Murder's a Swine: A Second World War Mystery

"Yes, two writers, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Gordon Neil Stewart. She was a British poet and novelist, and he was a journalist, originally from Australia. They got married in 1936, and they lived in West London. They were both, I think, quite active in civil defence and volunteering. They both signed up to be ARP wardens as soon as the war started. It was that experience, or particularly Pamela’s experiences, that gave them the scenario for this. They wrote two detective novels together as Nap Lombard. The first one was called Tidy Death , which is basically impossible to get. For whatever reason, the British Library decided to republish the second one first, and that’s Murder’s a Swine . This has, again, a brilliant, and very accurate contemporary feeling. The detectives are a married couple, and you can imagine that Pamela and Neil are giving some of their own relationship to Andrew and Agnes in the book. “Agatha Christie, as the most prominent and best-selling crime writer of the time, was under a lot of pressure not to write about the war” They live in a block of London flats, where they don’t know many of their neighbours. Everything is very transient; people are there when they’re on leave. Who is anyone, really? As the book opens, Agnes locks herself out. And as she’s waiting for the landlord of the building to come and let her in, she decides to go and wait in the air raid shelter out of the rain. She meets a warden who’s also hanging out down there, and together they find that someone has shoved a body in among the sandbags. The mystery unravels from there. It becomes clear early on that the murderer is somebody on a twisted revenge vendetta. Every time something awful happens, there’s some kind of pig connection. At one point, someone’s being terrorized by a pig head that keeps appearing at the window of their flat in the night. It’s got some scarier moments, but overall it’s quite a light hearted book. I think so. I’ve heard that Christie, as the most prominent and best-selling crime writer of the time, was under a lot of pressure not to write about the war. Though, as you can see, other writers were not bothered; E.C.R. Lorac wrote several books about the war, and most of her books of the time mention it at some point. I think Christie, in particular, had been scared off early on, because in 1939 she had a contract to write a series of 12 short stories for The Strand magazine. You can buy them now as a collection called The Labours of Hercules; each one is a Poirot story in which he solves a case that mimics the classical myth of the labours of Hercules. The twelfth story she wrote for that serialisation is about Hitler, or a Hitler-like figure who is the leader of a fascist organisation in a central European country, and The Strand refused to publish it. Her agent made sure she still got paid, but only 11 stories ever appeared. And for the subsequent anthology, she wrote a new twelfth story in its place. The Hitler story has since been republished in the academic John Curran’s edited edition of her notebooks . But I think she and her agent were wary after that—that things would be rejected for serialisation, or that readers would not want to read them, if they were too directly about the realities of the war at that moment. Other writers perhaps didn’t have that cautionary experience. But I do think they thought about it a lot, particularly among those writing detective fiction . They knew they were there to entertain and to comfort, and were aware that people read their books for recreation. So giving them serious dollops of wartime content was maybe not what they were for. But at the same time, Allingham in particular didn’t seem able to think about anything else—quite understandably. Probably for her, the choice was to give detective fiction a rest until after the war, or include the war in her mysteries. And she really needed the money, so she kept them coming. I do find it interesting, though, that in a genre where you are essentially making light of death anyway, to a greater or lesser extent, that this was something that troubled people."