Caroline: There are many things to love about the stories that emerged from the golden age of detective fiction. These mysteries from the interwar years have clever plots that engage with a complicated set of rules, an insistence on fair play, strong recurring characters and a powerful sense of narrative momentum that carries the reader towards a thrilling yet inevitable conclusion. For many, there is also something quintessentially British, or perhaps specifically English, about this type of novel — from the settings to the characters to the social norms that they display.
The familiarity of some of these settings adds to the charm too. We’ve talked about the appeal of the country house murder mystery on the show before, and of course there are also plenty that feature trains, ships, theatres and beautiful yet isolated islands. But there is one scenario that intrigues me more than any other at the moment. It too revolves around complex narratives, exciting conclusions, fair play and a lot of complicated rules. It is extremely, almost sickeningly English. The proverbial blunt instrument is also an absolute necessity.
It all makes me wonder: just why are there so many cricket murder mysteries?
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. This is the first part of Shedunnit’s “Mysteries of Summer” trilogy, in which I will be taking a closer look at how writers from the golden age of detective fiction incorporated the classic elements of an English summer into the murder mystery. Today, we’re looking at cricket, but make sure you are subscribed in your podcast app of choice so you don’t miss the next two instalments.
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Cricket has strong associations with the very best of the fickle English summer. It is reminiscent of long afternoons spent lazing in the sunshine, picnicking and chatting while the satisfying crack of leather against willow hints at the stately progress of a game underway somewhere in the middle distance, the two teams of white-clad players making a pleasing picture against the green of the grass. Every so often a shout goes up and the crowd quickly refocuses on the action: someone is caught, perhaps, or the bowler has got through to the stumps. There is a rhythm to it all that, for those who enjoy it, is inexpressibly comforting — just like the twists and turns of a classic mystery story.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Before we get any further into the details, I think it’s worth getting a few of the basics straight. What actually is cricket?
Andy Zaltzman: That’s a very good and very philosophical question, Caroline. I mean, attempting to explain cricket to those unfamiliar with cricket has been one of the great challenges the sport has faced pretty much since it was in invented.
Caroline: For those who follow cricket, especially on the radio, I think this voice will be very familiar…
Andy: I am Andy Zaltzman, comedian, host of The News Quiz and The Bugle podcast and Test Match Special cricket statistician.
Caroline: Andy is someone who is not unfamiliar, then, with communicating the nuances and subtleties of the game of cricket. Let’s give that explanation another go.
Andy: I think the best way to explain it is as an evolving human drama. A contest between two teams that, with each ball bowled by the bowling team to the batting team, shifts the narrative in some way. Whether barely perceptibly if nothing much happens, or quite dramatically if something big happens.
So you have the bowling side who are basically throwing a small hard ball at the batters who try to hit it. The batting side tries not to get out, and to score runs by hitting the ball into gaps or through the field, off the field, in the air or on the ground to score runs.
Caroline: That’s all you need to know to be getting on with. Eleven players on each team, one team fields, the other team bats, with two batsman playing at any one time. It’s also a sport, despite its somewhat genteel reputation, with a certain amount of violence built in. The ball is very hard, some bowlers can throw it at the batsman very fast, it really hurts if you get hit by it, and it similarly will really hurt it someone hits you with a cricket bat, which is a solid chunk of wood with a handle attached.
Cricket is very story driven, Andy says, which goes a long way to explaining why it has attracted so many writers over the decades.
Andy: I don’t think there is another sport that creates that type of narrative. Baseball in the postseason, I think, comes close in that you have those elongated rivalries. And that’s the thing with cricket. The test match game is, you know, five days for the game to evolve. And then you have a series, say, when England plays Australia, that’s five matches lasting five days each, usually spread over a couple of months. So you have these long form narratives. It’s almost like, you know, like a box set on TV where you sort of have to wait for the next instalment. I think the complexity of narrative is not necessarily why it’s so widely popular, but I think why cricket fans become so obsessed with it, because the story, when you’re following a game, and I’ve the great sort of privilege of working on the radio commentary on England’s test matches, it sort of grasps you by the soul over five days and you get sort of caught up in this narrative and all the potentials of it, and you know, at the end of each session, each day you think, well, what might happen next? So it does, it sort of envelops you. And that can be true whether you are watching it or not.
Caroline: This is one of the peculiarities of cricket — watching it live is one way to enjoy it, but a huge number of people also follow it passively, on the radio or via text, while doing other things, allowing it to weave into the background of their lives. You don’t actually need to be looking at the cricket to feel the lure of the story of cricket.
Andy: I mean, I’ve followed games on holiday. The last time Australia played England before I was working with the test match commentary team, I was on a holiday in Norway. And just getting score updates on my phone every 15 or 20 minutes. But you know, you could see how the story was shifting even in that abstract way of just looking at the score on a screen that you can see, again, those possibilities changing, some shutting off, some opening up. And so it is something that even if you are really busy with other stuff, a test match can still occupy and fascinate you. It is like reading a novel where it might take you a week, it might take you two weeks, but that story is just in your head the whole time. And a test match is very like that.
Caroline: Cricket is played in such a way, then, that really lends itself to inclusion in a tightly plotted story. But how did it end up as a popular backdrop for the golden age detective novel? Well, a good place to look is to that titan of early twentieth century crime fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was himself an enthusiastic player.
Andrew: Doyle, he was a very good cricketer actually. He played for the MCC on 10 separate occasions. And on one of those occasions he actually bowled out the WG Grace, the famous Dr WG Grace, who played for England on so many occasions.
Caroline: This is Andrew Green, a senior lecturer at Brunel University who has explored this connection between cricket and crime fiction extensively. Although Arthur Conan Doyle was quite a skilled player of cricket he was, surprisingly, a little less keen on writing about it.
Andrew: It’s very interesting that in fact, that he only mentions cricket in two of the Sherlock Holmes stories. There’s “The Adventure of the Priory School” and another story called “The Adventure of the Three Students” where there are kind of short passing references to cricket. But, of course, you know, Doyle was famously out of love with Sherlock Holmes. He really didn’t like committing to writing the stories and wished that he’d been known for other things apart from Sherlock Holmes. And so I’ve always kind of been tempted to wonder whether he didn’t deliberately exclude cricket from those stories because it was something that he didn’t want to soil by bringing it into his detective fiction writing, which he didn’t enjoy doing so much. He wrote what’s a pretty terrible poem called A Reminiscence of Cricket which was first published in 1922. But other than that, no. Doyle famously doesn’t write about cricket.
Caroline: However, you can still find some Sherlock Holmes cricket stories…
Andrew: Other people have made up for that. That there is a kind of, you know, spinoff body of fan fiction if you like, which kind of involves Sherlock Holmes. And there’s two novels in particular that place Holmes at some very kind of significant cricket matches. One of those is by a guy called Arunabha Sengupta, and it’s a book called Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of the Ashes, which places Holmes at the famous match where the bales were burned to create the ashes, which is what is played for every time England and Australia play each other in a test series. And another book called Sherlock Holmes at the 1902 Test by a guy called Stanley Shaw. So other people have decided that they want to bring cricket into Holmes in a way that Doyle didn’t.
Caroline: So Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes who was so admired by the initial wave of writers involved in the golden age of detective fiction, did not go out of his way to incorporate cricket into his work. But there was someone else in his family who did: E.W. Hornung, his brother in law, who created an extremely memorable character both on the cricket pitch and off.
Andrew: Arthur J Raffles a gentleman thief, who plays cricket for a team called The Gentlemen of England. He’s one of those amateur players who doesn’t have his own wealth, but tends to fund his activities by criminal activity. He’s a cad. That’s what Raffles is. Nothing short of that really.
Caroline: Raffles is on the opposite side of the law to Sherlock Holmes, but he’s no less readable for it. Hornung describes him throughout, too, as the “amateur cracksman”, a reference to both his amateur status in the criminal underworld and as a cricketer. And he also has his anti-hero make a clear connection between the two pastimes, something that we’re going to see a lot in cricketing crime novels.
Andrew: Here’s what Raffles has to say. He seems to have a slightly disparaging attitude towards cricket, actually. He says: “Cricket is good enough as a sport until you discover a better. What’s the satisfaction of taking a man’s wicket when you want his spoons? Still, if you can bowl a bit, your low cunning won’t get rusty. And always looking for the weak spots, just the kind of mental exercise one wants.”
So beginning to develop a connection between the psychology of cricket and the cricketer and the idea of the commission of crime, which I think is really interesting.
Caroline: This habit of making comparisons between cricket and other aspects of life is a deeply ingrained one, Andy Zaltzman told me.
Andy: We love as cricket fans to draw kind of parallels between cricket and life and see great metaphors within it, which is sometimes a little contrived. But I think there are sort of huge lessons that can be learned from it. And also, you know, a lot of parallels between the narratives that we create as humans, whether it’s our own stories or the great novelists, the great playwrights and the narratives that cricket produces as a sport.
Caroline: After the break — the eternal duel between batsman and bowler, criminal and detective.
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Caroline: I borrowed the title of this episode from Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of perhaps the greatest cricketing detective from the golden age itself, Lord Peter Wimsey. This particular phrase comes from her 1937 novel Busman’s Honeymoon, during which Wimsey is recognised by an enthusiastic vicar for his two notable pastimes: cricket and crime. But the peak of Wimsey’s cricketing-while-detecting activities actually comes a bit earlier in his canon, as Andrew Green will now explain for us.
Andrew: The book in which we kind of most often find cricket is a book called Murder Must Advertise, which was in 1933, I believe it was published. So really right in the heyday of the golden age. And in that book we are given various pieces of information about Wimsey and his cricketing career. So we are told first of all, that he played for Oxford University, the university he went to, at Lord’s. And he played at the university’s match that was taking place annually at Lord’s Cricket Ground. And that he scored two centuries in successive innings for the university. So obviously a very good cricketer.
Caroline: But Wimsey’s cricketing exploits are not all in the past tense. Cricket plays an important part in how his investigation of this particular case progresses towards its solution.
Andrew: So throughout the story we’re working up towards this match that takes place at the very end of the game between the advertising agency that Wimsey is working for in disguise as a character called Death Bredon. And whilst he’s actually there, he takes part in this cricket match where a character of the name of Tallboy who we’ve kind of suspected loosely all the way along, suddenly flies right into the frame as the guy who committed the murder, when we learned that he is absolutely deadly accurate in throwing a cricket ball. And that he has this kind of real skill in throwing and using projectiles. And that was the method that was used to kill the unfortunate victim at the beginning of the novel. And so the match becomes integral to the actual solution of the mystery as well as just being important in that kind of metaphorical way.
Caroline: In the case of Peter Wimsey, Sayers is using cricket as a way of signalling what kind of person he is. Together with his educational background, his title, his way of speaking and dressing, his sporting prowess tells us about his class and his personal code of conduct.
Andrew: There’s a real trend within these books that deal with cricket and crime, to see cricket as a kind of measure of moral value. Which I think is quite interesting. There’s a book by a kind of relatively unknown author, I think, called TS Stribling, called The Clues of the Caribbees. And he talks in that book about what he calls ‘the Anglo-Saxon values’ which are inherent in the game of cricket.
So there’s that tendency to connect cricket with this idea of moral and cultural value, and there’s a number of books in which that kind of happens.
There’s one with a fabulous title of Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera by Simon Brett. One of a series of novels that he wrote starring Blotto and Twinks. And within that novel there’s one of the characters who steals another person’s cricket bat. It’s a villain called Buzzer Bluntly, who has stolen the cricket bat of this character called Blotto, whose real name is the Honourable Devereux Lyminster. And this is seen as one of the lowest acts that could be committed, stealing somebody’s cricket bat, because the cricket bat is seen to be this symbol of decency.
And in that novel, it’s inverted as it then becomes a weapon, the cricket batter’s weapon which is something that’s done in a number of other books as well. There’s a story by John Dickson Carr where the cricket bat is used as a weapon and also in a book called Murder at School by James Hilton, where somebody is murdered using a cricket bat.
So there’s this kind of strange connection of values and the game of cricket. I think that’s really important when we begin to think about that character of Wimsey that this is one of the things that makes him a good bloke, is the fact that he has this ability at this high stakes culture sport.
Caroline: Despite cricket’s clear potential for violence — the cricket bat and ball as weapons, of course — it does have a reputation for gentleness and decency that the crime writer can play with. The restrictions and rules of the game, too, are very well suited to the purposes of a mystery plot.
Firstly, the cricket ground itself provides a nicely limited arena in which everything can happen.
Andrew: The village cricket ground or even the bigger cricket grounds: Lord’s, the Oval, which are the two most commonly selected cricket grounds for cricketing murder mysteries, are that closely knit geographical space where everything is happening within that confined space. It’s a bit of an expansion, if you like, of the idea of the locked room in that you have all of these people in the same place at the same time. This kind of a hermetically sealed space, perhaps. Which is, you know, so important in a lot of golden age detective fiction.
Caroline: That old closed circle of suspects, provided by the boundaries of a cricket ground just as well as by the walls of a country house estate or of a theatre. According to W.H. Auden’s famous essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” another key ingredient in the golden age murder mystery is the occupational group — a cast of characters brought together for a common purpose that is then subverted by murder. Cricket fits into this perfectly too, Andrew says.
Andrew: The example he gives is the theatrical company. But of course, the sporting team, is equally good as an example of that kind of occupational group. And he famously writes in that essay about the importance of societies that operate according to elaborate rituals, and so much golden age detective fiction depends upon the explanation of rituals. Cricket fits very well in that as well, of course, as being an elaborate ritual, which is reflective of a certain kind of cultural norm perhaps within England, and English culture particularly.
Caroline: This English idyll, then, can be shockingly disrupted by crime and death.
Andrew: One of the things that Auden talks about is what he calls the Great Good Place. He describes this Eden-like environment where crime suddenly erupts.
And I think that we’re encouraged in these books that deal with cricket to see the cricket ground, whether it’s the local village cricket ground, or Lord’s, or the Oval, as being that kind of Eden if you like, where suddenly we are going to find the serpent prowling through the grass and everything is about to go wrong.
Which of course is rectified as this tale works its way through. But I think that that is why cricket perhaps works particularly well as background for cricket for detective fiction.
Caroline: Then there are ways in which the rules of the sport itself can be turned to the crime writer’s advantage.
Andrew: There are other books as well that kind of deal with the kind of idyllic idea of the cricket ground. One of those is by a lesser known author called Barbara Worsley-Gough, a book called Alibi Innings. And one of the things that’s interesting about this book is the way that it explores how cricket provides the possibility for people who you think are there not to be there.
Caroline: We might think that the 22 people involved in the game of cricket are all occupied and visible, and thus have perfect alibis like actors on a stage. But it is not quite that simple: while all of the fielding team will be in the pitch during play, only two batsman are out at a time, meaning that there are nine members of that time either waiting for their turn to bat, or hanging around because they have already got out.
Andrew: It opens out all kinds of possibilities for those characters to be engaged in criminal activity or indeed in detective activity. So that’s something that’s played with in these novels quite often. And there’s another interesting example by a duo, actually a married writing team called the Radfords, who published under the title of E and MA Radford. They wrote a book called Murder Isn’t Cricket. In that book, they explore the way in which cricket provides this open space within which events can happen in public and in spaces where they should be seen, but where they aren’t seen simply because of the fact that everybody’s attention is on the match rather than on the people watching the match.
Caroline: Another very interesting parallel that we can make between cricket and crime fiction has to do with the one-on-one intellectual combat between batsman and bowler, each trying to outsmart the other, just as the detective and criminal are doing during a case. The crime writer Ernest Bramah, the creator of blind detective Max Carrados, sums this up brilliantly in great quote which Andrew is going to read for us now:
Andrew: “This personal duel between the law and the criminal has sometimes appeared to me in the terms of a game of cricket, Inspector. Law is in the field. The criminal at the wicket, if law makes a mistake tends down a, sends down a loose ball or drops the catch the criminal scores a little or has another lease of life. But if he makes a mistake, if he lets a straight ball pass or spoons towards a steady man, he’s done for. His mistakes are fatal. Those of the law are only temporary and retrievable.”
So this idea that cricket is being seen as a kind of apt metaphor for these competitions between the detective and a criminal are something that was recognised right there back in the golden age, is a useful way of understanding what is happening.
Caroline: For all of these reasons, cricket has clearly been very inspiring to crime writers. As well as the books we’ve already discussed, there are so many other examples that you might like to explore, both from the golden age and afterwards. The Amazing Test Match Crime by Adrian Arlington from 1939 is a very funny romp with some P.G. Wodehouse-esque notes to it, set against the backdrop of a cricket match, as is The Test Match Murder by Alfred Tack from 1948, in which a murder is committed while the England team is training for the Lord’s test during an Ashes series. Another notable example to look out for is Death Before Wicket by Nancy Spain from 1945, which is a mystery set in a school where a games mistress is poisoned while umpiring a cricket match. Spain was a keen and talented cricketer herself, and her book makes a strong showing in a niche where male authors have tended to dominate. There is also, incidentally, another murder mystery of the same name by Kerry Greenwood from 1999, part of her Phryne Fisher series, in which the sleuthing heroine is due to attend a test match in Sydney. Other novels written more recently but set in the early twentieth century make use of cricket too, like the Flashman series and those ones that Andrew mentioned, where contemporary authors have written extra Sherlock Holmes stories to add some cricket. The diehard enthusiast might like to look up Willie Rushton’s W.G. Grace’s Last Case, in which the celebrated cricketer himself turns detective. And to cap it all, there is even a crime novel written by a professional cricketer and former England captain, albeit not one from the golden age itself — Testkill by Ted Dexter — although I can’t in good conscious recommend that one as good reading.
It all comes back to cricket’s capacity to tell a good story. There is just something inherently literary about this deceptively simple sport. Here’s Andy Zaltzman again.
Andy: People have described a good cricket match as being a bit like a novel in that, you know, you have these periods where it appears that not much is happening. And then suddenly loads of things happen and the narrative gradually builds and fluctuates until you reach the end of it. And sometimes the end is quite unsatisfying. Sometimes it’s very dramatic. Some kind of, it sort of peters out. So I do think it is one of the reasons why it’s proved enduringly fascinating for people is because it has this infinite variety of narrative possibility.
Caroline: The infinite variety of narrative possibility. Not bad for one highly specific niche within detective fiction: cricket and crime.
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This episode of Shedunnit was hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Thanks to my guests Andy Zaltzman and Andrew Green — you can find more information about them and their work in the description for this episode or at shedunnitshow.com/cricketandcrime. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts. This episode was the first in Shedunnit’s “mysteries of summer” trilogy; listen out for the next one on coming this feed soon.
If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to hear more from me beyond the fortnightly episodes on this feed, join the Shedunnit Book Club, where I make extra bonus episodes every month for supporters. Find out more and sign up now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
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