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
20th 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 20th 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 19th 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 19th 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 20th 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 20th 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 2nd 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”.
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
