No sex, please, in the Detection Club

‘The crime novel,’ said Bertolt Brecht, ‘like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’ He was thinking of the detective story and the tribute was truest in the ‘golden age’, between the great wars; the period covered, hugely readably, by Martin Edwards.

Edwards’s primary subject is the Detection Club, whose members included the giants of the genre — G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham. Its rules (they loved rules) were given quasi commandment authority by one of the club’s founder-members, Monsignor Ronald Knox, professional churchman, amateur novelist. Most of the club liked to see themselves as ‘unprofessional’, as if fiction were like the annual ‘Gentleman versus Players’ cricket match. Grubby-fingered hacks like Edgar Wallace were unwelcome. ‘Scientific deduction is too easy,’ one Knoxian law decreed. Another was that ‘Love interest is undesirable’. And above all else, detection must pivot on ‘fair play’ with the reader. Like cricket.

The essence of the Golden Age detective novel, P. D. James recalled (writing in this magazine), was ‘plot and puzzle’. Some of the genre’s more generous practitioners appended, in a spirit of fair play, ‘clue-finders’, for the less detectively adept of their readers who may have turned the pages too fast. Or just been too dim.

James went on to ponder the members’ inner drives. The core fascination was not with detection but death, she concluded. The initiation ceremony for club neophytes centred on Eric the Skull, ritually brought in, red eyes glowing, by torchlight (it came close to inducing gibbering breakdown in Ngaio Marsh).

Sayers’s Whose Body? opens with Lord Wimsey looking down at a naked corpse in a bath. The fact that a foreskin is present is one to put in the cluefinder (this was, however, a clue too raw for the publisher, who made her change it to something milder about fingernails).