British Mystery Fiction

Introduction

Any survey of the history of British mystery and detective fiction history quickly uncovers two basic truths. First, what the average reader thinks of as contemporary British mystery and detective fiction is, in reality, far more mixed in pedigree, having been heavily influenced by American and Australian writers. Second, between 1749 and 1990, mystery and crime fiction writers produced more than 3,800 works of truly breathtaking variety. Great Britain has and continues to produce many of the most important figures in the mystery and detective fiction genre. Names such as Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Rendell, and Anne Perry are familiar to even casual readers of the genre.

Long Before Doyle: Early Whodunits

Although mystery and detective fiction is generally perceived as having arisen during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, its British antecedents go back much further. An early form of the genre, the “whodunit,” goes back at least to the eighteenth century. In stories of that classic form, either a professional or an amateur sleuth investigates a crime, usually a murder, identifies a list of suspects, and then narrows the list until the guilty party is identified. Elements of the whodunit can be found in the works of authors known primarily for other sorts of writing. A notable example is philosopher William Godwin’s Things as They Are: Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794, also known as Caleb Williams). This novel is sometimes regarded as the earliest example of detective fiction. A secretary suspected of the murder of his employer, Caleb Williams, is relentlessly pursued across England by the authorities even though another person, an associate of the villainous murder victim, has committed the crime. How Williams is vindicated—the revelation of clues and witnesses that exonerate him—became a set of genre conventions used by later generations of mystery writers, whose own detectives use circumstantial evidence to clear their clients.

The popularity of Caleb Williams inspired other crime novels, such as George Walker’s Theodore Cyphon: Or, the Benevolent Jew (1796), which describes problems resulting from laws that oppress minorities. The hero's cleverness in handling this oppression allows him to triumph over his foes. Like Caleb Williams, Cyphon is pursued and must take shelter in a poorhouse when he is suspected of a murder he has not committed.

Edward Bulwer Lytton, best known for his works of historical fiction, such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), also wrote a murder mystery, Pelham (1828). This book devotes considerable space to describing a crime, suspects, and clues that eventually reveal the true villain of the work. The hero, Henry Pelham, defends his friend Reginald Glanville against murder charges and exonerates him by investigating the existing physical evidence. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853) also depicts a murder, that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, which is solved by Inspector Bucket, one of the earliest literary examples of a police detective. In all of these stories, circumstantial evidence is used to determine which person, from a pool of suspects, is the actual culprit.

Sensation Novels

During the 1850s and 1860s, British authors started writing remarkable melodramatic thrillers known as sensation novels. One of the best-known of these writers is Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The first of these books is not exactly a murder mystery; it concerns the struggles of an art teacher, Walter Hartright, to discover the identity of a mysterious woman—possibly a fugitive from an asylum—found wandering on a road in Hampstead. The Moonstone, which shares a modified epistolary form with Collins’s earlier novel, concerns the tangled history and eventual theft of a large blue diamond given to a young woman by her uncle, a corrupt British army official in India. The Moonstone also provides an early example of detective fiction; Sergeant Cuff, the sleuth of the story, is a policeman, although he is hired privately to solve the case and acts more as a consulting detective than as an official representative of the law.

Another writer who shaped the genre of sensation fiction was Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). As in The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the plot of Lady Audley’s Secret is complex. Having received word of his wife, Helen’s, death while working in Australia, Braddon’s hero, George Talboys, returns to England and discovers his wife embroiled in a mystery of mistaken identity. Talboys gradually sorts out many clues that reveal a complex case of fraud and deception, following a methodology on which later detective fiction would rely.

A common technique in sensation fiction was revealing to readers full descriptions of the crimes being committed and the legal process that followed. Later, mystery writers tended to open their stories with the crimes committed already, so their plots involved only unraveling the mystery behind the crime. Challenging readers to consider clues intellectually, rather than evoking their emotional responses to graphic portrayals of murder, was a key component of the other main form created in the mid-nineteenth century, the casebook form of detective writing.

Casebook Fiction

Casebook fiction is a classic example of a genre of writing that came into being because of a dramatic social change. The rapid expansion of British cities as industrial centers during the early nineteenth century occasioned Sir Robert Peele’s creation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1828. Having an official police presence separate and distinct from the Crown relieved the anxiety of the new urbanized public. It also helped stimulate the creation of a new kind of fiction—police memoirs or casebooks. Early nineteenth-century writers began constructing comparatively realistic stories about police officials hunting criminals. Based in part on real-life case descriptions—notably the memoirs of the French detective Eugene-François Vidocq published in 1828-1829—the fictionalized British police casebooks were presented to a newly literate middle-class public hungry for stories involving murder and punishment. These books depicted police officers skilled at making clever deductions from evidence, tracking criminals, and disguising themselves.

Also known as yellowbacks because of their bright yellow covers, casebooks were written by authors such as William Russell, who used the pen name R. N. Waters; Andrew Forrester, Jr.; Charles Martel; and others. The books were essentially collections of short stories written in the first person and ostensibly related by real police officers and amateur sleuths working directly with the police on cases. The books represent the earliest examples of mystery literature that describes police methodology in a comparatively realistic manner.

Russell’s Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (1856) presents the purported narrative of a police detective who pursued criminals in the countryside while wearing disguises to conceal his identity as a member of the Metropolitan Police. The book describes the careful scrutinizing of crime scenes for clues, interviewing witnesses, and examining trace evidence. Russell emphasizes police procedures. For example, his story titled “Murder Under the Microscope” (1860) presents itself as a truthful retelling of an actual police case and attempts to provide realistic—and frequently lurid—portrayals of crime and punishment.

A characteristic aspect of casebook fiction is the anonymity of its purported narrators. In contrast to Wilkie Collins and other writers of sensation novels who were well known and made no effort to conceal their identities, casebook writers tended to be semi-anonymous figures whose own lives remained mysterious. Despite the general anonymity of its creators, casebook fiction strongly influenced the development of the detective genre. Late nineteenth-century contemporaries of Arthur Conan Doyle, such as Arthur Morrison, Max Pemberton, and Catherine Louisa Pirkis, drew much of their inspiration from the casebook school of writing as they helped shape modern detective fiction.

Doyle and His Contemporaries

During the late 1880s, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, and featured him in short stories and novels. Doyle is generally regarded as the founder of modern mystery and detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes is not only one of the most imitated characters in the genre but also one who has been repeatedly parodied and used by other authors as the hero of new adventures. Holmes is the subject of fifty-six short stories collected in five anthologies but is the protagonist of only four novels: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of the Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Valley of Fear (1914). All four novels follow the same pattern as Doyle’s short stories: Holmes, as a private detective, is asked by people to investigate possible criminal activities. For example, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes initially investigates the curious circumstances surrounding the death of country squire Sir Charles Baskerville. Dr. James Mortimer, a friend of the heir to Sir Charles’s estate, approaches Holmes because he fears that an age-old curse is threatening his friend, the young Henry Baskerville. In “The Red-Headed League,” a typical Holmes short story, the person who asks Holmes for help is not even sure that anything criminal has occurred. After being hired for a job, he found it easy and profitable. He suddenly discovered that his job had been terminated and his employers had disappeared. His suspicion that he has been duped in some mysterious way leads him to Holmes’s door. In both cases, Holmes applies his powers of deduction to solve the mysteries, but he does so solely as a private consultant and only reluctantly involves the police—whom he tends to treat with scorn.

Doyle’s popularity sparked an explosion in mystery publishing, especially short stories. Other authors were eager to follow the new trend of writing about private detectives instead of police officers. Many British authors from Doyle’s time and later created their own versions of consulting detectives, such as Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt and Horace Dorrington, Max Pemberton’s Bernard Sutton, Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee, and Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke.

Morrison’s Hewitt, often regarded as a poor counterfeit of Sherlock Holmes, appears in three volumes of collected stories: Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894), The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (1895), and The Adventures of Martin Hewitt (1896). Initially a lawyer, Hewitt discovers he is far more interested in solving crimes than working for the English court system. Like Holmes, he becomes a consulting detective. In contrast to the mild-mannered Hewitt, Morrison’s other private investigator, Horace Dorrington, is a far more ambiguous character. Featured in The Dorrington Deed-box (1897), Dorrington is a former thug who, although winning the trust of his clients, is not above trying to kill them for financial gain.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke is also noted for her deductive ability and, like Holmes, is decidedly eccentric. In The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894), Brooke works for Ebenezer Dyer, who is chief of a detective agency in London’s Lynch Court. What is most interesting about Brooke as a character is her status as an obstinately single woman who earns her living through her deductive abilities. She is like Holmes in remaining aloof from the opposite sex. Besides her professional relationship with Dyer, she never associates with men. As a woman of high intellectual ability, she can solve crimes without becoming romantically involved.

British Scientific Detection

Arthur Conan Doyle and his contemporaries were fascinated with the scientific processes inherent in police investigations. The nineteenth century witnessed the discovery of fingerprints’ uses in identifying people, the invention of photography, and the development of the microscope. These developments helped put forensic investigations on a scientific base and gave new and exciting tools to real and fictional criminal investigators. Doyle, L. T. Meade, and Clifford Halifax wrote about detectives skilled in the sciences and made scientific detection the primary focus of many of their mysteries.

L. T. Meade was the pen name of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1854-1914), the prolific author mainly of books and stories for young women. She also wrote numerous stories of crime and detection, alone and with collaborators. With Robert Eustace, the pen name of Eustace Robert Barton (1854-1943), she wrote The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899), the saga of a sinister secret society. Another of their collaborations, The Secret of Emu Plain (1898), introduced the Master of Mystery, John Bell, who debunked the existence of ghosts in much the same manner as the real-life Harry Houdini. Bell’s insistence on rationality and scientific method is particularly significant in the story “The Secret of Emu Plain” (1898), in which he investigates the disappearance of a young man in Australia and must fight local superstitions. Meade’s other collaborations with Eustace include many stories published in The Strand Magazine. Most of these stories exhibit the deep respect for science that pervaded Victorian literature and use as their theme the use, or misuse, of new technology.

Victor L. Whitechurch, a technophile who was a contemporary of Meade, was a clergyman and railroad enthusiast who used trains as settings for many of his stories and mystery novels, which ranged from The Canon in Residence in 1904 to Murder at the College in 1932. His most interesting character was Godfrey Page, arguably the first railway detective, who appeared in six stories in Pearson’s Weekly that were later collected in The Investigations of Godfrey Page, Railwayac (1990). Whitechurch invented the word railwayac, short for “railway maniac,” to apply to people who get immensely excited about railroads—someone like Godfrey Page. It is primarily Page’s love of railroads that drives him to investigate mysteries connected with them.

The Golden Age, 1920-1945

Sometimes called the cozy age because of the fondness of readers of that era for sentimentality and familial themes, the period between roughly 1920 and 1945 is more commonly known as the Golden Age because of the large amount of high-quality mystery fiction written then. Like the literary salons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writing circles among Golden Age writers abounded, serving as support networks and critical forums for young writers. One such group that was started in 1928 by four prolific and talented intellectuals was the Detection Club. Its members emphasized the writing and publishing of mystery and detective fiction as the club’s primary purpose. Members included G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ronald Knox, along with many less-known writers.

Some members of the Detection Club collaborated in writing mystery novels. One member would write a chapter of a new mystery and then hand the plot and characters over to another writer to continue until an entire book was written. Participants were bound by certain rules: Each writer had to keep the final solution in mind and could not introduce complications merely to make the job more difficult for writers who followed or for eventual readers. Although this kind of collaborative effort produced works intended more for the amusement of the members than for publication, the process of writing and revision no doubt encouraged club members to help each other and work on their own books.

A founder member of the club and a prolific author, G. K. Chesterton wrote a large volume of essays on literature, economics, theology, and politics and even some poetry. He wrote only one novel, The Man Who Was Thursday (1907), and collaborated on the Detection Club novel The Floating Admiral (1931), but he is popularly remembered as the author of forty-eight short stories featuring Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest and amateur sleuth. Mild-mannered and humble, but still a very observant Roman Catholic priest, Brown has a special knowledge of human nature that leads him to solve mysteries. He recognizes people’s weaknesses and sins and can look deeply into the souls of the characters with whom he associates.

Another charter member of the Detection Club, Agatha Christie is probably the best-selling novelist in the world. She produced no fewer than sixty-six mystery novels. More than thirty of her novels feature Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, and twelve feature Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster. Christie was fond of Marple, whom she apparently modeled on her own grandmother, but she found Poirot less appealing. Her readers disagreed, however. As a result, she acknowledged that she had a duty to provide fiction about characters whom her readers loved and, consequently, wrote most of her mysteries about Poirot. These ranged from The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 to Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case in 1975, the year before Christie herself died. Christie had written Curtain many years earlier, to ensure there would be a suitable book to end the Poirot series.

Another Detection Club member known for her work outside mystery writing was Dorothy L. Sayers. She left a lucrative career in advertising only because her fiction writing became too time-consuming for her to continue regular employment. Sayers was among many women who developed professional careers in fields formerly dominated by men because many British men went off to fight in World War I. She was fiercely proud of what she had accomplished. Although her father was a don at Oxford University, Sayers could not earn a degree there simply because she was a woman. After the war ended, women were finally admitted to Oxford, and Sayers earned a master’s degree there in modern languages and medieval literature. Her fiction often contains many satiric digs at the formerly all-male environments she had had to struggle to enter. The male characters in the advertising boardroom of her Murder Must Advertise (1933) and in the academic halls of her Gaudy Night (1935) are treated with scorn, no doubt born out of Sayers’s personal experiences.

As a mystery writer, Sayers is best known for her most famous detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, whom she used in eleven novels, ranging from Whose Body? in 1923 to Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937. She also used him in three volumes of short stories. Wimsey was such a colorful and eccentric character that even his creator grew exceptionally fond of him. Not only was she unable to kill him off when she got tired of writing about him, she was also unable to leave him alone. After she later created another fictional crime-solver in Harriet Vane, she had Vane meet and marry Wimsey.

Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Writers

One of the modern British crime writers credited with helping to move the mystery and detective genre to the level of mainstream literature is Ruth Rendell, who also writes a more romantic style of novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Born in 1930, Rendell was a reporter whose career foundered after she published an article about a dinner she had pretended to attend. The problem was that her article neglected to mention that the main speaker at the dinner had dropped dead in the middle of his speech. She eventually turned to writing fiction. In 1964, she introduced Inspector Reginald Wexford in From Doon with Death, the first of twenty books she would write about him. Wexford has a developed personality and life of his own. His readers know he is married to Dora, with whom he has two daughters. In fact, the series has developed the whole family so well that the readers have become very familiar with all its members. In the novel Road Rage (1997), Dora is taken hostage by a group of radical environmentalists.

In addition to her Wexford novels, which are essentially police procedurals, Rendell writes dark psychological crime novels that deal with sexual obsession, misunderstandings, blind chance, and the mysteries of the criminal mind. For example, Judgment in Stone (1977) is about an illiterate woman who murders an entire family because she misinterprets their attempts to be kind. The novel examines social class issues in England and their role in fostering crime. In The Face of Trespass (1974), an impoverished would-be writer becomes a victim of his own obsessions. Live Flesh (1986) is about a released criminal who finds it easy to regress to his former life. Other titles in Rendell’s psychological novels include Talking to Strange Men (1987), The Killing Doll (1984), and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001).

Another immensely popular and prolific modern British crime writer credited with helping to raise the entire genre of criminal and detective fiction to the mainstream level is P. D. James, who in 2000 celebrated her eightieth birthday with the publication of her autobiography. James is the author of nineteen books, most of which have been filmed or adapted to television in Great Britain, the United States, and other countries. Unlike most crime writers, she has a long background of work in law and law enforcement. In 1962, she published her first novel, Cover Her Face, in which she introduced Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh is unusual in being a published poet known as much for his intellectual gifts and deep knowledge of human behavior as he is for solving crimes. James’s novels spend a great deal of time developing backgrounds to their stories, and readers learn a good deal about the situations long before the detective appears on the scene. The novels deal with Dalgliesh as a lonely and introspective man, not just a detective.

In 1972, James wrote a novel that particularly speaks to her experiences in police work: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman introduces Cordelia Gray, a female detective. Unlike other authors’ characters who want to be detectives, Gray has gotten into the profession because she inherited her agency. Part of the charm of the ironically titled An Unsuitable Job for a Woman lies in Gray’s doubts about her ability to succeed as a detective. In 1982, James published a second novel about Gray, The Skull Beneath the Skin.

Twenty-first-century British mystery authors abound. Mary Diana Norman (1933-2011) wrote historical fiction mystery novels under the name Ariana Franklin, such as Relics of the Dead (2009) and The Assassin's Prayer (2010). The well-known J. K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series, continually published mystery and murder mystery fiction novels in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elly Griffiths, who often publishes under the pen name of Domenica de Rosa, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2020 for The Stranger Diaries (2018).

Historical Mysteries

A striking trend in modern British crime fiction is the number of novelists who write about past eras. The earliest, and in many ways one of the best, of these writers is Ellis Peters, who introduced her twelfth-century Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael in A Morbid Taste for Bones: A Medieval Whodunit in 1977. In his monastery herbarium at Shrewsbury Abbey, Brother Cadfael solves crimes by understanding the mysteries of the human heart and soul.

Peters’s Brother Cadfael Chronicles are set between 1135 and 1145 when King Stephen and Empress Maud fought a civil War In England. The order in which Peters has published the books parallels the historical sequence of the stories themselves, and actual historical events are often figured into the stories. For example, the return of the bones of Saint Winefride to their proper place at Shrewsbury Abbey is the subject of A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977), and King Stephen’s siege of Shrewsbury in 1138 provides the setting for One Corpse Too Many (1979).

Another writer in this rapidly expanding subgenre is Peter Tremayne, who introduced Sister Fidelma, princess of Cashel, in Absolution by Murder: A Sister Fidelma Mystery in 1994. More than seventeen other books in the series have followed. Sister Fidelma solves crimes in seventh-century Ireland. Like Peters’s Brother Cadfael Chronicles, the Sister Fidelma mysteries have a religious community as their setting. As the daughter of a former king and the sister of the current king, Fidelma is a dálaigh and an advocate of the Irish law courts. Her position gives Tremayne scope to demonstrate the unique law system in seventh-century Ireland. Sister Fidelma is often called by local authorities to determine the guilt or innocence of someone accused of a crime. Acting as an official representative of her brother, the king, she uses her special position to investigate and solve crimes herself.

Another British writer who sets his books in medieval England is Michael Jecks, who focuses on fourteenth-century Devonshire. His hero is Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former Knight Templar who often helps his friend Simon Puttock, bailiff of Lydford, solve crimes committed in his jurisdiction. The many books in this series range from The Last Templar (1995) to The Malice of Unnatural Death (2007).

Anne Perry, who has written two dozen books featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, chose Victorian England as her setting, perhaps in tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle. Thomas Pitt is a police inspector of the Bow Street Station who his wife, Charlotte, frequently assists, as he tries to keep order in Victorian London.

Since 1945, British crime fiction has become increasingly intertwined with film. As the short-story magazines that had been so important to earlier eras lost readers and ceased publication, films, and later television programs, began to attract mystery and detective fiction devotees. The Public Broadcasting Service’s Masterpiece Theater, for example, opened a venue for writers of mysteries and scriptwriters to turn popular mystery and detective stories into equally popular television programs.

One such writer is Colin Dexter, the author of the famed Inspector Morse mysteries set in late twentieth-century Oxford. Morse is the complete police detective. Intelligent and introspective, he is a lifelong bachelor, a hard drinker, and an enthusiast for puzzles and classical music. Almost from the beginning of the series, which began with Last Bus to Woodstock in 1975, Morse became so popular on both sides of the Atlantic that his stories were dramatized for television. Between 1987 and 2000, thirty-three episodes of the Inspector Morse series were made. The program was immensely popular, and John Thaw, the actor playing Morse, became so closely identified with the character that Dexter began revising his descriptions of Morse to match the actor’s appearance and character. Dexter even changed his car to match that of the television series.

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