The Wychford Poisoning Case. Anthony Berkeley

       INTRODUCTION

      ANTHONY BERKELEY COX—or Anthony Berkeley as he is best known—was born on 5 July, 1893 in Watford, a town near London. His father was a doctor and his mother was descended from the Earl of Monmouth, a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I. At school, Berkeley was what we would now call a high achiever—Head of House, prefect, Colour Sergeant in the Officer Training Corps and an expert marksman. In 1911, he left school to read Classics at University College, Oxford, but his university career was cut short by the First World War and, between 1914 and 1918, Berkeley served in France in the 7th Northamptonshire Regiment, reaching the rank of Lieutenant, and also in the Royal Air Force.

      After the war, Berkeley spent a couple of years ‘trying to find out what nature had intended him to do in life’ before he discovered that he had the most extraordinary knack for writing comic stories for the many weekly magazines and newspapers that carried such fiction in the 1920s. Thankfully, Berkeley also decided to try his hand at something more serious, a detective mystery.

      His first attempt, The Layton Court Mystery, was published anonymously in 1925 by Herbert Jenkins. The book marked the debut of Roger Sheringham, a man with more than a hint of his creator about him—in particular, like Berkeley, he was an Oxford man and his health had been compromised during the war. The Layton Court Mystery features a closed circle of suspects and a suitably unpleasant victim who is found dead in a locked room; the murderer’s identity comes as a devastating surprise. In dedicating the novel to his father, Berkeley explained that he had ‘tried to make the gentleman who eventually solves the mystery behave 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.’

      Sheringham’s tendency to make ‘a mistake or two occasionally’ may very well have been inspired by E.C. Bentley’s famous novel Trent’s Last Case, published a dozen years earlier. Certainly, fallibility was to become something of a trademark for Roger Sheringham.

      The Layton Court Mystery sold well and, enthused by the sales figures, Anthony Berkeley decided to focus on writing novels and to make Roger Sheringham the central figure of a series of mysteries. Sheringham’s second case, also published anonymously (the byline of the jacket was simply ‘By the author of The Layton Court Mystery’), was The Wychford Poisoning Case.

      The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926) is the rarest of Berkeley’s detective fiction. It was the first of his novels to be published by Collins but, unlike other Sheringham mysteries, has not until now been reissued, even in a paperback edition. It is unclear why this was but it has been suggested that it may have been because Berkeley felt acute embarrassment at a brief, irrelevant but bizarre scene in which an annoying young woman is subjected to corporal punishment. Whether or not the scene was meant ironically or simply as comic relief, it reads oddly today and, as with the casual anti-semitism that pollutes some Golden Age mysteries, leaves modern readers uncomfortable. Sexist aberrations aside, the novel is strong and the explanation of the poisoning is characteristically unexpected and outrageous. It is also noteworthy for being dedicated to Berkeley’s long-standing friend, the aristocratic Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture under her rather more prosaic pseudonym, E.M. Delafield.

      Unlike The Layton Court Mystery, The Wychford Poisoning Case is based on a real-life murder—that of James Maybrick, a Liverpool businessman, in 1889. Like many other writers of the era, Berkeley had a deep interest in what has come to be called ‘true crime’, writing essays on various different cases over the years—indeed, The Wychford Poisoning Case would not be the only occasion on which Berkeley would draw on what he called ‘the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life’. The Wychford Poisoning Case is also notable for the innovative consideration of psychology as a method of crime detection, pioneered some fifteen years earlier by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg with their stories of Luther Trant. This was an approach that Anthony Berkeley would eventually perfect with Malice Aforethought (1931), in which he gave an ingenious study of a murderer, and in two other novels, all of which were published under a different pen name, Francis Iles.

      The first two Sheringham mysteries sold well and the detective’s popularity was such that his name would be included in the title of the third, Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927), which for the first time in the series was published as by Anthony Berkeley.

      In all, Sheringham appears in ten novel-length detective stories, one of which, The Silk Stocking Murders (also reissued in this Detective Club series), is dedicated by Berkeley to none other than A.B. Cox! Sheringham is also mentioned in passing in two of Berkeley’s non-series novels, The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and Trial and Error (1937), and appears in a novella and a number of short stories, including two recently discovered ‘cautionary’ detective problems published during the Second World War.

      Though undoubtedly one of the ‘great detectives’ of the Golden Age, Roger Sheringham is not a particularly original creation. As already noted, there is much of E.C. Bentley’s Philip Trent about Sheringham, as there is about many other Golden Age detectives, including Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. And, emulating Bentley’s iconoclastic approach to the genre, Berkeley delighted in turning its unwritten rules upside down. Thus, while Sheringham’s cases conform, broadly, to the principal conventions of the detective story—there is always a crime and there is always at least one detective—the mysteries are distinctive and memorable for the way in which they drove the evolution of crime and detective stories. Each of the novels brings something new and fresh to what Berkeley had previously dismissed as the ‘crime-puzzle’. Several do have what can be described as twist endings but that is to diminish Berkeley’s ingenuity and undervalue his importance in the history of crime and detective fiction.

      While other luminaries wrought their magic consistently—Agatha Christie in making the most likely suspect the least likely suspect, and John Dickson Carr in making the impossible possible—Anthony Berkeley delighted in finding different ways to structure the crime story. ‘Anthony Berkeley is the supreme master not of “the twist” but of the “double twist”,’ wrote Milward Kennedy in the Sunday Times, but his focus was not so much on adding a twist at the end but on twisting the genre itself.

      Astonishingly, it is more than 75 years since the publication of Berkeley’s final novel, As for the Woman (1939), which appeared under the pen name of Francis Iles. And yet his influence lives on. Berkeley did much to shape the evolution of crime fiction in the 20th century and to transform the ‘crime puzzle’ into the novel of psychological suspense. In the words of one of his peers, Anthony Berkeley Cox—more than most—‘deserves to become immortal’.

      TONY MEDAWAR

      September 2016