C. E. Vulliamy

• Born: June 20, 1886
• Birthplace: Wales
• Died: September 4, 1971
• Place of death: England

Type of Plot: Inverted

Contribution

C. E. Vulliamy is best known for his novels and biographies of the Johnsonian era (the most controversial being a portrait of James Boswell as an opportunist in his friendship with Samuel Johnson), for his Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Wesley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, and for his articles in The Spectator. His mysteries are not as widely known. In the main they are novels of academia (Don Among the Dead Men, 1952) or of clergy (The Vicar’s Experiments, 1932; Tea at the Abbey, 1961), though the protagonist may be merely a headmaster or a rector. In Vulliamy’s novels, the mystery plot actually serves as the backdrop for mildly satiric treatments of British society and consequently depends on the techniques that dominate more traditional satiric forms. There is a sense of reductio ad absurdum in the portraits of foolish and fallible humanity. Vulliamy’s virtue is his vice, with the satiric at its best adding an extra dimension to the mystery genre, but at its worst detracting to such a degree that neither satire nor mystery convinces. Vulliamy employs the conventions of detective fiction but turns them on end, mocking them and, through his reversals and exaggerations, mocking the weaknesses of humanity that necessitate such conventions.

Biography

C. E. Vulliamy, born Colwyn Edward Vullimay in Wales on June 20, 1886, studied art under Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn, Cornwall, from 1910 to 1913. During World War I, he served in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and was stationed in France, Macedonia, and Turkey; he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1918, becoming camp commandant of the Twenty-eighth Division Headquarters and later education officer of the division, with a rank of captain. He was married to Eileen Hynes in 1916, and they had a son and a daughter.

After the war, Vulliamy pursued a full-time literary career. He was active in field archaeology, contributed regularly to The Spectator, and was a respected historical biographer. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an active member of the Royal Anthropological Society. His wife died in 1943; he survived her by almost thirty years, dying on September 4, 1971.

Analysis

C. E. Vulliamy’s mysteries are all to some degree inverted, and they follow the same general pattern. They begin with a grudge against another person (usually a social parasite who tends toward malicious gossip), a search for a perfect murder method, and a murder attempt (sometimes successful and sometimes not), followed by plans for further crimes, a deterioration of character involving a movement toward insanity, outside intervention, apprehension, a trial scene, a questionable verdict, and an ironic conclusion. This pattern varies slightly from tale to tale—sometimes the trial scene is excluded, sometimes the focus on madness is diminished—but the basic ingredients tend to remain consistent.

The stories reflect a pessimistic view of human nature and a deep-seated contempt for the foolishness of many social types, from Panglossian rectors to pretentious social climbers, from the limited products of public schools to the dim-witted, eccentric lords of the manor. Their characters and style partake of the artificial and exaggerated speech, manners, and sensibilities of some turn-of-the-century works, yet their negative, sometimes black-humor interpretations of human motivations and human behavior seem more modern. In other words, despite their strong sense of place—the English village—these works seem out of time, neither fully Edwardian nor fully modern. Although the narrative voice focuses particularly on the perspective of the villains, the murderers and would-be murderers, the effect is not that of the typical inverted form, in which the reader shares the perspective and the sensibilities of a first-person narrator. Instead, Vulliamy relies on a third-person omniscient narrative voice, which is distanced from characters and action, as if a superior judge, amused by the comic antics of his inferiors, retold them in such a way as to call attention to their limitations and to prove their inferiority. At his best, Vulliamy’s wit is keen and his tales ironic; at his worst, his characterizations are shallow and his narrative is overwrought.

The Vicar’s Experiments and Cakes for Your Birthday

Some consider The Vicar’s Experiments, an imitation of Francis Iles’s mysteries, a “minor masterpiece,” for it is written with discipline, the satire and negativism more carefully controlled than in Vulliamy’s other works. Usually, however, his plots are only contrived frames on which to hang satire, and as a consequence they sometimes verge on the silly. In Cakes for Your Birthday (1959), for example, after a foiled first attempt, the would-be murderers mail arsenic-coated cakes to their intended victim, who passes them on to an aunt who has just informed her of a will leaving her a considerable amount of money. The aunt dies; the intended victim is accused and tried, all the while reveling in her notoriety. Meanwhile, the main engineer of the plot goes slowly mad because he firmly believes that hanging the wrong person would be a miscarriage of justice. No one believes his confession, but a professional criminal, outraged by the ungentlemanly behavior of the accomplices, forces them to confess. The victim, who deserves punishment for her other deeds, though not for murder, is acquitted, but soon thereafter is thrown over a cliff by some unknown party. In Body in the Boudoir (1956), there is a coroner’s inquest before the results of the autopsy are known, a murder investigation before there is clearly a murder, and a murder weapon (a West African Calabar bean) that boggles the imagination. Clearly, one does not read Vulliamy for plot. Instead it is for what one critic has called “verbal coruscation” and “its glitter of style, now broadly funny, now keenly acidulous.”

Vulliamy’s Pet Peeves

As in Don Among the Dead Men, the story of a chemist who discovers a poison that leaves no traces, Vulliamy uses his plots as excuses to expostulate on his pet peeves. Everyone is subject to attack (sometimes most heavy-handedly), from the all-too-innocent clergyman to the self-made “Carbon King,” from the narrow-minded and befuddled academician to the malicious small-town gossip. It is gossip that disturbs Vulliamy most and is the subject of his most damning attacks in all of his works. In fact, he is highly suspicious of any village organization, from the Red Cross to “Scouts for louts” and “Guides for girlies,” believing that they are all dedicated to the propagation of gossip as if it were a duty required by their association. Male-female relationships also come under heavy attack, with all marriages depicted as a balancing act and all “love” relationships unnatural and exploitative. Lady Ruggerbrace, a minor character in Body in the Boudoir, sums up the Vulliamy attitude: “I am never surprised when I hear that a man has made a fool of himself: that is a phenomenon which I observe every day of my life.”

Vulliamy is also highly critical of bad taste, particularly in clothing and in architecture. In many works there is some description of what Vulliamy terms “giving rein to the Free Philistine.” This might involve, for example, wearing a bright yellow tie with polka dots or developing “desirable residences,” made most undesirable by “their pebble-dashed impudence, their green and red tiles, their doubly-damnable sham antiquity and their preposterous gables,” all of which would fill “an intelligent observer with dismay.” It might also involve a delight in the grotesque styles of eighteenth and nineteenth century “antiquities”: “the painted ceilings where tumbling nudities clustered on swagging clouds . . . the state beds (nurses of nightmares or couches for corpses), the wanton vagaries of rococo stucco . . . the picture galleries—cows by Cuyp, ladies by Lely, doubtful Rembrandts and undoubted Landseers . . . the rowdy-dowdies of Rubens.” A Mr. Foggery, who mistrusts any intelligence not associated with money-making and has a face “red and yellow in patches like the brickwork of his preposterous villa,” is typical of such philistine taste.

The police and professional criminals equally merit attack. Both groups deride bungling amateurs, but in doing so expose their own limitations. The professional robbers and murderers often are graduates of public schools or even of the University of Oxford, have a set of inviolate principles and inflationary fees, and alternate between rather contrived street talk and informed discussions of dahlias and Pythagorean laws of mathematics. Still, they are hardened criminals and think nothing of murdering for a fee or robbing for pleasure. In turn, the police in a Vulliamy mystery often long for a nice little corpse from a real professional. In Cakes for Your Birthday, they rather regret a failed murder, because they consider the would-be victim a “wicked slanderer” whose “obscene repulsive scandals” bring “misery and suspicion into a dozen innocent families” and, worst of all, mix “abominable lies with abominable truth.” Furthermore, they admit that legal remedies often do no good because of “a notable army of liars, fools, and idiots” who cloud the issues and leave the slandered forever tainted. “Cultivate suspicion,” says Inspector Fishbox to Sergeant Applecot, but that motto proves the undoing of many of Vulliamy’s detectives, who suspect far too many for far too little reason.

Body in the Boudoir

The inspector in Body in the Boudoir is typical. A cheerful cynic, he is a man with a system: Fearful that setting up a theory will lead one to reject all that does not fit, “even to the extent of twisting or fabricating evidence,” he instead considers all possibilities, working out dozens of possible solutions, even the most absurd. The result is much meaningless and nonproductive busywork and interminable interviews. He continually dreams up untenable theories about witnesses and draws conclusions on the flimsiest of evidence, all the while calling for neutrality. There is an Inspector Clouseau quality to the bungling. Harboyle metaphorically trips over his feet throughout his investigation. For example, he carries around morgue photographs of a dead girl and then overreacts, suspecting a guilty conscience, when someone shows distress and shock. His ideal is a detective chief superintendent who “wears glasses, quotes poetry, and looks peculiarly innocent,” a man who can move comfortably among the landed gentry as a police spy and hence has “more kills to his credit than anyone else in the whole perishing Force.” Ironically, it is this detective who solves the mystery, not Harboyle, by sketching out a working hypothesis based on the probability of the improbable and pursuing it to its fantastic but correct conclusions. In other words, though using the standard ploys of the detective mystery genre, Vulliamy reduces all to the absurd.

Word Play and Comedy

Stylistically, Vulliamy’s works tend toward the stilted, being at times overly euphuistic, with balanced phrasing, contrived sound combinations, and elaborate sentence construction—a bit too strained, a bit too arch. The result is characters whose speech and acts seem incredible. There are mock sermons, with inflated phraseology and hidebound clichés, sentences of more than two hundred words, and exhortations to action or nonaction, as the case may be. Phrases such as “brittle tinkle of icy drops” and “so furry in winter, so flimsy in summer,” with their heavy assonance, alliteration, and balance, abound, along with aphorisms such as “The dead shot shoots dead.” The better-educated characters quote Homer in Greek and Seneca in Latin; an angry lord towers “in red Homeric wrath among his myrmidons” in Body in the Boudoir, and a police dandy lectures from John Dryden’s translation of Persius and muses on “the terrible torture of thirst for the naphthaline waters of passion accurst.”

There are comic catalogs, including lists of murder methods and murder weapons: ingestion, penetration, puncture, “deadly dose . . . whiff or prick . . . stealthy stiletto . . . a blow in the bark or a stab in the back,” “a short though heavy bludgeon, truncheon, cudgel, or cosh.” Doctors roll out absurd lists of symptoms: “torticollis, kypchosis, scoliosis, and lordosis.” Characters’ names, too, are comically suggestive: Inspector Belching, the Reverend Theophilus Pogge, Sir Bedwith Bathwedder, Millie Peasewillow, Arthur Packett Lollesworth, William Edward Ripsguard, Ethel Meatring Peelyard, Agnes Farrier-Sludge, and Samuel Johnson, the butcher. Miss Wasp, Miss Bickerslow, Mrs. Pigge, and Lily Loveylove behave in accordance with their names, as do the “Old Rotters” of the Rotting Hill public school or the “Coddlers” from Coddlebury College for Women. The marquis of Ruggerbrace has an imposingly majestic figure but suffers from a remarkable “mental torpidity,” while Detective Inspector Harboyle is not as hard-boiled as his name might suggest. Mr. Pukey, of the Daily Whatnot, is determinedly obnoxious in his pursuit of a story, while the hateful Misses Waddleboy are “grim images of human decay and of mouldy frustration,” Victorian in sensibilities and social attitudes.

Vulliamy delights in calling attention to phrases that reflect one’s values or psychology, as when a mild-mannered gentleman, angered at his daughter’s murderer, repeats unhappily, “I would like to flay the bastard alive,” or when a detective talks about getting the murderer “safely to the gallows.” The “grim adverb” makes another’s heart turn cold at the thought of describing the entrapment of a suspect “just as a fisherman would speak of bringing a salmon to the gaff or a trout to the net.” There is deflation: “She was a Pardol of Stoke Ampersand, a family at least moderately famous for eleven centuries in the history of Great Britain, if only in footnotes and appendices”; there are mild satiric jibes: “He had learnt many things during his service in the Colonial Office and a truculent indecision was one of them.” Classic British understatement is another favorite comic device; for example, on being told that there is a body in the boudoir and a police inspector at the door, the marchioness of Ruggerbrace remarks, “There seems to be something wrong.” Literary and historical allusions similarly partake of the satiric, as in the comparison of a Captain Bashe to William of Ockham, for both “lived and thought (if that is the word) on the principle of rejecting unnecessary ideas,” a process in which Bashe “succeeded so admirably that he had scarcely any ideas at all.” After a long string of witnesses can remember almost nothing about a murder victim except her melancholy, the lengthy description given by a Miss Bleat is comic in its wealth and precision of detail, from the red agate brooch and unusual blue eyes to the fingernails varnished a pale pink, the lightly penciled eyebrows, and the hair the color of weak tea. Comic, too, is Vulliamy’s reliance on the hyperbolic, whereby the trivial acts of trivial minds are blown up out of proportion. Curiosity seekers visiting a castle the day after a murder are described as a highly destructive invading army and their various skirmishes with the residents and staff as full-blown battles.

Vulliamy will delight those who enjoy a heavy dose of debunking, but there is a superficiality to his attacks, for he ignores the deep-seated horrors of human nature and is content to mock its surface forms: manners, attire, diction, pretension. He is best at a comedy of manners of the sort one finds in The Vicar’s Experiments and Don Among the Dead Men.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Synod of Sleuths: Essays on Judeo-Christian Detective Fiction. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Discusses important Jewish and Christian religious figures in detective fiction; sheds light on Vulliamy’s works.

Erb, Peter C. Murder, Manners, and Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction—The John Albert Hall Lectures, 2004. London: SCM Press, 2007. Collected lectures on the role and representation of religion in detective fiction; provides perspective on Vulliamy’s writings.

Nover, Peter, ed. The Great Good Place? A Collection of Essays on American and British College Mystery Novels. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Compilation of essays focused on crime fiction set at college campuses or featuring academic characters; helps readers understand Vulliamy’s novels.

Shibuk, Charles. “Notes on C. E. Vulliamy.” The Armchair Detective 3, 5 (April, 1970; April, 1972): 161, 145. Contains information about the writing of Vulliamy.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of Tea at the Abbey, by C. E. Vulliamy. The Armchair Detective 7 (November, 1973): 55. Review by a fan of the author looks at this novel of the clergy.