Helen Simpson - The Anatomy of Murder

For Sayers, character and psychology were crucial to a proper analysis of whether or not Julia Wallace was murdered by her husband: “Though a man apparently well-balanced may give way to a sudden murderous frenzy, and may even combine that frenzy with a surprising amount of coolness and coming, it is rare for him to show no premonitory or subsequent symptoms of mental disturbance. This was one of the psychological difficulties in the way of the prosecution against Wallace.… The mind is indeed peculiar and the thoughts of the heart hidden. It is hopeless to explain the murder of Julia Wallace as the result of a momentary frenzy, whether Wallace was the criminal or another.”

Guarded though her conclusions were, it seemed that they were vindicated by research undertaken years after her death. True crime expert Jonathan Goodman and journalist Roger Wilkes made a convincing case that one of Wallace’s work colleagues committed the murder. The Wallace case has, however, never ceased to entrance crime writers. Margery Allingham wrote a short essay about the case, “The Compassionate Machine”, which surfaced recently, although it was unpublished during her lifetime. Chandler considered writing about the case for the American Weekly ; he called it “The Impossible Murder … the nonpareil of murder cases”, but decided not to go ahead because “it has been done to a turn by Dorothy Sayers”—evidence that he read The Anatomy of Murder , and was impressed. He made detailed notes about the circumstances surrounding the death of Julia Wallace, and concluded that it “will always be unbeatable”. As if to prove his point, during the past few years, doubts have surfaced again about Wallace’s innocence, and P.D. James, a long-standing member of the Detection Club, recently contributed a thoughtful article to the Sunday Times Magazine which came to a very different conclusion from Sayers. The continuing swirl of speculation about Julia Wallace’s murder demonstrates the lasting appeal of classic true crime cases—they are open to endless reinterpretation.

Sayers had a complicated friendship with the founder of the Detection Club, Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971). He wrote most of his novels under the name Anthony Berkeley, but also earned a distinct reputation with ironic studies of criminal psychology published under the pseudonym Francis Iles, had a good deal in common with Sayers. Like her, he was talented and highly intelligent, but he was also a difficult and troubled man. At first their relations were cordial, and Sayers worked closely with Berkeley in establishing the Detection Club on a firm footing. As time passed, however, the two forceful personalities clashed more than once—not least when Berkeley complained about Sayers’ delay in producing her contribution to The Anatomy of Murder , although this was due not to laziness on her part (far from it) but rather her relentless perfectionism.

“The Rattenbury Case” appeared under the Iles name. Perhaps this was an exercise in “branding”, since his work as Iles was generally more serious and substantial than most of the books which appeared under his real name, or as by Berkeley. Under both his pen-names, he often drew on classic cases for his fiction. The death of James Maybrick in Victorian Liverpool, for instance, inspired the second Berkeley book, The Wychford Poisoning Case , the Armstrong and Palmer cases influenced the first two Iles books, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact , and the Thompson-Bywaters case, which preoccupied him for years, supplied both plot elements and even the title of the third and final Iles book, As for the Woman.

Berkeley had long been disgusted by the hanging of Edith Thompson, and was struck by the similarities between her story and that of Alma Rattenbury. He argued—controversially, but not implausibly—that “if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.” For Berkeley, studying real life murder cases had an enduring appeal: “nothing outside fiction so effectually knocks down the front wall of a house and exposes its occupants in the details of their strange lives as does a trial for murder.” His essay is, by some distance, the longest in the book. Discussing the case gave him a chance to mount a hobby horse—the hypocrisy of English society about adultery: “To say that respect cannot exist between a man and woman whose relations are legally improper is just as silly as to say that respect invariably exists between married couples.”

Taken together, the stories told in The Anatomy of Murder represent a significant contribution to our understanding of the cases discussed, and their interest has scarcely diminished as a result of the passage of time. Many collections of essays about famous murder cases appeared during the twentieth century, but few match the quality of those in this book. The Detection Club’s members were novelists first and foremost, but The Anatomy of Murder reveals, most pleasingly, that they possessed at least some of the detective instincts and skills of their fictional heroes and heroines.

SEVEN members of the Detection Club here offer commentaries upon an equal number of murders, some famous, others unknown to the general public. In each case the writer has not been content simply to re-tell the story of the crime, but has endeavoured to throw light upon it; either by revelation of new facts, or by application of psychological tests to the mind of the criminal, or by comparison of the resources of present-day investigation with those of the past.

Sir Thomas Browne provides the writers with a common viewpoint, and the book with its motto:

Tis not only the mischief of diseases, and the villany of poysons, that make an end of us; we vainly accuse the fury of Gunnes, and the new invention of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholding unto every one we meet, he doth not kill us.

31 GERRARD STREET,

LONDON.

August , 1936.

by Helen Simpson

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