Leo Bruce

• Born: June 20, 1903
• Birthplace: Edenbridge, Kent, England
• Died: June 10, 1979
• Place of death: Bournemouth, England

Types of Plot: Private investigator; amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Sergeant William Beef, 1936-1952; Carolus Deene, 1955-1974

Contribution

Leo Bruce’s Sergeant William Beef and Carolus Deene novels have been praised as “superb examples of classic British mystery,” his plots have been described as “brilliantly ingenious,” and Bruce himself has been called “a master of the genre.” Yet, if his fame rests on his skill with the classic form, his chief importance to the history of the genre lies in his perfection of the immensely entertaining and parodic self-conscious detective novel, a subgenre that questions and revises, edits and inverts, occasionally criticizes and lampoons—all with a wry ironic tone—the conventions of the traditional whodunit. In the Sergeant Beef novels, certainly, and to a slightly lesser extent in the Carolus Deene series, the principal characters seem not only aware of their fictional existence but also inclined to use that recognition to remark on their counterparts in other detective stories, on the plots devised by other crime writers, and on the genre as a whole. For the well-read connoisseur of detective fiction, this artifice, which would be a disaster from the pen of a less gifted writer, invests Bruce’s fiction with a double significance: The novels are intricate puzzles that tantalize and fascinate and most of all entertain, and they are also theoretical works in that they provide analytical commentary on the literary form they represent. Thus, Bruce manages, in this most popular of fiction genres, to obey that age-old dictum that literature must both delight and instruct.

Biography

Leo Bruce was born Rupert Croft-Cooke on June 20, 1903, in Edenbridge, Kent, England, the son of Hubert Bruce Cooke and Lucy Taylor Cooke. Little information—beyond the standard sketchy biographical data—is available on Bruce’s life. He was educated at Tonbridge School, Kent, and Wellington College (now Wrekin College); from 1923 to 1926, he attended the University of Buenos Aires, where he founded and edited a weekly magazine, La Estrella.

Bruce’s career seems primarily to have involved either writing or the military, both in England and abroad. The exceptions were two years (1929-1931) spent as an antiquarian bookseller, and one year’s experience as a lecturer at the English Institute Montana in Zugerberg, Switzerland. Beginning with a stint in the British Army Intelligence Corps in 1940, Bruce went on to serve in the 1942 Madagascar offensive (for which he was awarded the British Empire Medal) and as commander of the Third Gurkha Rifles in 1943. Continuing his service on the Indian subcontinent from 1944 to 1946, Bruce was a field security officer in the Poona and Delhi districts and an intelligence school instructor in Karachi, West Pakistan. He returned to England to work as the book critic for The Sketch before deciding to concentrate on his freelance writing career.

Earlier, during the 1930’s, Bruce had spent several years as a writer; during that decade, he wrote plays, some twenty books, one collection of short fiction, and translations of Spanish works. After his years in the military, he produced several autobiographical volumes, biographies of a wide variety of figures (including a controversial life of Lord Alfred Douglas), at least three books on cookery, some poetry, and even one foray into literary criticism—a commentary on several Victorian writers. All along, Bruce was writing the detective novels that would earn for him acclaim as “a major British detective story writer of salient merit.”

Bruce’s first detective novel, Case for Three Detectives (1936), was also the first book for which he employed the pseudonym Leo Bruce, under which all of his detective novels would be published. In this book, Bruce introduced the plebeian Sergeant Beef, whose exploits he recounted until 1952, when Bruce inexplicably abandoned Beef after eight novels. The wealthy, university-educated Carolus Deene first appeared in At Death’s Door in 1955. Bruce wrote only a few more books after he abandoned the detective novel in 1974. He died on June 10, 1979.

Analysis

On the surface, the Sergeant Beef novels and the Carolus Deene novels appear to be quite dissimilar. The Beef chronicles have an engaging middle-class ponderousness that is wholly in keeping with Sergeant Beef’s person and behavior, while the Deene stories sparkle with wit and iridescent one-liners. Aside from his shadow, Lionel Townsend, Sergeant Beef has only a small cast of supporting players—his nearly invisible wife and Chief Inspector Stute of the Special Branch—onstage with him; Carolus Deene must constantly deal with a crowd of regulars—Hugh Gorringer and his wife, Mrs. Stick and her laconic husband, the sometimes annoying but always bright Rupert Priggley, and Deene’s friend John Moore of the Criminal Investigation Department—who are so brilliantly realized as characters that they add life and entertainment to the novels without detracting from the suspenseful narratives. Beef is decidedly, unabashedly bourgeois with a strong element of the working class; Deene describes himself as “repulsively rich” and lives in a Queen Anne house presided over by an eminently respectable housekeeper who serves him gourmet meals with vintage wine. William Beef investigates crimes because detection is his profession; Deene detects out of a love for puzzles (he is constantly in competition with another schoolmaster for the morning newspaper’s crossword) and an obsession with finding the truth. Beef’s detractors call him lucky rather than competent; Deene has a reputation for improbable theories that turn out to be accurate.

Superficial differences aside, however, Leo Bruce’s two detective series have important characteristics in common. Bruce’s novels are conventional stories of the type known variously as traditional British, Golden Age detective story, whodunit, or even puzzle mystery. As examples of a classic form familiar to aficionados of crime and mystery fiction, the Sergeant Beef and Carolus Deene books display Bruce’s adept handling of genre conventions: the basically comic universe, the presence of a great detective, locked rooms and perfect alibis, the closed circle of suspects from which the murderer (the crime in question is always murder) is eventually identified, clues—obvious and otherwise—and misdirections, a believable solution that somehow restores order to a society turned topsy-turvy, and the great detective’s summing up of the facts of the case. Even Bruce’s settings are familiar: little English villages with quaint hyphenated names located on or near bodies of water or distinct geological formations, proper seaside resorts, picturesque cottages and stately country homes, and respectable London suburbs. Although the murders are violent, Bruce rarely if ever provides explicit details of either method or aftermath; his treatment of crime has the delicacy and understatement of the traditional detective novels rather than the gritty realism of the newer, American crime novel. Bruce’s characters belong to the world of the Golden Age: His detectives carry no weapons and rely solely on the interview and the reenactment for results; minor characters are succinctly sketched character types—respectable citizens, eccentrics, obsequious tradespeople, loyal or disgruntled domestics, dotty parsons.

Case for Three Detectives

Another similarity between the two series is the self-mocking tone present in many of the individual books. Bruce excelled at constructing self-parodying detective novels in which some characters display a tendency to remark—often critically—on the conventions of the genre and the expectations of readers long familiar with those conventions. Bruce’s first detective novel sets the tone for the rest. In Case for Three Detectives, Sergeant Beef solves a murder that completely baffles three eminent sleuths—Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picot, and Monsignor Smith—clearly intended as parodies of Wimsey, Poirot, and Father Brown. The Sergeant Beef novels are particularly self-conscious; they are narrated by a writer of detective fiction, more specifically, by the novelist who records and then fictionalizes the adventures of Sergeant Beef. Lionel Townsend, the writer, has very specific—and rather elitist—ideas about the nature of detective fiction, ideas with which Sergeant Beef does not agree, and their frequent arguments turn on such matters as plot development, the detective’s personality, the role of a Watson, and the criteria by which readers judge the success or failure of a detective series. Bruce also calls attention to his fiction by alluding to characters who exist only in crime novels or by naming other authors. In one instance, Lionel Townsend’s more intelligent brother suggests to Beef that he have Aldous Huxley or E. M. Forster write up his cases.

Comments on the Genre

Bruce continued his oblique commentary on detective fiction in the Carolus Deene series, chiefly in the conversations between Deene and his junior Watson, Rupert Priggley. Armed with the affected cynicism of the adolescent, Priggley frequently makes reference to the clichés of badly written detective fiction. Listening to Deene interview a suspect whose answers are predictable, Priggley blurts, “Oh, God, . . . we’ll have an Indian poison unknown to science in a minute.” He mocks Deene about asking “some fabulously unexpected question,” and complains, “You’ve no idea how dated you are. All this looking for clues and questioning suspects and being mysterious about your theory till the last minute—it went out ages ago.” He then goes on to point out the traits of modern fiction; clearly, none applies to the Deene stories. Rupert Priggley even manages a comparison of the English and American genres:

If you suppose that at your time of life you can turn yourself into one of these hardboiled, steel-gutted, lynx-eyed American sleuths who carry guns and risk their lives every few pages, you’re wildly mistaken. You’re English, sir, as English as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule (Ma foi!) Poirot.

Bruce clearly has wide knowledge of the conventions of the genre in which he writes, and he has entertainingly taken advantage of his position as a practitioner to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of his chosen form.

Death in Albert Park and Crack of Doom

Bruce displays a fondness for misdirection caused by the red-herring murder, that is, the murder of an unrelated person—even a stranger—to conceal the circumstances of the planned killing. Mr. Crabbett in Death in Albert Park (1964) stabs two other women in addition to his wife so that the killings will look like serial murder in the Jack the Ripper tradition. A retired colonel kills a woman to throw suspicion on her husband for both that murder and the colonel’s murder of his own brother in Crack of Doom (1963). The plots of Jack on the Gallows Tree (1960) and Die All, Die Merrily (1961), among others, involve murder committed for the purpose of concealing the identity of a killer. In each case, the choice of an unrelated victim proves a major mistake for the killer; the cover-up murder provides Beef or Deene with the clues essential to the solution of the puzzle.

Humor and Murder

Murder may be a grim business, but the world of the traditional British detective novel is a comic one, informed largely by human folly and imperfection. In Bruce’s fictional world, much of the humor derives from the pretenses of people who try, often unsuccessfully, to adhere to an artificial code of conduct. Bruce’s comedy is dark at times, but it provides opportunity for laughter even as it probes the social restrictions and demands that lead the weak to frustration and finally to murder, or into the fantastic delusions of the totally egotistical man who plans a murder simply to know for himself that he has taken a life and gotten away with it. In one case, a ridiculous feud between two devout churchwomen—one a High Church devotee, the other rabidly Low Church—results in death. More often, however, the motive is money—money with which to buy recognition, to ensure social success, to continue in a luxurious lifestyle, to further ambition, or to gain freedom from imagined restrictions. A husband who married his wife for money soon resents his dependence and kills her for his freedom. A man does away with the other heirs to a fortune he wishes to enjoy alone. Another, believing himself to be his aunt’s heir, kills her only to discover that she has written him out of her will. What all these killers believe is that somehow money will earn for them the respect of their associates and peers, that money will help make up for their social deficiencies and will confer on them the cachet they so desperately want. The murderers are sometimes pathetically ridiculous in their machinations.

A master at manipulating the English language, Bruce neatly lampoons his characters with his capsule descriptions that home in on their affectations, on their foibles. Mr. Gorringer is introduced as “a large and important-looking man with a pair of huge crimson ears whose hairy cavities were marvellously attuned to passing rumour.” A secretary is declared to be as neat as the proverbial new pin: “She looked rather like a new pin, her long, narrow person rising to an inverted flowerpot hat.” The faithful Mrs. Stick mangles beyond recognition the French names she insists on using for her culinary efforts; she serves up these delicacies with a bottle of “Shah Toe Ma Gokes.” The very proper Miss Tissot arrogantly disapproves of everything about Carolus Deene—and says so quite bluntly—but when he offers to buy an aperitif for her, she orders one before the invitation is completed.

Bruce also clearly enjoys inventing names or juxtaposing names in incongruous contexts, often as a means of gently ridiculing the various public pretenses with which his detectives come in contact. In one novel the available newspapers are listed as The Daily Horror, The Daily Wail, The Daily Explosion, and The Daily Smirch. A prominent local is reverently referred to as “Colonel Lyle de Lisle De lisle L’Isle,” while a pretentious London club seems to accept only those whose names are hyphenated—thus the manager blithely refers to Cyril Nutt-Campion and Cecil Waveney-Long and Adrian Stokes-Gray, even Ronnie Bright-Wilson, all in the same brief conversation. The names of victims and culprits alike are grin producing, often because they reflect character or profession so well: Hilton Gupp is a fishy sort of man-about-town; Lady Drumbone is a member of Parliament who lectures loud and long on sundry crackpot causes; Cosmo Ducrow is a fabulous rich recluse; Grazia Vaillant lives for her crusade to introduce incense and ornate vestments to her village church, which is decidedly Protestant. Ambitious young police officers have improbable names such as Spender-Hennessy or Galsworthy; lesser characters sport the names Fagg, Chickle, Flipps, or Pinhole. Even pets do not escape Bruce’s name game; one dog breeder’s menagerie is named after various Marxist heroes.

Although Bruce did not formulate a theoretical statement about the nature and characteristics of the detective novel, as so many of his colleagues have done, his own work exemplifies a coherent and well-articulated approach to the genre as he saw and practiced it. Clearly Bruce was a traditionalist, a creator of classically restrained and very English detective novels. Yet he was also an innovator in that he used the genre to ridicule its own excesses. Bruce’s contribution to detective fiction is a fairly substantial body of work that both entertains and edifies, that engages and provokes.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sergeant William Beef , a village police officer turned private investigator, is married to a quiet countrywoman who thinks the world of her husband. Large, red-faced, plodding, and enamored of pubs (he loves beer, whiskey, and dart games), Beef is a remarkably astute detective whose methods, while slow, are amazingly thorough. Beef is somewhat peeved that he is not as famous as Hercule Poirot or Albert Campion, despite the almost constant presence of his biographer, Lionel Townsend; on more than one occasion, Beef complains that Townsend’s books imply that luck rather than skill is the secret to Beef’s successes.
• Lionel Townsend is a freelance writer and Sergeant Beef’s biographer and companion in detection. Constantly irritated by Beef’s methodical nature and endless dart playing, the university-educated Townsend makes it clear that he would much prefer to chronicle the exploits of a more glamorous detective, someone such as Lord Peter Wimsey, for example. When faced with another of Beef’s pub stops, Townsend sourly compares his own experiences with those of Dr. Watson. A bachelor, Townsend keeps a flat in the genteel vicinity of the Marble Arch and thinks disparaging thoughts about Beef’s “drab little house . . . as near Baker Street as he had been able to manage.”
• Carolus Deene , a senior history master at the Queen’s School, Newminster, is an amateur sleuth during school holidays and weekends. Forty years old and widowed, he is an “uncomfortably rich man,” who lives for his two consuming interests, teaching history and investigating crime. Working almost exclusively from interviews with those involved, Deene formulates “the kind of wild hypothetical imaginary stuff which might easily turn out to hold the seeds of truth.” In fact, he is as famous for his wild theorizing as for his ability to solve the puzzles of crime. He makes it clear that he is motivated both by an intellectual curiosity and by a desire to find out the truth.
• Hugh Gorringer , the headmaster of the Queen’s School, is possessed of a huge pair of hairy ears. Torn between an obsession with protecting the school from adverse publicity and an overwhelming curiosity about Deene’s adventures, Gorringer initially disapproves of Deene’s involvement in detection but almost always manages to find an excuse to be present at the events providing a solution to the crime.
• Rupert Priggley is a precocious Queen’s School student who frequently invites himself to accompany Deene. In the Deene series, Priggley provides most of the commentary on and criticism of the detective genre.
• Mrs. Stick , Deene’s highly respectable housekeeper, disapproves of his hobby of investigating crime and threatens to give notice if he does not stop. Insistent on calling things by their proper names, Mrs. Stick can be counted on to mispronounce the French names of the dishes she serves to Deene.

Bibliography

Bargainnier, Earl F. “The Self-Conscious Sergeant Beef Novels of Leo Bruce.” The Armchair Detective 18 (Spring, 1985): 154-159. A brief study of the self-referential and metafictional aspects of Bruce’s work.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. Introduction to Furious Old Women, by Leo Bruce. Overview of Bruce’s career that places Furious Old Women in the context of his other work, and of the larger genre of which it is a part.

Gohrbandt, Detlev, and Bruno von Lutz, eds. Seeing and Saying: Self-Referentiality in British and American Literature. New York: P. Lang, 1998. Study of the sort of self-referential narrative strategies employed by Bruce in his Sergeant Beef series.

Van Dover, J. K. We Must Have Certainty: Four Essays on the Detective Story. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2005. Traces the evolution, conventions, and ideological investments of detective fiction. Invaluable for understanding the aspects of that fiction on which Bruce’s work comments.