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"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"
This curious question was put to crime fiction writers prior to their being accepted as members of the famous Detection Club. The Club was founded in 1930 by a group (perhaps a better collective term would be a 'murder'?) of British authors of detective fiction, and provides a useful insight into the era now popularly known as 'the Golden Age of Detective Fiction'. Key founders of the Detection Club include Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley and E.C. Bentley, with G.K. Chesterton engaged as the Club's first president. All these authors are now strongly associated with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction; Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) largely established the 'closed circle of suspects' subgenre with its country house murder motif; Ronald Knox in a crime anthology laid out a series of "ten commandments" by which Golden Age authors were, to varying degree, largely to adhere, and E.C. Bentley's 1913 novel Trent's Last Case is held by most to have been the catalyst for this period and style of (mostly) British murder-mystery, in some part due to the way it was embraced by the aforementioned authors.
Despite this early start, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally applied to books written in the interwar years, and features some of the best authors of crime fiction. The team here at CHL HQ are themselves keen amateur sleuths, or at least dogged bookhounds, and have put together a short list of their favourite Golden Age titles here for your hopeful delectation.
The sequel to Bentley's hugely influential novel Trent's Last Case, following on directly from the events of that work. The chief protagonist is now married to the love interest of the previous book. The story is also significant for its oenological elements, Bentley's co-author Warner Allen being a writer on wine, and the plot includes a search for a near mythical champagne, Felix Poubelle 1884.
Rhubarb sprouting from dead rats, a headless horseman riding in the grounds of a girls' agricultural college, and a student missing, believed married. How much of this can be blamed on the rich and rowdy gentlemen-farmers-to-be at the nearby men's agricultural college? Rags do not usually include robbery and murder but jewellery is missed and a girl is found dead. Summoned by her pig-keeping nephew comes Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and she needs all her cool cunning to get to the bottom of the mystery.
A self declared 'detective story without a moral', by the creator of the Ten Commandments of Golden Age Detective Fiction, Ronald Knox. The three taps in question are the gas taps in the now deceased Mr Mottram's room in an English country inn near a fishing river...but is it murder?
Another key figure in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Sayers was a prolific author who remains popular to this day. Her series character Lord Peter Wimsey owes his forensic skills to some degree to Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke, but he is a distinctive character in his own right and a classic example of a Golden Age protagonist. This tale of murder most foul is set amongst the civilising clubs of bohemian London.
A favourite of J.K. Rowling, The Tiger in the Smoke is one of Allingham's most well-known titles, featuring her understated and ironic detective Albert Campion who, like Holmes and Poirot, can take a bit of evidence and unravel an entire, sinister plot...in this case on the trail of a charismatic but dangerous outlaw in smog-bound London.
The book that secured US author John Dickson Carr's membership to the Detection Club, making him one of the few Americans therein (although he was living in the UK at the time). Featuring Carr's recurring character Gideon Fell, The Hollow Man is a subgenre defining 'locked room mystery', selected as the best locked room mystery of all time by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers in 1981.
Josephine Tey (aka Elizabeth Mackintosh) is a great example of an author who had been somewhat overlooked as an author of Golden Age Detective Fiction, but who has started to regain popularity in recent years, helped in no small part by P.D. James' enthusiasm for her work, but also for starring in fictionalised form in the more recent novels of Nicola Upson. The Man in the Queue introduces readers to Tey's series detective, Inspector Alan Grant, renowned for his intuition, Scotch tenacity and intelligence.
One of the first detective writers to mingle romance with crime, Farjeon was also notable for his sinister and oft terrifying murder mysteries, prompting Sayers to write "Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures." Intimated somewhat by the series artwork here for this White Circle Pocket Novel edition of one of his more well-known titles.
Another key member of the Detection Club, Hare (aka Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark) was by profession/calling a Judge, which presumably gave him a useful perspective... This work, his third novel, is a perfect case in point, depicting the downfall of a man who committed an almost perfect murder, only to find that a quirk of the insurance laws deprives him of his hoped-for reward. An attractive vintage edition by Penguin.
Malaysia-born author Christianna Brand is one of the later authors to fall under the Golden Age of Detective Fiction umbrella, and is today better known for her Nanny McPhee stories. This was her fourth crime thriller, originally published in 1946, and is a splendid example of the 'multiple solutions' subgenre, and plays on Golden Age tropes to create a series of diversions and red herrings.
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is often seen as a 'cosy' era of crime writing, particularly perhaps when compared to its American 'hardboiled' counterpart; with its British country houses, its genteel (mostly male) amateur sleuths and its overarching middle-to-upper-middle-classness, it is quite easy to underestimate its actual variety and depth. A vast number of the titles that were published in the interwar years that fall under the umbrella of Golden Age are now out of print, often with good reason, but the true masters and queens of the genre rank amongst the very best crime writers, and many of those who had been forgotten are now rightly enjoying something of a renaissance due to re-emerging interest in the period.
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