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.

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 the Wallace Case - a Classic Murder Mystery

The murder of Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931 has fascinated people for over eighty years. Raymond Chandler was one of many crime novelists who was puzzled as to where the truth lay. Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr were among the others, and Sayers wrote an important essay about the case, included in the Detection Club book Anatomy of Murder. John Rhode wrote two novels which drew on aspects of the case, and more recently John Hutton wrote an excellent novel inspired by it. Now it is the turn of Sayers' admirer P.D.James, herself a doyenne of the Detection Club, to investigate - and the outcome of her own detective work has appeared in The Sunday Times today.

First, a brief recap on the main facts. William Herbert Wallace was a middle aged, respectable and apparently happily married insurance agent who received a telephone message at the Chess Club where he played, from a prospective new client, R.M. Qualtrough. Wallace was asked to call at Qualtrough's home the following evening. He duly et out, but the address given to him did not exist. When he returned home, he found his wife dead. She had been battered to death. Wallace was found guilty and sentenced to death, but reprieved on appeal. However, he died not long after being released from prison.

Research undertaken by Jonathan Goodman and Roger Wilkes seemed to establish that the actual killer was a man called Parry.However,P.D.James has cast doubt on this conclusion. To follow her detailed reasoning, one has to read her essay very carefully(and it is behind a paywall). I think it's a truly fascinating piece of work.

The question she has presented us with is this - was Wallace in fact guilty, after all? She thinks he was. I think it's marvellous that she has reinvestigated the case, and her essay is intensely readable, as you would expect. Even for those who are not true crime fans, it's an engrossing mystery. I want to reflect on P.D. James' arguments before coming to any conclusions - that's the lawyer in me, I guess! - but I must say that my instinctive view is that I still believe Wallace was innocent. Anthony Berkeley said of the Crippen case (I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly) that a man "does not become a fiend overnight", and I think he was right. The psychological profile of Wallace doesn't seem to me to be that of a murderer, and there are one or two other aspects of the latest theory that don't instantly convince me. But - the debate is now reopened, and I would be extremely interested to know what others think about this enduring and extraordinary puzzle.