Many psychologists have agreed that humour can help individuals to distance
themselves emotionally from their stressors. Often it is used by people in dangerous or stressful jobs, but this does not make them callous or cruel people. It is a way of coping and externalising the pain.
Although this article is about Golden Age detective fiction and its use of humour to conceal, and sometimes alleviate, trauma, it is interesting to look briefly at this coping strategy in more contemporary forms of entertainment.
For example, in a 2010 episode of the British cosy crime television series Midsomer Murders, when an unpleasant and unpopular man is beheaded, DCI John Barnaby remarks: “We’ll sign it off as a shaving accident then.”
My CSI protagonist in
The Terminal Velocity of Cats (2013) opens the book with a genuine quote from a Crime Scene Officer, “In what other job do you get to drive round all day with a dead man’s toenails in your van?”Richard Attenborough’s iconic musical comedy, Oh What a Lovely War! (1969), is lively, funny, and one of the most searing condemnations of the First World War.
Perhaps the most bitterly funny commentary on the War is the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, first aired in November 1989, in which Captain Edmund Blackadder, whose only ambition had been to get out of the war in one piece, is sent with his companions over the top, on a pointless and hopeless mission. Blackadder’s batman, Baldrick, announces he has one last cunning plan, but suddenly humour turns into tragedy as Blackadder replies: “Well, I'm afraid it'll have to wait. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here? [whistles blow along the line, signalling the start of the attack] Good luck, everyone. [blows whistle]
Humour in the face of tragedy and violence is very much in the tradition of Golden Age crime fiction, and one Golden Age author who suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) used humour to conceal and control his suffering throughout his writing life.
A.A. Milne is renowned for his children’s books featuring Winnie the Pooh (1926-28), and the majority of his writing for adults also puts a light-hearted spin on things; but there is another side to his personality that he could never overcome, which is the mental and emotional damage of the First World War. In his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now (1939), Milne writes of the years 1914-1918: ‘I should like to put an asterisk here, and then write ‘it was in 1919 that I found myself once again a civilian.’ For it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.’ Milne was commissioned in 1915. He found the regulation of army life unpleasant, but he was only on active service at the Somme for three or four months, between July and November 1916. He was then invalided home with trench fever. After this he was deemed unfit for active service and was transferred to the Intelligence Department to write war propaganda, ‘I had a room to myself and wrote pretty much what I liked. If it was not ‘patriotic’ enough, or neglected to point the moral with sufficient hardihood, then the major supplied the operative words in green pencil.’
Those few months on active service had a profound effect on Milne. In 1919 his poem From a Full Heart was published. This poem is unusual because it describes the effects of shell shock, now known as PTSD, from inside the mind of the sufferer. The rhyming couplets that describe the quiet, slow pleasures that Milne anticipates when the war is over are absurd and make the reader smile, and only afterwards realise that the ridiculous images have sunk deep into the mind.
‘In days of peace my fellow-men
Rightly regarded me as more like
A Bishop than a Major-Gen.,
And nothing since has made me warlike;
But when this age-long struggle ends
And I have seen the Allies dish up
The goose of Hindenburg—oh, friends!
I shall out-bish the mildest Bishop.
When the War is over and the Kaiser's out of print,
I'm going to buy some tortoises and watch the beggars sprint;
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I'm going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.
I never really longed for gore,
And any taste for red corpuscles
That lingered with me left before
The German troops had entered Brussels.
In early days the Colonel’s “Shun!”
Froze me; and, as the War grew older,
The noise of someone else's gun
Left me considerably colder.
When the War is over and the battle has been won,
I'm going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run;
When the War is over and the German Fleet we sink,
I'm going to keep a silk-worm's egg and listen to it think.
The Captains and the Kings depart—
It may be so, but not lieutenants;
Dawn after weary dawn I start
The never-ending round of penance;
One rock amid the welter stands
On which my gaze is fixed intently—
An after-life in quiet hands
Lived very lazily and gently.
When the War is over and we've done the Belgians proud,
I'm going to keep a chrysalis and read to it aloud;
When the War is over and we've finished up the show,
I'm going to plant a lemon-pip and listen to it grow.
Oh, I'm tired of the noise and the turmoil of battle
And I'm even upset by the lowing of cattle,
And the clang of' the bluebells is death to my liver,
And the roar of the dandelion gives me a shiver,
And a glacier, in movement, is much too exciting,
And I'm nervous, when standing on one, of alighting—
Give me Peace; that is all, that is all that I seek…
Say, starting on Saturday week.
Siegfried Sassoon was another poet who survived the First World War and was profoundly affected by his experiences. It is interesting to compare the difference in tone between Milne’s From a Full Heart to Sassoon’s poem, Aftermath, published in 1920, which also addresses the subject of the end of the war, but is filled with savage anger for the many young men who needlessly lost their lives. This is the first verse:
Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same—and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.
In all the war years, apart from that short time in France, Milne continued to write for Punch, as well as writing successful and popular plays. For Milne, writing was not merely a way of making a living, but a way of staying sane. However, the symptoms of shell shock continued. In his autobiography and in interviews, he described how horror could engulf him unexpectedly, often caused by visual and auditory stimuli: a visit to the reptile house with his six-year-old son; the buzzing of bees; the popping of a balloon. Those readers who have read Winnie-the-Pooh may remember that the first story about Pooh features both bees buzzing and a balloon popping.
One of the common results of PTSD is an inability to settle to things for the long haul, and, throughout his life, Milne continued to flit between genres, but one thing was constant, he preferred his fiction to be light and humorous. Christopher Milne once said that as a family they loved The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, but while his mother’s favourite part was the more spiritual The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, his father always preferred the rumbustious adventures of Toad.
Milne is best remembered for Winnie-the- Pooh, and the world of Pooh has been loved and admired for generations. It is a kind world where the inhabitants try to help each other; and it is a safe world in which the
buzzing is bees, not bullets, the bang is balloons, not bombs, and the dragons are really geese. In more recent years the world of Pooh has also been franchised, Americanised and psychoanalysed, but we won’t go into that.
Milne was a great fan of detective fiction novels, and he decided to write one - The Red House Mystery (1922). The setting is a country house, the prime suspect is the owner of the house, who has disappeared, leaving behind the dead body of his estranged, ne’er-do-well brother.Enter the protagonist, newly-declared amateur detective, Anthony Gillingham, a friend of one of the house-guests, Bill Beverley. Anthony is a young man who inherited enough money to live comfortably but, instead of settling down, he spends his life taking one job after another, always performing well at them, but when he has mastered them, he moves on. Now Anthony decides to be a detective, with Bill as his ‘Watson’. Bill is younger than Anthony, less intelligent, but physically fit and willing to do whatever his friend requires of him; while Anthony is always the clever one, the one who notices things, the one who is in control, and the one who is ready with a clever quip. And one significant thing to note is this: The Red House Mystery was published in 1922, but it could have as its motto the words of Basil Fawlty, ‘Don’t mention the War!’Anthony is thirty years old; Bill a bit younger. It is mentioned that Bill has been in the army, but the only time Anthony uses the word ‘war’ it is in regard to investigation, in the way Holmes said ‘the game is afoot.’ Milne may not have been able to dismiss his own war years with an asterisk, but for his detective story protagonist he could and did.
Despite offers of very considerable sums of money, Milne never wrote another detective fiction book, although in 1928 he did write a comedy crime fiction play, called The Fourth Wall, originally called The Perfect Alibi, which, I understand from reviews, is mainly memorable for its witty dialogue.
There is one fictional detective that everybody associates with the trauma caused by the First World War, and that is Lord Peter Wimsey, created by
Dorothy L. Sayers. Wimsey is the second son of a duke, extremely wealthy, and knowledgeable about music, art, wine and a collector of rare books, a good horseman and a superb cricketer. He served through much of the Great War until he was wounded and buried in a trench which collapsed in on him. This left him with severe shell shock (PTSD), which he was nursed through by his servant, and former sergeant, Bunter. Without wishing to belittle his sufferings, Wimsey had it much easier than most of his fellow sufferers, because he was cushioned by wealth, rank, and a family who loved him, even if they regarded his condition as a weakness; and above all, he had Bunter. Many less fortunate old soldiers ended up homeless, unemployed and with all their relationships broken beyond repair.
We first meet Wimsey in 1923 in
Whose Body?. Mr Thipps, a middle-class acquaintance, has the disconcerting experience of discovering a dead body in his bath, naked apart from a pair of pince nez. When Wimsey goes to visit Mr Thipps, he is kind to the poor man, but when Wimsey is alone with his friend, Inspector Charles Parker, and Bunter, he allows his flippancy to let rip:‘“We both have got a body in a bath,
We both have got a body in a bath -
For in spite of all temptations
To go in for cheap sensations
We insist upon a body in a bath -Nothing else will do for us, Parker. It’s mine at present, but we’re going shares in it. Property of the firm. Won’t you join us? You really must put something in the jack-pot. Perhaps you have a body. Oh do have a body. Every body welcome.”’
This coating of frivolity does not last. When it becomes obvious that detecting a murder means a trial and execution, Wimsey’s facade crumbles. As he considers the consequences of his discovery, he remembers the carnage when, as a very young child, he had pulled the tablecloth out from the breakfast table, and sent all the things on it smashing to the floor. Following this comes a full-scale panic attack, in which he mentally regresses back to the trenches.
In this and following Wimsey books, Sayers shows that one of the problems of coping with shell shock is that people who haven’t been there simply don’t understand. Even when they are being sympathetic and kind, there’s a note of dismissal, even patronage. After Wimsey’s attack, there’s wry humour in Sayers’ account of the Dowager Duchess’ words to Parker: “I am going to take this silly boy down to Denver for the weekend … he’s been doing too much … waking poor Bunter up in the middle of the night with scares about Germans, as if that wasn’t all over years ago … but then nerves are such funny things, and Peter always did have nightmares when he was quite a little boy.”
“Sorry you’ve been having a bad turn, old man,” said Parker, vaguely sympathetic.
All over years ago! All done with and disposed of after just five years! It seems that Siegfried Sassoon had good reason to demand, ‘Have you forgotten yet?’.
Sayers pushes the message home five years later in the
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), whose beautifully understated title says everything you need to know about the stiff upper lip. It is unfortunate that old General Fentiman should die sitting in his chair at the Bellona Club, especially on Armistice Day, when Fentiman’s grandson, George, is present to react so hysterically. Again Sayers rams home the message that those who had not experienced active service in the Great War could not understand, even if they were old soldiers from other wars. ‘It is doubtful which occurrence was more disagreeable to the senior members of the Bellona Club - the grotesque death of General Fentiman in their midst or the indecent neurasthenia of his grandson. Only the younger men felt no sense of outrage; they knew too much.’The war has stripped George Fentiman of his resilience, and when he realises he is a suspect in his grandfather’s murder, he has a complete psychological breakdown. It is not surprising that Wimsey finds it preferable to be regarded as a clown, rather than, like George, to be considered a weakling. As the solicitor, Mr Murbles says:
‘“Poor George inherited a weakly strain from his grandmother, I’m afraid.”
“Well nervous, anyhow,” said Wimsey, who knew better than the old solicitor the kind of mental and physical strain George Fentiman had undergone. The War pressed heavy upon imaginative men in responsible positions. “And then he was gassed and all that, you know,” he added apologetically.’
Wimsey shows other signs of shell shock, notably his eagerness to take risks, often in a flamboyant way, as when he dives into a shallow fountain, dressed as Harlequin, in Murder Must Advertise (1933).Wimsey never fully overcomes his shell shock but he does learn to control it more effectively. For such a successful amateur detective, the hanging of killers occurs surprisingly infrequently, mainly because Wimsey is in the habit of tipping them off so they can take ‘the gentleman’s way out.’
The end of the final Wimsey book, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), again shows Wimsey suffering from the symptoms that have dogged him whenever he has to take the responsibility for causing a man’s death. But this time is different, because Harriet is his wife, and she is with him on the morning of the execution, and to her he opens up in a way that might prove to be cathartic.
‘Quite suddenly he said, “Oh damn!” and began to cry - in an awkward, unpractised way at first, and then more easily. So she held him, crouched at her knees, against her breast,huddling his head in her arms that he might not hear eight o’clock strike.’
Ngaio Marsh’s police detective, Roderick Alleyn, also served in the First World War, but he does not usually reveal the symptoms of trauma that characterise Peter Wimsey. However, in Overture to Death (1939), Alleyn does admit the role that humour plays in coping with shock, whether it is the pain of surviving violent battle or the sudden death of a village acquaintance:
“All right,” Henry said to the landscape. “One’s got to do something about it. Can’t go on all day thinking of an old maid with her brains blown out. Might as well be funny in our hard, decadent modern way.”
“I remember getting the same reaction in the war,” said Alleyn vaguely.
“As they say in vaudeville, ‘I had to laugh.’
It’s not an uncommon rebound from shock.”’
From the first Wimsey book until the last, Sayers reveals how war trauma has shaped Wimsey’s personality, but other authors are more subtle when they describe dark humour as a coping mechanism for their detectives. Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion may have calmed down in later years, but in the early books he deliberately cultivates an air of flippant foolishness. ‘“His name is Albert Campion… he's quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.”’ This is how Campion is introduced in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). Of course, Allingham had not intended Campion to be
the protagonist of one book, let alone a whole, far-reaching series, but the intended hero, the slightly pompous George Abbershaw, was soon supplanted by ‘the fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles.’ Like Peter Wimsey, Campion enjoys camouflaging his identity by playing a variety of different characters and moving swiftly on from them; and he plunges into danger, with a reckless disregard for the potential consequences to himself. He was born in 1900, and in Sweet Danger (1933), he states that he served in the last six months of the Great War.
Gervase Fen by
Edmund Crispin is one of the most egotistical of the late Golden Age detectives, and also one of the least mindful of his dignity. 'His face was cheerful, ruddy and clean-shaven, with shrewd and humorous ice-blue eyes, and he had on a grey suit, a green tie embellished with mermaids, and an extraordinary hat.' (Love Lies Bleeding, 1948.) He drives ‘an extremely small, vociferous and battered sports car. Across its bonnet were scrawled in large white letters the words LILY CHRISTINE III. A steatopygic nude in chromium leaned forward at a dangerous angle from the radiator cap.’ (The Moving Toyshop 1946). Fen’s humour is both verbal and slapstick, as when he uses the theatrical make up in a murder victim’s dressing room to adorn his face. ‘Fen had been standing in front of the mirror, painting a large black moustache on his face. He now turned and exhibited the result. Elizabeth uttered a little squeal of delight. Fen frowned at her
… “This becomes interesting,” said Fen. He had applied removing cream to his upper lip and now looked as if he had been eating blancmange.’ (Swan Song, 1947.) Despite his selfishness, he is also basically decent and kind. He is also brave, in Love Lies Bleeding he attempts to shield a young woman he is trying to help with his own body when they are threatened by a killer holding a gun. His employment is as a Professor of English Literature; he flits from one hobby to another; and he terrorises his family with his science experiments in the attic of their home. He even, in a badly-considered move, stands for Parliament and, to his horror, is voted in when he tells the electorate exactly how stupid he thinks they are. And he too served in the Great War: ‘By some miracle, the shot went wide … Fen, who had fought in the Great War, fell flat on his face with well-drilled precision. Geoffrey, who had not, remained immobile.’ (Holy Disorders, 1946).
And last but not least, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Not perhaps a comedian, although he has a waspish wit, which he exercises usually against the unwitting Hastings, as in this conversation, in their first investigation, in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, (1920):
‘“Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.”
I acquiesced.“There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me.”
I was pleased with the compliment. There had been times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
“ Yes,” he continued, staring at me thoughtfully, “you will be invaluable.”’
