The Crimes of Dorothy Erskine Muir Transcript

Caroline: Reading crime fiction is about curiosity and the desire for knowledge. We start each book with no idea what has happened in the story's pivotal scenario and, at least in the certainty-orientated golden age tradition from the interwar years, by the end we will know all about it. This is a big part of the appeal of this period and genre. There's great pleasure to be had in that journey from knowing nothing to understanding everything.

True crime, by contrast, rarely offers such a satisfying conclusion. Real life doesn't often conform to the narrative templates we like in our fiction. People can withhold information, sometimes forever, investigators can be ineffective or corrupt, and documents can be lost or misinterpreted. The perpetual unknowability of an unsolved case provides the opposite of a definite conclusion. I think this is partly why passionate fans of crime fiction aren't necessarily also eager consumers of true stories about murders and the like. The subject matter might be similar on the surface, but the two things really aren't the same at all.

But what if they could be brought together? Could crime fiction provide the resolution that true crime lacks? What if a novelist took a perplexing unsolved crime, and constructed the solution that, in fiction, we would want it to have?

To answer these three intriguing questions, I think we need to look at the detective fiction of Dorothy Erskine Muir.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Dorothy Erskine Muir was a detective novelist more by circumstance than by ambition or design. Making her living from writing of any sort wasn't an desire she cherished from her early years, nor was she burning to write crime fiction particularly. And she didn't do much of it: she published only three detective novels: In Muffled Night in 1933, Five to Five in 1934 and In Memory of Charles in 1941. So why is she so interesting to me? In large part, it's because of the relationship these books have with crime in real life. The murder part of "murder mystery". Each one demonstrates a deep and perceptive engagement with an unsolved murder case, which she adapted and experimented with through her fiction. In doing so, she made some interesting points both about how we process true crime stories in real life and how alien the conventions of crime fiction are to actual crimes. But to understand how and why she did this, I think we need to get to know the author a little better first, because her unusual childhood and somewhat tragic early adulthood played an important part in why she wrote the way she did.

She was born in 1889 as Dorothy Agnes Sheepshanks, one of the 17 children of John Sheepshanks, an Anglican vicar and later a bishop. In his youth, he had been a missionary in rural western Canada during a gold rush there, and then, on his circuitous way back to Britain, he became a solo traveller across China, Mongolia and Siberia. She was the tenth of the twelve Sheepshanks children who survived to adulthood. At the time of Dorothy's birth, her father had established a more settled and conventional life as a vicar in Anfield, which was at that time a very poor parish in Liverpool. And then when she was four, her father was unexpectedly plucked from his parish by the prime minister William Gladstone and appointed as the Bishop of Norwich. This meant that young Dorothy moved across England and went from living in the nursery of a down-at-heel urban vicarage to roaming freely about a large 11th century episcopal palace and its extensive grounds.

In her 1955 memoir about her early life, Lift the Curtain, Erskine Muir corrected a common misconception she had encountered about being born towards the end of such a large family. People assume it must have been fun to be part of "a whole houseful of cheerful young people", she wrote, but this was not at all the case. Because of the wide span of ages between her siblings, it was actually a relatively lonely childhood. Her eldest brother was almost twenty years older than her and many of her older siblings had already moved out and even emigrated before she was old enough to be aware of their existence. Those who remained loved to tease and prank their much younger siblings when they weren't off living their own lives. Her parents were extremely busy with the ceremonial and practical duties involved in her father's job as bishop and seemed to have run a rather Victorian household in which young children did not mingle much with adults. As such her close companions were her brother William, who was next to her in age, and the various staff members at the Bishop's palace who took care of them.

Her parents, John and Margaret Sheepshanks, also held rather Victorian attitudes about educating their daughters. Dorothy's older sisters were only expected to gain a proficiency in music and languages, and to this end learned these subjects with a governess at home before spending a "finishing year" abroad in somewhere like Paris or Dresden in the expectation that soon after they would get married. Academic pursuits were only for the boys, who were expected to win scholarships at public schools like Winchester before going on to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge that would fit them for careers in the clergy, the civil service or philanthropic work. However, two factors enabled Dorothy to buck this trend.

First, the example of her oldest sister Mary, who was 17 years her senior. Mary had impressed everybody with her academic achievements at the high school she attended while the family were based in Liverpool, and after studying abroad in Germany for a year had gone to Newnham College, Cambridge to study languages. This meant that there was at least one female role model for Dorothy when, as a voracious independent reader in her early teens, she began to want more teaching than her governess could provide. Although maybe Mary's example wasn't helpful in the long run, as Dorothy wryly noted about her sister's stellar university career: "From our parents' point of view the result was not altogether fortunate, for Mary came to hold very advanced views in many respects, views of which father disapproved." Mary is better known today as Mary Ryott Sheepshanks, a noted pacifist, suffragist and twentieth century campaigner for adult education.

The second thing that helped young Dorothy in her desire for higher education was her own poor health. The family doctor diagnosed her with a weak heart and advised that she be sent to a seaside boarding school, which, eventually, her reluctant parents agreed to when she was 15. At St Felix School near Southwold in Suffolk, Dorothy thrived. Her work was of a standard that her teachers made a strong case that she should be allowed to sit the Oxford University entrance exam. Even then, she reflected in her memoirs, it was only the fact that she won a scholarship that convinced her parents that it was worth her going to study at all. That she did manage to continue her education was a piece of luck that was going to be a great help to her when tragedy struck a few years later.

But that was all still far in the future. In 1908 young Dorothy Sheepshanks escaped the gilded quasi-Victorian cage of the Bishop's palace in Norwich and became a student at Somerville College, Oxford. She was there four years ahead of Dorothy L. Sayers, so I don't think they will have overlapped, although of course it is interesting that the same college environment formed two writers from similar clergy backgrounds who were to go on to produce work in the same genre. Dorothy Sheepshanks certainly did very well at Somerville, achieving a First in her degree, although according to university rules at the time because she was a woman she was not allowed to graduate or officially receive the qualification she had earned. She did chafe against the strict rules about fraternisation between men and women students that kept her from socialising too much with her beloved brother William, who was studying at New College at the same time. Still, given what was to come, her time in Oxford was to prove well worth the effort it took her to get there. She might not have seen it this way herself, but when she moved to London to get a job and rent a house with her brother, she was also escaping the rather nineteenth century expectations her family had put upon its daughters, who were supposed to while away their lives marrying well to suitable friends of their brothers and bringing up pious children.

The few years Dorothy spent living in a rented house in Hampstead with her brother, working at the Women's Co-Operative Guild and delighting in her new-found independence, were among some of the happiest of her life. That all came to a sudden stop, however, when the First World War broke out in August 1914 and her brother William became determined to join up to fight. She saw him for the final time in May 1917 when he came home from the Front on leave. On his last day, he took her on a shopping trip to Regent Street and bought her a piece of jewellery as a parting gift. He didn't want her to see him off at the station, so their last moments together were on the busy street in the rain. As she later wrote: "I hate Regent Street in the rain to this day." William was killed on 10th July 1917 in Belgium as part of an attempt by British troops to recapture part of that area's strategically vital coastline. Dorothy's memoir ends abruptly on this date, as if even when writing it forty years later she could not countenance recording the way that her life had continued when his had not. They had been the best of friends and the closest of siblings since William's birth, and had planned to be so for the rest of their lives.

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Life did go on, though, as it has a habit of doing, although we have a much less detailed picture of what that looked like for Dorothy, since her only memoir ends in 1917. We do know that in 1922 she married Thomas Muir, a civil servant who had been a contemporary of William's at New College and who worked at the Home Office. Their two children, Christina and Alastair, were born in 1923 and 1927. Then, in 1932, Thomas died suddenly and unexpectedly of cancer, leaving Dorothy as the sole provider for a household that contained two children under the age of ten. Her father had been dead for over twenty years, and her elderly mother was hardly in a position to help. As previously noted, she wasn't particularly close to any of her other siblings and many of them lived abroad. What could Dorothy do in such a situation, other than write a detective novel?

I'm only partly joking. It might seem odd today to say that publishing a detective novel is a sensible response to a sudden change in life circumstances, but in 1933 the book market was very different to how it is today. The appetite from publishers for new crime fiction was voracious and there was less of an emphasis on established and celebrity authors. A debut novel was a cause for excitement rather than scepticism and caution. Serialisations in magazines and newspapers also provided a lucrative additional income stream for writers beyond direct book sales. Plus, it wasn't a complete change of occupation for her. Dorothy was already an author when her husband died, albeit one focused on a more academic sort of writing. In 1924 she had published a two-volume non fiction work titled A History of Milan Under the Visconti, which grew out of her history degree at Oxford. This wasn't a bestseller by any means, but it did receive a few positive, if short, mentions in the press, with the Saturday Review approvingly noting her command of the subject and the Daily News describing it as an "excellent volume". And so, at a time of crisis, she leaned into her literary and academic skills — the ones that her parents had been so reluctant for her to acquire. With her children, she moved to north Oxford, where she managed to rent a house on a long lease from St John’s College. Then she set herself up as a tutor helping to prepare candidates to sit the same Oxford entrance examination she had excelled in two decades earlier. And then amidst the kerfuffle of relocating and grieving and solo parenting and tutoring, she began writing a novel in one of the most popular and fast-growing genres of the early 1930s: the murder mystery.

More on that, after the break.

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Dorothy Erskine Muir's first detective novel, In Muffled Night, was published in 1933. The fascination with detective fiction was in full force by this point, and some of the other notable books published that year reflect the interest in the genre. The Detection Club put out their collaborative Ask a Policeman collection, Dorothy L. Sayers published Murder Must Advertise, Agatha Christie had another success with Poirot in Lord Edgware Dies and Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham solved a surprising mystery at a costume party in Jumping Jenny. This is to name just a few — John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Ronald Knox and many other famed writers of golden age detective fiction also had books out this year. This debut by an unknown credited only as "D. Erskine Muir" was entering a crowded field.

In Muffled Night is my favourite of her three detective novels and, to my mind, her best. It takes as its source material a notorious murder case of the nineteenth century, generally known as the Sandyford case, after the street in Glasgow where in July 1862 a servant named Jessie McPherson was found brutally murdered at the house where she worked. The shocking violence of the attack did much to elevate this case to national public interest, as did some of the peculiar circumstances around it. In particular, the fact that McPherson's employer, the 87 year old family patriarch James Fleming, had been alone in the house all weekend with her body and claimed not to have known anything about it raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, it was McPherson's close friend Jessie McLachlan, a young unmarried woman, who was tried for her murder and sentenced to death. After a public outcry this was converted into life imprisonment, and she was eventually released fifteen years later and allowed to emigrate to American to reunite with her son. Throughout, she maintained her innocence and today her case is considered a major miscarriage of justice.

There can be no doubt that this murder exerted a fascination over the imaginations of early twentieth century crime writers that was only exceeded by the Crippen case and perhaps the Florence Maybrick affair from the late 1880s. John Dickson Carr spent quite a long time reflecting on it in his 1941 novel Seeing is Believing and in 1960 Christianna Brand wrote a whole non-fiction book about it titled Heaven Knows Who — the title reflecting the lasting uncertainty about who had actually killed Jessie McPherson, if it wasn't Jessie McLachlan. There are passing references to it in Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley, Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers and When Last I Died by Gladys Mitchell, too.

But only Dorothy Erskine Muir chose to solve the case through fiction. She transplants the action from Glasgow to London and from 1862 to the early 1930s. The Fleming family becomes the Murrays, a well to do upper middle class dynasty ruled over by an exacting and elderly patriarch named James Murray. Together with his son and two grandchildren, James lives in the same dwelling he occupied when he got married fifty years earlier, with the household still run exactly the same way. The house is a time capsule, with everything from the decor to the servants' schedules still adhering to mid Victorian values. The evocative descriptions of the thickly carpeted, flock wallpapered, silent, airless rooms that open the novel make for a clever contrast with the disorder, violence and rumour that comes later.

The younger generations of Murrays escape this gloomy place as often as they can for a more modern house in the country, and that's what they have done for the crucial weekend during which the major action of the novel takes place. James Murray is left in the London house alone, looked after only by the housekeeper Helen Bailey. When the rest of the family return, they find Helen's bedroom door locked and James disgruntled because she seems to have vanished at the start of the weekend and left him to scrounge his own meals. When her door is broken down, they find that Helen has been horribly and fatally attacked in a way that seems entirely inconsistent with James's claims to have not heard or seen anything all weekend. Inspector Woods, a thoughtful, dedicated Scotland Yard detective who also appears in Erskine Muir's next novel, Five to Five, is put on the case and with a pleasing combination of dogged legwork and subtle insight, eventually brings the case to a definite conclusion.

Although Dorothy Erskine Muir included a note at the start of her novel that "all the above characters are fictitious and have no reference to any living person or persons", many of the major features of the Sandyford case are present in her story. The crucial role played by some bloody footprints and the police reconstruction of how they were created shows up, as does a critical attempt to pawn some jewellery and hide some bloody clothes. Thematically, too, there are many parallels. Helen Bailey's subservient position as housekeeper to an autocratic older employer is drawn straight from the Sandyford case, as is the way in which principal suspect Mary Spens is belittled and discredited because of her love of supposedly frivolous things and her desire to divorce her husband — this also brings the Edith Thompson case from 1923 to mind. That case, of course, inspired its own novelised versions, including F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow. Most strikingly of all in In Muffled Night, the shocking courtroom revelation around which the novel pivots is also a direct lift from real events in 1860s Glasgow.

Erskine Muir does a good job of sketching in the divisive national obsession that the case engenders without spending too long on ghoulish reports or rumours. "The whole country appeared to go mad over the case," we learn about half way through the book. "The 'Murray party' and the 'Spens party' split families, broke friendships, ruined the harmony of clubs. The Press took sides, even the clergy, and every section of the public. Prejudice, of course, far outweighed reason, and lovers of detective methods were overwhelmed and shouted down by partisans of morality." There's something kaleidoscopic about reading about fictional true crime obsessives in a true crime inspired novel that is based on a real life case, but it is nonetheless an effective additional touch.

Where, of course, In Muffled Night diverges from its source material is in the fact that it has an ending. While generations of true crime adherents might like to think they have arrived at the most plausible solution to the Sandyford case, it will forever remain officially unresolved. But in her novel, Erskine Muir constructs a solution that fits all the facts, just as if she had invented the entire plot from scratch. There's an element of wish fulfilment to this, naturally, that reminds me of a 1955 Margery Allingham short story titled "Three is a Lucky Number" that takes the Brides in the Bath murders and gives them a different ending. But still, the reader is able to close the book and feel as though justice was done, even if it was only on the page.

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Dorothy Erskine Muir followed up In Muffled Night with another detective novel featuring Inspector Woods, Five to Five, which was published the following year in 1934. Again she takes a real life case as her source material, this time the Slater case from 1908, in which 82-year-old jewel collector Marion Gilchrist was beaten to death at her home in Glasgow during the brief absence of her live-in maid. The robber was disturbed and stole only a brooch. The violence of the attack and the fact that Gilchrist was well known to be mortally afraid of burglars only increased public interest in the case and the pressure on the police to come up with a viable suspect. A young man named Oscar Slater, who left for New York five days after the murder and who had recently been trying to sell a pawnbroker's ticket for a brooch, was extradited, charged and found guilty by a nine to six margin in the Scottish courts. Slater had been born Oskar Josef Leschziner to a Jewish family based in southeastern Germany — it is very possible that his origins and accent influenced the outcome of the trial, as did his lifestyle as a dandy and a professional gambler. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after 20,000 people signed a petition to the Home Secretary. Slater had an alibi for the time of the crime and the brooch he had pawned was shown to be a totally different piece of jewellery. All evidence against him was circumstantial or prejudiced, such as his supposed "flight" to New York and a highly questionable identity parade that the police conducted. In 1910, the criminologist William Roughead published The Trial of Oscar Slater as part of the Notable British Trials series, in which he highlighted the many flaws in the prosecution's case. This book brought even greater attention to the case, including from Arthur Conan Doyle, who published his own non-fiction book, The Case of Oscar Slater, in 1912. Conan Doyle also helped to fund Slater's successful appeal in 1928, when his conviction was quashed — but only after he had served 19 years of hard labour at Peterhead Prison, where inmates were used as labourers in both a nearby quarry and a shipyard. The Gilchrist murder was never solved.

Five to Five moves the action from Glasgow to London once more, but keeps the essential details of the case. An elderly semi-invalid jewel collector named Simon Ewing is cruelly beaten to death in his flat during the brief absence of his live-in nurse, and Inspector Woods is initially unable to make the timeline of the crime work, given the fact that witnesses in the flat below heard the thumps of the attack and even seemed to see the perpetrator leaving as they went upstairs to help the nurse gain entry. Once again, Erskine Muir plots her own story on top of the details of the case, crafting a clever if disturbing story about greed and familial estrangement against the background of the economic downturn at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. I found this one to be a little less successful than her first effort, in large part I think because she omitted the aspects of Slater's character that in real life made him such an obvious scapegoat for a chaotic police investigation and the miscarriage of justice he experienced so horrifying. Her no-good young man character is a fairly ordinary one who lacks any particular charisma or appeal, for all that the mystery swirls a strange story around him. As an attempt to provide a plausible solution for the Slater case, though, Erskine Muir's plotting cannot be faulted. There's something of the methodical determination of Freeman Wills Crofts Inspector French about the way Inspector Woods goes about solving this one, which provides its own kind of satisfaction, even if it lacks the depth of atmosphere and character she achieved for In Muffled Night.

Dorothy Erskine Muir's third and final detective novel, In Memory of Charles, I propose to only touch on briefly, because I don't think it quite belongs with the other two. It is also, according to the author, based on a real life case, but one that happened somewhere other than Britain, and so far all attempts by both experts and me have failed to identify what occurrence she is referencing. It is once again concerned with the murder of an unpleasant patriarch figure, this time the Charles of the title, a City banker who has relocated his unwilling family to the countryside and is quickly making enemies of his neighbours and tenants with his petty, unpleasant ways. When Charles is found shot in a nearby forest clearing, his household and several others who live nearby come under suspicion. There is no sign of Inspector Woods in this book, with the investigation instead conducted by an Inspector Sturt of Scotland Yard, so it isn't really a follow on from the previous two novels. It was also published after a gap of seven years, and the crime fiction of 1941 was rather different. This book is much more focused on psychology rather than plot and clue and alibi. Its primary themes, I think, are the tension in Charles's household and the divisions between old-fashioned country people and the rich incomers who are beginning to buy up estates and live among them. Some of the horror in In Memory of Charles, especially around the peculiar and haunting memorial obelisk the victim's unhappy wife erects to him, make me think of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None from 1939. I still found In Memory of Charles to be compelling reading, but it made me wish that Dorothy Erskine Muir had left her true crime solving fiction project behind after the two novels of the 1930s and launched into writing her own truly original fiction. But, for reasons I haven't been able to discover, In Memory of Charles was her last detective novel. She lived until 1977 and published a variety of other non-fiction works, including biographies of Florence Nightingale, Machiavelli and Cromwell, but never returned to crime fiction.

As often seemed to happen to less prolific authors, Dorothy Erskine Muir's three thought-provoking detective novels quickly disappeared from view and have only recently been receiving more attention again after their republication in the 2020s by Moonstone Press. They are well worth reading for their qualities as detective novels alone, but I also recommend them because of the way they make the reader think about the relationship between fictional murder and real murder. Beyond just a providing definite solution to an unsolved real life case, Erskine Muir in all three of her novels weaves in a reminder that just because fiction can provide a certain conclusion that real life lacks, it doesn't make a murder in real life any less horrifying. Perhaps fully understanding the deliberate machinations that lay behind such events brings the evil that much closer to us. "To my mind it's been a beastly affair from start to finish," Inspector Woods says at the end of In Muffled Night, a gentle rebuke to another character who is inclined to celebrate the proving one of narrative about this "excellent case" and the quashing of all the others. This is what stayed with me, long after I had finished reading Dorothy Erskine Muir's detective fiction. These are not stories that glory in the murders they unravel, but that even as they lay out these tales, ask us to question whether we should be entertained by such tragedy at all.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated, and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. I'd like to thank Debra at Moonstone Press for first bringing the republication of Dorothy Erskine Muir's detective fiction to my attention. She is also running a special offer for Shedunnit listeners for the 30 days after this episode airs: if you buy the paperback set of Erskine Muir's three novels, you get three for the price of two and the podcast gets a little commission for referring you. You'll find the link for that in the episode description or on the podcast's website at shedunnitshow.com/thecrimesofdorothyerskinemuir, where there will also be a list of all the books mentioned and sources used in the creation of this episode. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

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