The Sanfield Scandal Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 14)

Green Penguin Music

Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Sanfield Scandal by Richard Keverne, Penguin 90.

This book was first published in 1929 and then joined the Green Penguin series in March 1937. It was the fourth novel to appear under the name Richard Keverne, which was the pseudonym of Clifford James Wheeler Hosken, a journalist who lived from 1882 to 1950. He began his crime fiction career in 1926 with Carteret's Cure and then proceeded to put out eleven other novels before the end of 1934 — an incredibly prolific period. One of these, 1930's The Pretender, appeared under his own name, Clifford Hosken, rather than the Keverne pen name. Before he wrapped up his crime fiction enterprise in 1944, he also published several volumes of short stories. He created two recurring police detective characters, Inspector Mace and Inspector Artifex, although neither appears in the novel we're looking at today. He had good publishers in both the UK and the US, and some of his work has drawn favourable comparisons to writers like Henry Wade and Freeman Wills Crofts. And yet, today the name Richard Keverne is almost entirely unknown, even to the most arden fans of interwar crime writing. We'll be trying to work out whether that obscurity is deserved or not later on in the episode.

The Sanfield Scandal focuses on two sets of strange events that take place a decade apart. A diamond necklace was stolen at a house party at the Tower House, a country estate with a bonafide castle in its grounds, during the First World War. Not long after, Sir Jeremy Sanfield shut up the house and left for America, leaving certain key documents about what really happened that night in the hands of his London lawyers. He never returns to England. Years later, Sir Jeremy is dead, and his son reopens the Tower House to be rented out. When its new tenant meets with a mysterious accident in the castle and a peculiarly persistent American visitor keeps popping up, the local doctor's sister, Faith Stanhope, vows to investigate.

Joining me to discuss The Sanfield Scandal is Jim Noy, a golden age detective fiction critic and the author of the Invisible Event blog. You might remember Jim from past Shedunnit episodes Locked Room, in which he told us all about impossible crimes, and The Long Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, which covered Jim's process in writing his novel The Red Death Murders. This book feels like it's a bit off his usual reading track, so I'm intrigued to hear what he has made of this more obscure title in the Green Penguin series.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. This book also contains the deliberate killing of an animal and we talk about that too, and I'll indicate the timestamp for that in the description as well. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Jim gives this one and why.

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Caroline: So what was your previous knowledge of or experience with Richard Keverne before we planned to do this?

Jim: Zero. I was dimly aware of the name probably because I have seen him on green penguins in bookshops that I've frequented down the years. I couldn't tell you anything about the style of book he wrote. If pressed prior to this, I couldn't have told you one of the titles of his books, absolutely nothing about him. Which in a way I feel speaks volumes in that I feel like a lot of the stuff that is great in the golden age is quite well known. I feel that with a lot of the reprints that we've had in recent years, a lot of the stuff that is on the second tier has been reprinted. A lot of the stuff on the third tier has started to be reprinted, and yet still it seems that no one has touched Richard Keverne and that can go one of two ways. Maybe there are some amazing books and he is completely overlooked, or maybe he is a little bit forgettable and is forgotten. We will obviously get into what we thought of the book in due course, but no, I knew nothing about him. I had no experience of him.

It was really lovely. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to come to a book with zero preconceptions because every book on my TBR is on my TBR because I want to read it, and so I therefore have some anticipation of it being good, whereas this I no idea what I was getting. And it's the first book I've read without preconceptions for years, I think.

Caroline: It's a big part of why I love doing this series because I get to have that experience like two or three times a year now. Where the Green Penguin series is truly this amazingly curated list of stuff you know, incredibly well, like the last one we did was The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers, which, okay, isn't the most famous Sayers, but it's still a Sayers.

Jim: Still well known, yeah.

Caroline: Lots of people have read it, it's still well known. And now this one, I was the same. I think that I had read the name Richard Keverne in an article once about Golden Age thriller writers. So I think I'd pegged him in my mind as thriller writer and had never inquired further than that or done anything else with it.

Never even heard the title of this book before I looked down the green penguin list to see what was coming up. So I guess therefore you had no expectations either way going into this novel, going in blind.

Jim: Absolutely nothing.

Caroline: Yeah, same. And so therefore, when started reading this, it opens in this legal context. We've got solicitors, Mr. Trigg and Mr. Carew. We learn about the Sanfield family estate, and very quickly there's a burglary and a mysterious woman and a slightly dodgy chauffeur. What were you thinking as you were reading those opening chapters? Where was it placing you?

Jim: Yeah, that's an excellent question. I suppose you're still aware that it could go almost anywhere. Obviously something is stolen, which is going to be meaningful. That's going to be a MacGuffin. You very much get that sense because otherwise, why start the plot at that point? I was aware at this point it could still turn into anything.

It could be a Freeman Wills Croftsian novel of formal detection. It could be that chapter two introduces our obscure foreign amateur detective who is happens to be passing by, with his indistinguishable foreign accent, of course. Again, it was probably once I'd got about maybe three chapters in and we'd met some people and we'd got a sense of how the people related to each other, and I started to think, oh, this is kind of Edgar Wallace.

And it was at that point where I started to realise we're probably not going to get a detective. It's not a novel of detection. This is much more of a thrillery setup. And it's going to be these sort of loosely realised, a reversal every three or four chapters, kind of thing that Wallace made incredibly popular. And so once I got that idiom of expectation into my head...Was that better? I'm not entirely sure if that was better, but certainly it's always nice to get a relatively quick sense of what a book is going to be, to not be left in doubt with what...Particularly when you pick it up with no preconceptions to not be left with any doubt as to what kind of thing you are getting.

Because I think the quicker you get on a book's wavelength, the more you have realistic expectations of what it's going to be, and then therefore the less likely it is to frustrate you when it doesn't turn out to be what you'd hoped it was going to be. I think if it had started with a lot of police officers and you're like, oh, okay, cool. This is going to be a formal novel of police detection and then it devolved into what it devolved into, I think I would have been furious. But because we started off with the elements of the book, which are evinced in those first few chapters, you get the very sense of a small community. I actually think the small community in it is very well realised. Although you only really have about eight characters.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jim: I think they do very well with a small town in the sense of people being very involved in everybody's life. It's very much a sense of some sort of loosely realised, not quite thought through plot shenanigans. The fact that it starts off like that and is that exact kind of book worked for me, I think.

Caroline: I did once because then quickly we moved to the small community to this place called Burgrave, which I think has to be Suffolk. As it happens the dedication of this book sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I discovered that the castle that's mentioned in the man who donated his castle to the community, it is referenced to a place called Orford in Suffolk where the man who it's dedicated to, Arthur Churchman. He bought this ruined Norman castle, and then his family used it as like a summer house or something, and then he donated it to community. As it happens, I know it well because my family used to go sailing there every year. And you can still visit the castle. I think it's now English heritage. It's free. You can climb all over it. And it is very interesting. So I've decided therefore that this book is set in Suffolk because of that link. I don't know for sure. Anyway, so he takes us to Suffolk and this small town called Burgrave. We meet the primary core of characters.

And once we did, I had the thought, did we even need that opening in London? Could we not just have been told that there was a burglary? I agree about the Edgar Wallace-ness of it all, and maybe it being urban helps you with that feeling. But yeah, I was looking backwards and being like, I don't know that I needed that. I could have started in chapter two.

Jim: I do feel that it fits in with the nature of the revelations in the book because several chapters in, you are told, oh, so-and-so got in the car and now this character in the book was not wearing the moustache that he had on before when he was playing the chauffeur. And that's the way Keverne, there's that very gentle way in which, like I say, every three, four chapters you are told of some new revelation in this very loosely thrillery way. I have had a lot of thoughts about this, it must be said, and I do not wish to bore your listeners with all of my thoughts, but I do think that is partly just Keverne writing this story in a way that is keeping everybody on board, because then they're able to go, oh, so these are the people who did the burglary. And while it could be they did the burglary because they have the paper that is stolen to refer to. I think it's nice that it ties up. You're right, we didn't need to see the burglary. But then equally, there's a lot of stuff in the book I feel we don't need to see, but I think it's just the nature of Keverne's writing. I don't think each editor was working particularly hard on this one, shall we say.

Caroline: No. So soon after we get to Burgrave, we meet two main characters, the main characters, perhaps, Hilary Borden, who is the tenant of the Sanfield estate, the Tower House, and Faith Stanhope, who is the doctor's bored sister and is trying to fill her days with visiting people and generally making herself helpful, but doesn't really seem to have a driving passion or occupation in life.

Speaking of triggers that make you realise what kind of book you're in. I think the one for me was when early on, Borden has what seems like a quite serious accident initially in this ruined castle that's in the grounds of the house, like he's found unconscious on the floor. The gardener says he fell. Faith Stanhope runs in and she thinks she's going to have to do first aid until her brother gets there. Turns out to be not quite so serious. And I was like, oh, so this isn't a murder mystery, is it? Because if it was, think he would have died and that would thus have been the crime we're detecting.

So that felt quite significant to me that there was, the path forked there. We could have gone off into one type of book, but actually we carried on with this as you say, this thriller, everything keeps changing slightly. We're not on firm ground. We don't quite know where we stand. There's all this uncertainty about who is this mysterious Mr. Borden who turned up opportunely to rent the house. What is the family scandal? What were the papers that were stolen? We don't know. Rather than it being a clear case of corpse, let's find out who did that.

Jim: Yep. That's fair. I think that's an excellent point, that it does diverge at that point and it became, I really could not get the Famous Five out of my head.

Caroline: Me neither. It was Famous Five, it was secret seven. It was, yeah, very much a sort of summer holiday adventure book in that way.

Jim: Yeah. It was, the Famous Five did not exist in 1929, of course. But you can absolutely see someone reading the Famous Five and going, oh I'm going to write a grownup book with jolly adventures. And it's exactly that. There is a point not too long after that where Borden is, I think, talking about some plan that he's going to see through and Faith Stanhope is like, well, I'll come along and I'll help. And he's like, 'my, you are such a bally good girl!' It's that it's exactly that. I think that I highlighted that, because I was like, that sums up the entire book. 'Oh. I say, I wouldn't have thought a girl would be in for these kind of adventures.' It's exactly that for the rest of the book. And there is a place for that kind of mystery.

Caroline: Yeah. It also, in addition to Famous Five, it reminded me last summer I through some serendipitous pickups in secondhand bookshops read a few of a school series from, I think it starts in the twenties and then extended on, called the Abbey Series by Elsie J. Oxenham, in which it's your classic girls schoolgirl stuff. Like a group of loosely connected young women who went to the same school then following what happens to them in the rest of their lives. But in this particular series, they're not united around a particular school so much as that they all have connections to this ruined abbey that's in the grounds of a house where their school was sited briefly, I think. And so all the stories revolve around the Abbey somehow. And every book someone has to return to the Abbey. And some new mystery about it is uncovered. And I couldn't stop thinking about that as well. That because the castle in this book, it doesn't really need to be there.

It's just this kind of repository for everybody's secrets. The castle itself is not part of the crime. It's just where people hide stuff and go to gloat over their secrets. So yeah, it reminded me of Oxenham's Abbey in that way, which also, especially when she was like 18 books deep starts to feel a bit forced and odd.

We are now going to be entering the spoiler zone, so stop here if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to hear major plot details.

She's like, we better go to the ruined Cistercian Abbey, because we haven't been there yet this book.

Jim: I love it. Yeah, you're right. It is very much the kind of place where, as you say, people hide things, drop a monographed handkerchief, and it's then, the whole, I'm sure we will get into the nature of the plot a bit later on, but yeah, you do wonder is there like an idea of a second book based around this.

A bit like Agatha Christie Christie with The Secret of Chimneys or something like that, is there then like we're going to come back to these characters. I don't know if you ever returned to these characters.

Caroline: I haven't looked into that either. But I do wonder if Faith, I feel like Faith is the most obvious recurrence in the same way of Bundle Brent is.

Jim: Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Caroline: She comes back somehow. But yes, given all of this derring do around a castle, it's not at all surprising then that you gradually realise that this is a hidden treasure mystery, or if not hidden treasure, hidden secret.

And different parties are all looking for this necklace that was stolen or hidden 20 years ago, hidden in the ruined castle. MacGuffins abound, basically. It did ring a small bell in my head and I was like, Ooh, Nine Tailors. This is same idea. I think this predates Nine Tailors.

Jim: It does.

Caroline: But in the same way that this is very Famous Five, that parts of it felt very Nine Tailors to me looking in the way that, the old squire paid off the woman and bankrupted himself doing it, same deal. Anyway, once we learn that this is about the hidden treasure, and people start observing each other from priest holes and pacing out rooms to find secret passages. How did you feel about it then?

Jim: By that point I was going with it. I didn't love it. It's not my kind of book. Like it pays to read broadly in the genre so that you don't get too bored of too much of the same thing. To be honest, my main reflection about halfway through was that I have about, I reckon about five and a half thousand books left in my life and had this not been one of them, I think I would have been okay with it. Like from well before the halfway point, I could tell you pretty much exactly what was going to happen in the rest of that book. Now, there was the odd reversal here or there, fine, of almost zero consequence, but from before the halfway point, I could tell you pretty much exactly what was going to happen in the rest of that book.

And there's an element of that is quite comforting. I can absolutely understand why that style of book would be very appealing. The genre is filled with tropes that we love because we like seeing the same themes recur, and we find that very comforting. Plot-wise, I'm not sure I'm such a huge fan of it, but I felt very much like the lawyer in Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair where every single day the same biscuit is bought in on the tray and the same cup of tea and it's just the same thing and it doesn't have to think. And I just yeah. I knew that was going to happen. Yeah, you just flipping through very casually. It just let it wash over me, which was nice, because I typically read much more puzzle dense stuff where you have to concentrate a lot harder and it was quite nice to just do something where I could almost half disengage my brain. It turned out to be pretty much the exact style of book that I expected from the second, third chapter I was all right with that.

I think I would have been irritated if it suddenly veered into formal detection or anything too complicated. I think it set itself up well and then sold you what it promised.

Caroline: I felt the same. I think it's a book that keeps its promises. Its promises are not complicated or elaborate or special perhaps, but it doesn't disappoint. It doesn't build you up to expect something that it then doesn't deliver. I think that's definitely true. I also think there is a place for this kind of book in the slightly brain switching off way.

And actually I recently wrote a review of a book that was a critique of romance fiction. And the author said something in it that I think applies to this situation too. And she said that romance is full of tropes, the biggest one being the happily ever after. She said but the best ones have me turning the pages excitedly, wanting to know what's going to happen even though I know what is going to happen.

And I think that applies to the best detective fiction as well. It takes your expectations and tropes. You know the crime is going to be solved at the end. You probably know even in more detail than that, how it's going to turn out. But you still read with suspense and excitement. Because the author makes you believe that maybe it's not going to, maybe this is the one time it won't turn out all as you expect.

I didn't feel that same tension around the form in Richard Keverne. In fact, the only place where he did surprise me was that Faith and Borden didn't fall into each other's arms at the end. I was like, if this was an Agatha Christie from 1924, they absolutely would have linked arms and skipped over the horizon into the sunset. But they didn't, it was left more ambiguous.

Jim: He would have gone back to America. She would have: 'I'll come with you, of course', because I was disaffected in my life here in Surrey, and so I will. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. Yeah. That I thought I'd misread it, because that was That's true. That's the one thing where I was like of course these two are going to fall into each arms in the end, and they didn't. It was weird.

Caroline: That was the only way in which he surprised me the rest of the time. It was very much as you expect, promises made and low stakes promises made and kept.

Jim: Yeah.

Caroline: What perhaps does make this book feel a bit looser is that there is no detective, there's no kind of point of view character. Even when Crofts is doing howdunnit in the early 1930s and Inspector French is mostly off the page and we're in the mind of the perpetrator instead, you still have that sense that there is this intelligence at work in the background and here I didn't have that feeling at all.

Do you feel like there is even a detective character? There is the investigator, I suppose.

Jim: Yeah, it's not a novel of detection, so there isn't really a detective character. There are these author inserts who are told things and there's no formal detection in that. They don't really ever work anything out, and we, as a reader. Yes, things happen to and around them, and we as a reader are never really given enough information to be able to make a connection, which is then going to be revealed at the end.

All the revelations happen as they go along. So when you find out that Carew is in league with the thieves, there's no clever slip that you are then told several chapters later, oh, if you'd recognised that he called her Moira when she said her name was Margaret or whatever. So there's no detection in that regard.

It is very much just that young adventurer, again, Bundle Brent element to it, and as you're quite right, there is no consistent point of view. So sometimes it is seen from Faith's point of view, sometimes it is seen from Borden's point of view. It's this nebulous third person overview.

Sometimes it's seen from the perspective of the bad guys who we gradually learn are exactly what they appear to be in the first place. If you can gradually learn that, I'm not entirely sure. I am a fan of books picking a certain number of points of view and sticking to it. It can be one person, you follow one person very closely. It could be like you mentioned Crofts, where typically with his howcatchems, you would have some from French's perspective and some from the murderer's perspective, and that's fine. That alternates between two perspectives. Here I just felt, again, because of the loose nature of the revelations, and there's no formal structuring to it, there's no real observation of clueing. I just felt Keverne was like, I need people to know that Carew is in league with bad guys. So I'm going to have a scene in which Carew has a conversation with the bad guys and they all know each other, and then we'll just go on from there. And it's very much the book where when you find a handkerchief with JM stitched in it, the handkerchief belongs to somebody with the initials JM. There's zero subterfuge, there's zero attempt to construct anything. It's like a series of very small sandcastles on the beach. There's no sense of bricks going in to make a nice bigger wall. It is just these very small, here's a thing, here's a thing, here's a thing, here's a thing.

And there's no opportunity then for a detective to put those bricks together and come up with the wall that you're just watching a series of but a bucket is overturned and a bucket is refilled and overturned, and a bucket is refilled and overturned, which again, it promised to be that kind of book. While I prefer it wasn't, I also can't really complain that it was.

Caroline: Yeah. There were a few things where revelations were made piecemeal to other characters. I quite enjoyed that. Faith learns something, for instance, the true identity of Mr. Borden as a member of the Sanfield family. But not everybody else knows that yet, and he doesn't know that she knows.

So we get a couple of chapters of seeing how she behaves under those conditions before finally everybody is put in the picture. And that happens a few times with different little gobbets of information. So I did enjoy that. But yes, I agree. There's no detection meaningfully. I enjoyed the little mini bits of tension that that created. But you're right it's not a novel of layers where we penetrate through to one level of understanding only to realise that there's another one beneath or anything like that. And in some cases I felt like Keverne was almost a bit careless with the cards he had to play.

His primary mystery is who is Hilary Borden? Who is this weather beaten man of the empire who's suddenly appeared and taken the lease on this country estate with the mysterious castle in the grounds right when he was needed to be there. And he, I think only just over halfway through the book we and Faith, and eventually everyone learns that he's actually Jack Sanfield, the missing heir. I feel like that's a last chapter revelation, if ever I saw one, and here he is giving it away halfway through.

Jim: See it never even occurred to me that was a mystery. I just assumed that he was a guy who happened to show up and there was something about his getting access to the house that then forced the hands of the criminals who were trying to get into the house. So when old Mr. Trig turns up and he was like, my God, you are Jack Sanfield. I was like okay. I wasn't even aware that I wasn't even aware that I should be astounded by this. I was like, oh, cool. Yeah just another thing that's happened. And I suppose that there, they're hints where he turns up to hire the place from Mr. Carew and he says, I've got malaria and I've been told that I need to get some fresh air. And then you, again, you are immediately told this guy didn't appear at all malarial. And so I was like, oh yeah, cool. But maybe I should have thought about it a bit more. But again, like I say, I was reading it with maybe half an eye closed anyway, so that never occurred to me to be a mystery. The thing that was the biggest mystery for me was, it's called The Sanfield Scandal. And yet, fairly early on it's established that there isn't really anybody else who's going to be affected by the scandal. Because they're just like, oh, you stole the papers and, maybe they have blackmail in mind.

And somebody goes who would they blackmail? And they're like, oh yeah, good point. There's the dude in America, but he doesn't really care. So there is no scandal.

Caroline: Yeah, you're right.

Jim: And so for me, the big mystery was, why is it called The Sanfield Scandal?

Caroline: Yes, you're right. It should much better be called like the The Sanfield Affair like that. Something a bit less definite. because you're right, there is no scandal. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. The Mysterious Tower Affair or I don't know, some something else. I feel like that was a bit of a misnomer. And then once you get to what the scandal is, I'm a bit like, oh, isn't that all? So the scandal is that somebody attended a party, pretended that her expensive necklace was stolen at the party, whereas in fact she hid it somewhere and then the guy whose house the party was at rather than let her claim on the insurance paid her 20,000 pounds, which is the value of the thing that was stolen. I'm not sure I understand why that would be scandalous, because somebody has something stolen at your party, but equally she's going to claim it from the insurance anyway.

Caroline: I think my only guess is that it speaks to something that is said a lot in detective fiction that I just don't think we care about anymore, which is the idea that even having the police anywhere near you is scandalous. People always saying yes, I'm aware there's two corpses on my hearth rug, but can we possibly just hush this up among ourselves?

That's fairly common, right? So that's the only breath of scandal I could imagine that having to, probably, for an insurance claim, even then you'd have to call the police, make an official report. There'd have to be some attempt to recover, investigate before an insurer is going to pay out. And that having grubby little constables sniffing around your castle is just not to be countenanced.

Therefore, you pay the woman yourself and then you avoid all of that. I agree. I don't think even at the time that's not really a scandal. That's just business, isn't it? Just ordinary getting on with things. And then the only other vaguely scandalous thing is this question of whether the older Sanfield brother, whether he took his own life when actually it was given out that he had died from his war wounds. I think he was back home to convalesce?

Jim: Yes.

Caroline: Which again, maybe that would have been scandalous in 1918, but we're quite a long way after that now, and I think enough collective trauma has been experienced that I don't think, I don't think anyone's going to invite the family over to dinner, just if that's known, so yes, I agree that the scandal is non-exist or very historical if it exists at all.

Jim: I like your talking about 1918 because it did strike me as the kind of book that probably should have been published at least 10 years earlier. This is very flattered to be considered part of the Golden Age.

Caroline: Yeah, I think that's interesting. I don't know whether it's even a kind of nostalgia product. When it does come out in the late twenties that people did enjoy reading the stuff Edgar Wallace was doing in 1919. And therefore there's still a market for that, even though it's not the primary, it's not where the kind of people at the forefront of the genre are anymore, even where Edgar Wallace is anymore. But there are still people who want it. I wonder if maybe that's Keverne's niche.

Jim: Perhaps because Wallace was still publishing in 1929, he died in 1932, I would think, or 33. He was still very much selling thousands, millions of books every year. So this does feel like something, which yes, possibly was published because it was very similar to something that had been successful. In fairness, Christie published The Seven Dials Mystery in 1929, which isn't entirely dissimilar. She'd published Secret of Chimneys, which this brought to mind quite a lot. Was that three, four years earlier? So just because it is the Golden Age, which we say starts in 1920, not entirely sure of I think that's just out of deference to Christie and Crofts both publishing their debuts in 1920. I think that there is it trying to fit into a niche of something which is perhaps easier to understand.

Proper clued detection is still very much a new thing at this stage. There have been a few attempts to do something interesting with it, but I'm going to say the majority of people writing crime and mystery stuff in this era are probably still more strongly influenced by the very long hand of Edwardian fiction than they are trying to innovate.

But, we saw so much innovation in the 1930s. I think the majority of what's happening in late 1920 is still very... I don't wanna say hide bound, but is still very caught up in the incredibly long tail of what has been being written for the 130 odd 140 odd years prior.

Caroline: I think that's an astute observation. I would think as well of Margery Allingham and what she's doing with her first few books in the late 1920s. The Crime at Black Dudley is also a bit famous, five-ish in its way. Yes, I think you're right. We, looking back on this period, we have these ideas about when people started doing various things and what the dominant formers, and I guess we've decided it's, yeah the clued detective story of, Christie in the thirties, Berkeley in the thirties, Carr, et cetera. But actually maybe if you were living through it. The volume of Keverne type stuff that's still going on. Maybe that did feel like that was crime fiction too, even though now we've made it a footnote.

Jim: Yeah. It very much was Christie, Man in the Brown Suit is very sort of adventury. You look at some of Crofts' early stuff, first published in 1920, did The Cheyne Mystery, which is fundamentally a kind of a sea-based thriller. He did The Pit-Prop Syndicate, which is a very tedious thriller. Crofts had also in the 1920s written arguably two of the best novels of the entire Golden Age in The Starvel Tragedy, and The Sea Mystery. And Christie had written something a lot more formal, obviously with Styles and with Murder on the Links to an extent. And obviously The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, which did a huge amount to progress the form. But you still had people like JJ Connington who was writing in the early 1920s doing these sort of loosely, not quite realised kind of country house adventures.

I'm a firm believer in the fact that I think Anthony Berkeley probably invented the country house mystery in 1925. And so to make it actually a formal idea of detection attached to a country house party with The L we look at back at this era and go it was formal detection. It was proper clues, proper development logically realising an ending, which is inevitable, but also surprising in some way. But as much as you had some really good work being done by the late 1920s Berkeley published The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Gladys Mitchell with Speedy Death. I think that was 1929. What else? Dashiel Hammett and The Dain Curse was doing a lot of good work in 1929. Those again, I feel, are probably outliers for the twenties, where it was more what ho chocks away good fun chaps stuff and I'm not sure that is so golden, but perhaps the twenties are less golden. I do think people who are golden age fans are probably more a fan of what went on in the thirties and into the forties than they are on the whole of most of what happened in the twenties.

Caroline: Yeah, I think we do just look past what we aren't so interested in and what doesn't hold up quite so well. Speaking of promises made by this book or fulfilled or unfulfilled, I was absolutely sure all the way through that there was going to be espionage somewhere. It just felt to me like at some point, spies are going to jump out from behind a bush because that's what happens in a lot of these books.

The Christie ones you've mentioned have this kind of espionage angle to them. The early Tommy and Tuppence ones certainly do. Ditto, I think at least some of the Allingham ones do as well. So I was sure that there were going to be spies and then there weren't any spies. It was just a simple case of some dastardly American gangsters trying to steal a necklace and blackmail some people, and they're all very efficiently rounded up. And that's the end. Nothing else. How did you find the ending?

Jim: But I think that was all it was ever going to be. I think as soon as there had to be something bigger, as soon as there had to be like an Emperor Palpatine behind it all or something else with wider implications, I would have been very surprised had that been the case, because there was such a focus on these eight characters I think at most, that if they then turn around and go, oh, and also there are 1920- We were not quite in the red scare yet, are we? It's far too early for that, but there are whatever the 1920s equivalent of the Nazis are or whatever the 1920s equivalent of the communist in the fifties is.

Caroline: Or even just organised crime, like I think sometimes, like a shadowy underworld network of criminals. And it's not even that. It's literally just these, American entrepreneurs.

Jim: Yeah. Entrepreneurs, I like that, but like even then, the crimes were mostly drug gangs.

Caroline: Yes, true.

Jim: Right? I've read books where there's absolutely, I will not spoil it, but absolutely insane plot where they're smuggling drugs by sealing together the pages of newspapers and hiding the drugs between the pages of newspapers.

And you're just like, what? What? So even if it had been like a drug gang, there would have had to been some reason for the drug- I suppose they could have gone, we need the 20,000 pound necklace to finance the next bit of the drug gang operation, but I think even then, that requires Keverne to raise his nose slightly above the level of his typewriter and be more interested than whatever is immediately happening in what he's writing. The end was hilarious. I'm a bit like you. I thought the two main characters would end up falling into each other's arms and I figured they'd return to America and she'd give up the life that she was bored of. And I think everyone just gets caught and possibly confesses. Yes. And Carew, the lawyer who's in with it, is then very willing to give up his conspirators and just tells everything to the police.

Caroline: And it's all wrapped up in the easy and efficient way of getting a villain to monologue while a policeman is listening on the other side of the door. A policeman is on the page for about two seconds to just walk the perps out to the car.

Basically, they don't actually really engage in the detection or even the revelation at all. And that's it. As I said, apart from the lack of espionage or some deeper evil behind it all the only thing that surprised me was the lack of a clear romantic resolution, which I feel in this type of Agatha Christie or in, say, a Patricia Wentworth, you would a hundred percent definitely get that. But instead we get this slightly ambiguous ending where Borden slash Sanfield makes clear that he is going to return to America. He doesn't want to pursue the life of the English squire in diminishing circumstances. He's going back to America, and she just says yeah, I guess so. And then that's the end. So there's not even really the promise that she's going to go visit him or anything like that. So that ambiguity was interesting, but it felt more lazy than laden with meaning.

Content Warning: Below, Caroline and Jim discuss killing of a dog in the narrative.

Jim: That's fair. That's fair. I suppose possibly the one bit upon reflection that might have surprised me is they killed the dog.

Caroline: Oh, I was going to mention this. That as a dog owner myself, I was pretty incensed by that.

Jim: I can't work out if that is just, it's a slightly more callous age, and so there isn't quite that. Because I, I have read other books from this era in which animals die. There are books from 2025 in which animals die, of course. But he was obviously quite moved by it and quite upset by it, and quite, generally put out by it. It was like, oh, the dog's dead.

Caroline: They were saddened. Yeah, the good people found it sad and disgusting, which which is better than my major bone of contention in this area is Edmund Crispin, who in basically every book is doing something horrible to a dog and always in this, oh, haha isn't it terribly funny kind of way. It's no, it's not terribly funny.

Jim: That's really interesting. I don't think I'll ever read Crispin in quite the same way. I hadn't picked up on that myself.

Caroline: Honestly, if it's not dogs, it's horses. There is some, and I don't, from what I've been able to read about his biography, he doesn't seem I think he had cats that he was very fond of and stuff like that. He doesn't seem like someone who at all personally had any interest in animal cruelty, and yet it's in every single book there is element of it.

I could understand it if it was a character trait he fell back on to show that somebody was a villain. It's not even as simple as that, but yeah. Anyway I found the death of the dog sad. I think it would have been possible to use the dog in the plot without killing it, it did perform a useful function a few times in terms of alerting to intruders and sealing off an exit to a place and that kind of thing. And I suppose having the dog be poisoned by the baddies definitely clinched that they were baddies, but I don't think we doubted that before that happened.

Jim: No, I think that's fair. There was nothing to stop them drugging it and then running off with it and locking it up somewhere or drugging it and dumping it in the woods. So it's out of the way for a couple of chapters or something like that. But then, like I said, post World War I, I do wonder if there is this slight lack of sensitivity around these issues, whether they just didn't think much in the same way that there's often a I don't know, anti-Semitic streak that comes out and these things isn't necessarily meant to be, not that there is in this book, but yeah, there is from just general writing from this era that isn't necessarily intended to be shocking or hurtful or hateful. It's just a thing that happens. It's just an opinion that people express, in the same way that I need the dog to be out of the way, so the best way to do it's to kill the dog. And you're like, oh, okay. A hundred years later, we're a little bit more sensitive about that kind of thing. But I genuinely didn't expect the dog to die. But that's partly because I felt like a big swing. I don't think there was necessarily was a big swing for Keverne. I think it was just a way for him to get the dog out of the way, because the dog has to be out of the way for the plot to happen.

Caroline: You're right. It's not a big emotional beat, although, as you say, the characters do express regret about it, but they aren't still regretting it eight chapters later or something.

Jim: the dog is quite swiftly forgotten.

Caroline: Yeah it's not the motivation for someone to suddenly go off on a different path and act totally differently. I feel like maybe in a more recent book you might have something as shocking as a, the death of a child or an animal if it then propels a character to do something really important or something like that. But yeah, not otherwise. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm glad you mentioned that.

So now that we've talked all the way through the book and we've talked a bit about where it sits in the chronological period and so on, what's your assessment of Richard Keverne generally? Do you think he deserves his slightly forgotten, lesser known status, or should people be seeking him out?

Jim: I am always reluctant to write an author off after one book because I feel if your first Christie is Passenger to Frankfurt, you're going to absolutely write her off. Or if your first Carr is Panic in Box C, you're absolutely going to write him off. If your first Freeman Wills Crofts is The Pit-Prop Syndicate, you're going to write him off.

And so I feel here Keverne wrote exactly the book that he promised you upfront. He would write as we've said, if that kind of pre-Famous Five loose adventuring that you don't have to pay too much attention appeals to somebody listening to this, then I see no reason not to assume that it wouldn't occur elsewhere in Keverne's writing. Equally Freeman Wills Crofts never quite wrote anything like The Pit-Prop Syndicate again. So maybe this is a one off. It's very difficult to tell. I am always reluctant to say after one book, no, you shouldn't read this author. Will I be seeking Keverne again, as I say, I've got five and a half thousand books left in my life.

Caroline: I love that you think about it that way.

Jim: Yeah. Unfortunate. I'm fortunately I do, so I would have read a good 3000 of those books before I feel compelled to be knocking anything off the list with more Richard Keverne, let's say. If the opportunity came up and if somebody said there was a particularly good one that I should seek out, then I would seek it out. This is not so ruinously bad that I would never read anything by the guy again. But if, it's a big if, this is emblematic of the kind of thing he wrote, I can understand why he is largely forgotten.

Caroline: Yes I would agree with that, and I would add that I found the prose very readable. Sometimes in the Edgar Wallace School of Writing today, the prose is just too overwrought or affected.

And that distracts me from my pleasant enjoyment of just being swept along. Whereas I found Keverne's prose to be unremarkable and very clean, and therefore no barrier to just enjoying the, and then adventure of it all. So in that sense, I might be more inclined. I think honestly, I, if I wanted this type of book, I might be more inclined to pick up a Richard Keverne than say an Edgar Wallace even. I'm not a noted lover of Edgar Wallace. I just find him a bit much sometimes. This is much calmer and more peaceful, and if that's what you're seeking, then I think he can provide it.

But yeah, I would take a recommendation if there's Keverne enthusiasts out there who have read them all and can say, no, this is the one, I would contemplate it. But one question I often get for with the Green Penguin series is when I say that I think a book is just okay. I say why is it a Green Penguin then?

What weren't they choosing the best of the best? And I think the answer to that, insofar as I've been able to research it, is that they were choosing what was available. Getting hold of paperback rights was still a very new thing. A lot of publishers were very sceptical about it. They thought it was going to cannibalise the sales of their preexisting editions.

And so a lot of the time they weren't interested in having their stuff be reprinted. So it was what could be got, what could be got for the budget that they had, and therefore you end up with some strange bedfellows.

Jim: Oh yeah. I mean there's no unified guarantee of quality of a book anyway. So to somebody, this might be an amazing book, good luck to that person. But nevertheless, there is possibly someone out there who exists who thinks this is an amazing book. If you are a fan of Gerald Verner, you would probably really enjoy this, for instance. And if you enjoyed this, you'd probably be a fan of Gerald Verner. Yes I think it would be a mistake to assume, as I used to when I first started getting into this genre that the Green Penguin was a guarantee of quality. I think you are absolutely right. I think the Green Penguin was a guarantee of availability and I think that there is a lot of stuff published in Green Penguin that fundamentally, they probably just wanted to put out a certain number of books a year, or they wanted to have a broad range of books and it was fundamentally whoever would sign up to it. But equally, somebody out there read The Problem of the Green Capsule by John Dickson Carr and gave it one out of 10 for God's sakes. That's the best book the Golden Age ever produced, and somebody thinks it's only worth 10% of the available praise that can be poured upon it. So there's no guarantee that something is going to be universally adored by everybody. It's going to be very good for someone and fairly middling for I think the rest of us.

Caroline: So with that in mind, how many green penguins out of five do you want to award The Sanfield Scandal?

Jim: Because it made me have a lot of thoughts about what went on in the 1920s and what we talk of as the golden age and how a lot of the 1920s stuff is probably flattered by being included in the Golden Age umbrella, I would give it probably three out of five, but for someone who isn't as obsessed as me on the nature of golden age detective fiction, which is most normal people, I think, I'd probably say come in it expecting a two out of five, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Caroline: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think for instance I couldn't in all if you want this kind of thriller without detection, I don't think I could recommend you this book over an early Margery Allingham for instance. She does that, but she's got better characters and better writing. You know what I mean? So yeah. I think three for the interest, two for the book seems fair to me.

Jim: You can read The Secret of Chimneys. You can read The Man in the Brown Suit. You can read The Seven Dials Mystery. You can read early JJ Connington. There's plenty of other stuff out there that does this stuff better. And by the time you are tired of that style of book, you will then be ready to move on to proper detective fiction.

Caroline: Thank you very much for joining me in this contemplation, Jim. It's been great to have you.

Jim: It is always lovely to chat, Caroline. Thank you so much for thinking of me and thank you again. I'm genuinely really grateful for the opportunity to come to something with no preconceptions at all. Such a rare experience these days. It was I honestly really enjoyed being able to do that, so thank you. It's been lovely.

Music

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

Many thanks to my guest, Jim Noy. He publishes reviews of golden age detective fiction prolifically on his excellent blog, theinvisibleevent.com, and he has also written a crime novel, The Red Death Murders, which you should definitely check out too. You can find a link to that, as well as all the other titles we referenced, in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thesanfieldscandal. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

The next episode of Green Penguin Book Club will be coming your way in May and will be covering The Murders in Praed Street by John Rhode, so if you're reading along with me, that's your next target. To help you find copies of this book, I've made a page on the Shedunnit website that links to all the various retailers, and that's linked in the episode description too. Buying a book via that page will also benefit the podcast through commission, so it's a great way to support the show while doing something that you were going to do anyway. And don't forget, if you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. I'm in the process of transitioning it into more of its own publication, rather than something that duplicates what you hear on the show, so you can get more original stuff from me about detective fiction there. For instance, in the latest one, I reviewed The Problem of the Green Capsule by John Dickson Carr, inspired by Jim calling it the best golden age detective novel in this episode.

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

Thanks for listening.