Caroline: Detective novels are all about doubt and certainty, and moving from one state to the other. A murder is committed and the world is plunged into doubt: who did it, how did they do it, why did they do it, can anyone’s story about it be trusted, and so on. Gradually, over the course of the story, the detective excavates all of these layers of doubt to leave only the complete certainty of the correct solution. On the most elemental level, everything exists in a stark binary: innocent and guilty, truth and lies, good and evil.
But what happens when there are characters who exist outside of these clean absolutes? Who live not in this neatly categorised black and white world, but amid endless shades of grey? Who are distrusted and misbelieved by default, all because of their feelings about their health, long before a murderer steps onto the stage? The people for whom “you probably imagined it!” is not so much an offer of comfort, but a regular refrain. There are far more of these figures than you might expect.
Today, we’re going to meet the hypochondriacs of golden age detective fiction.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. A friendly warning: there are going to be some minor spoilers in this episode — no solutions to whodunnits totally revealed, but some plot details discussed. If you want to avoiding knowing such details about something that you’re reading or plan to read, please consult the list of books and stories in the episode description before proceeding.
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First, I think it would be good to establish what we mean by hypochondria, even though I think it’s a word that gets used much more widely and frequently than its now “archaic” status would indicate. The dictionary definition of the word is something like “a mental condition characterised by the persistent and unwarranted belief or fear that one has a serious illness” and for the past two hundred years or so, that’s how it has been used: to signify the state of being anxious about one’s health, often in spite of a lack of medical evidence of sickness.
The word itself is much older than this meaning, though. It is made up of two Greek words: hupo meaning ‘under’ and khondros denoting the cartilage of the sternum, hinting at hypochondria’s original meaning as a term for part of the torso or abdomen. But now, the colloquial definition is pretty settled as anxiety over an illness we can’t detect an organic cause for. Today, the more common term in a clinical or official setting is “health anxiety” — that’s what the NHS and the World Health Organisation, among others, prefer.
This isn’t the subject of this episode, but hypochondria is something that I’ve experienced myself for the last decade and more, since I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 17 years old. This personal experience is partly what has given me an interest in this subject, hence why I’ve now written a whole book about it, and it’s also what gives me empathy for hypochondriac characters when they show up in golden age detective fiction. And boy, do they show up. Once you start paying attention, you realise that the hypochondriacs are everywhere in classic crime fiction.
Hypochondria is a state of constant doubt. For the hypochondriac themselves, they exist in the perpetual state of never being quite sure if what they feel is quote “real”, or a product of their imagination. For those around them, they never know how seriously to take statements like “I think I have a terminal illness” when they are being uttered five times a day. We’ve all likely heard stories of hypochondriacs who insisted they were seriously ill, were disbelieved, and then turned out to be extremely sick. There is an entire sub-genre of memoir about this with titles like I Told You I Was Sick. But outside of a book, existing in a perpetual state of doubt is an exhausting and unsatisfying way to live.
The hypochondriac is, in a way, an amateur detective. They are constantly alert for clues, or symptoms, and building a coherent narrative out of these disparate snatches of information. Hypochondria is also an absolute gift to the detective novelist, especially one writing the kind of puzzle mystery that was very popular in what we call the golden age, the period between the end of the first world war and the start of the second. To play fair, as was largely the convention in these stories, in practice means to lay clues throughout a story in a way that the reader could theoretically pick up on. The best fair play mysteries, though, do this while still making the solution to the puzzle a surprise.
I think the feeling that a lot of us are chasing when reading these books relates to this: that wonderful moment of realisation when you understand that the answer has been hiding in plain sight all this time. Pulling this off, then, requires a lot of clever writing and, more than anything else, misdirection. Clues must be laid in the open, but this must be done in such a way that the reader does not notice them. This requires misdirection, the same kind of sleight of hand that a magician employs to make a trick work. Don’t look at my left hand, pulling a duplicate card out of my sleeve, look at my right hand, which is doing some clever flourishes with a handkerchief!
For a detective novelist, a hypochondriac character can be that handkerchief, if I may stretch a weak metaphor a bit too far. Hypochondria is a handy shorthand of a set of assumed character traits that readers will immediately recognise. Hypochondriacs are, according to the well-known stereotype, self-involved, weak-willed and unreliable. Including one in a story is a way of creating a character who will, by default, not be believed. They are noisy, creating a lot of confusion and fuss in a household, which of course can detract and distract from what is really going on. I would recommend seeking out the Agatha Christie short story “The Case of the Perfect Maid” to see this used to full effect — assumptions are made about an invalid that allow some very nefarious goings-on to almost remain undetected. And, as you will hear shortly, positioning a hypochondriac in a plot so that the veracity of their testimony is crucial to the reader’s perceptions, is a common and highly effective trick.
As a secondary effect, a hypochondriac can also be a useful way of showing how other characters react to supposed weakness. Someone may be spoken of as kind, generous, loving, and so on, but are they patient and tolerant with their hypochondriac cousin, or do they snap and them and mock them? A writer can use the hypochondriac as a mechanism to reveal hidden traits in those around them.
So, enough of the theory and the hypotheticals. How did the writers of golden age detective fiction actually deploy hypochondria in their work? As far as I’ve been able to gather from my reading and research, there are two main ways. Firstly, a hypochondriac will be introduced in a story as the murder victim — a central character around whom the rest of the story will revolve. Or, in the second approach, the hypochondriac will be a character either close to or in some kind of contact with the main murder victim, so that their doubtful testimony affects how the murder is perceived and investigated.
Let’s look at this latter category first, the witnesses and the supporting players — and this is where I’m just going to reiterate my spoiler warning from the start of the episode, because I’m about to start discussing specific books and plots. This is where we start see another very important aspect of hypochondria in fiction of all kinds, not just detective novels: humour. Hypochondria, while also scary, can be silly too, and these supporting hypochondriacs, as I think of them, can be a way for an author to introduce aspects of absurdity and comedy, albeit sometimes in a dark way. I’m going to give you three contrasting examples of this in action in detective fiction from the golden age.
Agatha Christie does this superbly in her wartime novel, N or M?, first published in 1941. Picking up again with her sleuths from two 1920s titles, The Secret Adversary and Partners in Crime, Christie sends Tommy and Tuppence in disguise to a seaside boarding house to hunt for German spies on behalf of British intelligence. All of their fellow guests are on the suspect list, and they must consider each carefully without being unmasked as investigators themselves. Among them are Mr and Mrs Cayley, an innocent-seeming middle aged couple.
Mr Cayley is, in Tommy’s phrase, “a genuine hypochondriacal invalid”, who is perpetually fussing about his health and is seen as “a walking chemist’s shop”, while his wife, whom Tuppence later describes as “vacuous” and “brainless”, seems to have made catering to her husband’s many whims her entire occupation. We get various scenes of Mr Cayley talking people’s ears off about his various symptoms and treatments, and his wife dashing about repositioning his cushions and fetching him scarves. A bit sad and absurd, but not necessarily suspicious. But then, as Tommy says at one point, wouldn’t the hypochondriac be “an easy part to act” if a spy was trying to lie low? The Cayleys are not therefore eliminated from suspicion as quickly as the reader might be inclined, and the hypochondria is a major part of why that is.
In fact, re-reading this book for the first time in a while as I was making this episode, I was struck by the incredible callousness with which both Tommy and Tuppence refer to both of the Cayleys. “If he threw away all his little pillboxes and went out for a good ten mile walk every day he’d be a different man,” Tommy declares at one point. The total lack of empathy or pity tells us both something about the slightly brittle characters Christie is still developing for her sleuths, and the way hypochondria was regarded at the time — entirely as a selfish affectation, basically.
We are encouraged to think the same of Mrs Sanson, mother of Esther Sanson, in Christianna Brand’s 1944 novel Green for Danger. At the book’s opening, Esther is keen to go away to volunteer at a hospital and do her bit for the war effort, while her mother is using her own supposed poor health as emotional blackmail to stop her going. Nursing, too, is a natural move for Esther because of the experience she has gained at home with her mother. “Since Esther had tenderly nursed her mother through several years of perfect health, there was not very much that she could learn from her on that subject,” we are told.
Brand writes well of “the strange inner magic of the true hypochondriac” by which Mrs Sanson, who is actually completely fine, is able to look like she is on death’s door right when she wants to. This “little act” of hers has never failed before, but this time Esther does pull free and go to the hospital, only for one of the things that her mother has always dreaded to actually happen in her absence. This is one of the reasons why I like Brand’s use of hypochondria so much more than Christie’s — in Green for Danger, we get to see all the contradictions of the long-term hypochondriac on display. Yes, Mrs Sanson’s constant niggling about her health is annoying, but she’s also not wrong to be worried. Both things can be true.
My third example of an intriguing supporting hypochondriac comes from Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes, a standalone mystery novel that she published in 1940. This is actually the book that the Shedunnit Book Club are reading next month, so I have been thinking about it especially hard, but regardless, I think the character of Phillida Madrigal would have stood out to me. Even before the crime is committed, this book creates an atmosphere of unease and unpleasantness that has the protagonist, Phillida’s younger half-sister Frances Ivory, seeking help from her grandmother. And Phillida’s perpetual invalidism is a big part of what is unsettling her — Frances needs her big sister to help her save the family’s business and reputation, and instead Phillida is staying in bed and wailing intermittently. Although the word “hypochondria” is never used about her, the behaviour of other characters and all the long-suffering, eye-rolling references to Phillida’s “nerves” let the reader know that her sickness is not necessarily to be taken that seriously. It also seems to come and go suspiciously depending on how active a part she wants to take in the family’s troubles, which again leaves us in doubt as to how reliable her statements are about herself or indeed anything else. Allingham wants us to know that Phillida cannot be trusted, and her intermittent spells of “illness” are a big part of how she communicates this.
After the break: hypochondriacs as victims.
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The story that first set me on the path of considering hypochondria in detective fiction, and indeed seeing it everywhere, was “The Blue Geranium” by Agatha Christie. First published in 1929, this was then one of the stories that appeared in her 1932 collection The Thirteen Problems, also known as The Tuesday Night Club and marks one of the earliest appearances of Miss Marple. “Beware of the Full Moon. The Blue Primrose means warning; the Blue Hollyhock means danger; the Blue Geranium means death.” In some ways, it is quite a typical story for Christie: we have a dead wife, a widower under suspicion, and much talk about it in a small village. The Moving Finger, Dumb Witness and one of the stories from The Labours of Hercules use a similar backdrop.
Where “The Blue Geranium” distinguished itself to me, though, was in its portrayal of its central character, Mrs Pritchard. The story is introduced to the other characters hearing it as “a ghost story”, but there never seemed to be much that was supernatural about Mrs Pritchard. She just lives a very tragic life, as what Christie calls “one of those semi-invalids”. “I believe she had really something wrong with her, but whatever it was she played it for all it was worth,” we are told. Again, I find Christie’s lack of empathy in her portrayal interesting, and it makes me wonder whether she had direct experience of someone behaving like this. Mrs Pritchard is shown to be whiny and always complaining, demanding that her husband wait upon her as well as the succession of hospital nurses they hire, and then berating him when he does something wrong. Dolly Bantry even says at one point that “if George Pritchard had brained her with a hatchet and there had been any woman on the jury, he would have been triumphantly acquitted”.
Mrs Pritchard is a combination, then, of someone with a genuine illness and also a hypochondriac inclined to think herself sicker than she is. In addition, she has the belief in quack remedies and other mystical things that can go hand in hand with hypochondria — indeed, the story revolves around the mysterious prophecy made by a fortune teller she consults called Zarida. This, of course, is dismissed and laughed at by both her husband and her nurse as just another one of Mrs Pritchard’s silly foibles. Except then it comes true: the flowers on her wallpaper do start changing colour with the full moon, and then she does die when the geranium turns blue. Christie does a wonderful job, I think, of showing how a hypochondriac can be annoying and frustrating, but also not be wrong that they are in danger. There are fascinating parallels between this story and a 1941 novel by Dorothy Bowers, Fear for Miss Betony. In that one, too, a fortune teller is involved in a plot that also sees a long-term invalid and hypochondriac disbelieved and dismissed — and in that case, even accused of poisoning herself to gain greater attention. I don’t think I need to tell you how that storyline works out.
Before we move on, an honourable mention for two other hypochondriac murder victims created by Agatha Christie that I especially like. There’s the first Mrs Dyson, an offstage character in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery, who is described as “a malade imaginaire”, which is a French term that literally means “an imaginary invalid” and an idiom that references the title of a Moliere play from 1673. The cloud of suspicion about the first Mrs Dyson’s death still hangs over her husband, because everyone had always assumed that her illness was imaginary, until she died of it. And then there’s Luther Crackenthorpe, the rich and irascible patriarch from Christie’s 1957 novel 4.50 From Paddington, who his doctor swears is actually in perfect health despite his constant complaints, and yet who still dies anyway in mysterious circumstances.
Luther Crackenthorpe belongs to a substantial subset of hypochondriacs from detective fiction who are primarily annoying and thus difficult to pity, even when they become murder victims. In 1933’s Family Matters by Anthony Rolls, Robert Kewdingham is a frustrated, probably depressed man in his late forties who lost his job in the economic crash of the late 1920s. He is obsessed with collecting antiquities and seems not to have bothered looking very hard for a new job despite financial difficulties. He also frequently administers homemade remedies to himself, which makes his subsequent involvement in a poison plot not that surprising.
Another unlikable hypochondriac shows up in E.M. Delafield’s wonderfully creepy short story “They Don’t Wear Labels”. A landlady observes two of her paying guests over a period of months, noting how devotedly Mr Peverelli takes care of his sick wife, even though her idea of “being friendly” was to talk about her health until everyone else was thoroughly sick of hearing about it. This is a classic piece of misdirection on the author’s part: initially the reader is invited to feel sympathy for Mr Peverelli and find his wife extremely selfish and annoying, until there start to be hints that perhaps something else is afoot. This one has a great ending that I don’t want to spoil, but I do really recommend it — you can find it in the British Library Crime Classics anthology Capital Crimes.
Mildred Taylor, murder victim at the heart of John Dickson Carr’s Below Suspicion from 1949, is a querulous, elderly hypochondriac who dies by antimony poisoning. This novel has a lot else going on, including references to witchcraft, devil worship and masked nightclubs and is in some ways more of a post-WW2 thriller than a golden age-style detective novel. But that central plot of an unlikeable hypochondriac old lady being poisoned in an innovative way, and then her companion being accused of her murder, feels very classic crime to me.
Mrs Hardstaffe, the victim at the centre of Harriet Rutland’s 1942 novel Blue Murder is similarly easy to dislike. She is unkind to family and servants alike. But then she joins a select club within crime fiction’s hypochondriacs by dying of a morphine overdose. This quasi-medical end is another good piece of misdirection — could the hypochondriac have made a mistake in their never-ending search for treatment and relief, or did choose this murder method deliberately to disguise their actions? The same doubt applies itself to rich middle-aged, snobbish widow Sybil Foster, the murder victim at the heart of Ngaio Marsh’s late novel Grave Mistake. Her overdose occurs while she is at a luxury spa sanatorium place, the semi-medical setting further enhancing the effect.
The hypochondriac’s thirst for treatment and interest in quack remedies can be exploited to excellent effect in a crime story. Aunt Julia in Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral from 1931 is poisoned by an illicit cup of early morning tea into which she has slipped a tampered-with remedy. And in 1929’s Poison in the Garden Suburb by G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, the murder victim drops dead after swallowing some strychnine during a public meeting. It is quickly revealed by multiple witnesses to investigators that the victim was a well known hypochondriac. This colours the inquiry from the start, in terms of whether it could have been accident, suicide or murder, and in how they interpret his relationships with his wife and his medical attendants. There is nothing wrong with him, according to a doctor “bar what he put in his stomach himself. He’d never have needed to miss a day at the bank if it hadn’t been for his dosing away. He’d never go to an evening party, like that one where he met his death, without he’d swallow half a dozen things in the course of the evening.” When someone is so ready to take any pills or tonics offered, without asking questions, it is frighteningly easy to see how they could be murdered.
Hypochondria is, in some ways, just a heightened awareness of mortality. On a daily basis, we hypochondriacs are merely more alive to that fact that life is fragile and finite than the rest of you. So perhaps it is not strange at all to find so many hypochondriacs present in a literary genre that contains more death than most. Something will get us all in the end. It just might not be a golden age murderer as part of an elaborate poisoning plot.
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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find a full list of the books consulted and mentioned at shedunnitshow.com/youprobablyimaginedit. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
If you’re listening to this on the day it is released, my new book all about the themes discussed in this episode, A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria is published today in the UK and in two weeks’ time in North America. It would make a big difference to me if you chose to look it up online and even perhaps order it at your preferred bookseller or library — the more people who search for or buy a book around publication day, basically showing publishers that they’re interested in what the writer has to say, the greater the chance is that they will get to write other books in future. Check the description of this episode to find links to all the relevant information about it, or if you’d like to come and see me at an in-person event in the next few months have a look at carolinecrampton.com/events.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
