‘Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.’
Dorothy L. Sayers
In the beginning was Poe. It all begins with him. An alcoholic American critic who created, among other things, the detective story. And for that, if for nothing else, God bless Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe’s detective was the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant if patronising bibliophile of independent means who appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, a long short story published in 1841, and in two other short stories. For these and other mysteries, Poe created the concept of a detective story—a story in which murder or some other crime is solved by observation and deduction—and Poe also created many of the tropes of detective fiction: the ‘impossible crime’, the notion of an amateur investigator from whom the professionals seek advice, the least likely suspect as murderer … Quite simply, before anyone did anything, Poe did everything. Or almost everything.
While Poe’s stories were popular, and prompted others to try their hand at detective fiction, it would be nearly twenty years before the first novel-length detective story was published. This was The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–63) by Charles Warren Adams, writing as Charles Felix. Though other detective novels appeared, most notably The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, detection remained generally subordinate to romance and suspense, and it would be a further twenty years before the next landmark in detective fiction, Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published in 1886. And then, in 1887, readers were introduced to the greatest detective of them all, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As well as that first novel, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes appeared in three more novels, but it is principally because of the fifty-six short stories about Holmes, published in the Strand magazine, that the character has endured. While Holmes had other ‘rivals’ in the 1880s and ’90s, most notably Arthur Morrison’s investigator Martin Hewitt, none has survived to the present day.
The popularity of detective fiction, especially in the short story form, continued into the Edwardian Age, although only two characters from that period approach Holmes in terms of the quality of the stories in which they appear: G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Catholic priest with an eye for paradox and a soul for the guilty, who featured in more than fifty stories; and Dr John Thorndyke, R. Austin Freeman’s preternaturally intelligent forensic investigator, although his novel-length cases are more satisfying than the forty-one short stories in which he appears.
While the puzzles set by Chesterton and Freeman were for the most part very much in the tradition of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, E. C. Bentley’s 1913 novel Trent’s Last Case was a game-changer, its publication often regarded as marking the beginning of what has become known as the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction. In Trent’s Last Case, Bentley presented a clear problem, the shooting of a millionaire; but he turned convention on its head by allowing Trent to fall in love with a suspect—commonplace now but far from so at that time—and Bentley further confounded readers’ expectations because Trent does not solve the case.
Trent’s Last Case was immensely popular and remains in print today, along with Bentley’s second Trent novel and a volume containing all thirteen of the Trent short stories, Trent Interviews (1938). The novel prompted a boom in detective fiction in Britain, and for the best part of the next twenty years a detective short story appeared in almost every issue of almost every magazine: in long-lost titles like The Red, Pearson’s, The Bystander, The Sphere, The Corner, Britannia and Eve, as well as others that have endured like Harper’s and The Tatler. Detective stories—and episodic mystery serials—also became a standard feature in national weekly newspapers like the News of the World, and they could also be found in regional weeklies like the Yorkshire Weekly Post and the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph. These and countless other titles quickly became a strong, diverse and seemingly sustainable market for detective fiction, especially stories that turned on a twist or which featured an impossible crime, an unusual weapon or an unbreakable alibi, and they provided a complementary source of income for many of the best-known Golden Age authors as well as for some opportunistic hacks.
As the First World War ended, a steady trickle of novels that have come to be recognised as classics of the genre began to appear. In 1920, the Irish engineer Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask, a sturdy police procedural whose mystery carried it through multiple editions. The same year, Agatha Christie, unquestionably the most popular writer of the Golden Age, had her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, serialised over eighteen weeks in the weekly edition of The Times, providing a retired Belgian police officer, Hercule Poirot, with his first case, and his first published book in Britain in 1921. In 1923, Dorothy L. Sayers’ first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, was published, while 1924 saw the publication of The Rasp, the first of Philip Macdonald’s Colonel Gethryn novels. In 1925, John Rhode’s Dr Priestley and Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham took their first bow in, respectively, The Paddington Mystery and The Layton Court Mystery.
And so on. The trickle became a flood …
By the mid-1920s the appetite for crime fiction was enormous in Britain, as well as in much of the English-speaking world. As well as the many weekly and monthly magazines that carried crime and detective stories, daily newspapers also published mysteries, often basic puzzle stories in which the object was simply to spot the murderer’s error before the detective. And when radio came along, in the form of 2LO, the precursor to the BBC, it provided a new outlet for detective fiction, a tradition that continues—thankfully—to this day.
In 1928, with his tongue (as often) firmly in his cheek, Father Ronald Knox set out ten rules for anyone considering writing a detective story; in America, the crime writer S. S. Van Dine did much the same, albeit at greater length. And in late 1929, Anthony Berkeley founded the Detection Club, a dining club to allow the elite of the genre to gather together and at the same time distinguish themselves from the mass of writers then working to meet the enormous demand for mysteries.
With hindsight, the 1930s can be seen as the high-point of the Golden Age, with many of the greatest writers in the genre producing their finest work, carefully constructed novels in which generally bloodless crimes are committed by consistently ingenious means; criminals are protected by unbreakable alibis and seemingly impenetrable mysteries are resolved by unmatchable detectives.
The Golden Age can be regarded as having ended in 1937 with the publication of Dorothy L. Sayers’ final Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, which she described as ‘a love story with detective interruptions’, despite previously having said that ‘sloppy sentiment’ had no place in detective stories. However, it is important to acknowledge that there is much debate about dates. Some consider that the Golden Age continued into the 1940s, while others argue