Murder Mystery, Legal History III: The Afterlives of Empire in MM Kaye and Agatha Christie

An Indian butler is shot on a moonlit island filled with radiant Chinars at the centre of Kashmir’s dal lake. A German housemaid is clubbed to death on a Berlin street lined with families of British officers occupying former homes of wealthy Nazis. An English secretary is strangled in a charming white washed cottage “amid the scent of roses and jasmine” in sunny Cyprus. A leftwing Arab Zanzibari is poisoned on a flight from Mombasa throwing suspicion on a small group of English and American tourists. A picnicking party finds itself stranded on an Andaman island, amid a raging hurricane, as a killer picks off the guests one by one. Pirate treasures, Nazi diamonds, Russian spies, gun runners and Mau-Mau fighters are thrown into alongside love, hate, lust, greed, fear and revenge in the mix of motives.

As I moved on from Nairobi following research leads to London and then Delhi, I found my research sites mirrored in the work of M.M Kaye. I was looking at histories of civil liberty lawyering across territories that had been part of the British empire, most of my lawyers were engaged in resisting the powers of a variety of Emergency regimes, be it during anti-colonial wars of independence (Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus); struggles of postcolonial state formation (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), or during military occupation (postwar Europe). These mobile lawyers moved across colonial/postcolonial jurisdictions in the course of their practice, and using their lives as an archive helped think across fields that are usually historiographicaly distinct. The independence and partitions in South Asia are seen as distinct from the long drawn out wars of decolonization in Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus and Palestine, while the British occupation in post-war Europe is rarely put together with events in Asia and Africa. Yet they come together in concert in Kaye’s mystery volumes, as places deeply interconnected. Lt. Colonel Robert Melville in Death inBerlin for instance has served in Egypt and is headed to Malaya after Berlin (Berlin counts as a home posting, according to his horrified wife). The murder of Monica Ford’s brother in a Mau Mau in Kenya is a turning point in the plot of Death in Cyprus.

These interconnections are not a coincidence, Kaye’s murder mysteries are based on notes she had taken while following countries where her husband served as a British military officer during the 2^nd World War and after. Death in Berlin (1955) is dedicated to “army wives like (herself) who have followed the drum”. Mary Margaret (Mollie) Kaye was very much a child of the Raj. Born to an intelligence officer in the British Indian Army, M.M Kaye returned to Simla in 1941 after a decade of living in London and earning a living as a writer and children’s book illustrator. Like many of her heroines, she got engaged a British Indian army officer in a whirlwind romance, having two children before his divorce with his wife in Ireland got finalized. As she would later explain, “We just couldn't wait. Had it been peacetime, I wouldn't have done it because of the way I had been brought up. But these were the pressures of war." Kaye’s considerable fame came from her hugely popular Indian historical novels, The Far Pavilions  and the Shadow of the Moon which are both set in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Kaye’s great uncle Sir John Kaye was a leading historian of the Revolt of 1857 and the First Afghan War). However, her lesser known works include a set of six murder mysteries set in India (Andamans and Kashmir), Kenya, Germany, Cyprus and Zanzibar.

Read together they tell a story of an Empire in retreat, carrying it’s flotsam and jetsam with it. Discussing their contemporaries in a Srinagar ball on the eve of Indian independence, Major Hugo Creed, dispassionately notes that the eccentric Lady Candera, was a “special brand in the Indian Empire. Next year there will be no Indian Empire, so that brand will become extinct- along with Johnnies and Helens and their ilk. They won’t go to ground in England, because it will not be able to give them what they want, so the Lady Candera’s will retire to infest places like Cyprus and Maderia and the Johnnies and Helens will probably get themselves to Kenya”. As recent scholarship has shown, tools of colonial governance including the managing of anti-colonial emergencies were exported from region to region. Binyamin Blum for instance shows how Palestinian policemen and forensic practices were exported to Kenya, and as were counter-insurgency tactics from Malaya. The legal infrastructure in place in East Africa and South-east Asia, were often transplants of law codes developed in colonial India. 

 Kaye’s cast of characters is always led by a plucky damsel (often in distress and a silent, strong, sardonic hero, usually with a job in military intelligence. Their frequent clashes animate the investigation, with slaps, rough kissing and making sounds like “infuriated and frightened kitten’. Military men (bluff and genial, old and doddery, young and resentful); military wives, ranging from Mrs Leslie in Berlin , “the model of an army wife (“one knew instinctively that she referred to her husband’s regiment as “My regiment”, to the regimental wives as “my wives”, did her duty as to Welfare, and all that concerned the good of the battalion, played an excellent game of bridge, and adequate game of tennis and gold, read all the bestsellers, and was sincerely convinced that there was only one regiment in the British army that counted”) to those that absolutely hated army life, Stella Melville for whom the East was “uncivilized and frightening). There are several predatory women on the lookout for other men’s husbands (Death in Cyprus actually has four); eccentric spinsters like Miss Pond in Death in Kashmir who wore in “addition to an anxious expression, a haphazard collection of garments that gave the impression of being flung together in a hurry…including short buttoned boots, a batik scarf, mustard yellow gloves and several assorted beads”;   middle aged secretaries in love with their bosses, an occasional loud American or an extremely Anglicized “native” who can mix with the English such as Sayyide Zuhra-binti-Salem, who the heroines discovers with some shock, speaks seven languages, has a BA degree and was “considerably better educated than herself or for that matter the majority of European women”. While superficially similar to say Orwell’s cast of colonials in Burmese Days, written several decades later, Kaye’s gaze is sympathetic of the dying breed. Reviewing Johnny and Helen Warrender, the hardrinking polo playing office of the Lunjore Lancers and his social climbing wife in Death in Kashmir as “their world crumbled around them” with the mechanization of the cavalry, the “makrs of dissipation and weakness” and “discontented middle age settled upon them”.  India was to be given her freedom and there was “nothing left for the Johnnies and Helens except memories and debts”. Kaye’s heroine notes, “there is always something more pitiful in the destruction of petty but prized possessions than in the crash of dynasties, for the latter is at least spectacular and dramatic, while the former is of no more account in the eye of history than the breaking of the child’s toy”. Trapped into an army routine, Stella Melville draws a quivering breath and says “I hate the army! I hate it, Oh why did Robert have to be a soldier? Why couldn’t he have been a farmer or a pig-breeder or a stockbroker or anything but a solider?.....the dirt, the dust, the flies, the dark secret faces, the horrible heat and the awful club life?..the awfulness of brassy sunshine?

The advantage of a detective novel, is no one needs to be what they seem, and the easy stereotypes could actually be an effective disguise. So the rosy cheeked Bonzo and Alec, 18 year old twin military officers in Kashmir who spend most of their time skiing and wooing the heroine, are Boris and Alexis with a White Russian mother, and possible communist sympathies? Why passions seeth under the regimental Memsahib’s sensible tweeds. Is the bluff and hearty colonel, looking forward to his retirement on an pension in an converted “worker’s flat” or can his loyalties be tempted by financial game? If the crime in the detective novel arises out of social conditions, the “malice domestic” in Kaye’s novels arise out of the temptations of Empire.  

           

The Occupation Detective Novel: Berlin as a Space of Emergency

Written during the travels of an army wife, it is no surprise that every site is one of a legal exception/Emergency. Her two Indian novels are set in Kashmir and the Andaman Islands. Kashmir, was a semi-autonomous princely state in 1947 operating outside of colonial law, soon to be drawn into a long drawn out international conflict between India and Pakistan with successive emergency regimes in both Indian and Pakistani administered Kashmir. The Andamans, a penal colony in the Indian Ocean, as Uditi Sen argues, was imagined as “terra nullius” open to colonial/postcolonial authority and transformation. Cyprus and Kenya are both sites of violence wars of decolonization and draconian laws, while Zanzibar (though semi-autonomous) is on the brink of revolution.

             Novels written in the wake of an occupying army adds Berlin and postwar Germany to the mix of sites of decolonization in interesting ways. Postwar Berlin was divided into sectors run by different allied powers and was a site of jurisdictional conflict. While military authorities exercised jurisdiction over uniformed servicemen, their authority over civilians remained ambiguous. These tensions played out in the real life case of Madsen v Kinsella, where the glamorous Brooklyn born wife of an American serviceman was convicted of murdering her pilot husband in occupied Germany. Mrs Madsen’s filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that the US Court for the Allied High Commission in Germany did not have the jurisdiction to try her. A suspect, like Madmoiselle Beljame in Death in Berlin might easily disappear into the Soviet sector, never to reappear. 

While Kaye’s gaze on Asia and Africa is appreciative of the colour and natural beauty, the “shattered ruins” of Berlin remind her of the “stupidity of it all! The waste and horror of man’s inhumanity to man”. The devastation is there to see, unlike in the British colony, where the devastation is imagined in the future. The naïve heroine in Death in Zanzibar is reminded that of the romanticism of the colony, “It is the only place I have yet hit upon where black and white and every shade in between’em appear to be able to live together in complete friendliness and harmony with no color bar. It is a living proof and practical demonstration that it can be done, They are all, whatever their race or caste or religion, loyal subjects of His Highness the Sultan..but it won’t last, In the end one …of them will manage to destroy it…Progress is a Lout”. In Berlin, Britain’s changing role in the world is underlined, as Norah Leslie, the Brigadier’s wife confesses that German’s terrified her, not because of their politics, but their industry. In contrast to postwar Britain with its welfare state, a country “too intent on its tea breaks, five day week and next pay rise”, the German workmen were willing and eager to work flat out, they are finding their feet and bursting with confidence. The changing world stage would requires special measures that might seem “un British”, a young schoolboy told off for snooping as “not British” austerely replies, “ “the secret service has to snoop. Where’d us British be if we didn’t? Beat by the Russians and the Japanese, and the FBI, that’s what”.  As AWB Brian Simpson charts, the 1950s, saw Britain trying to simultaneously build a postwar order with lipservice to human rights and the rule of law, while trying to keep it’s colonial territories and counter-insurgencies outside their jurisdiction. 

Crime in the Colony: Empire and the Golden Age Detective Novel

"Take all this business about Kenya," said Major Palgrave. "Lots of chaps gabbing away who know nothing about the place! Now I spent fourteen years of my life there. Some of the best years of my life, too."

Despite Major Palgrave’s central role in the plot of Agatha Christie’s A CaribbeanMystery, the readers never do get to know much about the “business in Kenya” or apart from the convenience of drowning, a chance remark by a Venezuelan tourist and a blackmailing housekeeper, do we know much of the Caribbean either.

In contrast, empire, in all its forms, courses through early English detective fiction. Wilkie Collin’s  The Moonstone, which set the rules for the early genre, centered on a diamond (named after the Hindu god Chandra) that was stolen during the Siege of Seringapatnam and a troupe of Indian jugglers. Dr Watson meets Holmes after being injured in service in the 2^nd Afghan War. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 drives the plot in the Sign of Four. Sumatran bacteria, Lime house Opium dens, comrades from the Boer Wars, mysterious Malays and Calcutta trained snake charmers menace who young women with swamp adders . It existed as part of the landscape, as a racial stereotypes, as a signifier of criminality, of oriental exoticism and shaping the political economy. An Indian student, Daulat Ras (“quiet and methodical”) is one of the key suspects in the Adventure of the Three Students, while the key antagonist in the Sign of Four is a blow dart wielding Tonga, from the Andaman Islands. Laura Otis even suggests that Holmes is the creation of a physician, who see’s the detective as protecting the “British nation” from the ills of contamination of the empire.  Holmes’s himself declares that he spent two years in Tibet after his “death” at the Reichenbach Falls (an episode delightfully reimagined by Jamyang Norbu in the Mandala of Sherlock Homes).

            In contrast, the Empire recedes from view in the Golden Age Detective Novel. Take for example, the work of Agatha Christie (whose first husband was born in Peshawar and the second worked as an archeologist in Iraq and Syria), the empire functions largely as a backstage to remove characters from the scene. Never doe’ll sons are sent off to Australia (Dumb Witness), mining prospects in Africa are occasionally "motives for murder (A Pocketful of Rye), grandchildren in Ceylon remove an eyewitness from the scene (4:50 fromPaddington) returning memsahibs struggle with the absence of a fleet of servants (Mrs McGinty’s Dead) and a policeman retiring from Malaysia (perhaps service during the insurgency) investigates a serial killer in an English Village (Murder in Easy). Earnest archaeologists (Murder in Mesopotamia), women politicians (Appointment with Death) and writers of salacious novels (Death on the Nile) may voyage to the east, but travel with a self-contained world of Home Counties Englishman and a smattering of temperamental Europeans. Historian Christopher Prior contrasting Christie’s pre-war and postwar fiction notes a general trend where the postwar books showed a spike in the number of murderers who had connections to or were born in the colonies. The “natives” are clearly ruled out as suspects, though occasionally a clever murderer might disguise themselves with a turban.  I pick Christie as the key example, because she is the third most published writer in  the English language, outsold only by William Shakespeare (and the Bible!) and sells more in India than in the UK at present. In contrast, her contemporaries with the exception of the New Zealand settings of Ngaio Marsh (a New Zealander herself) limit themselves to London squares and English country houses.

The central conceit of picking a Belgian detective, was Christie’s (and Poirot’s) self-awareness of how contemptuously the English viewed foreigners. Poirot self-consciously becomes more foreign, when he wants suspects to under-estimate him. Christie’s pre-war works are full of casual anti-Semitic and racist observances, made bearable only by the ruthless decimation of European nationalities, the French are mendacious, the Italians and Spaniards temperamental, the Americans are flashy and tasteless, and one character is gently dismissed with the words “Poor creature, she’s a Swede”.  Significantly, unlike say Holmes, race and nationality are never correlated to criminality. It was usually the “Old School Tie” wearing establishment Englishman or the gentle paragon of the Women’s Institute who was pouring strychnine into the soup.

            The one stock character is the retired colonial army officer/official, neatly summed up as Miss Marple listens to Major Palgrave drone on “somewhat uninteresting recollections of a lifetime”,

 “ It was a routine with which she was well acquainted. The locale varied. In the past, it had been predominantly India. Majors, Colonels, Lieutenant-Generals - and a familiar series of words: Simla. Bearers. Tigers. Chota Hazri - Tiffin. Khitmagars, and so on. With Major Palgrave the terms were slightly different. Safari. Kikuyu. Elephants. Swahili. But the pattern was essentially the same. An elderly man who needed a listener so that he could, in memory, relive days in which he had been happy. Days when his back had been straight, his eyesight keen, his hearing acute. Some of these talkers had been handsome soldierly old boys, some again had been regrettably unattractive, and Major Palgrave, purple of face, with a glass eye, and the general appearance of a stuffed frog, belonged in the latter category.”

Indeed, the stock character is so familiar, it allows a villain to disguise themselves as an Anglo Indian colonel with a turbaned Indian butler, choleric temper, gout and tables laden with Benares brass. But as Poirot points out, the “retired Anglo Indian army officer, a well-known comic figure with a liver and choleric temper” is “bogus, very bogus”. Empire is both an exit and a disguise. 

Hickory Dickory Death: Decolonizing London

            I want to briefly turn to Hickory DickoryDock  (1955),  the one Christie novel that has a sizable number of  non-White characters (apart from Death Comes as the End, which is set in Thebes in 2000 BC). An international student’s boarding house in London (built by knocking down through two Victorian townhouses) is disturbed by a series of mysterious thefts of items ranging from a diamond ring, a stethoscope, lightbulbs and bath salts. Set in the 1950s, it’s one of the few to reflect the changing composition of University of London students, it’s inhabitants include two Indians studying political science, a Jamaican law student, a West African, an Egyptian, an American Fulbright scholar, several Frenchwomen, a stolid Dutchman and two unnamed Turks and an Iraqi. Owned by a Greek proprietress (often drunk) and excitable Italian staff, it’s managed by a cheerful Englishwoman just returned from Singapore, which meant she “understood racial differences and people’s susceptibilities”. Scholarly appreciation of Christie, gingerly steps around Hickory Dickory Dock, embarrassed by the racial stereotypes and the extremely improbably plot that leads to 3 murders within 48 hours and the plausibility of three-way switch between a bottle of morphine, a bottle of bicarbonate of soda and a bottle of boracic acid.  The TV adaptation changes the settings to the 1930s and erases all the non-White characters from the script.

            This is one of the few Christie’s that gives a sense of a changing United Kingdom, and there are ways of reading her stereotypical representations against the grain . As Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon remarks, “half our nurses in our hospitals seem to be black nowadays….and I understand much pleasanter and more attentive than the English ones”. The expansion of the National Health Service at the end of the Second World War had led to a severe shortage in medical personnel, which was met by increased recruitment of nurses from Jamaica and the Bahamas. Beginning with arrivals on Windrush, the Carribeannurses and medical professionals were integral to building the NHS and faced both arduous working conditions and racism. The passing acknowledgement in Christie’s murder mystery, comes up sharply in contrast with say the absence of Caribbean nurses in Call the Midwife, a contemporary TV show depicting the lives of midwives in East London in the 1950s (the first West Indian nurse joins the cast in Series Seven). With increasing numbers of students from the colonies/former colonies coming to the UK to study, London increasingly became a hub of anti-colonial activism in the 1950s, allowing the creation of networks across regions and colonies. Mitra Sharafi’s new work shows, several were studying law in the Inns of Court and would return to lead movements for political and social change in their homes. While colonial law students had been coming to London since the late 19th century, the second world war widened the demographics and politics. Wartime travel restrictions changed the requirements for legal training in London. Instead of spending two years in London to train at the Inns of Court, prospective students could do the first year of coursework in  their own countries and only spend nine months in the UK keeping their dinners and giving the qualifying exams. These changes opened up the profession to wider demographic, including women and students from working class backgrounds, including several lawyers who I follow in my current research.  Unlike the sons of merchants, colonial officials and landed gentry who came to study in the late 19th and early 20th century, the 1940s saw children of schoolteachers, railway engine drivers and small shopkeepers making their way to LOndon.  It is not surprising that Elizabeth Johnston, the Jamaican lawyer is described by Poirot as the most intelligent person in the hostel, is both studying law and is found to be card carrying member of the Communist Party.  This also makes student hostels, like the one on Hickory Road, a site for police surveillance 

            Christopher Prior classifies thenon-white cast into one of three stereotypes: arrogant and condescending; simple and credulous and excitable and temperamental. Yet, each of Christie’s stereotypes can be inverted to reveal something about the politics of the time. Take Elizabeth Johnstone, the Jamaican law student dismisses her American housemate’s feeling that something is wrong, as “her American way of thought. They are all the same, these Americans, nervous, apprehensive, suspecting every kind of foolish thing! Look at the fools they have made of themselves with their witch hunts, their hysterical spy mania and their obsession over communism”. As a left wing Carribean student, Johnstone is acutely aware of the McCarthy era witch hunts which were actively criticized for their departure from ordinary legal norms in London’s leftists circles. Pamplets were written on the Rosenberg prosecution and the Smith Act cases, and student groups debated and followed the American “Red Scare”.

            The West African student, Akibombo, discomfits his housemates by suggesting the murder is the result of a blood feud or an honor killing. While much of his description is a crude caricature, the actual solution involves convoluted family relationships, dressed up in modern scientific language.  Finally, the Indian medical student, Chandra Lal is dismissed as a suspect by Poirot, given that his mind is entirely occupied by “politics and persecution mania”, and indeed Lal is in full form, threatening to cause an international incident when his room is searched as part of the murder investigation and calling out his housemates for borderline racist humor. When the housemates express surprise at a “seemingly senseless” damage to Elizabeth Johnstone’s notes, Lal becomes “excited and voluble” pointing out this is “oppression, deliberate oppression of native races, contempt and prejudice, colour prejudice”. Christie intends Lal to be a figure of caricature, but reading him in the 21^st century, shows him to be astute, analogizing the narrative of “senseless violence” with the British who claim to not know, “Why the Mau Mau? Why does Egypt resent the Suez Canal”. The answers, he suggests are clear, well authenticated examples of racial oppression. With Indian independence, the postcolonial Indian state had emerged as a powerful voice in international affairs pointing out racial discrimination and arguing for decolonization. It successfully passed a General Assemblyresolution condemning the anti-Indian legislation in South Africa,  was engaged in drafting the UDHR, drew attention to atrocities carried out by colonial authorities in Malaysia and East Africa and sharply responded to racial discrimination against it’s citizens in the UK. The British state was both embarrassed and exasperated by Indian use of the international institutions and media, and believed them to by hypocritical given its military action in Hyderabad, Goa and Kashmir, and limiting of rights of its own citizens through constitutional amendments. As mysterious thefts plague the hostel, the other Indian student Gopal Ram just “smiles and says material possessions do not matter” but only because nothing has yet been stolen from him. 

My posts so far have largely looked at murder mysteries written by British authors with colonial settings, in my last post I will turn to a set of detective stories written by Indians, Singaporeans and Kenyans set in the same period.

Murder Mystery, Legal History Part II: Death in the Colony

“A flock of pelicans, their white wings dyed apricot by the setting sun, sailed low over the acacia trees of the garden with a sound like tearing silk, and the sudden swish of their passing sent Alice’s heart into her throat and dried her mouth with panic”

            The opening lines of M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kenya, transports the reader into Flamingo a sprawling plantation on the banks of Lake Naivasha dominated by the huge sprawling single storied house with “thatched roofs, wide verandahs and spacious rooms paneled in undressed cedar wood, that defied all architectural rules and yet blended with the wild beauty of the Rift Valley” dominated by the septugenaraian Kenyan settler, Lady Emily De Brett, tramping about the estate in her scarlet dungarees, flashing diamonds and a pith helmet. Despite the gardens bursting with color, frolicking hippos, tea on the verandah, the army of servants, the heady round of picnics to the Crater Lake and sundowners with friends, there’s at atmosphere of lurking menace. The year is 1955, and despite the official narrative being that the Mau Mau rebellion had been crushed, characters worry about the Mau Mau on the run or being disguised among the plantation staff, particularly rumors around the mysterious “General Africa” (a reference to Waruhiru Itote, the real life Mau Mau fighter who went by the name General China) who was rumored to be in hiding near Naivasha. Flamingo itself had successfully held off a Mau Mau attack in the past, though it’s manager had died in the crossfire. As the settlers drink they umpteenth gin and tonic, they look over their shoulders convinced that the “secret ceremonies, extortion, intimidation-same old filthy familiar ingredients simmering away again ready to boil over in the drop of the hat”. The lurking tension spills into outright fear, as one by one characters are murdered, and while it could well be the Mau-Mau (the choice of weapons includes a panga and an poison tipped Masai arrow), it’s equally likely to be one of the small community of Europeans living around the plantation.

I read Death in Kenya in the Fall of 2016, after a day’s research at the National Archives of Kenya in Nairobi where the files I was reading portrayed another kind of terror, unleashed upon the Kenyan population by the colonial state. As documented extensively by scholars like Caroline Elkins and David Anderson and leading up to a High Court case for reparations, the Kenyan Emergency saw the suspension of civil liberties, tens of thousands of deaths, the imprisonment of around 400,000 Kikuyu into concentration camps and “enclosed villages, torture, beating, mutilation, castration and sexual assault. Ostensibly to curb the Mau Mau insurgency, a guerilla movement prompted by the expropriation of land by White settlers, the retaliation attacked not  just the Mau Mau gureilla fighters but a large majority of the civilian population. By 1957, in a secret memoranda, the Attorney General advised the Governor that the situation was prompting “comparisons with Nazi Germany” and argued for a legal regulation of torture, famously saying “those who administerviolence … should remain collected, balanced and dispassionate".

How does one read light fiction set amid such unspeakable violence? At first, Kaye’s sympathies with the settlers seem clear, as she says in the Authors note, much of opinions voiced by her characters were taken from life, and very few of the Kenya born settlers would believe the “winds of change” would blow strongly enough to blow them out of the country they looked upon as their own. This comes through brutally when Drew Stratton, the swarthy sunburned settler, who walked like a cowboy displays a tally of “Mau Mau” kills on the verandah to the queasy Victoria Caryll, newly arrived from England. Stratton and his friends are reported to have gone underground, with blackface, to infiltrate the Mau Mau groups. Describing the horrors of the Mau Mau, and the losses suffered by loyalist Africans and Europeans, Stratton roughly rejects Victoria’s plaintive statement that “it is their country” making the case for settler colonialism in the crudest possible terms, “I want to stay here, and if that is immoral and indefensible colonialism, then every American whose pioneer forebears went in the covered wagon to open up the West is tarred with the same brush; and when the UNO orders them out, we may consider moving”.

            It is here, in its crudest and most violent articulation, that the uncertainties of the settler imagination are also highlighted. The awareness that their methods are under critique, the role of the UN and the shift in power towards the United States. The self-awareness comes through in Stratton’s apology for “the grossly oversimplified lecture on the Settler’s point of view”.  Settler society is seen as a corrupted European society, as the gentle Alice de Brett shudders at the “casual attitude of most women towards firearms and the sight and smell of blood”. Morals are seen as lax, and several married characters are having affairs outside their marriages. Kenneth Brandon, the Byronic 19 year old, “capacity for falling in love with other men’s wives” makes him qualified as the right type for Kenya.

            Kenyan settlers, particularly the hedonistic aristocrats who belonged to the Happy Valley Set had making international scandal pages including its very own real life murder mystery, when the  Earl of Errol was foundmysteriously shot in his Buick in Ngong road. His lover’s husband another British aristocrat was tried and acquitted of his murder and would later commit suicide. As Lady De Brett asserts, it would unlikely that any jury in Kenya would find her (and by implication any prominent settler) guilty of murder. Martin Weiner and Elizabeth Kolsky have documented that Europeans were rarely found guilty of violence in colonial trials. The impunity of white violence and close, besieged nature of settler society, also makes it awkward for the police inspector to conduct his investigation having to interrogate and detain his friends and social acquaintance.

While Kaye had spent a short period of time in Kenya, her powers of observation on local culture are acute and are reflected in the book. A key alibi is established by several African staff members hearing a suspect play a piano, and when the suspect suggests that “none of the servants would know the difference between one tune and another”, the inspector points out that the average African has a better ear for music than one imagines. Peter Leman’srecent work traces how orality in accounts of legal trials has the “the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality”. Songs, verbal oath takings and music formed a key part of the evidence in the famous Kapenguria trial, which sought to prosecute Jomo Kenyatta and other Kikuyu leaders for managing the Mau Mau. 

The violence against Africans during the Emergency is an uncomfortable reminder offstage, as a character worries about her maid giving evidence to the police, “they may take here away and hold her for questioning. You know what they are like”. Another notes that the police had roped into the house servants for questioning and turned the labour lines on the plantation “into the nearest thing to a concentration camp”. The role of the Brandons, Flamingo’s neighbours,  in the brutal suppression of the revolt, offers a possibility that the Mau-Mau might take revenge by putting poison in their medicine box. As Lady Brett acknowledges, there are things worse than murder, including, “trials, hanging, suspicion, miscarriage of justice”.

             As Erik Lindstrum shows in his recent article, British knowledge about violence in the colonies was both widespread, but also “fragmented and ambiguous”. British newspapers trying to position themselves as neutral failed to convey the extent of colonial violence and some of the most widely circulated narratives were framed by fiction and film. The solution to Death in Kenya (not to give away spoilers) is an ambiguous statement to the question of the settler colony. The serial murders insanity is driven by their desire to mark out a permanent presence in the colony, to master its future, even though it requires the sacrifice of English men and women. The murder is also revenged by an African, posing a problem for the British policeman, who don’t know what to do with an African who had killed a European but in the process saved the life of another.  

Murder by the Panga: The Bassan Murder Case

In 1960, the plot of Death in Kenya seemed to take real life turn. Satyavadi Bassan, a young Kenyan-Indian and her two infant daughters were found hacked to death by a panga in their car on the road to Nyeri. Pyarelal Bassan, her husband and her four year old daughter were also found gravely injury and recounted at attack by three African men who had stopped their car, demanded money and attacked the family. The Indian Association of Nyeri rejected the idea of a robbery gone awry and insisted the murder was political, linking it to secret gatherings of Africans and the targeting of Indians as “outsiders” and “parasites” in Kenyan nationalist rhetoric. The use of the panga (like the wounds of Alice de Brett in Death in Kenya) were seen as “reminiscent of the Mau Mau killings”.  As Sana Aiyyar in her study of the Indian diaspora in Kenya notes, “the use of the panga and mutiliation..became the catalyst for politicization of the Nyeri murder”. Aiyar argues that wile the Indian leaders in Kenya attacked African leadership for not condemning the violence, the emergent African political leaders also assumed that the attack was carried out by Africans and marked a “resurgence of ritualistic violence that threatened their leadership”

            The subsequent trial and investigation revealed, as in Kaye’s who-dunnit, the crime originated neither from economic reasons nor the political churn of nationalism,  but from a domestic setting. Pyarelal Bassan was found to have hired the men to murder his wife and children, and the trial hinted at both Pyarelal and Satyavati having extra-martial liaisons. Once again we see a crime that originates in the "malice domestic" of a settler society, being initially framed as a crime arising out of the violent churn of African politics.

Crime in the Colony:   Elspeth Huxley’s Murders in Chania 

Colonial Kenya also forms the setting for a series of murder mysteries by ElspethHuxley. Huxley, the author of over 42 books is best known for her memoir, TheFlame Trees of Thika, serialized in television and frequently analysed by literary scholars working on colonialism, memory and nostalgia. Huxley’s murder mysteries set in the fictional country of Chania (standing in for Kenya) draw richly from colonial legal sources.

            Katherine Luongo opens her compelling study of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1950 with an extract from Huxley’s first crime novel, Murder at Government House (1937), a long digression from the process of investigating the murder of the Governor of Chania in his study. 

“included a lengthy, elaborate anecdote about another high-profle murder case in the colony, the “Wabenda witchcraft case.”  Chania’s secretary for Native Affairs recounted the local narrative of the “Wabenda witchcraft case” to the detective in charge of investigating the governor’s murder: The Wabenda, among whom witchcraft was more strongly entrenched than among most Chania tribes, had put to death an old woman, who, they alleged, was a witch. The woman had stood trial before the elders and the chiefs of the tribe, had been subjected to a poison ordeal, and found guilty of causing the death of one of the head chief’s wives and the deformity of two of his children. Then, following the custom of the tribe, she had been executed, in a slow and painful manner. . . . It was a horrible death, but meted out after due trial, and for the most anti-social crime in the Wabenda calendar.  After outlining the circumstances surrounding the witch-killing, the secretary for Native Affairs turned to how Wabenda and British conceptions and processes of justice collided in the context of the case. He elaborated, The chiefs and elders were put on trial for the murder of the old witch. Forty-i ve of them appeared in the dock – a special dock built for the occasion. They did not deny that the witch had died under their instructions. They claimed that in ordering her death they were protecting the tribe from sorcery, in accordance with their obligations and traditions. They were found guilty and condemned to death. There was no alternative under British law; the judges who pronounced sentence did so with reluctance and disquiet.

But as the secretary for Native Affairs noted, the “Wabenda witchcraft case” was not easily resolved by the sentencing of the forty-i ve Wabenda in the British courts. He noted, The Government was in an awkward position. It could not, obviously, execute forty-five respectable old men, many of them appointed to authority and trusted by the Government, who had acted in good faith and according to the customs of their fathers. In the end it had compromised. Thirty-four of the elders had been reprieved and pardoned. Ten had been reprieved and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. In one case, that of the senior chief who had supervised the execution, the death sentence had been allowed to stand. 4 Finally, the secretary for Native Affairs addressed some of the ways in which the case was figured in additional “judicial settings”; in the Supreme Court of Chania, in the governor’s Privy Council, and in the equally salient “courts of opinion” of various metropolitan and Chanian publics. He explained, The case was not yet over. The sentenced chief, M’bola, had appealed to the Supreme Court, lost, and finally appealed to the Privy Council. Feeling in native areas ran high. Agitators had seized upon the case as an example of the tyranny and brutality of British rule. Administrators feared serious troubles should it be carried out.”

As Luongo asks,  “Why would a story of witchcraft, law, and the colonies have resonated with British reading publics at home and abroad?”. She does on to show that these fictional events mirrored  a real life witch killing case in the 1930s, i.e. the Wakamba Witch trials, which “long-standing, circuitous, imperial story of African witchcraft beliefs and practices challenging the ability of colonial states to achieve law and order in the British African Empire”.  Huxley’s who-dunnits are not Mayhem Parva imported to the colony, but arise from it’s settings. For instance, in Death of a Safari, a lions kills and a charging buffalo are turned into weapons of murder. or in African Poisons shows extensive knowledge of land use rights, animal husbandry and African toxins.

Huxley, unlike Kaye, was a long term resident in Kenya and her murder mysteries offer better rounded characters and complex accounts of the changing political situation. The women are not damsels in distress, but professionals. 

In Murder in Government House, the detective is assisted by Olivia Brandeis is an anthropologist who documents a Kenyan secret society with rituals of seizing power from the English (possibly inspired by Mary Leakey), the safari in Murder on an African Safari (1938) is led by the dashing aviatrix (modelled on real life Beryl Markham) who flies ahead to spot the wild game; The African Poison Murders (1939) has a female solicitor trying to set up a practice (modelled on K.P Hurst, the sole female Barrister in Kenya who was one of the rare European lawyers who had engaged to defend Africans accused as Mau-Mau) and Thomasina Labouchiere is an assistant to the British commission negotiating independence an at the Incident at the Merry Hippo (1963) (mirroring perhaps Huxley’s own experience as an independent member of the commission for the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland)  . Her who-dunnits spaced out over two decades offer an acutely changing awareness of politics, for instance in African Poison Murders tensions break out between English and German settlers, when a possible Nazi sympathizing German is found poisoned on his farm. She demonstrates acute insights into the nature of the colonial bureaucracy, outlining the differences between different kinds of training in Murder in Government House, or the awareness that the Governor can suspend the right of a solicitor to practice in African Poison Murders.

The Historian as a Detective: Richard Rathbone's Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana

How can legal historians draw from structures of detective novels? In many ways, their methods of collecting and evaluating evidence, building off fragments and constructing the "who dunnit" is the same. One model is Richard Rathbone's Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana,  which as reviewer notes, “is not the West African companion to Elspeth Huxley's East African whodunnit, Murder at Government House. Nor, despite its trailer of 'Colonial Ghana' (itself a curious chronological byline), is it a critique of Colonial Office administration” Rathbone uses the “ritual murder” of an Ghanian chief during a royal funeral procession, and subsequent investigation and trial to trace how traditional and new Ghanian elites engaged with the local and imperial administration during the transition from late colonial rule to independence. The book is also a whodunit, as Rathbone seeks to also solve the mystery of Akea Mensa’s death (aided by none other than mystery writer and British civil servant P.D James, who is acknowledged in the book). Did Mensa really die or did he go into exile? Was this suicide, an accidental fall into a mineshaft or a public lynching? Was the motive “ritual murder” or unpopular treasury reforms?

In my next post, I'll return to M.M Kaye's sojourns to Zanzibar, Cyprus, India and Germany and reflect upon the absence/presence of empire in the Golden Age Detective Novel 

PS: I am grateful to Surabhi Ranganathan for talking through some of these ideas.

Murder Mystery and Legal History: Part I

An elderly memsahib’s body lies crushed at the bottom of a moonlit ski slope in Kashmir in the twilight of the Raj. Prominent businessmen in colonial Calcutta are mysteriously stabbed in the heart by a gramophone needle as they cross the street. The British governor of the fictional African country of Chania is strangled in his study at the end of a dinner party. A French governess is drowned in an abandoned swimming pool in postwar Berlin. This was not what I had expected I’d be writing about when I was invited to invite to join the Legal History blog as a guest blogger in April 2020.

I was eager to use the opportunity to work through theoretical and methodological questions that were arising out of my current research project which seeks to write an alternate international history of radical lawyering emerging from Asia and Africa in the 1950s, by following a network of civil liberties lawyers as they navigate colonial rule, postcolonial authoritarianism, mass migrations and new social movements. Focusing on legal practice across time, I hoped would make visible how the engagement with anti-colonial trials were formative for a generation of young lawyers who would go onto pioneer new forms of progressive lawyering. As a lawyer and a historian of South Asia, I was moving out to explore new geographies and histories and the challenge of writing a transnational history of local legal events. I wanted to think about how sedition trials in Guyana, Pakistan and Singapore would tell us about the nature of “postcolonial” sedition. And how does one understand how a legal practice for political lawyering is funded and sustained. Or, more curiously, why did so many of the lawyers that I was studying enjoy listening to Paul Robeson. 

Yet, before I could begin, the COVID epidemic reached worrying proportions. I relocated countries in short notice, was working with hastily photographed books and consumed with worry about friends and family. Reading difficult texts or grainy archival photos remains challenging and I found myself regressing to comfort reading, consisting of historical novels and mid 20^th century murder mysteries. As historian Aparna Balachandran confirmed in her wonderful essay on “Agatha Christie as Pandemic Reading”, I was not the only person to turn to detective stories. As I was contemplating what, then, to write for the blog, Surabhi Ranganathan suggested that instead of seeing reading for comfort as external to my research, I should think about the links between the two. 
In the series of post to follow, I draw upon three sets of mid 20^th century detective novels, both as sources to think about legal history and as worldbuilders for the terrain that the figures I am studying operated in. I am neither a literary scholar nor a book historian, so my explorations should be taken as akin to the amateur detective, often treading over ground already covered by professionals. 

The Game is Afoot

While murders mark the beginning of human civilization, the public fascination with a murder mystery is a particularly modern phenomenon. Scholars ranging from Michael Foucault to Judith Flanders have shown how public fascination with violent crime arose during the 19^th century, linked to the growth of the popular press, the emergence of the modern police, new medical, forensic and psychological sciences that sought to claim authority and particularly the separation of the public from the private. Indeed, it is not assassinations or public brawls that fed the Victorian public, but the voyeuristic interest in the crime domestic, the opening up of a private home for public consumption. Literary historians argue that the emergence of detective fiction by the late 19^th century developed forms and conventions that were markers of modernity. There remain a number of debates over whether detective stories are inherently leftwing (as opposed to thrillers which are conservative); whether it has literary value or what are the distinct politics of the genre in different languages and regions. There seems to be an overwhelming consensus, that despite its origins in the US with Edgar Alan Poe’s Murders in Rue Morgue and its immense popularity in countries like Japan., the 20^th century genre was distinctly centered and influenced by Britain peaking as a genre in the 1930s and 1940s, described as the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction".

Curiously while these are decades of  extreme political turmoil in Europe, economic depression and contentious politics in Britain and radical left wing and nationalist movements across the empire, the Golden Age Detective story remains almost unaffected from the turmoil. There are occasionally shadowy organizations seeking to overthrow regimes in the Balkans (Comrades of the Red Hand in  Secret of the Chimneys), pointedly non-ideological plots for world domination (The Big Four), and whispers of colonial disturbances (Colonel Race in Christie’s Death on the Nile). The idealized setting is what novelist Colin Watson has evocatively described as Mayhem Parva,

            “a cross between a village and commuters' dormitory in the South of England, self-contained and largely self-sufficient. It would have a well-attended church, an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detective-inspectors, a village institute, library and shop — including a chemist's where weed killer and hair dye might conveniently be bought. The district would be rural, but not uncompromisingly so — there would be a good bus service for the keeping of suspicious appointments in the nearby town, for instance — but its general character would be sufficiently picturesque to chime with the English suburb dweller's sadly uninformed hankering after retirement to `the country.”

            While the locations might occasionally be more exotic, such Miss Marple’sinvestigation in St Honore, Hercule Poirot’s visit to Petra or Roderick Alleyn’s trip on a ship from London to South Africa, in reality this was just “Mayhem Parva’ exported. The victim, detective and group of relevant suspects (carefully excluding the “natives” and most of the service staff) were inhabitants of Mayhem Parva transplanted to more colorful settings. The murderer, the detective and usually the victim (making exceptions for blackmailing butlers) were recognizably gentry. The working/service classes if they appeared were crusty but loyal retainers or adenoidal maids who were “pathetically stupid”. 
 Given this general setting of the genre, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate.

Part I: Leftists Litigating: Raymond Postgate and the Trouble with Juries

The murder at the heart of the book is classic Mayhem Parva. The setting is a country house in Devon, inhabited by eleven year old orphan Philip Arkwright, his widowed aunt, two long term family retainers, with occasional visits by the local vicar, the aging doctor, a stolid maidservant and the boy’s tutor.  Philip is the owner of considerable fortune and his death would make his aunt a very wealthy woman and his cook and gardener considerable legacies. When Philip dies a lingering and painful death after eating salad for lunch, the autopsy finds the dressing was sprinkled were hederin (found in ivy dust) which grows plentifully around the house.

But this is where Postgate changes the game. The novel doesn’t follow the painstaking investigation into Arkwright’s murder. At the beginning, we know his aunt, Rosalie Van Beer is under arrest and on trial for murder of the nephew and our setting is the Court of the Assizes in London where the clerk is summoning the jurors to take their oaths. The focus of the book remains the twelve jurors, who represent a cross-section of British society.

The book opens with two epigraphs. The first is the juror’s oath in a trial for murder, “Swearing by almighty God, that I will well and truly try and true deliverance make between our Sovereign Lord the King and the Prisoner at the Bar whom I shall have in charge and a true verdict give according to evidence”. The second more intriguingly is from Karl Marx, and notes “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but on the contrary their social existence that determines their consciousness”. It is the tension between these two epigraphs that holds the book together. While both the police, the tutor (who likes to snoop) and the two lawyers narrate their own investigations, the real detectives in this case are the twelve jurors who are trying to put together  and evaluate the truth drawing on their own social experiences.

The jury trial had long been fetishised as a fundamental right of every Englishman and by the mid 20^th century was presented as a mark of civilisational development and testament to freedom. As Kalyani Ramnath shows, in the colonies, “native subjects” demanded the right to trial by jury of their peers and protested the limited system of assessors. Arthur George Popsegrove, the jury foreman, savours as he repeats his oath, these were “splendid words, each phrase with a patina of history upon it. The consciousness of their meaning and their beauty seemed to radiate to him. No one could doubt, watching him, that he would true deliverance make, as far as ever his powers would let him”. A true Englishman named after the original English king (Arthur) and the present one (George) savouring his rights. Yet, as Postgate’s readers know Arthur Popesgrove was born Achilles Papanastasiou in a small village in Greece. And his move to stolid Englishness, was achieved through Athens and the Riviera, using his skills as a “young Levantine who was willing to work, a promising cook, a graceful and even beautiful waiter and dancer, ..with scruples and inhibitions”. Popesgrove’s career to respectability has been marked with petty theft, fraud, blackmail, seducing older men which makes his faith in the British jury system particularly ironic. As foreman he decides his duty is to combat prejudice arguing that the failure of the defendant to give evidence could not be held against her (“the judge made the English law on the point absolutely clear) and that not everyone can keep their head when questioned by a clever lawyer”.

Other jurors view the oath with some dubiousness, Alice Morris, whose husband was murdered in an anti-Semitic attack and whose killers were never prosecuted, wonders why when the law did nothing to protect her, did it expect her to protect and punish others. It wanted her time, “it claims it as a debt”, but couldn’t do anything to save her husband. The fanatical shop assistant, Mr Bryant kinds the oath “our sovereign Lord the King” almost blasphemous, while Victoria Atkins, the tobacconist, thinks it’s a “silly way of talking”. The Verdict of Twelve, is unusual in being a courtroom drama where the professional legal actors come across very poorly.

“All men in wigs and gowns at first sight look like puppets. The room seemed full of marionettes. The judge looked like a shriveled and malicious doll made of leather. Sir Isambard Burns, the chief counsel, for the defense, had a thing long body and a crow like face. Into one eye, he continually fitted and removed an eyeglass; he looked like a Christmas toy performing a tedious trick. Counsel …for the Crown looked like a wax doll; his shiny pink face under his wig looked as unreal as it had been painted”.

The prosecution counsel’s speeches created an atmosphere of resigned tedium, while the defence counsel dramatic cross-examination is shown as hollow, since he “did not mean to imply anything in particular, but hoped to start some irrelevant doubt in the mind of a stupid juror”. As Postgate notes, “ despite the descriptions in detective novels, court cases are rarely dramatic. For one five minute scene, there are hours of dull and formal proceedings”. The introduction of cutting edge psychiatric evidence is played out to gentle ridicule with the jury feeling they “nearly understood what he said, and if they had only paid more attention to the context they would have understood it altogether”. The expert witness ends his cross examination by declaring the victim was a “concealed sado-masochist” with an Oedipal complex. By the end the audience in the courtroom were “openly yawning”, the “air was stale and the room was cold”. The juror Smith, “being a reader of detective novels and expecting scenes of thrilling excitement, did not realize he was going to be “abominably bored”.

Postgate presents the much fetishized British legal machinery under a harsh and unrelenting neon light. While the Golden Age author frequently showed disdain for the bumbling (and often lower middle class) police inspector, at its core was the ideal of British justice, fair trial and the idea that no innocent be wrongly punished. For instance, Superintendent Spence in Mrs McGinty's Dead engages Hercule Poirot to prove the innocence of the man Spence had himself arrested and had been found guilty in a jury trial. The traditional genre of the detective story, as Franco Moretti observes, absolves society of innocence for the crime. The “crime” is resolved by the arrest of the criminal, and the genre rarely goes into the social conditions that made the crime possible. Postgate turns the genre on it’s head, not in the obvious way as many socially minded figures of his times did, in the psychology or economic conditions that is experienced by the “criminal”. Not only is the psychologist a figure of mockery, so is the upper class Socialist poet on the jury, who while “patiently assembling a Marxist interpretation of the evidence”, loudly declaims against “ridiculous, narrow minded and baseless class prejudice”, and ends up subverting justice.

Juries and Class Consciousness

Class remains the defining feature of every character in the narrative, and attempts to shift or alter class positions brings down the ire of the other characters. The jury is resolutely middle class, property and tax qualifications being necessary for jury service. Victoria Atkins, who began life in a backslum and worked as a housemaid, only qualifies because of a recent legacy from an aunt. Postgate however remains firmly attuned to the fine gradations of class in British society. Describing two jurors, Dr Homes as Oxford don, “who was ill bred, repulsive to look at at and grotesquely idle was a gentleman”, while Mr Stannard, “who had worked hard all his life, who was  kindly to all and was as agreeable in presence as in mind” was not because he ran a pub. The jurors range largely through the lower middle class, including a Plasterer’s Union Shop Steward, a hairdresser’s assistant, a door to door salesman and a shop manager. Class mobility and class camouflage, where accents were neutralized and postures copied are heavily police by all classes. Yet class shapes the ability of the jurors to see and empathize, Dr Holmes, the morbidly obese Oxford professor of classics, and perhaps the highest social class in the jury, realizes with sudden shock that his redoubtable analytic skills was little help in the jury It was not “what would a rather dirty minded poet probably have written in the times of Domitian?, but “How to ordinary human beings behave in the times of stress? What did that unpleasant looking woman over there probably do to a boy I have never seen?”

While Postgate is careful to draw attention to economic conditions and class consciousness, there isn’t a patronizing glorification of working classes. He’s acutely conscious of British working class xenophobia. Edward George, plasterer and trade union official, recounts how men drew benefits that they were not entitled to, even drawing strike pay for dead men. Describing the cook and the gardener in the victim’s household, he notes, “they were to all appearances the typical “old retainers”, devoted to the memory of the Old Master, affectionate to the Young Master and resenting the vulgar intruder….but does the Old Retainer ever really exist? Most people who talk of him have never heard servants talk among themselves or have any idea of what goes on when the green baize door closes and talk is really free in the servants hall”. The servants, regarded themselves merely as “two persons, reasonably well rewarded, who performed very well a skilled task, one of whose conditions were a demeanor of respect and loyalty. Affection entered into it very little”, their chief interest was the “accumulation of enough money to retire upon in a cottage of their own”. The young upper class radical Francis Allen’s socialism, despite a bookshelf groaning under Marx’s Capital and selections from the Left Book Club, is described as emotional rather than economic in origin, “his real teachers were Auden, Isherwood, Lewis and Spender”.

Strikingly two of the most significant jurors are women, one an unmarried tobacconist “severe looking, very plain middle aged woman in black, wearing glasses”, and the other a wealthy widow, who stood out “like a single yellow flower in a green field among the dingy collection of mostly middle aged men with grey and red faces”. Given the property qualifications for jury service, it is not surprising that both the women were unmarried. Women had only begun to be serve of British juries in 1920, two years after the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, 1919 and were the subject of critique and caricature in public media as “lacking the constitution or intellect to serve”. Amid ten inattentive, indecisive and prejudiced male jurors, the two women stand out in the clarity of their decisions. Mrs Morris retorts “I don’t think women on juries look at evidence any differently to men”. I know we are supposed to be softer and more gentle and so on, but that doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with it. Actually, we need the protection of law more than women do.”.

Raymond Postgate’s murder mysteries are not his best known works. A founding member of the British Communist Party, Postgate’s first major work was Bolshevik Theory (1920), a book appreciated by Lenin himself. In 1934, he would publish How to Make a Revolution, drawing on his own experiences as “labour agitator and editor of a communist newspaper” to discuss comparative revolutionary ideas (Marxism, Fascism, Anarchism, Syndicalism etc) and practices (general strikes, financial pressure, armed revolution) keeping in mind current developments in Germany and Russia. His magum opus, The Common People 1746-1946(1939) co-authored his brother in law GDH Cole, was a history of English working classes and political movements over 200 years. Ironically, and perhaps reflecting the peculiar nature of upper-class British communism, his most widely read work remains The Good Food Guide (1951) (originally titled, Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Food) complied because he was aghast at the standard of cooking in post-ward Britain and sought to “ to raise the standard of cooking in Britain’ and ‘to do ourselves all a bit of good by making our holidays, travels and evenings-out in due course more enjoyable”.

Despite his affinities to Fabian socialism and interest in Marxism, Postgate according to Marc Mullholland, insisted upon the agency of individual men and women, drawing attention to the “strength of will, the ability, the courage and even the arguments of his protagonists”. Given that the book began by invoking Marx’s , “conditions create consciousness”, much of the book is an investigation into the conditions behind the individuals who come to represent public will.

The Verdict of Twelve was set in the 1930s but published in 1940, at a moment with British victory in the 2^nd World War was less than certain and faced both a political and ideological challenge from both Germany and Russia. What was the value of the British system of justice? Alice Morris, the widow whose husband was killed by an anti-Semitic mob in London, fulminates remembering that her husband’s killers were never punished,

“the arm of the law was weak: after (her husband) died the police had explained to her again and again that they had not got the power to arrest all the likely suspects and force them to confess. In Germany, and for that matter in the United States, the law wasn’t made a fool of like that. They fetched in everybody they suspected and if the guilty did’nt confess right away, they were made to all right. Over there they knew how. But here they couldn’t even question people properly, so her husband was dead and not avenged”.

The equation of criminal justice in Nazi Germany and the USA might seem startling to the contemporary reader, but as James Whitman shows, American race, segregation and citizenship laws were eagerly studied by Nazi lawyers as models.  In the 1930s, questions of fair trialwere internationalized and debated across the public sphere, be it the ScottsboroTrials in the US or the Meerut Conspiracy Cases in India. 

D.N Pritt, the Labour MP and flamboyant lawyer (who as Manav Kapur noted makes an offstage cameo in the Verdict of Twelve as competition for the defense counsel, Sir Isambard for posts in a future Labour government), chaired an independent public enquiry in the Reichstag Fire. He also offered a defense of the fairness of the Stalin’s show trials in the 1936. Several left wing lawyers authored studies and defenses of Soviet Justice, contrasting it with the British system. During the Second World War, the stakes of presenting "British justice" as superior, and the nagging doubts that the system was flawed both become starkly apparent.

A Matter of Poison

Legal history has recently taken a toxic turn, with increasing attention to availability and use of poisons in crime, the development of forensic mechanisms to detect poisons and the "poison panics" fed by the popular press. Historians of science and media in Britain have pointed to the use of non-traditional poisons that were increasingly available to ordinary people in the form of arsenic (soaking fly papers), cyanide (destroying wasps nests) or eserine (eye drops)

 But could the suspects in the Arkwright household have known that ivy dust would be fatal? Or how was the doctor able to make the diagnoses in the post-mortem? The clue in this case is a newspaper cutting found in the house that reported a similar case of accidental poisoning in Essex, providing the knowhow to the poisoner. This was not an uncommon incident, as knowledge of poisons proliferated through both the media coverage of "poison panics" and the consumption of detective fiction.

Perhaps the most effective murder mystery has been Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse. As an apothecaries assistant during the First World War, Agatha Christie had a formbidale knowledge of poisons that she put to good use in her books. In Pale Horse, the poison of choice is Thallium, an odourless and tasteless poison that leaves little traces in the body but has a distinctive symptoms such as hair-fall.

There have been atleast three instances, where a Latin American woman was saved from slow poisoning, a baby in Qatar was stopped from accidental poisoning and an American serial killer caught, because the medical and police staff had read Christie's Pale Horse and were able to identify the symptoms of thallium poisoning.

In the next installment of Murder Mystery and Legal History, I'll turn to murders set amid decolonization in Asia and Africa.

PS: A note of thanks to Surabhi Ranganathan for talking through these ideas