The Golden Age A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley

LIGHT MUSIC PLAYS, WOMAN LAUGHS

MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

Murder is the darkest and most despicable of crimes.

And yet we're attracted to it, in real life and in fiction.

And that's because every murder tells a good story.

This was certainly true at the start of the 20th century,

when Edwardian press barons were demanding a murder a day

for the pleasure of their newspaper readers.

And even more so in the two decades between the wars,

when there was a great explosion of crime in the novels of

the Golden Age of detective fiction,

the very best of it written by women.

These authors perfected the art of the whodunnit

with all the usual cast of suspects.

They turned the murder mystery into something cerebral, something

tidy and domesticated, rather like solving a crossword puzzle.

And they made armchair detectives out of all of us.

My investigation into the Golden Age begins with a real crime -

the first notorious killing of the 20th century.

In July 1910, Britain was gripped by the progress of a huge manhunt.

It was on a scale that hadn't been seen

since the search for Jack the Ripper.

The fugitive was Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen,

and he was wanted for the murder and the mutilation of his wife Cora.

Together with his mistress, Ethel Le Neve,

Dr Crippen had fled from London.

Handbills had been posted everywhere,

and distributed to the police throughout the world.

Everyone was talking about this case.

The Home Secretary himself, a certain Winston Churchill,

had authorised a reward - worth £20,000 in today's money -

for their capture.

So where were Dr Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve?

In fact they'd already left the country.

They were temporarily holed up in a hotel in Belgium,

but they planned to head for North America.

Henry Kendall was the captain of a steamship

heading across the Atlantic to Canada,

and a couple of his passengers had aroused his suspicions.

The SS Montrose had only been at sea for one day when Captain Kendall

noticed a father and son behaving strangely on deck.

He thought it was very odd that they squeezed each other's hands

"immoderately", as he put it,

and that they would sometimes disappear behind the lifeboats.

The two of them were travelling as Mr and Master Robinson.

What happened next was just like a detective novel...

with the Captain playing the part of Sherlock Holmes.

Captain Kendall decided to carry out an experiment to try to confirm

his suspicions that he had Dr Crippen on board.

He took a newspaper photograph of Crippen

and using chalk he whitened out the doctor's moustache,

and then he blackened out the frames of his spectacles.

And, yes, it was like a Photofit.

Without his moustache and his spectacles,

Dr Crippen clearly was the mysterious passenger Mr Robinson.

Captain Kendall also had access to a piece of pioneering technology

that would speed up the process of 20th-century

crime investigation.

It was the Marconi wireless.

But the transmitter only had a range of 150 miles.

When the Captain made his breakthrough,

his ship was already 130 miles away from the nearest receiver.

He had 20 miles left to get the message out.

Rushing along the lower deck to the wireless room, Kendall handed

the operator the message that would electrify the world.

It read, "Have strong suspicions that Crippen,

"London cellar murderer,

"and accomplice are amongst saloon passengers.

"Moustache taken off, wearing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy.

"Voice, manners and build undoubtedly a girl."

But would the message get through in time?

MORSE CODE

So what exactly were the events

that had led up to this extraordinary situation?

Dr Crippen, an American who dabbled in cheap patent medicines

and dentistry, had been living what seemed like

a pretty conventional life in a North London villa.

His wife, Cora, was a would-be music hall artiste.

But the marriage was troubled,

and Crippen had begun an affair with his young secretary, Ethel Le Neve.

On 19th January 1910, Crippen visited the chemist to order

five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide,

an enormous dosage of a deadly poison.

He signed the poison register, as he was required to,

with the words "for homeopathic purposes".

On 31st January, the Crippens held a little party at home.

Later, Crippen would claim that

it had been followed by a terrible row between him and his wife.

Cora had said that she was leaving him the very next day.

Whatever really happened that night, the guests at that party

were the last people to see Cora Crippen alive.

To explain Cora's absence, Crippen claimed that she'd gone back

to America, and then he said that she'd died out there.

Growing suspicious,

Cora's friends now paid a visit to New Scotland Yard.

The case was taken up by Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew,

a veteran of the Ripper murders.

He was a member of the Yard's newly formed murder squad.

Its members prided themselves on their prowess

and their skill in disguises - however unconvincing.

Chief Inspector Dew searched Crippen's house,

but everything seemed fine.

Yet Dew wasn't quite satisfied.

He came back three days later for another look,

to discover that Crippen had disappeared.

"My quarry had gone,"

Dew said, "and the manner of his going pointed at guilt."

The house, where this block of flats now stands,

held a strange attraction for Dew.

"That sinister cellar," he wrote, "seemed to draw me to it."

With his sergeant, Dew began to work away at the brick floor

and then to remove the earth beneath.

Suddenly there came the most nauseating stench, so bad

that Dew and his men had to rush out to the garden for fresh air.

Fortifying themselves with brandy, they returned to the cellar

and soon made a grim discovery.

There, in a shallow grave, lay a limbless, headless torso.

What kind of a person could have done this?

Surely not the slight and seemingly gentle Dr Crippen?

The story caused a frenzy of excitement,

all stoked up by lurid headlines in the popular press.

Inspector Dew was now under enormous pressure to catch the killer.

And then that famous telegram arrived from the mid-Atlantic.

Chief Inspector Dew now hatched an ingenious plan -

to catch a faster ship to overtake the Montrose

before it reached Canada, and to arrest Crippen on board.

And the press were hard on his heels.

Word had leaked about what was happening on the SS Montrose.

Newspaper readers could now follow Dew's pursuit as he closed in

on his suspects at the rate of three and a half miles per hour.

This story had it all.

As well as gruesome murder,

there was illicit romance and a chase across the Atlantic.

And, best of all, Crippen and Le Neve didn't even know

that the police were on to them,

although every newspaper reader in Britain did.

Without his knowledge,

Dr Crippen had become the most famous murderer in the world.

Dew attempted to evade the journalists by disguising himself

as a harbour pilot in order to board the Montrose.

But it was no good.

Reporters were there to capture the moment when Dew finally

greeted his suspect with the words "Good morning, Dr Crippen."

Press photographers caught everything that happened next.

The crowds waiting at Liverpool docks,

Dew escorting Crippen off the boat,

the anticipation outside Bow Street's Magistrates' Court

for the committal of Crippen and Le Neve.

Some journalists found ingenious ways

of taking prohibited photographs in the court.

The press had made the couple into a highly marketable commodity.

This was a very modern murder.

Bizarre offers now began to come in.

If they were acquitted,

Crippen would get £1,000 a week for a 20-week tour.

Le Neve would receive £200 a week for a performance including

a music-hall sketch entitled Caught By Wireless.

On 18th October, the trial of Dr Crippen began

here at the Old Bailey.

From the start it was clear this was going to be a huge spectacle.

4,000 people applied for tickets.

The court had to issue special half-day passes

so that double the normal number could get in.

In the words of the Daily Mail's reporter, the crowds "begged,

"pleaded, wheedled and argued" for seats in the public gallery.

Inside, there was even more chaos.

There was a rowdy atmosphere, like a music hall.

People were shouting, "Blue tickets that way, red tickets up here."

The trial ended on Saturday 22nd October.

The jury took only 27 minutes

to find Crippen guilty of wilful murder.

He was sentenced to death.

Le Neve, at a separate trial, was acquitted.

And she lost no time in selling her side of the story.

A publicity shot showed her infamous disguise as a boy.

But Le Neve's fame was short-lived.

It was Crippen himself who would be immortalised.

Even during his trial, sculptors at Madame Tussauds had been

preparing a wax figure based on those snatched court photographs.

Now, within days of the passing of Crippen's death sentence,

Tussauds unveiled their new addition to the Chamber of Horrors.

And over 100 years later, he's still on show.

So here is Dr Crippen,

on display to the public before he's even met the hangman.

And in the 1912 catalogue to the Chamber of Horrors

he takes his place amongst the greats.

He's on the same page as his fellow doctor William Palmer, the poisoner,

and opposite the 19th century's most famous murderess, Maria Manning.

But he's also placed above them,

because all the rest have a description of their crimes.

Not Dr Crippen. Everyone knows exactly who he is.

And a contemporary journalist described this place,

the Chamber of Horrors, as being the holiest of holies.

These are the people that everyone wanted to see.

What does that say about the Edwardians?

Six years after Crippen's death,

a young woman was beginning her own lifelong fascination with poison.

During the Great War,

she was doing her bit by training as a hospital drug dispenser.

At a chemist's shop in her native Torquay,

she watched the head pharmacist skilfully mixing medicines.

She was transfixed as he added the final ingredient -

a substance that could be poisonous.

The young woman's name was Agatha Christie.

One day, the head pharmacist showed her something that he always

carried in his pocket.

It was a black lump of curare - poison.

"If that gets into your bloodstream,"

he said, "it will paralyse you and kill you."

She asked him why he carried it around,

and he gave a very striking answer.

"Well, my dear," he said, "it makes me feel powerful."

With the pharmacist's rather sinister boast in her mind,

Christie began to conceive of the idea of writing a detective story.

Naturally it would involve a death by poisoning.

But she had to decide who would die, and who would do it,

and where,

and why.

Agatha's sister Madge had challenged her

to compose a murder mystery in which the clever reader,

armed with all the same clues as the detective, could spot the murderer.

Christie spent four years polishing what would become her first novel,

tweaking the plot and the characters.

Finally, to finish it off, she came back to her home county of Devon

and she spent two weeks all by herself, staying at

this remote country-house hotel in Dartmoor.

The result would be The Mysterious Affair At Styles.

In what was to become her lifelong habit, Christie took herself off

on long and solitary walks to think up the dialogue.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles wasn't exactly an overnight success.

Numerous publishers turned it down - imagine them

kicking themselves later on - but it did sell respectably,

and it set the mould for the Golden Age to follow.

It had everything - a country house setting, a closed circle

of suspects, there were things like maps to help you, there was even

a reproduced fragment of somebody's will, and most importantly,

it introduced a new detective,

who was the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes.

He was a fastidious little Belgian called Hercule Poirot.

As a foreigner, Poirot stood outside the rigid British class structure

which most of the Golden Age detectives belonged to.

This made him a disinterested observer,

but also a trusted confidante.

He'd go on to utilise his "little grey cells" in 33 novels,

one play and over 50 short stories.

And Christie would follow Poirot

with another seemingly harmless amateur detective,

the village busybody Miss Jane Marple.

The puzzles that Christie invented for her two best-loved sleuths

were fiendishly difficult to solve.

To find out how she devised her plots, I've come to meet

her grandson Mathew Pritchard at Christie's rural retreat

on the Dart Estuary in Devon.

First of all, there's a family heirloom to discover.

Tell me about this ancient-looking machine you've got here.

Some years in fact after she died,

we came across that machine in an old box.

She used to dictate her work in the 1960s to a Dictaphone

and then send it away to be... to be typed.

So can we hear the actual voice of Agatha Christie?

We'll do our best.

This one's a school story.

"Likely opening gambit, first day of summer term."

That's right, that's Cat Among The Pigeons.

Who's going to get it - the girl, the games mistress or the maid?

I think the games mistress got it, as far as I remember.

Prussic acid. And what does that say?

"Stabbed through eye with hat pin."

HE CHUCKLES Well, there you go.

-Here's a genuine doodle.

-That's right.

Here, for instance, is probably the most concise

and accurate description of what a detective story is like.

Who, why, when, how, where, which?

Can't get simpler than that, can you?

It's easy, anyone could do this!

In 1926 Agatha Christie brought out what many regard as her most

audacious detective novel, The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd.

This is her description of how the body is discovered.

Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the armchair before the fire.

His head had fallen sideways, and clearly visible, just below

the collar of his coat, was a shining piece of twisted metalwork.

Parker and I advanced till we stood over the recumbent figure.

I heard the butler draw in his breath with a sharp hiss.

"Stabbed from be'ind," he murmured. "'Orrible!"

Now, there are a couple of reasons

why this is absolute classic Agatha Christie.

Firstly, there's the bloodlessness of it.

We have a dead body, we have a murder weapon,

but a man is just sitting in a chair, and the dagger itself

is described as just a shining piece of twisted metalwork.

And, secondly, it's utterly, utterly simple and straightforward

but at the same time very, very clever indeed,

because really we have here an unreliable narrator,

and he goes on to tell us about a little something that he does.

"I did what little had to be done."

And only at the very end of the book do you discover

that at that point he was hiding a Dictaphone in his bag,

he was getting rid of a vital clue, a clue that would reveal

that in this case the narrator is the murderer.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd was a genuine tour de force

as far as detective stories were concerned.

She was accused of cheating, too, but I think the important thing

was that it was original and people loved talking about it,

and I think that was probably the moment when she stopped being

an ordinary crime writer and became one that was universally recognised.

Although she was an intensely private woman,

Christie knew her readers very well.

This is an essay that Agatha Christie wrote in the 1930s,

answering the question, "What kind of people read detective stories

"and why?"

And she says, "It's the busy people, the workers of the world."

That's because a detective story gives them

"complete relaxation, an escape from the realism of everyday life."

She says, "It has the tonic value of a puzzle,

"it sharpens your wits, it makes you mentally alert."

And the ethical background, she says,

"is usually sound. Rarely is the criminal the hero of the book.

"Society unites to hunt him down, and the reader can have

"all the fun of the chase without moving from a comfortable armchair."

These "busy people", these "workers of the world" as Christie calls them

were keen to devour detective stories in all sorts of formats.

Railway stations with their branches of WH Smith's

sold cheap mystery magazines as well as the latest whodunnits.

These novels were formulaic, they were often very snobbish,

but they were a cracking good read.

The easy appeal of Christie's books quickly made her

the Queen of Crime in this emerging Golden Age of detective fiction.

To understand the popularity of Christie and her fellow writers,

I've come to meet our current reigning queen, PD James.

Can I ask you specifically about the 1920s and '30s, then,

this inter-war period?

What was it about that time that allowed these very commercially

successful crime writers to come forward for the first time?

It was an England which was grieving.

There was hardly a house which hadn't lost somebody in that war,

and one was brought up feeling that this can't possibly

happen again, it just cannot, a whole generation destroyed.

And, you see, what the detective story does, it takes death,

and sometimes in its most horrible form, and it sort of sanitises it,

it makes it into an intellectual puzzle.

We don't grieve, we don't grieve at all about the person who's dead,

we don't worry about what will happen to the person who did it.

We have a puzzle and we can apply our little grey cells

to seeing if we can do better than Poirot or Miss Marple,

and on the whole, you know, we are satisfied whatever.

If we do it we feel satisfied and if we don't we think, "It must have

"been a very clever puzzle, I couldn't see it for one moment."

PD James belongs to a long tradition of female detective writers

that began in the 1920s.

But why exactly do women make such good crime novelists?

Our strength is that we're very interested in motive.

We're interested in the people,

we're interested in the lives they live,

and so much of crime writing and so much

of fabrication of clues depends on daily living, small things

that are noticed, and women notice them, men just don't notice them.

By the late 1920s, the writers of the Golden Age,

both male and female,

had begun to meet up for informal dinners together.

This led to what would become known as the Detection Club,

still going strong today.

It had some arcane and amusing rules and regulations.

To join, you have to undergo a curious initiation.

The current master of ceremonies is Simon Brett.

What mean these lights, these reminders of our mortality?

Lucy Worsley,

is it your firm desire to become a member of the Detection Club?

That is my desire.

You seek a great honour, but must also accept a great responsibility.

For I must charge you that in all your writings,

henceforward and forever, your characters will

well and truly try to resolve the many issues with which you may

be pleased to confront them, using only their native wits

and not resorting to divine revelation, excessive sanguinity,

lucky guesses, mumbo jumbo, jiggery pokery, coincidence or Act of God.

Do you so promise?

-I do.

-Will you honour the Queen's English?

I will!

Lucy Worsley, will you place your hand upon Eric the Skull?

Oh, yes, please! Can I?

Well... Lucy Worsley,

do you solemnly swear to observe faithfully those promises

which you have made for as long as you are a member of this club?

I do!

And I'm afraid that's as far as we can go,

because you're basically not a crime writer.

-Very fine writer...

-I'm touching Eric, though.

-I know you're touching Eric,

you've done some lovely historical stuff, but it doesn't count.

That is very disappointing.

Well, there you go.

I shall switch Eric off in a fit of pique.

Take that, Eric.

I think there's always been an element of playfulness

in crime writing. I mean, certainly, you know, the famous examples

of the 1930s, and 1920s, indeed, Agatha Christie and all those,

they were kind of playing a game, you know,

this murder mystery game really, and in a sense the murder was

the first thing that happened, but a murder in Agatha Christie Land

is not, you know... It's not like brains and blood

splattered all over the walls, it's quite decorously done,

and so it does become almost like a parlour game really

to guess who was the murderer.

But I think there was something in the zeitgeist. I think it's no coincidence

that that was also the period when the crossword developed, you know,

that was just the period that people got interested in crosswords,

and a lot of crime novels of the Golden Age are quite like crosswords.

Before I left, Simon agreed to share one final secret

about the club's most treasured artefact.

There is one secret about Eric which I will tell you -

that he has been examined by medical experts,

and there is a strong belief that actually it's Erica.

-No way.

-Yes, apparently it's a female skull, but don't tell anyone!

The person who dreamt up Eric, or Erica, and one of

the founding members of the Detection Club was Dorothy L Sayers.

Of all the Golden Age novelists, she is my absolute favourite.

In my opinion, Dorothy L Sayers

isn't just the best of the Golden Age detective story writers,

she's a great novelist full stop.

She had a very big brain.

She did well at Somerville College in Oxford,

and then she moved to London and in the 1920s

she was working as a copywriter at an advertising agency.

She came up with famous jingles like "Guinness is good for you"

and later she recreated this competitive world of the office

in one of her detective stories, Murder Must Advertise.

Hers was a very different life to Agatha Christie's.

She was a brilliant young Oxford scholar,

and then a struggling writer in Bohemian London.

She fell in love with a man who refused to marry her.

Then, by a different relationship,

she gave birth in secret to an illegitimate child.

She never felt able publicly to acknowledge her son.

And yet out of these troubled years

would come great literary success.

In her debut novel, Whose Body?,

Sayers introduced Lord Peter Wimsey,

a dashing aristocratic detective,

and, like Dorothy herself, an Oxford graduate.

She gave Lord Peter all the money and assurance

and easy success that she would have liked for herself.

It was Lord Peter, though, who would lead her out of her difficulties

into financial security and a career as a full-time novelist.

At Somerville, which is Sayers' old college in Oxford, I met the critic

and my fellow Sayers fan Charlotte Higgins, to talk about Lord Peter.

Now then, here we have the first appearance,

in a short-story magazine,

of a rather foolish-looking gentleman called Lord Peter Wimsey.

I mean, he looks like your typical aristocratic goofy fool

with a monocle, upper-class twit really,

but of course behind that it becomes very clear that Lord Peter Wimsey...

that's just the sort of surface of him, he's actually

a much deeper character than that, and you get strongly running through

all the books this sense of damage that happened because of the war.

So, in modern terms we would say that he had

post-traumatic stress injury.

We have glancing accounts of him somehow

having had a nervous breakdown in the past, of him still going

through periods when he wakes in the night and screams, he has these

appalling nightmares, and that's one of the reasons he has this extremely

close relationship with his valet, Bunter, the estimable Bunter.

-Who was his batman from the Trenches.

-Exactly so, exactly so.

It makes him bearable, doesn't it, because a lot of people think

"Oh, Lord Peter Wimsey, ridiculous snob, we don't like this story,"

but, as it says here, "He's not nearly so foolish as he looks."

-Yeah.

-That's what makes her different

and in my opinion better than Agatha Christie,

because you don't see any of that in Agatha Christie,

there everything in the garden is lovely.

This is really good-quality stuff, this is proper prose.

A lot of the other writers of the Golden Age are quite...

sort of coy about describing actual scenes of violence and blood,

but Dorothy L Sayers never holds back, does she?

No, it's all done with chilling detail, frankly.

She doesn't hold back,

and I think, for me, part of that is just this sort of

intellectual honesty of it, there is a sort of sense that

if we take part in the detection as a reader

we're going to play that game along with the characters,

and, just as they have to look death in the face, so do we.

"Harriet's luck was in. It WAS a corpse. Indubitably a corpse."

"Indeed, if the head did not come off in Harriet's hands,

"it was only because the spine was intact, for the larynx

"and all the great vessels of the neck had been severed

"to the bone, and a frightful stream, bright red and glistening,

"was running over the surface of the rock

"and dripping into a little hollow below.

"Harriet put the head down again and felt suddenly sick."

The "Harriet" in this story is the bold and brilliant Harriet Vane.

She's almost the alter ego of her creator, Dorothy L Sayers.

Both of them studied at Oxford, both of them

became detective novelists, and I love Harriet Vane.

When I was growing up she made me want to be a girl detective,

solving crimes and righting wrongs

and forging a very independent furrow through life.

Harriet first appears in the novel Strong Poison,

and she's in the dock.

She's been accused of murder, and who's going to save her

but Lord Peter Wimsey.

During the course of his investigation

he falls in love with her, and Sayers spends the next few novels

building up and teasing us with their on-off,

will-they-won't-they relationship.

The whole thing culminates in her best book of all,

which is Gaudy Night.

I think it's her best because it's not just a detective story,

but also a remarkable manifesto for women's education

and a commentary on the difficulties that women faced in the 1930s.

In this book, Sayers said herself that she'd expressed

"the things that I had been wanting to say all my life."

The story begins with Harriet Vane attending the annual

"gaudy" celebrations at her old Oxford college.

But the female scholars there

are under persecution from a mystery misogynist.

And then we get 400 pages of the mystery itself,

all set in this women's college,

but the book isn't really about the mystery, it's about the women.

Whether it's possible for them to combine independence and work

with married life and husbands.

At the end of it all Harriet decides to take the chance,

to agree to marry Lord Peter Wimsey.

She realises that he's a good man

who won't stifle her or cramp her style,

and on the very last page they have their first kiss,

here in New College Lane,

and we see them "closely and passionately embracing".

As a reader, if you've followed them through thousands of pages,

you want to go, "Yes! What took you so long?"

With Gaudy Night, Sayers thought that she'd exhausted

the possibilities of the detective novel.

She now returned to more scholarly pursuits.

But even without Lord Peter and Harriet,

the Golden Age would still continue.

Detective novels were now being published at the rate of

1,000 every year.

Yet nothing could beat a real-life whodunnit.

In 1931, a new murder mystery got everybody talking,

wanting to know the solution.

There were alibis and clues and red herrings.

But this time it wasn't fiction.

It happened in real life, here in Liverpool.

The central character in the story was tall, cerebral

and habitually dressed in black.

He liked to recite Marcus Aurelius, to conduct chemistry experiments

in a back bedroom, and to practise his violin at the window.

This may all sound rather familiar,

but we're not talking about Sherlock Holmes.

He was a 52-year-old insurance agent named William Herbert Wallace.

It all began in a chess club.

On the evening of Monday 19th January 1931,

the mild-mannered Wallace had just arrived at the Liverpool Central Club

when he was handed what would be our first clue.

It was a telephone message from a call received

25 minutes earlier.

The voice on the phone identified himself as Mr RM Qualtrough.

He wanted Wallace to visit him on insurance business,

at 7:30 the following evening, at his home, 25 Menlove Gardens East.

Even though he seemed puzzled by the message, Wallace took out

his small Prudential diary

and made a note of Qualtrough's name and address.

He obviously decided to keep the appointment.

The next day, which was the 20th January, Wallace had his tea,

he got together some papers for this business meeting

with the unknown man

and he said goodbye to his wife Julia right here at the back door

of their house on Wolverton Street,

and he then set off to this unknown address, Menlove Gardens East.

And so began Wallace's odd nocturnal journey.

Hold tight, please. BELL DINGS

The tram conductor would later recall Wallace emphasising the fact

that he was a stranger and repeatedly asking for directions.

And when he finally reached the right neighbourhood,

Wallace said he was able to find

Menlove Gardens North and South and West,

but East simply didn't exist.

Wallace stopped to ask several people,

and so drew attention to himself, but nobody was able to help him

find the address or the mysterious Mr Qualtrough.

Wallace headed home, and he was seen by an eyewitness

speaking to a mystery man a few streets away from his house.

Was this an accomplice, or was it simply a red herring?

When Wallace got back from his pointless search,

he claimed that the door of his house had been locked.

He waited around until his neighbours were passing,

Mr and Mrs Johnston,

and then he tried it again and this time it opened.

It's almost as if he'd wanted witnesses

to his going back into his house.

Wallace went inside.

On lighting the gas lamp in the kitchen,

he noticed a small cabinet had been broken into

and that a piece of its door was lying on the floor.

He went upstairs, calling out his wife's name,

but there was no sign of her.

In the front bedroom, the bedclothes had been pulled back.

He went back downstairs,

and now he noticed that the parlour door was ajar.

He struck a match, held it aloft, and went in.

The scene which greeted him was ghastly.

There, lying across the rug in front of the fireplace,

was the body of his wife, Julia, her head in a pool of blood.

She'd been savagely attacked.

Wallace went to get his neighbours.

"Come and look, she's been killed," he said.

And he showed a surprising lack of emotion as he knelt down

by his dead wife's body.

"They've finished her," he said. "Look at the brains."

The murder baffled everybody.

But when Mr Qualtrough's mysterious telephone call was traced to

a kiosk just 400 yards away from Wallace's house,

people began to suspect that Qualtrough and Wallace

were one and the same person and that the business

of the appointment had been nothing more than a very elaborate alibi.

The murder weapon wasn't found, and there was no motive.

But then, there were no other suspects.

So Wallace was arrested.

On 22nd April his trial opened

here at St George's Hall in central Liverpool.

It drew massive attention.

As he sat through his trial,

Wallace's behaviour counted against him.

He was impassive, cold.

He didn't visibly react when people mentioned his dead wife

and he was heard to say that he felt

that the jury members were rather stupid.

He also had the misfortune to fit most people's image of a murderer.

He tended to wear black

and he had little round spectacles like Dr Crippen's.

On the other hand, though, Wallace's defence were pretty confident.

There was no killer piece of evidence against him.

That's why, after four days of trial, and an hour's deliberation,

there was a gasp in court

when the jury revealed that they thought he was guilty.

The date was set for Wallace's hanging.

But then came the final twist that turned

the case of William Herbert Wallace into a legal landmark.

In May 1931, the Court of Criminal Appeal

overturned his conviction.

Basically they said the evidence was insufficient.

The jury had got it wrong.

So Wallace lived to tell his tale,

and to sell it of course to a Sunday magazine,

under the bragging title of The Man They Did Not Hang.

The Wallace case is perhaps the ultimate whodunnit,

because it remains unsolved to this day.

It provided wonderful fodder for speculation

amongst the Golden Age writers like Dorothy L Sayers.

Capitalising on this real-life mystery,

they started to provide ingenious fictionalised solutions

to the case, transforming it from reality into myth.

LIGHT MUSIC PLAYS

It's no coincidence that the murder mystery reached a peak in popularity

at the same time as a similar vogue for chess and the crossword puzzle.

Britain now also saw an explosion of murder mystery games,

the forerunners of Cluedo.

This, for example, is the Baffle Book.

It's not a collection of stories, it's a set of 30 mysteries

and detective problems to be solved from given data.

"Be your own detective," it says inside,

and you're put into all sorts of everyday situations like this.

"You're staying with the Duchess, the Butler comes in

"with the tragic announcement that the Master has been found slain

"in the Billiard Room, an oriental dagger through his heart.

"What are you going to do?"

Then there's the Murder Jigsaw. In this it's only as you

put in the very last piece that you realise that this man

isn't holding a musical instrument, he's using a gun

disguised as a clarinet to shoot the victim over here.

And top of the tree, we've got the Murder Dossier.

This is full of all kinds of evidence.

We've got a cable and a police memo and testimony

and crime-scene photographs, even a clue.

Here's a bit of blood-stained curtain.

And here's a sample of somebody's hair.

And what you're supposed to do is read through the whole thing,

come to your conclusion and only then do you open

the envelope at the back containing the solution.

All these games and puzzles are jolly good fun.

But they do show how murder between the wars

had become sanitised and, with that, trivialised.

In real life, most murder was driven by poverty,

alcohol or abusive relationships.

No sign of that here,

nor of the Great Depression or the rise of Fascism.

And some people don't even like to

use the name "the Golden Age" for this.

They think a more accurate name for this school of fiction

would be "snobbery with violence".

Little by little, the whodunnit began to seem stale,

and its writers out of touch.

By the 1930s, though, a new genre of entertainment

would unleash the primitive emotions aroused by murder.

This was the cinema.

It was now rivalling the detective novel.

The British were spending hours a week

in dark and ornate picture houses.

The '30s were to become a Golden Age for the crime film too,

with 350 thrillers released during the decade.

And the greatest genius to practise the fine art of cinematic murder

was of course Alfred Hitchcock.

The assembly of pieces of film to create fright

is the essential part of my job.

The first Hitchcock murder shocker was a silent film, The Lodger.

It was terrifying right from its opening shot of a screaming girl,

backlit to accentuate her golden halo of hair.

The film was based on a novel and a stage play that had given

the 16-year-old Hitchcock an enjoyable shiver.

It's the story of a Ripper-style murderer

stalking blonde girls in London.

It resonated with Hitchcock, who had followed famous murder cases

from his youth.

As his official biographer and friend John Russell Taylor

explained to me, he had a lifelong fascination with real-life murder.

Hitchcock must have been interested in true crime from very early on,

because at that time, when he was a kid in Leytonstone,

the nearest playground to Leytonstone was Epping Forest,

and every August Bank Holiday there seemed to be at least one

sexually motivated murder in Epping Forest.

It was a regular for the newspapers,

and he seemed to have consumed those all with great interest.

I'm sure that was part of the reason for his choices in film-making.

Here Hitchcock introduces the eponymous Lodger in chilling style.

The Lodger sets up all sorts of themes that we'll see

running throughout the rest of Hitchcock's work.

There's the association between sex and death,

there's a blonde in peril,

there's voyeurism and there's dark humour too.

In The Lodger here is the man himself, with his back to the camera

in the first of his famous cameo appearances.

He's the newspaper editor receiving the news

and writing his eye-catching headlines.

With all these shots of newspapers rolling off the presses,

Hitchcock shows us the media's sensationalising response to crime,

exactly as it had been seen 15 years before in the case of Dr Crippen.

Hitchcock, born in the last year of the 19th century,

was influenced by the murderous entertainments of the Victorians.

For example, just look at the acting style in The Lodger.

All this gesturing and the intensity of it

reminds me of Victorian melodrama.

And that's because Hitchcock

and his actors knew about this stylised form of theatre.

They were taking its traditions with them

into the world of silent cinema.

And he also tapped into another genre

of Victorian crime entertainment.

It strikes me that what he's doing has a lot in common with

the sensation novelists of the 1860s.

Cos what they were hoping to achieve was to make the hair stand on end,

to send a shiver down the spine, to create a sensation in the reader,

and that's exactly what he's doing in his films.

He once fantasised to me that the ideal situation would be

if you didn't have to make the film, you could just wire the seats

in the cinema,

so you would get the shock, horror, laughter at the right moments

just from the electrical effects on the audience,

and so I think he saw films as machines to work on the audience.

Hitchcock was concerned with something very different from

the brainy trickery of the detective writers.

What interested him was much more visceral.

I don't deal in mystery.

I never make whodunnits, because they're intellectual exercises.

You're just wondering, you're not emoting.

Raw emotion is the key to another Hitchcock film,

the 1936 talkie called Sabotage.

Here he brilliantly stretches the scene out

to ratchet up the suspense.

Sylvia Sidney has just worked out that her husband

is the saboteur whose actions have killed her brother.

She's now wrestling with an impulse to kill him.

Hitchcock said he wanted to maintain the audience's sympathy for her,

and make us feel like killing the man ourselves.

He builds up their confrontation through this montage

of reaction shots, her hand hovering throughout over the carving knife.

Hitchcock makes us endure a slow and agonising wait before the deed.

SHE GASPS, HE SHOUTS

Sabotage, and this scene in particular,

was enthusiastically reviewed

by one of the country's leading film critics.

He was an aspiring novelist called Graham Greene.

"This melodrama," Greene wrote in the Spectator,

"is convincingly realistic."

By the mid-1930s Greene was writing novels influenced by

American crime writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Their hard-boiled thrillers, amoral and violent,

made a refreshing alternative to the cosy British whodunnit.

Now Greene set about creating his very own version,

a British crime noir.

He'd take murder, and the murderer, out of the library

and the drawing room and he'd place them in a shabby seaside resort.

Brighton Rock, I really intended when I began writing it

to be a detective story.

Then the character Pinkie took hold

and I realised that I was not going to write a detective story at all.

All that remains of a detective story is the original murder.

I wanted to make people believe that he was

a sufficiently evil person almost to justify the notion of hell.

Like Hitchcock, Greene was a Catholic,

hence his preoccupation with evil and sin and guilt and redemption.

Even the cover blurb of Brighton Rock tells us that

this is a new kind of novel. As it says here,

"In this book murder is no parlour game likely to be solved

"on the last page,

"but an act of terrible and terrifying significance."

The emphasis is now off the detective

and onto the murderer himself.

The hero - or the antihero - of Brighton Rock

is a teenage gangster called Pinkie.

He's rather clever and very violent.

He seems to be in charge of half of the criminals of Brighton.

Graham Greene says that he's like a child with haemophilia -

everyone who touches him draws blood.

He grinned again, passing through the charge-room,

but a bright spot of colour stood out on each cheekbone.

There was poison in his veins, though he grinned and bore it.

He'd been insulted. He was going to show the world.

They thought because he was only 17...

He jerked his narrow shoulders back

at the memory that he'd killed his man,

and these bogies who thought they were clever

weren't clever enough to discover that.

He trailed the clouds of his own glory.

Hell lay about him in his infancy.

He was ready for more deaths.

And we're in a very different environment now too.

The story of Brighton Rock takes place in tea rooms and pubs

and amusement arcades.

The murder happens in a public toilet.

It's a long way away from the rarefied country houses

of the classic Golden Age detective novels.

Graham Greene loves taking us into the sleazy underbelly

behind the shiny shops and the hotels of the Brighton seafront.

Brighton Rock points to the future, to the American-style thriller,

and the brutal, psychological type of crime fiction that we read today.

But it's still recognisable as a very British murder -

after all, what could be more British than a seaside pier?

Greene's novel also taps into a deeper past

and the dark obsessions we've encountered.

Pinkie's evil character is rooted in our fear of murder,

but also our fascination with the murderer,

just like earlier entertainments like ballads and broadsides

and melodramas.

May this crime forever be a curse.

The same fears fed the imagination of Victorian writers

like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

They turned the sensational crimes of their own day

into great literature.

It's all added up to a significant strand of our national psyche.

The very British relish for murder hasn't gone away -

far from it.

Just look at your television schedule.

It'll be packed with all kinds of gory stuff that you can

hardly bear to watch, and yet you do.

It seems that we still can't resist this guilty pleasure.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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