Josephine Bell

• Born: December 8, 1897
• Birthplace: Manchester, Lancashire, England
• Died: April 24, 1987
• Place of death: Unknown

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; psychological; police procedural; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: David Wintringham and Steven Mitchell, 1937-1958; Claude Warrington-Reeve and Steven Mitchell, 1959-1963; Henry Frost, 1964-1966; Amy Tupper, 1979-1980

Contribution

Since the 1920’s, respectable, middle-class Englishwomen have been committing murder on paper to the delight of millions of readers. They constitute a recognized group, if not a formal school, of skilled practitioners of the genre. Although Josephine Bell did not begin publishing detective stories until late in the Golden Age of crime fiction between the two world wars, she was definitely of the same historical and literary generation as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. She was “among the most reliable of those intelligent, unsensational women writers who have created a peculiarly English corner in this kind of fiction,” and she deserves to be remembered along with those other great writers of the period for the excellence of her craftsmanship. Her novels are notable for the imaginative patterning of their puzzles, realistic portrayal of people from various walks of life, skillful rendering of place, deft evocation of atmosphere, interesting subject matter, and gentle, ironic humor.

Bell’s career as a crime writer reflected the historical and literary development of the genre over a period of nearly fifty years. She demonstrated considerable talent in a variety of crime fiction. During the heyday of the classic detective novel, she mastered its conventions and wrote whodunits. After World War II, as the genre evolved to include more types of crime novels, Bell exhibited both flexibility and versatility by extending her canon to include the gothic novel, the police procedural, and the thriller.

Biography

Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier, the second of three children of Maud Tessimond Windsor and Joseph Edward Collier, a surgeon in Manchester. Doris was very fond of her father, who died of cancer when she was seven years old. Her mother was married a second time to Jean Estradier, a French teacher, and had one child by him, a girl named Alice. Young Doris did not get on well with her stepfather, so she was happy to leave for boarding school when she was twelve. She attended the Godolphin School, Salisbury, where she met Dorothy L. Sayers. In Doris’s first year, Sayers was already a senior.

On leaving school in 1916, Doris applied to study medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge University. At college, she took a keen interest in rowing and stroked in the very first Newnham eight. When she went to University College Hospital to do her clinical training, no accommodation for female medical students existed, so she had to sleep in a side ward. At University College Hospital she met Norman Dyer Ball, a fellow student, and was married to him in 1923; four children were eventually born to them.

Doris and her husband went into general practice together in Greenwich in 1927. In 1936, Norman was killed in an automobile accident. After her husband’s death, Doris moved her small family to Guildford in Surrey, where she started a general practice of her own. At the same time, to supplement her income, she decided to become a professional writer. Murder in Hospital, already complete when her husband died, was published in 1937; she produced one or two novels a year for the next half century. She was a founding member of the Crime Writers’ Association. After retiring from medical practice in 1954, she devoted herself to writing, sailing, theatergoing, and community involvement. She died in 1987.

Analysis

Josephine Bell was not a literary innovator, nor was she an abject conformist. She did not introduce new devices or make significant changes in existing conventions of the genre. Instead, she was scrupulous in observing the traditions of the classic detective story—except for the treatment of her detective hero: She rejected the idea of the eccentric master sleuth in favor of more realistic characterization. In fact, she surpassed many of the Golden Age writers in realistic presentation of both principal and secondary characters. Furthermore, unlike many of her contemporaries, who did not change with the times, after World War II Bell introduced greater range and depth of psychological development in her characters and even portrayed individuals with personality disorders. She strove continually to create lifelike characters and often drew on her wide experience of human nature in representing humankind’s foibles, follies, and vices.

Bell’s career as a professional crime writer spanned fifty years. For the first twenty years, she wrote a series of books featuring a detective team composed of a gifted amateur, Dr. David Wintringham, and a Scotland Yard professional, Inspector Steven Mitchell. They worked together on eight cases—approximately half of the tales—and Wintringham appeared alone in seven other mysteries. Mitchell functioned on his own in only one story; Bell subsequently paired him with a more flamboyant amateur partner, Claude Warrington-Reeve, in three other whodunits. Bell followed the Golden Age tradition in favoring the gifted amateur over the more pedestrian police officer but departed from it by failing to endow her medical amateur with an eccentric personality. Wintringham’s character is consistently realistic and undramatic. Although Mitchell is more than simply a Watson-type foil, he is always secondary to the more compelling figures of Wintringham and Warrington-Reeve.

Dr. David Wintringham

Although Dr. David Wintringham is the main character, no information concerning his physical appearance or social background is given. His personality is revealed through his thoughts, conversation, and behavior. Some critics have suggested that Bell’s reputation suffered because she failed to create a great detective, that Wintringham’s personality was not vivid enough to draw a large following. There may be some truth in this charge. Post-World War II writers who created ordinary, unsensational sleuths developed the personalities and personal lives of their characters more fully. Without peculiar mannerisms, idiosyncratic habits, and extravagant gestures to rivet attention, a character must be developed more fully to compensate for the loss of drama.

Wintringham’s professional training provides him with skills that enable him to be a good detective. He possesses keen powers of observation, intense curiosity, dogged determination, and a strong commitment to truth and justice. Bell frequently draws parallels between doctoring and detecting—that is, between scientific investigation and police investigation.

“That’s right.” The Inspector smiled approvingly. “You’re getting more thorough. Not so much of the I’ve-had-an-inspiration about you this time, is there?”

“You forget that I am doing research of a kind,” answered David. “It is a very sobering experience.”

“Really? I always understood it was packed full of thrills.”

“Not a bit of it. You ought to know better. Your own work is research; it is also popularly regarded as exciting. Is it packed full of thrills?”

“I should say not.”

“There you are.”

For a few minutes the two men reflected on their drab existence.

Inspector Steven Mitchell

More is revealed about Mitchell through direct description. In Murder in Hospital, he is presented as looking homely in the typical mackintosh and bowler hat of the Central Intelligence Division detective. He is further characterized in Death on the Borough Council (1937) as “a medium-sized man with an ordinary pleasant-featured face.” His family background is described in the first novel, which also includes an account of his motives for joining the police force.

Inspector Mitchell came of a respectable middle-class family who had always lived in one or other of the South London suburbs, moving about for no apparent reason from one small and genteel villa to another. His father’s work in a city office tethered them within reasonable distance of it, but like so many suburban families they seemed unable to settle anywhere permanently. This fact and his varied schooling produced in young Mitchell a restlessness that was not really fundamental to his character, but made him refuse the chance of a job in the office where his father worked to seek the excitement he supposed inseparable from life in the police force.

That he had been wrong in this supposition he never really noticed. The routine work and discipline were entirely to his liking. He settled down well and worked hard. He had good average brains and infinite patience, while his kind manner towards witnesses had often elicited facts that would have been withheld from more brilliant officers.

Neither character changes much, although Bell makes an effort to represent realistically the passing of time. Over the course of the first five novels, Wintringham’s personal life progresses at a normal rate. In the first novel, he is engaged to be married to Jill; in the second, they have been married and are expecting their first child; in the third, their son, Nicky, is a toddler; and in the fifth, the family has grown by the addition of a daughter, Susan. In addition, Mitchell’s success is charted as he advances through the ranks of the police hierarchy from inspector to chief superintendent.

The pattern of the relationship between Wintringham and Mitchell as well as of the deductive method is set in the first few books. A crime occurs within Wintringham’s domain or purview; Mitchell is assigned to the case as the investigating officer from Scotland Yard; Wintringham offers to help unofficially because of inside knowledge or connections; Mitchell rejects Wintringham’s help at first, but then welcomes it when Wintringham turns up valuable information. “’It’s against all the rules,’ grumbled Mitchell. ’But I’d rather, by a long chalk, have you working where I can see you, than behind my back.’” Wintringham frequently provides some vital medical evidence that leads to the solution of the crime, while Mitchell works quietly in the background, interviewing suspects and collecting facts by routine police methods. Eventually, they pool the results of their labors and find the solution by means of logical deduction. Confrontation and apprehension of the culprit follow.

The Upfold Witch and Death on the Reserve

In the early 1960’s, Bell introduced a second amateur medical sleuth in the character of Henry Frost, a retired general practitioner who appears in two novels, The Upfold Witch (1964) and Death on the Reserve (1966). Frost exhibits many of the same personality traits as Wintringham: a strong will, an eye for detail, a developed logical sense, and moral fiber. In some ways he might be seen as a more mature version of Wintringham.

Amy Tupper

The only other character in Bell’s later fiction to stage a comeback was Miss Amy Tupper, who made her debut in Wolf! Wolf! (1979) and played a part in A Question of Inheritance (1980). She is an inquisitive elderly single woman who spurs official investigation of crimes by asking questions that had not occurred to the police. Her private inquiries turn up important information that helps solve the mystery.

Bell follows the formula of classic detective fiction introduced by Edgar Allan Poe in the mid-nineteenth century. This formula is natural for her and for her sleuth, because the deductive method follows the steps of the empirical scientific method: observation, interviewing, research, formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and presentation of results. These steps are repeated until all relevant facts are accounted for and all questions are answered.

Puzzle Novels

In the manner of the works of Freeman Wills Crofts and R. Austin Freeman, Bell’s detective novels often focus more on the problem or puzzle than on the personality of the sleuth. She was attracted to detective fiction for the same reasons she enjoyed medicine—because she liked to solve problems. Bell sets the puzzle and then teases out the solution. Emphasis is placed on the steps leading to identification of the villain. Through skillful manipulation of the omniscient narrative viewpoint, she introduces seemingly unrelated characters, events, and facts; then she painstakingly reveals how the discrete pieces of the puzzle come together to form a fascinating pattern. That is, the detective uncovers facts that he eventually assembles into an intricate but coherent pattern, much as the doctor does in medical research.

In novels of this sort—for example, The Port of London Murders (1938)—as in those with an inverted structure, Bell was less concerned to disguise the identity of the criminal than to disclose the complexity of the crime and the ingenuity of its solution. Still, despite her focus on how the investigators solve the puzzle rather than on who committed the crime, she cleverly masks the identity of the culprit, who often is the least likely suspect. Good examples of this technique occur in Death on the Borough Council, Death at Half-Term (1939), Easy Prey (1959), The Upfold Witch, and Death of a Con Man (1968).

Murder in Hospital

Bell’s plotting can sometimes be faulted for too much reliance on coincidence, both in gathering evidence and in solving the puzzle. For example, in Murder in Hospital Wintringham just happens to pass through a certain hospital ward when the doctor in charge is about to inoculate a child with antidiphtheria serum without asking if she had received a previous injection. Patients sensitized by prior injections require smaller doses and could be killed by the amount administered initially. In a blinding flash of insight, Wintringham realizes how several unexplained deaths have been caused and by whom. Similar coincidences occur often enough in other novels to strain credibility.

Villains and Victims

Different types of villains march through the pages of Bell’s novels. Some are people dominated by greed, such as Gordon Longford in The Port of London Murders, Cyril Dewhurst in Death at Half-Term, Stephen Coke in Easy Prey, and Roy Waters in Death of a Con Man. A few, such as Edgar Trouncey in Death on the Reserve and John Wainwright in The Upfold Witch, are motivated by a combination of sexual desire and greed. Some are neurotic individuals who are driven by fanatic obsessions—for example, the mad scientist in Murder in Hospital, the rabbit keeper in Death on the Borough Council, and the religious megalomaniac in The Innocent (1982). Others are criminally insane—for example, the paranoid schizophrenic Simon Fawcett in The Hunter and the Trapped (1963). Whoever they are and whatever their crimes, however, they are provided with a quick exit at the end of the story, often in the form of a suicidal attempt to avoid being taken into custody.

In her early novels, Bell also follows the Golden Age protocol regarding victims. They are either unattractive persons for whom the reader could never grieve or too underdeveloped as characters to be missed. Victims are usually hapless individuals who are destroyed by chance, those who threaten the security of the villain, or people whose deaths would lead to profit for the killer.

Bell has employed a variety of closed communities as settings; she sometimes limits the setting in terms of place or in terms of social group. Murders occur in areas such as a hospital, a library, a public school, a nature reserve, an archaeological dig, and the ever-popular country village. In two novels, Bell also limits suspects within the community of a religious sect. Whatever the scene of the crime, she provides excellent local color, evoking in the reader a sense of each place’s mood and atmosphere.

Later Works

Beginning in the 1950’s, Bell began to try her hand at a variety of other types of crime fiction. She drew on the gothic tradition in To Let, Furnished (1952) and again in New People at the Hollies (1961). She went to great lengths to acquire knowledge of forensics and police procedures so that she could get the details right. Of all her books, Bones in the Barrow (1953) is most often cited for careful attention to police routine. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, she wrote several romantic thrillers, including Death of a Poison-Tongue (1972) and A Pigeon Among the Cats (1974). In these novels, a young heroine finds herself in a dangerous situation involving murder and is finally rescued through a combination of her own efforts and outside assistance. In the latter works, Bell uses the genre to discuss and expose important social problems such as the danger of superstition, the inadequacy of social services, unethical recruitment practices of coercive religious sects, and drug addiction. A retrospective view of Bell’s career discloses both an ability to adjust to changing styles in the genre and an ability to write in a variety of mystery modes. Her work very much reflects the development of the genre over fifty years, the evolution of the detective story to the crime novel, the whodunit to the “whydunit.”

Principal Series Characters:

• Dr. David Wintringham is a gifted amateur sleuth whose professional training provides him with skills that enable him to solve crimes. A family man, he possesses keen powers of observation, intense curiosity, dogged determination, courage, and strong moral principles.
• Inspector Steven Mitchell of Scotland Yard, who advances to chief superintendent, is a model of the hardworking but uninspired police officer. Ordinary in every sense, he is pleasant but nondescript in appearance and is endowed with average intelligence and homely virtues. His kindness and patience during interviews build trust and often elicit valuable information. His painstaking attention to routine police investigation also contributes to his success.
• Claude Warrington-Reeve , a kind but arrogant London barrister who works with Chief Superintendent Mitchell on three cases, is an altogether more flamboyant figure and is cast in the mold of the eccentric master sleuth of Golden Age detective fiction. He drives a fast black Jaguar and in one book dramatically fells a culprit on the golf course with a long drive.
• Dr. Henry Frost , a retired general practitioner who appears in two novels, exhibits many of the same character traits as David Wintringham: strength of will, keen observation, a talent for logical deduction, tenacity, and a fundamental moral sense. He is skilled at finding and interpreting physical evidence at the scene of the crime and then building a chain of evidence to reach a solution to the problem.
• Miss Amy Tupper , featured in two novels, is an energetic, inquisitive, indomitable elderly single woman who spurs police investigation into crimes by asking questions that they cannot ignore. She is motivated by sympathy for crime victims and by a desire for justice.

Bibliography

Brean, Herbert. Preface to Crimes Across the Sea: The Nineteenth Annual Anthology of the Mystery Writers of America, edited by John Creasey. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Preface to an anthology that includes Bell’s work, discusses her in relation to such other contributors as Ellery Queen and Julian Symons.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. The focus of this study is on Bell’s contemporaries rather than on her, but it mentions her in passing and provides an important study of the milieu in which she wrote.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Analyzes Bell’s use of setting in The Port of London Murders. Bibliographic references and index.

White, Terry, ed. Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller in American, British, and Continental Courtroom Literature. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. This bibliography covers legal thrillers from early to later writers. Contains a brief biography of Bell.