Cricket and crime prove, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be particularly interesting bedfellows. Crime and violence permeate cricketing lexis; a batsman may ‘steal’ a single or hit a ‘swashbuckling’ drive; a bowler might deliver a ‘savage’ bouncer or a ‘wrong-un’ to ‘annihilate’ the tail-end.
The potential brutality of the game is perhaps most enduringly captured in the events of the notorious ‘Bodyline’ Ashes series of 1932-3 when, as a response to the legendary batting of the Australian Don Bradman, an England side – boasting the talents of its most famous fast bowler Harold Larwood and captained by Douglas Jardine – deliberately bowled on the line of the batsmen’s bodies. The ensuing outraged response of the Australian nation and its media can be imagined.
One of the greatest exponents of classic detective fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was no mean cricketer, playing First Class cricket on no fewer than 10 occasions for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Once he famously dismissed the England and global cricketing legend W.G. Grace – an event that provides the subject for one of Doyle’s rightly lesser known literary efforts, ‘A Reminiscence of Cricket’ (1922). On another occasion, facing the bowling of Bill Bradley, Doyle’s trousers caught fire when a fast ball struck a vesta case that he had omitted to remove from his pocket. Interestingly for such a keen cricketer, the only appearances of cricket in the Holmes canon are passing references in two stories from 1904 – ‘The Adventure of the Priory School’ and ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’. Doyle had quickly fallen out of love with his most famous literary creation, and perhaps he did not want to sully the game he loved so much by engaging with it in the Holmes stories. Others have stepped in through fan fiction to fill the gap, though. For example, Arunabha Sengupta’s Sherlock Homes and the Birth of the Ashes and Stanley Shaw’s Sherlock Holmes at the 1902 Fifth Test, both of which involve Holmes in significant historical test matches.
Doyle was not the only significant crime-writing cricketer. J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, had his own team – The Allahakhbarries – and teams of Authors played annual fixtures against the Artists and the Actors, including such great literary names as A.A. Milne, P.G. Wodehouse and E.W. Hornung, all of whom wrote crime novels in varying forms. And let’s not forget the crime writer Nancy Spain, author of Death Before Wicket (1945) who played international cricket for the England Women’s XI.
In ‘The Game Played in the Dark’ from Max Carrados (1914), Ernest Bramah uses cricket as an extended metaphor for the competition between a criminal and a detective. Sir Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’ famous detective, is a competent cricketer. On his way to a First at Oxford, Wimsey finds time to represent the University. In Murder Must Advertise, we learn that he played for the University at Lord’s and that on another occasion made ‘two centuries in successive innings’. The novel also includes an intricate and significant account of a cricket match – it is the murderer’s ability to throw a cricket ball with deadly accuracy that finally marks him out as the culprit in the killing of Victor Dean. Cricketing prowess is a characteristic Wimsey shares with both E.W. Hornung’s Arthur J. Raffles and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman. Raffles is a ‘gentleman thief’ who plays cricket for the Gentlemen of England – a team comprising amateurs, from the days when unpaid wealthy and often aristocratic cricketers played alongside paid and socially inferior ‘professionals’. Featuring in a sequence of short stories and one novel, he is an exceptional batsman, bowler and fielder. Cricket, however, is always of lesser interest as a ‘game’ for Raffles than is crime. Indeed, in ‘Gentlemen and Players’ (1899), he seems somewhat disparaging of the game:
Cricket is good enough sport until you discover a better. What’s the satisfaction of taking a man’s wicket when you want his spoons?
He is quick, however, to see the ways in which cricket and crime relate:
Still, if you can bowl a bit your low cunning won’t get rusty, and always looking for the weak spot’s just the kind of mental exercise one wants. Yes, perhaps there's some affinity between the two things after all. But I'd chuck up cricket to-morrow, Bunny, if it wasn't for the glorious protection it affords a person of my proclivities.
In many ways, Raffles relates closely to Flashman. Cricket plays a significant role in Flashman’s Lady (2005) which opens with a chance meeting in a London tavern between Flashman and Tom Brown. Recalling Flashman’s reputation as a bowler, Brown invites him to join the Old Rugbeians in a match played at Lord’s. Flashman puts in an impressive performance, including a hat-trick, and this leads to further matches.
The test match is the ultimate form of cricket, and there are several books set during test matches. As well as the examples by Sengupta and Shaw already mentioned above, there is Testkill, a less than successful novel by the cricketing legend Ted Dexter writing with Clifford Makins that is heavy on cricket and light on detection. More successful is The Test Match Murder by Alfred Tack (1948), set against the preparations for a fictional Lord’s test against Australia. As the England team prepares for the match at Ascote Hall, the ancestral home of Sir Edwin Ascote, the crime novelist George Brent is called in to investigate the mysterious death of Wilfred Sinclair. It is not long before more deaths follow, threatening the security of the team, the Ashes and the hopes of the nation. Adrian Allington’s 1939 novel The Amazing Test Match Crime, is also set against the backdrop of a test match. Here cricket, ‘the King of Games and the Game of Kings’, appears as the benchmark of moral and social standards. Against it are pitched confused outsiders, such as the Bond-like villain of the piece (the Professor – who is endlessly bemused by what he calls ‘Crickets’), and characters such as Ralph the Disappointment who finds the game confusing and is, by his own admission, ‘no pukka fella’. There is also A Six for the Toff (1955) by John Creasey, in which The Oval acts as a cricketing manifestation of the Garden of Eden, a paradisal space temporarily put out of joint by the sordid incursion of crime.
Kerry Greenwood’s Death Before Wicket (2008) is a tale of theft, murder and academic intrigue set at Sydney University. Cricket peppers the talk of the Dons and their students and the novel features a staff versus students match during which one of the students is ingeniously poisoned. Here cricket – as in the Bramah story with which we began – serves as an unfolding metaphor for the twists and turns of criminal investigation. In the morally disrupted world of crime, cricket stands firm as a measure of civilisation and personal morality. One of the Dons reflects ruefully upon the fact that one of his students (at the very heart of the crime, as it transpires) should also be capable of executing beautiful cover drives. T.S. Sibling equates cricket with moral rectitude in Clues of the Caribbees (1929), praising its ‘Anglo-Saxon values’, and towards the end of Simon Brett’s 2012 novel Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera – faced with an evil villain intent on world domination – the Honourable Devereux Lyminster uses his cricket bat as a kind of Excalibur to bring down justice on an army of ‘Buzzer’ Bluntleigh’s henchmen.
A fuller version of this material can be found by following the link below to the Shedunnit podcast episode Cricket & Crime where Andrew Green and Andy Zaltzman can be heard in conversation with Caroline Crampton: https://shedunnitshow.com/category/episodes/
Andrew Green’s novel Dead in the Long Room is also forthcoming, published by Peripeteia Press.
