First published eighty years ago this month, Herewith the Clues was the fourth and final title in Hutchinson’s innovative series of crime dossiers. These dispensed with a conventional detective narrative in favour of a body of raw evidence: official reports, crime-scene photographs, letters, telegrams and newspaper cuttings, as well as actual forensic samples such as a cigarette end, a cinema ticket, even a pistol cartridge case. The reader – or readers, for this was book as party game – sifted the evidence before filling out a mark sheet with reasons for eliminating certain of the suspects, and drawing conclusions to the identity of the murderer. Only then would the seal be broken on the last item in the dossier: the official solution, in the form of a report from Scotland Yard.
Dennis Wheatley and J G Links, who jointly devised and wrote the books, had a hard job selling the concept to Hutchinson, who raised two main objections. There was the physical task of sourcing the thousands of dead matches, locks of hair and fake arsenic tablets; the numerous samples of different papers to be printed in different inks; the insertion of small objects and slips of folded paper into glassine envelopes, and pasting them in; the collating, paper-punching and binding with a red ribbon, tied with a bow; all representing a leap in the dark in terms of time and outlay. And then, how to market and display such an egregious format, with its odds and ends in a cardboard folder, when the best new thing was a cheap paperback that would slip in the pocket?
As it was, the first title in the series, Murder Off Miami (1936), sold 120,000 copies in six months (to keep up with demand, locks of hair were sourced from French nuns, while employees at the print works spent evenings lighting and extinguishing matches). Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937) did less well, while The Malinsay Massacre (1938) was let down by having only a single item of tangible evidence (the arsenic tablet, with its deflating “Note to readers: The poison has been extracted from this tablet”). Herewith the Clues was a return to form, but the spirit of the time was against it, with the outbreak of war imminent, and stock was soon remaindered.
The first I knew about the crime dossiers was at Coracle Press in 1982 or ’83, when Simon Cutts showed Colin Sackett and me a copy that had just been republished by Webb & Bower in facsimile form, painstakingly true to the original. We were amazed to find the rationale that guided our own editions being applied wholesale in a commercial enterprise. Eclecticism, of means and materials, of formats and influences, was fundamental to what we did, aided logistically by smallness of editions and the generous commitment of time to projects driven more by principle than economics. But could you apply that to editions of thousands? A visit was arranged to Intergraphic Print in Feltham, where the books were produced, to see how they did it. It was curious to see the techniques we had arrived at ourselves for the assembly of complex printed objects being applied in the same way here: the pre-mechanical-age hand assembly, the processionary collating walk, in the footsteps of medievals, around stacks of print on a central table.
Why are the crime dossiers worth remembering? In their own, crime fiction, genre their influence was negligible (perhaps the nearest we have to them now are role-playing murder evenings and country house weekends). Further afield, it is easier to find work that might remind us of them than anything clearly indebted. B S Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is one: a novel in a box of 27 unbound sections, the first and last specified, the bulk to be shuffled and read in countless permutations, every reading unique. Another is Raymond Queneau’s One hundred million million poems (Cent mille milliards de poèmes), published in 1961, comprising ten sonnets with a common rhyme scheme printed on card, the lines of the poem cut horizontally into separate strips, so that any combination of lines can be manipulated. There are too countless examples of collations of eclectic source material, such as Paterson, William Carlos Williams’s serial epic poem published in 1963, that includes personal letters and newspaper articles interspersed with original verse. But the legacy of the crime dossiers seems less what they enabled, more what they stand for: a form of publishing that cares about materials and tactility, about the engagement of the reader and disengagement from the shackles of narrative.