Caroline: I talk a lot on this podcast about the golden age of detective fiction — that period between the first and second world wars when the fair play puzzle mystery was at the peak of its popularity and its biggest creators were writing their best work. But in the last few years, there has been a sense that we might be living through, if not a second golden age, at least another moment of great admiration for this kind of crime writing, with new books that show golden age influence finding millions of readers and reprints of lost gems from a century ago everywhere you look. There’s never been a better time to be a fan of the classic murder mystery.
It wasn’t always like this, though. Once the golden age style whodunnit had well and truly fallen out of favour after the second world war, there was a long period of several decades in which publishers were loathe to touch authors who wanted to write books that followed the example of those from the 1920s and 1930s. When, before internet bookselling and today’s thriving culture of reprints, you just had to hope you encountered your favourite author’s out of print titles in a secondhand bookshop one day.
What we have, essentially, is this huge peak of popularity for the golden age style mystery pre-1940, then a big trough of disinterest in the second half of the twentieth century, before the interest begins to tick up again in the 2000s so that we reach our current situation here, at the start of 2024. And since this is the beginning of a new year, I thought it would be interesting to look back over all of this and read my way through the classic murder mystery’s life cycle over the past hundred years.
So join me, won’t you, as I go back in time to January 1924.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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Here’s how this is going to work. Starting with a book published one hundred years ago, I’m going to read my way through the last century of mysteries, checking in every decade to see how crime fiction has developed and changed. So that’s a book from 1924, one from 1934, 1944, 1954, and so on. I have done a couple of versions of this experiment before, if you like this idea and want more of it — in 2021 I read a century of whodunnits from 1900 to 2000, and in 2022 I clawed my way out of a serious reading slump I started in the 1920s and ended up in the 2020s. But I’ve never looked at specific years before like this, and I think the restriction of having to read something from precisely a hundred, ninety, eighty and so on years ago will throw up some interesting and unusual choices. So, let’s begin.
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On the 28th January 1924, the third and final instalment of a story titled Anna the Adventuress was published in the Evening News. This was the serialised version of a novel that was then published in August of that year under a title more familiar to us: The Man in the Brown Suit. This was Agatha Christie’s fourth novel, a rollicking thriller-meets-romance that sees its heroine, Anne Beddingfield, travel from Devon to Cape Town and then further into southern Africa in pursuit of the answer to a mystery that she witnesses on an Underground platform in London. It was partially inspired by the year of round-the-world travel that Agatha and her then husband Archie Christie had undertaken in 1922 as part of the British Empire Mission, during which they had followed a very similar route to the one that Anne takes in the book.
This is perhaps a surprising choice as my starting point for this centenary reading journey, since The Man in the Brown Suit is by no means what we would now think of as an archetypal fair play mystery. It has some elements of puzzle clueing about it — and indeed it hints at a plot device that was going to make Christie very famous later on in the 1920s. But it is largely a breathless, cheerful adventure story rather than a closed circle whodunnit. I picked it for two reasons. Firstly, because it is what the Shedunnit Book Club is reading together this month and I am nothing if not efficient with my reading time. And secondly, because I think its presence here is a good reminder that the “golden age” is not nearly such a homogenous as we perhaps think it was with hindsight. Especially in the years immediately following the First World War, early career writers like Christie were experimenting with all kinds of genres, tropes and styles. The “classic murder mystery” was far from being a settled entity, and this book — which I greatly enjoyed — is a good reminder of that.
Next, we skip forward a decade to 1934, from which I am reading The Plague Court Murders by John Dickson Carr. This was a very difficult choice to make, it should be said, because 1934 is also the year in which Agatha Christie published Murder on the Orient Express, Dorothy L. Sayers brought out The Nine Tailors, Ngaio Marsh’s debut A Man Lay Dead appeared, and it also saw the arrival of one of my favourite Margery Allingham books, Death of a Ghost. But for reasons that I hope will become clear, I decided to go with The Plague Court Murders.
Carr, an American writer, had married an Englishwoman, Clarice Cleaves, in 1932 and made his permanent home in the UK. The majority of the dozens of crime novels he would go on to publish were set in Britain and his two series detectives, the academic and amateur sleuth Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, a baronet and barrister who also has a medical degree, are both English. It is Merrivale that I’m interested in here, because The Plague Court Murders — published under one of Carr’s pseudonym’s, Carter Dickson — marks the sleuth’s first appearance in a novel. Carr had already published half a dozen other books, though, featuring other characters like Henri Bencolin and Gideon Fell, and you can see in The Plague Court Murders that he is already settling into his craft.
This book is centred around the trope that Carr was to make his calling card: the impossible crime. The body of a psychic who is due to hold a seance in a haunted house is discovered stabbed in a small stone cottage with all doors and windows locked. The ground around the cottage has 30 feet of undisturbed mud around it, apparently showing that nobody even approached the building, let alone went inside. All possible suspects were actually conducting the seance at the time of death, meaning that they were all holding hands. It seems impossible that a murder could have been committed, and yet there is a corpse to explain.
Carr is scrupulous when it comes to playing fair by his readers. There is no ghostly explanation here, although the book carries a heavy mantle of Carr’s trademark dread and gothic-tinged horror. With his skilful plotting, the impossibilities of the mystery are gradually revealed to be possible after all. For this reason, The Plague Court Murders feels like a good point to check in on the 1930s, when the fair play mystery was in full flower and writers like Carr, Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers were beginning to innovate with the form.
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And just like that, we’re already past the true golden age of detective fiction, which experts generally consider to have come to an end in 1939, when the Second World War started. Two people who had been very influential in the previous two decades both as writers and as co-founders of the Detection Club, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, both retired from publishing full-length detective novels at this point. But thankfully plenty of their crime writing colleagues kept going — and one particularly prolific writer during the war itself was Edith Caroline Rivett, better known by her penname of E.C.R. Lorac. I can’t absolutely vouch for the accuracy of this calculation because not all of Lorac’s work is easy to track down, but I think she published fifteen books between 1939 and 1945 between her ECR Lorac and Carol Carnac pseudonyms — that’s at least two a year, a really astonishing number given everything else that was going on.
My choice for my 1944 book, therefore, had to be a Lorac. Checkmate to Murder is very much a wartime novel, set in London, where the author herself had been based in the early years of the war, before she evacuated herself to Lancashire to stay with her sister and brother in law. The action of the book takes place on a foggy night in Hampstead. A group of friends are hanging out in an artist’s studio when an elderly rich man is shot in his home next door, and end up being the prime suspects for his murder. What makes this book perfect as my choice for 1944, I think, is that Lorac combines the best of the skills from the last two decades of crime fiction with contemporary details about what it was like to exist in London under wartime conditions. Her clueing is superb, her misdirection excellent, her work with alibis very strong, and on top of that we get a slice of social history via the way she incorporates blackout regulations and the changes to police investigations that the war had brought. The detective novel itself is still very recognisably golden age, but its context is beginning to shift and change with the passing of time.
The distance between 1944 and 1954 feels very large. And my selection for this year, That Yew Tree’s Shade by Cyril Hare, makes it feel like we are arriving at the end of something. Cyril Hare was the pseudonym of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, a barrister and judge who published his first crime novel of ten, Tenant for Death, in 1937. His recurring protagonist, Francis Pettigrew, is also a lawyer, but by the time we get to That Yew Tree’s Shade — Hare’s penultimate novel — Pettigrew is older, retired and no longer living in London. In a manner that has become familiar the career of other long-running sleuths like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Pettigrew is called out of a bucolic retirement here to deputise for a local judge who is taken ill.
But it is as a witness, rather than as an officer of the court, that he is drawn into the mystery that occupies most of the book. He turns out to have been the last person, he believes, to see a woman named Mrs Pink alive as she walked into some local woods, where she would later be discovered, murdered. As such, he is able to help the police fix the time of death — a very important element of the story.
We have lots of golden age tropes here, which is to be expected as Hare started out writing detective fiction at that time. But there is something elegiac about this novel, as if it is conscious of its place at the tail end of a tradition that was beginning to be superseded by thrillers, police procedurals, and other kinds of writing that considered the fair play puzzle mystery to belong to the past. It’s definitely a book that is looking backwards, not forwards.
Surprise! For 1964 I’m repeating an author. We have a second appearance by Agatha Christie with A Caribbean Mystery. I did this for two reasons. Firstly, I feel like Christie can’t be fully represented just by The Man in the Brown Suit, a novel that isn’t typical of her later output. And secondly, by this point, Christie is one of the few true golden age era authors still publishing very consistently — some of the others being Michael Innes, Gladys Mitchell and Ngaio Marsh. At a moment when a new generation of crime writers is taking the baton forward, I think it’s a good idea to check in with what one of the old guard is now doing. This is a moment of transition — 1964 was also the year of Ruth Rendell’s first Inspector Wexford novel, From Doon with Death, was published, and P.D. James had just debuted Adam Dalgliesh with Cover Her Face in 1962.
I had already read A Caribbean Mystery a long time ago, and I remembered it as not my favourite Christie by quite a long way. But upon revisiting it now, I think I was perhaps put off by some of the rather “of their time” elements in the various film and TV adaptations I have seen. Although this is undoubtedly a later Christie, in the sense that nostalgia and reflection has become a major theme, the plot is still tight. I also liked the way that Miss Marple runs this case more actively than some of her others where she is merely an observer. Seeing her out of her usual English milieu and in a holiday resort adds novelty, too. This is still very much a golden age closed circle mystery, rather than anything more modern, but I appreciate that Christie was still adapting her work to include the world as it was when she was writing, rather than trying to write what would by this point have been historical fiction.
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Now we have really left the golden age behind us, it feels like. The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell is my choice for 1974, and this was like nothing else I had read to date on my centenary journey. This is a standalone novel, not part of Rendall’s Inspector Wexford series or the books she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. it centres around a writer, Gray Lanceton, who despite some literary success has been reduced by a series of unfortunate circumstances to the life of a recluse living in a run down cottage on the edge of a forest. His desperate love affair with a beautiful married woman, Drusilla Browne, is a big part of what has driven Gray from the world. So far, this sounds more like a romance novel than a crime one, I will admit, but what Rendell does marvellously in this book is introduce a constant sense of eerie unease. Drusilla keeps asking Gray to murder her much older husband for her, so that they can live together on the money she will inherit, and the psychological study that Rendell draws of Gray’s agony as he contemplates this disastrous course of action is as suspenseful as any thriller I’ve ever read. Harking back to the early 1930s for a minute, because when am I not doing that, this book made me think of Anthony Berkeley’s experiments with introducing the then-new concepts found in the field of psychology to detective fiction in books like Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. Ruth Rendell is able to much the malice and the menace so much further in her own psychological study, and the result is both creepy and fascinating.
Arriving in 1984, it’s time to say goodbye to one of the last true golden age sleuths still out there detecting. Gladys Mitchell’s 66th and final detective novel, The Crozier Pharaohs, was published posthumously this year following the author’s death in July 1983. It marks the final appearance of her sleuth Mrs Bradley, who had appeared almost annually in a mystery novel since her debut in Speedy Death in 1929. Now, I know that Mitchell and her psychoanalyst creation are controversial among some mystery fans — some people love them, others can’t stand them — but there can be no denying that they were a major presence through many of the decades through which we’ve just travelled. And unlike some other final outings for longrunning detectives (thinking of the last Tommy and Tuppence novel, Postern of Fate, ouch) The Crozier Pharaohs actually finds Mrs Bradley on good form. The pharaohs in question are not to be found in Egypt, but in an English seaside town where a pair of dog breeding sisters care for their pharaoh hounds, the oldest known kind of domesticated dog. Of course, a precious dog goes missing, and during the search the suspected dog-napper is found drowned in a local river. Mrs Bradley, or Dame Beatrice as she is now, and her regular sidekick Laura take on the case, and while this isn’t my favourite Gladys Mitchell I’ve ever read, it was a pretty solidly enjoyable book, which I was actually quite surprised by. I’m not sure it can be said to be especially emblematic of the 1980s, because I think Gladys Mitchell always went against the grain of every literary trend she encountered, but I’m glad to have got to see Mrs Bradley off in style.
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We’ve arrived at 1994. I’m reading Original Sin by PD James. The sentences must be very short now. That’s what most of the other crime writing I’ve read from this period is like. Conjunctions are out. Semi colons, we don’t know them. Quotations in other languages? Forget it.
P.D. James, though, is still using commas and peppering her work with layered allusions to writers like William Blake, and I love her for it. The philosophy and the architectural history is dense in this story about an old-fashioned publishing house headquartered in East London. The company seems to be experiencing a series of anonymous, dangerous pranks, but by the time James’s Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh is called in, the chief executive of the publishing company has been murdered.
I enjoyed this book greatly, perhaps the most of any new-to-me book that I read for this episode, but it wasn’t until several weeks after I finished it that I worked out why that might be. First, I read Iain Sinclair’s original review of the book for the London Review of Books, in which he completely tears it apart and condemns it as “the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery” and says it reads like an “Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner”. I now think Agatha Christie force fed on Pevsner might be my literary holy grail and I’m very grateful to Iain for articulating this, even if he did mean it as an insult to P.D. James. And then I finally twigged why some elements of this book seemed very familiar. It has a lot of similar elements to a 1957 novel by Nicholas Blake called End of Chapter, which I read a couple of years ago. It’s also set in a publishing house, and without getting spoilery, there are some other things about the two books that line up as well. I believe James even had to address the suggestion that she had based her plot on Blake’s when Original Sin came out, and she said that the similarities were coincidental and unintentional. But for me it goes some way to explain why this novel from 1994 still feels recognisable in some aspects: it is still reaching back into the past.
It feels very apt for 2004 that I first encountered my book choice not on the page, but on the screen. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson provided the source material for a 2011 television series of the same name that I enjoyed very much when I randomly encountered while channel hopping one night (remember when we still did that?). When it came to putting together my reading list for this episode, I jumped at the chance of actually reading the original novel. This, it turns out, is the first of a series of books about a police detective turned private investigator named Jackson Brodie, who appropriately enough for early twenty first century crime fiction is brooding, troubled and bereaved. In Case Histories, he takes on three seemingly unconnected cases, each that seem to have little chance of being solved. In each, a girl or woman has been lost or is missing, which mirrors a tragedy in Jackson’s own life. Alert as I am to some of the clichés of more recent crime fiction, I was very ready to dismiss this book for displaying many of them, but Atkinson’s writing is strong and the intertwined mysteries keep you turning the pages. When I looked into this book a little more after finishing it, I spotted that this is sometimes described as “literary crime fiction”, and that does seem fitting given Atkinson’s use of interlocking narratives and shifting points of narratorial view – this isn’t a straightforward point a to point b story. I think the crime novel is morphing and changing yet again.
We’ve arrived at 2014, and I’m reading The Secret Place by Tana French. Tana is a previous guest on Shedunnit, and I know she’s a great reader of golden age detective fiction, even though much of her own work is set around a police murder squad working in present day Dublin. Still, this novel is partially based at a girls’ boarding school, which feels like a very throwback trope, as does French’s general habit of making her books interlock by manoevering former background characters in previous titles into lead roles in subsequent books.
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the plot of this book because I truly feel it’s one that you get the most from if you come to it with no prior knowledge at all. But let’s just say that it revolves heavily around a group of teenage girls and explores their evolving friendship dynamic as they become unwilling participants in a murder inquiry. And aside from just being a very intriguing read, the most interesting thing about this book for me is that Tana doesn’t seem to feel the need that most crime writers share to explain absolutely everything away. She is comfortable leaving some loose ends, some peculiar aspects of her story that just don’t weave in tightly at the conclusion. I’ve encountered this in everything i’ve read by her — maybe it was a ghost, or a spirit, or in your head, she seems to shrug. I don’t know, you decide. If you, like me, have been raised on the exhaustive denouments of the golden age, this can feel quite uncomfortable, to have elements that don’t get explained as part of some great conspiracy. I did find an interview with Tana where she addressed this aspect of her work, and I want to read you one quote from it now:
“I’m way more interested in the whydunit than in the whodunit. I think the really important question about murder is what can bring a normal person, someone who doesn’t enjoy inflicting harm, to the point where he or she believes that murder is necessary or even desirable.”
Even though The Secret Place does have a page-turning mystery at its heart, that is the question it is exploring. Why this murder happened is far more important to the story than who did it. And this shift, for me, shows quite how far we’ve travelled since 1924. Ten books later, the whodunnit has begun to unravel.
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So there you have it — that’s my journey a century of evolving crime fiction beginning one hundred years ago. I realise that by having my last book be from 2014 I haven’t brought myself completely up to date yet, and so I’ll be on the lookout this year for a brand new book to read that can sum up 2024 for me, and show me what new boundaries are being pushed by the most skilful detective novelists of today. Perhaps I’ll have to make a little update episode when I find it, so keep an ear out for that. Of course, this whole experiment was done with maximum subjectivity — I chose the books i read, and I think I naturally gravitated towards more “golden age” influenced titles even in the later years, just because I don’t especially like to read violent or more hard-boiled crime fiction. Even with that bias in place, I still ended up reading books that were very different from my usual fare, and I feel like I learned a lot about how the classic puzzle murder mystery was transformed and remade over the last hundred years. The golden age never really ended, I think, if you know where to look.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find a full list of books mentioned at shedunnitshow.com/whodunnitcentenary1924. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
