This reissue of Bats in the Belfry ushers back into print a hidden gem from the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars. The pseudonymous author, E.C.R. Lorac, enjoyed a successful if low-key career spanning more than a quarter of a century. Yet this particular novel seems to have aroused little attention, either on first publication or subsequently, despite its quality.
Two aspects of the book lift it well above the ordinary. The first is the plot. By the time this novel appeared in 1937, Lorac was an experienced, highly professional writer of whodunits, and had developed the crucial skill of being able to shift suspicion from one character to another without allowing interest to flag. The opening scene, set on an evening in March, introduces us to most of the people who will play a central part in the story, including Bruce Attleton and his glamorous wife Sybilla, their friends Thomas Burroughs, Neil Rockingham, and Robert Grenville, and Bruce’s ward Elizabeth. They have gathered following the funeral of Anthony Fell, a young architect from Australia, and “a cousin of sorts” of Bruce’s, who has been killed in a car crash. Before long, the conversation turns to the subject of how to dispose of a body. This proves to be significant…
We learn that Bruce is being plagued by a mysterious stranger called Debrette, but the nature of the connection between them is unclear. When both Bruce and Debrette go missing, Robert Grenville tries to find out what is going on. Before long, a corpse (“fashionably headless and handless” as Milward Kennedy put in when reviewing the novel for the Sunday Times) is found in the spooky, derelict Belfry. The plot thickens nicely from there; this is a good example of “fair play” detection, and Lorac’s generosity with clues gives the alert reader every chance of working out the solution to a well-constructed mystery.
The second key ingredient of the story is its atmosphere. During this phase of her career, Lorac set many of her novels in central London; Murder in St John’s Wood and Murder in Chelsea both appeared in 1934, and they were followed by The Organ Speaks, in which a corpse is found in a music pavilion in Regent’s Park. She knew the city well, but perhaps never captured its dark side better than in this novel. The sinister Belfry Studio, also known as “the Morgue”, is nicely evoked: “A gaunt tower showed up against the lowering sky, which was lit by the reflection of Neon lights in the West End. At the corner of the tower gargoyles stood out against the crazily luminous rain, and the long roof of the main body of the building showed black against the sky.”
Lorac wrote the book in August 1936, while staying with her mother, Beatrice Rivett, at Westward Ho! In a copy she inscribed to her mother, she recalled their “lovely holiday”, and memories of the sun on the Burrows, and the sands of Bideford Bay. She was fond of the north-west coast of Devon, and in 1931 had used it as a setting for the opening scene of her very first novel, The Murder on the Burrows. Bats in the Belfry, with its very different locale, was published rapidly, in January 1937, by Collins Crime Club, the prestigious imprint under which many of her books appeared.
The Lorac name concealed the identity of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958), who was born in Hendon and educated at South Hampstead High School and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She was generally known as Carol Rivett, and when she published her first novel, she reversed that name to disguise her identity (when inscribing another Lorac book, she described her authorial persona as “Carol in the Looking Glass”). Probably she, like other women writers of the day—Lucy Malleson, who wrote as J. Kilmeny Keith prior to adopting the pen-name Anthony Gilbert, was a prominent example—thought it preferable to imply to readers that she was a male author. Most of the reviews assumed that Lorac was a man. Indeed, the critic and author H.R.F. Keating wrote in his enjoyable monograph Murder Must Appetize (1975) of “my slight sense of shock on discovering that this trenchantly logical, pipe smoke-wreathed hero of my boyhood was Miss Edith Caroline Rivett, elegant practitioner of the arts of embroidery and calligraphy with a stitched tunicle and an illuminated book of benefactors to be seen in Westminster Abbey”.
The young Keating associated Lorac with Freeman Wills Crofts, master of the methodical, well-constructed police story, and creator of Inspector Joseph French, a Scotland Yard man whose amiable manner and quiet persistence were shared by Lorac’s Inspector Macdonald. Macdonald, like French, is a character far removed from omniscient superstars of detection such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Lord Peter Wimsey, and his cases benefit from at least a surface element of realism. Conversely, he was much less memorable than his most illustrious fictional predecessors. Even Lorac seems to have forgotten his first name—in his debut appearance, his first name is James, but mysteriously, it soon became Robert.
As Keating implies, Lorac was a member of that generation of crime writers who eschewed personal publicity, and little has been written about her life. Lorac was elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club in the year that Bats in the Belfry appeared, and later served as the Club’s Secretary. She never married, and she bequeathed her literary estate to her sister.
Lorac was a prolific novelist, and perhaps to avoid flooding the market with books under the same name, in 1936 she began to publish under the name Carol Carnac. Most of the Carnac novels feature Chief Inspector Julian Rivers, a policeman in the same mould as Macdonald. By the time of Lorac’s death in 1958, she had produced more than seventy books, but in the last sixty years, her reputation has—inevitably—faded. Nevertheless, her books have long commanded interest from collectors, and early first editions in dust jackets command high prices. Since 2013 there has even been an E.C.R. Lorac discussion forum on Facebook. I hope its members, as well as many readers unfamiliar with this accomplished author, enjoy the long-awaited reappearance of Bats in the Belfry.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com