Anthony Berkeley

• Born: July 5, 1893
• Birthplace: Watford, Hertfordshire, England
• Died: March 9, 1971
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted; psychological; thriller

Principal Series: Roger Sheringham, 1925-1945; Ambrose Chitterwick, 1929-1937

Contribution

Anthony Berkeley achieved fame during one of the periods in which mystery writing was ascendant. In the 1920’s, he was frequently linked with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and S. S. Van Dine as one of the four giants in the field. Indeed, John Dickson Carr, himself a giant, called Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) one of the best detective stories ever written. Nevertheless, Berkeley parted company with them, particularly with Christie—even though she did prove to be, if not the most durable, certainly the most enduring of the quartet—as he moved from the mystery as intellectual conundrum toward an exploration of the limits within which the genre could sustain psychology and suspense. One can almost imagine Berkeley wondering: “What if the reader knew from the first paragraph who the murderer was? How would one generate suspense?” Thereon, he pioneered the inverted mystery, told from the criminal’s point of view or, in a further twist, from the perspective of the victim.

Berkeley was more than equal to the challenges that he drew from the genre, and his work has been justly celebrated for its perspicuity. His characters are rich and deeply realized as he pursues the implications of the murderous motive on their psyches. Although his plots are sometimes contrived (plot machinations are not his principal focus), his stories are shot through with elegance, intelligence, and grace.

One last contribution that Berkeley tendered was to the performing arts. One of his Francis Iles novels—Malice Aforethought: The Story of a Commonplace Crime (1931)—was adapted for television in Great Britain in 1979, while another one, Before the Fact (1932), was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into his 1941 classic film Suspicion with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, and Trial and Error (1937) was directed by Vincent Sherman and scripted by Barry Trivers as Flight from Destiny (1941). Hitchcock, at least via his screenwriter, betrayed the novelist’s conception of a fit resolution to the thriller; Hitchcock evidently believed that he knew the marketplace better than did the original artist.

Biography

Anthony Berkeley was born Anthony Berkeley Cox in Watford, Herfordshire, England, and his given names would later become indelibly linked with those of the top British mystery authors of the Golden Age. As a child, he attended a day school in Watford and at Sherborne College, Wessex. He later studied at University College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in classics. After World War I started in 1914, he enlisted in the British Army and eventually attained the rank of lieutenant. However, he became a victim of gas warfare on a French battlefield and left the army with permanently damaged health.

In 1917 Berkeley married Margaret Fearnley Farrar. That marriage ended in 1931 and was followed a year later by Berkeley’s marriage to a woman variously identified as Helen Macgregor or Helen Peters. This marriage lasted little more than a decade. Meanwhile, Berkeley worked at several occupations, including real estate. He was a director of a company called Publicity Services and one of two officers of another firm called A. B. Cox, Ltd.

Berkeley’s writing and journalistic career as Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles lasted several decades. He began by contributing witty sketches to Punch, the English humor magazine, but soon discovered that writing detective fiction was more remunerative. The year 1925 was a boom time for Berkeley. That year he published the classic short story “The Avenging Chance” and (as A. B. Cox) the comic opera Brenda Entertains, the novel The Family Witch: An Essay in Absurdity, and the collection Jugged Journalism. He carefully guarded his privacy from within the precincts of the fashionable London area known as St. John’s Wood.

As Anthony Berkeley, he founded the Detection Club in 1928. A London organization, the club brought together top British crime writers dedicated to the care and preservation of the classic detective story. The very existence of the organization attested to the popularity of mystery and detective writing in the 1920’s. In 1929 Berkeley published his masterpiece, The Poisoned Chocolates Case, in which members of the club appeared as thinly disguised fictional characters.

Berkeley had a considerable effect on the way that the Detection Club was chartered; while the oath that candidates for membership had to swear reflects Berkeley’s own wit—it parodies the Oath of Confirmation of the Church of England—it also works to confirm on the practitioners of mystery writing the status and standards of a serious and well-regarded profession, if not an art. Berkeley collaborated with other club members on several round-robin tales and anthologies: Behind the Screen (serialized in The Listener, 1930), The Scoop (serialized in The Listener, 1931; reprinted as The Scoop, and, Behind the Screen, 1983), The Floating Admiral (1931; reprinted in 1980); Ask a Policeman (1933, reprinted 1987), Six Against the Yard: In Which Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Father Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers, Russell Thorndike Commit the Crime of Murder Which Ex-Superintendent Cornish, C.I.D., Is Called upon to Solve (1936; also known as Six Against Scotland Yard), The Anatomy of Murder (1936), and More Anatomy of Murder (1936).

Although Berkeley published his last novel in 1939, he continued reviewing mysteries for the rest of his life. As Francis Iles, he wrote for the London Daily Telegraph in the 1930’s, for John O’London’s Weekly in 1938, for the London Sunday Times after World War II, and for the Manchester Guardian from the mid-1950’s to 1970. He also wrote articles dedicated to his fascination with crime, such as his 1937 essay “Was Crippen a Murderer?”

Interestingly, although Berkeley sought to prevent the public from intruding on his personal affairs, he was not insensitive to professional obligations. Like Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle before him, he recognized public demands, affably molding his detective, in this case Roger Sheringham, into a more likable and engaging creature when it became apparent that that was what the public desired. This is one of many parallels between serial publication as practiced by Dickens and the series of novels that many detective writers published. Anthony Cox died in 1971, his privacy inviolate and the immortality of Anthony Berkeley assured.

Analysis

The classic English murder mystery enjoyed a golden age in the 1920’s. Whether the mystery’s triumph resulted from the confidence that followed the postwar boom or from a prescient awareness that this era of prosperity would soon come to an end, the public imagination was captured by erudite, self-sufficient, all-knowing, and in some instances debonair detectives—the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, and Philo Vance. The reading public was entranced by someone who had all the answers, someone for whom the grimmest, grimiest, and most gruesome aspects of life—murder most foul—could be tidied up, dusted off, and safely divested of their most dire threats so that life could continue peaceful, placid, and prosperous.

“The Avenging Chance”

Anthony Berkeley entered the increasingly fertile field of mysteries, becoming a major figure with the 1925 publication of the often-reprinted short story “The Avenging Chance,” which featured detective Roger Sheringham, on whom his author bestowed the worst of all possible characteristics of insufferable amateur sleuths. A British World War I veteran who has become successful at writing crime novels, Sheringham is vain, sneering, and in all ways offensive. The story was, in fact, conceived as a parody, as the following passage illustrates:

Roger Sheringham was inclined to think afterwards that the Poisoned Chocolates Case, as the papers called it, was perhaps the most perfectly planned murder he had ever encountered. The motive was so obvious, when you knew where to look for it—but you didn’t know; the method was so significant when you had grasped its real essentials—but you didn’t grasp them; the traces were so thinly covered, when you had realised what was covering them—but you didn’t realise. But for a piece of the merest bad luck, which the murderer could not possibly have foreseen, the crime must have been added to the classical list of great mysteries.

However, the story proved sufficiently popular to inspire its as yet unnamed author to expand it into a novel, which is now considered to be one of Berkeley’s four classics, The Poisoned Chocolates Case. His other important novels are Malice Aforethought, Before the Fact, and Trial and Error. He actually wrote many others, now considered forgettable, having in fact been forgotten and fallen out of print.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case

The Poisoned Chocolates Case is clever and interesting: Its premise is based on the detective club Berkeley founded. A private, nonprofessional organization of crime fanciers reviews a case that has, in true English mystery fashion, stumped Scotland Yard. Six members will successively present their solutions to the mysterious death of a wealthy young woman, who, it seems, has eaten poisoned chocolates evidently intended for someone else. The reader is presented with a series of possible scenarios (some members suggest more than one), each one more compelling than the last. Thus Berkeley exhausts all the possible suspects, not excepting the present company of putative investigators. Berkeley even goes so far as to present a table of likely motives, real-life parallel cases, and alleged killers, reminiscent of the techniques of Edgar Allan Poe, who based the fictional artifice of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” on a genuine, unsolved mystery. (Berkeley does this as well in his 1926 The Wychford Poisoning Case.)

Like that of Poe, Berkeley’s method is logical, or ratiocinative, as the chroniclers of C. Auguste Dupin or Sherlock Holmes might aver. Thus, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is remarkable less for its action and adventure—there are no mean streets or brawls here—than for its calm, clear rationale. This is murder most civilized, gleaming only momentarily in the twilight of the British Empire. It is, moreover, murder, in this pretelevision era, by talking heads. Thus, the author must find a way other than plot convolutions to generate interest, to say nothing of suspense, since he is, in effect, retelling his story five times.

Yet Berkeley creates a crescendo of climaxes and revelations of solutions, with Roger Sheringham, the detective presumptive, assigned by the luck of the draw the fourth presentation. He is twice trumped by superior solutions, for the last, and most perfect answer, belongs to the slightest and most insignificant of the club’s communicants, Ambrose Chitterwick. Roger is rendered beside himself by this untoward and alien chain of events, and the conventions of the genre are no less disturbed. This final solution cannot be proved, however, so that at the end the reader is left baffled by the ironies and multiplicities of the mystery’s solution, not unlike the messy and disheveled patterns of life itself.

Trial and Error

Also published under the name Anthony Berkeley was Trial and Error, which posits a mild-mannered, unprepossessing protagonist, Mr. Todhunter. Already under a death sentence imposed by an incurable illness, Mr. Todhunter, like the last and best ratiocinator in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, is most improbable in his role: He has decided that the way to achieve meaning in life is to kill someone evil. Thus, the reader is presented with a would-be murderer in search of a crime. The murder, then, within the structure of the text, is a pivotal climax rather than the more usual starting point for the principal plot developments. Trial and Error is one of Berkeley’s first exercises with the inverted mystery; it enabled him to experiment with the form, expand and extend it, at the same time indulging his instincts for parody of the methods, and particularly the characters, of mysteries.

Berkeley’s method is to sacrifice convention and routine for the sake of characterization. How will these people react when the terms of their worlds, the conditions under which they have become accustomed to acting, are suddenly shifted? What will Mr. Todhunter be like as a murderer, for example? These are the concerns of the author. Berkeley believes that the unexpected is not a device that results from the complexities and permutations of plot, but is the effect of upending the story from the very beginning. He is not finished with poor Mr. Todhunter’s inversion, for Trial and Error proceeds to tax its antihero with the challenge of seeing someone else wrongly convicted for Todhunter’s crime. With Berkeley’s knowledge of the law securely grounding the story, Mr. Todhunter must therefore, honorably if not entirely happily, undertake to secure a legal death sentence for himself. There is yet another, final turn to the screw of this most ironic plot before Berkeley releases it.

Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact

Under {/I} {/I} {/I} the nom de plume Francis Iles, Berkeley wrote Malice Aforethought, Before the Fact, and As for the Woman (1939)—the last a little-known, generally unavailable, and not highly regarded endeavor. The first two, however, are gems. Here is even more experimentation and novelty within the scope of the novel. Malice Aforethought centers on the revenge of a henpecked husband, another of Berkeley’s Milquetoasts, who, when finally and unmercifully provoked, is shown to be the equal of any murderer. Yet he, like Berkeley’s earlier protagonists, must suffer unforeseen consequences for his presumption: his arrest and trial for a murder of which he is innocent, following his successful evasion of the charge of which he is guilty, uxoricide.

Malice Aforethought famously announces at the outset that the murder of a wife will be its object: “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business.” The story then proceeds to scrutinize the effect on this downtrodden character of such a motive and such a circumstance. Thus, character is again the chief interest. Similarly, in Before the Fact, it is fairly clear that the plain, drab heiress will be killed in some fashion by her impecunious, improvident, and irresponsible husband. As with Trial and Error, greater attention is devoted to the anticipation of the murder than to its outcome. In Before the Fact, the author clearly knows the extent to which the heroine’s love for her beleaguering spouse will allow her to forgive and excuse his errancy. Played against this knowledge is the extent to which the husband is capable of evil. One might hazard the observation that the book becomes a prophetic textbook on abuse—in this example, mental and psychological—to which a wife can be subjected, with little hope of recourse.

The imbalances and tensions within the married estate obviously intrigue Berkeley. Both of the major Iles novels follow the trajectory of domestic tragedies. In contrast, The Poisoned Chocolates Case remains speculative, remote, apart from the actual—virtually everything in it is related at second or third hand. Similarly, Mr. Todhunter is an uninformed and incurious old bachelor, also abstracted from life, until his self-propelled change. Berkeley’s range is wide.

Uniting these four books, besides their intriguing switches and switchbacks, are Berkeley’s grace and ironic wit. His section of the Detection Club round-robin Ask a Policeman (1933) delightfully spoofs Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. “The Policeman Only Taps Once” (1936), likewise, parodies James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. His novels are urbane, well-paced, well-crafted specimens of the interlude between a passing postwar age and an advancing prewar time. They depict the upper-middle and lower-upper classes attempting to deal with a slice of life’s particular but unexpected savagery and ironic, unyielding justice. In each case, characters willingly open Pandora’s box, whereupon they discover that they have invited doom by venturing beyond their stations. What they find is in fact a kind of looking-glass world, one similar to what they know, which is now forever elusive, but horrifyingly inverted and contradictory.

Within the civilized and graceful casing that his language and structure create—which duplicates the lives these characters have been leading up to the point at which the novels open—Berkeley’s characters encounter a heart of darkness, a void at the center of their lives. It was probably there all along, but only now have they had to confront it. Berkeley exposes through ironic detective fiction the same world that T. S. Eliot was revealing in poetry in the 1920’s: a world of hollow, sere, and meaningless lives, where existence is a shadow and the only reality is death. What more fitting insight might a student of murder suggest?

Principal Series Characters:

• Roger Sheringham , an amateur sleuth and mystery aficionado, was created initially to parody an unpleasant acquaintance of the author. Anthony Berkeley’s readers, however, warmed to him, and he reappeared in other novels, with his offensiveness—an all-knowing insouciance—much subdued and rendered more genial, but retaining his urbanity and sophistication.
• Ambrose Chitterwick , an unlikely, mild-mannered detective, negates all popular images of the sleuth but nevertheless solves baffling crimes.

Bibliography

“Anthony Berkeley Cox.” In Twelve Englishmen of Mystery, edited by Earl Bargannier. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984. Discusses Berkeley as a distinctively English writer and analyzes the relationship of British culture to his work.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. 1941. Reprint. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984. Organizes the history of detective fiction into a “biography,” and situates Berkeley’s works in relation to others in the narrative.

Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Rev. ed. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1976. Includes a critique of Berkeley’s detective fiction.

Johns, Ayresome. The Anthony Berkeley Cox Files. London: Ferret Fantasy, 1993. Bibliography of works by and about the author.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Discusses Berkeley alongside such disparate fellow authors as Fyodor Dostoevski, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Details his contribution to the genre.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Helps place Berkeley among his fellow writers.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1985. Critical study by Symons, a fellow mystery writer, that includes consideration of Berkeley’s contributions to crime fiction.

Turnbull, Malcolm J. Elusion Aforethought: The Life and Writing of Anthony Berkeley Cox. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Combined biography and critical study, situating Berkeley’s works alongside relevant episodes in his life.