Leo Bruce, pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke, was a British writer of detective novels
He was born in Edenbridge, Kent in 1903. He studied at Wellington College and then at Bouenos Aires. During the Second World War he joined the intelligence corps and was sent to Bombay. After the war, he was a literary critic for the magazine The Sketch. In addition to being a novelist, he was also a poet, and author of comedies, radio plays and essays. In 1953 he was the protagonist of a famous trial brought against him for homosexuality and solicitation and for this he was sentenced to six months in prison. Rightly believing that he had been unjustly tried and convicted (the trial was a way to give visibility to his accusers in public opinion) in 1954 he left England and went to live in Tangier, Morocco. He subsequently wandered through other countries, including Tunisia, Cyprus, Germany and Ireland. He returned to England in 1970, dying in 1979 in Liverpool.
His most famous characters are William Beef and Carolus Deene. They belong, one might say, to the two periods of Rupert Croft-Cooke's activity: the first, before the trial, includes the novels featuring Sergeant Beef; the second, essentially those with Carolus Deene
William Beef is a country policeman who makes his first appearance in the novel "Case for Three Detectives", where he ridicules three famous detectives, Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith, clearly recognizable as Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown, solving a famous Locked Room case, opposing the three detectives' solutions with his own. From the second novel onwards, Beef leaves the police force, to the astonishment of his Watson, Lionel Townsend, and becomes a private detective.
Carolus Deene, on the other hand, is a very rich history teacher, a widower. He works as a detective for fun during his holidays.
Case With Ropes and Rings, is a whodunnit, very funny and brilliant, that deals with two very similar murders, but of two subjects, in the environment of the ring, who for life, economic and cultural conditions, are completely different, and are faced and solved with genius by Beef.
After A Case for Three Detectives, Beef gained popularity thanks to the books that his friend and companion Lionel Townsend wrote, making him and his fictionalized deeds, their protagonist. For which he resigned from the police, gradually carrying out activities as a private investigator.
It is in this role that he is hired by Lord Edenbridge, to remove the shame that the suicide of his son Alan Foulkes has poured on him and on the exclusive College of Penshurst that he attended, and of which the pastor Horatius Knox is the headmaster. In essence, Beef must investigate and clarify whether it was really suicide, as concluded by the Coroner and Police verdict, or something else, which would therefore restore honor to the deceased, to his father and to the College of which he was a member. In order to investigate without arousing suspicion, gaining the sympathy of the boys, Beef gets hired for the vacation period of the College's effective doorman, in his place. And by skillfully questioning the boys, also through unorthodox practices that his friend Townsend, very fussy and loyal to order and rules, does not understand, such as for example dart tournaments in the town's pubs, and also in his guardhouse (even during class hours), he manages to gather useful clues to unravel the tangle. In essence, Alan Foulkes, the nobleman's second son, a nice, dynamic young man who was very good at sports, was found hanged in the college gym, in boxing gear, with shorts, wearing one boot and another not, with an overturned chair, and the gym door closed. Beef interrogates the boys and the gym custodian, and also Prof. Herbert Jones, the director of the boarding school and professor of literature, with ambiguous attitudes, who was rumoured to have a strong antipathy towards the boy.
The investigations continue without apparently producing useful results, according to Townsend, who complains about the rough and brusque manners of his friend, a great frequenter of pubs and squalid dives, especially when he has to find Alan's girlfriend, Freda, who works in one of these pubs.
At a certain point, attention is drawn to a second murder, apparently occurring in very similar circumstances: Stan Beecher, a rising pugliese, a former brawler, is found hanged inside the gym where he trained, closed. In this case, two wires are also found, one red and one yellow near the body, which are thought to refer to Spanish nationalist circles.
The testimony of Jones' housekeeper who speaks of blackmail against her master, that of Lord Edenbridge's firstborn and Alan's brother, Lord Hadlow who for his gambling debts had been the victim of loan sharks, later reported by his father and who on the evening of his brother's murder had received from him the assurance of pocketing money to repay the gambling debts, reshuffle the cards on the table and support the possibility that Alan was blackmailing his professor Jones for something, and that therefore he is a possible suspect, together with his brother, who with Alan's death would have inherited all of his father's property, without other heirs. To these is added a third suspect, a certain Abe Greenbough, Beecher's manager, who the investigations connect to Beecher's death. In addition, in the pocket of Herbert Jones' jacket a gym key is found: Herbert Jones is discovered to have had many licentious relationships, with different women, behind the back of his wife, a severe woman, when he was away from home. Beef will succeed in finding the person responsible, or rather those responsible for the two murders, rejecting the charge of murder in favor of Jones, who Inspector Stute, prompted by the uningenious Townsend, had hastily arrested for the murder of Alan Foulkes.
In this sparkling novel, Bruce seemed to me very close to Crispin in The Moving Toyshop (1946), a novel that also takes place in a College, and which also carries out investigations in pubs, moved by the same vein of caricature. The brilliant tone is based on the dualism that mimics S.H. and Watson, between Sergeant Beef, who is the antithesis and caricature of the most accredited detectives (which had already been evident in his debut novel), and his companion, the writer Lionel Townsend, who despite the brilliance of his writing, does not possess the brilliance of Beef's wit and ability to abstract and go beyond what the mere clue would suggest. And so the two, grotesquely, are always opposed, even if in the end they reconcile, especially since Townsend recognizes his friend's wit. In a certain sense, they are very close to Poirot and his romantic, very dutiful and not very brilliant friend, Captain Hastings.
It is not a locked room as it would seem at first, but the affirmation of the thesis of crime as opposed to that of suicide, finds its main hinge always in the key: if it had been a canonical Chamber, the modus agendi of the murderer would have had to be demonstrated, having managed to eclipse himself by leaving the key inside the lock; since it is not, we must start from the suicide hypothesis, rejecting it (Beef rejects it, not the police) precisely because the key cannot be found, and the door of the gym was closed, and the caretaker found nothing, sweeping outside, nor did Beef find anything inside, and the windows were all impossible to open. In this case, Beef's genius, as opposed to the obvious reasoning of his companion (who is also that of the police, since Townsend and Stute are in fact allies in the campaign to ridicule Beef's investigation (who then ridicules them), lies in reversing both the crimes and the possible murderers and establishing both the similarity and points of contact between the two crimes, and the fact that the victims enter into relationships with environments different from their own, peculiar to the other crime: so that in this X-structure (chiasmus), until the very end, interconnections and differences in approach are not understood.
Also from a social point of view, Bruce's novels with Beef (more than those with Carolus Deene) show noteworthy peculiarities. First of all, Beef is not an expression of the aristocracy or the middle and upper middle class, but of the lower middle class and the urban proletariat: it is no coincidence that he drinks excessively and makes crude jokes. The characters in the novels with Beef, provide always the same structure: Beef versus Townsend, and accessory, corollary characters, such as Inspector Stute (who never understands anything or almost nothing) and Beef's wife, whose name is not even known, who has a constant but impalpable presence. And like the wife, the other minor characters are also impalpable when only just sketched: not very intelligent parish priests, stupid policemen, elements of the urban sub-proletariat when not very low-ranking criminals, rigid military men, etc.
Regarding Bruce's work, the very subtle American critic, Earl F. Bargainnier, among other things one of the first scholars to have put the corpus of Agatha Christie's works under the microscope in The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie, wrote in “The Self-Conscious Sergeant Beef Novels of Leo Bruce, The Armchair Detective 18 (Spring, 1985)”: “Leo Bruce’s two detective series have important characteristics in common. Bruce’s novels are conventional stories of the type known variously as traditional British, Golden Age detective story, whodunit, or even puzzle mystery. As examples of a classic form familiar to aficionados of crime and mystery fiction, the Sergeant Beef and Carolus Deene books display Bruce’s adept handling of genre conventions: the basically comic universe, the presence of a great detective, locked rooms and perfect alibis, the closed circle of suspects from which the murderer (the crime in question is always murder) is eventually identified, clues—obvious and otherwise—and misdirections, a believable solution that somehow restores order to a society turned topsy-turvy, and the great detective’s summing up of the facts of the case. Even Bruce’s settings are familiar: little English villages with quaint hyphenated names located on or near bodies of water or distinct geological formations, proper seaside resorts, picturesque cottages and stately country homes, and respectable London suburbs. Although the murders are violent, Bruce rarely if ever provides explicit details of either method or aftermath; his treatment of crime has the delicacy and understatement of the traditional detective novels rather than the gritty realism of the newer, American crime novel. Bruce’s characters belong to the world of the Golden Age: His detectives carry no weapons and rely solely on the interview and the reenactment for results; minor characters are succinctly sketched character types—respectable citizens, eccentrics, obsequious tradespeople, loyal or disgruntled domestics, dotty parsons.”.
All theses that are easy to share, if you read Leo Bruce's novels carefully. However, in the novels with Beef as the protagonist, a characteristic emerges forcefully that is typical of Bruce and that apparently finds bridges with other fellow writers, contemporary to him: the ability to weave ingenious plots, with often impossible crimes (that would drive any possible policeman crazy), always or almost always crimes (and therefore finding himself in the most classic track that can be), without ever delving too deep, maintaining that typically British detachment from blood (which would instead characterize hardboiled), but concentrating those energies that others, like Townsend ridicule, because they could never expect a plebeian like Beef to succeed where a character of more cultured extraction cannot. In this, Bruce's novel takes on connotations of social and revolutionary criticism.
Not only that.
The novels with Beef bring out another clear contrast: while they criticize the detective genre with a parodic style, whose main elements are the commoner Beef and his snobbish shadow Townsend, they are nevertheless among its greatest examples, as they are built on intricate and ingenious plots, resolved in an impeccable way. Moreover, this contrast between parody of the detective genre and its maximum affirmation is clearly present in all the plots (even in that of the novel I presented).
Bargainnier adds: “In the Sergeant Beef novels, certainly, and to a slightly lesser extent in the Carolus Deene series, the principal characters seem not only aware of their fictional existence but also inclined to use that recognition to remark on their counterparts in other detective stories, on the plots devised by other crime writers, and on the genre as a whole. For the well-read connoisseur of detective fiction, this artifice, which would be a disaster from the pen of a less gifted writer, invests Bruce’s fiction with a double significance: The novels are intricate puzzles that tantalize and fascinate and most of all entertain, and they are also theoretical works in that they provide analytical commentary on the literary form they represent. Thus, Bruce manages, in this most popular of fiction genres, to obey that age-old dictum that literature must both delight and instruct.”
In other words, Bruce, like any sophisticated and cultured writer who respects himself and is expected (comparisons can be for example Boucher, or Carr or Crispin) tends not only to make self-irony, but also to parody and criticize the characters and plots present in novels by other writers, and at the same time follow the most orthodox dictates of the deductive novel (van Dine's rules are well present) to rise to unusual heights. Thus in the novels especially with Beef (but also in those with Carolus Deene) : . . “The novels are intricate puzzles that tantalize and fascinate and most of all entertain, and they are also theoretical works in that they provide analytical commentary on the literary form they represent. Thus, Bruce manages, in this most popular of fiction genres, to obey that age-old dictum that literature must both delight and instruct.”
Pietro De Palma
