A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (2013) s01e03 Episode Script
The Golden Age
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.
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
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.
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