The Case of Georgette Heyer Transcript

If I say the name Georgette Heyer, it immediately conjures a certain set of images, doesn't it? Debutantes in ballgowns designed to have the Empire silhouette, dashing men in flawless Regency evening dress, or else the military uniforms of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Opulent Mayfair townhouses, beautiful country estates, Almack's assembly rooms. Those who have cracked open a few Heyer novels will know that they even have a unique and distinctive vocabulary: a character might "make a cake of themselves", have "pockets to let", land someone a "facer", suspect that "havey-cavey business" is going on, or curse someone as a "shuttlehead".

What does not come to mind is golden age detective fiction. The interplay between alibi and motive, detective and suspect, clue and red herring, is not Georgette Heyer's realm. That's a domain that belongs to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and the rest of the Detection Club. Or does it? For Heyer wrote a dozen crime novels of her own, beginning in 1932, right in the middle of the interwar period so associated with classic crime. She created a pair of recurring Scotland Yard detectives and wrote mysteries set in country houses, suburban villas and London flats. Her sleuths tackle poisonings, shootings, bludgeonings — the works. She would seem to have fulfilled all of the requirements of a golden age crime writer, and yet we don't associate her with that period or genre at all.

Our question for today, then, is why isn't Georgette Heyer considered a detective novelist?

Music

Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Music

Before we get into the episode proper, I'd like to update you on the Shedunnit Pledge Drive. If you've listened recently, you will know that every year at this time I run this little campaign over four episodes, with the aim of adding 100 new members to the Shedunnit Book Club, the podcast's paying membership scheme that supports everything I do here. Basically, I talk about it now, so that I don't have to talk about it for the rest of the year. At the time of recording this, just less than halfway through that period, we've already met that 100 member goal. I'm so grateful to everyone who has joined the book club, recommended it to a friend, shared the podcast, left a review, or in some other way helped to raise its visibility. I really do appreciate the effort on your side that makes it possible for me to keep creating episodes for you.

So, what now? The Pledge Drive Goal is met. I'm not going to move the goal posts and claim that there's another, bigger goal that we now have to strive for just for the sake of it. If I've learned anything in my seven years (yikes!) of making this show, it's that doing one thing really well always feels better than trying to do lots of things just OK. We did what we set out to do this year, and fingers crossed what we have raised so far is going to cover all the rising costs for the next twelve months. I haven't put up subscription prices since the club started in 2019 and I don't want to have to do that ever, if I can help it. However, as a thank you to everyone for listening and taking part, even though we've met the goal the pledge drive perks will remain available for the rest of the period, ie until 9th December. That means, if you join the book club before then at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive, you can still claim a free membership to send to a friend and get access to Shedunnit's secret sister show, Today in Murder Mysteries. Thank you again for all your support.

Music

Georgette Heyer was born in 1902 in Wimbledon, south west London, the eldest of three children in a comfortable middle-class family. She was an imaginative child who loved reading and writing stories. In 1919 when she was 17, she started writing a serialised story about an Earl who becomes a highwayman in the 1750s to amuse her younger brother Boris, while he was ill.

Her father, who wrote poetry himself, overheard some of the tale and encouraged his daughter to submit it to publishers. The very first one she sent it to, Constable, offered to buy it and seventeen-year-old Georgette very coolly negotiated the deal and a possible option on future novels. Already, she knew she wanted to devote her life to writing. The Black Moth was published in 1921. In a hint of what was to come, Georgette gave her £100 advance to her father to help with the family's financial troubles during the post WWI economic slump.

After this early success, still in her teens, Georgette Heyer embarked very seriously on a writing career. She secured an agent and a new publisher and the following year saw the release of her next historical novel, The Great Roxhythe. Another followed in 1923 and in 1925. She also began writing short fiction, for which magazines would pay good money in the 1920s. She seems to have decided to consider her fiction a professional pursuit right from the start. As her biographer says: "Georgette was remarkably single-minded about her writing. It was never a question of whether she could write, but rather a question of what she would write."

Then her life was irrevocably changed in 1925. Two things happened. First, she got engaged to Ronald Rougier, a rugby player and mining engineer she had met while her family was on holiday in Hertfordshire in 1920. A month after this happy event, Georgette's beloved father died suddenly and unexpectedly. As well as a beloved parent, he had been her literary mentor and cheerleader, and now he was gone. In addition to her grief, Georgette now also had to deal with the fact that she and Ronald were financially responsible for her mother and two younger brothers. The youngest, Frank, was only thirteen. The pressure of supporting them all was to become a major factor in Georgette's career for the next decade at least. Especially once, after a couple of overseas postings, Ronald gave up engineering, leaving her novels as their sole source of income while he first tried starting his own business and then trained as a barrister.

It was fortunate, then, that right from the start Georgette Heyer's writing was popular.

Jennifer:  It's obvious from the very beginning that she sold well, from that very first book, The Black Moth, which has now been in print for 104 years. Every book she wrote, even the books that she later suppressed, had multiple reprints from the beginning. So even the contemporary novels would've had 10 reprintings in the first seven or eight years. She never had a rejection and she basically didn't have an editor.

Caroline: This is Dr Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer's biographer. She has spent several decades study Heyer's life and work and has become an expert on her fiction, as well as being a fan. When we try to gauge Heyer's popularity, Jen says, we have to take into account both Georgette's own high expectations for herself and the fact that by the time she was an established author, she was operating at a level few writers ever reach.

Jennifer:  Some books obviously sold in huge numbers and some books in not such huge numbers, but she always sold well. I mean, Penhallow is a particularly good example of a book that she had expected to be a tour de force, so she called it, and that it would have this huge sale.

Now in first edition, it sold 17,000 copies before it was published. Pre-sales effectively, which is fantastic. I mean, any author today would love to have 17,000 copies already sold before the book comes out.

But for her, that felt like a failure. Whereas the next book Friday's Child came out in 1944 during the war, very basic, soft boards, no margins, no chapter headings because of the paper shortage, again. Sold 70,000 copies in its first printing and 250,000 copies in its first two years. So a huge success.

And it's gone on selling obviously. So all of her books sold well, but many of them sold differently. Her Regency and Georgians, for example, all have sold hugely. I would guess that she's probably sold a conservative estimate, would be 30 million, but I think it's probably more like 50 million since she began writing. We don't have exact figures. She was certainly selling a million copies a year in Pan paperbacks when she died in 1974.

Caroline: This is, frankly, an astonishing number of books to sell. And not only did Georgette Heyer's fiction sell in the time it was written — it has kept selling. When she died, 48 of her 55 novels were still in print and almost all of them have remained so since. So often, I talk about writers who were hugely popular in their own era but modern readers have to be reliant on good fortune with secondhand copies and recent reprints. That is not the case for Georgette Heyer, at all. I asked Jen why that is. Why was Georgette Heyer so immediately popular, and why has she remained so for over a century?

Jennifer:  I think really at heart, it was the writing, it's superb writing. She was an extraordinary prose stylist, really never a word wrong, but also this incredible world building, she always makes you feel like you are there regardless of the genre, whether it's her contemporary fiction, her Regency, Georgian, her detective novels, her medieval, and the characters just live for you.

The dialogue is alive and sparkling and the plots are pretty wonderful. So there's just something about her that really just draws you in and compels you. She was a compulsive writer and perhaps that's part of why she's a compelling read. I was always fascinated by this apparently seamless blend of history with fiction. How on earth did she do that without info dumping? She just seemed to be able to blend these things together.

Caroline: Although Heyer is today very identified with her historical fiction, especially that set in the Regency and Georgian periods, she did branch out from that into other periods and genres. She also wrote medieval historical fiction, including one novel about William the Conqueror, and in the 1920s she penned a quartet of contemporary novels. These she later came to dislike and did her best to suppress them, probably because they were quite autobiographical. She encouraged her publishers not to issue new editions. But to me, her most significant and successful foray away from historical fiction came in 1932, with a book called Footsteps in the Dark. This was her first attempt at mystery fiction. But although retrospectively we tend to count it as part of her detective dozen, it wasn't a full puzzle mystery.

Jennifer:  It's more of sort of Edgar Wallace vein type thriller, secret passages and the old country house and skeletons and masked man and things like that. More of a sort of mystery thriller, I would say, than a classic detective novel.

Caroline: Again, Heyer didn't look back especially fondly or proudly on this book in her later years. She wrote: "This work, published simultaneously with my son... was the first of my thrillers and was perpetuated while I was, as any Regency character would have said, increasing. One husband and two ribald brothers all had fingers in it, and I do not claim it as a Major Work." We'll come back to this statement shortly, as it has some interesting points to unpack.

Ad break

Whatever she may have thought about it later, in 1932, Footsteps in the Dark went down well enough for Heyer to make writing crime fiction an annual undertaking for the rest of the decade. Until the onset of the Second World War, she published one detective novel and one work of historical fiction each year. And she began to develop more of a golden age style. Her 1933 mystery, Why Shoot A Butler? is a country house murder mystery with a butler as its initial murder victim, very clearly playing on "the butler did it" cliché by then common in crime fiction. That case is investigated by a one-off character, barrister Frank Amberley, and her 1934 effort The Unfinished Clue also has no recurring detective, being solved by an Inspector Harding who we never meet again.

But in 1935's Death in the Stocks she introduces Superintendent Hannasyde, who was later joined, and then replaced by, a Sergeant Hemingway. Both are sensible, sober Scotland Yard types rather in the vein of Margery Allingham's Stanislaus Oates or Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, although because they were created by Heyer they have rather more wit and bite to them. Hemingway, especially, loves a good turn of phrase and often refers to his "flair" for solving crime. Other characters recur between books, too, such as the lawyer Giles Carrington from Death in the Stocks who then shows up in Behold Here's Poison as another murder victim's solicitor, and Timothy Harte who is an irritating teenage wild west obsessive in 1937's They Found Him Dead and then a likely suspect in 1951's Duplicate Death. There begins to be a sense of development and recurrence that is rather satisfying as a reader.

Jennifer:  You can see a trajectory in her detective fiction because Footsteps in the Dark is different from all the other detective novels that come after. Why Shoot a Butler? is moving more into that sort of classic, it's the country house, it's got the butler, and many classic characters of that genre as it's developing in the 1920s and thirties.

Then she writes The Unfinished Clue. Now that I like to think is really the first of her true detective novels. Particularly in that it's the first time she really allows her own personal sense of humour, she gives it free rein. So she has Lola the Mexican dancer, she has the dreadful General Sir Billington Smith and the weak son and Dina, the quite strong minded sister of the poor, weak wife.

Caroline: The best thing about Georgette Heyer's detective fiction tends not to be the detectives, or even the murders. And I'm not the only person to think this. Dorothy L. Sayers said as much in a 1934 review of The Unfinished Clue. Here's what Sayers had to say about it, as read by Jen:

Jennifer:  I said last week that good writing would often carry a poor plot, and here is a case in point. Reduced to its main outlines, The Unfinished Clue has a stamp of stereotype all over it.

Here is the same old weekend party, the disagreeable rich man who is stabbed in the study, the downtrodden wife, the rebellious son with the undesirable fiance, the hard up nephew, the wife's lover, the husband's petting partner, and her husband. All the stock characters including the mysterious widow out of the victim's past.

And the gentlemanly detective with the sugary love affair, together with a solution which has grown whiskers in the sixties, and is as preposterous now as it was then. And yet simply because it is written in a perfectly delightful light comedy vein, the book is pure joy from start to finish.

Lola, the fiancé by herself is worth the money. And indeed, all the characters from the chief constable to the head parlourmaid are people we know intimately and appreciatively from the first words they utter. Miss Heyer has given us a sparkling conversation piece, rich in chuckles, and all we ask of the plot is that it should keep us going until the comedy is played out.

Caroline: With the exception of Penhallow from 1942, which is a very different type of story, a devastating, dark semi-Gothic family saga that happens to include a murder, Sayers could have written this about any of Georgette Heyer's crime fiction. The plots don't tend to be hugely innovative, nor the settings wildly original. And yet the books are delightful to read, because of the characters and their dialogue. The same qualities that make Heyer's Regency fiction sparkle are present in the crime fiction too, just in service of murder investigations instead of marriage plots.

This still doesn't answer the question as to why Heyer has not enjoyed much of a reputation as a crime writer, though. There are plenty of detective fiction authors, like Ngaio Marsh, like Patricia Wentworth, like Margery Allingham, who spent less of their time crafting intricate plots and devoted more attention to character, atmosphere and style. Often their books have a romantic subplot and veer a little more towards the sensational or thriller style. Dorothy L. Sayers only published eleven full-length detective novels and, latterly, focused on a love interest for her detective. Why are they known as crime writers, when Georgette Heyer is not?

One of the common charges levelled at Heyer in this area is that she didn't actually come up with the plots for her crime novels herself. As we heard in her own retrospective on Footsteps in the Dark, her husband and, in that instance, her brothers, lent a hand. And in the eyes of some detective fiction purists, this seems to devalue Heyer's fiction somehow.

Jennifer:  She was writing two books a year in the 1930s, and so Ronald certainly worked out the howdunnit of some of her detective novels. Probably the most famous one is No Wind of Blame, where as she once said, the murder method was so complicated that even she didn't really understand it. And she had to go to him and say, when she was coming to the end of writing that book, okay, so now I need to be able to explain how the murder was done. Can you please explain it to me? And he had just sit her down and tell her how it all worked, you know?

Certainly Ronald was a very important reader to her. And Richard did tell me that, Ronald would sometimes say things like, okay, so this is the murder, this is how it's done.

Caroline: Richard is Richard Rougier, Georgette Heyer's son, who Jen knew very well before his death in 2007.

Jennifer: So A's going to do this, and then B's going to do that, and then C will do this. And she'd say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, because that's not possible. Because A would never do that and B would not behave like that, and C wouldn't respond like that. So because the characters lived for her from the very beginning, Ronald was not able to make them do whatever it was he necessarily wanted them to do. It wasn't like it was a collaborative, he was writing bits and she was writing. It was never like that. She wrote, he gave her the hows of things, but he was helpful. He was obviously a really major support, he believed in her, he encouraged her. He said things to her that were obviously supportive. That's clear from the letters.

Caroline: Given that it is widely agreed that the plots are the least good things about Georgette Heyer's detective fiction, I'm not sure that this critique holds up. And even if Georgette and Ronald had collaborated more extensively on these books, I'm not sure that would have been necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of crime writers at this time worked with co-authors, either other writers, as in the case of Helen Simpson and Clemence Dane, or with experts in a relevant field, as Dorothy L. Sayers did with Dr Robert Eustace on The Documents in the Case.

Another criticism of Heyer's detective fiction that I've seen a fair amount is that she just wrote it for the money, jumping on the detective fiction trend because it was so popular in the 1930s. Now, again, this doesn't really hold water at all — as we've already heard, Heyer's historical fiction was always much more successful for her, and if you think authors don't write all sorts of books because they make money then, I'm afraid, you're rather naive. Writing, especially as someone like Heyer did it, is a job, not a hobby. But this is an interesting point, because just like Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer did struggle greatly with the fact that her books were enormously popular and yet she never seemed to have any ready money.

Jennifer:  Well look, I don't think they were ever very good with money. She was constantly worried about money for many years and certainly in the fifties, in 51 and 53 when she wrote Duplicate Death and Detection Unlimited, she would've said that those were written to pay these enormous tax bills. I mean, she and Ronald lived through the era of super tax when if you earned above a certain amount, you're paying up to 97p in the pound.

The other challenge too, of course, is that particularly through the thirties and into the forties, it's not like you had electronic sales figures that you were able to, you know, get ahold of. You were getting your royalties probably twice a year. You didn't know how much they were going to be until the cheque arrived and so you can't plan ahead. You need to be, I would've thought conservative and careful with your money, frugal. This is not necessarily how they lived.

Caroline: The eventual solution to Georgette's financial problems was similar to that found for Agatha Christie, with the creation of a limited company and outside investment. The correspondence about this that Jen quotes her biography of Heyer is strikingly similar to that which I've seen for Christie, too. So I don't think that her financial motivations really had anything to do with Heyer's relatively unknown status as a detective novelist.

A more compelling argument to me is the fact that Georgette was an extremely private person. She found all publicity work "nauseating" and, because her books sold well from the start, was fortunate as to be in a position to simply refuse to do any of it. There is one supposed "interview" with her that was published in the late 1920s, done by the New Zealand writer Jane Mander, but it seems likely that this was actually based on Mander's reminiscences of the two writers' acquaintanceship rather than the product of a conversation conducted for the purposes of publication. Heyer hated being photographed, ignored reporters whenever she could, and declined all invitations for literary functions and public appearances. I don't know for sure if she was ever invited to join the Detection Club — I strongly suspect not — but if she had been, she would almost certainly have said no. Interestingly, this absolute insistence on her privacy did not seem to do her book sales any harm, but I think it has had an effect in curtailing the lasting cultural awareness of her as a writer. To take Christie as a comparison again: part of what keeps her fans interested, generations later, is the fact that they can visit her house in Devon, read her autobiography, and feel that they know the woman behind the work (even if they are in fact getting only a very partial picture). Georgette Heyer never provided even that much access to herself or her life. Jen, and the previous Heyer biographer, Joan Aiken Hodge, have done their best to let readers into Georgette Heyer's world, but it's very hard to get to know her beyond her fiction.

So why isn't Georgette Heyer considered to be a candidate for that elusive title, queen of crime? Why isn't she mentioned in the same breath as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and the other mystery luminaries who started out during the interwar years? I think the true answer lies not in her detective fiction or in her life story, but in the other novels that she published. Her historical fiction, especially the Regency novels, became her cultural legacy. The ubiquity of empire line dresses, quadrilles and compromises in culture today is down to her. Had those dozen detective novels been her sole output, I think she probably would have easily held her own against the middle-ranking writers from the golden age of detective fiction. But she had bigger fish to fry. Without Georgette Heyer, there is no Bridgerton, no Jilly Cooper, and the historical romance genre as we know it today would likely be very different. The scale of that achievement eclipsed her crime fiction.

She simply outdid herself.

Music

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

Many thanks to my guest, Dr Jennifer Kloester. She has published several books about Georgette Heyer, including Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, Georgette Heyer's Regency World and, most recently, The Novels of Georgette Heyer. All are worth reading and more information can be found at her website, jenniferkloester.com and in the description of this episode.

You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thecaseofgeorgetteheyer. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

The Shedunnit Pledge Drive continues! This is the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year. If you’d like to be part of that and get access to a whole host of audio goodies and the option to gift a year's membership to a friend for free, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive. I read all of Heyer's detective novels in order this year and I may well make a bonus episode about that in the future; if I do, it will just be for members of the Shedunnit Book Club, in case that gives you an extra reason to consider joining.

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

Thanks for listening.