Murder's the darkest and most despicable crime of all,
And yet we're attracted to it, in real life and in fiction.
And that's because every murder
This was certainly true at the start
when Edwardian press barons were demanding a murder a day
of their newspaper readers.
And even more so in the two decades
when there was a great explosion
the Golden Age of detective fiction,
with all the usual cast of suspects.
They turned the murder mystery into something cerebral, something
tidy and domesticated, rather
And they made armchair detectives
and he was wanted for the murder and the mutilation of his wife Cora.
Together with his mistress,
and distributed to the police
The Home Secretary himself, a certain Winston Churchill,
and his lover Ethel Le Neve?
In fact they'd already left
They were temporarily holed up
heading across the Atlantic
and a couple of his passengers had aroused his suspicions.
The SS Montrose had only been at sea for one day when Captain Kendall
behaving strangely on deck.
He thought it was very odd that they squeezed each other's hands
"immoderately", as he put it,
and that they would sometimes
The two of them were travelling
just like a detective novel...
the part of Sherlock Holmes.
Captain Kendall decided to carry out an experiment to try to confirm
He took a newspaper photograph
and using chalk he whitened out
the frames of his spectacles.
And, yes, it was like a Photofit.
mysterious passenger Mr Robinson.
a piece of pioneering technology
the process of 20th-century
It was the Marconi wireless.
But the transmitter only had
his ship was already 130 miles
It read, "Have strong suspicions
"and accomplice are amongst
Dr Crippen, an American who dabbled
and dentistry, had been living
His wife, Cora, was a would-be
But the marriage was troubled,
his young secretary, Ethel Le Neve.
On 19th January 1910, Crippen visited the chemist to order
He signed the poison register,
"for homeopathic purposes".
On 31st January, the Crippens held a little party at home.
Later, Crippen would claim that
it had been followed by a terrible row between him and his wife.
leaving him the very next day.
Whatever really happened that night,
were the last people to see
to America, and then he said
Cora's friends now paid a visit
The case was taken up by Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew,
He was a member of the Yard's
Its members prided themselves
and their skill in disguises -
but everything seemed fine.
He came back three days later
held a strange attraction for Dew.
With his sergeant, Dew began to work away at the brick floor
Suddenly there came the most
that Dew and his men had to rush
Chief Inspector Dew now hatched
Word had leaked about what was happening on the SS Montrose.
Newspaper readers could now follow Dew's pursuit as he closed in
on his suspects at the rate of three and a half miles per hour.
As well as gruesome murder,
and Le Neve didn't even know
although every newspaper reader
Dr Crippen had become the most famous murderer in the world.
journalists by disguising himself
Reporters were there to capture the moment when Dew finally
greeted his suspect with the words "Good morning, Dr Crippen."
everything that happened next.
Dew escorting Crippen off the boat,
Bow Street's Magistrates' Court
The press had made the couple into a highly marketable commodity.
This was a very modern murder.
Bizarre offers now began to come in.
Crippen would get ã1,000 a week
the trial of Dr Crippen began
In the words of the Daily Mail's reporter, the crowds "begged,
Inside, there was even more chaos.
There was a rowdy atmosphere,
People were shouting, "Blue tickets
The jury took only 27 minutes
Le Neve, at a separate trial,
in selling her side of the story.
But Le Neve's fame was short-lived.
Even during his trial, sculptors at Madame Tussauds had been
preparing a wax figure based on those snatched court photographs.
Now, within days of the passing of Crippen's death sentence,
Tussauds unveiled their new addition
before he's even met the hangman.
He's on the same page as his fellow doctor William Palmer, the poisoner,
a description of their crimes.
Everyone knows exactly who he is.
And a contemporary journalist
lifelong fascination with poison.
She was transfixed as he added
he said, "it will paralyse you
"it makes me feel powerful."
With the pharmacist's rather sinister boast in her mind,
Christie began to conceive of the idea of writing a detective story.
to compose a murder mystery in which the clever reader,
armed with all the same clues as the detective, could spot the murderer.
Christie spent four years polishing what would become her first novel,
Finally, to finish it off, she came back to her home county of Devon
this remote country-house hotel
In what was to become her lifelong habit, Christie took herself off
The Mysterious Affair At Styles wasn't exactly an overnight success.
turned it down - imagine them
kicking themselves later on - but it did sell respectably,
for the Golden Age to follow.
It had everything - a country house
of suspects, there were things like maps to help you, there was even
a reproduced fragment of somebody's will, and most importantly,
He was a fastidious little Belgian
As a foreigner, Poirot stood outside the rigid British class structure
but also a trusted confidante.
"little grey cells" in 33 novels,
one play and over 50 short stories.
on the Dart Estuary in Devon.
First of all, there's a family
Tell me about this ancient-looking
Some years in fact after she died,
we came across that machine
She used to dictate her work in the 1960s to a Dictaphone
and then send it away to be...
So can we hear the actual voice
that's Cat Among The Pigeons.
Who's going to get it - the girl,
I think the games mistress got it,
"Stabbed through eye with hat pin."
is probably the most concise
and accurate description of what
Who, why, when, how, where, which?
Can't get simpler than that,
what many regard as her most
The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd.
of how the body is discovered.
Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the armchair before the fire.
His head had fallen sideways, and clearly visible, just below
his breath with a sharp hiss.
Now, there are a couple of reasons
why this is absolute classic
And, secondly, it's utterly, utterly simple and straightforward
because really we have here
and he goes on to tell us about
"I did what little had to be done."
of the book do you discover
that at that point he was hiding
he was getting rid of a vital clue,
the narrator is the murderer.
The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd was a genuine tour de force
as far as detective stories
She was accused of cheating, too, but I think the important thing
and people loved talking about it,
and I think that was probably the moment when she stopped being
an ordinary crime writer and became one that was universally recognised.
Although she was an intensely
Christie knew her readers very well.
answering the question, "What kind of people read detective stories
And she says, "It's the busy people,
a detective story gives them
"complete relaxation, an escape from the realism of everyday life."
She says, "It has the tonic value
it makes you mentally alert."
And the ethical background,
"is usually sound. Rarely is the criminal the hero of the book.
"Society unites to hunt him down,
"all the fun of the chase without moving from a comfortable armchair."
These "busy people", these "workers
were keen to devour detective
Railway stations with their branches
sold cheap mystery magazines as well as the latest whodunnits.
These novels were formulaic, they were often very snobbish,
The easy appeal of Christie's books
I've come to meet our current
What was it about that time that allowed these very commercially
successful crime writers to come forward for the first time?
There was hardly a house which hadn't lost somebody in that war,
and one was brought up feeling
and sometimes in its most horrible form, and it sort of sanitises it,
We don't grieve, we don't grieve at all about the person who's dead,
we don't worry about what will
We have a puzzle and we can apply our little grey cells
to seeing if we can do better than
and on the whole, you know,
If we do it we feel satisfied and if we don't we think, "It must have
"been a very clever puzzle, I couldn't see it for one moment."
PD James belongs to a long tradition of female detective writers
and so much of crime writing
of fabrication of clues depends on daily living, small things
that are noticed, and women notice them, men just don't notice them.
the writers of the Golden Age,
This led to what would become known
It had some arcane and amusing
To join, you have to undergo
The current master of ceremonies
these reminders of our mortality?
is it your firm desire to become
You seek a great honour, but must also accept a great responsibility.
well and truly try to resolve the many issues with which you may
be pleased to confront them, using only their native wits
and not resorting to divine revelation, excessive sanguinity,
lucky guesses, mumbo jumbo, jiggery pokery, coincidence or Act of God.
Will you honour the Queen's English?
that's as far as we can go,
you've done some lovely historical stuff, but it doesn't count.
That is very disappointing.
I think there's always been
in crime writing. I mean, certainly, you know, the famous examples
Agatha Christie and all those,
they were kind of playing a game,
and in a sense the murder was
the first thing that happened, but a murder in Agatha Christie Land
It's not like brains and blood
splattered all over the walls, it's quite decorously done,
and so it does become almost like
to guess who was the murderer.
something in the zeitgeist. I think it's no coincidence
that that was also the period when the crossword developed, you know,
that was just the period that people got interested in crosswords,
agreed to share one final secret
There is one secret about Eric
and there is a strong belief
No way. Yes, apparently it's a female skull, but don't tell anyone!
The person who dreamt up Eric,
the founding members of the Detection Club was Dorothy L Sayers.
she is my absolute favourite.
In my opinion, Dorothy L Sayers
Golden Age detective story writers,
she's a great novelist full stop.
She did well at Somerville College
and then she moved to London
she was working as a copywriter
She came up with famous jingles
and later she recreated this competitive world of the office
Hers was a very different life
and then a struggling writer
She fell in love with a man
Then, by a different relationship,
And yet out of these troubled years
would come great literary success.
Sayers introduced Lord Peter Wimsey,
of a rather foolish-looking gentleman called Lord Peter Wimsey.
I mean, he looks like your typical
but of course behind that it becomes very clear that Lord Peter Wimsey...
that's just the sort of surface
a much deeper character than that, and you get strongly running through
all the books this sense of damage that happened because of the war.
So, in modern terms we would
post-traumatic stress injury.
having had a nervous breakdown in the past, of him still going
through periods when he wakes in the night and screams, he has these
appalling nightmares, and that's one of the reasons he has this extremely
close relationship with his valet, Bunter, the estimable Bunter.
Who was his batman from the Trenches. Exactly so, exactly so.
It makes him bearable, doesn't it, because a lot of people think
"Oh, Lord Peter Wimsey, ridiculous
but, as it says here, "He's not
because you don't see any of that
there everything in the garden
This is really good-quality stuff,
of the Golden Age are quite...
sort of coy about describing actual scenes of violence and blood,
never holds back, does she?
with chilling detail, frankly.
part of that is just this sort of
intellectual honesty of it, there is a sort of sense that
if we take part in the detection
we're going to play that game
and, just as they have to look death in the face, so do we.
"Harriet's luck was in. It WAS
"Indeed, if the head did not come off in Harriet's hands,
"it was only because the spine
"to the bone, and a frightful stream, bright red and glistening,
"and dripping into a little hollow
"Harriet put the head down again
She's almost the alter ego of her creator, Dorothy L Sayers.
became detective novelists,
When I was growing up she made me want to be a girl detective,
She's been accused of murder, and who's going to save her
will-they-won't-they relationship.
I think it's her best because
but also a remarkable manifesto
and a commentary on the difficulties that women faced in the 1930s.
In this book, Sayers said herself
"the things that I had been wanting
The story begins with Harriet Vane
"gaudy" celebrations at her old
But the female scholars there
but the book isn't really about the mystery, it's about the women.
Whether it's possible for them to combine independence and work
At the end of it all Harriet decides to take the chance,
to agree to marry Lord Peter Wimsey.
She realises that he's a good man
they have their first kiss,
and passionately embracing".
through thousands of pages,
thought that she'd exhausted
But even without Lord Peter
Detective novels were now being
In 1931, a new murder mystery
wanting to know the solution.
There were alibis and clues
in the story was tall, cerebral
He was a 52-year-old insurance agent named William Herbert Wallace.
It all began in a chess club.
He wanted Wallace to visit him
Even though he seemed puzzled by the message, Wallace took out
and made a note of Qualtrough's
The next day, which was the 20th January, Wallace had his tea,
he got together some papers
and he said goodbye to his wife Julia right here at the back door
of their house on Wolverton Street,
and he then set off to this unknown address, Menlove Gardens East.
The tram conductor would later recall Wallace emphasising the fact
repeatedly asking for directions.
And when he finally reached
Wallace said he was able to find
but East simply didn't exist.
and so drew attention to himself, but nobody was able to help him
the mysterious Mr Qualtrough.
Wallace headed home, and he was
a few streets away from his house.
of his house had been locked.
to his going back into his house.
and that a piece of its door
calling out his wife's name,
her head in a pool of blood.
"Come and look, she's been killed,"
But when Mr Qualtrough's mysterious telephone call was traced to
a kiosk just 400 yards away
that Qualtrough and Wallace
were one and the same person
of the appointment had been nothing more than a very elaborate alibi.
On 22nd April his trial opened
As he sat through his trial,
He didn't visibly react when people
He also had the misfortune to fit most people's image of a murderer.
and he had little round spectacles
On the other hand, though, Wallace's defence were pretty confident.
That's why, after four days of trial, and an hour's deliberation,
But then came the final twist
the case of William Herbert Wallace
the evidence was insufficient.
So Wallace lived to tell his tale,
of The Man They Did Not Hang.
The Wallace case is perhaps
amongst the Golden Age writers
they started to provide ingenious
to the case, transforming it
It's no coincidence that the murder mystery reached a peak in popularity
It's not a collection of stories,
to be solved from given data.
and you're put into all sorts of everyday situations like this.
"You're staying with the Duchess,
"with the tragic announcement that the Master has been found slain
"in the Billiard Room, an oriental
"What are you going to do?"
that you realise that this man
isn't holding a musical instrument,
to shoot the victim over here.
we've got the Murder Dossier.
and a police memo and testimony
and crime-scene photographs,
Here's a bit of blood-stained
And what you're supposed to do
All these games and puzzles
and, with that, trivialised.
most murder was driven by poverty,
alcohol or abusive relationships.
nor of the Great Depression
use the name "the Golden Age"
They think a more accurate name
would be "snobbery with violence".
the whodunnit began to seem stale,
and its writers out of touch.
a new genre of entertainment
would unleash the primitive emotions
in dark and ornate picture houses.
with 350 thrillers released
And the greatest genius to practise the fine art of cinematic murder
The first Hitchcock murder shocker was a silent film, The Lodger.
It was terrifying right from its opening shot of a screaming girl,
The film was based on a novel and a stage play that had given
It resonated with Hitchcock, who had followed famous murder cases
Hitchcock must have been interested in true crime from very early on,
when he was a kid in Leytonstone,
Leytonstone was Epping Forest,
and every August Bank Holiday there seemed to be at least one
It was a regular for the newspapers,
and he seemed to have consumed those
I'm sure that was part of the reason
Here Hitchcock introduces the eponymous Lodger in chilling style.
The Lodger sets up all sorts
running throughout the rest
and there's dark humour too.
In The Lodger here is the man himself, with his back to the camera
his eye-catching headlines.
With all these shots of newspapers
Hitchcock shows us the media's sensationalising response to crime,
exactly as it had been seen 15 years before in the case of Dr Crippen.
Hitchcock, born in the last year
was influenced by the murderous entertainments of the Victorians.
For example, just look at the acting
reminds me of Victorian melodrama.
And that's because Hitchcock
and his actors knew about this
They were taking its traditions
of Victorian crime entertainment.
It strikes me that what he's doing
Cos what they were hoping to achieve was to make the hair stand on end,
to create a sensation in the reader,
what he's doing in his films.
that the ideal situation would be
so you would get the shock, horror, laughter at the right moments
just from the electrical effects
and so I think he saw films as machines to work on the audience.
I never make whodunnits, because
to ratchet up the suspense.
Sylvia Sidney has just worked out
is the saboteur whose actions
Hitchcock said he wanted to maintain
He builds up their confrontation
of reaction shots, her hand hovering throughout over the carving knife.
Hitchcock makes us endure a slow and agonising wait before the deed.
and this scene in particular,
was enthusiastically reviewed
by one of the country's leading
He was an aspiring novelist
Greene wrote in the Spectator,
"is convincingly realistic."
was writing novels influenced by
American crime writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Their hard-boiled thrillers,
made a refreshing alternative to the cosy British whodunnit.
Now Greene set about creating
and the murderer, out of the library
and the drawing room and he'd place
All that remains of a detective story is the original murder.
a sufficiently evil person almost to justify the notion of hell.
hence his preoccupation with evil and sin and guilt and redemption.
of Brighton Rock tells us that
parlour game likely to be solved
and terrifying significance."
and onto the murderer himself.
The hero - or the antihero -
is a teenage gangster called Pinkie.
He's rather clever and very violent.
He seems to be in charge of half of the criminals of Brighton.
he's like a child with haemophilia -
but a bright spot of colour stood out on each cheekbone.
There was poison in his veins, though he grinned and bore it.
He jerked his narrow shoulders back
and these bogies who thought
Hell lay about him in his infancy.
He was ready for more deaths.
And we're in a very different
takes place in tea rooms and pubs
the rarefied country houses
Graham Greene loves taking us
the hotels of the Brighton seafront.
Brighton Rock points to the future,
and the brutal, psychological type of crime fiction that we read today.
But it's still recognisable
after all, what could be more British than a seaside pier?
Greene's novel also taps into
just like earlier entertainments like ballads and broadsides
They turned the sensational
It'll be packed with all kinds
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