Charles Christmas Bush was born on Christmas Day 1888 at Home Cottage in Hockham, a village in Norfolk in the east of England. Christmas Bush, as he was known as a child, was of Quaker descent and his family had lived in the area for over 400 years. He was educated in the village school and, in 1899, won a three-year scholarship to Thetford Grammar, where he gained distinctions in Religious Knowledge, English and Geography while winning prizes for English and German. In 1902 he won a further two-year scholarship and in 1903 his Form Prize. Outside school, Bush was a competent sportsman, playing competitive draughts and opening for the village cricket team; he also sang with his friend Ernest Hensley at the Primitive Methodist Chapel alongside his sister Hilda and her friend Ella Pinner, whom Bush would eventually marry.
In 1904, despite his Quaker upbringing, Bush secured a temporary position as assistant master at a Catholic school in North Worcestershire. In 1905, he returned to Norfolk to be an assistant master at Swaffham Boys’ School and he became a published author when ‘Life in the Black Country’ appeared in the Norwich Mercury. He resumed singing at chapel and also played cricket, opening for ‘Swaffham Singles’ and, lower down the order, for ‘Great Hockham Reading Room’ a team that included his brothers in conviction, the two Ernests. Later that year, Bush matriculated as an undergraduate at King’s College, London, where he studied modern languages, and on graduating he returned to teaching, this time at a school in Wood Green, North London. Around this time Bush also married Ella Pinner, although what happened next is unclear. Curtis Evans, the authority on Bush and other Golden Age writers, has determined that while the two remained married until Ella’s death in the late 1960s, they do not appear ever to have lived together. Evans has also established that when Bush returned from four years’ military service during the First World War, including a year in Egypt, he returned to Wood Green School and fathered a child by a teaching colleague, Winifred Chart. Their son, born out of wedlock in 1920 and largely unacknowledged, would grow up to become the composer Geoffrey Bush, co-author with Edmund Crispin of the excellent puzzle short story ‘Who Killed Baker?’
Romantic entanglements aside, teaching had always been Bush’s ambition. However, he did not find it fulfilling and in the mid-1920s, as the result of a bet, he wrote a novel which much to his delight was accepted and published. Set in 1919, The Plumley Inheritance (1926) concerns a treasure hunt and a mysterious murder, which prove to be connected. While not uncriticised by contemporary reviewers—‘Mr Bush has two strings to his bow, and the story might have been a better one if he had restricted himself to one’—the book sold well. It was followed by The Perfect Murder Case (1929), whose manuscript the publisher required Bush to halve in length, and then two titles in 1930: Dead Man Twice in the summer and Murder at Fenwold for Christmas. Buoyant, Bush decided in 1931 to become a full-time writer and he eventually produced over seventy books, including some sixty novels as Christopher Bush. These feature several recurring characters, including Major Ludovic Travers who appears in all of them, and have been reprinted by Dean Street Press. Many of the best are set in English villages but Travers also solves crimes in France in The Case of the Three Strange Faces (1933), The Case of the Flying Ass (1939) and The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940). Bush also wrote four excellent Second World War mysteries, including three—The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942)—that were partly inspired by his time at C19, a D-Day marshalling camp on Southampton Common in Hampshire, and also his service with the Home Guard, which Curtis Evans has established included serving as an officer at Pennylands prisoner of war camp in Ayrshire.
Writing success brought wealth and, in the early 1930s, Bush fulfilled a promise to his mother by buying the cottage where he had been born. He added two wings transforming it into Home Hall, which is now a boutique hotel. He also bought ‘Horsepen’, a fifteenth-century house in the village of Beckley in East Sussex, where he would live with his partner Marjorie Barclay for around twenty years.
While Bush is best-remembered for the crime fiction published under his own name, he also wrote a Ruritanian adventure, The Trail of the Three Lean Men (1932), published as by ‘Noel Barclay’, combining a variant of his given forename and Marjorie’s surname. He adopted another pen name, the euphonious ‘Michael Home’, for a series of novels set in and around the East Anglian village of Heathley, a thinly disguised version of his birthplace. The first of the series, known as the Breckland novels, God and the Rabbit (1933), is a semi-autobiographical story about a boy who wins scholarships and becomes a schoolmaster while supporting his strait-laced mother from London and his dissolute father, a poacher. In later years, Bush would claim that, as had happened with The Perfect Murder Case, the publisher had required the manuscript of God and the Rabbit to be cut by half. True or not, the novel was very well-received and a second quickly followed. In This Valley (1934) is a melodrama about a Methodist farmer and his son, an ambitious man with two women in his life, suggesting autobiographical elements in this novel too. In all, there are around twenty Michael Home novels, including David (1937), a biblical biography, and three overtly autobiographical books, Autumn Fields (1945), Spring Sowing (1946) and Winter Harvest (1967). As well as the Breckland series, there were several Home novels involving Britain’s military intelligence services, including two featuring Major John Benham of MI5: The Strange Prisoner (1947) and The Auber File (1953).
In 1941, after leaving the Home Guard, Bush made headlines locally for restoring the medieval wood carvings on the exterior of Horsepen, working to a Tudor design as specified by advisers from the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was also active in civic matters in the nearby town of Hastings as a member of the Twenty Club ‘for men and women prominent in literature or art’ and he was a patron of local artists and galleries, on one occasion donating to an exhibition ‘A portrait of Mr Michael Home by Mr Christopher Bush’. And he was also prominent in the Detection Club, to which he had been elected in the late 1930s.
In the early 1950s Bush and Marjorie moved to the Great House in Lavenham in Suffolk where, while continuing to write, he again became a pillar of the community, opening art exhibitions and giving talks about being a writer. A modest man, Bush had no time for what he called ‘literary arrogance’, seeing himself as simply ‘a public entertainer whose chief duty is to be thoroughly competent at whatever line of writing he decides to adopt’. But while many of Bush’s novels have good ideas and interesting settings, others seem to some to fulfil the criticism levelled at lesser lights of the Golden Age by H. R. F. Keating—a former President of the Detection Club—that their work is characterised by ‘ingenuity of plot, cardboardity of character [and] chunter of story’. Nonetheless, Bush remains popular and has been praised in particular for his ability to create and deconstruct the unbreakable alibi, a trait shared with the ‘alibi king’ himself, Freeman Wills Crofts.
With Marjorie’s death in 1968, Bush lost his enthusiasm for writing. He died on 21 September 1973 at the age of eighty-four.
One of two versions of ‘The Hampstead Murder’, this text was published in the November 1955 issue of The Saint magazine.