Caroline: One hundred years ago this year, in 1923, Agatha Christie’s novel The Murder on the Links was published. On the surface, this is not an especially momentous anniversary — especially when compared with the others that we will enjoy in future years as the centenaries of her most famous works rolls round. This book was her third ever novel and the second to feature Hercule Poirot. It was positively received at the time of publication but rarely, if ever, appears on lists of favourite Christies today.
So why commemorate this book at all? Well, I think it is worth looking more closely at because of its opening scenario. Poirot and Hastings are summoned to France by a millionaire who fears that his life is at risk. But by the time they arrive in the northern seaside town of Merlinville-sur-Mer, the millionaire is already dead, stabbed and buried in a shallow grave on the golf course by his house. It turns out that there is a long and proud tradition of golf-based murder mysteries, in which this Christie effort is just a minor entry.
Join me, then, as we tee off, drive down the fairway, hit the rough, and somehow make a birdie — all while avoiding the corpse in the bunker.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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Golf has existed for a very long time. The precursor to the modern game emerged in Scotland and it had become such a popular activity by the fifteenth century that in 1457 the parliament banned it for fear that it was leading young men to neglect their military training. It surged in popularity again in the nineteenth century, when the arrival of railways in Britain made it easy for people to explore areas beyond their immediate surroundings, and especially to access the links courses on the coasts. The closure of country houses — as per Guy’s episode a few weeks ago — assisted, providing readymade clubhouses and parkland that could be easily converted. As the twentieth century dawned, more widespread car ownership and the growth of a class of people with more defined leisure time created a mobile population with time to kill on hobbies like golf. The same shift was occurring in America, too, with more and more golf courses opening in the 1910s and 1920s as demand for the sport grew.
The golden age of detective fiction, then, arrived once golf was already an accepted and growing leisure activity for people with spare money and time — exactly the kind of people who both read and feature in detective fiction. And that same convalescent effect post first world war that made people want to read books full of escapist mysteries and puzzles may well have sent them out onto the golf course as well, where they could enjoy an activity with a strong structure and rules. That is all very well, but it only partially explains why golf crops up so much, relatively speaking, in mystery stories. There are plenty of pastimes that people enjoyed in the 1920s that don’t have an entire subgenre of murder mystery devoted to them. So there has to be something about golf particularly that integrates well with this format.
There are several things, in fact. First and foremost, golf courses tend to be in fairly remote, unpopulated locations. If they are near towns or cities, they are on the outskirts, just because of the amount of space a golf course needs. As a place for a secluded encounter between murderer and victim, or a location for dumping something inconvenient like a corpse or weapon, they’re not bad. But then from the crime writer’s point of view, a golf course is somewhere that people regularly frequent, as they play there and socialise, so things hidden there can be more plausibly discovered than if they are dumped in the middle of some remote farmland, say. It’s also a reason why people travel — keen players will take holidays specifically to try particular courses, providing a novelist with a plausible reason for a lot of different people to be thrown together at a golf resort or course-adjacent hotel.
Golf is also a game in which every player literally carries a bag of potential weapons around with them and hits balls very hard into the far distance. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that you couldn’t design a better sport for the murder mystery. Golf courses even have ready made sandpits in which you can easily and quickly bury a body… And as you will see, this is a common feature of stories that involve golf. In the late 1990s, one Thomas W Taylor even produced a now quite rare and collectible catalogue of all the different murder methods deployed in golfing mysteries, which included quote “exploding ball; exploding club head; explosive charge in the cup; exploding golf course (believe it or not); speared with the flagstick; trick club; and sabotaged golf cart”. There’s just so much potential.
While it was the centenary of The Murder on the Links that prompted me to first look into golf-based murder mysteries, Agatha Christie’s 1923 effort is very far from being the first story to explore the mystery potential of this game. In that story, too, the action quickly moves away from the golf course once the body has been discovered, making the title somewhat misleading. But there are plenty of other titles that integrate the game more fully into the mystery. Back in 1907, the Irish barrister and journalist Matthias McDonnell Bodkin had published a short story titled “The Murder on the Golf Links” that featured his regular detective Paul Beck spending a relaxing month playing on the links at a seaside hotel, only for the body of a fellow guest’s unwanted fiancé to be discovered “in the great, sandy bunker that guarded the seventeenth green”. Golf prowess is far more significant to the character development in McDonnell Bodkin’s story than Christie’s, too: rivals for the fair maiden’s hand are described as having exactly matched handicaps, while the heroine herself reigns “undisputed queen of the links”. The detective Paul Beck, meanwhile, describes himself as a “lucky player”, although the reader is invited to believe that as with his sleuthing, there is much more skill to his actions than he lets on. “If he never made a brilliant stroke, he never made a bad one, and kept wonderfully clear of the bunkers,” we are told.
The prolific writer of early twentieth century genre and suspense fiction, E. Phillips Oppenheim, also dabbled in golf around the same time. In 1906 he published A Lost Leader, a politically minded thriller in which a Liberal political supporter is gradually lured away from the pleasures of the golf course to become actively involved in his party’s future again. The story was made into a silent film in 1922. Another intriguing ornament to the genre comes from Horace G Hutchinson, who was himself a noted amateur golfer with a “dashing and flamboyant” style and the winner of the 1886 and 1887 Amateur Championships. He wrote quite a number of non-fiction books about golf with titles like Hints on the Game of Golf and The Book of Golf and Golfers, but he also wrote over a dozen novels, some of which took on a crime element as that genre rose in popularity through the 1910s and 1920s. Unfortunately many of them are hard to obtain now, but they have been characterised as “adventure stories for grown-up boys” by one critic, which perhaps gives us some idea of the style. Interestingly, given his own experience in the game, only one of Hutchinson’s novels seems to feature golf heavily. In 1930’s The Lost Golfer, a London solicitor on holiday playing at a seaside course is kidnapped when he discovers something unpleasant on the shore.
Once the true golden age of detective fiction arrived in the 1920s, the golf stories appear in much greater numbers. In 1921, Mary Roberts Rinehart, sometimes known as “the American Agatha Christie”, published Tish Plays the Game, an instalment in her series about spinster heroine Letitia Carberry in which she takes up golf. In 1925, Ronald Knox — who would go on to publish those ten famous “rules” for detective fiction later in the decade — made golf a key feature of his first detective novel, The Viaduct Murder. A group of golfers discovers the dead body of the local atheist below a railway viaduct, kickstarting the murder investigation that forms most of the story. In 1927, we get The Bunker at the 5th by Marcus Dods, a now rare and collectible title which apparently features extensive discussion of golf clubs — mashie niblick, anyone? — and a body discovered in the bunker of the title. Another variation on the golf-based body discovery trope can be found in “The Red Golf Ball” by Gerald Verner, a short story that originated under the title of “The Fatal 13th”. In this one, a body is found in the undergrowth near the course while a less-than-skilled golfer is looking for his ball. Agatha Christie does something similar in 1934’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, when Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff and thus finds a dying man below who gasps out the enigmatic title of the book before dying, thus kicking off the whole plot. There’s a different variation in David Frome’s The Murder on the Sixth Hole, sometimes titled The Strange Death of Martin Green, in which the body is found not hidden in the undergrowth or buried in a bunker, but face down in a water hazard, having drowned. Truly, a golf course is a very unsafe place to be.
Miles Burton’s 1933 Tragedy at the Thirteenth Hole takes the now-familiar idea of a character transplanted from their real life to a golf resort and pushes it further, with his series character Inspector Henry Arnold ordered to convalesce near a seaside links course after a case of influenza. In a twist on the convention, though, Arnold isn’t actually a golfer himself, but while sightseeing at a local castle that overlooks the course he sees someone die after being hit on the head with a golf ball. A complicated and curious investigation follows.
There are two novels from the 1930s that feature interesting shenanigans with golf bags and clubs as possible murder weapons. In both cases I feel like saying too much will completely spoil the plots involved, but I would recommend paying close attention to these items when you are reading the first Nero Wolf novel, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout from 1934, and the title story from Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Murder in the Mews. You have to be careful about what might be concealed within a golf club: in E.C. Bentley’s 1939 short story “The Sweet Shot”, a man playing a solitary round is killed using high explosives hidden in his club. Bentley also featured golf in his 1936 novel Trent’s Own Case, the long awaited follow up to his 1913 novel Trent’s Last Case which is often credited with helping to kickstart the golden age of detective fiction. In Trent’s Own Case, the hero is forced to investigate a murder with a close friend as the prime suspect after a murder victim is discovered on a golf course.
Golf is used as a diversion while a murder is committed in Gerard Fairlie’s 1932 novel Mr. Malcolm Presents. It all takes place at the famous Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, while the British Amateur Golf Tournament is being played. Rather than getting away with the crime while the crowd’s attention is on the match, the killer is confronted by Fairlie’s series character Mr Malcolm and forced to play an unusual round of golf with him, from which only one of them will emerge alive. Again, this book is very hard to get hold of nowadays, so I haven’t been able to read it in full, but this certainly sounds like one of the stranger golf-based resolutions to a plot. Golf roulette, perhaps? A similar, albeit far less extreme, version of the detective and suspect on the course together idea is explored in Christopher Bush’s 1937 novel The Case of the Green Felt Hat. Protagonist Ludovic Travers and his wife are on holiday near a course, and when the murder investigation kicks in, Travers ends up playing various rounds with likely suspects as a means of investigating them under cover. Then Elizabeth Daly tried her hand at a golf mystery with Unexpected Night, with a scenario somewhat reminiscent of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. In this, her first novel to feature 1940s sleuth Henry Gamadge, Daly has him take a few days off to play golf, only to discover a body at the base of a cliff near the course.
Perhaps the most notable yet now inaccessible golfing mysteries from this time came from Herbert Adams, who wrote a whole series about Roger Bennion, an amateur golfer and amateur detective. Lots of his cases are set in and around golfing competitions, and many have excellent golf-based titles like The Body in the Bunker, Death Off the Fairway, Nineteenth Hole Mystery, Death on the First Tee, and so on. His very first novel, The Secret of Bogey House, from 1924 introduces a different character, Jimmie Haswell, and begins with someone chasing a lost golf ball and thus getting drawn into the darker history of what appears to be a quote “innocent pleasure resort”. Unfortunately Adams’ books don’t yet seem to have attracted a republisher, so your best chance of getting hold of one cheaply is a chance encounter in a secondhand bookshop or library, because the remaining copies from the original printings now go for hundreds of pounds to collectors. Sadly, this is the case for a lot of the books I’ve mentioned here — some specialist golf-based mystery publisher needs to get on the case, I think, and make this important subgenre of the classic murder mystery more accessible to fans of the books and the game alike.
After the break: Agatha Christie, golf widow.
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Golf played a surprisingly large role in the life of Agatha Christie, even though it only shows up somewhat tangentially in three of her stories and she wasn’t much an enthusiastic player herself. Her first engagement, to family friend Reggie Lucy, occurred while playing golf. Reggie had been helping her “improve” her game, which she notes in her autobiography was near non existent, mostly due to a total lack of interest in the sport and no general aptitude for games. But in those halcyon days before the onset of the first world war, games like golf and croquet were one of the few ways in which middle class girls like Agatha were permitted to socialise with eligible bachelors, so she persevered. These rules were bizarre — she could be alone with a man while playing golf, but having tea or dinner with him one on one would have been considered ruinous to her reputation. Thus golf was endured, even if it wasn’t her favourite way to spend time.
One day while Reggie was back home on leave from his military service in Hong Kong, they had played four holes on the course at Torquay and then sat down for a rest because it was too hot when Reggie popped the question in a confusing and uninspiring way. “You’ve got a lot of scalps, Agatha, haven’t you? Well, you can put mine with them any time you like,” he said. Once she understood that he was proposing marriage, Agatha was quite keen to seal the deal straight away, but Reggie made it clear that she was free to change her mind at any time — he was about to depart for another two years of work in Hong Kong, so even if they had “an understanding” they would be spending a long time apart before there was any prospect of a wedding. They kept exchanging letters and considered themselves engaged, but Reggie kept encouraging Agatha to explore her options — go to parties, meet other men, and so on. And thus, in 1912, she met a young officer from the newly formed Royal Flying Corps named Archie Christie, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Golf kept pursuing Agatha, though. After the war, Archie became what she later described as “keenly appreciative” of the game, and even came to regard it with an almost religious zeal. At first, while they still lived in London, they spent lots of their weekends playing at a course in East Croydon. Agatha did enjoy the walking this involved and liked that Archie enjoyed himself, even if she came to regret the monotony of this regular occupation. She was keen to move to a country cottage, albeit one within commuting distance of Archie’s job in the City, so that she and her daughter could enjoy a more rural lifestyle and presumably be outside without clubs sometimes. Archie agreed, but only if they could live in the vicinity of Sunningdale in Berkshire, since he happened to have been recently elected to the prestigious Sunningdale Golf Club. By this point, according to Agatha, Archie thought of nothing but golf and Agatha herself was, as she reflected years later, “becoming that well-known figure, a golf widow”. In 1934’s Unfinished Portrait, the second of her six novels published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, Agatha gave this golf-based marital friction to her protagonist, Celia. “I just want to play a decent game of golf with another man. I do think you’re being rather unreasonable about it,” her husband says.
Archie became so obsessed with golf that he refused to play any other sports in case it ruin his eye for his main game — tennis with his wife, for instance, was absolutely not to be countenanced. When inviting friends to stay for the weekend, couples were only permitted if the man played golf and could join Archie on his rounds, otherwise he deeply resented the golfing time lost to socialising. This meant that Agatha did not see her husband much at all: during the week he was away at work and on weekends he was away on the golf course. Archie was very fond of their daughter Rosalind though, Agatha recounted, so much so that the little girl was allowed to clean her father’s golf clubs. Such a privilege. It was also around this time that Agatha won her first and only golf trophy — she had the maximum handicap for the course, but was lucky to meet in the finals another woman who had the same. This Mrs Burberry seemed to care deeply about the tournament, and so her nerves went to pieces, whereas Agatha, who didn’t care at all, won hole after hole. She treasured her silver trophy for years afterwards, enjoying the absurdity of having won something playing a game she really didn’t like at all.
A small caveat here — of course, we only have Agatha’s side of the story when it comes to her golf widowhood, so perhaps Archie would tell it differently. Regardless, golf was a major part of the Christies’ marriage. A holiday in Italy had to be cut short so that Archie could make it back in time for a meeting at the Sunningdale golf course. They had moved to Sunningdale because of golf, and their entire social circle there was orientated around it. A second course was being built nearby, and Archie had ideas about building a family house right on it. Plus, Nancy Neele, the woman for whom Archie eventually left Agatha, was rather good at golf. Biographers remain undecided on whether there was infidelity involved in the breakdown of the marriage, but there certainly was golf — there is a photograph of Nancy, Archie and a friend on the course at Sunningdale in 1926 before the whole situation blew up and Agatha “disappeared” for her notorious eleven days. Given all of this, it is perhaps surprising that golf doesn’t feature more heavily in her fiction. Whether she liked it or not, she certainly had a familiarity with the game lasting several decades.
Even though the plot of The Murder on the Links doesn’t really live up the golfing potential of its titles, it certainly exists in a canon of golfing mysteries that has lasted at least a century. After the Second World War, when the golden age of detective fiction is traditionally said to have ended, crime writers continued to use golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic as source material for their plots. We get Sir Henry Merrivale improving his golf game and also investigating a serial wife-murderer in Carter Dickson’s 1946 novel My Late Wives. Sir John Appleby’s son Bobby finds a corpse in a bunker in Michael Innes’s 1952 novella An Awkward Lie, although this one has the nice twist that in between Bobby discovering the body and bringing a policeman back to investigate it, the victim vanishes and the bunker is raked smooth. Following that, in 1956, William Campbell Gault published a Californian golf mystery titled Fair Prey, in which yet another corpse is found in the rough on a fancy golf course. Then there’s George Harmon Coxe’s The Big Gamble from 1958, a somewhat hardboiled mystery in which crime photographer Kent Murdoch is thwarted from his ambition to play a peaceful round of golf by the advent of a thrilling case. In 1965 mystery returned to St Andrews with Angus MacVicar’s Murder at the Open.
The following decade did not see any dimming of enthusiasm for the golf mystery. England international cricketer Ted Dexter and sports journalist Clifford Makins teamed up in 1979 to publish Deadly Putter, a sequel to a previous co-authored novel set in the world of professional cricket. In 1974 Brian Ball put out Death of a Low-Handicap Man, a murder mystery set at a Yorkshire golf club which features the relatively rare incidence of a victim beaten to death with a golf club. And there’s still more: Catherine Aird’s 2005 A Hole in One, Richard L. Baldwin’s 2000 Administration Can Be Murder, the Pete Hacker series by James Y Bartlett, which includes 1992’s Death from the Ladies’ Tee, the Murder in the Rough collection edited by Otto Penzler, 2005’s Open Season by Jim Moriarty about a photographer at the Masters tournament… The list just goes on and on. My personal favourite title, by the way, is Par for the Corpse by Kathleen Kelly Sprissler.
Golf and the murder mystery, it turns out, are a combination that just keeps delivering intriguing plots. So if you are a golfer, or indeed ever find yourself near a golf course, I feel I must warn you to be on your guard. If the crime fiction of the last hundred years is to be believed, you are highly likely to trip over a corpse, be attacked with a putter, or find yourself buried in a bunker.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.
You can find links to all the books mentioned and other information about this episode at shedunnitshow.com/deathunderpar. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
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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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