Bruce Graeme

• Born: May 23, 1900
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 14, 1982
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Police procedural; amateur sleuth; private investigator; inverted

Principal Series: Blackshirt, 1923-1940; William Stevens and Pierre Allain, 1931-1943; Monsieur Blackshirt series, 1933-1938; Theodore I. Terhune, 1941-1951; Lord Blackshirt, 1941-1943; Auguste Jantry, 1946-1952; Robert Mather, 1970-1980

Contribution

Bruce Graeme created not only conventionally moral protagonists—detectives, private investigators, and high-minded amateur sleuths—but also a lovable thief who leads police on many merry chases. The criminal Blackshirt is every bit as calculating, original, and clever as Detective Sergeant Robert Mather and amateur sleuth Theodore I. Terhune, other Graeme characters. Blackshirt, though a thoroughgoing wrongdoer, excites readers’ sympathy because of his good-natured mode of operation. His exploits were followed avidly for five decades by mystery lovers in Great Britain and elsewhere, as the series was continued by Graeme’s son, the prolific mystery writer Roderic Jeffries, who used the pen name Roderic Graeme for his Blackshirt books.

Graeme’s tales tend to have a certain air of unreality about them, with their farcical situations and bizarre characters. At times, too, his plots rely excessively on outrageous coincidence. Still, in the main, his English and Continental settings are convincingly portrayed, his characters are realistic, and his plots are plausible.

Biography

Bruce Graeme was born Graham Montague Jeffries in London on May 23, 1900, to parents of some means. He was schooled in private academies. When he was eighteen, Graeme saw action in World War I with the Queen’s Westminster Rifles Regiment. When the war ended, his principal preoccupation became writing, and he adopted the nom de plume Bruce Graeme. In 1925, he was married to Lorna Louch, with whom he was to have a son and a daughter. (The son would follow Graeme’s lead and take up writing mysteries under the pseudonym Roderic Graeme.) In the late 1920’s, Graeme learned valuable lessons about crime as well as about writing when he worked as a reporter for the Middlesex County Times in Ealing, England. In 1919 and in the 1940’s, he worked as a film producer.

Shortly after his marriage, Graeme published his first work, La Belle Laurine (1926). This mystery adventure was followed by more than one hundred mystery novels, a number of uncollected short stories, and several nonfictional works. Although far more appreciated in his native Great Britain than abroad, Graeme did publish a few American editions. He became a founding member of the Crime Writers’ Association. He died in 1982, nine days before his eighty-second birthday.

Analysis

Bruce Graeme’s fertile imagination is reflected in the sheer volume of his literary output. His chief talent lay in creating tightly constructed plots with sufficient twists in them to keep readers’ interest. On the whole, his methods were conservative rather than innovative, yet he succeeded in adding a personal touch to the conventions of the mystery and detective genre.

Graeme’s most notable departure from the methods of the ordinary crime novel is his use of a criminal as chief protagonist in place of a heroic professional or amateur detective. Blackshirt, the central character in many of Graeme’s novels, is audacious, quick-witted, humorous, tenacious, and resourceful; in short, he possesses many of the qualities usually ascribed to people on the other side of the law. No wonder that over the years the British reading public became enamored of the Blackshirt and Son of Blackshirt (or Lord Blackshirt) series. Furthermore, beginning with Monsieur Blackshirt in 1933, Graeme chronicled the adventures of a seventeenth century Blackshirt ancestor; The Vengeance of Monsieur Blackshirt (1934), The Sword of Monsieur Blackshirt (1936), and The Inn of Thirteen Swords (1938) continue the saga of this character.

Blackshirt leads a double life reminiscent of characters in British novels of the Victorian and Edwardian eras such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). By day Graeme’s character is Richard Verrell, the famed writer of mystery stories, and by night he is Blackshirt, the master criminal. The Blackshirt books are not the only ones in the Graeme canon to use the device of a double life. In The Undetective (1962), for example, the murderer proves to be a pleasant, methodical police detective named Edward Meredith. Despite the fact that the individual killed is a criminal, Meredith still is guilty of murder—and that secret is kept until the book’s finale.

Graeme’s stories are propelled by fast-paced dialogue and brisk narration. Often he achieves an almost breathless pace, demanding the reader’s careful attention. Graeme’s characters do not waste words: Time seems of the essence. They speak in bursts of clever dialogue and quick-witted, sometimes slangy retorts and quips. Seldom do they wax philosophical; indeed, the rapid pace of events prevents their doing so.

Graeme’s ear for dialect and speech patterns is evidenced by the authenticity of his dialogue. His police detectives exchange banter in their characteristically world-weary and sarcastic manner, his gentlemen characters’ speech is articulate and witty, and common folk from working-class areas chatter in colorful, ragged, animated fashion; each type of person addresses others in accordance with his origins and social background.

The Undetective

Graeme’s outstanding characteristic as a crime novelist may well be his sense of humor and his love of the bizarre. Few of his works lack humor, and most are infused with it. Frequently his characters are plunged into highly amusing dilemmas. For example, in The Undetective, a crime-fiction writer, Iain Wallace Carter, adopts the nom de plume John Ky Lowell to write a book about what he terms an “undetective,” a police detective of memorable ineptitude. The novel succeeds far beyond the writer’s greatest hopes, and the London police become incensed by the fact that John Ky Lowell has made them a laughingstock. When a murder occurs in Carter’s neighborhood, his brother-in-law, Police Inspector Meredith, suggests to Carter that the mysterious author of the “undetective” tale is responsible and vows that he will hunt him down. Carter is amazed to find that for the first time in his life he is a murder suspect. Moreover, he cannot afford to tell the police of his innocence because that would mean revealing his identity as the author of the notorious novel that lampooned them. Somehow, Carter manages not only to keep his identity a secret from the police—a very difficult feat—but also to solve the mystery to his own satisfaction, thus exonerating John Ky Lowell.

If Graeme has a message to convey in his fiction, it is that many criminals are normal people who, when faced by adverse circumstances or an opportunity to better themselves substantially, choose to do illegal things. The line between some of Graeme’s upright citizens and his criminals is a fine one indeed. One detects in his lawbreakers admirable qualities sometimes temporarily overshadowed by evil. His sympathy toward and fascination with such characters is a rare quality in a crime-fiction writer.

The Devil Was a Woman

Glimmerings of a social conscience can be discerned in novels such as The Devil Was a Woman (1966), in which wretched sections of London and their sad denizens are portrayed in an often powerfully realistic way. Nevertheless, Graeme was not a social scientist or a reformer. He left those pursuits to others, concentrating instead on telling rollicking tales of adventure, intrigue, and mystery.

Graeme’s ability to communicate the flavor of life in early twentieth century England springs from his capacity to capture speech patterns accurately, coupled with his skillful depiction of setting. In The Devil Was a Woman, for example, a character describes a down-at-the-heels hotel:

As I have already admitted, one does not expect Ritz accommodation for what the ill-named Gardens Hotel overcharged: it wouldn’t be easy to find anywhere a more drab bedroom. The flowered wallpaper could well have been pasted on the walls sometime during the early years of King Edward VII’s reign: its one chair was uncomfortable enough not to encourage guests to sit on it longer than necessary; the bed-linen had been “sides to middle’d”; the bedspread had faded to depressingly unrecognisable shades; and, worst of all, the view through the years’-grimed lace window-curtains consisted of sooted walls, smoke-blackened chimney-pots, and basilisk-eyed windows.

Graeme’s eye for revealing detail, exemplified by phrases such as “the years’-grimed lace window-curtains,” is as acute as that of novelist George Orwell. Unlike Orwell, however, Graeme does not depict slums so much to decry them—though he does do that—as to set a scene or establish a mood with them. Often, the settings of his books create mystery and intrigue by being off the beaten track, desolate, and forbidding. Graeme’s slum buildings and grim, monotonous suburban row houses are appropriate to the characters who inhabit them: A dangerously askew house with sinister-appearing windows will almost always harbor dangerous or deranged characters, while tidy suburban bungalows in a middle-class area of London will house tidy, respectable, dull people. On occasion, however, Graeme will surprise his readers by upending this convention, giving murderers trappings of respectability. He captures the essence not only of London neighborhoods but also of such Continental locations as the Côte d’Azure and the Loire Valley.

Graeme occupies an important place among British—and international—crime writers. The prolific Graeme introduced to his reading public several noteworthy characters, including the memorable Blackshirt antiheroes. His fast-moving plots, his essentially humane view of characters, and his distinctive sense of humor make him a mystery writer to be remembered.

Principal Series Character:

• Blackshirt , a man known to his daytime acquaintances as
• Richard Verrell , a successful mystery writer with a wry wit, at night becomes a rogue garbed in black, roaming London and stealing whatever seems most worth having.

Bibliography

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. This work, designed for students, looks at theoretical approaches to crime fiction and will help the reader understand Graeme’s place in the genre over the years.

Hutchings, Peter J. The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics: Incriminating Subjects. New York: Routledge, 2001. A study of the representation of criminals in art, literature, and popular culture that provides perspective on Graeme’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Peach, Linden. Masquerade, Crime, and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Extended study of the theme and portrayal of disguise and deception in mystery and detective fiction; provides perspective on Graeme’s work.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of Disappearance of Roger Tremayne, by Bruce Graeme. The Mystery FANcier 1 (March, 1977): 41. Review of a Graeme book dealing with a man with amnesia that was the basis of the British film Ten Days in Paris (1939).