Caroline: Every January, I think about the Christmas Eve shift in the bookshop where I worked as a teenager. The day itself would be hectic, with a constant flow of people crowding in to do last minute present shopping. Then, after we had closed, the staff stayed for an extra two hours to transform the shop ready for its first post-Christmas opening. We would take down all of the decorations and replace all of the books on display.
Cookery books promising decadent meals, beautiful shiny editions of escapist novels, non-fiction books about science or adventure or travel — these were all relegated to the back of the shop. In their place, we stacked the tables with books about diets, exercise, meditation and quote “inspiring” stories of transformation. The covers were white, the text assertive and dramatic. Joy and sparkle was replaced by austerity and discipline. That’s apparently how we wanted to welcome the new year.
Granted, this was in 2005. I would hope that we are more enlightened now, and know that this calendar-based aesthetic shift is as much of a construct as anything else. Still, it’s still hard to escape, even if you decline to participate in all of this Januaryness, as I generally do. I do, however, like to embark on new reading projects at this time of year. Although given my taste in books, these efforts tend to look back in time, rather than anticipating the future. To better understand what we read today, let’s go back first, to 1925.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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Here are the rules of my centenary reading challenge. I’m going to read, and discuss with you in this episode, ten books, together making up one century of crime fiction. I’ll begin a hundred years ago in 1925, and then check in with a title at 1935, 1945, 1955 and so on. The ten-year intervals are arbitrary, of course, but they help me narrow down which books to read from a vast pool of possibilities. My hope is that I can get a sense of crime fiction’s progression through different generations of writers and their styles. Since I primarily read books from the interwar period for this podcast, it does me good not to consider these works in isolation for once and rather join them up with what came after.
Long-time listeners will know that this isn’t my first time attempting a reading series like this. I first did something like it back in 2021 in an episode called A Century of Whodunnits, and then again in 2022. But it was this time last year, in January 2024, that I felt like I really found the ideal format with a sequence of books beginning a hundred years before, in 1924. Plenty of you seemed to agree, judging by the conversations I had with listeners afterwards, and so I thought we might try making this an annual tradition. And without further ado, let’s go back to 1925.
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The Paddington Mystery by John Rhode is our starting point. This is the book that the Shedunnit Book Club is reading this month, and the book that inspired me to do this in the first place. You can still join us, by the way, if you’d like – the link to sign up is in the episode description. This slim novel marks the first appearance of Rhode’s detective Dr Lancelot Priestley, who would feature in over 70 more novels and several radio plays over four decades. Dr Priestley is a mathematician with a penchant for debunking bad science across many disciplines. We learn in this book that although he has previously worked as a professor at a university, now in his mid-fifties thanks to a family inheritance able to exist as an independent researcher, penning his papers disagreeing with the likes of Einstein and immersing himself in whatever equations currently take his fancy. He lives in Westbourne Terrace in the Paddington area of London with his daughter April.
I’ve been intimidated by the work of John Rhode for a long time. He was a founding member of the Detection Club and an extremely prolific writer who maintained a publishing schedule of at least two, often three and sometimes four books a year from the 1920s until his death in 1964. He had two very long-running characters in Dr Priestley and Desmond Merrion, a military intelligence officer turned private detective, who appeared in over 60 novels of his own. Where on earth to start?
This project gave me the impetus I needed to crack the spine on a John Rhode book — or more properly a Cecil Street book, since John Rhode, Miles Burton and Cecil Waye were all pseudonyms used by Street, a former artillery and intelligence officer in the British army. I found The Paddington Mystery to be very pleasant and straightforward reading material, albeit more reminiscent of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton and R. Austin Freeman than anything else. Both the crime in this book and the way it is solved by Dr Priestley bring to mind very strongly the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and, particularly, Dr Thorndyke.
As much as I enjoyed this book, it did make me more aware of the fact that the “golden age of detective fiction” wasn’t an official period that kicked off on 1st January 1920. Even by 1925, many of the writers we now closely identify with that time — like Margery Allingham, Gladys Mitchell, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey and so on — were yet to publish their first crime fiction. Agatha Christie was still mostly doing thriller and adventure dominated stories like The Secret at Chimneys, and Anthony Berkeley had just published his first book this year, under a pseudonym that was simply a question mark. John Rhode wasn’t an outlier in harking back to the popular crime fiction styles of the 1900s and 1910s — the new “golden age” style barely existed yet.
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My next book is an old favourite, both of mine and I think for many of you listening, too: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, first published in 1935. Set in a women’s college at Oxford University, it concerns the activities of an anonymous malefactor who is terrorising academics and students alike with anonymous letters, graffiti, pranks and more. It is unusual in many ways, not least its philosophical consideration of feminism and women’s education, and its abandonment of the traditional setup in a novel of detection of corpse and detective, witnesses and clues.
I’m not going to analyse this book in too much detail because, hint hint, you will be getting much more of that on the very next episode of Shedunnit. But I do want to take a moment to consider where this book sits in relation to our previous title, The Paddington Mystery, from 1925. If that book was looking backwards to a previous tradition, then Gaudy Night is very much looking forwards. As early as 1928, in her introduction to an anthology titled The Omnibus of Crime: Great Short Stories of Detection, Sayers was exploring the idea that what she called the detective novelist’s “bag of tricks” could be placed in a less rigidly formal type of writing. She wondered if the genre could develop a “new and less rigid formula” that would come closer “to the novel of manners” then popular in literary fiction. Gaudy Night is her attempt to do this: to create a detective novel that is exciting to read not just because you want to know whodunnit, and that contains deeper themes and characters. Whether or not you think she succeeded will depend on your view of Sayers and your appetite for the antics of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, but the very fact that this kind of evolution was being contemplated at this point for the detective novel tell us something about how quickly writers began to chafe against the restrictions of the “golden age” style, even while it was at the zenith of its popularity.
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I’m starting to feel like my ten year intervals are precisely calculated to skip all the major events of these decades. First we missed all the excitement of the late 1920s, like the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the founding of the Detection Club, and now we’ve missed almost all of the Second World War. Still, our book for 1945, Coroner’s Pidgin by Margery Allingham, does take place during the war, so we aren’t leapfrogging this epochal event entirely.
Coroner’s Pidgin, also known by the title Pearls Before Swine in the United States, was Allingham’s twelfth book featuring her enigmatic detective Albert Campion. At the start, he has just returned from a secretive overseas mission, presumably related to wartime intelligence, and is looking forward greatly to a relaxing bath in his flat in central London. The city has suffered heavily with bomb damage since he was last there and loved ones have been dispersed by the disruption, but his building is still standing. Just as he is sinking into the bubbles, though, Campion is disturbed by his erstwhile manservant Lugg and a stranger letting themselves in to deposit a dead body. Of course, Campion must solve this mystery, and it leads him into a tangled case that involves wartime art fraud, among other things. As with a lot of the Campion books, there are some madcap antics here that require a certain suspension of disbelief, but as a true wartime mystery I think this holds up very well. I appreciate Allingham’s attention to detail of what life was really like at this time, since so many of the other detective novels from the early 1940s that I have read seem to prefer to pretend that the war was barely happening at all.
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Another great leap forward, this time to 1955 and Tour de Force by Christianna Brand. This was Brand’s sixth novel featuring Inspector Cockrill, who after the career highs of her great impossible crime novels from the 1940s like Green for Danger and Suddenly at His Residence, is now retired and on his holidays. Two other things remain consistent in this book from Brand’s earlier mysteries: queer-coded fashion designer character Mr Cecil makes another appearance as Cockrill’s fellow traveller on the package coach tour, and Brand is still very keen on “impossible” murders. Cockrill himself secures the impossibility in this one, being seated reading a book at a crucial point overlooking a beach on the fateful afternoon. He can thus confirm that none of the suspects crept up to their hotel to do the crime, except one of the must have. It’s a delicious scenario, one of Brand’s best.
Unfortunately, the promise of the premise isn’t quite fulfilled, to my mind. Some of the characters, especially the tour guide Mr Fernando, are over-drawn to the point of caricature, and the fictional Mediterranean island of San Juan el Pirata is a bizarre setting that dictates a peculiar conclusion to the tale. That said, the 1950s-specific details about the package holiday, the still-felt aftermath of the Second World War, and clothes like rubber brassières are very appealing. Perhaps we might sum this book as the last gasp of the true golden age detective novel?
After the break: don’t worry, there is an Agatha Christie on the way.
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Finally, we reach Agatha Christie. By 1965, her first novel is fully 45 years ago and she is globally acclaimed as the most popular crime writer of all time. This year, she published At Bertram’s Hotel, the tenth of her twelve Miss Marple novels. This is one of my personal Christie favourites, so it was a delight to have an excuse to revisit it.
This is a novel about revisiting and nostalgia. Miss Marple is staying in a hotel in London she remembers from her youth, and is surprised to find that Bertram’s is still exactly the way she remembers it, right down to the cakes they serve for tea, even though many decades have passed since she was last there. This feels peculiar to her, and she comes to realise that there is a pervading sense of wrongness in this place — a feeling that is ultimately vindicated by her discovery of what is really going on at the hotel.
This book was just as good as I had remembered. The plot still relies a little too heavily on coincidence, perhaps, but the setting, atmosphere and themes are all excellent. Crucially, Christie is no longer trying to write a fair play plotted mystery — if she ever was. Rather, this feels like another take on Dorothy L. Sayers’ project from the 1930s to write a novel with detective elements while not being dominated by them. Miss Marple’s reflections on ageing and memory are characteristically sharp and surprising. Christie was 75 herself when this book was published and it is a reminder, yet again, what a formidable mind she possessed.
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1975 is really untrodden territory for me. For this year, I have chosen to look at a title that many listeners have suggested for me over the years Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. This was the pseudonym of Barbara Mertz, an American Egyptologist and writer in several different genres of fiction. This is the first in a series of twenty books following the exploits of Amelia Peabody — a wealthy spinster and suffragist who is travelling the world after her father’s death. It’s a historical mystery, set in 1884, and heavily informed both by Mertz’s PhD research and her love of Victorian adventure novels.
I actually first read this novel years ago at the behest of listeners to my old podcast SRSLY — true fans will remember that episode from 2016. I couldn’t really remember anything about it, though, and so enjoyed getting reacquainted with Amelia and her entourage. I found her first-person narration a little mannered at times, but the twists and turns of the plot are undoubtedly enjoyable.
Obviously, there is very little that says “1975” directly about this book because of its historical setting, but I do think it represents an interesting moment where crime fiction was well and truly shattering into many different subgenres, rather than there being a truly dominant form. Agatha Christie had arguably created the historical mystery genre in 1944 with Death Comes as the End, and over the next several decades it became a very popular form of writing. The Elizabeth Peters novels are just one example of this type of long-running series: there are also the Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters, which began in 1977 with A Morbid Taste for Bones, and, later, Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels. I don’t think it’s possible to consider later twentieth century crime fiction without touching on this direction that it took.
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Choosing a book to read for 1985 felt overwhelming: crime fiction was so widely written by this point that I could have had my pick of books by Ruth Rendell, Dick Francis, Harry Keating, Patricia Moyes, and more. I eventually went for B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton, partly because I have heard past podcast guest Martin Edwards speak very highly of her work, and partly because I wanted to include at least one American writer in this project.
As the title of B is for Burglar would indicate, this was the second in her “alphabet” mystery series, in which each book takes its title from a letter of the alphabet. There are 25 books in the series, because Grafton died before writing her planned final instalment, “Z is for Zero” and her family have respected her wishes not to hire a ghostwriter.
I’m fascinated by the conceit of this series, as I always enjoy writers whose novels interlock in some way. All the books star a former police officer turned private detective called Kinsey Millhone, an avowed loner who solves cases in a fictional Californian town called Santa Teresa. Again unusually, although the books were published over the course of 35 years, all the stories take place in the 1980s, each picking up a few weeks or months after the end of the last one. I presume Grafton did this to avoid the Poirot problem of an unrealistically aged detective towards the end of the sequence.
B is for Burglar is a tense, thrilling novel that began with Kinsey being hired for a missing person’s case, which expanded to become a possible murder inquiry with relevance to drug dealing and fraud. It certainly doesn’t show many traces of the interwar British detective novel, but it was entirely enjoyable in its own rather dark way, and when I have time I will certainly be picking up a different letter to peruse.
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We’re spending 1995 in the company of Scottish writer Val McDermid. I was keen to try a book from this time that had a relationship to television adaptation, which by this time was becoming an ever-more popular means of telling crime fiction stories. I settled on McDermid’s novel The Mermaids Singing, which was adapted as the pilot episode of the ITV series based on her work Wire in the Blood.
The book is set in a fictional northern English city called Bradfield (presumably an amalgamation of Bradford and Sheffield) where there has been a gruesome series of murders of men based on medieval torture methods. The local police call in Dr Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist who works a profiler, and he attempts to track down the unknown serial killer. I must admit, the darkness and violence in this book was a bit beyond my usual comfort level, but I was impressed by the narrative propulsion and the dual timelines and perspectives McDermid used in this book. It’s also a book that includes interesting trans and gay characters as well as discussion of LGBTQ spaces in the city — something that I don’t think very many of McDermid’s contemporaries were doing at this time.
Writing in the Guardian in 2020, she explained how this book became a turning point in her career, allowing her to fully earn her living as a writer for the first time. The entire plot had come to her suddenly and completely while she was driving on the motorway; she had to pull over onto the hard shoulder to write it down before it vanished again. I’m glad she did, even if this type of crime fiction is unlikely ever to enter my regular rotation — McDermid is a magnificent writer and a very generous figure in British crime writing today, and she more than deserved her big break with this book.
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Next, we are heading back across the Atlantic for 2005’s Still Life by Louise Penny, the award-winning start of her length series featuring police detective Armand Gamache. He is the head of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec, and I understand that all of his adventures take place in the Francophone province, many of them in and around the setting for this book, the village of Three Pines. Indeed, I’ve heard fans of this series comment on its burgeoning “Midsomer Murders problem”, with the level of criminality in this small community reaching implausible levels as the books go on.
In start contrast to our previous book, Penny’s work tends towards what is generally called “cosy” crime, with very little violence described and a focus instead on the gently eccentric personalities in the small village. Although there is a murder, of course, the body of a local artist is found pierced by an arrow out in the woods without much description and the corpse is rapidly tidied away as the investigation begins. It does feel like Penny is self-consciously referencing some tropes from the golden age of detective fiction, such as the closed circle of suspects, although her story is contemporary and not deliberately vintage in nature. I learned some things about Canadian history from the backstories of the various characters in the village, but I think overall this book might err a little on the sentimental side for me. Still, this kind of cosy mystery has become a substantial subgenre in its own right in the last twenty years, in part thanks to the success of Louise Penny, and it was worth experiencing.
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We have arrived at my final book — for 2015, I’m reading The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. This book appealed to me because I too like to imagine backstories for the people I see out the window when I’m travelling by rail, which is one of its central devices. It also felt informed by Agatha Christie’s 1957 Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington, which is another of my favourites of hers and which also begins with something seen from a train carriage. As listeners will know by now, I do like to collect examples of similar tropes across many different types of book.
I ended up listening to this book on audiobook, which worked well as it has three timelines that are narrated by three different actors. One of these characters, Rachel, commutes by train, and builds up an imaginary relationship with a couple she sees from the window every day. The second, Anna, is a stay-at-home mother now in a relationship with Rachel’s ex-husband. The third, Megan, is the woman Rachel sees from the train. Rachel’s life is on a downward spiral, with heavy drinking and frequent blackouts, so when she thinks she has seen something from the train that might inform a police investigation, she can’t be sure whether to trust her own memories. Eventually, all three timelines and characters converge in a dramatic finale.
When this book was first published, I was working as a journalist at a magazine that covered literary and popular culture in some detail, so even though I had never read it before, many of its themes felt familiar to me. Rachel’s troubles with alcohol, Megan’s mental health problems and Anna’s parenting difficulties all felt consistent with the trend for “domestic noir” in crime fiction that became popular in the mid-2010s. Same goes for the parallel first person narratives and timelines, as well as the inclusion of plot elements about domestic violence and coercive control. I think, with hindsight, we will consider this novel part of a “girl” based canon that flowed from the enormous popularity of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, published in 2012 and then adapted as a film in 2014. If the crime sections of the bookshops I go to are anything to go by, these true crime-informed suspense plots are still enormously popular, ten years on.
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And there we have it: ten books and a hundred years of crime fiction. I think I packed a lot in, in terms of a variety of styles and subgenres, but I would love to hear from listeners about what you would choose for a reading challenge like this. I’m also going to be on the lookout throughout this coming year for a book to choose for 2025 that I feel represents what crime fiction is doing now, and I’ll reveal that towards the end of the year, if anyone wants to complete the century with me. Happy reading.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more of the podcast, there are plenty more episodes that you’ve never heard before — all of the bonus material that I make just for the ears of my supporters in the Shedunnit Book Club. Join now at shedunnitbookclub.com to hear them all.
All the books mentioned in this episode are listed in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/whodunnitcentenary1925. 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 CC McLoughlin.
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