A Very British Murder (36 page)

‘The Detection Club’ was founded in the 1930s to promote and celebrate the profession of crime novelist. Its members included Dorothy L. Sayers, seen here at a Club meeting, with a broad smile and glass of beer.

Dorothy L. Sayers in the arms of her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, who brought her financial stability and fame. This humorous sketch by a friend glosses over the fact that in real life Sayers was much less lucky than her fictional characters in finding lasting love.

‘Eric the Skull’, with his glowing red eyes, is the property of ‘The Detection Club’, and is still used to this day at the ritual initiation of new members. (‘Eric’ was recently discovered to be female.)

The ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction saw murder treated rather like a crossword puzzle. Here’s a book of murder puzzles ‘to be solved from given data’, and a jigsaw showing a crime scene.

Murder, by the 1930s, had become something of a parlour game, with very little blood or violence.

You could even buy your own ‘Murder Dossier’, a set of printed clues including photographs of cigarette butts or even actual matchsticks, with the solution in a sealed envelope at the back.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s early films, he never shows a killing, just allows his viewers to imagine it. This is the victim in
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
(1927), the story of a serial killer with many similarities to ‘Jack The Ripper’.

Hitchcock’s film
Murder!
(1930) was his only foray into the conventional ‘whodunit’ of detective fiction’s Golden Age. His work, morally ambiguous, had more in common with the sensation novelists of the 1860s, or the post-war thriller.