englishman’s home is his castle: as Councillor Cornish says of the owner of the vandalised flat in The China Governess, ‘This is a perfectly ordinary innocent citizen, Superintendent, and in any civilized city his home ought

130 

L. HOPKINS

to be inviolate’ (14). Many houses in the Campion stories seem almost to possess consciousness and personalities. In Police at the Funeral ‘the old house was undergoing an upheaval, a volcano of long fermented trouble’ (59). In Sweet Danger we are told of the mill at Pontisbright that ‘[l]ike all very old houses it had a certain drowsy elegance that was very soothing and comforting in a madly gyrating world’ (71), whereas in the sitting room of the mad Dr Galley ‘the chairs had this engaging habit of sprawling and curling until they looked as if one saw them in a trick mirror’ (85). In Death of a Ghost Belle sits down and ‘The old room which still breathed the presence of the turbulent Lafcadio seemed to range itself around her’ (182), while the turbulent Rosa-Rosa and her friends propose to fight over possession of the cottage (206). In Dancers in Mourning Campion ‘knew something of country life and the social obligations which certain houses seem to carry as though they had a personality quite apart from their owners’ (39), and he is therefore able to diagnose that the guests who converge on Jimmy Sutane’s house at teatime must have received invitations (41). In The Tiger in the Smoke, when Meg and Amanda visit the Levetts’ new house and Jack Havoc breaks in, Amanda gets ‘an impression of pursuit … It was as though the whole house was running away from forces descending upon it rapidly from outside’ (112); by contrast, ‘Old Avril’s home had a personality as definite and comfortable as his own’ (164). Increasingly, however, houses in the books come under threat. In Police at the Funeral Great-aunt Caroline says ‘[r]eporters are beginning to besiege the house already’ (68), and the police also come to call, to the horror of the inhabitants: ‘“Searching the house?” said Uncle William aghast. “They can’t do a thing like that. Or has this Labour Government made that possible?”’ (121); he also feels it is ‘[v]ery insulting to be disbelieved in one’s own house’ (164). In Dancers in Mourning Linda Sutane asks Campion, ‘Have you ever had rats in the house?’ and goes on, ‘If you get mice they’re just a nuisance, like flies or too many old magazines, but once you get rats you’re aware of an evil, unseen intelligence which is working against you in your own house’ (125). In The Fashion in Shrouds Ferdie Paul breaks into Amanda’s house to stage Campion’s supposed suicide (309); in Hide My Eyes Polly says to Richard, ‘Tell them that whatever they do they’re not to rush the house’ (184); and in The China Governess the delinquent Barry Cornish breaks into the Kinnits’ London house. If houses are under attack, though, the landscape may actively fight. In Mystery Mile Ali Fergusson Barber goes into the quicksand while

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

131

trying to finish Campion off (214); in Sweet Danger the mill kills Brett Savanake (236); and in The Tiger in the Smoke, where when Tom speaks, ‘It was as though a chunk of Suffolk soil, long suffering and eternal, had stirred itself’ (86), it is the topography of Saint-Odile, which though in France has belonged to an English family, that finally defeats Havoc. The collective effect is of an Englishness which is embattled but still defensible. Alongside this focus on houses and terrain goes an acute interest in the relationship between town and country. Ostensibly these are very different. In The Beckoning Lady Minnie says that Amanda’s illicit borrowing of Sidney Simon Smith’s battery is ‘[j]ust like the country’, and Campion adds, ‘Where everyone is his own Robin Goodfellow’ (104), and we hear too of ‘the wordless communication peculiar to the countryside’ (144). The whole action of Hide My Eyes takes place on one frenetic day when Annabelle Tassie, fresh from the country, pays a visit to her aunt in London and is exposed to several of the clichés of city life, including meeting a lot of new people, dining in a French restaurant and nearly being murdered. These stirring events are counterpointed by a quiet but sustained contrast between town and country. When Annabelle wishes the policeman a good morning, ‘She was up from the country, he decided. That was about it’ (30). When Polly tells her it’s possible to start imagining things when you live alone, Annabelle replies, ‘I know you can. It’s always happening in the country. People have great quarrels and make it up again, all without seeing or communicating with each other in any way’ (138). At the climax of the book ‘it was raining hard in the city way, which to Annabelle’s country ears was extraordinarily noisy, the water drumming on the roofs and gurgling in pipes and gulleys’ (197), but it is possible to see what is happening because ‘[t]here is always a certain amount of light from a city sky’ (212). Allingham is sensitive to the magic of London: in The China Governess, Charlie Luke is suddenly ‘confronted by a prospect of his beloved city which he had never seen before’ and stood transfixed before the unaccustomed view of London at night time, a vast panorama which reminded him not so much of the aerial photographs of today but rather of some wood engravings far off and magical, in a printshop in his childhood. They dated from the previous century and were coarsely printed on tinted paper, with tinsel outlining the design. They had been intended as backcloths for toy theatres and were wildly ambitious. The Fall of Rome was included, several battlefields, and even Hell itself complete with steaming lakes and cauldrons of coloured fire. Now to Luke’s amazed

132 

L. HOPKINS

delight he saw the same glorious jumble of grandeur and mystery spread out before him. He saw the chains and whorls of the street lamps, the ragged silver sash of the river and all the spires and domes and chimney-pots, outlined with a sorcerer’s red fire, smudging against the misty sky. It made his heart move in his side. (11)

At the same time, though, Allingham also rejoices in the eccentricities of the countryside, and in fact there is not so much separation between them as we might suppose: in Cargo of Eagles Mortimer Kelsey describes Saltey as ‘London’s back door’ (51), in Flowers for the Judge we are told that ‘[t]hose who live in that ghostly part of London which is the most crowded square mile by day and the most deserted by night, insist that at three o’clock in the morning it is as peaceful as a country churchyard’ (177), and the opening sentences of The Mind Readers are ‘[t]he great city of London was once more her splendid self … In the tightly packed clusters of villages with the ancient names—Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow—new towers were rising’ (9). The city can feel as unpopulated as the country and can be seen as made up of villages just as the countryside is; both are English, and England needs both. One of the cardboard theatre sets of which the city reminds Luke depicts Hell, and in both Pontisbright and Sanctuary witchcraft is still being practised. Even more than Father Brown, Campion is interested in the unholy. In Mystery Mile Isopel Lobbett says, ‘Sometimes I feel … that we’ve roused the devil’ (65). In Police at the Funeral Marcus Featherstone says of Socrates Close, ‘There’s rank evil there’ (42), Joyce says that Andrew ‘had a devil’ (99), and when Aunt Kitty asks Campion if he believes in ‘the power of Evil’ and he replies that he does (176), she declares baldly, ‘This house is Evil’ (177). In Death of a Ghost Max Fustian tells Lisa, ‘When Hecate opens the door of Hell to me she will look like you’ (28), and Mrs Potter looking at the inquisitive Miss Cunninghame feels that ‘[t]he mild eyes seemed to have become positively devilish’ (119). But Campion is also interested in the holy: the Gyrth Chalice has a potent guardian, and in The Tiger in the Smoke Canon Avril ‘believed in miracles and frequently observed them’ (30), Campion says, ‘Someone else looks after Uncle Hubert’ (174), and the Saint-Odile treasure invariably performs ‘the little miracle’ (221) of making honest women weep. Indeed in The Tiger in the Smoke it is not so much Campion as the whole genre of detective fiction which gets a reset; Campion himself is still personally involved in that Meg Elginbrodde is his first cousin, but the events

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

133

of the books have much more than personal significance and Jack Havoc, who starts life as Johnny Cash, is in effect an allegorical character. Nor is he alone in that: in More Work for the Undertaker too Luke, intervening in Lawrence Palinode’s interrogation of Clytie, says, ‘“That’ll be quite enough.” He involved a thousand-volt charge into his primness and succeeded in looking like the Angel of the Lord from a modern morality play’ (198). There is also an allegorical moment in Traitor’s Purse when Campion is tempted to explain his condition to Amanda: ‘he saw his choice as clearly as if it had been presented to him in pictorial form, like one of the old morality pictures of the primrose path flanked with gin palaces on one side and the steep track amid the chasms on the other’ (131). Campion’s processes of detection become increasingly bound up with this paysage moralisé. In More Work for the Undertaker, Campion walked up Barrow Road. Apron Street lay to his right but he did not turn. He wandered on, disregarding the rain, his chin tucked into his coat collar. It was the first break he had had in which to give his mind to the various brightly coloured threads which made up the puzzle, and at the moment it looked the most impossible knot of human monkey-business he had ever seen. He walked for a long time, considering each strand in the tangle, following each loose end as far as it would take him. It was an instructive experience, but he was still a long way from the solution. (148)

It is at that point that someone tries to run him over, which clarifies matters to the point that soon afterwards he reassures Luke: ‘“Oh, it’s coming, Charles,” he said. “It’s teasing out, don’t you know. As I see it, the point to keep in mind now is that there are clearly two different coloured threads in the—er—coil. The question is, are they tied at the end? I feel they ought to be, but I don’t know. What do you think?”’ (166). Later he astonishes Luke by wondering whether Captain Seton ever consults a clairvoyant: ‘I may be growing visionary myself, but I can imagine a silly, very slightly sexy association between a chap like that and some crazy half-vicious woman between fifty and sixty whom he visits, and to whom he blabs his own and everyone else’s business’ (219). And his mind is still working: Campion ‘had awakened … with a query. It had been thrown up, complete and vital, by his subconscious mind in sleep, and the more he considered it the more obvious and elementary it became’ (221). He also spots the resemblance between Renee and the portrait of Professor Palinode (228), and finally when he hears there is a packing-case

134 

L. HOPKINS

marked ‘Conjurer’s Stores’ he says, ‘So it’s arrived at last, has it? That’s my one superstition. When at last the little coincidence turns up unsought and unhoped for I know the angels are on my side’ (257). Campion’s conviction that ‘the angels are on my side’ chimes not only with the books’ interest in holiness but also with an increasing insistence on the workings of something which might be fate or might be providence. In The Tiger in the Smoke Havoc says of the treasure, ‘it’s waiting for me … I’m meant to find it’ (148). When Havoc expounds his belief in the Science of Luck Canon Avril says, ‘You’ve been reading the Frenchmen, I suppose?’ (197), echoing Ngaio Marsh’s Opening Night, published the year before The Tiger in the Smoke, where the play the theatre company are staging ‘displayed the influence of Existentialism’ (49). However Canon Avril himself has recently been engaged in a psychomachia about whether he should enter the church which concludes when he tells himself that ‘events have so arranged themselves that I have no choice’ (191); this is not existentialism as expounded by Camus and Sartre but an older, simpler belief which is akin to the Argument from Design. Other characters too are affected by this sense of a guiding hand. Approaching the cellar where Geoffrey Levett has been taken, Campion has ‘a sudden premonition that urgency was vitally important’ (153), and when Tiddy Doll loses one of his dark lenses in the boat Charlie Luke thinks, ‘The luck had come. He knew it as surely as the dairy hand knows that the cream in the churn has turned’ (207). Nor is The Tiger in the Smoke the only book in which the idea occurs: in The Fashion in Shrouds Sinclair says, ‘Things happen and link up rather peculiarly. Haven’t you noticed it? They do round Georgia and me, anyway. Don’t they do it everywhere?’ (151) and almost immediately afterwards Amanda says, ‘I can hear machinery’ (151); ‘“Organized machinations of fate,” murmured Mr Campion, and felt for the first time that old swift trickle down the spine’ (152). There is also a quasi-mystical and often reiterated sense that truth has a voice of its own: in The Tiger in the Smoke Tiddy Doll tells Havoc that he’s been surprised by how things have changed since the war and ‘[t]he ruthless broadside was annihilating and the ring of truth so clear that the most stupid among them could not help but recognize it’ (137), and when Havoc explains that Elginbrodde left a letter for Meg’s second husband, Geoffrey ‘recognized the unmistakable ring of truth in the reported words’ (146). In The China Governess Basil Toberman says, ‘Truth has a way of emerging’ (51), and there is a related idea that murder too will always emerge. In Hide My Eyes Polly tells Gerry Hawker that ‘[m]urder will out’ (194), and Luke says the same

6  AN ASS IN HORN-RIMS: ALBERT CAMPION 

135

thing in The China Governess: ‘Murder will out … I’ve known murderers give themselves away rather than leave it a mystery!’ (252). Like truth, murder makes its own noise. In this moralised, divinely regulated world, there is a sense in which Campion is not only a detective but an emissary, and he succeeds because of the way he looks at things. One of the recurrent ideas in the books is the importance of a sense of proportion. In Death of a Ghost Oates says ‘you know as well as I do that when a chap of that age and type suddenly becomes a killer it means something’s gone radically wrong with his sense of proportion’ (174). In The Fashion in Shrouds Ramillies says, ‘Georgia needs a sense of proportion. She’ll get one when she comes out to me with the Taretons’ (110); Val says to Campion, ‘When I came to you in London I was afraid of losing something really important for always; now I think I have lost it. It’s altered my entire perspective’ (142); and Ferdie Paul says of the supposed perpetrator, ‘His sense of proportion has gone to pot’ (300). In The Beckoning Lady Amanda says, ‘I like old Tonker. He’s got such a valuable sense of proportion’ (144). In The China Governess Miss Aicheson warns Timothy that investigating his birth may lead to him ‘losing your sense of proportion and swinging violently either one way or the other. Left or Right’ (112). In Death of a Ghost, however, the narrator observes that ‘as time went on even Campion began to see the events here recorded from that detached distance so often miscalled true perspective’ (176). In fact, proportion and perspective do not entail distance and detachment but require involvement and investment, and that is what Campion learns to develop behind his horn-rims, which do not help him to see but do act as protective camouflage while he learns how to feel about people, places, and values.

References Allingham, Margery. The Beckoning Lady [1955]. London: The Hogarth Press, 1985a. ———. ‘The Black Tent’. In The Return of Mr Campion. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998a. ———. Cargo of Eagles [1968]. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986a. ———. ‘The Case is Altered’. In The Return of Mr Campion. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998b. ———. The Case of the Late Pig [1937]. London: Penguin, 1940. ———. The China Governess [1963]. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986b.

136 

L. HOPKINS

———. Coroner’s Pidgin [1945]. London: J. M. Dent, 1987a. ———. The Crime at Black Dudley [1929]. London: Penguin, 1950a. ———. Dancers in Mourning [1937]. New York: Felony and Mayhem, 2008. ———. Death of a Ghost [1934]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942. ———. The Fashion in Shrouds [1938]. London: J. M. Dent, 1986c. ———. Flowers for the Judge [1936]. London: Vintage, 2006. ———. Hide My Eyes [1958]. London: Hogarth, 1985b. ———. Look to the Lady [1931]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950b. ———. Mr Campion’s Lucky Day and Other Stories [1973]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992a. ———. The Mind Readers [1965]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. ———. More Work for the Undertaker [1949]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. ———. Mystery Mile [1930]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950c. ———. Police at the Funeral [1931]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950d. ———. The Return of Mr Campion. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998d. ———. Sweet Danger [1933]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950e. ———. The Tiger in the Smoke [1952]. London: The Hogarth Press, 1987b. ———. Traitor’s Purse [1941]. London: J. M. Dent, 1985c. ———. ‘The Unseen Door’. In Mr Campion’s Lucky Day and Other Stories [1973]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992b. Walton, Samantha. Guilty but Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wentworth, Patricia. The Black Cabinet [1925]. London: Dean Street Press, 2016.

PART IV

Binocular Vision

CHAPTER 7

Seeing Double: Inspector Alleyn

Ngaio Marsh’s Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn, the only professional among the detectives created by the four queens of crime and also the only one to be distinguished by good looks, does not wear any form of eyeglass. He does however make frequent use of a lens, to the point where it becomes identified with his role as a detective. In Tied Up in Tinsel, Alleyn, arriving as a guest at a country house at Christmas, finds himself unwillingly trapped in the role of investigating officer, even though he is without his usual assistants and hasn’t brought any of his usual gear. His first question to his host, Hilary Bill-Tasman, is, ‘Have you got a lens?’ (522); later he asks Hilary ‘may I borrow that lens of yours? It’ll make me feel less of a phoney’ (539) and says to Superintendent Wrayburn, ‘I do hate … this going on a job minus my kit. It makes one feel such a damned, piddling amateur. However, Fox will bring it and in the meantime I’ve the Bill-Tasman lens’ (544). In Grave Mistake, too, a lens is understood as the signature item of a real detective: when Alleyn ‘finally took out a pocket lens’, ‘Mr Markos crowed delightedly. “At last!” he cried, “we can believe you are the genuine article”’ (606). A lens not only provides a focus but also enlarges, and in this it resembles two other aspects of Alleyn’s technique: his fondness for reconstructions of the crime, which allow particular moments to be pored over in detail, and the visual sensibility which first leads him into conversation with his wife, the painter Agatha Troy. We are told in Tied Up in Tinsel that Troy is ‘far from being a “representational” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_7

139

140 

L. HOPKINS

portrait-painter. Rather she abstracted the essence of her subjects’ (594); the Alleyn books as a whole, with their recurrent interest in superstitions, strange beliefs and quirky esoteric religions, are also drawn to primal, archetypal motifs such as the hunt, quasi-Gothic forms of monstrosity, and rituals such as the death of the winter king, all of which offer magnified versions of normal experiences and impulses in something of the same way as a lens makes things bigger and clearer. Alleyn’s reliance on a lens is established very early in the books as the bedrock of his detective methods. In A Man Lay Dead he uses a magnifying glass to examine a button (78), in Artists in Crime he looks at the photograph of Garcia through a lens (537), and in Opening Night ‘Alleyn squinted through a lens at the wing-taps of the gas-fire’ (122). By Swing, Brother, Swing the lens is established as something he always keeps about his person: when he examines the gun Alleyn ‘produced a pocket-lens and squinted through it down the barrel’ (581), and in Death and the Dancing Footman he has his lens with him even though he packed in haste (504). In Hand in Glove he examines the parish register ‘using a strong pocket lens’ (132) and then uses it again to look at the bottom of the planks across the ditch (138), and in Death at the Dolphin, after the glove purporting to be Hamnet Shakespeare’s is recovered, Alleyn ‘took a jeweller’s eye-glass out of his pocket’ and examines it (512). He even takes it out when there is nothing that he can usefully do with it: in Clutch of Constables, Voices and footfalls on the upper deck announced the return of the passengers. Alleyn restored the painting to its suitcase and the suitcase to its position against the wall. He opened the cabin door, shut his working-kit, took out his pocket-lens, squatted at the head of the bunk and waited. (138)

What he is waiting for is the entrance of people, and he will not need a lens to see them come in or to confirm their identities; he seems to wield it purely as a way of reminding the passengers on the boat that he is a detective, and possibly in order to hint that it might be dangerous to let him get too close to the purported Constable painting, since the lens might make damaging discoveries about it. Although Alleyn sometimes invokes Holmes, his reliance on the lens identifies him primarily with a different detective and a different, more modern set of methods. In some of the earliest books Alleyn is attended by Nigel Bathgate, a journalist who becomes a personal friend; in The Nursing Home Murder Alleyn thinks of Nigel as ‘my Boswell’ (551) and

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

141

in Death in Ecstasy Nigel is described in the Dramatis Personae as ‘His Watson’ (6), but by Enter a Murderer Nigel is used to evoke a third, less famous, but more pertinent figure when Alleyn adjures Nigel ‘Think. Think. Think’, and Nigel replies, ‘You talk like a Thorndyke’ (309). This is a comparison taken up and developed by Alleyn himself: in Death in Ecstasy he says, ‘This is a very exotic case. Thorndyke stuff. Not my cup of tea at all’ (87), and in Artists in Crime he observes of Basil Pilgrim’s overcoat, ‘It’s ideal for demonstration purposes—the short of thing Holmes and Thorndyke read like a book’ (627). R.  Austin Freeman’s Dr John Thorndyke does indeed take an interest in lenses, to the extent that in Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime Tommy when pretending to be Dr Thorndyke says, ‘I’m simply dying to use that new camera of mine! It’s supposed to have the most marvellous lens that ever was or could be’ (38). In one story, ‘The Aluminium Dagger’, Dr Thorndyke pulls out a pocket lens and a police inspector jokes that ‘His motto ought to be, “We magnify thee”’ (98). In another story, ‘The Case of Oscar Brodski’, the solution hinges on the fact that when Thorndyke attempts to reconstruct the shattered spectacles of a murder victim, he finds that ‘[t]here’s too much glass. We have almost completely built up the broken lenses, and the fragments that are left over are considerably more than are required to fill up the gaps’ (30), a conclusion which Thorndyke is assisted in reaching by a ‘dwarf microscope’ (17) and ‘his pocket-lens’ (32) as well as by a lens which he borrows from his friend Jervis (22); in ‘31 New Inn’ too spectacles are the crucial clue (266). In ‘A Case of Premeditation’ he takes a camera when he goes to investigate (65) and dismisses General O’Gorman’s use of bloodhounds even while conceding that ‘[t]he hound possesses a special sense—the olfactory—which in man is quite rudimentary’ (67). Thorndyke also has a laboratory assistant named Polton for whom ‘[o]ptical apparatus was the passion of his life’ (91) and himself uses ‘a small folding camera’ (178) to which he is able to affix ‘a tele-photo lens’ (246). Like Thorndyke, Alleyn too relies on a camera as well as lens. He is invariably accompanied not only by Inspector Fox but also by Sergeants Bailey and Thompson, to whom he refers in Off with His Head, where he and Fox ‘left Bailey and Thompson to deal with certain aspects of technical routine’ (93), as ‘the flash and dabs chaps’ (105); neither of them has anything resembling a personality, although in Black As He’s Painted Bailey is described for the first time as ‘mulishly inclined’ (85), but they can always provide photographs of the scene of the crime and of any fingerprints that may be found there as well as the ‘photomicrograph’ which

142 

L. HOPKINS

Alleyn requests in both Swing, Brother, Swing (633) and Final Curtain (466). However Alleyn also has his own camera, identified in Death and the Dancing Footman as ‘a very expensive instrument’ (506) and in When in Rome as ‘his own and very particular little camera’ (336); he photographs the body in the well with it, something the Italian police neglect to do, and later in the book it is the absence of Baron van der Veghel from Kenneth Dorne’s group photo which convinces Alleyn of his guilt. In Photo-Finish too something connected to a camera provides a crucial clue when Alleyn is handed the lens cap supposedly found by Marco and although ‘[i]n a general way he did not go much for “inspiration” in detective work, … if ever he had been visited by such a bonus, it was at that moment down by the lake’ (65). Alleyn is also a little like a lens himself: in Death in Ecstasy ‘[t]he entrance of Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn had a curious effect upon the scene and upon the actors. It was an effect which might be likened to that achieved by the cinema when the camera is shifted and the whole scene presented from a different view-point’ (25). Finally in Spinsters in Jeopardy his police case proves to contain ‘a pair of very powerful field-glasses’ (300), adding another kind of lens to his repertoire. Alleyn’s reliance on lenses kept in his kit or in his pocket is accentuated by the fact that many of the subsidiary characters in the books wear a heady variety of visual aids, starting with Alleyn’s sidekick Inspector Fox, who always puts on steel-rimmed glasses to make notes; in Black As He’s Painted Fox is described as ‘look[ing] over the top of his elderly spectacles’ (76). In the first of the books, A Man Lay Dead, Tokareff is ‘bespectacled, earnest, and resoundingly verbose’ (57), Inspector Fisher wears spectacles (142), and when Charles debags Arthur Wilde he breaks his glasses (38). In The Nursing Home Murder the narrator says of Sir John Phillips that ‘[n]o one ever saw him without his single eye-glass and there was a rumour that he wore it ribbonless while he operated’ (438); when Sir John hears the amount of hyoscine found in Sir Derek’s body ‘[h]e moved his eyebrows and his glass fell to the floor’ (504). Later ‘Ruth O’Callaghan walked into the room. She appeared to be dressed in a series of unrelated lengths of material. Her eyeglasses were canted over the top angle of her enormous nose’ (497), and when Alleyn interviews the matron ‘[h]e smiled very charmingly into her competent spectacles’ (511), while ‘Dr Roberts was a thin, sandy-haired man, with a deprecating manner. He took off his spectacles and polished them’ (448). In Death in a White Tie Lady Alleyn looks at Alleyn ‘over the top of her spectacles’ (7),

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

143

which we later learn are horn-rimmed (206); Sir Herbert Carrados wears an eyeglass (16); Lord Robert Gospell wears glasses (24); and Sir Daniel Davidson has glasses which he wears ‘on a wide black ribbon’ (43) and says of Miss Harris ‘She was quite unremarkable and one would never have seen her if she had not almost always been alone. She wore glasses’ (137). Later Miss Harris wears rimless pince-nez (174), and her uncle the vicar has ‘glasses which were clipped half-way down his nose’ (242). In Death in Ecstasy Miss Wade wears pince-nez (135), as too does Idris Campanula in Overture to Death (330), and in the same book Alleyn, challenged by Dr Templett to do some Holmesian deduction, declares that the doctor wore a rimless eyeglass in the play (380). In Scales of Justice George Lacklander wears a monocle (479) and Mr Danberry-Phinn’s reading glasses become an important clue when they are caught on a twig (524); Mr Danberry-Phinn also watches Colonel Cartarette through field-­ glasses (484). Glasses are particularly important in Singing in the Shrouds, where they become a guide to personality and temperament. We are told of Dennis’s experience of Mr Merryman that ‘[t]he spectacles, the rumpled hair and cherubic countenance had led him to diagnose absence-of-mind, benevolence and timidity’ (268), but in fact Merryman, who turns out to be the murderer, puts his glasses to deliberate uses which do not centre on seeing. When introduced to Alleyn ‘Mr Merryman looked sharply at him over the tops of his spectacles’ (303), suggesting that he actually wants to inspect him, but on a later occasion he uses them as a prop in a wholly disingenuous performance of benevolence: ‘“Let us talk about flowers instead,” Mr Merryman suggested and beamed through his spectacles upon the company’ (308)—an apparently innocuous suggestion, but in fact one which nods at Aubyn Dale’s unfortunate mangling of the word ‘agapanthus’ on a television programme, which led him to a nervous breakdown. When Mr Merryman and Mr McAngus later clash spectacles (346) it looks like a comment on their very different world-views, while Aubyn Dale adopts dark glasses as part of his attempt to lie low after his faux pas (388). The hot-tempered Captain Bannerman also deploys his glasses for purposes other than seeing: when Alleyn asks him about alibis ‘Captain Bannerman removed his spectacles and again advanced his now empurpled face to within a short distance of Alleyn’s’ (291), clearly hinting at the possibility of violence. Alleyn himself may not wear glasses, but he is surrounded by people who do.

144 

L. HOPKINS

Alongside this emphasis on eyewear, there are clear psychological overtones attached to eyes and seeing. The Alleyn books do not quite take psychoanalysis seriously, but they also do not quite dismiss it. The zealous teacher Caroline Able in Final Curtain, who explains everything with reference to complexes, is a figure of fun and Stephanie Vaughan in Enter a Murderer asks Alleyn ‘if he had read Freud, if he had read Ernest Jones. Mr Alleyn said he thought them all jolly good. Nigel felt nervous’ (219). Caroline Able’s interest in the psyche is firmly dealt with by the novel when it deploys the traditional narrative strategy of marrying her off to the nearest eligible male, and Nigel is nervous because he assumes that Alleyn’s bland reaction masks a scepticism which he might be tempted to reveal. A particularly striking example of the ambivalence with which psychoanalysis is treated comes in Photo-Finish, where the secretary Hanley first notes that he hates knives and that ‘Freud would have had something to say about it’ (121) and then explains that Isabella Sommita had a pair of daggers hung on the wall because ‘[s]he thought they teamed up with that marvellous pregnant female. In a way, one could see why’ (121). In a way, one can indeed see why: knives are a phallic symbol and pregnancy results from sex. But in another way one cannot at all see why, and the fact that Hanley apparently does see the choice as logical confirms his already established campness and adds to other hints about the nature of his relationship with Montague Reece, whose relationship with Sommita is apparently platonic. Moreover all three of these characters—Caroline Able, Stephanie Vaughan and Hanley—prove in the end to be red herrings. In contrast to Agatha Christie, where everyone is potentially guilty of something even if not necessarily of the crime under investigation, Marsh’s characters are not particularly suggestive and sometimes not even all that interesting (apart from their often quirky names); indeed the Alleyn books are often not so much whodunnits as howdunnits in which a perfectly obvious suspect appears to have an alibi and the interest consists in seeing it broken. Any suggestion that we might need to pay attention to a minor character’s psychology is a misdirection in narrative terms, but contributes to the impression that the books have a general, anthrologically flavoured interest in the workings of the human mind. There is a particular attention to the psychological suggestiveness of eyes, but at the same time there is a refusal to subscribe to the usual explanation of what that might mean. In Swing, Brother, Swing Breezy Bellairs, who is a drug addict, screams that everyone is looking at him—‘Eyes. Eyes. Eyes’ (585)—and in A Man Lay Dead Alleyn, inviting Nigel for a

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

145

walk, asks him ‘Have you ever read Eyes and No Eyes? I am going to improve your keen young journalistic brain’ (121). Neither of these remarks really leads anywhere in narrative terms, and the same is true of the Alleyn books’ many references to that most famous psychologising of eyes, Freud’s reading of the myth of Oedipus. In Died in the Wool Cliff explains that he couldn’t join the army because ‘[t]hey wouldn’t have me. Eyes and feet’ (143); Oedipus’ own name translates as ‘swollen foot’ and his wife Jocasta blinds herself on learning that she is also his mother. Shortly after Cliff starts talking about Flossie and says, ‘I suppose I’d better explain … that I’m not absolutely positive what the Oedipus Complex exactly is’ (146); the reader who does know what it is might well flirt with the idea that Cliff regarded Flossie as a surrogate mother and killed her, although in fact the motive turns out to be the concealment of pro-Nazi espionage. In Swing, Brother, Swing Lord Pastern says to Carlisle, ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if you had one of those things—Oedipus and all that’ (526), and in Scales of Justice Mr Phinn says of his kittens, ‘The girl-­ child who suffers from a marked mother-fixation is Edie … Edie Puss, of course’ (458); both of these are throwaway comments which do not resonate with anything else that happens in the books but do contribute to a sense that while they are interested in the psyche, they do not find psychoanalysis a persuasive explanatory tool. In Hand in Glove Patrick says, ‘I knew about Bob Maine … I’ve never been able to make out why I didn’t like it. If you say Oedipus Complex I shall be furious’ (378); in fact he has presumably divined the element of unscrupulousness in Maine’s character which eventually leads him to commit murder. The exception to this trivialising of the Oedipus Complex comes in Singing in the Shrouds, where Alleyn calls Mr Merryman’s story ‘a sort of text-book shining example of the Oedipus Complex and the whole blasted job’ (453), but this time we have the opposite problem in that the drama of Merryman’s childhood is too pat and perfect a fit with the details of his crimes, which seem like a reductive imitation rather than an impassioned response to an emotional crisis. The most important question for the reader might well be that of Alleyn’s own psychology, since that is likely to inform his methods of detection. In fact, these are many and various. Partly, Alleyn looks: in Spinsters in Jeopardy the narrator observes that ‘[i]n Alleyn the trick of quick observation was a professional habit’ (244), and in Death and the Dancing Footman Alleyn notices the fishing reel, which is cheekily positioned next to a portrait of ‘a Victorian gentleman wearing an ineffable air

146 

L. HOPKINS

of hauteur and a costume which suggested that he had begun to dress up as Mr Sherlock Holmes’ (505). Partly he listens: in Opening Night we are told that ‘[i]t was part of Alleyn’s professional equipment that something in his make-up invited confidence’ (168); in Artists in Crime, Ormerin declares that Alleyn is getting them all to talk and saying nothing himself and Alleyn replies, ‘you draw up the blinds on my technique and leave it blinking foolishly in the light of day’ (519); and in Last Ditch, Alleyn’s son Ricky remembers that ‘[h]e had once heard his mother say that a great deal of his father’s success as an investigating officer stemmed from his gift for getting people to talk about themselves’ (249). Alleyn’s status as part of the gentry (his brother is a baronet) means that is also socially competent: in Death and the Dancing Footman, when he listens to Chloris and Mandrake ‘Alleyn thought he recognized that particular shape of caressing rudeness which is the courtship note among members of the advanced intelligentsia’ (483). In all these respects he recalls other detectives, particularly Campion; in others, however, he is very different from them. Alleyn ostensibly has a philosophy of detection, which he has set down in a book which has apparently become a primer for police officers: in Vintage Murder, the book in which Alleyn visits Marsh’s native New Zealand for the first time, Inspector Wade tells Alleyn, ‘We’ve all been trained on your book’ (280). However all we actually learn of the book comes when Wade says ‘I’ve just been reading your views on conjecture, sir’ (283), and Alleyn is quick to explain that he does not always practise what he preaches; indeed in Death at the Dolphin Fox says, ‘You always say don’t conjecture but personally, Mr Alleyn, when you get one of your hunches in this sort of way I reckon it’s safe to go nap on it’ (592), and Alleyn quite often gets hunches. In Death in a White Tie he solves the crime as he is going to sleep and ‘in a single flash, saw the pattern of the dance’ (238), and in Enter a Murderer he says ‘intuition is as good as induction any day’ (218). He is also sensitive to atmosphere and emotion: in Surfeit of Lampreys ‘Alleyn received a sudden and extremely vivid impression of a united family’ (106), and in Vintage Murder, Ackroyd says Mason will now be very wealthy and ‘[a]t once Alleyn sensed a feeling of panic, of protest’ (298). In Overture to Death we are told that Alleyn ‘had never been able to conquer his proclivity for first impressions’ (431) and he also has a (correct) premonition that he will visit the Copelands again (456). In the same book he also offers one of the rare definitions of his technique:

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

147

‘Do you just collect stray bits of evidence,’ asked Henry, ‘and hope they’ll make sense?’ ‘More or less. You scavenge and then you arrange everything and try and see the pattern’. (470)

He also writes to Troy, ‘You told me once that your only method in detection would be based on character: and a very sound method, too, as long as you’ve got a flair for it’ (517). While character-based deduction might be a very sound method, however, it is not one that would stand up well in a court of law, and Alleyn is constantly in quest of more objective modes of proceeding. In A Man Lay Dead he tells Nigel, ‘I know now. I have known for some time, I think; but even though a Yard official is supposed to have no psyche, I find there is often a moment in a case when a piece of one’s mind, one’s feeling, one’s sense, knows the end while all the rest of the trained brain cuts this intuitive bit dead’ (175). The idea that a Yard official should have no psyche is repeatedly shown to be a governing principle of Alleyn’s actions. In The Nursing Home Murder he says to Jane Harden, ‘Try to think of me as a sort of automaton, unpleasant but quite impersonal’ (527). He intermittently reproaches Nigel for being queasy, reads private letters, and has a professional manner which is markedly different from his personal one, something which is tellingly brought out in Vintage Murder, where Alleyn appears on the scene of the crime before Inspector Wade knows who he is and is challenged: ‘I just thought—’ began Alleyn with that particular air of hurt innocence that always annoyed him when he met it in his official capacity. ‘I just thought—’ (279)

The private Alleyn reacts in a way which would infuriate his professional self, and later explains that he had temporarily disengaged from his official persona: ‘I had imagined the whole show was simply a ghastly accident. The official mind must have functioned—reaction to sudden death or something. If I had suspected homicide, I should have done my best to keep them all on the stage’ (320). He can also look at the police from the outside: in Off with His Head Alleyn thinks that if Mrs Bünz has fled Nazi Germany ‘she’ll think we’re ruthless automatons’ (138). Alleyn is never an automaton, but he does strive for a very high degree of detachment: in Artists in Crime he searches Troy’s room and exhorts her, ‘If you will

148 

L. HOPKINS

simply think of me as a ship’s steward or—or some other sexless official’ (611), and in Died in the Wool Alleyn he asks Terence Lynne for Arthur Rubrick’s diary and tells her ‘you must try to think of me as something quite impersonal, as indeed I am’ (201). In Swing, Brother, Swing Alleyn tells Carlisle Wayne that his questions are ‘entirely impersonal. Irrelevant matters will be most thankfully rejected and forgotten’ (596) and in Dead Water ‘Alleyn produced his stock comment … “If it turns out that there’s no connection, I assure you I shall be glad to forget it”’ (362). Whether he or anyone else can really believe this is unclear; it is true that in the early books he sometimes affects to have a poor memory, but that motif soon disappears from the series and lends no serious support to the idea of Alleyn as a man who can simply press a mental delete button. He remains a human embarrassed by his own humanity, which is all the more reason for the books to explore what being human means. It is part of his attempt to efface the personal and subjective that one of Alleyn’s favourite techniques is to mount reconstructions of crime, which always include at least one observer. In A Man Lay Dead Alleyn says to Nigel: I am going to ask the group of suspected persons to look on while we go through a performance of the murder. One of the guests must slide down the banister and in dumb-show re-enact that terrible little scene. I want you, with the ‘very comment of your soul’, if that was the phrase, to observe the others. Yes, it’s Hamlet’s old stunt over again, and if it comes off I hope I shan’t make the muck he did of the result. (180)

The comparison with Hamlet proves a recurrent one. In Singing in the Shrouds Alleyn suggests that Father Jourdain ‘played Horatio’s part’ by watching the suspects (347) and in Black As He’s Painted the murder of the ambassador is described in a way which directly recalls Hamlet’s own reconstruction of the crime: ‘And then from many voices like the king and courtiers in the play: “Lights! Lights! Lights!”’ (74). In Enter a Murderer Stephanie Vaughan says she can’t remember how Arthur Surbonadier struck her but ‘[p]erhaps if you were to do it—but gently, please—I might remember’ (281); later, when Nigel asks if the reconstruction at the Unicorn will be like the one in the Frantock case, Alleyn replies, ‘The conditions are very different. In this instance I am simply using the characters to prove my theory. In the Arthur Wilde case I forced his confession. This, unless these unspeakable mummers insist on dramatising

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

149

themselves, will be less theatrical’ (376). Although Nigel jestingly says to Alleyn, ‘Thanks to you I was able to watch the murder in comfort from a fifteen- and sixpenny stall provided by the murderer’ (417), the main point is that the reconstruction allows Alleyn to judge who could and could not have fired the gun, and ultimately to identify the criminal. In The Nursing Home Murder Alleyn backs up his hunch with another reconstruction and the two together deliver the goods; he explains that ‘[i]f it hadn’t been for my “idea”, I shouldn’t have watched Roberts’ (651). In Death in Ecstasy Alleyn says, ‘And now will you all please show me exactly how you were placed while the cup was passed round the circle’ (29); in Opening Night Helena and Adam Poole reenact a short part of the play to give Alleyn of how long Poole was offstage (137); and in Grave Mistake, Fox calls their nocturnal activities in the vicinity of Sybil Foster’s grave ‘A reconstruction’ (650). The idea is still going strong in the final Alleyn book, Light Thickens, where Alleyn asks the cast ‘to do exactly what you did then’ (367); he and Fox also act out a short part of the play (371) and the railway game featuring a figure which the boys christen ‘Gaston Sears’ is also a sort of reconstruction which ultimately affords a crucial clue. Reconstruction is related to acting, which is in itself a form of doubleness: in Opening Night, a very tired Martyn Tarne is asked to deliver a line in a certain way and ‘Poole’s suggestions entered like those of a mesmerist, and that perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted fully invested her’ (60). But reconstruction is also a way of seeing things again, and in this sense afford an opportunity for a form of metaphorical double vision. In this it is akin to another element of double vision in the books which comes from Alleyn’s marriage to the painter Agatha Troy. Troy is first introduced in Artists in Crime, where Alleyn sees her painting and ‘drew in his breath sharply. It was as if his deliberately cultivated memory of the wharf at Suva had been simplified and made articulate. The sketch was an almost painfully explicit statement of the feeling of that scene’ (457). Falling for the painting is almost immediately followed by falling for the artist: when his eyes meet Troy’s ‘Alleyn was immediately conscious of a clarification of his emotions’ (460). He is also subject to a clarification of his aesthetic sensibilities. Even in their first meeting Troy tells him he is ‘very observant for a layman’ after he is able to remind her of where exactly a bit of colour was repeated (459), and in Death in a White Tie she says to Alleyn, ‘How extraordinarily well-trained your eye must be! To notice the grains of plate-powder in the tooling of a cigarette-case; could anything be more admirable?’

150 

L. HOPKINS

(288). By the time of Death and the Dancing Footman, when Alleyn enters Mrs Compline’s sick-room he ‘saw the scene as a pattern of hard whites and swimming blacks’ (510), and in Died in the Wool he starts his investigation into Florence Rubrick’s death by enquiring about her portrait: ‘He saw by their startled glances at the portrait that custom had made it invisible to them’ (27) and when he asks, ‘Is it a good likeness?’, ‘Fabian and Ursula Harme said, “No.” Douglas Grace and Terence Lynne said, “Yes”’ (30). This gives Alleyn his first insight into Florence Rubrick’s character, and later when he looks at Cliff, ‘Alleyn thought that his wife would have liked to paint the boy’ (142). In Clutch of Constables Alleyn compares the supposed Constable with the real landscape and discovers a suggestive difference, and in Black As He’s Painted the effect of this visual education is summed up: ‘Whenever Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, whatever it might be, he did so with double vision’ (30). Having had his own aesthetic perceptions developed, Alleyn also sets himself to develop those of others, and to solve crimes in doing so. In Surfeit of Lampreys he tells Mike (who subsequently becomes a policeman) ‘tell me exactly what you saw and heard and smelt’ (123) and explains to him that ‘[y]ou know your brain is really rather like a camera. It takes a photograph of everything you see, only very often you never develop the photograph. Try to develop the photograph your brain took of the hall’ (124); the possibilities of this approach are demonstrated when Mike’s brother Henry says, ‘I remember the look of the table very clearly. It reflected the light from the window’ (203). In Death and the Dancing Footman Nicholas Compline’s claim that he can’t remember whether he shut the door prompts Alleyn to say, ‘I’d like an exact picture, you know’ (537); in Colour Scheme Dr Ackrington makes Colonel Claire visualise his journey down the path and asks him, ‘what do you see?’ (783), and Alleyn concludes that ‘Questing’s murderer is the man who knew that he was colour blind’ (830). In Died in the Wool Ursula says, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how, for no particular reason, something you see will stick in your memory?’ (46) and when Alleyn asks about the condition of the floor Merrywether says, ‘I noticed it and yet I never noticed it if you can understand’ (141). In Hand in Glove Alleyn’s questions induce Nicola Maitland-­ Mayne to remember more than she thought she would: ‘“I can see him now,” Nicola said, surprised at the vivid memory. “I think he had his hand inside his overcoat. The lamplight was on him. He turned his back to us. He stooped and straightened up”’ (93). In Death at the Dolphin Alleyn has the same effect on Emily Dunne when he asks her about the hand of

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

151

an injured child: ‘I remember I did sort of look at it. I moved it between my own hands and I remember noticing how grubby it was which made it childish and—then—there was something …’ (506). In Clutch of Constables Alleyn asks Troy the name of the junk shop and she says, ‘It was so dark. I don’t think I saw. But—wait a bit—yes: on a very dilapidated little sign in Dr Natouche’s torchlight. “Jno. Bagg: Licensed Dealer”’ (126); later in the same book she manages to ‘summon up her draughtsman’s memory’ to recall the number plate of a motor bike (147). In all these cases there is a form of double vision as witnesses mentally revisit the scene and draw fresh conclusions from reappraising what they saw. Although Alleyn learns from Troy to see better, she also disturbs his vision in one respect: in Artists in Crime we read that Alleyn ‘afterwards told Nigel Bathgate that he was unable to bring Troy into focus with the case’ (530), and we are offered a gloss on this remark in Died in the Wool when Fabian says, ‘You see, Terry, I’ve often thought that of all us you’re best equipped to look at the whole thing in perspective. Or are you?’ (83). His doubt presumably arises from a sudden suspicion that Terry may have felt an emotional involvement, and he proves to be right, which means that she is not after all the best equipped to look at the situation in perspective. The idea of perspective is a recurrent and important one in the Alleyn books. In False Scent Richard Dacres first ‘suffered one of those horrid experiences, fortunately rare, in which the victim confronts himself as a stranger in an abrupt perspective’ (472); then Charles Templeton tells him, ‘You must keep a sense of perspective, my dear boy’ (499); finally he worries after the murder that ‘I can’t get it into perspective’ (594). In Hand in Glove Nicola Maitland-Mayne is afraid of telling Alleyn what she saw Lady Bantling do because ‘[i]t’ll sound disproportionate’ (94), and in Final Curtain Troy muses after Alleyn’s return from his long trip to New Zealand, ‘That there were hazards ahead she made no doubt, but for the moment all was well; she could relax and find a perspective’ (432). There are also many references to distorted vision, as in Death in Ecstasy where the heroin-user Maurice Pringle ‘looked strangely at Alleyn as though he was bringing the inspector into focus’ (61), and the opposite of finding that all-important perspective is the loss of one’s eye. In Death in a White Tie Donald Potter says, ‘I suppose I lost my eye. Bridget says I did’ (224); in Swing, Brother, Swing Lady Pastern tells Carlisle that ‘Félicité has met this person in his own setting and has, as I think you would say, lost her eye’ (539); and in Singing in the Shrouds Father Jourdain says, ‘when one is looking for peculiar behaviour one seems to see it all over the place … I

152 

L. HOPKINS

suppose I lost my eye’ (361), while Jemima says, ‘I just need to keep my eye. And see that [Tim] keeps his’ (377). To lose one’s eye, it seems, is to misperceive both other people and one’s own place in the world and to lose sight of one’s values and of the relative importance of particular contexts and behaviours. It is particularly important to keep one’s eye when trying to understand people, but it is also exceptionally difficult. In Death and the Dancing Footman, one of the few sensible remarks made by Jonathan Royal is that ‘[n]o one person … is the same individual to more than one other person’ (339); this is perhaps best illustrated in Died in the Wool when Markins comes into Alleyn’s room late at night and Alleyn reflects, ‘Four versions of Flossie already and it must now be half-past two at least. Must he listen to a fifth?’ (122). As the title of Black As He’s Painted playfully suggests, it is possible (indeed essential) to represent people in more than one way, and ironically the most naturalistic kind of portrayal may not always be the most revealing. In Swing, Brother, Swing the narrator observes: If any painter, a surrealist for choice, attempted to set the figure of a working detective officer against an appropriate and composite background, he would turn his attention to rooms overlaid with films of dust, to objects suspended in unaccustomed dinginess, to ash-trays and tablecloths, unemptied waste bins, tables littered with powder, dirty glasses, disordered chairs, stale food, and garments that retained an unfresh smell of disuse. (710)

This is not a portrait of a detective, but it might convey more information than one, and this kind of oblique approach does indeed often prove revealing in the Alleyn books, as in Death in a White Tie when Troy says she’d have liked to paint Evelyn Carrados’ hands and call them ‘[h]ands of a frightened woman’ and Alleyn replies, ‘God bless your good painter’s eyes’ (81); when Lady Carrados is revealed to be a victim of blackmail Troy’s insight is vindicated. Nor is Troy the only person to be able to see in this way: in Swing, Brother, Swing Edward Manx says of Carlisle Wayne that ‘she would retain memories as sharp as pencil drawings of unimportant details’ (508), and towards the climax of the book Carlisle ‘looked at the others through her fingers and thought that there was something a little wrong, a little misshapen, about all of them. Her aunt, for instance. Why had she not seen before that Lady Pastern’s body was too long and her head too big? It was so. And surely Félicité was fantastically narrow. Her skeleton must be all

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

153

wrong’ (625). Carlisle’s surreal but revealing vision of her family is echoed by several more explicit references to surrealism elsewhere in the Alleyn books: in Off with His Head Alleyn says of the sword dance, ‘It’s as full of disjointed symbolism as a surrealist’s dream’ (111) and in Photo-Finish, ‘it struck him that he had created a picture worthy of Salvador Dali—a Burmese gong on an island in New Zealand, a figure beating it’ (150). In Death and the Dancing Footman, where Mandrake thinks that William Compline ‘was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject’ (308), William Compline himself says of Jonathan Royal that ‘[i]f I painted his picture I should make him egg-shaped, with quite a merry smile, and a scorpion round his head. And then, you know, for eyes he would have the sort of windows you can’t see through. Clouded glass’ (329); Compline might be presented as a simple soul, but he is onto something here, for what he proposes would be no bad indication of Jonathan Royal’s dangerous combination of malice and insensitivity to emotional undercurrents. In Grave Mistake Verity Preston thinks, ‘We deprive ourselves aesthetically when we forgo the advantages of symbolism’ (574); Marsh would concur, and does not forgo them. Marsh couples her interest in symbolism with a strong attraction to archetypal motifs and stories featuring religious arcana and esoteric beliefs and objects. She is particularly drawn to two discrete but connected manifestations of what might be termed traditional English culture: the rituals and language of hunting, and folk customs centring on the killing of a winter king. References to hunting are everywhere in the books. In Artists in Crime Troy writes to Katti Bostock that Valmai Seacliff is ‘on the hunt’ (465); in Death in a White Tie Alleyn after Lord Robert Gospell’s murder says, ‘The hunt is up’ (79); in Overture to Death Henry Jernigham had liked hunting ‘until one day, quite suddenly as if a new pair of eyes had been put into his head, he had seen a mob of well-fed expensive people, with red faces, astraddle shiny quadrupeds, all whooping ceremoniously after a very small creature which later was torn to pieces’ (337). In Death and the Dancing Footman Alleyn, describing how Nicholas Compline committed the murder, says, ‘the wireless was giving tongue’ (573); in Singing in the Shrouds Father Jourdain tells Alleyn he can scent misery ‘[b]ut I can’t hunt it home’ (331) and after the attack on Jemima Alleyn ‘knew, as he hunted, he was too late’ (395); and in Hand in Glove Nicola says to Andrew Bantling, ‘Good hunting! If you are hunting’ (14), and Miss Cartell, who is a member of the Hunt Club committee (55), recalls that she used to hunt with Nicola’s father (32). In Dead Water ‘Miss Cost

154 

L. HOPKINS

had hunted her evening quarry with obsessive devotion and had recorded the fruits of the chase as if in some antic game-book’ (356–7). In Clutch of Constables Alleyn calls Fox a ‘clue-hound’ (129); in Tied Up in Tinsel Alleyn says to Superintendent Wrayburn, ‘Lovely hunting weather’ (541); in Last Ditch Ricky Alleyn, spotting Sydney Jones in St Pierre des Roches, wonders, ‘Which was the hunter and which the hunted?’ (305), and Mr Harkness says to the police, ‘Good hunting’ (331), while Ricky wonders of the Pharamonds, ‘Did they always hunt in a pack?’ (341). In Photo-­ Finish Beppo Latienzo says of the search for Strix, ‘The hunt is up’ (60), and in Light Thickens Alleyn warns Peregrine Jay that if Macbeth stays on the stage William Smith and his mother ‘will be hunted remorselessly’ (376). None of the plots of these books has anything to do with actual hunting, but the metaphor leaches into the fabric of the texts. References to hunting are particularly numerous in Off with His Head, where they are coupled with the idea of the sacrificial killing of a winter king. The determined folklorist Mrs Bünz says she was motivated by ‘the zest of the hunter’ (9) and asks if the horse being shod is a hunter (19), and Dame Alice declares that Lord Rekkage ‘[h]unted with the Quorn till he fell on his head’ (11). The vicar ‘was despised by Dame Alice not because he couldn’t afford, but because he didn’t care, to ride to hounds’ (56); Superintendent Yeo Carey says William Andersen ‘gets all the shoeing for the Mardian and adjacent hunts’ (84); and Dr Otterly says of the Guiser and the sword dance that ‘It runs in his blood like poaching does in Old Moley Moon’s up to Yowford Bridge or hunting in Dame Alice Mardian’s’ (113). Later Alleyn observes to Fox that they are in trouble ‘unless we can “find” as the Mardian ladies would say’ (162) and Dame Alice tells Dulcie to bring ‘the hunting-horn from the gun-room’ (224), upon which ‘Dulcie staggered out bearing a hunting-horn and a hideous gong slung between two tusks’ (225); then finally during the performance of the sword dance ‘“Crack” swung from side to side as if the monster ogled its audience and made up its mind where to hunt’ (228). The word ‘Monster’ introduces the idea of Darwinian evolution, and that is also found elsewhere in the book when Superintendent Yeo Carey attributes Dulcie Mardian’s mental state to ‘in-breeding which is what’s been going on hot and strong in the Mardian family for a great time’ (77) and Alleyn jokingly tells Dr Otterly that he himself is a typical CID officer but ‘Fox is a sport’ (114), sport being a term for a plant which differs radically and unexpectedly from its rootstock. The ideas of hunting and evolution are coupled too in The Nursing Home Murder. Dr Roberts, who has written a book on eugenics,

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

155

kills Sir Derek O’Callaghan because there is hereditary insanity in his family, which Roberts attributes to inbreeding (549); Nurse Banks introduces an explicitly Darwinian note when she says that Sir Derek is ‘probably the last of his species and he’ll be the first to go when the Dawn breaks’ (461); and later when Alleyn tells Jane Harden that it was murder he adds, ‘So the hunt is up’ (525). In Death at the Bar George Nark asks Alleyn, ‘I don’t suppose you know a piece of work called The Evvylootion of the Species?’ (763); obviously he does, and so too does his creator. Hunting and Darwinian theory went hand in hand in the later nineteenth century, when ideas about degeneration, the dark side of evolution, provided a rationale for the extermination of animals such as ‘back-going’ deer, whose diminishing antlers suggested that they could threaten the future of their species by fathering unfit offspring. The Alleyn books repeatedly use the language of degeneration. In Death in Ecstasy Alleyn visits Mrs Candour and ‘realized that she wished him to see a hot-house flower, enervated, perhaps a little degenerate, but fatal, fatal’ (188); in Colour Scheme Dr Ackrington refers to ‘the emasculate popinjays who appear to form the nucleus of the intelligentsia at home in these degenerate days. Bloomsbury’ (586). In Opening Night the play being staged offers a comment on heredity which is underlined by Martyn Tarne’s strong resemblance to her second cousin Adam Poole; Martyn and Poole are both decent people, but the premise of the play is that future versions of ourselves may be weaker and baser than we are. There are also several instances of the word monster, though with no acknowledgement of the Darwinian theory that apparent monstrosity is a driver of evolutionary change in ways which are more likely to develop a species than to cause it to degenerate: in Photo-Finish Troy calls Isabella Sommita ‘a monster’ (48); in When in Rome Alleyn asks Kenneth Dorne, ‘are you simply a born, stupid, unalterable monster?’ (369); and in Light Thickens Geoffrey Harcourt-Smith is dismissed as ‘a schizophrenic monster’ (293) and Macbeth too is described as ‘a monster’ (349). Marsh’s interest in evolution is inflected by the fact that she was born and brought up in New Zealand. Although her ancestry was British, she was proud to bear a Maori first name even if it was difficult for her readers at ‘Home’ to pronounce, and she created some attractive Maori characters and also some sympathetic African ones. She thought, however, that there were profound differences between races. In Black As He’s Painted Alleyn likes and respects the Boomer, but understands him as profoundly different from himself, and the Boomer himself speaks to Alleyn of ‘our separate

156 

L. HOPKINS

evolutionary processes’ (178). Unsurprisingly, Marsh is particularly alert to differences between Maoris and white immigrants to New Zealand such as her own ancestors. In Vintage Murder Dr Rangi Te Pokiha says of the Maoris’ encounter with ‘The pakeha’ that ‘[i]n trying to follow his example we have forgotten many of our customs and have been unable wisely to assimilate his. Hygiene and eugenics for example. We have become spiritually and physically obese’ (424). In Colour Scheme Rua Te Haku says of the Maori, ‘In a century we have had to swallow the progress of nineteen hundred years. Do you wonder that we suffer a little from evolutionary dyspepsia?’ (613). However, if the Maori have been affected by white immigrants, the white immigrants too have been changed: when Simon Claire, who deliberately affects a style of speech which his genteel English mother considers uncouth, says, ‘Somebody’s been up the track ahead of us. Didn’t you pick that?’ (695), he is demonstrating scouting skills of the kind which degeneration theorists believed to have died out in ‘overcivilised’ nations and to survive only among ‘savages’. Simon may have less elegance than his parents, at least in their eyes, but he is more vigorous than they and seems much more likely to succeed. This willingness to look beyond the details of the individual crimes on which the books centre to some much bigger pictures is consonant with Alleyn’s own twin techniques of repetition and magnification, and it is never more clearly demonstrated than in the books’ interest in strange beliefs, odd forms of worship, cults, and esoterica. In all the books set in New Zealand and also in Light Thickens Marsh mentions the Maori concept of things being tapu, but she is interested too in English folk customs such as the sword dance in Off with his Head, which Dr Otterly regards as an early manifestation of the Lear story and which generates intense interest and emotion (in the case of Ernie Andersen uncontrollably so). In Tied Up in Tinsel, where Colonel Forrester dresses up as a Druid rather than Father Christmas, Hilary Bill-Tasman’s conviction that ‘there’s an overlap between the Teutonic and the Druidical’ (442) recalls Mrs Bünz, and Bill-­ Tasman also touches on questions of belief when he says to Troy, ‘I suppose … you think I’m effete and heartless and have lost my sense of spiritual values’ (477). We also learn in Off with His Head that Sergeant Obby was put up for the (Masonic) Lodge by William Andersen (126), and freemasonry is glanced at again in Death at the Dolphin, where Winter Morris’s remark that Destiny Meade would ‘woo the Grand Master to let the goat out of the lodge’ (573) suggests that the black mass of Spinsters in Jeopardy might be connected with masonry in Marsh’s mind.

7  SEEING DOUBLE: INSPECTOR ALLEYN 

157

In Tied Up in Tinsel, Troy asks Hilary Bill-Tasman, ‘Are you a Christian?’ (478). Neither Troy nor Alleyn openly professes a faith, but although both Spinsters in Jeopardy and Death in Ecstasy feature bizarre sects led by charismatic crooks and the plot of Dead Water turns on a faked miracle, Marsh takes some forms of religion much more seriously. In Singing in the Shrouds the wholly admirable Father Jourdain believes in the devil (363), and in Clutch of Constables Troy thinks, ‘If it were all true … and if the devil really was out and about in the streets of Tollardwark! What a thing that would be to be sure!’ (54); in a sense the devil is out and about, since almost all the passengers on the boat are disguised criminals of one sort or another. In Spinsters in Jeopardy Alleyn ‘seemed to see himself for the first time, a stranger, a being divorced from experience, a chrysalis from which his spirit had escaped and which it now looked upon, he thought, with astonishment as a soul might look after death at its late housing’ (377), and this experience is repeated in Photo-Finish where what he imagines is described as ‘his “Familiar”, though truly a more accurate name might be “Unfamiliar”’ (128); the language is an apparent nod to the concept of the unheimlich but the experience itself suggests the immortality of the soul. Perhaps most striking is Black As He’s Painted, where the Boomer is confident that ‘Assassination is not my destiny’ (26) and Mr Whipplestone picks up the cat and goes home ‘little knowing that he carried his destiny under his jacket’ (43); these apparently uncritical assumptions about the existence of destiny are disturbingly supplemented when Alleyn, investigating the Sanskrits’ pottery, is convinced he is being watched, and does indeed find a pair of eyes fixed upon him. They prove to belong to someone who is dead (199), but the implication is that they still have agency, and that the life of the spirit does not end with that of the body. Alleyn’s literal magnifying glass is thus echoed by the books’ own willingness to engage in a process of metaphorical magnification which turns crime fiction’s traditional emphasis on individual lives and deaths into a matter of Life and Death as abstract concepts.

References Christie, Agatha. Partners in Crime [1929]. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Freeman, R.  Austin. ‘The Aluminium Dagger’. In Miraculous Mysteries. Ed. Martin Edwards. London: The British Library, 2017. ———. The Best Dr Thorndyke Detective Stories. Ed. E.  F. Bleiler. New  York: Dover, 1973.

158 

L. HOPKINS

Marsh, Ngaio. Artists in Crime [1938]. London: HarperCollins, 2009a. ———. Black As He’s Painted [1974]. London: HarperCollins, 2009b. ———. Clutch of Constables [1968]. London: HarperCollins, 2009c. ———. Dead Water [1964]. London: HarperCollins, 2009d. ———. Death and the Dancing Footman [1942]. London: HarperCollins, 2009e. ———. Death at the Bar [1940]. London: HarperCollins, 2009f. ———. Death at the Dolphin [1966]. London: HarperCollins, 2009g. ———. Death in Ecstasy [1936]. London: HarperCollins, 2009h. ———. Death in a White Tie [1938]. London: HarperCollins, 2009i. ———. Died in the Wool [1945]. London: HarperCollins, 2009j. ———. Enter a Murderer [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2009k. ———. False Scent [1960]. London: HarperCollins, 2009l. ———. Final Curtain [1947]. London: HarperCollins, 2009m. ———. Grave Mistake [1978]. London: HarperCollins, 2009n. ———. Hand in Glove [1962]. London: HarperCollins, 2009o. ———. Last Ditch [1977]. London: HarperCollins, 2009p. ———. Light Thickens [1982]. London: HarperCollins, 2009q. ———. A Man Lay Dead [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2009r. ———. The Nursing Home Murder [1935]. London: HarperCollins, 2009s. ———. Off with His Head [1957]. London: HarperCollins, 2009t. ———. Opening Night [1951]. London: HarperCollins, 2009u. ———. Overture to Death [1939]. London: HarperCollins, 2009v. ———. Photo-Finish [1980]. London: HarperCollins, 2009w. ———. Scales of Justice [1955]. London: HarperCollins, 2009x. ———. Singing in the Shrouds [1958]. London: HarperCollins, 2009y. ———. Spinsters in Jeopardy [1954]. London: HarperCollins, 2009z. ———. Surfeit of Lampreys [1941]. London: HarperCollins, 2009aa. ———. Swing, Brother, Swing [1949]. London: HarperCollins, 2009ab. ———. Tied up in Tinsel [1971]. London: HarperCollins, 2009ac. ———. Vintage Murder [1937]. London: HarperCollins, 2009ad. ———. When in Rome [1970]. London: HarperCollins, 2009ae.

CHAPTER 8

The Double Vision of Dornford Yates

In the introduction to his book Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries, Nicholas Daly observes that ‘readers may still discern the vestiges of an absent chapter on John Buchan and Dornford Yates’ (vi). This is not that chapter, but it is an attempt to explore how Yates’ interest in Ruritanian fiction, which I will compare with books written by John Buchan and Eric Ambler as well as with The Prisoner of Zenda itself, combines with his obsession with binoculars to make his work too an investigation of the nature of ocular proof. Yates’ work is not detective fiction, but both the Berry stories and the Chandos books share many of the concerns and tropes that energise golden age detective fiction. In particular, they investigate English national identity in the same way that detective fiction so often does, and paradoxical though it may seem, their engagement with other countries (Riechtenburg and Austria for Chandos, France for Berry and his household) is central to how they do this. Both sets of books also explore questions of individual agency and the process of historical change, and in this respect the idea of binocular vision offers an important metaphor. Yates may not specialise in detective fiction as such (though both the Chandos and the Berry books do feature investigations of crimes, and Ne’er-do-Well is detective fiction pure and simple), but he does shed light on what is at stake in the genre, what it can achieve, and why a stress on visual aids is so helpful to it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_8

159

160 

L. HOPKINS

In Yates’ 1930 Fire Below the hero, Richard Chandos, declares that ‘[c]omedy and tragedy sometimes go cheek by jowl’ (110). This is certainly true of Yates’ oeuvre, which is divided almost evenly between the Wodehousian Berry books and thrillers featuring violent deaths, and it is also more generally true of the various little kingdoms, principalities, and duchies in which Ruritanian stories are set. These countries are typically somewhere in Mitteleuropa, as if they lurked unnoticed amidst the vast territorial possessions of the Habsburg Empire; as Nicolas Daly puts it, ‘The people speak German; and its national air is almost certainly the waltz’ (4). In Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier, the hero Henry Barstow dreamed as a young man of ‘intrigue conducted to the strains of Mozart, Gluck and Strauss’ (12), and Ruritanian territories abound in picturesque villages, pretty rustic maidens, and soldiers with quaint uniforms but not much firepower. From the publication of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda in 1884 until the outbreak of World War II, Ruritania offered an escape from a real Europe where the outlook was growing progressively darker. The Prisoner of Zenda was wildly popular and extremely influential. In Margery Allignham’s Mystery Mile a member of an unidentified European royal house invites Campion to ‘impersonate me, as before’ (222); this is made particularly apposite by the fact that Campion’s real name is Rudolph. In Chesterton’s ‘The Fairy Tale of Father Brown’, ‘The picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist’ (329); in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase Wimsey jokes that the corpse Harriet finds is that of ‘the Prime Minister of Ruritania’ (58), and he is not so far off because the murdered man proves to believe himself heir to the Russian throne and to have bookshelves containing a ‘remarkable amount of romantic narrative about love and war in Ruritanian states’ in which ‘[t]he rise and fall of governments appeared to be a private arrangement, comfortably thrashed out among a selection of small Balkan States, vaguely situated and acknowledging no relationships outside the domestic circle’ (288). (I will return to the ways in which Ruritanian fiction can investigate processes of historical causation.) In a later Sayers novel, Gaudy Night, Peter is called urgently abroad and ‘Harriet amused herself with wondering whether the Prince of Ruritania had been shot’ (77). In particular, Ruritania is a recurrent presence in the works of Agatha Christie. In one of the short stories collected in Poirot’s Early Cases Prince Paul of Maurania wants to marry Valerie Saintclair morganatically (124);

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

161

the hero of The Secret of Chimneys is Prince Nicholas of Herzoslovakia, in disguise as Anthony Cade; and in The Listerdale Mystery both ‘The Girl in the Train’ and ‘Jane in Search of a Job’ feature Grand Duchesses from Ruritanian countries (though one turns out to be a fake). The Prisoner of Zenda itself is fondly recalled by Christie in two books written towards the end of her career. In Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), Lady Matilda explains that when she was a girl The Prisoner of Zenda was ‘about the first taste of romance we got’ (100); ‘In the afternoon we were allowed to sit down and read a story book and The Prisoner of Zenda was usually one of the first ones that came our way’ (100). She also notes that ‘The Prisoner of Zenda was very romantic. One fell in love, usually, with the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll’ (101), to which Stafford Nye responds ‘Ah, of course, now I know. That’s where the word Ruritanian comes from: one is always throwing it about’ (101). (Nye should know, because he himself resembles a remote Hungarian ancestress of aristocratic descent and one character, who is supposed to be the son of Hitler, is compared to the Grand Duchess Anastasia [278]). Three years later in Postern of Fate (1973) Tuppence, sorting through books, thinks, ‘“I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t come across The Prisoner of Zenda.” She sighed with enormous pleasure at the remembrance. “The Prisoner of Zenda. One’s first introduction, really, to the romantic novel … Rudolph Rassendyll, some name like that, whom one dreamt of at night”’ (14). Later in the same book Mrs Griffin says, ‘My grandmother used to read The Prisoner of Zenda, I believe. I read it once myself. Really very enjoyable. Romantic, you know. The first romantic book, I imagine, one is allowed to read’ (165). The Prisoner of Zenda is indeed romantic, but one of the reasons for its success it that it seasons adventure with a broad streak of comedy. When he discovers that the real king has been made prisoner by his half-brother, Rudolf Rassendyll observes that ‘the farce had to be reality for us now’ (62); later he adds, ‘I am reminded of a situation in one of our English plays—The Critic’ (64). Even as Rudolf notes that when the news of the imposture is broken to Flavia: ‘It was the sob that told her no comedy was afoot’ (181), he tacitly acknowledges the potential for comedy that has always been inherent in the situation, and in Rupert of Hentzau we are openly told that ‘[t]he tragedy and comedy of these busy days were strangely mingled’ (125). In Rupert of Hentzau there is a hilarious scene (54–5) when the count of Luzau-Rischenheim wants to tell the king that Rudolf Rassendyll is in Zenda and impersonating him, but is unable to because Colonel Sapt, standing immediately behind the king, is pointing a

162 

L. HOPKINS

revolver at him over the king’s ear, and in any case the king himself only wants to discuss how to get dogs’ coats silkier. But there is also a much more serious note, for one of the affordances of Ruritanian fiction was a space for dispassionate investigation of how history is made (perhaps the best example of this is Philip Pullman’s The Tin Princess). Asked to identify the best book published between the two world wars, Yates’ comic hero Berry Pleydell says, ‘That’s easy. Lost Horizon’ (As Berry and I Were Saying, 181). James Hilton’s novel tackles the issue of causation head on: when Mallinson accuses Conway, the central character, of fatalism and says he was different ‘during the trouble at Baskul’, Conway’s reply is ‘then there was a chance that I could alter events by my own actions. But now, for the moment at least, there’s no such chance. We’re here because we’re here, if you want a reason’ (57); later, surprised at Chang’s lack of interest in news, Conway says, ‘Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know’, to which Chang replies, ‘Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920’ (98). Both Anthony Hope and Dornford Yates are interested in whether events are indeed foreseeable or whether a difference can be made by the actions of one individual. The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, set up a number of rules and protocols for Ruritanian fiction. The first of these is that Englishmen can always do better than foreigners. In Rupert of Hentzau Fritz observes that ‘we are ready to believe much of an Englishman’ (124), and Yates’ Fire Below gives us two English travellers with splendid physiques and no psyches making light work of a bunch of comedy foreigners; for George Hanbury, a native of any country other than England is a wallah, and Richard Chandos, learning that Marya did not send the telegram which has brought him hotfoot to Riechtenburg to rescue her, says in shocked tones, ‘If one can’t trust the Post Office—well’ (24). The accident of birth is often a very significant factor in Ruritanian fiction, and there must be some comic relief and a hint of romance, preferably doomed, though it is acceptable for wives to be won during the course of the narrative. There is a sense that normal morality is suspended (this is most obviously the case in Yates, where characters whom we are apparently meant to admire cheerfully commit murder), and there is an occasional dash of the Gothic: in Rupert of Hentzau the chancellor is called Helsing (121), and in Yates’ An Eye for a Tooth in the graveyard ‘every mound was staked’ (144) and they proceed to ‘the place where three roads met’ (147), which might recall Bram Stoker’s Carfax. Dracula is also evoked in Perishable

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

163

Goods, where Chandos sees Boy Pleydell after Adèle is kidnapped and ‘the thick, dark hair I remembered was white as snow’ (24), recalling the way that Jonathan Harker’s hair turns white overnight, while in As Berry and I Were Saying we discover that when Boy was at the bar his superior was named Harker (although this really was the name of the lawyer who offered Yates a place in his chambers, it is a helpful coincidence). In B-Berry and I Look Back Boy recalls his friendship with Harry Irving (84), whose father Henry Irving was Stoker’s employer and sometimes considered to have been the model for Dracula, and in This Publican Rowena is ‘a brilliant vampire’ (14). In this sense, Riechtenburg and Transylvania are generically if not geographically contiguous. Most importantly, Ruritania always has some contact with England. Nicholas Daly argues that ‘Ruritania … is in many ways less an exotic space than a miniaturized Britain with no industrial middle class and little in the way of law and order; it is a heterotopia of Britain, the same but slightly different’ (33), and Yates institutionalises this by having his Ruritanian books in constant intertextual dialogue with not only his other thrillers but also his Berry books. In this respect he has something in common with Georgette Heyer, whose detective fictions can be seen as commenting on her historical novels (Hopkins 2021), and indeed in The Berry Scene there is a character named George Wrotham (193), the name of one of Heyer’s most romantic characters (to be found in Friday’s Child). Jennifer Kloester notes that Heyer struggled with the writing of her detective story A Christmas Party in the wake of her brother-in-law’s death in action during World War II: ‘There is no escape in it: my gorge rises at it, in fact. As I sat today, trying to spur up some interest in it, I found myself thinking: “if this were only a period book!”’ (207). An excursion into any Ruritanian territory is always to some extent an excursion into the past; in Yates, this develops into fully fledged nostalgia, complementing the increasingly backward glance of the Berry books but also offering an implicit critique of the condition of England. Before considering what Yates was, however, it is important to acknowledge what he was not. In B-Berry and I Look Back, Berry tells Boy, Yates’ fictional alter ego, ‘I can see no resemblance whatever between any book that Buchan wrote and any book of yours. Now, if they said Anthony Hope …’ (123). Berry is quite right: Yates is very different from Buchan. The Prisoner of Zenda is a fresh and innocent tale; in the books that follow it archness and self-consciousness become the inevitable condition of the Ruritanian genre. No one can ever go to Ruritania without remembering

164 

L. HOPKINS

that Anthony Hope was there first, and without at least a nod at some of the tropes he inaugurated. Buchan is no exception, but his Ruritania is a mirror less of England than of Scotland, and is coloured by the doomed glamour of Jacobitism. In Castle Gay, Prince John of Evallonia appears at a ball dressed as Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is intended by the hero, Jaikie Galt, as a grace note, a pleasing conceit which he knows will delight the romantic soul of Dickson McCunn, but the short story ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’, which shows us a drink-sodden Charles Stuart in a poverty-stricken old age, makes an uncomfortable companion-­piece, as too does The Blanket of the Dark, where Peter Pentecost, son of the duke of Buckingham, is connected to the Jacobites when Solomon Darking asks, ‘You will take the low road, my lord?’ (189), glancing at the lament ‘Loch Lomond’ (‘Oh, you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, / And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye’; the ‘low road’ supposedly signifies death). The Blanket of the Dark also has an echo of another failed and fallen king: Chapter Fifteen, in which Peter fails to liaise with Darking, is very like the tracking of Laputa in Prester John, and David Daniell notes that when he finds himself alone with Henry VIII, ‘Peter recognises for the first time the reality of royal power—and does not want it. Buchan put a boy and a wounded man of near-absolute power in a cave, at the climactic failure of a rebellion, at least once before, in Prester John in 1910. The setting of that strong scene is also beside prodigious water’ (ix). It is true that unlike Laputa Peter survives, albeit in obscurity, and leaves descendants, so his failure is in a sense also his success and the sign of his ability to rise above worldly things, but the last of those descendants dies during the narrator’s lifetime. Richard Usborne justly observes that in most of Buchan’s books ‘[n]ot only was each hero successful in what he undertook. He was a Success in Life. The books present a succession of successes, and the Buchan success ethic has to be examined’ (88). Buchan was also very successful himself. Nevertheless he is remarkably interested in failure, and particularly in the failure of kings. In one way or another, A Prince of the Captivity, Prester John, Midwinter, ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’, The Dancing Floor, The Courts of the Morning, The Blanket of the Dark, The House of the Four Winds, and Huntingtower all include literal or metaphorical kings and princes, and in John Macnab Lord Lamancha is presented by the narrator as living proof of the fact that men are not born equal and that some will always have a natural authority over others. Nevertheless, Buchan’s kings fail, primarily because of the zeitgeist. When Sandy Arbuthnot starts to

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

165

explain what he is doing in The Courts of the Morning, he begins by referring to the prevalence of megalomania in the world (106). In John Macnab, three eminent professional men find themselves simultaneously assailed by ennui, suggesting that the fault lies not in their individual psychologies (indeed Buchan has not much time for psychology) but in the air and the times. Buchan himself also fails, for his fiction falls short of the Ruritanian ideal in two crucial respects. In the first place, it is portentous. His characters can move through vast landscapes but find the exact people they need (this is one of a number of ways in which he resembles J. R. R. Tolkien); locked up or trapped, they are saved by a passing elephant or a swooping aeroplane. Above all, they are always humble, presenting themselves as tools in the grand plan of a merciful providence, but it is the essence of Ruritania that history cannot be made unless decisive action is taken by an individual (and preferably by an Englishman). Secondly, there is no romance, because Buchan cannot do women; Richard Usborne, noting Buchan’s fetishisation of the idea of sportsmanship, adds that ‘The feminine of sportsman is sportsman’ (96). In The Blanket of the Dark, Peter is repelled by Sabine when he suddenly sees her as Aphrodite rather than Artemis (94), and the women towards whom the books’ heroes are attracted are typically boyish and gallant. The Countess Araminta Troyos is no exception: she is entirely onedimensional and exists merely as a plot device. In turn, this leads to a problem with Prince John, who cannot be a romantic hero because there is no heroine. This is dangerous, especially after Archie has specifically evoked the concept of le roi fainéant by quoting Tennyson’s ‘[i]t little profits that an idle king’, so Prince John is allowed to disguise himself as a chauffeur and do some useful cutting of wires on his own initiative. He thus establishes himself as possessed of enterprise and common sense, and it is also a promising sign that he can pass undetected as a Scottish chauffeur. Nevertheless, even if Prince John is personally equipped to lead Evallonia into a hopeful future, history is obviously against him, and this is consequently a darker version of Ruritania than Hope’s. Perhaps this was one reason why Yates was keen to dissociate himself from Buchan. In fact there are elements in common: in Yates’ Cost Price the circus provides Chandos with a means of escape and concealment (79) just as it does for Jaikie Galt in Buchan’s Evallonia, and Yates’ biographer A. J. Smithers jests that ‘[i]t looks as if at some time, perhaps in 1919, the last Elphberg must have been driven out and the country partitioned

166 

L. HOPKINS

between Riechtenburg and Evallonia’ (22). But in As Berry and I Were Saying there is a clear dig at Sandy Arbuthnot’s impenetrable disguises when Boy Pleydell declares, ‘it’s so easy, when A and B are in a jam, for C, the hero, to appear in a waiter’s dress and lug them out. But how did C get there? How did he get taken on? How was it that he was there at the critical moment?’ (183) (Sandy appears disguised as a waiter in The Courts of the Morning, though it is never explained how this came about). Boy (Yates himself in a much more transparent disguise) declares that his own work is by contrast credible: ‘Frankly, I should be ashamed to offer my public something which no thinking man could accept. It is, I suppose, a matter of self-respect’ (183). Boy/Yates is however quite happy to pay homage to Anthony Hope. In An Eye for a Tooth Duke Saul’s heir is called Rudolph (249), and so too is the real Count of Virgil in She Painted Her Face, who is dispossessed by his identical twin brother. In Perishable Goods, which Jack Adrian terms ‘Yates’s conflation of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau’ (The Best of Berry, xvii), Jonathan Mansel says, ‘There’s only one thing to do, and that is to go on play-acting’ (68), clearly nodding at ‘play-actor’, Rupert of Hentzau’s derogatory term for Rudolf Rassendyll, and in As Berry and I Were Saying Berry asks Boy, ‘Was Rupert of Hentzau as good as The Prisoner of Zenda?’ (181). In B-Berry and I Look Back, Boy is asked about the actor George Alexander and says, ‘He was quite good in a society play, but his rendering of Rudolf in The Prisoner of Zenda was dreadful. And that is by no means a difficult part to play’ (92). The difference between Yates and Hope is however that in Yates’ hands, even real countries start to feel Ruritanian, while fictional ones might just possibly be real. In Perishable Goods, which is set in Austria, the hero Richard Chandos notes, I do not believe in Enchantment: but, if there be such a thing, it stood at my shoulder that evening upon the ramparts of Gath. Castle, spur and thicket, mountains and forests and the flash of the water below seemed all ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ and I could not shake off the feeling that we were about to quit a fantastic country which, search for it as we might, we never should see again. (192)

Austria, which is real, feels like fairyland; conversely in Blood Royal, which is set in the fictional principality of Riechtenburg, Chandos declares of Major Grieg, ‘I shall not set down his true name or, indeed, the true

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

167

names of some others of whom I shall tell. These and the names of some places I have been careful to change’ (8). This crossover between reality and fantasy both bedevils and energises Yates’ fiction, and is particularly marked in The Stolen March, a strange fantasy set in a tiny country which, like Ruritania, cannot be found on the map but which differs significantly from Ruritania in that its inhabitants include talking animals and fairy tales come to life. The Stolen March recalls Alice in Wonderland, but it also features Auntie Emma, one of the many fiendish criminals who cross the path of Richard Chandos and Jonathan Mansel, and the quest for its lost land of nursery rhyme is prefaced by the reminder that ‘it was 1930 and that slices of Europe are not easily hid’ (37). Both Eulalie and the Beaulieus, three of the four main characters of The Stolen March, independently know Boy Pleydell (52) and Simon has a letter from Berry in his wallet (220); by the same token, in The Berry Scene the Pleydells bump into the Beaulieus in France (203). It is not only the distinction between different series of books which is riddled but that between Ruritania and reality. Dornford Yates has been largely forgotten today, and many might think that is a very good thing, for he is offensive in almost every possible respect. He subscribes unequivocally to notions of English superiority: in An Eye for a Tooth Mansel airily declares, ‘These Austrians are not like us’ (115), and in Jonah and Co., Piers, Duke of Padua, is an acceptable suitor for Jill because he is ‘English on both sides’ (119). He inherits the Victorian passion for physiognomy: Chandos says of the crook called China, ‘his cheekbones were very high, and he had the lowest forehead I ever saw’ (An Eye for a Tooth, 89), and in She Fell Among Thieves ‘Mansel said [the corpse] was that of a Spaniard, the moment he saw its face’ (76). He is a snob: in Perishable Goods Mansel explains airily that ‘[w]hen I say “George,” I mean “George and the servants,” of course’ (123) and when ‘Rose’ Noble explains noblesse oblige Chandos muses, ‘I could not help wondering what was the fellow’s history, for he had a commanding presence and was by no means common, as Punter and Bunch, while his speech was constantly betraying a considerable education which for some unaccountable reason he seemed to despise’ (163). (In fact, ‘Rose’ Noble’s history hardly matters since Mansel kills him anyway, and as for the rest of the crooks, they are regarded by the heroes as members of an inferior species.) In Perishable Goods Chandos records that Punter and Bunch ‘gave no trouble, comported themselves most humbly and touched their hats to their warders, if ever they spoke. Such piety suggested that their recent bodily affliction had chastened their souls’ (191); the choice of the word

168 

L. HOPKINS

‘piety’ suggests a quasi-religious element of veneration of their elders and betters which Chandos (and Yates) would find wholly justified. As for women, Boy Pleydell’s obsession with tiny feet is positively unsettling, and the haughty high-born heroines of Blood Royal, She Painted Her Face and Storm Music can hardly be told apart from one another. Finally Yates is quite extraordinarily hypocritical. In The House that Berry Built, Jill is delighted that the house they build in the Pyrenees will look English because ‘[o]ne and all, we wanted an English home’ (79); quite apart from the nastily parochial note of this, Yates himself left England as soon as he could and never went back because he did not like the weather. By the same token, the dedication to Elm Tree Road of Jonah and Co. may lament that ‘[n]ow the farm is gone, and a garage has taken its room’ and the Duchess of Varvic declare that John Bowshot ‘simply couldn’t see Beehive without its forge’ (An Eye for a Tooth, 98), but there is no one more car-mad than Yates: The Berry Scene opens in 1907 when they get their first car (2) as though life itself began then, and a common plotline of both the Berry and the Chandos books is ‘Englishmen drive to Pau and show up foreigners on the way’. It is not surprising that in Tom Sharpe’s Indecent Exposure, where a bunch of white South Africans constitute themselves as the Dornford Yates Club and enact the adventures of Berry, Boy, and Daphne, Kommandant van Heerden should feel that each time he looks at the picture of Yates on the dustjacket of one of his books, ‘he was filled with that sense of social hierarchy for which his soul hankered’ (62); Yates is indeed a reactionary. Yates himself, of course, would not have accepted that he is any way offensive, and it is true that he can write sensitively about the windows of Chartres or about the suffering of a horse (Jonah and Co., 200). His own self-defence would not have rested on this, however, but on a claim that the values and attitudes he upholds are right. Towards the end of The House that Berry Built, the mayor advises the Pleydells that the Germans are after them because they have done ‘too much good’ (320) by spreading pro-British propaganda; Yates would consider that the same was true of him, for he thinks of himself as upholding the traditions of an older, better England. In Ne’er-Do-Well, Baldric says, ‘We can go on behaving’ (9) and when Richard and Jenny Chandos go to visit the Avons (incidentally another Heyer name), Chandos thinks, ‘the setting seemed to belong to the days of chivalry’ (98). In Berry and Co., on their first Sunday back at White Ladies after World War I the five cousins go to church: ‘A shaft of sunlight beat full on an old black hatchment, making known the faded

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

169

quarterings, while, underneath, a slender panel of brass, but two years old, showed that the teaching of its grim forbear had not been in vain’ (6); someone, it seems, had been ready to serve and die in 1917 because they had inherited the chivalric ethos embodied in the memorial panel of one of their ancestors. Moreover, the place in which that sacrifice is commemorated is the emotional centre of a proper community: Beyond the house rises the quiet church tower, grey against the green of the chestnuts which stand beyond: to the left is a pride of elms to which rooks have repaired at sundown since James the First was king: and beyond are woodland and meadow and rolling park, whose lord is a jealous lord and will not sell an acre of all his heritage. So Quality has been saved—a shred of the stuff that English dreams are made of … some local habitations, gathered about a green. (And Berry Came Too, 214)

The Shakespearean allusions and the sense of history, not to mention the choice of the obviously emblematic name of Quality for the village in question, add weight and resonance to the implicit assertion that true Englishness rests on the unchallenged presence of a class system. I have suggested elsewhere (Hopkins 2016) that detective fiction often mounts an enquiry into who owns the land, and who deserves to do so. In both the thrillers and the Berry books Yates is obsessed by this question. In Berry and Co. Dunkelsbaum, who is apparently from Argentina but speaks a Germanic form of English, proposes to buy Merry Down; Boy demands indignantly, ‘D’you mean to say that this is what I fought for? … For this brute’s peaceful possession of Merry Down?’ to which an unusually serious Berry replies, ‘More. It’s what Derry Bagot and his boy died for, if you happen to be looking at it that way’ (216). In The Berry Scene, Mansel says, ‘With us, the right of way is the Ark of the Covenant’ (42), and when Berry sets out from his home at White Ladies to tackle a landowner who has closed a lane in the village of Bilberry he says, ‘This is what White Ladies is for. She has always done what she could to be Bilberry’s rod and staff’ (45). For Yates, it is wholly natural and admirable that those who are better born should own the land, but he would also have considered that they justified that privilege by behaving better. In Perishable Goods Adèle laments that Mansel will not live ‘to share our lovely secret and teach me to play the game’ (176); Yates would have thought that he himself was playing the game, and if anyone failed to understand that, the problem would have been theirs, not his.

170 

L. HOPKINS

Moreover, Yates is a more complex author than he might initially appear. Everything about him is dual, down to the name of his most famous character, Richard William Chandos. (This echoes Yates’ own real name, Cecil William Mercer, and like Chandos he was habitually known as William or Bill.) Many Utopian fictions depend on a trope central to comedy, interchangeability. This is certainly true of the book which inaugurated the tradition of Ruritanian fiction, The Prisoner of Zenda, where the infidelity of an eighteenth-century countess has infused the blood of the royal house of Elphberg, kings of Ruritania, into the otherwise English Rassendylls, with the result that Rudolf Rassendyll is the double of King Rudolf of Ruritania.1 It is, however, even more true of Yates. On the simplest of levels, he is obsessed with binoculars, with the sense of dual focus intensified by the fact that he often refers to ‘a binocular’ (though he also regards this as interchangeable with the term field-glasses). Yates has an obsessive concern with vision. Two of the titles of Chandos books, An Eye for a Tooth and Blind Corner, foreground the idea of sight, and one of those has a villain whose name, Saul, recalls the story of Saul/Paul being struck blind on the road to Damascus. (In Perishable Goods, Chandos recalls how ‘I wished for the day with a fervour which I think would have opened the eyes of St Paul himself’ [19]). ‘Rose’ Noble twice threatens to put out someone’s eye; in In Blind Corner he tells Chandos, ‘You say you’re not going to talk … Well, there’s your right eye gone. I don’t set up for a surgeon, but my hand don’t always shake, and an inch of red-hot wire makes a nice, clean job. And maybe, when you’re short of a light, you’ll find your tongue; it’s not an operation you’ll find in the medical books, but by God, I’ve known it work’ (151), and in Perishable Goods he says, ‘I’ve known a guy that kicked when he had two lights, as mild as his mother’s milk when he had but one’ (108).2 There is an obvious hint of Oedipus here, supported by the many instances in which Yates’ characters, like Oedipus, suffer leg injuries. Boy breaks his in Perishable Goods, and on other occasions sustains a wound to his knee and is kicked on the leg by a carthorse, Mansel has a permanent limp from a war wound, and in Perishable Goods ‘Rose’ Noble recalls someone who was tortured: ‘the jerky leg came on at about the same time. You see, when he wouldn’t answer, somebody happened to touch his sciatic nerve’ (164). The idea of the Oedipal is also underlined by the fact that Duke Saul is killed by a mantrap which effectively castrates its victims: ‘their jaws were made to meet at rather more than one metre above the ground … if a man touched one off, he would, if of normal stature, be pierced just above the hips’ (140).

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

171

But the recurrent threats to putting out an eye also point to a simple truth: vision may be variable, subject, and intermittent, and things may look different if you have only one eye. This is perhaps why binoculars are so important to Yates. In the first of the Chandos books, Blind Corner, Chandos records that ‘[a]t once I rose and took the binocular, and since I knew precisely where to look for the road, I was in time to see a closed car flash into and out of view on its journey South’ (56); in An Eye for a Tooth he tells how Cain ‘little dream[ed] that he was observed. So, since my binocular was powerful, I saw him extremely well’ (111). As they escape on the boat at the end of Cost Price Chandos ‘was watching the quay with my binocular’ (256). In Perishable Goods some of the party ‘repaired to the hog’s back, from which four men with glasses could command a very great view’ (34), and throughout the adventure ‘each of us carried a binocular of considerable power’ (70), which is what enables them to detect the abducted Adèle (71). In Red in the Morning, as they follow the kidnapped Jenny ‘Mansel thrust binoculars into my hand’ (38); later, Chandos narrates how from a high point above Arx ‘I then took my binoculars out, and, though I was badly placed, for I could not lie square, I was able to see that the man who was washing was Lousy and the Lowland was Gedge’s car’ (69). In Ne’er-­ do-­Well, Inspector Falcon asks, ‘By the way, Mr Chandos, have you a binocular?’ (41), and then proceeds to use it to inspect various parts of the nursing home (4 and 74). In Gale Warning, John Bagot, seeking to spy on Sermon Square, ‘took a binocular with me and climbed the winding stair to the top of the monument’ (30); it proves so useful that he muses, ‘I even remember cursing because I had not thought to take my binocular off—the soldier cursing because he has remembered to take his sword’ (35). Later when he has reached France Bagot tells Audrey, ‘I think there’s a bluff … I believe that from there a man with a pair of glasses can see the crossroads at Cerf’ (76); shortly afterwards he ‘told Audrey to stop, snatched my binoculars’ (113) and decides that they must go in front of the car they are tailing but ‘[f]ollow him with the glasses’ (114). In the freestanding thriller She Painted Her Face, the hero Richard Exon notes that he spotted a path ‘and when I had taken my glasses, I found that it led to an elegant belvedere. This looked unfrequented, and but for my glasses I could not have picked it out’ (35–6). The apogee of the motif comes in She Fell Among Thieves. When he sets out to reconnoitre as inconspicuously as possible, Chandos notes that ‘I had a binocular with me, and when I had covered two miles, I had a

172 

L. HOPKINS

sudden whim to survey Jezreel’ (33); he realises that he has attracted attention when he sees Vanity Fair looking back at him through her own glasses, upon which he feels foolish but consoles himself that ‘[t]o take with me and use my glasses was a perfectly natural act’ (34). Soon after he sees signs of a path so ‘[a]t once I whipped out my glasses and set my back to a rock’ (35); later he watches Jean through his glasses (67), then when he sees a human figure ‘[i]n a flash I had found my glasses’ (68) and finds himself looking at Jenny naked. Finding himself once again observed by an agent of Vanity Fair, he kills the man by using his glasses as a knuckleduster: ‘I let him have my binocular full in the face’ (70). Since the glasses are bloodied as a result, he buries them (76), but Mansel soon gives him a replacement pair (78); finally after they have rescued Jenny ‘Carson was ten miles off, sitting up in the mouth of a loft, with Mansel’s Rolls beneath him and field-glasses up to his eyes’ (213). Nor is the interest in binoculars confined to the Chandos books. In The Courts of Idleness Surrey Fettering looks through binoculars just before he is killed (89), and in the short story ‘Zero’, Jonah sees his former charger through field-glasses (The Best of Berry, 89). In Adèle and Co. ‘Carson lay silent beside us, with fieldglasses up to his eyes’ (156), and in The House that Berry Built Boy records first how ‘armed with field-glasses, we drove through Lally and on to the road to Pau—to survey the site from the opposite side of the valley, two miles away’ (57) and then that as the house rises ‘Husbandmen neglected their labour; flocks and herds cared for themselves; people sat still at windows, propping binoculars’ (104); finally when Berry is accidentally left behind he informs the others that ‘[b]efore me, I found a very remarkable view. This took me some time to observe, because the hag I protect had seen fit to alter the focus of my binocular’ (310). The double vision offered by binoculars is metaphorical as well as literal. In Blood Royal Sully says, ‘In politics … there are two kings of sight—near sight and long sight. Neither is satisfactory’ (70); together, however, they might be, just as the Berry and Chandos books, ostensibly wholly different in setting and tone, are in fact two sides of one coin. Yates is also obsessed with doubles. In As Berry and I Were Saying, two of Boy’s reminiscences of his time at the Bar concern two separate pairs of men who are unrelated but identical (28 and 61). In She Fell Among Thieves the real Count Gaston de Rachel is dead and has been replaced by his valet, who happened to look identical (creating a problem for Yates’ normal physiognomy-based characterisation because the valet is a bad lot and the real de Rachel was a gentleman).3 In She Painted Her Face, the real

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

173

Count of Virgil is displaced by his identical twin brother; in And Berry Came Too, Perdita says of Berry and a portrait of the Regency Bertram Pleydell, ‘Shave you and cut his hair, and you would be twins’ (145); in Ne’er-Do-Well St Amant’s chauffeur has an identical twin brother (112), and one of the short stories in The Courts of Idleness centres on identical twin sisters (171). In She Fell Among Thieves, the Austrian police are convinced there is only one Rolls and two sets of number plates (124); similarly in Jonah and Co. twin brothers help establish that Ping and Pong are two separate cars. Not for nothing do the names of both Boy Pleydell’s first wife, Adèle Feste, and Olivia, the heroine of Safe Custody, come from Twelfth Night, a play which features twins who cannot be told apart. Another important aspect of both the Berry and the Chandos books is substitution of a subtler sort, particularly the replacement of one woman by another. In And Berry Came Too, Perdita Boyte appears to be a love-­ interest for Boy but returns to America and is effectively replaced by Adèle. At the start of She Fell Among Thieves Léonie has apparently been killed in an air crash (ironically this is finally confirmed not in a Chandos book but in a Berry one, where we glean the additional information that George Hanbury and his wife, the former Marya Dresden, were also on the plane). A new wife, Jenny (who has already been swapped as a child), seamlessly replaces Léonie, and both Léonie and Jenny in turn helpfully agree to treat Lelia and Mona Lelong as avatars of themselves,4 while in Cost Price Jenny says, ‘I want to thank Colette for taking my place’ (243). One of the most interesting features of this duality is the intersection between Yates’ two fundamentally different series of books, the violent, heavily sexualised thrillers of which Chandos is the hero and the Wodehousian short stories centred on Bertram ‘Berry’ Pleydell. These are narrated by Berry’s cousin and brother-in-law, Boy Pleydell, and have a cast of recurring characters, including Daphne, who is Boy’s sister and Berry’s wife; another cousin, Jill Mansel; and Jill’s brother, Jonathan Mansel, who is the link between the two series because he is both a supporting player in the light comedy of the Berry books and Chandos’ daring and idolised leader. Equally at home putting ice on Berry’s chair in Hampshire and hanging criminals from trees in Carinthia, Mansel troubles both moral and genre norms, his hyphenated identities distinguished only by the fact that he is Jonah to his family and Jonathan to Chandos and Hanbury. Richard Usborne declares that ‘Jonah was the link between the “Berry” books (funny) and the “Chandos” books (unfunny)’ (31), but actually the divide is not quite as clear-cut as that: the Chandos books can

174 

L. HOPKINS

sometimes be funny and the later Berry books are occasionally dark. Moreover, both sets of books can be seen as sharing a common ancestry: Usborne goes on to say that ‘Anthony Hope’s Dolly Dialogues … gave the style to Boy’s self-recorded flirtations, just as Hope’s other, Prisoner of Zenda style gave the mood to the “Chandos” thrillers’ (32). An even stranger aspect of the interrelationship between the Berry and Chandos books emerges in As Berry and I Were Saying and is then developed in B-Berry and I Look Back, when Boy Pleydell turns out to be not only the narrator of the Berry books but also the author of all titles published under the name of Dornford Yates. He and the other characters discuss the merits and demerits of both the Berry and the Chandos stories (predictably, the ethereal Jill’s favourite is The Stolen March [As Berry and I Were Saying, 172]), and the real Mansel and Adèle dispassionately discuss the love story of the fictional Mansel and Adèle (The Best of Berry, 260–1). Ruritania always shares a border with real countries, but here two apparently unrelated genres also prove to be fundamentally interconnected. In As Berry and I Were Saying, Berry says of Boy’s reminiscences of his time at the Bar that ‘all this crime stuff is going to debase the book’ (10), but whether it does so or not it unmistakably confirms the kinship between the two apparently disparate series and their characters. The Berry books also encode a duality of their own, for the essence of Berry himself is extreme suavity of style coupled with outrageous violation of norms and forms. A particularly interesting instance of this combination is his frequent and often ingenious (mis)appropriations of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a touchstone for Yates; his biographer A.  J. Smithers observes that ‘Harrow and Oxford (particularly the OUDS) soaked him in Shakespeare and thus fixed his manner of writing’ (1), and the books delight to display familiarity with even the most obscure of the plays and poems.5 Both the Berry and the Chandos books are particularly fond of Henry V, an obviously appropriate play for the Berry books because it is a paean to English triumphalism; Smithers declares that in Yates’ writing ‘Henry V is never far below the surface, and he loved England’ (2). In The Courts of Idleness (1920) Fettering asks, ‘tell me about England. Is it the same dear place?’ and Fay replies, ‘On the whole, it is. Only there are heaps of cars now everywhere, and strikes have come in, and cocktails’ (65). The question is repeated in Blind Corner when an expiring murder victim asks Chandos, ‘What’s England like?’ and there it is specifically connected to the Henriad. Chandos notes, ‘I tried to tell him’—presumably meaning that he too would have felt obliged to mention strikes—but he is

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

175

interrupted by the dying man, who says, ‘But the country’s the same … The woods and the meadows at sundown and—’; Chandos’ comment is, ‘he died as Falstaff did, speaking of green fields’ (6).6 However the master-text for both the Berry and the Chandos books is As You Like It,7 a play which has two dukes and two worlds. Dukes are right up Yates’ street; Duke Saul of Varvic is followed by Duke Paul of Riechtenberg, and Jill Mansel improbably becomes Duchess of Padua, only to be widowed in a plane crash which also disposes of her twins (who seem to be aged about ten at the time).8 In fact Yates is obsessed with aristocracy, and also with royalty. In And Berry Came Too Boy calls Perdita a queen (37) and thinks of Jill looking at the abbey plate as ‘a King’s daughter in blue and silver, with her pretty hands in her pockets, appraising her father’s hoard’ (115), while Berry declares that as a child, ‘my cot having disappeared, I was put to sleep in Queen Elizabeth’s bed’ (116); in The Berry Scene there is even a royal dog, in the shape of The Bold. In Blind Corner Chandos speaks of ‘the royalty of Mansel’s nature’ (13) and in Perishable Goods he develops the theme: ‘there was a natural royalty about him such as, I think, few monarchs have been able to boast’ (1); later in the same book Chandos hides in an oak tree, as Charles II did after the Battle of Worcester, and we are told that the Castle of Gath belonged to the Emperor Maximilian, which proves to be a preparation for Yates having his cake and eating it when Mansel nearly dies in the emperor’s bed but is saved at the last moment: ‘For once Fate had not bungled, but had laid a king upon a king’s bed to die’ (PG 175). In The Stolen March, Pomfret calls Eulalie ‘royal’ (113) just before they start meeting real kings and princesses. Yates’ interest in royalty may look like simple snobbery, and there is indeed an element of that, but it also supports his conviction that individual action counts. As a child he lived in Wellesley House in Walmer, named after the Duke of Wellington who had been Warden of Walmer Castle and had died there, and when Berry and Co. go to Lisbon they are very conscious of following in Wellington’s footsteps; there is a sense in which a template suggested by Wellington also shapes the Chandos books, where Englishmen shape destiny in foreign countries (I am aware that Wellington was Irish, but I am sure Yates would have thought of him as an Englishman). It is the great man theory of history reduced almost to the point of absurdity, and at the same time the persistent references to As You Like It work to suggest that fantasy mirrors reality just as the Forest of Arden offers a looking-glass version of the court.

176 

L. HOPKINS

It is instructive to contrast Yates with the much more sophisticated version of Ruritania offered by Eric Ambler. Ambler rarely treats of murder and may appear to be more of a psychologist than a crime writer, but he was awarded two Gold Daggers, a Silver Dagger, and a Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain and named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers Association of America, so he may be considered a denizen of the world of crime, and he certainly had a visa for Ruritania. It is a recurrent feature of his fiction that characters seek a new territory, not off the map but not quite on it, where they won’t have to repay their debts or face justice and where it will not matter that their passports are invalid or expired. In Siege at the Villa Lipp (originally published as Send No More Roses), Mat Tuakana wants ‘a kingdom’, in the shape of Placid Island (38), and the book ends with Paul Firman and Melanie Wicky-Frey as sole inhabitants of Carlo Lech’s Caribbean island, where they feel safe but bored. At the end of Dirty Story, Arthur Abdel Simpson, in luck for the first time in his life, finds himself in possession of sixteen passports which can transform those who are stateless (including himself) into citizens of a totally fictional country. But Ambler’s most sustained trip to Ruritanian territory comes in The Dark Frontier, which gives us Ruritania as heterocrania, in a way exemplified when Henry Barstow’s prologue declares that ‘my mind dwelt in the twilight land of convalescence’ (9), as though a dreamscape were also a landscape. The Dark Frontier echoes Yates’ favourite binocular metaphor when Casey says of ‘Carruthers’ (really Professor Barstow in a fugue state of the sort which Agatha Christie took her to Harrogate), ‘His was a strange patchwork of a personality. You received the impression that you were seeing him through binoculars that moved in and out of focus of their own volition’ (104). This most stylish of all Ruritanian fictions has a strong element of self-parody, with targets including physiognomy: ‘Let him but get near enough to a man to observe that his eyes were set too close together (the Professor wondered, in passing, if the formation of the frontal bone was, in fact, influenced by moral considerations) and Carruthers could read that man’s mind like an open book’ (29). The Dark Frontier is full of typical Ambler wit and economy: Chapter One is entitled ‘The man who changed his mind’ (11), drawing attention to the fact that while The Prisoner of Zenda centres on two bodies, The Dark Frontier has two minds in one body. But The Dark Frontier also offers a serious investigation of the processes of historical change. At the beginning of the story, Simon Groom

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

177

says that Ixania ‘has produced a man of genius. Her peasants are wretched, her bourgeoisie is corrupt, and her government is ineffectual; yet by a freak of biology or destiny, or both, this thing has happened’ (18). Ah, so we have a great man; will he change the world? In fact, he won’t. The Countess says, ‘Small things sometimes decide the fate of nations’ (192), and Henry Barstow’s temporary madness comically outweighs the greatness of Kassen. While it may well be true that ‘in men’s hearts, romanticism never dies’ (28), it is also important not to forget wider social and political drivers of change, such as the fact that Ixania has gone from a monarchy to a republic dominated by the old aristocracy (52), and there is always the possibility of sheer fluke: Casey recalls how ‘I invariably found myself amazed by the way in which sheer luck had converted what, in cold blood, seemed asinine decisions into strokes of genius. I see now that in thinking this I was mistaken. The play of action upon circumstances must be determined by some universal law’ (105). In Yates, however, it is much more likely to be decided by Richard Chandos’ fist. The Berry and Chandos series could well be figured as looking at the world through different eyes; bringing them together achieves a binocular vision in which England and Ruritania are, as so often, revealed as two sides of a diptych, and which also allows us to see that although the Berry and Chandos books are only intermittently about the detection of specific crimes, what is happening to England is in itself, in Yates’ eyes, a crime and a despoliation.

Notes 1. The novel makes either a slip or a deliberate mistake about what has actually happened, because we are told that amongst the Burlesdon portraits ‘you will find five or six, including that of the sixth earl, distinguished by long, sharp, straight noses and a quantity of dark-red hair; these five or six have also blue eyes, whereas among the Rassendylls dark eyes are the commoner’ (4). However James, fifth earl of Burlesdon, fights a duel with Prince Rudolf of Ruritania and dies six months afterwards of a chill he contracts in the raw morning air, after which the countess, two months later, bore an heir to the title and estates of the family of Burlesdon’ (4). If this is the heir, he must be the oldest male child; since the earl dies before his birth, there cannot have been any more, and even if there had been an earlier daughter, she could not have transmitted the Rassendyll name. Logically, therefore, all subsequent descendants are really Elphbergs; there is no one who could possibly have inherited the dark eyes of ‘real’ Rassendylls. This disavowal of the device is of course a common tactic of comedy.

178 

L. HOPKINS

2. In The House that Berry Built, the murdered chauffeur has only one eye. In Storm Music, Helena says of young Florin, ‘If I’d asked for his eyes, he’d have plucked them out of his head’ (21). In She Painted Her Face, Exon fears that he is ‘hastening to that terrible valley of torment, where hearts are broken in pieces and the light of the eyes is put out’ (136) and the Count of Virgil shot a dog that was going blind (164). 3. In As Berry and I Were Saying Boy is adamant ‘that a man who looks like another will be found to have the same nature’ [40], and the entire plot of This Publican is predicated on the assumption that Rowena will behave in the same way as a woman she resembles. 4. Chandos seems almost to suggest that Lelia is an avatar of Léonie when he says ‘I have constantly asked myself whether Fate did not hear my wife’s prayers and lay upon Lelia’s shoulders her precious mantle of love. It cannot, I think, be denied that Lelia took my wife’s place and played out that very part which, had she been present, Léonie would have played: and it will be remembered that I never set eyes upon Lelia till Bell had reported to Léonie and made her suspense too heavy for her to bear. From that time on her one idea was to be with me, and help me and save my life: and all these things Lelia did’ (Fire Below, 193). 5. In Red in the Morning the villain Brevet (in whom Berry took ‘peculiar pleasure’ [As Berry and I Were Saying, 136]) quotes Rape of Lucrece and calls it ‘incomparable’ (103), says ‘“Weariness can snore upon the flint”, can’t it? I believe that’s Cymbeline, but I can’t be sure’ (119), calls Punter and Rust ‘spirits of another sort’ (213) and remarks that ‘the heroic couplet is a medium for which I cannot care. If ever Shakespeare employs it, he almost always nods’ (214); in the same book Chandos says ‘All’s well that ends well’ (194) and notes that the villains ‘regarded me in silence, as though I were some strange fish’ (121), which may be an allusion to The Tempest. 6. Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death is also evoked in Perishable Goods when Mansel when he thinks he is dying says ‘See what a tide I’m taking’ (176), in Red in the Morning, when Brevet is uneasy about driving through Tours and Gedge says scornfully ‘One man in a different car? An’ the stuff in Abraham’s bosom? You’re getting loose?’ (171), and in Cost Price: ‘Primrose ’Ill,’ [h]e murmured. ‘Used to play there, as a kid. Roll on the green grass, while me sister spooned. I ’member … one arter … noon …’ The babble failed and died. And half a minute later, Sloper was dead. So a faithful servant died as did Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a good many years before. (197) Other aspects of the Henriad are also evoked. In Ne’er-Do-Well Chandos says of Mansel ‘As always, when we were alone, we began to recall other days. “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars”’ (2); Mansel himself remarks that it has been a good day—‘The open air and doing something

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

179

worth while. “And gentlemen in England, now a-bed …”’ (5); and Chandos’ observation that ‘The next day, Sunday, we lunched at Buckram Place’ (6) might perhaps recall the men in buckram whose number increases every time Falstaff tells the tale. In Berry and Co., we find ‘Soldier, mountebank, and rhymester too!’ said Jonah. ‘And yet we breathe the same air.’ ‘I admit it’s strange,’ said my brother-in-law. ‘But it was foretold by my predecessor. I think you’ll find the prophecy in Henry the Fifth. “And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best. Neighboured by fruit of baser quality.” My game, I think. What?’ (105) 7. In the preface to The Stolen March, Yates declares, I have always held that the old duke of Shakespeare’s AS YOU LIKE IT had the best of it. Certainly, Jaques’ deer did not speak; but times have changed, and Etchechuria is more secure than was the Forest of Arden. In the text itself, Simon (whose surname is Beaulieu, meaning literally ‘beautiful place’) quotes, ‘Under the greenwood tree’ (11), which is later sung in Etchechuria (247); Patricia says, ‘I can see the books in the brooks’ (48); ‘the uses of audacity’ (287) seems to glance at ‘the uses of adversity’; and the last stage of the plot hinges of Simon’s accidental discovery of the Sovereign Touchstone. In And Berry Came Too, ‘stretched on the turf, we fleeted it carelessly’ (72); Boy ‘had to let the Rolls out, to make up the time we had fleeted’ (218); Perdita tells Boy that he sees ‘[s]ermons in stones’ (100); and the milestone is ‘dressed in tight, grey-green lichen—that venerable livery peculiar to “the constant service of the antique world”’ (151). Another phrase from the play is quoted when Harold the camper is identified as ‘[a] “weaker vessel” born’ (ABCT, 166) and Berry describes himself to Miss Weigh as ‘a definitely weaker vessel’ (ABCT, 222). In The Brother of Daphne, they have been ‘fleeting the time carelessly’ in Devon when they realise they are ‘[l]ost on a heath (which I have every reason to suppose was blasted)’ (34), thus passing from the world of As You Like It to that of King Lear. Berry also has a number of comic interactions with goats, the animals cared for by Audrey, Touchstone’s bride. In Blood Royal Chandos when he thinks Léonie is lost to him notes that ‘Shakespeare has said somewhere that “men have died and worms have eaten them—but not for love”: and, though I am a child in such matters, I cannot doubt that he is right”’ (211); the ‘somewhere’ is of course As You Like It. In Cost Price Jasper says, ‘You have a proverb, sir, saying, “Motley’s the only wear”’ (170) and Chandos observes of Colette asleep, ‘Her hat had fallen off, and her tumbled curls declared her a weary Rosalind’ (187). Later, Colette refers to herself as ‘the weaker vessel’ (206) and calls Chandos ‘Adam’, and he tells her, ‘You found

180 

L. HOPKINS

a strong man in the greenwood, and because he was not of your world you rated him high’ (238); finally on the voyage to Fowey, ‘We “fleeted the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world”’ (264). In Gale Warning, ‘I shall never forget one moment of all that day, but for some strange reason I seem to remember most clearly the “shining morning face” of the town of Dieppe’ (91), an echo of Jacques’ ‘Seven ages’ speech, and As You Like It is also evoked by the name of Audrey Bagot. In She Fell Among Thieves Vanity Fair says of the false Count de Rachel, ‘“The toad, ugly and venomous, bears nevertheless a precious jewel in its head”’ (146) and ‘we stayed at Anise, fleeting the days “as they did in the golden world”’ (250). In Red in the Morning, Rage says, ‘I ought to be at Biarritz—fleetin’ the days as they did in the golden world’ (217), and in Berry and Co. Boy Pleydell recalls that ‘I had fleeted four fat years carelessly as a member of “The House”’ (101) and when Boy praises the smell of brewing Adèle says ‘Books in the running brooks, Virtue in vats, and good in everything’ (280). In Jonah and Co. Adèle has ‘a little suede hat, which would have suited Rosalind’ (40), and in Adèle and Co., in which a character called Auntie Emma is a man and Piers, Berry and Boy all cross-dress, Boy refers to his ‘motley’ (246) and says that he, Berry and Piers are collectively ‘a touchstone’ (247). In The House that Berry Built, Mansel says, ‘I like this place’ (56); Boy says Jill is ‘out of the golden world’ (89) who ‘can hear the tongues in the trees and read the books in the brooks’ (89). In The Berry Scene there is a character called Lady Touchstone, who quotes ‘Motley’s the only wear’ (127), and ‘[t]he little sward remembered As You Like It’ (105). In The Brother of Daphne, ‘“Sweet are the uses of perversity,” he said, with inimitable inflection’ (64), and ‘sweet are the uses of adversity’ is also parodied in As Berry and I Were Saying when Berry tells Boy, ‘Sweet … are the uses of publicity’ (221) and in B-Berry and I Look Back where he varies it to: ‘Sweet are the uses of advertisement’ (149); elsewhere in B-Berry and I Look Back Boy recalls seeing Oscar Asche’s production of As You Like It (86). In Storm Music, Geoffrey Bohun says, ‘Ask what you like, my dear John. I’m in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent’ (261). In She Painted Her Face, Exon reproaches Herrick that ‘you swore that the inns were out of the golden world’ (20), Elizabeth Virgil says, ‘Shakespeare’s right and “all the world’s a stage”’ (122), the Duchess of Whelp says Elizabeth belongs to ‘The Golden World’ (166), and Exon thinks Elizabeth is ‘Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, rolled into one’ (253). 8. Piers and Jill are married by 1924 (The Berry Scene, 138) and Piers and the Fauns die in 1935 (The Berry Scene 280).

8  THE DOUBLE VISION OF DORNFORD YATES 

181

References Ambler, Eric. The Dark Frontier [1936]. London: Fontana, 1984a. ———. Dirty Story [1967]. London: World Books, 1969. ———. Siege at the Villa Lipp [Send No More Roses, 1974]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2009. Buchan, John. The Blanket of the Dark [1931]. Edinburgh: B&W Publishing, 1994. ———. Castle Gay [1930]. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1983a. ———. The Courts of the Morning [1929]. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1983b. ———. The House of the Four Winds [1935]. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1984. ———. John Macnab [1925]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956. Chesterton, G.  K. The Complete Father Brown Stories [1992]. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. Christie, Agatha. The Listerdale Mystery [1934]. London: HarperCollins, 2003a. ———. Passenger to Frankfurt [1970]. London: HarperCollins, 2003b. ———. Poirot’s Early Cases [1974]. London: HarperCollins, 2002. ———. Postern of Fate [1973]. London: HarperCollins, 2015. Daly, Nicholas. Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hilton, James [1933]. Lost Horizon. London: Vintage, 2015. Hope, Anthony. The Prisoner of Zenda [1894]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007. ———. Rupert of Hentzau [1898]. London: Wordsworth, 1984. Hopkins, Lisa. Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. ———. Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2021. Kloester, Jennifer. Georgette Heyer: The Biography of a Bestseller [2011]. London: Arrow, 2013. Pullman, Philip. The Tin Princess [1994]. London: Scholastic, 2000. Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase [1932]. London: NEL, 1974. Sharpe, Tom. Indecent Exposure [1984]. London: Arrow, 2004. Smithers, A.  J. Dornford Yates: A Biography. 2nd ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985. Usborne, Richard. Clubland Heroes: A nostalgic study of some recurrent characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper. Rev. ed. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1974. Yates, Dornford. Adèle and Co. [1931]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001a. ———. And Berry Came Too [1936]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001b. ———. As Berry and I Were Saying [1952]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001c. ———. B-Berry and I Look Back [1958]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001d. ———. Berry and Co. [1921]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001e. ———. The Berry Scene [1947]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001f. ———. The Best of Berry. Ed. Jack Adrian. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1989.

182 

L. HOPKINS

———. Blind Corner [1927]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001g. ———. Blood Royal [1929]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001h. ———. The Brother of Daphne [1914]. Ashed Phoenix Library, 2018. ———. Cost Price [1949]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001i. ———. The Courts of Idleness [1920]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001j. ———. An Eye for a Tooth [1943]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001k. ———. Fire Below [1930]. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1988. ———. Gale Warning [1939]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001l. ———. The House That Berry Built [1945]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001m. ———. Jonah and Co. [1922]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001n. ———. Ne’er-Do-Well [1954]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001o. ———. Perishable Goods [1928]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001p. ———. Red in the Morning [1946]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001q. ———. She Fell Among Thieves [1935]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001r. ———. She Painted Her Face [1937]. Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001s. ———. The Stolen March [1926]. London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1943. ———. Storm Music [1934]. Milton Keynes: Lightning Source, n.d. ———. This Publican. London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1938.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

The visual aids employed by detectives trope not only their own personal methods of detection but also the aesthetics, philosophies, and projects of the books in which they appear, and condition the cultural work those books can perform. Crime fiction is typically an insecure genre, nervous about its cultural status, its readers, and its moral purpose. It purports to focus on the investigation of one or more specific, local crimes with a definitely identifiable perpetrator, and its appeal is implicitly premised on the idea that uncovering the identity of that perpetrator will lead to stability, justice, and the restoration of order. In the case of golden age detective fiction in particular, the genre was always already nostalgic; the order which is restored is typically socially conservative, and the frequent presence of a romance element implicitly promises that the community will reproduce itself along the same lines. But at the same time the genre is haunted by fears of degeneration, disintegration, and the ways in which taxation and ‘the servant crisis’ are undermining the traditional lifestyles of aristocratic and gentry families. The degeneration motif in particular also raises questions about design, providence, and eschatology. The detective, by the end, has a godlike omniscience, and is also often troubled by questions about the human soul; the form itself is too stylish and contemporary to be anything more than agnostic at best, but the emphasis on modes of perception which is emblematised by the focus on visual aids allows hints of the metaphysical and the more-than-human to be smuggled into © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3_9

183

184 

L. HOPKINS

the narrative. Ariadne Oliver’s unfocused gaze, the blindness of Max Carrados, Father Brown’s sensitivity to the invisible, Wimsey’s monocle, Campion’s horn-rims, Alleyn’s lens, and the binoculars of Yates’ characters all afford the genre a way of sharpening and adjusting its perspective and allow it to focus on aspects and implications of crime rather than just on crime itself. The idea that one or more of the senses must be enhanced or heightened also mobilises the debate about whether over-civilisation was causing the perceptions of modern humans to atrophy, while frequent reminders that the idea of ocular proof is bound up with the story of Othello comment on the ways in which so many of the detectives I discuss are affected by human relationships; even Father Brown develops a friendship with Flambeau, while Campion, Wimsey, Alleyn, and Richard Chandos are all influenced and changed by falling in love just as Othello’s life is radically altered by his marriage to Desdemona. The use of eyewear in general implicitly raises questions about cognitive processes and the nature of ocular proof and can potentially hint at the Oedipal, but a stress on specific forms of eyewear also allows authors to direct readers’ attention in particular ways. The apparent vagueness of Ariadne Oliver gives us a key insight into the ways Christie achieves the suggestiveness which brings readers back to her books time and again and also conveys a strong sense that what matters for Christie are not external appearances but the emotional, associative, and sometimes even the irrational workings of the mind. What Max Carrados and Father Brown can and cannot see comments not only on the methods employed by Sherlock Holmes but also on the blind spots of polite society and the areas which it is uncomfortable discussing, and both Carrados’ blindness and Father Brown’s visual limitations also invite the reader to concentrate on the unseen rather the seen, and implicitly often on the numinous. Wimsey and Campion, both amateurs who work closely with policemen, both to differing degrees marginalised within their aristocratic families, and both eventually married to women with independent careers, shine a light not only on individual crimes but also on class and, to a lesser extent, on gender. Finally both Yates’ use of Ruritania and Marsh’s setting of some of the Alleyn books in New Zealand allow the authors to detect both personal and national identities. In Death and the Dancing Footman Aubrey Mandrake says, ‘There’ll always be an England where there’s a muddy lane, a hoarding by a cowslip field, and curates in the rain’ (472), and Dr Hart describes Jonathan Royal’s study as furnished with ‘English leather chairs … pictures, English sportings, I think’ (516); however, the two

9 CONCLUSION 

185

potentially murderous attacks in the book are made with a Buddha statue and a Maori mere. In the Father Brown story ‘The Crime of the Communist’, ‘I have to do with England,’ said Father Brown. ‘I come from there. And the funniest thing of all is that even if you love it and belong to it, you still can’t make head or tail of it’ (720). Both Marsh and Yates tried to make head or tail of England by juxtaposing it with other places and training a pair of binoculars through which the two can be seen both separately and together. In this sense it is not only the spectacled detectives who don eyewear to enable them to see in specific ways and focus on specific things; the books in which they appear do so too.

References Chesterton, G.  K. The Complete Father Brown Stories [1992]. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. Marsh, Ngaio. Death and the Dancing Footman [1942]. London: HarperCollins, 2009.

Index1

A Allingham, Margery, 4, 11, 16, 20, 86n1, 111–113, 119, 127, 129, 131, 132 The Beckoning Lady, 112 ‘The Black Tent,’ 119, 121 Cargo of Eagles, 132 ‘The Case is Altered,’ 120 The Case of the Late Pig, 111, 114 The China Governess, 112, 114, 122, 124, 129–131, 134, 135 Coroner’s Pidgin, 112, 123, 129 The Crime at Black Dudley, 20, 111, 119, 120, 129 Dancers in Mourning, 4, 120, 125, 130 Death of a Ghost, 86n1, 115, 116, 122, 130, 135

The Fashion in Shrouds, 116, 124, 134 Flowers for the Judge, 117, 121, 132 Hide My Eyes, 16, 121, 122, 131 Look to the Lady, 120–122 The Mind Readers, 16, 20, 122, 127, 132 More Work for the Undertaker, 122, 123, 129, 133 Mystery Mile, 111, 119, 121, 122, 124, 160 Police at the Funeral, 118, 122, 129, 130 Sweet Danger, 130, 131 The Tiger in the Smoke, 113, 124, 130–132, 134 Traitor’s Purse, 20, 86n1, 111–113, 124, 125, 127, 129, 133

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Hopkins, Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29849-3

187

188 

INDEX

Ambler, Eric, 21, 159, 160, 176 The Dark Frontier, 21, 160, 176 Dirty Story, 176 Siege at the Villa Lipp, 176 Atavism, 18, 53, 54, 85 B Bennett, Margot, 5 The Widow of Bath, 5 Binoculars, 21, 159, 170–172, 176, 177, 184, 185 Bloomfield, Jem, 44 Bowdoin Van Riper, A., 58 Brabazon, James, 72, 91, 109 Bramah, Ernest, 11, 18, 30, 56 Brown, Father, 5, 11, 12, 17, 19, 67, 71–86, 132, 184, 185 Buchan, John, 21, 159, 163–165 Castle Gay, 164 The Courts of the Morning, 164–166 The House of the Four Winds, 164 John Macnab, 164, 165 Bude, John, 7 Death Knows No Calendar, 7 Bulwer-Lytton, E. G. E., 58 C Campion, Albert, 4, 5, 11, 15, 16, 20, 111–135, 146, 160, 184 Carr, John Dickson, 5 The Case of the Constant Suicides, 5 The Plague Court Murders, 5 The Seat of the Scornful, 5 Till Death Do Us Part, 5 Carrados, Max, 11, 18, 30, 51–67, 74, 184 Cefalu, Paul, 13

Chesterton, G. K., 10–12, 19, 67, 71–73, 75, 78, 80, 83, 86, 160 Christie, Agatha, 5, 8, 11, 13, 16–18, 25–31, 33, 35–45, 71, 141, 144, 160, 161, 176, 184 The ABC Murders, 18, 28, 29, 38–40 After the Funeral, 32, 38 And Then There Were None, 32 By the Pricking of My Thumbs, 39, 43, 44 Cards on the Table, 18, 28–31, 33, 35, 40 Cat Among the Pigeons, 42 Come, Tell Me How You Live, 27, 28, 36, 39 Dead Man’s Folly, 27, 35 Death in the Clouds, 7, 10, 15, 37 Death on the Nile, 13, 37 Destination Unknown, 32 Elephants can Remember, 16–17, 26, 27, 34, 35, 40, 41, 43, 44 Endless Night, 13 Five Little Pigs, 38, 46 4.50 from Paddington, 38 Hallowe’en Party, 27, 31, 33–35, 40, 41, 43 Hickory Dickory Dock, 39 The Hollow, 30, 37 ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?,’ 37 The Labours of Hercules, 8, 14, 32 The Listerdale Mystery, 161 ‘The Market Basing Mystery,’ 13 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, 14, 22n1 The Moving Finger, 32 Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36 The Murder at the Vicarage, 22n1 Murder in Mesopotamia, 37

 INDEX 

Murder in the Mews, 13–14 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 13, 25, 39 The Murder on the Links, 15 The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 8 The Mystery of the Blue Train, 5 Nemesis, 42 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, 8 The Pale Horse, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 43, 46n1 Parker Pyne Investigates, 46n1 Partners in Crime, 38, 71, 141 Passenger to Frankfurt, 161 Poirot’s Early Cases, 160 Postern of Fate, 161 Sad Cypress, 37 The Seven Dials Mystery, 27, 32 Sleeping Murder, 37, 42–44 They Came to Baghdad, 33 They Do It With Mirrors, 32 Third Girl, 25, 31, 33–36, 40–44 The Thirteen Problems, 29 Three Act Tragedy, 32 Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, 7 Crispin, Edmund, 6, 7 The Case of the Gilded Fly, 7 Holy Disorders, 7 The Moving Toyshop, 6 D Daly, Nicholas, 159, 160, 163 Darwin, Charles, 16, 18, 52–57, 112 The Origin of Species, 16, 53–54, 56, 86 Davies, David Stuart, 11 Degeneration, 16, 18, 52, 59, 60, 85, 86, 112, 129, 155, 156, 183 Desmond, Adrian, 41, 57

189

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 9, 11, 12, 51, 53, 57 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 113 ‘The Blue Carbuncle,’ 52 ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery,’ 52, 56 ‘The Brown Hand,’ 57 ‘The Cardboard Box,’ 13, 52–54 ‘A Case of Identity,’ 52 ‘The Crooked Man,’ 52 ‘The Final Problem,’ 13, 54, 59 ‘The Greek Interpreter,’ 54 The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 51 ‘The Musgrave Ritual,’ 54 ‘The Naval Treaty,’ 55 ‘The Red-Headed League,’ 52 ‘The Reigate Squire,’ 56 ‘The Resident Patient,’ 52 ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ 52 ‘Silver Blaze,’ 51 ‘The Yellow Face,’ 54 Du Maurier, Gerald, 86n1 Trilby, 82, 86n1 Duncan, Francis, 4, 44 Murder Has a Motive, 4 Dunnett, Dorothy, 5, 7 E Eco, Umberto, 5 The Name of the Rose, 5 Edwards, Martin, 30, 73 Ellegard, Alvar, 58 Evolution, 16, 18, 52, 53, 57, 60, 86, 112, 154, 155 F Freeman, R. Austin, 141

190 

INDEX

G Gilbert, Anthony, 4 Death in Fancy Dress, 4 Gilbert, Michael, 16 Smallbone Deceased, 16 Goldsmith, Hilary A., 52 Grauby, Françoise, 28

L Ledger, Sally, 57 Lenses, 4, 9, 10, 16, 32, 94, 97, 122, 134, 141, 142 Lorac, E. C. R., 5, 14, 16 Post after Post-Mortem, 14, 16 These Names Make Clues, 5

H Haggard, H. Rider, 59 Hannay, Margaret P., 109 Harrison, Michael, 51 Heyer, Georgette, 6, 7, 9, 13, 42, 163, 168 Behold, Here’s Poison, 7 A Blunt Instrument, 9 A Christmas Party, 6, 13, 163 Detection Unlimited, 9 Footsteps in the Dark, 6 The Unfinished Clue, 6 Hilton, James, 162 Hitchman, Janet, 95, 109 Hockney, David, 10 Hodgson, William Hope, 11, 12 Carnacki the Ghost Finder, 11 Holmes, Sherlock, 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 51–67, 72–74, 77, 78, 113, 114, 140, 141, 146, 184 Honavar, Santosh, 51 Hope, Anthony, 160, 162–166, 174 Hopkins, Lisa, 35, 163, 169 Horn-rims, 20, 94–96, 111–135, 184 Hunting, 15–17, 55, 153–155

M Marsh, Ngaio, 3–6, 8–10, 12, 14–16, 20, 21, 30, 86n1, 134, 139, 144, 146, 153, 155–157, 184, 185 Artists in Crime, 6, 10, 86n1, 140, 141, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153 Black As He’s Painted, 14, 141, 142, 148, 150, 152, 155, 157 Clutch of Constables, 6, 15, 140, 150, 151, 154, 157 Dead Water, 14, 148, 153, 157 Death and the Dancing Footman, 6, 11, 140, 142, 145, 146, 150, 152, 153, 184 Death at the Bar, 9, 155 Death at the Dolphin, 14, 140, 146, 150, 156 Death in a White Tie, 11, 142, 146, 149, 151–153 Death in Ecstasy, 14, 141–143, 149, 151, 155, 157 Died in the Wool, 16, 145, 148, 150–152 Enter a Murderer, 14, 141, 144, 146, 148 False Scent, 151 Final Curtain, 6, 14, 30, 142, 144, 151 Grave Mistake, 8, 11, 139, 149, 153 Hand in Glove, 140, 145, 150, 151, 153

K Klages, Kelly, 25 Księzȯ polska, Irena, 25

 INDEX 

Last Ditch, 8, 146, 154 Light Thickens, 14, 149, 154–156 A Man Lay Dead, 140, 142, 144, 147, 148 The Nursing Home Murder, 140, 142, 147, 149, 154 Off with His Head, 11, 14, 141, 147, 153, 154, 156 Opening Night, 14, 134, 140, 146, 149, 155 Overture to Death, 143, 146, 153 Photo-Finish, 11, 14, 142, 144, 153–155, 157 Scales of Justice, 4, 143, 145 Singing in the Shrouds, 12, 14, 143, 145, 148, 151, 153, 157 Surfeit of Lampreys, 4, 9, 146, 150 Swing, Brother, Swing, 3, 140, 142, 144, 145, 148, 151, 152 Vintage Murder, 14, 86n1, 146, 147, 156 When in Rome, 142, 155 Maslin, Kimberly, 9, 26, 36 Matus, Jill L., 57 Mayhall, Laura, 21 McGlynn, Mary, 91 Melville, Alan, 16 Quick Curtain, 16 Messent, Peter, 3 Monocles, 4, 5, 9, 17, 19, 20, 73, 91–109, 143, 184 P Pince-nez, 5, 6, 8, 9, 17, 21n1, 25, 32, 91, 94, 105, 121, 143 Pinkerton’s detective agency, 3 Poe, Edgar Allan, 4, 25, 26 Poirot, Hercule, 7, 8, 10, 13–15, 17, 18, 25–27, 29–42, 44–46, 46n1 Prevost, Elizabeth, 21 Pykett, Lyn, 57

191

Q Queen, Ellery, 5 R Reeder, Mr J. G., 5 S Sayers, Dorothy L., 11, 13, 19, 20, 29, 72, 91–93, 95, 108, 109, 160 ‘The Article in Question,’ 94 ‘The Bone of Contention,’ 96, 103, 104 Busman’s Honeymoon, 11, 102 ‘The Cave of Ali Baba,’ 100 Clouds of Witness, 94, 95, 100, 102, 107 Five Red Herrings, 94, 97, 102–108 Gaudy Night, 13, 91, 96, 104, 107, 109, 160 Have His Carcase, 92–97, 102–104, 107, 160 ‘The Learned Adventure of The Dragon’s Head,’ 96, 103 ‘The Man with Copper Fingers,’ 92 Murder Must Advertise, 92–94, 101, 102, 104, 106 The Nine Tailors, 95, 103, 107, 108 ‘The Stolen Stomach,’ 103 Strong Poison, 93, 94, 101–103, 105 ‘Talboys,’ 96, 102, 104 Unnatural Death, 95, 97–99, 101, 102, 104, 106 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 92–94, 102, 104 ‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face,’ 93, 105, 108 ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,’ 92, 93, 105, 106 Whose Body, 19, 91, 92, 94, 101, 103, 105, 106

192 

INDEX

Schwartz, Omer, 76 Scouting, 51–67, 156 Sen, Mrittika, 51 Shakespeare, William, 13, 43, 44, 174, 178n5, 178n6, 179–180n7 Othello, 13–15, 107 Sharpe, Tom, 168 Smithers, A. J., 165, 174 Stagg, Clinton H., 67n1 Stewart, Victoria, 108 Stoker, Bram, 57, 162, 163 The Jewel of Seven Stars, 57, 58 Suchet, David, 17, 25 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth, 4, 51 Symons, Julian, 7 The Belting Inheritance, 7 T Thorndyke, Dr, 7, 8, 16, 97, 141 U Usborne, Richard, 164, 165, 173, 174 Ustinov, Peter, 17, 25 V Vance, Philo, 5 Voyles, Katherine, 9, 20, 51 W Walkowitz, Judith R., 57 Wallace, Edgar, 5 Walton, Samantha, 127 Warnicke, Retha M., 58 Wentworth, Patricia, 7, 8, 13, 29, 35, 114 The Black Cabinet, 8, 114 The Brading Collection, 7, 21n1

The Clock Strikes Twelve, 21n1 Danger Point, 21n1 Latter End, 21n1 Out of the Past, 8 The Silent Pool, 13 Wimsey, Lord Peter, 5, 15, 19, 20, 29, 91–109, 119, 160, 184 Wodehouse, P. G., 4, 27, 92 Heavy Weather, 4 Jill the Reckless, 92 Y Yates, Dornford, 5, 13, 16, 21, 159–177, 184, 185 Adèle and Co., 172, 180n7 And Berry Came Too, 169, 173, 175, 179n7 As Berry and I Were Saying, 162, 163, 166, 172, 174, 178n3, 178n5, 180n7 B-Berry and I Look Back, 163, 166, 174, 180n7 Berry and Co., 168, 169, 179n6, 180n7 The Berry Scene, 163, 167–169, 175, 180n7, 180n8 The Best of Berry, 5, 166, 172, 174 Blind Corner, 170, 171, 174, 175 Blood Royal, 166, 168, 172, 179n7 The Brother of Daphne, 179n7, 180n7 Cost Price, 165, 171, 173, 178n6, 179n7 The Courts of Idleness, 172–174 An Eye for a Tooth, 162, 166–168, 170, 171 Fire Below, 13, 160, 162, 178n4 Gale Warning, 5, 13, 171, 180n7 The House That Berry Built, 168, 172, 178n2, 180n7

 INDEX 

Jonah and Co., 167, 168, 173, 180n7 Ne’er-Do-Well, 159, 168, 171, 173, 178n6 Perishable Goods, 16, 162–163, 166, 167, 169–171, 175, 178n6 Red in the Morning, 16, 171, 178n5, 178n6, 180n7

193

She Fell Among Thieves, 167, 171–173, 180n7 She Painted Her Face, 166, 168, 171, 172, 178n2, 180n7 The Stolen March, 167, 174, 175, 179n7 Storm Music, 168, 178n2, 180n7 This Publican, 163, 178n3