It
comes as a surprise to discover that the author of this detective novel was
Christopher Caudwell (his mother’s surname), the Communist Party member who
wrote on cultural issues from a left-wing perspective, and who died fighting in
the Spanish Civil War in February 1937 at the age of 29. His was a strange, accelerated, career with
distinct segments encompassing prolific journalism, poetry and writing on
aeronautics in addition to the novels and Marxist polemic. The posthumous political works by Caudwell
are not much read now, the fiction even less so; the seven novels written under
his real name have faded from view to such an extent that an MA thesis dealing in
part with a couple of them referred to him as Caudwell throughout, as it was
better known.
Fatality in Fleet Street was published in
1933, before Sprigg joined the Communist Party.
It concerns a Fleet Street proprietor, Lord Carpenter, the “Governing
Director of Affiliated Publications, the biggest newspaper group in the
world”. Carpenter is anti-Soviet and seeks
to foment war with the USSR as the latter’s trade balance has become comparable
with England’s, making it an economic threat.
The policy is widely opposed among his staff and by the Prime
Minister. Carpenter also happens to be a
philandering bully, so that when he is found dead there are plenty of suspects
with a wide variety of motives. Beneath
the conventional detective story is a satire on the power of press barons to
manipulate public opinion, with even the PM helpless when faced by the ability
of the warmongering Carpenter to determine the country’s political actions. This manipulation is reinforced by
Carpenter’s virtual monopoly on news, assisted by the passing of laws
circumscribing the discussion of foreign policy on the wireless.
Although
the book was published in 1933, for some reason it is set in the future, in the
autumn of 1938 (p.2), November 1939 (p.155) or, if the date of Tuesday 12
October is accurate, 1937 (p.32).
Clearly Sprigg was not overly concerned with fine detail. Whichever date is correct, it leads to one or
two departures from history in our time-line, a world in which the Crystal
Palace (destroyed by fire in November 1936) is still standing, there is no
reference to the rise of Nazism and, if the events are taking place in late
1939, the Second World War hasn’t broken out.
Stalin has gone, replaced with “rulers gentler in political methods”,
and the USSR is a great manufacturer thanks to her Twelve-Year Plan (p.153),
which reads like science fiction. The
reference to Ukraine as a success story is particularly ironic because the
Holodomor took place during 1931-2 (about the time Sprigg was writing his novel),
Soviet mismanagement resulting in the deaths of millions through starvation.
The
characters are broadly drawn, and there is a suspicion that they have suffered
because of hasty writing. The main one,
Charles Venables, with monocle, is a journalist and crime expert on Carpenter’s
newspaper who delves into the mystery, which often means going head to head
with the police in the shape of the standard issue Inspector Manciple. Venables appears in four of Sprigg’s books,
of which Fatality in Fleet Street is
the second. He evokes Lord Peter Wimsey
and Albert Campion, both of whom were well established by 1933, and an
unreciprocated love interest (but which promises more) reminds one of Wimsey
and Harriet Vane.
A
group of Russian revolutionaries hiding out in the East End have apparently
dropped in from a discarded draft of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, odd considering Caudwell would so shortly embrace
radical politics. Their clichéd
attributes may have been the product of Sprigg’s false consciousness, soon to
undergo a far-reaching transformation, or they may represent a dislike of
clandestine political action compared to the mass agitation that he would later
undertake as a member of the CPGB in Poplar.
Middle class women are generally well-rounded compared to the menfolk, the
working class characters tend to be a bit ‘gor blimey’. The most amusing secondary character is a
highly intelligent Chinese journalist, Lee Kum Tong, whose depiction may have been
influence by Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan, with his pithy sayings designed
to subvert patronising Western notions of Chinese eternal wisdom. The plotting is reasonable, though the
identity of the murderer is not difficult to guess fairly early on. A large part is taken up by a trial, the
outcome of which is not in doubt, and it pads out the novel. There is a neat twist that is not too far
away from a scenario employed by Agatha Christie in Murder on the Orient Express, which appeared at the beginning of
1934.
Even
though superficially they seem very different, a certain continuity exists
between Fatality in Fleet Street and the
political works such as Illusion and
Reality and Studies in a Dying
Culture. The connection is the
crisis in bourgeois culture; its exploration from a liberal standpoint in the detective
novel is examined from a class-based perspective in the non-fiction. Patriotism is manufactured cynically by Lord
Carpenter to promote war for commercial advantage, parliamentary democracy is at
risk of subversion by special interests while the public is kept in the dark
and persuaded of courses of action on flimsy and exaggerated evidence. These are linkages with resonance even today.
Sprigg/Caudwell
would have been sorry to see the obscurity into which his cultural analyses
have sunk with the demise of the Communist Party as a political force and Marx
as an influential thinker, but it might have been some consolation to see his
novels rediscovered, and Christopher St John Sprigg come out from the shadow
cast by Christopher Caudwell. The range
and quantity of Sprigg’s writing shows that he had a formidable intellect, and
had he survived the Spanish Civil War who knows what he would have
achieved. One thing seems fairly clear,
however: with the principle of Socialist
Realism taking firm hold after the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, Caudwell
would not have returned to such a bourgeois form as the detective novel even if
he had written more fiction.
It
would be good to see all of his books back in print, but sadly Fatality in Fleet Street has not been
issued as part of a Sprigg collection but as one of a series with the label
‘London Bound’, classic crime novels all set in the capital. Oleander have produced an attractive volume, and
even though Sprigg’s effort does not quite come up to the level of the best
detective fiction of the period, it is still recommended as an enjoyable read, by
one of the Golden Age’s most fascinating figures.
