Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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The detective ficiton started truly in 1841 by Edgar allan poe by the short story of the Monsieur C. Dupin the Murderers of the rue morgue.The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of detective fiction (also see Golden Age). Opinions differ as to its length and its starting and finishing dates, and in practice it is usually used to refer to a type of fiction which was predominant in the 1920s and 1930s but had been written since at least 1911 and is still being written -- though in much smaller numbers -- today. Two literary critics have placed it "as between the first novel of Agatha Christie and the last of Dorothy L. Sayers" (therefore, 1920 to 1937).[1] The critic Julian Symons, in his history of the detective story, titles two chapters devoted to the Golden Age as "the Twenties" and "the Thirties"; he notes that Philip Van Doren Stern's article, "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley" (1941)[2] "could serve ... as an obituary for the Golden Age."[3]

Most of the authors of the Golden Age were British: Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Josephine Tey (1896 - 1952), Margery Allingham (1904 - 1966), Ngaio Marsh (1895 - 1982), Anthony Berkeley (aka Francis Iles) (1893 - 1971), R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943), Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957) Philip MacDonald (1900–1980), Michael Innes (1906–1993), and many more; some of them, such as John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen, were American but had a similar touch. Certain conventions and clichés were established that limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the twists and turns within the plot and, primarily, to the identity of the murderer. The majority of novels of that era were whodunits, and several authors excelled, after successfully leading their readers on the wrong track, in convincingly revealing the least likely suspect as the villain. There was also a predilection for certain casts of characters and certain settings, with the secluded English country house and its upper-class inhabitants at the top of the list.

The rules of the game – and Golden Age mysteries were considered games – were codified in 1929 by Ronald Knox.[4] According to Knox, a detective story

"must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."

His "Ten Commandments" (or "Decalogue") are as follows:

  1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
  5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
  7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
  8. The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
  9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
  10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

A similar but more detailed list of prerequisites was prepared by S. S. Van Dine in an article entitled Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories which appeared in the American Magazine in September 1928.

The outbreak of the Second World War is often taken as a death knell for the light-hearted, straightforward whodunnit of the Golden Age. But as Ian Ousby writes (The Crime and Mystery Book, 1997), the Golden Age

"was a long time a-dying. Indeed, one could argue that it still is not dead, since its mannerisms have proved stubbornly persistent in writers one might have expected to abandon them altogether as dated, or worse. Yet the Second World War marked a significant close, just as the First World War had marked a significant beginning. Only during the inter-war years, and particularly in the 1920s, did Golden Age fiction have the happy innocence, the purity and confidence of purpose, which was its true hallmark.
Even by the 1930s its assumptions were being challenged. [...] Where it had once been commonplace to view the Golden Age as a high watermark of achievement, it became equally the fashion to denounce it. It had, so the indictment ran, followed rules which trivialized its subject. It had preferred settings which expressed a narrow, if not deliberately elitist, vision of society. And for heroes it had created detectives at best two-dimensional, at worst tiresome."

Despite beginning his career as an author of several successful collections of Golden Age stories, the influential critic Julian Symons became highly dismissive of the classical detective story and probably did as much to kill it as anyone, extolling in its place 'psychological' stories like those of Francis Iles, usually based in suburbia and involving allegedly 'realistic' lower-middle-class characters.[original research?] "If we consider the crime story only as a puzzle, nothing written in the last twenty years (before 1972) comes within trailing distance of the best Golden Age work, although it should be said that little attempts to do so. ... "[3] Other attacks have been made by Edmund Wilson (Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?) and Raymond Chandler (The Simple Art of Murder). But in sheer number of sales -- particularly those of Agatha Christie, its leading light -- modern detective fiction has never approached the popularity of Golden Age writing.

"Every so often somebody reprises Edmund Wilson's famous put-down of detective novels, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Wilson regarded the genre as terminally subliterary, either an addiction or a harmless vice on a par with crossword puzzles. But the truth is that for every Edmund Wilson who resists the genre there are dozens of intellectuals who have embraced it wholeheartedly. The enduring highbrow appeal of the detective novel ... is one of the literary marvels of the century." [5]

Gilbert Adair's whodunits The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and A Mysterious Affair of Style (2007) are evocations of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The board game Cluedo relies on the structure of the country-house murder.

Many support groups exist for fans of Golden Age Detective Fiction, including a Golden Age of Detective Fiction Wiki and Yahoo Group.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Brand, Christianna; London Particular. Introduction by Linda Semple and Rosalind Coward, page ii. London: Pandora, 1988 paperback edition, ISBN 0-86358-273-7
  2. ^ Stern, Philip Van Doren. "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley", Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, 1941, pp 227-236. Reprinted in Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Revised edition, New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1976.
  3. ^ a b Symons, Julian, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. London: Faber and Faber, 1972 (with revisions in Penguin Books, 1974). ISBN 0-14-003794-2. Page 149 (Penguin edition).
  4. ^ From the Introduction to The Best Detective Stories of 1928-29. Reprinted in Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Revised edition, New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1976.
  5. ^ Lehman, David, The Mysterious Romance of Murder. Boston Review, Feb/Mar 2000

[edit] External links