Rustles of expectation gradually quietened in the Jacqueline du Prè Music Building on Saturday morning as the audience settled. Readers and writers of mystery and crime books waited in anticipation for the weekend of excellent and interesting talks to begin.
Natasha Cooper, the Conference Guest of Honour, also chaired the conference this year. She welcomed everyone warmly: ‘St Hilda’s is the friendliest of crime weekends and we want you to have the best time yet.’
The first speaker was Jill Paton Walsh on The Attenbury Emeralds: Jewels as an Occasion of Sin, and her paper included many of the recurring themes that were explored during a weekend that inspired deep thought. Jill talked about the ‘end game drama of Golden Age Crime Fiction’, in which the reader knows that the murderer’s punishment will be ‘the noose, the rope, and the trap’. But at this time it was not only the murderer who faced ‘the problem of human hanging’ but also the detective. When the crime was solved he, or she, would have to live with the ‘emotional difficulty’ of being ‘complicit in judicial justice’. Truly the wages of sin are death in this section of the crime genre.
‘The struggle between good and evil, dark and light is at the heart of the crime novel,’ Kate Charles said at the beginning of the next paper, Tiger in the Smoke: The Theology of Margery Allingham. She spoke about Allingham’s idea that, if you obey your rules and do all you honestly can, Christ’s teachings become simple and seem based on reason. Allingham wrote a personalisation of the fight between dark and light into her book Tiger in the Smoke. Her character, Canon Avril, is the embodiment of good. He lives out Allingham’s own theology; he is ‘honest in mind’ and becomes part of ‘the pattern’ that allows the natural order of things to ‘stay in the balance’. Avril struggles against Jack Havoc, a malevolent chancer, whose sins include murder. At the climax of this book the incarnation of good looks into the face of evil.
In his talk on Original Sinners Martin Edwards introduced a lighter note. ‘Crime writers often play games with the concept of justice,’ he said. In some books a form of natural justice allows for a more moral outcome than if the murderer is delivered up to the judicial system. Readers usually empathise with the detective and so are sometimes happy to go along with this if the writer shows that the detective’s sympathies are with the criminal. For example, even though ‘sin mattered to Agatha Christie and she believed passionately in evil’, her character Poirot allows murderers to escape the law in two books, Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain. Martin then spoke about writers who blur the boundaries of justice and who play about with the concepts of stalker/prey, victim/culprit, even guilt and innocence. He recommends C S Forrester, Cornell Woolrich, Peter Lovesey and P D James as writers of the sort of plot that explores these themes and the mysteries of human behaviour.
Getting Away with Murder was also the theme of Christine Poulson’s paper. In modern fiction the wages of sin are no longer death by hanging. ‘But murder needs to be met with justice and there should be retribution,’ she said. Novels where the murderer is allowed to escape fall into two camps, she argues. First, if there is a moral case for justice still to be served by that outcome, Christine offered the examples of the Conan Doyle story, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange (where Holmes appoints himself as judge and Watson as jury before allowing a man who has killed to go free); the wonderful story by Susan Gaskell, A Jury of her Peers, and also Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie; these works all explore natural justice.The second camp is when evil clearly triumphs over good but the reader is tempted into complicity. Patricia Highsmith’s novels about Ripley and the Thomas Harris novels about Hannibal Lecter are part of this genre. In Harris’s novels we are shown a charismatic sadist and, as we read, we may be charmed by Lecter into thinking, ‘If I were a psychopathic cannibal, I’d like to be just like him.’ Christine said that as a writer it’s interesting to ask, ‘What is justice?’ and whether that should sometimes be achieved outside the law. ‘The writer is the moral arbiter within the novel. And we don’t really want murderers to get away with it? Do we?’
Natasha Cooper introduced the next speaker, Robert Barnard, as ‘a lightly witty, highly erudite writer’. In his lecture The Burglar who also Played Cricket: a fresh look at Raffles and Bunny Robert Barnard compared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose writing is ‘cerebral, like a series of cryptic crosswords’ with the work of Ernest William Hornung, whose character, Raffles, is a man of action, not thought. Hornung wrote Raffles as an enormously egotistical character riding roughshod over his henchman, Bunny’s, values. Bunny has a schoolboy, or folk-wisdom, idea of morality, but Raffles has only two motivations: wealth or sensation. Raffles has no moral sense and is moved only by expediency. Perhaps it would be true to say that he falls into the category of charismatic characters who are nevertheless amoral.
During questions, Robert had some excellent advice for writers: ‘Keep your eyes open and your ears open. Travel by public transport at different times of the day and listen to people, watch people. Don’t keep yourself to yourself with email and mobile phones.’
Next came Anarchism and Anger: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams – the first crime novel? This paper was written and presented by Andrew Taylor, who began by speaking about Charles Dickens as a philosophical anarchist who believed that education would make the State’s intervention in morality redundant.
William Godwin’s book The Adventures of Caleb Williams was published before Dickens was born and is sometimes described as one of the first mystery novels. But Godwin intended the book to be a vehicle to show how society can harm the individual. He planned the narrative backwards, from effects to causes, so ‘laying bare the involutions of motive’.
Andrew described the novel as ‘Not really a whodunit, although it includes murder. It is more a psychological penetration of the consequences of investigation. During the course of the book everyone becomes guilty and characters often pay, not only for their own sins, but for other people’s as well.’
Mary Andrea Clarke began her lecture on Headsman and Hangmen with a series of questions: ‘If there is a commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” then what about judicial killing? Does the executioner not have feelings too? What if they had doubts about what they were doing, or about the guilt of the convicted?’ She took us on a fascinating journey through the history of executions, from medieval hangings, beheadings and immolations to the more recent hanging of Ruth Ellis. Many of the men who took on the task of meting out society’s justice became broken in health and took to drink. In 1932 an executioner threatened to decapitate his wife and daughter with a razor, before turning the blade on himself and committing suicide. Albert Pierrepoint, executioner from 1931 to 1956, in his autobiography Executioner: Pierrepoint, wrote, ‘Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge,’ but as Mary reminded us in her summing up, ‘Executioners have always excited interest, controversy and heated opinions.’
Laura Wilson wound up the first afternoon with The Demon in the Glass: the life and work of Patrick Hamilton. ‘Patrick Hamilton is the quintessential writer about England in the ‘30s,’ she said, ‘but he’s dropped out of literary sight.’ His books are British noir and contain a dark social history of low-life London. Hamilton realised that vision and imagination rose from stored observation and would sit in a pub or bar and listen for hours. From his meticulous observations of psychological interactions came works such as Rope, (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock), Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Hangover Square.
On Sunday Kate Charles introduced Natasha Cooper, the Conference Guest of Honour, as an erudite writer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of crime and mystery fiction. The Conference Lecture was Looking Behind the Mask.
Natasha Cooper talked about Josephine Tey’s fascination with the reality of identity and what lies behind the physical appearance of a character. These themes are investigated in Tey’s work. The Daughter of Time, for instance, centres around the idea that faces can be ‘read’ and character can be divined from a portrait: in this case the portrait of Richard III. Brat Farrar delves further into the question of the possible contradiction between external appearance and the personality within. Two characters in the book have identical physical appearances, but one is good, and the other is a brutal killer. Tey is not the only writer to explore these questions. Natasha also spoke about the unflattering description of George Smiley in John le Carrè’s books and the comparison made between George’s appearance and that of his externally beautiful wife, Anne, who commits serial adultery. Another writer who has a fascination for probing below the surface of his characters’ exteriors and asking questions about their identity is John Buchan. In his case it’s possible that this may be traced to an accident he had when he was five years old. Suffering from a fractured skull, Buchan was confined to bed, and forbidden to read or speak. Natasha summed up her warmly received paper: ‘Crime is the most important of today’s genres. We have the knowledge we are capable of good and bad and the battle between them has formed the basis of all fiction. It is endlessly reassuring to see the bad beaten back by the good, particularly when the beater-back is fallible and imperfect, like ourselves. We all have to look behind the mask – if we do not we will not know the truth about ourselves, or other people, and that is a kind of half-life. So the wages of sin are truly death.’ In response to a question from the floor about the search for identity, Natasha said, ‘What is the core of you and what is real is at the heart of both crime fiction and life.’
Betty Rowlands in her lecture Sin Can Be Fun talked about the origins of the idea of sin. Adam and Eve, living in perfection, nevertheless ate the apple, even though God told them not to. The Original Sin was therefore disobedience – although this is not listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Agatha Christie’s writing is full of sins and sinners and ‘hers collect their wages, usually hanging.’ Betty said, ‘In my own writing I have a laid back approach to plotting. I have the elements in mind, write the first scene and allow it to continue. Plots develop a life of their own, I find. The sins of my characters not only pay my wages but also give me a lot of fun along the way.’
Marcia Talley gave the last paper From Dante to Disney:The Seven Deadly Sins in Crime Fiction. She said, ‘In crime writing most motives lead back to one of the Seven. Murder is always a symptom of one of the root sins.’ Dorothy L Sayers writing is full of her belief that bad habits of mind are the wellhead from which criminal behaviour springs and this belief came partly from the concept of the Seven which was rooted in her from childhood. ‘Agatha Christie’s plots often explore the Seven Deadlies,’ Marcia said. And she went on to ask, ‘Where would mystery writers be without the Seven Deadly Sins?’
Her last sentence summed up both her paper, and many of ideas that were expressed by speakers throughout this exceptional Conference: ‘Sin is easy, virtue is hard and the conflict between them has always made a good story.’