An Inspector Calls Transcript

The stock detective of golden age detective fiction is definitely an amateur. It's someone at the country house party who has the role of sleuth thrust upon them by circumstance, or a person with known criminological interests who has built up a reputation for repeatedly solving crimes simply through word of mouth, or someone in a profession with some thematic contact with crime, such as the church or the law. So many of the genre's most enduring sleuths are in this mould: Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Albert Campion, Father Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Roger Sheringham, Dr Thorndyke, and more.

These are not the only detectives to appear in interwar detective fiction, though. Far from it. There exists a whole squad of other sleuths who take the lead in their own murder mysteries — the professional police detective. And I think it's high time we focused in on their exploits. There are lots of instances where these characters do much more than just support and enable their amateur colleagues. Often self-effacing and less obviously eccentric, these Scotland Yard inspectors are quite capable of taking a starring role in their own cases. And plenty of writers took advantage of the potential contained within a really efficient and effective detective inspector.

Let's take a closer a look at what they are up to, shall we?

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Crime fiction is awash with professional police detectives who exist in dialogue with amateur sleuths. Sherlock Holmes had Inspector Lestrade, Hercule Poirot had Inspector Japp, Peter Wimsey had Inspector Parker, and so on. Today, though, I'm interested in the Inspectors who carry the burden of a case alone, taking centre stage in their own novel. What kind of character is capable of this without having an unconventional foil to bounce off? And what opportunities does this give a writer to craft a different kind of story, away from the template that Conan Doyle had so successfully laid down? Let's find out.

The first Inspector to come calling today is Chief Inspector Macdonald, the creation of E.C.R. Lorac. I'm not absolutely confident about this count, because despite the recent spate of republications some of Lorac's books are still hard to obtain and I haven't read them all. However, I think Macdonald appears in an astonishing 46 books. He first shows up in Lorac's debut novel The Murder on the Burrows from 1931 and his last appearance was in Dishonour Among Thieves from 1959. During that time he undergoes a change of first name, being known as James initially, before settling in as a Robert for the rest of the series. He weathers the changes of three decades, because Lorac kept setting his books in an approximate version of the time in which they were published. She even kept writing about him in a fairly contemporary way during the Second World War, which resulted in books that are inadvertently an excellent record of what it was like to live through the early 1940s without knowing how events were going to turn out. I made a whole episode about that period of her work, incidentally, back in 2021, titled "ECR Lorac Rises Through the Ranks" if you would like to explore that period further. Macdonald travelled, too. There are plenty of books sent in and around London, as might be expected for a Scotland Yard detective, but he also goes to Lancashire in books like Crime Counter Crime and Fell Murder, to Devon in Fire in the Thatch and Death Came Softly and even leaves the UK occasionally in his post-war adventures. Murder in Vienna from 1956, unsurprisingly, finds Macdonald in Austria, while 1958's Murder on a Monument sees him investigate a case in Rome.

Despite how many books there are with Macdonald as the leading detective, we learn surprisingly few details about him over the almost thirty years that his adventures span. As you'll see throughout our survey of inspectors today, writers often choose this kind of protagonist when they are more interested in detail of the cases rather than developing a complex or striking hero. The one exception to this that springs to mind is Ngaio Marsh's Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, who does have a prominent personal life to which readers are privy as his series goes on. But perhaps that's because in many ways Alleyn is much closer to a Wimsey-style gentleman amateur, even though he is employed full time in Scotland Yard's CID.

So, what do we know about Lorac's Inspector Macdonald? Well, he's a so-called "London Scot" and a "Highlander by extraction". He studied at Oxford University, but we don't know if he took a degree and, if so, what it was in. He is not married, and in 1945's Murder by Matchlight he says that he's "not likely to be". He seems to be satisfied working alone, as he does a lot in a books like The Organ Speaks from 1935. That said, he does have a jovial working relationship with a Detective Inspector Reeves, who appears in over half of the Macdonald novels.

Most of what we know about Macdonald comes from our ability, as readers, to observe his actions during his cases. Lorac doesn't go in for first person narration or even a particularly close third person style, so we don't often get to see inside Macdonald's head. His manner with witnesses and suspects, though, shows us that he is charismatic, polite and good at quickly forming a rapport with someone. He has a wryness to his mode of speech and a quick way with a turn of phrase that makes him fun to read. Blessedly, too, Lorac does not write out his Scottish accent, if he in fact has one.

It isn't just the reader who finds Macdonald impermeable. Although superficially courteous, he is very good at giving away absolutely nothing else. This supreme self-containment can even be a little frightening. A witness in the Murder by Matchlight case says: "If ever I felt afraid of anybody it is of Macdonald. It's his quietness and you can't tell what he's thinking." At the same time, Macdonald also seems to have a heightened sensitivity to theatricality. He finds himself drawn to characters who are on the stage in some way, like magicians or actors, and he is very sharp in his observations of them. We get one such instance in 1944's Checkmate to Murder, when Lorac gives us Macdonald's reaction to meeting the actor André Delaunier: "He had a fine voice, but MacDonald found the deep tones slightly irritating - there was a mannered quality about Delaunier’s admirable diction which made his speech seem unreal."

Above all, the facet of Macdonald's character that I personally find the most appealing is his seriousness. If you read as many interwar mysteries as I do, there's a tendency sometimes for the flippancy with which some detectives treat violence and murder to grate a little. It depends on the book and how it is handled, but I don't always want crime to be played out like it is a fun little game. And Macdonald certainly does not see his work this way. In 1937's Bats in the Belfry, he makes this very clear: "I like detective stories myself, they make me laugh, whereas real crime isn't funny," he says. Lorac isn't heavy handed with this, but it crops up regularly in her Macdonald novels. In Murder by Matchlight, her inspector updates his attitudes to take in the wartime setting. "Just as soon as a society tolerates private vengeance, that society is allying itself to Nazism and opening an avenue for every abuse which exists," he declares.

I have enjoyed some Macdonald novels more than others, but I have yet to read a bad one. He is a wonderful protagonist to my mind: defined enough to give grounding to a novel, but not drawn in so much detail that he detracts at all from the case. My one regret is that because E.C.R. Lorac's work isn't being republished in order, I haven't been able to read his adventures chronologically and thus see how she developed him on the page from book to book. I can only hope that one day all 46 books will be back in print so that I can embark on that project.

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Next I want to take a look at Inspector Cockrill, who is one of three police detective inspectors created by Christianna Brand. Cockrill was clearly her favourite, since he appears in six novels and a number of short stories, while Inspectors Charlesworth and Chucky only have three and one novels to their name respectively. Unlike all the other inspectors we're going to meet today, Cockrill is not a Scotland Yard man — he is attached to the Kent police force and is referred to variously in Brand's novels as "a veteran country policeman", "Cockie", and "the Terror of Kent". She makes a feature of this in Death of Jezebel from 1948, when she brings Inspector Cockrill up to London to co-investigate a case with her Scotland Yard sleuth Inspector Charlesworth. The town mouse and country mouse dynamic is a fun feature of that book.

Cockrill has a very distinctive appearance. Brand goes out of her way to make sure her readers know that he is a small, older man who favours shabby coats and an old felt hat he wears sideways on his head in the "Napoleonic fashion". She describes his manners as "darting" and "bird-like" and gives him a habit of perpetual smoking. In Heads You Lose, his first outing from 1941, she tells use that "The fingers of his right hand were so stained with nicotine as to appear to be tipped with wood." Most importantly, he is grumpy. In that same passage, we hear that "He was widely advertised as having a heart of gold beneath his irascible exterior; but there were those who said bitterly that the heart was so infinitesimal and you had to dig so deep down to get to it, that it was hardly worth the trouble."

Such is Cockrill's grumpiness that it is hard to imagine him taking orders well or demolishing a mound of paperwork with the kind of efficiency that Inspector Macdonald might exhibit. The emphasis on his costume and manner do hint at a more amateur detective sensibility — his Napoleon hat is an enduring feature, just as Sidney Paget's illustrations gave us the lasting image of Sherlock Holmes in the deerstalker. And yet his status as a police detective gives him access to the kind of case that an amateur could never have. Green for Danger from 1944, in which he investigates a subtle murder at a hospital under wartime conditions, would not work with an amateur in the starring role, for instance. After his retirement from the force, though, he does run into cases more in the way a Poirot or a Campion might. One crops up while he is on holiday in Tour de Force, and he is called in unofficially by friends in Fog of Doubt.

I think Cockrill is at his best when he fulfils two very necessary functions in Brand's fiction. First, when he helps her set up the impossibility of her crime scenario. As I've talked about on the show before, she was very partial to a seemingly impossible crime — a murder committed on stage in front of thousands of witness, or in a room that nobody could access — and Cockrill is often the final impossible touch to such a situation. In Tour de Force, for example, he is the key witness to the fact that nobody can have left the beach and entered the murdered woman's hotel room to kill her, because he was sitting reading on the terrace in between.

Second, for all that she loves to emphasise his irascible nature, Brand liked to give Cockrill moments of genuine emotion that deepened her books. Because of his direct involvement in the murder scene in Tour de Force, he gets to experience for the first time what it is like to be not the detective but the suspect — and it's a surprisingly moving moment. "He stood there, staring down at the blood- spattered page and, for the first time for many, many years, knew what it was to be afraid: uncertain and afraid. He opened his mouth to speak: and shut it again. One wrong word, one false move.... And yet one could not stand, speechless and motionless, and let the trap close." And he has a similar role in Fog of Doubt, as he tries to get a young family friend to confide in him before it is too late. Both of these books come after his retirement, though, and can't be said to have much to do with his status as a police inspector. I do think Christianna Brand stretched that official role about as far as she could with Inspector Cockrill. He solves his cases in the end, to be sure, but I'm not sure that his police superiors would have spoken very highly of him.

After the break:

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Our next inspector is Bobby Owen, hero of 35 novels by E.R. Punshon that were published between 1933 and 1956. One of these, The Bath Mysteries from 1936, featured in one of my personal favourite episodes of Shedunnit, "Brides in the Bath" from 2019. Dorothy L. Sayers had a very high opinion of Punshon's detective fiction. She once posed the question "what is distinction" in a review and answered it thusly: "We recognise it in Sherlock Holmes, in Trent’s Last Case, in the Father Brown stories and in the works of Mr E. R. Punshon we salute it every time." Illustrious company indeed.

Bobby Owen interests me because he does not come to us fully formed as a Detective Chief Inspector, as this type of character tends to do. In his first outing, Information Received, he is a mere constable who happens to be on patrol outside an upscale London townhouse when a rich man is found murdered in his billiard room. Although he is enthusiastic enough about his job, working at Scotland Yard had not always been Bobby's one ambition in life. He had studied at Oxford and scraped a pass in his degree, only to find that there was very little graduate work to be had in the economic slump of the early 1930s. Thus, he joins the police. He has a little of the "gentleman cop" about him, but he isn't nearly as upper crust as Roderick Alleyn, say. Punshon himself had been working since the age of 14 and had lived a whole life before he took up writing — emigrating to Canada, trying to make his living as a farmer, and then working his way back to Britain as a hand on a cattle ship when his agricultural career failed.

Characters in detective fiction are so often frozen at the moment when they became popular — think of the peculiar agelessness of Poirot or Marple as they advance through case after case. There's something so refreshing, then, about getting to follow Bobby Owen through his life and career, as he ascends from the rank of constable to that of inspector and eventually commander of Scotland Yard. His personal life evolves too, and we get to see his developing relationship with his future wife across several books. He's not an outstandingly original detective, but he does come with an entire detective career, and that's rather lacking elsewhere in golden age detective fiction.

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Now I want us to go to the other extreme and look at an inspector who appears only once but who is nonetheless very memorable to me. The detective in Margery Allingham's 1940 standalone murder mystery Black Plumes is Divisional Detective Inspector Bridie, a character that is never to my knowledge mentioned again in Allingham's extensive catalogue of works. Upon first introduction to the crime scene, he is described as an "elderly Orkney Scot with the hooded grey eyes and the prim expression" who possesses an "owlish and official stare". We learn very little about him apart from that he hails from Orkney and has the accent of those islands — which Allingham somewhat tediously makes clear by writing out every time he says "ch" instead of "j" as in the world just and putting hyphens between every double r to make it clear they are rolled. He is a peculiar mixture of diffidence and confidence, too. He approaches the upper middle class Ivory family with much deferential respect, but he is also quietly remorseless in his pursuit of the truth. He is polite but does not allow his witness and suspects to get away with lying to him. Later, we learn that he "privately accredited himself" with the distinction of "the best policeman in the world".

Black Plumes was written by Allingham to take advantage of the lucrative magazine serial market in the US in the mid to late 1930s, and indeed it appeared there under the title "Bring Out Your Rubber Tyred Hearses". Perhaps she would have written more about her Orkney Scot detective inspector had the war not intervened and utterly altered the publishing business. In tone, this novel reminds me of an early twentieth century family saga like The Forsyte Saga.

Bridie isn't even the protagonist of this book. That's Frances Ivory, 20 year old daughter of the Ivory family who have been dealing art to London society for over a century. She is definitely the central character, but it's an unusual choice on Allingham's behalf. Frances doesn't get involved with the detection, nor do any of the crimes personally happen to her. She's the centre of the book in an emotional sense, standing in for the reader and channeling the story's atmosphere and ensuring that we stay fully informed without the presence of either a first person narrator or the traditional Holmes-Watson explanatory dynamic.

Bridie is France's foil in every way. He's old where she is young, from an outlying part of Scotland when she is born in raised in the wealthiest part of central London. He's calm where she is impetuous. He represents officialdom and consequences with a capital c while she would do anything to avoid having to take face up to the seriousness of her family's situation. It's just so well crafted, and Inspector Bridie is such an excellent example of an inspector character who operates from the periphery of a mystery.

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The first time I encountered our final inspector today, Inspector French, I heartily disliked him. Freeman Wills Crofts first novel to feature this character is Inspector French’s Greatest Case, which was an early reading choice when the Shedunnit Book Club first started in 2019. French is a Scotland Yard inspector called in in that book to investigate the robbery of a diamond merchant and the murder of a clerk on Hatten Garden in London. The case takes him all over Europe, from the Swiss Alps to Barcelona, but the travel is handled in an entirely perfunctory, non descriptive way. Everything in the book is subservient to French's extreme focus on explaining how the crime was done. He seemed like an automaton. Stolid is the word that comes to mind. He has a pleasant wife and an otherwise untroubled life, which allows him to do nothing but crosscheck train timetables and reinterview minor witnesses. Crofts' reputation as a writer of "humdrum" tales that turned on the laborious breaking down of seemingly perfect alibis by extensive and detailed policework was well-deserved, I thought. Expertly done, but not for me.

Perhaps that first outing for Inspector French isn't the best example of his exploits. Or maybe I just wasn't in the frame of mind to appreciate his exploits. Either way, five years has passed and I have now become an enthusiastic reader of the Inspector French novels Luckily, there are 29 of them, plus some short stories, so I've still got plenty to go. And now that I've read more, I can confirm that Inspector French is still a largely personality-less figure who exists mostly to break down criminals' plots with his incredible diligence and attention to detail. There is a very small amount of progression through the series, as he moves up through the ranks at Scotland Yard, but otherwise all the books I've read so far are in the same pattern, even those like 1934's The 12:30 from Croydon that are formatted as a howdunnit rather than a whodunnit.

What keeps me coming back is French's incredible competence. He's just so thoroughly good at his job and determined to go the extra mile to see justice done. Such as in 1931's Mystery in the Channel, where he literally drives a boat up and down the English Channel for miles in order to prove a point about exactly how fast it could go at a certain state of the tide. There are times when I'm in the mood for the eccentric flourishes of a clever amateur, and then there are other times when I just want to read about somebody who is extremely good at their job getting it done. For me, French is the supreme example of this, but I think that's ultimately why characters like him can carry their own novels and be satisfying to readers. A golden age detective inspector might not be personally very exciting, but he will follow all the rules and still reveal whodunnit in the end.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton.

You can find a full list of the books and sources used in the making in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/aninspectorcalls. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

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Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

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