Anthony Berkeley (1893–1971)

An interesting and well-written experimental sort of detective novel.
Roger Sheringham has established a small club for people interested in criminology. His latest idea is for them all to investigate a recent unsolved crime ("The Poisoned Chocolates Case") during the course of one week. On successive evenings, each member will then take the floor to share his or her conclusions in hopes that somewhere along the line they will solve it and hand it back over to the police.

What follows is a show more fairly amusing indictment of traditional detective stories. In many such books, the reader is primed to accept that the detective's deduction on any given fact is the only possible conclusion. But in this book there are as many deductions as there are people, and all of them plausible in their own way.
The only flaw in this structure is that when you finally reach the "real" solution, you are still left with a nagging feeling that it's only one of many possibilities...
Which maybe was the point.
And indeed a couple of other authors wrote additional solutions in later years, which are evidently part of the newest edition of the book. It might be worth tracking down just to check out those other solutions.


A few excerpts to show off the occasional flashes of humor:

Roger sped to the rescue. The combatants reminded him of a bull and a gadfly, and that is a contest which it is often good fun to watch. But the Crimes Circle had been founded to investigate the crimes of others, not to provide opportunities for new ones.


The motion was carried unanimously. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would have liked to vote against it, but she had never yet belonged to any committee where all motions were not carried unanimously and habit was too strong for her.


"A friend of Mrs. Bendix's then. At least," amended Mrs. Fielder-Flemming in some confusion, remembering that real friends seldom murder each other, "she thought of him as a friend. Dear me, this is getting very interesting, Alicia." show less

SPOILERS ABOUND

If Before the Fact is remembered other than by enthusiasts of the “alternate” murder mysteries that were relatively popular in England in the 1930s it is as the inspiration of Hitchcock’s Suspicion. .

BTF was published in 1932 and for the reader who knows only the England of Marsh, Allingham and Christie it may come as a shock to find a story which deals so openly, if with a somewhat oblique form of openness, with matters of sexuality. The POV character, Lina, is clearly show more frigid during the first weeks of her marriage before finding pleasure in sex. Her husband, Johnnie, describes her then as having been like a wet fish in bed. We learn that, if Lina had allowed, Johnnie would have experimented unspecified sexual ‘abnormalities.’ Lina, during a time when she is estranged from her husband, frankly considers the possibility of not just taking a lover but of living openly with him.

The ‘twist’ of the book is that the ‘murderee’ as she comes to think of herself, is aware ‘ Before the Fact’ that her husband intends to murder her. Indeed she knowingly takes the poisoned drink from her husband only after she is sure that he will ‘get away’ with murdering her.

My lack of patience with the book is that after one gets over its novelty one realizes that it is a comparatively well written exercise in making the victim to complicit in her victimization that one ceases to blame her victimizer for his actions. Indeed one finishes the book blaming neither the murderer or the person who stood by watching his actions. The Lina whose mind the reader sees into is suffering from masochism so great that she talks herself into seeing her husband, a man of ruthless egotism who has robbed and murdered his way through life, as a child for whom she is responsible. How many women who end up in battered women’s shelters have bought into this idea that somehow it is their fault that they were not able to reign in the weaknesses of the man in their lives? Though Iles works hard to make Johnnie an attractive cad to this reader he is merely a man who preyed on other people. The author may have written the book to explore why people stay in such oppressive relationships but on rereading it seems more like a paean to wifely martyrdom. Rather than seeing Lina as a martyr or a woman who loved not wisely but too well this reader saw her as a woman who had a weak a moral compass as her husband. This reader ended the book feeling more sorry for the other people that Johnnie will murder after he has run through every last cent of his dead wife’s money than she did for Lina.

There was, at this time in England, an amazing amount of affection for the aristocratic cad. Had Johnnie been from the working class one cannot doubt that he would have been thrown into prison and any of Lina’s set who read about his exploits would have seen him as nothing but a common thief and murderer. It is this same affection one sees in Marsh’s A Surfeit of Lampreys wherein the reader is invited to find the fact that the titular family lives by not paying the money they owe to tradespeople and servants charming. Looking back over almost eighty years one sees the enormous degree of entitlement still enjoyed by members of the gentry and aristocracy at that time and one wonders if anything short of the intervention of a World War could have prevented serious class violence from erupting in England. show less

Self-satisfied amateur detective Roger Sheringham did not exactly cover himself with glory during his previous outing, Roger Sheringham And The Vane Mystery, but here Anthony Berkeley allows him to redeem himself---albeit in his own inimitable way, one not always easy for the reader to take. In his capacity of crime expert on a London paper, Roger is contacted by a distressed vicar, who tells him that after moving to London to find work, his daughter, a steady, reliable girl, has ceased to show more contact her family. Looking into the matter as requested, Roger discovers to his dismay that the girl has committed suicide, hanging herself with her own stocking. When a second girl kills herself the same way, Roger is surprised but happy enough to get an article about "suggestibility" out of it; but when a third young woman dies, he is convinced that these are not suicides, but murders... The Silk Stocking Murders is a creepy, uncomfortable book, which lingers on the details of the women's deaths, including their more fetishistic aspects: most notably, the stocking in each case is one the victim was wearing, such that she is found with one stocking on and one bare leg. There is also unusual emphasis, for this period, upon the subsequent condition of the bodies - Roger is allowed to look on during the police surgeon's initial examination of one of the murdered girls - and it is fairly frank about the sexual underpinnings of the crimes. Moreover, exposing the killer ultimately requires a re-enactment of the deaths---complete with a live model... As he begins to look into the first three deaths - and there will be others before the case is closed - what strikes Roger is the lack of motive for suicide: the vicar's daughter, for instance, found a good job; while another of the young women was on the verge of marriage. After realising that the police are not satisfied either, Roger puts aside his hurt feelings from their previous collaboration and teams up once again with Inspector Morseby to look into the deaths; but it is the amateur trio that he forms with the sister of the first victim and the fiancé of the third that begins to make headway. Although one of the victims is (we gather) a prostitute, the others would not have let a stranger into their rooms---which implies not just that that the killer is someone the victims knew, but that he knew all of them. By comparing lists of friends and acquaintances, Roger and his collaborators find three names into common, three prime suspects---which presents Roger with something of a moral dilemma, since one of them - the one on whom the police are focusing - happens to be a friend of his, too...

Roger had seen plenty of violent death during his service in France during the war, but dead men are different from dead girls, and girls dead through slow strangulation different from any others. He shuddered in spite of his efforts to control himself as his gaze rested on the distorted face. She may have been pretty in life, but she certainly was not pretty in death. By her sides lay her hands, tightly clenched.
She was a small girl, not much more than five feet in height and slightly built, and she was dressed in her underclothes only, with a light-coloured silk stocking on one leg; the other stocking still lay, though now loosely, round her neck... show less

I was looking forward to reading Before the Fact by Francis Iles as the Alfred Hitchcock movie ‘Suspicion” was based upon this book. Also I had read a book by this author before and really enjoyed it. Luckily, I was very taken with this story, although I admit that there were times when I had strong reactions to the choices the characters made and found myself talking aloud to it.

When spinster Lina McLaidlaw marries the charming Johnnie Aysgarth, she thought she must be the happiest show more person alive. As the marriage progressed, the layers were slowly peeled back and revealed that she had married a total cad. Addicted to gambling and women, eventually Lina leaves him only to go back when he crooks his finger in her direction. Johnnie was always able to turn on the charm and work his magic on his “Monkeyface” and she, moronically went along with him. She finds out even more despicable things about him, but not only stays in the marriage, she also finds reasons to excuse his behaviour. Eventually, she realizes that Johnnie will stoop to anything even murder.

I applaud the author on a very clever and well crafted plot. As rotten as Johnnie is, Lina is the character that drove me crazy and there were many times when I felt like wringing her neck. Basically this is a dark comedy about what happens when a no-good rotter and the ultimate masochist come together. Although I suspect that many prefer the kinder, less offensive movie version, I loved every cruel and vile moment of Before The Fact and highly recommend it. show less