Agatha
Christie (whose books have sold something like a hundred million
copies) started writing detective fiction whilst she was working as a nurse
during World War I. Her first novel (The Mysterious Affair
at Styles, which introduced Hercule Poirot)
was published in 1920 - notable as the 'puzzle story' that ushered in what
is generally called the'Golden Age' of detective fiction. Christie
wrote over 70 more novels between then and her death in the 1970s; much
that she wrote was adapted for stage and screen (our story, 'The Witness
for the Prosecution,' for example, was turned into a highly successful play
and film - d. Billy Wilder, 1953).
In contrast to the 'First Golden Age', this period (the interwar years
of the 20s and 30s) was notable for the huge proliferation of novels and
a decline in the popularity of the short story. Julian Symons, in
Bloody Murder, relates this to the broad socio-economic changes that
took place in the wake of the First World War. He emphasises particularly
the creation of a new structure of domestic life, with women more leisured
- and increasingly using their leisure to read books: 'Supply.followed
their demand for reading that would reinforce their own view of the world
and society - long, untroubling 'library novels', light romances, detective
novels.'Critics have often called attention to the many aspects of interwar life that were excluded from the 'fairy-tale land' of Golden Age detective fiction: rapidly increasing unemployment, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rise of European dictatorships. The majority of those who wrote detective fiction during this period are associated with right-wing socio-political views - views summed up in the title of Colin Watson's study, Snobbery with Violence (1971). The usual critical judgement, then, is that the social vision of both Christie and Sayers is very conservative, and this is related to setting and character as well as to choice of subject matter: 'Country houses and/or upper-middle-class village communities may provide the satisfyingly manageable closed societies demanded by the form; they also purvey a typifying vision of British society as a whole strikingly at odds with many insistent realities of the interwar years.' (Martin Priestman, Crime Fiction). The detective-figures operating within this cloistered environment can be seen as closely identified with the privileged classes: Christie's Miss Marple, for example, in contrast to the militant detective heroines of more recent crime fiction, 'is simply an incarnation of upper-middle-class English village life at its most apparently insular and inward-turned' (Priestman); of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, Symons says that it 'would be charitable to think that [Wimsey] was conceived as a joke but, unhappily, there is every indication that Sayers regarded him with an adoring eye. Lord Peter, the second son of the Duke of Denver, is a caricature of the English aristocrat conceived with an immensely snobbish, loving seriousness.'
The standard view of the uniformly insular and snobbish character of Golden Age detective fiction is challenged by Alison Light in Forever England. The bloodless, detached domestic murder story is a 'literature of convalescence', read 'to forget', to remove the threat of violence, and acting to reassure a nation ravaged by war. Is it right, Light asks, to see the whole body of this fiction simply as evidence of English middle class arrogance and national complacency? In particular she seeks to counter the critical tendency to patronise Christie, whose views she distinguishes from (e.g.) Sayers' 'sychophantic' flattery of the upper classes. Christie, she argues, manifests no such romantic conservatism: 'If they are ultimately defensive fictions, looking for an insider on whom to blame the apparent uncertainty of social life, then that same refusal to look beyond the Home Counties and their inhabitants for her psychic swindlers could surely open up for Christie's readers the unsettling implication that 'it is the middle classes who are the murdering classes', and their victims are their own selves. The fiction may work in the end to offer 'reassurance' but since her communities always thrive on suspicion their insecurities can never be resolved. Perhaps it is this contradiction which makes these fictions for many such compulsive reading.Should we not read the flood of whodunits between the wars not so much as a sign of the fixity of class assumptions but as symptomatic of their instability?'
Margery Allingham is a slightly later 'Golden Age' writer. In 1928 she published the first of her novels to feature Albert Campion (bespectacled and bland, another well-bred, upper crust amateur investigator). Her writing career stretched on into the 1960s: during this time Campion became less Wimsey-ish and, as it matured, Allingham's fiction can be seen as having contributed to the development of the detective story as serious literary genre. She is credited with casting a more critical eye on social hypocrisy and with breaking away from many of the conventions of the orthodox detective story - as, for example, in Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and in the short story included in the Craig collection.
The New Wave Queens: P.D. James and Ruth Rendell
P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, both of whom started writing in the 1960s, are generally regarded as two of the most interesting of contemporary British crime writers.
Roy Marsden as Dalgliesh in the popular TV series
