Eden Phillpotts

• Born: November 4, 1862
• Birthplace: Mount Abu, India
• Died: December 29, 1960
• Place of death: Broadclyst, Exeter, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; police procedural

Principal Series: John Ringrose, 1925-1926; Avis Bryden, 1932-1933

Contribution

Eden Phillpotts’s significance in the history of mystery and detective fiction derives largely from his occasional inventiveness in the matter of how fictional crimes are committed and, more important, from his highly detailed and carefully crafted descriptions of southwest England, the setting for most of his work. This area, which includes Dartmoor National Park, contains hundreds of square miles of rolling moorland, within which are mysterious mists, fierce winds, and peaceful villages. His careful evocation of the spirit of this region informs almost all of his fiction. Phillpotts also achieved some standing in the English literary community for his novels about the moors, and his forays into detective fiction certainly helped to legitimize the genre for many in the English-reading public.

Biography

Eden Phillpotts was born in Mount Abu, India, on November 4, 1862, to Captain Henry Phillpotts, an Indian army officer, and Adelaide Matilda Sophia Waters, whose father worked for the Indian civil service. When he was three years old, his father died, and his mother, barely twenty-one years old, returned to Devonshire, England, taking Eden and his two brothers with her. He was educated at public school in Plymouth, which he left at the age of seventeen for a clerk’s job in an insurance firm in London. Phillpotts studied acting for several years in his spare time but decided that he was not suited to it and began trying his hand at writing. By 1890, he had become somewhat successful at marketing some of his writing, and he left his job with the insurance company to become an assistant editor for Black and White, a minor periodical. Practice and an enormous creative energy enabled Phillpotts to give up his editorial work and devote himself full-time to writing. He moved from London to Devon, settling first at Torquay, where he spent thirty years. In 1929, he moved to Broadclyst, a town near Exeter, and not far from the Dartmoor National Park. He remained at Broadclyst until his death in 1960.

In 1892, while still in London, Phillpotts was married to Emily Topham. Together they had a son, Henry Eden, born in 1895, and a daughter, Mary Adelaide, born in 1896. Soon after his wife died in 1928, Phillpotts was married to Lucy Robina Joyce Webb, the daughter of a physician.

During his long life, Phillpotts wrote more than one hundred novels, of which nineteen were tales of mystery and detection. He also wrote some forty-five plays, numerous short stories, verse, and children’s literature. In addition, he published essays, travel writing, and memoirs. At his death he also left behind some six thousand letters written during his lifetime.

Analysis

Eden Phillpotts began his novel-writing career with a work of detective fiction—The End of Life (1891)—and produced many other detective novels and short stories over the course of the next sixty years. Of the twenty-some works in the detective genre, only The Grey Room (1921), “Found Drowned” (1931), and The Red Redmaynes (1922) have earned much positive critical attention. Never an innovator, Phillpotts brought a solid knowledge of craft and a fine eye for detail to his detective fiction. While some of the plot complications and their resulting denouements stretch credibility to the breaking point, his painstaking delineations of the people and places of the Moorlands give his work a ring of authenticity. In fact, Phillpotts’s detective novels are, for the most part, examples of the work of a local colorist whose story lines are really subservient to his celebration of the region.

Southwest England was the area to which Phillpotts’s mother brought him from India in 1865, and southwest England, specifically Devon and Cornwall and the area known as Dartmoor, is the place to which he returned when his writing gave him independence. For sixty years, he wrote about the place and its people. Agatha Christie, whose work Phillpotts encouraged when she was very young, dedicated Peril at End House (1932) to Phillpotts, whom she called “the Hardy of the Moors.”

The use of setting as a major element in mystery and detective fiction was certainly not a new idea; in the work of writers such as Raymond Chandler, for example, setting can play a major part in shaping the motivation of characters and in establishing tone. In Phillpotts’s fiction, however, setting has little impact on the characters. Instead, it is often the subject of long, slow passages in which the writer rhapsodizes about the physical beauty of a particular place or geographic feature. These passages seldom have anything to do with driving the narrative or complicating the plot. It is as if the writer pauses in mid-story to comment on a matter unrelated to the action. That these passages are carefully written, providing accurate pictures of the region Phillpotts knew so well, does not mitigate their deadening effect on the story itself.

The Thing at Their Heels

The detectives with whom Phillpotts peopled his novels fall into two rather general categories: those who are inexperienced and given to a number of false starts and those who are much older and much less naïve about the potential for wrongdoing that lies just beneath the surface of many an innocent-looking person. The writer’s worldview as evidenced by these creations seems not to differ significantly from the standard values of early twentieth century English society. Villains are villains primarily because of flaws in their characters and not because of flaws in their social environment. Persons whose views differ markedly from those of the majority are suspect. For example, in The Thing at Their Heels (1923), which Phillpotts wrote under the pseudonym Harrington Hext, four people are murdered by a clergyman who is a social-reform zealot. The reader soon realizes that the clergyman’s views are so far afield from those of his community that he is suspect. Further, Phillpotts’s world is one in which hard work, honesty, and thrift are rewarded. Greed of any kind—but particularly the lust for money—is the soil in which evil grows.

The Marylebone Miser

Solving crimes is not always easy for Phillpotts’s detectives. He strews endless numbers of red herrings in their paths, confusing them and many of his readers in the process. Moreover, Phillpotts tries out most of the then-standard conventions in the genre, appearing in the process to be more interested in whether he can use the convention than in its applicability to the tale he is telling. In The Marylebone Miser (1926), for example, a Scotland Yard detective named Ambrose and the retired Central Investigations Department man John Ringrose are involved in a locked-room mystery. Yet the focus of the action in this lumbering story is on murders that occur elsewhere, and the mystery of who killed an old miser in the locked room is left largely unresolved at the end of the novel.

The Grey Room and They Were Seven

Another characteristic of Phillpotts’s detective novels is his penchant for inventing bizarre means for committing crimes. In one of his best-known novels, The Grey Room, persons who spend the night in a particular bedroom are found dead in the morning. After endless peregrinations and exhaustive analyses of possibilities, Phillpotts finally reveals to his readers that the bed belonged to members of the Borgia family, who used it to murder their enemies by an ingenious method of causing poison to be emitted from the bed covers whenever anyone lay on it for a period of time. Other novels, for example, “Found Drowned” and Monkshood (1939), feature murderers who use rare and almost impossible-to-detect poisons. In They Were Seven (1944), seven people, all cousins, conspire in an unlikely fashion to murder an uncle, but they bungle the attempt. A Scotland Yard detective, no less a bungler, muddles through in the end, but the book contains one improbability after another.

“Found Drowned”

On a few occasions, Phillpotts managed to get most things right and produced work that serious students of the genre have admired. One such example is “Found Drowned.” Two friends, a small-town police officer and a retired physician, are given depth of character rarely seen in Phillpotts’s detective fiction. They exude a certain warmth, and they are not without wit. Phillpotts mixes in popular notions about politics, and he introduces a private investigator to aid the two friends in the resolution of the single murder that occurs in the novel. Shorter than many of his other novels, “Found Drowned” is more tightly constructed and is mercifully freer of long-winded passages describing the landscape. His use of rural dialect in contrast with the somewhat stilted speech of the central characters gives the tale another nice touch.

The Red Redmaynes

The Red Redmaynes is another Phillpotts novel that, though extraordinarily long, is well controlled. It features an American private detective, Peter Ganns. He is full of idiosyncrasies, but he is equal to the task at hand: tracking down a villain who is the murderer of the brothers Redmayne. Though the novel is primarily set in Cornwall, the action ranges as far away as Italy, and the suspense is well maintained.

Bred in the Bone

Three of Phillpotts’s mystery novels featured Avis Bryden, born Avis Ullathorne, who first appears in Bred in the Bone (1932). The young woman, the wife of farmer Peter Bryden, meets a police inspector, Victor Midwinter, who is in the area to investigate a murder in which her husband appears to be involved. By the novel’s end, Avis has become the instrument of her deranged husband’s death, but she has earned the respect of Inspector Midwinter.

Serious students of the genre should be familiar with Phillpotts’s fiction because it provides some indication of the wide variety of the sort of detective writing that was being produced in the United States and England during the 1920’s and 1930’s. For the most part, however, his mystery and detective fiction is unremarkable, and few of his characters remain long with the reader.

Principal Series Characters:

• John Ringrose , recently retired from the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, first appears as a central character in A Voice from the Dark (1925). Made wiser and cynical by his years with the yard, Ringrose relies on hard-nosed investigation and careful analysis based on fact.
• Avis Bryden , born Avis Ullathorne, is a young woman reared in humble surroundings who becomes the mistress of a Devonshire farmer, Peter Bryden, and bears his child.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. “Preface to ’Found Drowned.’” In A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950. New York: Garland, 1976. Preface by two preeminent scholars of mystery and detective fiction, arguing for Phillpott’s novel’s place in the annals of the genre.

Day, Kenneth F. Eden Phillpotts on Dartmoor. North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1981. Study of Phillpotts’s home and haunts, as well as of his fictionalized representation of them in his novels.

Dayananda, James Y., ed. Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960): Selected Letters. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984. Collected personal and professional correspondence of Phillpotts; provides invaluable insights into his life and work.

Girvan, Waveney, ed. Eden Phillpotts: An Assessment and a Tribute. London: Hutchinson, 1953. Collection of homages to Philpotts by his professional admirers.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. A useful work for contextualizing Phillpotts’s distinctive use of the moors of England in his fiction. Bibliographic references and index.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Looks at the history of detective fiction and contains a chapter on classic detective fiction and how it changed that sheds light on Phillpotts’s work.