The Layton Court Mystery, 1925 - Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley Cox was one of the great innovators of the Golden Age of detective fiction, an enigmatic and bizarre man who wrote detective stories from 1925 to 1939 under several pen-names, including Francis Iles. The Layton Court Mystery, originally published anonymously in 1925, was written in honor to the father, a great fan of detective fiction. Berkeley wrote it for pure entertainment and he introduced his most famous detective, Roger Sheringham: anti-Semitic, rude, fallible and pretentious, Sheringham was founded on an offensive person that Berkeley once knew, but he shared some characteristics both with his creator and the amateur detective Philip Trent, created by Edmund Bentley in Trent’s Last Case (1913). 

As Berkeley wrote in the dedication:

"I have tried to make the gentleman who eventually solves the mystery as nearly as possible as he might be expected to do in real life. That is to say, he is very far removed from a sphinx and he does make a mistake or two occasionally. I have never believed very much in those hawk-eyed, tight-lipped gentry who pursue their silent and inexorable way straight to the heart of things without ever once overbalancing or turning aside after false goals." 

Apparently, The Layton Court Mystery is a classic country-house mystery: it takes place in a English country house, a property rented for a week end by the rich and ambiguous Victor Stanworth; there is a group of guests and a murder perpetrated in a locked room. Alec Grierson, a Sheringham’s friend, takes on the role of Watson. Moreover, the detection rules the whole story: Berkeley reports interrogations, researches, discoveries, true and false deductions, physical and psychological clues. Because of these reasons, some parts of the novel appear long-winded, with many useless conversations between Roger and Alec that add nothing to the plot. The story contains funny situations (the wrong deductions, the "dispute" with the bull), but has also many ingenuousness and improbabilities (how could a man kill himself shooting a bullet in his forehead?). 

As yet, the novel seems a simple whodunit, but I think there is more. Berkeley had probably read Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913), Milne’s The Red House Mystery (1922) and MacDonald’s The Rasp (1924), but he did not copy anything: even though the story is not very original, the novel is well-plotted and fair with the reader, who has all clues to solve the mystery. Playing with the rules of the game and creating a detective who is an antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, Berkeley reveals both the qualities and the limits of the “whodunit” frame, and seems undermine (unconsciously?) the “scaffolding” of the classical mystery. The book shows the mastery of Berkeley as a plotter, in which you can see the bones of a revolutionary talent, even if it is far from being a masterpiece. The locked room problem has a disappointing mechanical solution, but the identity of the murder is a real surprise, which discloses the parodic nature of the novel. Especially in 1925 the solution must have been astonishing, and it is certainly the best device of the book. Martin Edwards has brilliantly pointed out that “Berkeley’s knack of coming up with an ingenious mystery solution that proves mistaken was unparalleled, and afforded him endless opportunities to indulge in ironic reflection on the nature of detective work” (Anthony Berkeley's Golden Age Gothic Follies, in Mysteries Unlocked, 2014, p. 102). I subscribe to his claim.

The ploy will be brilliantly modified, some months later, by Agatha Christie in her superb The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).

A new awareness?

The time for break the rules is ripe. The Golden Age is coming back.

I’m glad to see the recent increasing interest in reprinting forgotten Golden Age mysteries, mostly thanks to the British Library. Among the garbage that we are forced to see every day in the bookcases, the great novels of such authors like Crofts, Farjeon and Bude are finally back in the shelves. But the most important impulse comes from the work of the scholars: Martin Edward’s The Golden Age of Murder (2015) and Curtis Evan’s The Spectrum of English Murder (2015) are two landmarks that readers should not neglect. In their works, Edwards and Evans show that the Golden Age was a richer affair than much of modern mystery scholars would have us believe.

Modern scholars often don’t care about the complexity of the Golden Age period. They have divided this Era in two separated worlds: Hard-Boiled fiction and clue-puzzle mystery. This dichotomy came to be regarded as a sex war: American males on one side, British females on the other. The most part of influent mystery scholars claims that there was neither communication nor link between Hard-Boiled and mystery. They see the mystery as a genre dominated by rules and norms, unable to reach a literary value. This is a very incomplete part of the picture, which masks the strong cross-pollination of mystery during the two World Wars.

The recent studies of such critics as Lucy Worsley or P.D. James didn’t take into account the variety of nuances of the period, and they lost the opportunity to say something new about the Golden Age. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) by James, for instance, is not as intensively-researched as I expected and I often disagree with her point of view. First of all I don’t find a real sense of being so selective in the history of the genre. There is no space for the great male Golden Age writers, for instance Anthony Boucher or S.S. Van Dine, which had a fundamental role in the evolution of mystery. Ellery Queen is never mentioned, and it is totally unacceptable. Secondly, I think that the idea of the “rules of the game” (those written by Van Dine and Knox) has been totally exaggerated by the scholars in the past, and James seemed having a fixation on Knox’s commandaments. She took them far too literally and I honestly don’t understand why. I recommend reading the superb essay of John Dickson Carr, The Greatest Game in the World (1946), in which he wrote: 

“Those who nail a manifesto to the wall, saying, “The beginner will do this, and must under no circumstances do that”, are in many cases quoting not rules but prejudices. [...] With all due respect and admiration for those who have compiled lists, it would not be difficult to show that they were often giving dubious advice and sometimes talking arrant nonsense”.

Thirdly, in the James’s book there are too many mistakes: for instance, the perpetrator of The Purloined Letter by Poe is not the most unlikely suspect, and the James’s claim that the detective novel was not intellectually respected until Sayers wrote Gaudy Night (1935) is simply absurd, how Curtis Evans has perfectly revealed in the essay Murder in The Criterion: T.S. Eliot on Detective Fiction (2014).

Many scholars probably think that every Golden Age novel was set in a Country House, where people spoke like Maggie Smith in Downtown Abbey, detectives were snobbish gentlemen and a murder was a little inconvenience. This is nonsense: of course, there were writers for which the novels were simply entertainment, but for many others the reality was totally different. Honestly, though, there is nothing wrong in writing a simple good and well-plotted story, without implied messages. Many crime writers write bad stories nowadays having nothing to say about life, death and people.

James privileged realism and credibility over ingenuity, but I think these are wrong criterions to analyze a fiction novel, mostly a crime novel. “Realism" is the curtain for those who are not able to write clever stories, and “credibility” has the duty to cover the lack of genius.

Many myths of the Golden Age have been unmasked yet: for instance, in the brilliant Evans’s essay The Amateur Detective Just Won’t Do: Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction (2014), he revealed not only that the Hard-Boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler had great affinity with classical mystery, but also that the american writer, despite what he wrote in his The Simple Art of Murder (1950), actually enjoyed the detective fiction of Freeman W. Crofts and Richard A. Freeman. 

Yes, there is still a lot to do, but the time is ripe.