Forgotten Book - The Jury Disagree

My Forgotten Book for today was featured, (or more precisely, its dust jacket was featured) for about a nanosecond, in Lucy Worsley's TV show about crime fiction, when she was discussing the  Wallace case. The Jury Disagree, by George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer Roberts, is a fictionalised version of the case, and the authors' interpretation of the facts is as interesting as the excellent jury room setting.

The twelve jurors whose deliberations about the case they have heard form the heart of the novel are described by reference to their work, rather than by name. So we have the Watch-Maker, the Actor, the Journalist, the Clerk, and so on. This might appear rather formulaic, especially when it is the man who makes watches who is fascinated by the timeline of events in the case, and the journalist likes to interpret the facts imaginatively. But the story has a real pull, and I enjoyed it.

I thought that the authors handled the adaptation of a real life case rather well. There are differences between the detailed facts of the actual and fictional crimes, but they do not detract in any way from the appeal of the book, and the ending is neatly contrived. You can never quite be sure how things are going to work out, and it's thought-provoking that the real trial resulted in a verdict that was clearly unsustainable.Whether or not you believe that William Herbert Wallace killed his wife, a question on which opinions are divided (personally, I think he was innocent,but P.D. James felt differently) I think it's pretty clear that the evidence to find him guilty beyond reasonable doubt simply was not there.

Goodchild and Bechhofer Roberts made a good writing team and I'm reading another of their books, We Shot an Arrow, at present, which I shall cover in this feature in the new year. Their prose was functional, but they were good at maintaining pace and tension, and that is more than can be said of some Golden Age writers. Even if you are not interested in the Wallace case, The Jury Disagree remains an engaging read.

P.D. James - a few thoughts

The sad news of P.D. James' death at the age of 94 has prompted heartfelt tributes from her many friends and admirers, including fellow practitioners such as her great friend Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid and Mark Billingham. We have lost one of the great detective novelists; there's no doubt that when future historians of the genre look back on twentieth century crime fiction, they will rank P.D. James highly. I'll say something more about her detective fiction soon, but for now I will just share a few personal thoughts about her.

I began reading her work in my teens, and soon became hooked. My first encounter with her in person came in the mid-80s, when she was on a publicity tour at the time of publication of the excellent A Taste for Death. I may be a writer now, but I've always been (and always will be) a fan, and when she came to my home town in Cheshire I was delighted to acquire a signed copy of the book. A few years later, when I'd achieved publication, I was asked to co-edit an anthology produced by the East Anglian chapter of the Crime Writers' Association, as I'd previously put together an anthology for the Northern chapter. The result was a book called Anglian Blood, and it contained a mix of fact and fiction. Phyllis was then a member of the CWA (this was before the controversy that sadly led to her resignation) and she was good enough to contribute a short piece called "Is There Arsenic Still for Tea?" A great thrill - my only regret was the book finished up with perhaps the most horrific cover artwork I've ever seen. I dread to think what she thought of it, and took care not to ask!

On the memorable night that I became a member of the Detection Club, I had the joyful experience of sitting with Phyllis, as well as two other writers I'd long admired, Jessica Mann and Simon Brett. More daunting, but also pleasurable in a different way, was the experience of delivering a talk about Golden Age fiction at St Hilda's College, with Phyllis sitting in the front row.

When Simon asked me to become the Detection Club's first archivist, Phyllis proved to be very supportive. She had long taken an interest in the genre's history - she was a passionate admirer of Dorothy L. Sayers, and author of Talking about Detective Fiction - and one day she rang me up out of the blue to tell me about something she'd discovered about the Club's early days. What's more, she promptly sent the material to me. A small thing, perhaps, but indicative of the kindness of which many who knew her better than I did have spoken. Last year, I had the great pleasure of sitting next to her at a dinner, when we discussed The Golden Age of Murder, her researches into the Wallace case (subsequently published in the Sunday Times) and her true crime book, The Maul and the Pear-Tree, co-written with a former colleague, T.A. Critchley.

That night, she and I and Sheila Keating journeyed home from the dinner in a taxi together, and Phyllis regaled us with an account of being awarded the freedom of Lyons. She was witty and convivial, interesting and interested. You'd never have guessed she was 93. A few days ago, Sheila very kindly sent her the manuscript of The Golden Age of Murder, which has just gone through a final copy edit, but the news came back that Phyllis was too frail to read a full-length book. Of course, I like to think that she would have enjoyed it, but I'll never know. What I do know is that she was not only a fine writer, but more importantly a warm and wise woman who showed a great deal of generosity to younger writers, of whom I am just one. Hers, truly, was a life well lived.      

Forgotten Book - Vegetable Duck

John Rhode, like so many of his Detection Club colleagues, was fascinated by true crime, and he was one of those novelists (Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and recently P.D. James, are others) who was enthralled by the mystery surrounding the Wallace case. Did the mild-mannered insurance agent William Wallace batter his wife Julia to death with a poker, or was someone else guilty? To this day, there is not a total consensus. Sayers suspected he was innocent, but I'm not sure Rhode took the same view.

He adapted the case for fictional purposes in The Telephone Call in 1948, but he'd also made use of it four years earlier in Vegetable Duck, which is my Forgotten Book for today. Here is where I confess my ignorance - "vegetable duck" is apparently a delicacy of sorts, a marrow stuffed with mince, which happens to be the favourite foodstuff of one of the characters in the novel. I must admit, though, that I'd never heard of it. And it's not on the menu at any of the happily numerous pubs which do meals in this neck of the woods!

Rhode makes explicit reference, more than once, to the Wallace case in this book. The circumstances of the murder are very different from those in the original crime - you guessed it, the vegetable duck is poisoned - and the setting is a reasonably prosperous part of London rather than a northern city. But the type of "alibi" put forward by Wallace is used by the victim's husband here. Dr Priestley utters words of wisdom in the background, but the main detecting is done by a cop, Jimmy Waghorn, who often featured in Rhode stories.

I enjoyed this book. It was crisp and readable, and contained a number of points of interest. Rhode's technique means that I was able to spot the culprit on first appearance, but the means by which the dreadful deed were done remained unclear to me at that stage. "Means" fascinated Rhode rather more than they do me, or most other modern writers. But he was a capable performer, and this is a good example of his post-war work.

Forgotten Book - The Obituary Arrrives at Two O'Clock

Having enjoyed Shizuko Natsuki's The Third Lady a while back, I was tempted to sample her work again, and this led to my reading today's Forgotten Book - a title she produced back in 1983, and seems to have translated herself five years later as The Obituary Arrives at Two O'Clock. The title struck me as extremely intriguing, as I find stories focusing on obituaries rather fascinating, but I have to say that the title does not bear any relation to the book. Rather, the starting point is a ploy slightly reminsicent of the Wallace case, which I have discussed here several times recently.

Kosuke Okita is a youngish landscape gardener who is owed a lot of money by a rascally co-owner of a golf club. One night, he receives a mysterious telephone call from a woman in need of help, and this prompts him to go out on an abortive attempt to meet and help her. At about the same time, the man who has been cheating him is bludgeoned to death with a golf club. Kosuke has no alibi, and becomes the prime suspect.

After that opening, there is no similarity between the storyline and the Wallace case. Kosuke eventually goes on the run, and when he disappears, it seems that he has committed suicide. But is it possible he is still alive, and if so, what on earth is going on? Tension is maintained pretty well, and there's a rather grim explanation of the final mystery in the very last sentence of the book.

The excellent ingredients mean that there is much to enjoy in this book. The regular shifts in viewpoint mean you can never be quite sure where you are with events, and the effect is quite pleasing. Having said that, you have to suspend your disbelief on several occasions, and I felt that there were not enough suspects, and a bit too much time was devoted to discussing the intricacies of the Japanese golf club business. Not a masterpiece, but a good book, and further evidence of Natsuki's storytelling ability, as well as another reminder of the dangers associated with believing everything people tell you on the telephone.

The Wallace Case - Alan Hamilton's perspective

My blog about P.D. James' essay on the legendary Wallace case prompted some very interesting comments and emails. One of them came from Alan Hamilton, who has just written a novel, Stalemate, which draws on the case (and which I very much look forward to reading.) Alan's research has been impressive, and I invited him to contribute a guest blog setting out some of his thoughts, which I hope will also whet readers' appetites for his novel.

"James Agate, a critic famous in his day, wrote, ‘either the murderer was Wallace or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, then here at last is the perfect murder.’

Let’s start with what we know.

We know that at the time of the murder Wallace was terminally ill. He’d spent a month as an in-patient in a Liverpool hospital in mid-1930 and had it made clear to him that his remaining kidney was diseased and malfunctioning and that nothing could be done to reverse or even arrest that. We also know he was a deeply introspective, introverted, and cerebral man. Wholly self-taught, his interests covered chemistry, science in general, philosophy, chess, music, and literature – interests that, together with his psychological traits, tended to cut him off from those among whom he lived and worked.

We know, and this knowledge is only about fifteen years old, that Julia Wallace was nearly twenty years older than her husband and yet had got away with claiming to be the same age as him. No one at the time suspected it. She did not look her age. She had lied persistently on official documents about her age, parentage, place of birth and even her first name, and did so too with her marriage certificate.  We know she rented and did not own the house she lived in when she met Wallace. We know she had today’s equivalent of £2340 in her Post Office account and on the night she was killed about £40 in cash in a pocket applied to the inside of her corset. She would have had to undress to get at the money.

We know that when Wallace arrived home from his wasted trip to Mossley Hill in pursuit of business from Mr Qualtrough, he was able to enter his back yard through the door in the wall. He said he’d told his wife to bolt it after him. If she had, he wouldn’t have been able, or expected, to get in.

We know that Julia was killed around 8pm. Professor McFall wrote that in the first report he made to the CID. He later changed his mind although he had no better evidence than he had had when he made that first report.

And finally we know that, contrary to PD James’s theory, Wallace did not cost Parry his job by reporting him to the Pru for paying-in less than he collected. It was more than a year after Wallace caught Parry out that Parry left the Pru of his own accord. About a month before the murder, Parry gave Wallace a calendar from his new employer. It was Wallace’s supervisor who told him later that Parry’s father had made good shortages in his son’s accounts.

So, given what we know, what might have happened? Someone killed Julia and with a degree of violence of which Wallace, given his temperament and physical condition, was probably incapable. What’s more, whoever it was did it when Wallace was several miles from home. Someone who was let into the house by Julia; someone she either knew or thought she knew. Someone who intended from the start, or was provoked, to kill her. Someone from her distinctly strange past, perhaps, or someone who wanted her out of the way? Or someone who was persuaded, rewarded, or pressured to kill her so someone else could benefit? Someone else who might then feel that at the end of a lifetime of frustration and disappointment he (or she) had organised ‘the perfect murder’". 

P.D. James and true crime wriitng - a few more thoughts

P.D. James' reassessment of the Wallace case, which I posted about yesterday, is one of the most exciting pieces of "true crime" writing I've read for a long time. And so I thought I'd make a few more points, again in the hope of stimulating debate among those who find the Wallace mystery as intriguing as I do.

For a start, I'm really pleased that this admirable writer, whose The Maul and The Pear-Tree (co-written with T.A. Critchley) is a very good book about a nineteenth century case, has turned again to a historical puzzle.There is a long and rather splendid tradition of crime novelists taking an interest in real life cases and I'm pleased to see from this essay that the Queen of Crime is on top form. Not that, after her very enjoyable paper about the Golden Age at St Hilda's a couple of months back, I had any doubt about that.

I would like to think that this stylish and ingenious essay will kick-start a revival of interest in classic murder cases. They were in vogue again about 20 years ago, but with a few notable exceptions (above all, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher) the trend in "true crime" writing has seemed to be rather downmarket, with a number of lurid books about gangsters and the Mafia that prioritised sensation rather than quality.

As regards Wallace, I'm still mulling over P.D. James' arguments, but on the whole I side with the  "Wallace was innocent" campaign. I don't attach much importance, for instance, to the fact that the presumed killer's ex-girlfriend said late in life that she didn't believe he was a murderer. There could be various reasons why she said that. Most important, though, is Wallace's psychological profile. Does it suggest a murderer? (Or someone who would dress up as his wife in order to create confusion about the time of death?) Well, we are all capable of unexpected behaviour, but I don't see him as a man who could commit such a crime and then maintain a resolute protestation of innocence until he died. He might have been an insurance salesman (and a former political agent) but I don't know of any evidence suggesting he was capable of sustained dishonesty, let alone violence. The alternative suspect, Parry, on the other hand, had a criminal record, albeit for comparatively minor offences.

One thing is for sure. As the never-ending debate about Jack the Ripper shows, these classic cases are never closed. There's always the chance that some fresh and plausible theory will crop up. And that explains the enduring appeal of true crime writing.