Death On Paper Transcript

Caroline: Dear listener,

I trust this letter finds you well. Perhaps you are curled up somewhere cosy, pressing play as a break from reading your favourite detective novel. Or maybe you are out and about, using the podcast to stay connected to the golden age of detective fiction even while you're busy living modern life. Either way, I hope I have your attention for what promises to be a most absorbing literary investigation.

I'm sure you're curious as to why I am addressing you this way. I don't usually write letters to my listeners, do I? But it felt fitting for our subject matter today. I have spent the past couple of months immersed in mystery stories that are composed of old letters, diary entries, witness statements, court transcripts, newspaper cuttings, ship's logs and all manner of such documents. What better way, I thought, to tell you about my journey through this world of crime fiction that is told in fragments, than to follow the example of these authors and write my own letters to you?

So, consider this our first shared dispatch. A confidential note, if you will, setting the scene for what is to come. The realm of epistolary crime novels turns every reader into an armchair detective, who must sift through the evidence as it unfolds and piece together the truth from fractured perspectives. This is a type of mystery where the real story lurks between the lines. Are you ready to discover it with me?

Yours in detection,

Caroline Crampton

Music

P.S. Welcome to Shedunnit.

Music

Dear listener,

Before we go any further in our correspondence, I feel I should explain what I mean by an "epistolary crime novel". "Epistolary" comes from "epistle", a word of Latin origin meaning a letter. Epistolary thus means "relating to letters or letter-writing". Since the late seventeenth century the expression "epistolary novel" has been used to describe a work of fiction that is told through a collection of letters. Early examples include works by Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. Within the last century or so, the term has expanded to encompass other forms of document too, so that an epistolary novel might also contain other forms of record or communication, like telegrams, diary entries, newspaper cuttings, legal documents and so on. An epistolary crime novel is one that uses this technique to unfold a tale of mystery or detection.

I think that the appeal of this type of novel to the crime writer lies in the active participation that it demands from the reader. In a novel written all the way through in conventional prose, the writer does all the work of stringing the story together and pacing the release of plot information. The reader passively follows the path that has already been laid out for them. When the story is presented as a series of seemingly disparate letters and documents, though, the narrative work is shared with the reader, who must interpret the fragments placed before them and deduce how they relate to each other.

Crime writers, especially those working in the interwar period, were keen on maintaining a sense of "fair play" between author and reader. In practical terms, this usually meant that the clues and information used by the detective are shared as they arise, so that the reader could solve along with them, rather than the solution just being a surprise reveal in the final chapter. Removing the surrounding narration and reducing the novel just to the case's source material feels like an extension of something that was already happening in this genre. Rather than reading about a detective combing through witness statements and poring over maps, the reader can do it for themselves.

The first epistolary crime novels appeared long before the golden age of detective fiction. The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams began to be serialised in Once a Week magazine in 1862. It consists entirely of extracts from letters, diary entries, witness statements, newspaper reports and memoranda penned by the detective in the case, insurance investigator Ralph Henderson. Other than an editor's note at the start of the serialisation that exhorts the reader to be patient and pay "a very close attention to names and dates to comprehend the view of the compiler, as to the case he is investigating", we are on our own with the documents.

As we read, the nature of Henderson's case gradually emerges: he is trying to prove that a certain sinister "Baron R_" is guilty of the murder of his wife, who died after drinking a bottle of acid that she got while supposedly sleepwalking in her husband's home laboratory. The Baron, you see, had recently taken out five separate insurance policies on her life. The book ends with Henderson summing up his case and the chain of evidence he has assembled. Gradually we have come to realise that what we are reading is the dossier that he is going to submit to his superiors at the insurance company. He concludes with a question for them, that is really a question for the reader: "Is that chain [of evidence] one of purely accidental coincidences, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution almost too horrible to contemplate?" Charles Warren Adams was a lawyer by profession and I think you can tell from The Notting Hill Mystery that he was skilled at assembling and arguing cases. And although he was arguably the first to put the reader in the position of both detective and judge, he would not be the last.

Five years after the serialisation of The Notting Hill Mystery concluded, Wilkie Collins began releasing instalments of his own epistolary crime novel, The Moonstone, which covers the theft of a sacred diamond from the family of the corrupt British army officer who original stole it from India. This novel is very important to the development of the detective fiction genre and contains many elements that we now consider standard, such as the interplay between professional and amateur detectives, the country house setting, a closed circle of suspects, and more. But that is not what concerns us today — for more about The Moonstone's place in the canon I must refer you to my 2021 episode "The First Whodunnit".

No: what matters for now is that The Moonstone is presented as a series of extracts from various narratives, statements, papers and letters. It is an epistolary crime novel. It is worth noting, too, that this wasn't Collins's first novel in this format. The Woman in White from 1859 uses a similar multi-perspective narration style, although it is more of a sensation novel and does not contain any detection. This was in general a popular form for nineteenth century novels of sensation and suspense. Other major examples include Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu from 1872 and, of course, Dracula by Bram Stoker from 1897.

In The Moonstone, the extracts are long — the narrative of Gabriel Betteredge, steward to the Verinder household, takes up most of the first half of the book, for instance. Each one is told in the first person. The reader can really settle into each perspective and begin to know the characters, which is harder to do with the shorter fragments used in The Notting Hill Mystery. The mystery emerges as the reader progresses through each account and begins to notice the limitations and inconsistencies between them. Collins generates red herrings and investigative dead ends in this way, before the true solution eventually emerges in a series of shorter letters and extracts at the end. Two of these late contributions are told from the point of Sergeant Cuff and Franklin Blake, the two characters who have acted as detectives in the case. The "compare and contrast" technique that Collins uses to convey the biases and differing morals of the book's characters to the book's readers is one that would be taken up enthusiastically in the following decades by other crime writers.

But more on that in my next dispatch.

Until then I remain, as always, your loyal podcast host,

Caroline

Music

Dear listener,

To my mind, a fair play golden age-style puzzle mystery is already a game that is being played by the writer and the reader. It's an intellectual dual, a chess match, if you will. On the one side, we have the mind that is creating the story, moving around characters and dropping clues while doing their best to keep their opponent in the dark for as long as possible. On the other side, there is the reader, who examines every line for its possible implications for the solution of the mystery and tries to work out what will happen before it is revealed on the page. Transplanting this contest into the epistolary form gives new advantages to both sides. The writer has more scope for concealing their clueing and the reader can, in theory, access the same primary sources as the detective, rather than relying on selective and secondhand information.

But beyond the puzzle, what does the epistolary form bring to the detective novel? Let's take a closer look.

First and foremost, we have the intimacy and the opportunity for psychological insight. Using personal documents like diary entries and private letters to tell some or all of a story gives the reader access to a character's inner thoughts and motivations to a degree that is hard to achieve even via conventional first-person narration. Not only do we learn what is happening to our characters, but we also learn what they think about it — what they truly think about it, in private, when there is no need to filter or moderate their opinions for public consumption.

Some epistolary crime novels will stick with a single perspective throughout, allowing the reader to immerse themselves fully in one character's mind and experience. S.S. Murder by Q Patrick from 1933 is an excellent example of this. Q. Patrick, by the way, was a pseudonym primarily used by Richard Wilson Webb with a cast of co-writers that rotated over the years. This novel was written by Webb and Mary Louise Aswell. The entire novel is formed of letters written by a journalist named Mary Llewellyn to her fiancé as she travels from New York to Rio de Janeiro aboard a ship called the S.S. Moderna. On her first evening aboard, a wealthy businessman dies at the bridge table after drinking a dose of strychnine that has been slipped into his cocktail.

Although she is supposed to be taking this maritime journey as a convalescence holiday, Mary proceeds to investigate, with the hope of securing a scoop for her newspaper. She documents everything she comes across in letters and her journal, addressing it all to her future husband Davy. She even copies in maps and notes and bridge scores alongside writing down her own thoughts. She is a first-time, accidental sleuth who makes plenty of mistakes along the way, and having full access to her thoughts and feelings only increases the reader's investment in the case. It could not play fairer, either, with Mary in later entries pointing Davy back to the relevant pages and lines where she unwittingly recorded key clues. It's a highly successful epistolary mystery, to my mind.

Another take on the single perspective epistolary crime novel can be found in Death on the Down Beat by Sebastian Farr from 1941. This contains another one-sided correspondence between spouses, with Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Alan Hope writing home to his wife Julia as he investigates the case of a conductor shot dead during a concert. From his letters, we form a good impression of Hope as an imaginative, pro-active officer who is a little out of his depth in a case that revolves around the performance of classical music. Unlike in S.S. Murder, though, there is a wider variety of other materials included alongside Hope's letters: extracts from musical scores, newspaper cuttings, lists of orchestra personnel, witness statements, and so on. Although Hope is the only character's mind to which the reader has any access, there are other sources of evidence in this book as well. I really enjoyed puzzling this one out, and would recommend it to anyone who likes attending concerts.

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Neither of these books take advantage of a key facet of the epistolary mystery, though: its ability to put multiple perspectives on show. As I already mentioned in reference to The Moonstone, being able to compare different people's accounts of the same events is a great way of concealing or revealing plot information. It also allows the reader a glimpse into each character's psychology, as we access their true thoughts about each other. The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace excels at this, using letters to show multiple perspectives on the same unhappy household. Spinster companion Agatha Milsom and the lodger she calls "the objectionable Mr. Munting" both write about each other and the other inhabitants, and it is intriguing to note the differences in what they include and gloss over, and to consider what that means later on when a murderer strikes. The gaps and elisions in the different accounts of the same events are where she hides her clues.

Sayers also began her final full-length detective novel, Busman's Honeymoon, with an epistolary section made up of letters and diary entries that acquaints the reader with the engagement period and wedding of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. The conventional narrative of the book then begins as they depart for the honeymoon of the title. As in Documents, this technique allows the reader to quickly gather the impressions of a large group of characters and to learn something about the inner workings of their minds. What the Duchess of Denver considers to be dowdy and peculiar, the Dean of Shrewsbury College describes as symmetrical and neat. The reader must decide who has the right of it.

This letter has become quite long, hasn't it? I must sign off here for now, but I'll be back soon with more examples of how the epistolary form is works for crime fiction.

Until then,

Caroline

Music

Dear listener,

I hope your curiosity about letters, documents, dossiers and the like did not get the better of you in between missives! I won't keep you waiting any longer. Another great advantage of the epistolary novel for the golden age crime writer is the opportunities it offers for unreliability and misdirection. Just because a character is writing a personal letter or in a private journal does not mean that they are telling the truth, or even some of the truth, and the clever crime writer can have great fun with this. As well as piecing together the story from disparate pieces of evidence, readers must also decide how trustworthy said evidence is.

There's one technique I particularly wanted to highlight in relation to this, and it's the inclusion of documents written by characters who are writers, especially crime writers. All readers of epistolary crime novels learn to be on high alert when encountering one of these. The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake from 1938 is a good example: almost half of the book is a diary written by mystery novelist Frank Cairnes, who is grieving the death of his young son in a hit and run accident. Such is Blake's skill with suspense that the reader is quite swept along with Frank's burgeoning desire for revenge. But when the narrative switches to third-person prose following detective Nigel Strangeways, inconsistencies and problems with the diary's version of events start to emerge.

Anthony Berkeley did something similar in 1930 with his novel The Second Shot, in which part of the book is presented as a manuscript written by one of the participants in a country house murder game gone wrong. And then more intriguing still is The Manuscript Murder by Lewis Robinson from 1933, in which a writer character pens not just an account of events but a full fictional reconstruction of events leading up to the crime, using his skill to imagine what could have happened to cause the crime rather than just relating what did happen. It is only when this version is contradicted by an addendum from a different character that the true story begins to emerge.

It's this access to a supposedly true account of a crime that is then progressively undercut by other evidence that can give the epistolary crime novel one of its other great features: suspense. Think of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Nothing could be more plausible than Dr Sheppard's account of events in that book, and nothing could be more thrilling than the moment that the reader realises what has really been going on. All of the books I've already mentioned do this to some degree: building suspense and tension by limiting the perspectives and information to which the reader has access. Providing only documents, rather than a joined-up narrative, allows the writer to drip-feed information gradually and subtly, making the climactic moment of revelation all the more impactful.

I wonder where this journey will take us next? You'll have to wait for my next letter to find out.

All best wishes,

Caroline

Music

Dear listener,

I hope you forgave me for my crude attempt to demonstrate the suspenseful potential of the epistolary form. Crime novels told this way don't follow a single template, though. There are those, like The Beast Must Die or our recent green penguin read The Man in the Dark by John Ferguson, that are broken up into only a handful of different sections — a diary, accounts from a handful of perspectives, the occasional newspaper cutting as an epilogue, that sort of thing. And then there are more fragmented stories, for which a writer has gone to the trouble of distributing their plot among many different sources.

These are the ones that really call upon the reader to play detective in earnest. Some do this almost literally. The blurb for The Maze by Philip Macdonald from 1932 is an excellent example:

"Maxwell Brunton was found dead in his study — murdered beyond doubt. There were ten people in the house on the night of the murder, and at least seven of them had an adequate motive for murdering him. But Anthony Gethryn has only the evidence given at the Coroner's inquest to work with. In other words YOU, the reader, and HE, the detective, are upon equal footing. HE solves the mystery. Can YOU?"

The words "he" and "you" are all in capital letters, by the way, in case that wasn't clear. The Maze is a dossier of a novel, made up only of the exhibits and statements from the inquest, from which detectives real and fictional must build a case. Macdonald was building on his 1930 novel, The Rynox Mystery, I think, which has comments and statements interpolated into the narrative, but ended up reducing The Maze only to these elements. This is where the epistolary crime novel begins to blur into the kind of paper-based game that might today be sold as an "escape room in a box" or something like that — less a book, and more a heap of jumbled material that the players must do the work of assembling into something coherent. Anyone familiar with the crime dossiers created by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links will know that this is not a recent phenomenon, of course. Wheatley and Links published four of these case files during the 1930s, which included all manner of documents and pieces of evidence that could be used to solve the case. The solution was explained in the sealed final pages of the file so that the player/reader could check their work at the end.

Part of the pleasure of the Wheatley dossiers is the attempts made to preserve the authenticity of the original document forms via the use of different fonts, layouts, and so on, such that it really feels like the reader is handling genuine evidence. It's for this reason that I enjoy epistolary crime novels like Death on the Down Beat that include unusual elements, beyond letters and diaries. That's the only one I have come across, so far, that includes sheet music, for instance. Burglars In Buck by G.D.H. and Margaret Cole is also worth mentioning in this regard, since it consists of a chronological dossier containing not just letters and reports but telegrams, newspaper cuttings, police memos and some slightly odd on-paper reconstructions of telephone calls and in-person conversations. Like many of the Coles novels, this one is sadly rather rare today, but worth tracking down if you can for the diversity of its documentary evidence.

I think there will be just one more letter from me after this one.

In haste, then, I am still your podcast host,

Caroline

Music

Dear listener,

If you have been reading between the lines and connecting the dots in our correspondence, then you will have noticed that many of the golden age epistolary crime novels that I have mentioned were published in 1930 or soon after. This is not a coincidence, to my mind. This is the point at which detective novelists, having brought their genre to a heightened level of popularity and prominence during the 1920s, began to seek new avenues to explore. This is the moment when the psychological aspect of crime is explored, when some writers doubled down on the impossible crime or the howdunnit, and when others started trying to introduce more literary or romantic elements. The epistolary form is just one area of innovation among many.

But it has also been one of the most enduring. The golden age of detective fiction is long over, but still some of the biggest works of crime fiction published in the past two decades have included one or more of the elements I have mentioned. Think of the layering of narrative in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, the use of interview transcripts in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, or the explicitly golden age style of the documents assembled in The Appeal by Janice Hallett. Solve-it-yourself texts like Cain's Jawbone or murder mystery board games and escape rooms are enjoying a new golden age of their own as well.

Many other things about crime fiction have changed in the past 80 or so years. Detectives are more likely now to have a drink problem than an enviable moustache, and their adventures don't involve so very many pauses for tea taken in the shade of a large sycamore in a country house garden. But this desire to present stories through fragments and documents has remained. And I think this is because of the active participation in the puzzle that this demands from the reader. We're competitive and impatient. We don't just want to be told a story, we want to have a chance of getting to the solution first. As much as we like reading about the exploits of brilliant detectives, we also want to solve mysteries for ourselves, and to decide for ourselves where the blame truly lies.

Signing off for the last time, I am, as always, your loyal partner in crime,

Caroline

Music

P.S. This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated, and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find links to all the books and sources it referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/deathonpaper. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to ensure the podcast's continued existence and get some extra audio goodies in the bargain, become a paying supporter now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.