Born in England in 1907, Christopher St John Sprigg was educated at a school in West London, now known as St Benedict’s. Aged fifteen, he left school to work on the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor, before joining a specialist aviation publisher, which had been founded by his brother Theodore.
Other than journalism, Sprigg’s first published work was a poem, ‘Once I Did Think’, which appeared in March 1927 in The Dial, an American literary magazine; it was the only example of his poetry published in his lifetime. Around this time Sprigg also decided to try his hand at detective fiction. The first of eight crime novels was the surprisingly gruesome Crime in Kensington (1933) in which amateur detective Charles Venables investigates the murder and dismemberment of the owner of a small hotel. Another, Fatality in Fleet Street (1933), deals with the killing of an anti-Soviet newspaper proprietor, while Death of a Queen (1935) concerns a Ruritanian case of regicide. Sprigg also wrote various non-fiction titles such as The Airship (1931), British Airways (1933) and Great Flights (1935) as well as an instruction manual for pilots, Fly with Me (1933), one of two books he co-authored with Captain Duncan Davis, director of the Brooklands School where Sprigg had himself learned to fly.
In 1934, Sprigg discovered Marxism and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to his brother it was to protect his reputation as a writer of thrillers that he did this under a pseudonym, ‘Christopher Caudwell’, taken from their mother’s maiden name. As Caudwell, Sprigg wrote widely on the application of Marxist principles to a range of subjects including literature and philosophy, and he became involved in campaigning and fundraising for the Party, moving to Poplar in the East End of London.
In June 1936, Sprigg was one of a group of men arrested for disrupting a demonstration by Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists; he was found guilty and fined for assaulting a police officer. On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Sprigg’s branch of the Party raised funds for an ambulance, which Sprigg then drove to Spain where he enlisted in the British battalion of the International Brigade. On 12 February 1937 Sprigg died in the battle of Jarama near Madrid ‘when he stayed behind with his machine gun’ to cover his battalion’s withdrawal.
Sprigg’s final detective mystery, Six Queer Things (1937), was published posthumously and his many essays were collected in volumes including Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) and The Crisis in Physics (1939), a collection compiled by Professor Hyman Levy, a communist academic. As an indication of how highly Caudwell was regarded by many of his contemporaries, not long after his death the writers J. B. Priestley, Ethel Mannin and Storm Jameson, together with the poet W. H. Auden and several Labour Party politicians, established a memorial fund for the purchase of an ambulance.
‘The Case of the Unlucky Airman’ was first published in Everywoman’s Magazine in September 1935.