Margot Bennett, "Someone From the Past" (1958)

I'm going to spoil the ending of this one to some degree. I'll try to say some general things first, so you can tell whether you care about the spoiling.

This is another novel reissued as a British Library Crime Classic—just this past year, 2023. Margot Bennett was the first woman to win the Gold Dagger (though there was at least one woman on the shortlist every previous year). She never wrote another crime novel after this one, mostly turning instead to writing for television. Did she quit on a high?

In some ways, yes. The book is a fairly successful marriage of the classic form of the whodunnit with some then-contemporary psychological content. As in the previous winner, the psychologies of the main characters are foregrounded and examined as putative explanations for their actions—murder is more than base motive. But, unlike with the previous winner, there is a genuine, well-executed mystery at the core of the novel: which among four suspects, all complete shits of varying consistency, murdered the protagonist's friend? 

The protagonist is a youngish woman, Nancy, who is a writer for magazines. Her dead friend is Sarah. The four suspects are all terrible, terrible men with whom Nancy, Sarah, or both have romantic pasts or presents. I say "romantic". This feels like a euphemism here, since none of the relationships described are obviously loving, in the sense we should hope to use that word. 

The book works, insofar as it does, because the four male suspects are all convincingly bad. One of them is actively trying to frame Nancy for Sarah's death, and going some way to succeeding. She doesn't know which of them it is, and the police are on to her (not without reason—she doesn't always help herself). Meanwhile, all four terrible men take turns at being personally horrible to Nancy, each in their own entirely believable way. So we believe that any of them could be capable of the crime, and we don't know which it is until the last few pages. This engaging, well-wrought plot  is written up tightly enough to create tension, with adept use of flashback to fill in the characters. It's all helped along by snappy, funny dialogue; the introduction by Martin Edwards speculates that Bennett identified with Nancy, and she certainly gets all the very best lines.

There are two reasons why I'm not entirely sold on this book. The first is that it is so appallingly, irredeemably squalid. Perhaps this is exactly as it was for young women writers in the 1950s, but oh dear, the grime and the stink and the horrible, horrible men make you itch as you read. This is an achievement, in a way, but not a pleasant one. The second reason is more serious, and involves the spoiler. After the mystery is solved, after all is settled, after we know which of the shits is a murderer, after we and Nancy know they are all shits: after all that, she falls swooning into the arms of the worst of the shits, the one who has treated her most appallingly, whose only positive quality appears to be his innocence of murder.

Now, there is a question of how seriously this ending should be taken. It's possible that Bennett meant it as a sort of tragic coda—that she sees the obvious problems with the proposition, and sees Nancy as deserving of them, as no better than she ought to be. But I don't think this is so. I think this is meant to be a consummate, cheering resolution. To modern sensibilities, it is certainly not cheering, and really not believable—in fact, close to incomprehensible. It mars what is otherwise a very fine book, worth reading for its plot, its dialogue, and its itchy squalor.

Julian Symons, "The Colour of Murder" (1957)

Everyone in this book is awful, pathetic, or both. Not terribly so: just ordinarily awful, mundanely pathetic. And I suppose not quite everyone. There's a barrister whose only character flaw is a measure of egotism, and a likeable prostitute. But every other character, minor or major, is composed in a rebarbative key. It's quite an achievement to make even the brief walk-on parts believably unpleasant.

The narrative centres on John Wilkins, a minor-league fantasist in denial about his drinking problem. His fantasies and his drinking owe much to his grasping, social-climbing wife, May, and his overbearing, meddling mother. Their intertwined lives induce an atmosphere of intense entrapment. The reader is given to wonder how many similar miserable situations have been avoided by the liberalisation of the divorce laws and the loosening of stifling middle-class social norms since the 1950s. If John and May could just have separated painlessly, and acceptably to all, none of the plot happens.

Since they can't separate, the plot happens. John's fantasies lead him into a tangle of lies and a delusional semi-affair with a young woman; his lies, along with his drinking and concomitant blackouts, contribute to the credibility of the murder case against him when she's found dead. The book has two parts. The first is a long pre-trial interview between John and a psychiatrist. He was irrationally involved with her. He may have killed her. He doesn't know. He can't remember. The second is the trial itself. An epilogue seems intended to cement the ambiguity surrounding the murder case, but rests on a coincidence so far-fetched that the ambiguity instead collapses. The book might have been better without it.

The Colour of Murder was reissued as a British Library Crime Classic in 2018, so it wasn't just a prize-winner in 1957; it is esteemed today. Both accolades deserve inquiry.

Why did it win a prize in 1957? Perhaps because of the forensic focus on the states of mind of the central suspect. The introduction to the BL edition highlights this as a novelty at the time, and certainly in comparison to novels from the "Golden Age" of crime novels, there is considerable depth, nuance, and plausibility to the psychological characterisation. This is mostly in the first part of the book. The trial part is nicely done, and I might have appreciated it more had I not recently read Grierson's similar, better effort. The introduction claims that Symons uses this part to "explore the nature of justice", but I can't say I found much exploration worth considering.

Symons' reputation in the world of crime fiction now rests mostly on his history of the genre, Bloody Murder, rather than on his own novels. So why reissue this one (and one other, The Belting Inheritance)? While it certainly has merits as a novel, it's also fascinating as a social document of the 1950s. The introduction notes this, but in relation to concrete facts about the prevalence of "television parties" and racism. I was more struck by what the book tells about the claustrophobic, small-minded, straitened nature of lower-middle-class 1950s life: among other elements, how painfully important it was to cleanse oneself from any taint of unsuitable social origins or associations, and how temptingly easy it was to re-associate oneself to disastrous effect. If you ever want to read a novel that makes you both aware and glad that the not-too-distant past really is the past, this is one to consider.

Edward Grierson, "The Second Man" (1956)

Several of these early winners are out of print. My copy of "The Second Man" is a yellowed, liver-spotted hardback. It smells of dusty libraries and dingy storerooms. It's delicious.

The book itself is less redolent of its times than you might fear from a synopsis, though it still has a distinct 1950s air. The central character is Marion Kerrison, a barrister newly arrived in an unnamed northern town that is clearly Sheffield and has clearly never seen a woman wearing a barrister's wig before. You might expect this setup to lead inevitably to her game conquest of the man's world, allowing the author displaying their impeccable egalitarian credentials—after all, would you premise your novel so if you were going to do your heroine down? And expecting this, you might be wary, because often what looked impeccably egalitarian in the 1950s is apt to seem rather cringeworthy today.

But Grierson doesn't actually seem that interested in his clash-of-genders premise, nor in proving that he's on the right side. The novel is narrated in the first person by a chambers colleague of Kerrison. This is a neat distancing trick that proofs against posterity; we don't quite know whether the condescending stuff about women's emotional nature and so on is due to the author or the character. But it also distances the narrator from the protagonist. Kerrison very sensibly avoids the boy's clubs of the lawyers' mess and such, and so is often absent as the narrator drinks loyal toasts, passes port, and sinks snooker balls. The narrator positions himself between his overtly reactionary colleagues and those who fall over themselves to offer patronising support. He doesn't seem to care too much; nor does the author.

So what does the author care about? Not the central plot: there's some mystery, but we're effectively told whodunnit early on, and the remaining howdunnit questions aren't especially taxing. Not the quarter-hearted romance subplot, which really seems to be there due to a vague sense of novelistic necessity. Rather, and rather nicely, he cares about the practice of the law: the conduct of trials, the nuances of cross-examination, day to day life in chambers and courts.

Given that Grierson was a barrister who wrote fiction and crime novels on the side, perhaps this isn't too surprising, but it's still striking, and strikingly well done. The book is excellently paced, with a few short chapters leading up to two long ones that describe in great detail the trial at the novel's heart. After these, a few more short chapters wrap things up briskly. It's really those two central chapters where the interest of the novel lies. They are very good, written with verve, dramatic without melodrama, the obvious product of deep involvement with what's being described. They're worth reading the book for. The defendant at the trial is also a well-drawn character, perhaps better drawn than the protagonist or narrator.

Very well. A good, competent, engaging legal mystery. But why exactly did this win an award? Was competent and engaging good enough in 1956? (I suppose reading the other books shortlisted that year might provide a clue, but life's too short) Was the award jury swinging back towards the familiar certitudes of law and trial after the dalliance with ethical thinking the year before? Hard to say, but I'd more happily read further Grierson than further Graham.

Winston Graham, "The Little Walls" (1955)

Why would you start a literary prize for genre fiction? Publicity, obviously. But why would you want publicity? Because you're confident that your genre has reached a point of maturity from which proselytising might reap converts? Or because you're quietly anxious that the genre is ailing, and the congregation might dwindle without reinvigoration?

As the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, "The Little Walls"  supports the latter speculation. It's an anxious novel. The most enduring work of Its author, Winston Graham, is the series of Poldark novels, inspiration for multiple Sunday-night-sexytimes TV adaptations. But he turned his hand to various forms and genres, and he certainly had a keen sense of the competition in the crime genre; through his characters, he ventriloquises jabs at private dicks "who risk their lives and their virtue for ten dollars a day and expenses" and "literary Catholics" (apparently the only case in which religion is still fashionable).

Considering the award it won, the book hasn't much crime in it, nor much mystery. It's a manhunt and a womanhunt combined, and both are essentially solved two thirds of the way through the book. So what's left? For the hunted man and the hunting man to fight over the hunted woman, as a direct reckoning over past sins and as a proxy for a clash of values. 

Ah yes, the clash of values. The book's action is accommodated to a battle-of-ideas framework in which a dogged Christian morality incorporating a firm belief in right and wrong is set against an anarchist live-as-you-will tendency very loosely inspired by a mix of Freud and Nietzsche. This framework is somewhat laboriously constructed from elements of set-piece dialogues, reconstructed diary entries, and the protagonist's private musings. No prizes for guessing which side wins. It wins by winning the woman, who (perhaps unsurprisingly, but not pleasingly all the same) seems to lack much by way of agency, and a fair bit by way of character---though she definitely has a physical appearance. Another period trope to tick off the bingo card is a disabled person whose disability is quite explicitly presented as an outward marker of inner corruption.

All the same, there's enough here to see why it might have won an award; it's not badly written, the bloviating about the nature of morality gives it an air of superiority over the mere genre stuff, there is some interest in the plot and some nice observations of particularities of feeling, thought, and action. Several minor characters seem superfluous, but do allow the author to efficiently invoke an atmosphere and a milieu.

This last seems faintly incredible from 70 years distance. The book is set in a post-war Europe in which it is very possible for a member of the monied, educated upper middle class to arrange personal meetings with senior police officers in multiple countries, to turn up in Capri confident of ingratiation into a society circle, to all in all act as though the world is very much at their command. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I suppose it's not unbelievable. The population was much smaller, and the percentage of the population occupying this particular social stratum was smaller. Perhaps a person within that stratum did indeed get to have the doors opened for them by other members of it.

To be more generous about the ideas, the book's atmosphere also imbues a sense that this is a Europe shaken by the war and the Holocaust, sitting loosely now on its moral foundations, where a kind of ethical anarchism might really be an appropriate intellectual stance, not just a convenient excuse for knavery. In a Europe like that, one might feel the need to have one's protagonist shore up the foundations, and to do it with something besides brute force. All the same, it's hard not to conflate the book's anxiety about the moral state of Europe with the CWA's anxiety about the state of the crime novel—as if it's time for the genre to reflect on its own moral state, and to do so through introspective reflection. I'm all for introspective reflection, but one can have too much of a good thing.