A Brief Introduction
The publication of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories in the 1890s is the usual starting point in analyses of the classic detective fiction that flourished in the early twentieth century. Following in Doyle's footsteps were other short-story writers like G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Morrison and R. Austin Freeman, and then, from the 20s on, 'the Queens of Crime' - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham. The main critical issues debated in recent years have been formalist classifications and the generic codes of classic detective fiction; the alleged conservatism of the genre (taking up the question of indeterminacy and determinacy); changes in the role of the detective; the structural, thematic and ideological implications of urban and rural settings; the figuring of 'Englishness'; and the relationship between classic detective fiction and literary modernism.
The Beginning of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Doyle wrote, “It had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.” Sherlock Holmes, the character Doyle had introduced in The Sign of Four, made his debut in Strand Magazine in 1891, starting the early twentieth-century fashion for series of short crime stories linked by the personality of a distinctive and perspicacious detective figure. With his medical training, Doyle created in Sherlock Holmes a ‘scientific detective’ remarkable for his extraordinary attention to detail and his capacity for astute analysis.
The contemporary appeal of Sherlock Holmes is well-summarised by Stephen Knight in John A. Hodgson (ed), Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories: ‘To become a best-seller like [Conan Doyle] a writer of crime stories has to embody in the detective a set of values which the audience finds convincing, forces which they can believe will work to contain the disorders of crime. What then were the values that gave power to the Holmes phenomenon – what does the great detective stand for?...In the first place he stands for science, that exciting new nineteenth-century force in the public mind…He can explain the causes of material evidence either by “the science of deduction”, as Doyle calls it, or through his knowledge of forensic facts and criminal history. That was a vividly contemporary and credible force against crime. But it also had its inherent drawbacks, as many people found facts and objective science potentially anti-humane…Doyle avoided such a bad aura by making the second major value of his great detective that equally potent contemporary force – individualism: the essence of humanity as it seemed to many then, and now. Holmes isn’t only a man of objective science: he’s also aloof, arrogant, eccentric, even bohemian. His exotic character humanises his scientific skills: a lofty hero, but crucially a human one.’
Successors to Sherlock Holmes
The huge success of the Holmes stories published in Strand Magazine soon prompted others to create their own versions of the formula. Arthur Morrison, who in his other work life in London’s East End, used as his series protagonist Martin Hewitt, a turn-of-the-century solicitor’s clerk and a deliberate contrast to the ‘superman’ qualities of Holmes, maintaining that his success in detection was due to nothing more than sensible employment of quite commonplace intellectual equipment. Just before the First World War, R. Austin Freeman and G. K. Chesterton created their successors to Holmes, Dr Thorndyke and Father Brown. Thorndyke is often counted as the first detective to use the resources of forensic science, relying on technical expertise and laboratory analysis. Father Brown, on the other hand, carried the puzzle stories of classic detection towards the realm of the metaphysical. Ian Ousby (The Crime and Mystery Book) describes Father Brown as ‘A detective without charisma, without apparent distinction, seemingly without any of the qualities which make a detective: Chesterton’s conception would prove as influential as Conan Doyle’s.’ One of the best overviews of Golden Age detective fiction, Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder, sums up the transition between Holmes and his successors as follows: ‘In writing about most of Sherlock Holmes’s immediate successors one has to make a change of gear. The interest of their work lies in the cleverness with which problems are propounded and solved, rather than in their ability to create characters or to write stories interesting as tales rather than as puzzles. The amount of talent at work in this period gives it a good claim to be called the first Golden Age of the crime story, but it should be recognized that the metal is nine-carat quality, whereas the best of the Holmes stories are almost pure gold…’
The Queens of Crime
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 seventy more novels between then and her death in the 1970s; much that she wrote was adapted for stage and screen. Sharing Christie’s ‘Queen of Crime’ title was another British writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford (1915 – as a medievalist), Sayers also started to write detective novels in the early 1920s. Several of her stories featured Montague Egg, but her most famous creation was Lord Peter Wimsey, the dashing gentleman-scholar who first appeared in Whose Body? (1923).
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 in many respects the embodiment sheltered, upper-middle-class English village life; of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Julian 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, in her interpretation, 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 (for example) 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. She published the first of her novels to feature Albert Campion (bespectacled and bland, another well-bred, upper crust amateur investigator) in 1928. Her writing career stretched, however, 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).
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, and are often located ‘in the line of’ their Golden Age predecessors – the ‘New Wave Queens of Crime’. Julian Symons, for example, sees links, though he also argues that there are considerable departures, particularly with regard to the ‘realistic’ choice and representation of subject matter: James, who, for example, sets one of her novels (The Black Tower) in a home for incurables, ‘can be formidably realistic in a way that would never have been attempted by Sayers or any other Golden Age writer’; Rendell, though she sometimes goes in for ingenious surprise endings, similarly moves beyond the confines of Golden Age fiction, treating topics like transvestism, sexual frustration and family hatred based on personality (rather than, say, a disputed inheritance). They also depart from Golden Age conventions in their choice of detective-protagonist: as Ian Ousby says, ‘nothing about the fiction of the Golden Age has dated more dramatically or more cruelly than the personality of the detective it usually favoured. His private income, his connoisseurship about wine and first editions, his breezy chatter and his air of negligent superiority.'
Above images are from the following sites:
http://www.bastulli.com/James/PDJAMES.htm
http://www.idir.net/~nedblake/allingham_01.html
http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/dorothyleighsayers.html
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