Christopher St John Sprigg - Death of an Airman

There are several remarkable things about Christopher St John Sprigg's Death of an Airman. The first one is that despite its popularity when first published in the early 1930s, it has been out of print for many decades and has only republished by the British Library's imprint.

The story is an unusual whodunnit, set around a small airbase in the south of England in the early 1930s. Flying has taken off as a hobby for wealthy young people who delight in the thrills and dangers, and the reader is introduced to an excellent selection of unusual characters who form the basis for the mystery. The reader arrives on the scene with the Bishop of Cootamundra, an Australian bishop, "on leave" in England who wants to learn to fly so he can better visit his scattered outback flock.

On the first day of his instruction the Bishop witnesses a crash and determines that there is something odd about the death, concluding that murder has occurred. Here's were the book gets a more unusual and interesting. One thing is the aerodrome's characters - most of these are women, including the young woman, Sally Sackbut, who manages the business - Sprigg clearly did not baulk at giving women characters key roles. Another thing is the motive behind the murder which is related to drugs trafficking. Drugs are an unusual plot device for a mainstream murder mystery in the 1930s and it leads our detectives into an international hunt for the killer. There are some fascinating period aspects to this, at one point a policeman expresses surprise at a murder being linked to drug trafficking, "We don’t often get that mixed up with drugs. Have you brought the stuff you found?" he says! Aircraft from the continent stop for customs checks in Kent!

Another interesting part to the book is the detailed descriptions of aircraft and flying. The author was a expert pilot himself, and in fact the most interesting thing about Death of an Airman is the author. Christopher St John Sprigg is better known to history by his pseudonym, Christopher Caudwell. In 1934, the year Death of an Airman was published, Caudwell was starting on a very intense engagement with Marxism and a few years later would publish his first Marxist book of literary criticism about poetry. Caudwell was also an accomplished poet and critic, whose life and work was cut short when he died fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He died firing a machine gun to cover the escape of his comrades in February 1937, having joined the British Communist Party in 1935. 

Reading Death of an Airman to find hints of Caudwell's emerging Marxism is a pointless task, though his inclusion of numerous female characters points to an individual who didn't accept at least some of the most common fictional stereotypes. In fact while Death of an Airman is an unusual novel, its not a brilliant detective one. The cast of characters, the unusual setting and the period details make it a worthwhile read, but the overall dramatic story was a little disappointing.

Related Reviews

Carr - The Hollow Man
Leonard - Maximum Bob
Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice