[A look at half a dozen detective yarns from 1939-45]
Health Professionals in English
Detective Fiction of the Second World War
From its beginning, detective fiction in the classic
tradition, in English, has been closely connected with the medical profession.
Most famously, not only Sherlock Holmes's fictional chronicler and partner in
detection, Dr John Watson, but also his creator (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and
real-life prototype (Dr Julian Bell) were medical men. Doctors featured
frequently, often prominently, in the classic detective story of the 1930s,
indispensable in the cast of village characters, necessary to the investigative
process, occasionally detecting themselves1, and in a few celebrated
cases as villains of the piece. It is not giving anything away to cite one example
of the last category (no spoilers here), the excellently 'noir' study Malice
Aforethought (1931), by Frances Iles, which opens with the sentence:
"It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife
that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter."2
Although historians have paid serious attention to such novels in recent decades, analysing their significance within cultural production and attempting to decipher their less apparent, possibly subversive messages in relation to war among other issues3, their relevance for medical history has not come under comparable scrutiny.
The Whodunit does its Bit
While the outbreak of war in 1939 may have put an
end, by definition, to the pre-war world, including the country-house settings
and paradoxical "cosiness" associated with the murder mystery, it did
not entirely revolutionise the nation's reading habits.4 To begin
with, more of the same was produced by established and new writers, as the
demand for literary distraction and solace increased, but the war soon became
integrated into new narratives with realistic settings, and in these the health
professions would often, naturally, feature. The 'Queen of Crime', Agatha
Christie, epitomised the ideal of involvement, working in the dispensary at
University College Hospital and simultaneously writing books like the wartime
spy story N or M? (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942).5
Gladys Mitchell was another well-known author who
continued with her normal output, enhanced in the case of Sunset over Soho
(1943) by a precise wartime setting,6 Her detective, Mrs Lestrange
Bradley, is a psychiatric consultant to the Home Office in peace time and has
been called into consultation by the War Office for some special work, the
nature of which is left unspecified (possibilities rooted in reality might
include some kind of assessment for the armed forces, or for secret operations,
or possibly in relation to combat stress or conscientious objection). In any
case she proclaims her dislike of commissions of this sort, which she usually
finds neither interesting nor particularly useful. (p. 117) At the start of the
book, in Chapter 1, 'Blitz', she is making presumably better use of her time by
helping to cope with the aftermath of a bombing raid on London, doing the round
of shelters she was scheduled to visit and assisting in a Rest Centre. There
she observes the extraordinary calmness of the people, surprised at their
unexpected acceptance of appalling din and danger, despite the same impression
already being familiar enough to have become a commonplace. The reaction is
taken at face value rather than as a symptom of shock although people are at
the same time "all shaken and stricken".
She is interested too in her own reaction, noting a
certain detached preoccupation with effects and results of the air-raid rather
than any tendency to focus on an enemy as having caused it. In addition to
people being on the whole patient, reasonable and brave, the staff and officers
provide "amazingly selfless" service even when "almost rushed
off their feet." (p.9) For her they are not anonymous, faceless
professionals but a subject for study in themselves. She sees each of the
officers, one male and one female, as flouting gender stereotypes (which she
herself nevertheless employs in analysing them): the man in her view more of a
man, not less, for recognising in himself some of the more penetrating feminine
qualities, while the woman appears a natural leader, her accepted female role
confirmed by her three sons in the army, yet her mentality allegedly masculine
in breadth, feminine in subtlety. The shelter's emergency hospital has a
nursing sister on duty, and is equipped with emergency maternity arrangements,
described as "marvellously adequate", a judgment reinforced when it
emerges later that twin babies have been born there during a raid. (p.177) The
Centre is beset by enquiries and business calls from the Town Hall, Borough
Engineer and the like, as well as having to deal with the medical and welfare
work; interpreters are at a premium due to the racial mix of those attending,
and volunteers are always wanted. On a more sinister note, in connection with
the murder plot, she learns that it is "becoming a common trick to dump
bodes where they'll look like air-raid casualties." (p.17)
Trying To Get In
More mundane but no less authentically of the period
is the setting of Josephine Bell's Death at the Medical Board.7
The author had already begun to find her niche with two tales of detection and
medical life: Murder in Hospital (1937) and The Port of London
Murders (1938), and wrote from an impressive basis of experience, as a
practising doctor - she qualified at UCL - from a medical family.
The Medical Board is for prospective members of the
WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force). She notices how seriously the would-be recruits
take the occasion, interpreting this not as deference but as a sign of healthy
distrust of the authority invested in those with the power to find something
wrong and so to undermine the interviewees' choice of wartime role. The
Chairman is an Admiral, and a 'Sir', the other doctor on the board a man whose
partner is in the Naval Reserve. As usual the candidates are late, not through
any fault of their own, but because they have been delayed while their
intelligence and psychological fitness were tested - fitness, as she thinks
satirically, "for washing dishes or cooking cabbages!" About sixteen,
in single file, troop in, regulation dressing-gowns having been handed out to
those who had not brought their own. She judges them to be normal girls who, far
from suffering visible deprivation, look noticeably plumper than their older
sisters did in pre-war days of "banting and slimming". (pp. 14-15).
The proceedings are disrupted by the suspicious death of one of them, who has
been resisting classification as medically unfit. One strand of the complex
plot is concerned with the production of false certificates of exemption from
service on medical grounds, as part of a scheme by a "spy gang" to
sabotage the war effort.
The male doctor-detective who eventually arrives at
the solution has been occupied with "Hush-hush" wartime research and
is called to assist the police. His expertise helps to penetrate the "thick
blanket of officialdom and routine that seemed to outsiders to characterise
Medical Boards" (pp. 24-25) and he is not misled by the "pretty
widespread", erroneous assumption that "the doctors at the Board
would not know anything." (p.115) In the course of the investigation
suspicion falls temporarily at least on a "mad RAF chap", a
psychiatric casualty who has very bad shell-shock after being bombed in a
hangar at the aerodrome. This man reputedly becomes violent at times and after
being discharged from the RAF, he has become the scapegoat for anything unpleasant
in the village, and is said to be worried he might be doing things without
knowing. (p.139) In the end the author voices her concerns, through her
detective's forebodings to his wife, about what she perceived as the threat of
post-war bureaucracy, and in particular socialised medicine: "After this
war we'll both be middle-aged, respectable citizens, planned into tight corners
where we won't be able to stretch our arms and legs." (p. 204) Bell
eventually became a full-time writer, continuing to draw on her medical
background, and to hanker after pre-NHS days.
In Hospital
A lesser-known writer, G V Galwey, made similarly
effective use of his own experience in Murder on Leave (1946),
especially with reference to the Royal Navy (RN) in which he had served for six
years before being invalided out, and which he tried to rejoin early in the
war. Failing at first on medical grounds, he was accepted into the RN patrol
service before being declared unfit for sea service in 1941.8 With
this record he must inevitably have had repeated contacts with the medical
services, and they loom large in his book, published just after the war but set
in 1944, with earlier events casting long shadows on the plot and characters.
The murder victim is a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse who worked in an RN
auxiliary hospital in Inverness, where much of the investigation takes place.
The author has an evident grasp of the complexities and nuances of hospital
nursing in wartime as subsequently described by historians of the subject9,
and presents individuals with their various traits and attitudes, not as
stereotypes or stock figures: the Matron, for example, has "a face which
has done its best to be sweet for rather too many years [...] but with a
certain resilient tenacity to go on doing her job". (p. 66) A colleague
describes the dead woman as being very good in the theatre, but not a good
nurse, because she was not kind, so that patients "didn't cooperate with
her - they didn't feel she cared". (pp. 68-69) One of her patients
was a German officer who later convalesced on parole at her father's large
house and has now escaped from a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in the vicinity.
One of the key clues consists of remnants of a
field-dressing, threads of gauze impregnated with picric, and in the course of
their detecting the Chief Inspector and his helper each infiltrate the
hospital, the young woman assigned to packing up
medical chests for the Coastal Forces craft while a colleague sews
sheets economically sides-to-middle. The police
detective is more elaborately disguised as a badly
burned patient, with the reluctant connivance of
Matron. Although it "seems unethical to admit [him] to a bed when
there's nothing the matter" (p. 94), it is only
for one night, so he is dressed in a coarse yellow flannel nightshirt,
swathed in bandages - "a wicked waste" - and decorated with gentian
violet. On the pretext that the freshest possible air is needed to rest his
lungs, his hospital bed is pushed out on the verandah of what might once have been
the drawing-room of the house, but is now a surgical ward, to supervise
proceedings at a social in the grounds. Nevertheless the hospital environment,
although important, remains secondary to
the Navy as the main context of Galwey's book.
Doctors and Nurses
In Christianna Brand's classic Green for Danger
(1945) on the other hand, it is at the heart of everything that happens.10
An Author's Note to the Pandora paperback edition (p. vi) confirms, putting it
modestly, that (as any reader would have guessed) she had "some
acquaintance" with the inside workings of a military hospital, having
spent the whole of the London blitz in a heavily bombed area, largely among
VADs. No less than five London hospitals were actually hit during the heaviest
raid of 1941.11 The assertion is made in the process of refuting
criticism of the way she has depicted her characters as reacting coolly to the
air-raids. This is not to play down the effects of the bombing, in fact the
plot hinges on the physical and psychological damage it causes, but there is a
great deal more in her work.
A prefatory chapter indicates what has brought the
doctors (male) and nurses (female) to this former children's sanatorium,
"hurriedly scrambled into shape" as a military hospital: "one
had put one's name down during the Munich crisis, and already it was becoming a
tiny bit uncomfortable to be out of uniform"; “Eat, drink and sleep
together... for tomorrow we join the V.A.D.s!” (pp.1-2) There are illuminating
conversations and detailed descriptions of the physical and social scene on the
wards, in the "modern" operating theatre, in the nurses'
accommodation, and off-duty at a Mess party. Murder methods, clues and the
double-twist dénoument are dependent on medical equipment and supplies,
ingeniously deployed. Motives are intimately connected with the wartime
circumstances. Gender, class and status differences emerge from dialogue and
through changing relationships, modified by the prevailing imperative of
comradely cheerfulness and getting on with the job, which does not of course
preclude complaining. A nurse describes her shared quarters as "our
slum", the "best a grateful nation can do for its Florrie
Nightingales in the year 1940." (p.101)
Post-traumatic stress (not of
course so named at the time) is apparent in at least one key character, and all
admit to being under a strain.
Altogether this is a key text for the subject of
this article. Fortunately it is (probably) still to be found without too much
difficulty in public libraries at least, having achieved and sustained a
deserved if fairly low-key popularity and gone through several editions/ A quite
memorable film (1946), starring Alastair Sim as the Detective Inspector, can still
crop up on television. The film inevitably omits some of the detail and nuances
of the book, as in the subsuming of Brand's panegyric to bravery under
bombardment (p.100) in the brief exchange: "The nurses have stood it
awfully well." "So have the doctors."
Why Read Wartime Whodunits?
No doubt crime fiction likewise inevitably omits
much of the detail and nuances of reality, not to mention the possibility of
any given book being written not as a chronicle of the times but perhaps as a
pot-boiler, as part of the morale boosting internal propaganda effort, or
merely as ephemeral entertainment. By that very fact, however, the incidental
background material included to add topicality, verisimilitude and atmosphere
can have an enhanced validity. Reading detective stories is obviously no
substitute for study and research when it comes to understanding the
interactions of medicine and war in the 20th century.12 Nor are the
novels directly comparable with the personal reminiscences accumulated in the
past 60-odd years and now being increasingly collected, although these can
provide interesting comparisons and resonances.11 That said, and
without seeking to blur the distinction between fact and fiction, record and
imagination, these books can provide one way for generations who did not live
through the war years to acquire insights into what it may "really"
have been like.
See also: E. A. Willis, ‘English
detective fiction and the “People’s War”’. Forum for Modern Language Studies,
vol.42, no.1, 2006: 13-21.
SmothPUBS online
February 2015
References:-
Dates of first publication are given in
brackets in the text; page numbers in the text refer to the editions cited
below.
1 Binyon T J.
"Murder Will Out" The Detective in Fiction. Oxford: OUP, 1989.
2 Iles F. Malice
Aforethought. London: Pan Books, 1948.
3 Rowland S. From
Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell:British Women Writers in Detective and Crime
Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
4 Munton A. English
Fiction of the Second World War. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
5 Christie A. Agatha
Christie: An Autobiography. London: Fontana/Collins 1978.
6 Mitchell G. Sunset
over Soho. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1943.
7 Bell J. Death
at the Medical Board. London: Longman, Green & Co. Ltd., 1944.
8 Galwey GV. Murder
on Leave. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.
9 Starns P. Nurses
at War: Women on the Frontline 1939-1945. Stroud: Sutton, 2000.
10 Brand C. Green
for Danger. London: Pandora, 1987.
11 Wicks B. Waiting
for the All Clear: True Stories from Survivors of the Blitz. London: Guild
Publishing, 1990.
12 Cooter R,
Harrison M, Sturdy S, eds. War, Medicine and Modernity. Stroud: Sutton,
1998.
