Golden Age of Mystery and Detective Fiction

Introduction

The so-called Golden Age of mystery novels is generally regarded as the period between World Wars I and II, which encompassed all of the 1920’s and 1930’s. During that period that the conventions of the mystery genre were established. At first, the Golden Age was dominated by British writers. Three British women and one New Zealander woman, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh—were so influential that they became known as the “Queens of Crime.” American writers of what are sometimes called “classical” mysteries, works that bowed to these conventions, emerged during the mid-1920’s. American writers, however, soon found themselves in competition with writers from the realistic, “hard-boiled” school of mystery writing. Although the hard-boiled mystery was popular in the United States, especially among male readers, works of that kind were not read in Great Britain in any significant numbers until the late 1930’s, and even then they did not capture the interest of the reading public as soon as they had in America.

It is often pointed out that the Golden Age of the mystery novel was preceded by a golden age of the mystery short story, which began with Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes in 1887. According to critic Julian Symons, the short-story genre continued to flourish during the 1920’s and the 1930’s, dying out only as magazines became less interested in publishing short stories, partly because the expansion of libraries gave readers easier access to books. Sherlock Holmes stories have retained a loyal reading public, but most authors of mystery short stories of the 1920’s and 1930’s are now forgotten. However, the four women who dominated the Golden Age continue to be well known, and their works can still be found on the shelves of bookstores and libraries.

It is sometimes argued that the Golden Age actually began before World War I, in 1913, the year in which British journalist E. C. Bentley published his only important mystery novel, Trent’s Last Case. Bentley said that he wrote the book to point out what he saw as objectionable qualities in Sherlock Holmes, notably his infallibility and his egotism. Bentley’s protagonist, Philip Trent is often called the first fallible detective. In fact, in Bentley’s novel, he falls in love with the prime suspect in the murder case and abandons his investigation. The novel has several qualities that would soon become standard. For example, it takes place in a closed setting, a country house, whose occupants represent a closed society. However, Dorothy L. Sayers called Trent’s Last Case a landmark work because it was the first story to depict a detective as a real human being. Nevertheless, other critics have pointed out that Philip Trent does not share all of his findings with his readers. Therefore Trent’s Last Case is not a clue-puzzle—a structure that is seen by many as the most important mystery format of the Golden Age.

The Clue-Puzzle

Clue-puzzles are mysteries in which both detectives and readers are provided with the same clues at the same time, enabling the readers to follow the sleuths’ investigations step by step, assessing clues and arriving at solutions to the crimes as quickly as the investigators do. That is the theory. However, in practice, readers are seldom so fully informed. Nevertheless, as with difficult Sunday crossword puzzles, the challenge of the clue-puzzle format brings readers back again and again.

The primary appeal of clue-puzzles is intellectual, not emotional. Therefore, when writers introduce romance into their novels, as Dorothy L. Sayers does in her series showing the developing relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, they minimize sentimental scenes and emphasize the progress of the plot. Well-written clue-puzzles may have clearly drawn settings, perhaps even atmosphere, and they should contain interesting, believable characters. However, what they must have is flawless plots. Blackmail and embezzlement may be discovered in clue-puzzles, but the central crimes should always be murder—sometimes one murder, sometimes more than one. Permissible clues include circumstantial evidence, such as the placement of a dead body; blood at the scene; weapons, present or absent; letters and papers; and statements by the characters. These statements may include information on where the informants were at a particular time, what they saw, what they heard, and what they know about the victim and other characters.

Other types of clues have to do with motives. By ascertaining who benefits from a murder, a detective can often narrow the list of suspects, as Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot does in The A.B.C. Murders (1935). At the end of that novel, as in many other Golden Age mysteries, the sleuth assembles all the suspects and, with a policeman friend in attendance, makes a speech retracing all the steps in his investigation. At the conclusion of the speech, the detective identifies the criminal, who is promptly carted off by the police. The novel does not include a description of the culprit’s time in prison or of the execution that, it is assumed, will follow. Once the puzzle is solved, the story is over. Because a clue-puzzle mystery ends with the identification of the murderer, it is often called a “whodunit.”

Clues and the Reader

Agatha Christie, who is credited with doing the most to invent the clue-puzzle, did not believe that writers should make the task of detection easy for readers. Most of the clues she supplies turn out to be irrelevant. Moreover, she often uses detectives’ sidekicks to mislead readers by having them misinterpret clues and jump to erroneous conclusions. When Hercule Poirot’s friend Captain Arthur Hastings picks up the wrong clues and reaches the wrong conclusions, Christie does not always have Poirot correct his friend immediately. Instead, she often has him say that they will discuss the matter later or has him simply remain silent, smiling secretively, leaving readers as much in the dark as Hastings.

Christie’s approach is somewhat different in books in which her sleuth is Miss Jane Marple. Marple does not take initiatives in interviewing suspects, even informally. She generally picks up clues by watching others and listening to them. As she tells the vicar in the first book in which she appears, Murder at the Vicarage (1930), she has a hobby, the study of human nature. In pursuit of that lofty goal, she feels it is her duty to know everything that is going on in her little village, St. Mary Mead. Moreover, Marple is not overly hampered by scruples. In St. Mary Mead, she uses binoculars to keep an eye on her neighbors. She also listens to gossip, which is the primary diversion in her village. Some verbal clues that aid her in her investigations come from friends at the tea table; others are the overheard gossip of servants. Marple is broad-minded where eavesdropping is concerned; in one of her last books, At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), she is delighted to discover a high-backed chair facing the fireplace in which one can sit unobserved while other people in the room carry on revealing conversations. Her skill in knitting clues into finished garments is illustrated in The Thirteen Problems (1932; also known as The Tuesday Club Murders). In that book, she explains how, simply by observing small details, she solved twelve criminal cases and also prevented a young girl from ruining her life.

Rules of the Game

Recognizing that the clue-puzzle had become the standard form for a mystery novel by the mid-1920’s, writers and critics began to analyze the new genre. In a 1924 essay titled “The Art of the Detective Story,” R. Austin Freeman stressed that the form appealed primarily to the readers’ intellects. In 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an introduction to an anthology in which she recognized the genre as a clue-puzzle, while suggesting that it move toward a broader definition, perhaps as a comedy of manners. Meanwhile, in 1926, E. M. Wrong had insisted on the need for “fair play” in authors’ treatment of their readers. In 1928, the American author Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote mysteries under the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine, included both the concept of the puzzle form and the idea of fair play in an essay entitled “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.”

Wrong and Wright were not the only critics who were concerned about fair play in clue-puzzles. Critics and writers agreed that detectives should not conceal clues from readers. There was a consensus that solutions to crimes should not come as the result of unexpected revelations of past histories, introduction of new characters, use of the supernatural, or reliance on coincidences. These strictures were included in ten rules, known as the “Detective Story Decalogue,” that Ronald A. Knox, a British detective writer himself and a Roman Catholic priest, listed in his preface to The Best Detective Stories of 1928-1929 (1929).

When the Detection Club was formed in 1929 by twenty-six mystery writers, including Knox, Sayers, and Christie, its members swore to an oath based on Knox’s rules. Undoubtedly, the Detection Club and the rules of fair play helped to discourage the writing of some novels that were labeled mysteries but in fact were not. Among these were the books the satirical poet Ogden Nash called “had-I-but-known” novels, in which romantic heroines straight out of gothic novels describe series of hairbreadth escapes. Since it is obvious that the heroines have survived to tell their stories, there are no mysteries to be solved.

Theory and Practice

Although everyone in the Detection Club recognized that though it was important to adhere to the clue-puzzle form as closely as possible, they recognized that creative imaginations could not and should not be stifled. Even before the club set down its rules, Agatha Christie broke the rule that the thoughts of the detective’s friend must not be concealed from the reader. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Dr. James Sheppard is called in to examine a widow who has been found dead, apparently a suicide. Roger Ackroyd, a friend of the doctor, guesses at her motive. Ackroyd tells Sheppard that he had been planning to marry the widow but that she had broken off her engagement because she was being blackmailed for a crime that she had committed, the murder of her abusive husband. Then Ackroyd is killed, and his niece Flora consults Hercule Poirot, who happens to be staying nearby. Dr. Sheppard becomes Poirot’s friend and confidant. Because the doctor is also the book’s narrator, it is only natural for readers to assume that he is dutifully reporting Poirot’s ideas, as well as his own thoughts. However, the doctor-narrator himself turns out to be the murderer. After the formation of the Detection Club, there were reportedly some heated discussions about Christie’s novel. Finally, however, it was agreed that her use of a ruse in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was justified. In his seminal work Bloody Murder (1972), Julian Symons uses this work as evidence of his belief that “Every successful detective story in this period involved a deceit practiced upon the reader.”

Among Knox’s other rules was his insistence that twins not be used as a plot device unless readers are properly prepared for them and his absolute prohibition of what he called “Chinamen.” This latter rule is assumed by some simply to be facetious, perhaps reflecting an inside joke among Detection Club members. However, others believe that the rule refers to a convention that was generally observed during the Golden Age, keeping all the suspects within the same social circle.

As some critics have pointed out, although one of the conventions of clue-puzzles is that the stories involve solving murders, one of Dorothy L. Sayers’s most popular books, Gaudy Night (1935), not only does not begin with a murder, but no murder occurs within its entire narrative. Sayers also broke another rule by introducing romance into her mysteries, a practice that Van Dine had specifically forbidden, as distracting readers from the main business of the books.

The Red Herring

“Red herring” is a term used in discussions of mystery fiction that originated in the blood sport of foxhunting, in which red herrings were sometimes dragged across trails to throw hounds off the track. In both logic and in politics, the term has long been used to describe attempts at diversion. In mystery fiction, a red herring is a clue or suspect that is introduced to divert the attention of readers. In a sense, a writer who introduces a red herring is like a magician performing a sleight-of-hand trick, but without admitting it to readers. Early twentieth century writers and critics agreed that using red herrings in stories was not a violation of the fair-play rule. Agatha Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), used several red herrings, intriguing clues that turned out to be irrelevant.

Dorothy L. Sayers recognized the plot device by titling one of her novels The Five Red Herrings (1931). That book is set among a community of artists in the Scottish Highlands. When a painter is found dead at the foot of a cliff, it is assumed that while stepping back to look at his work, he simply took one step too many and fell off the cliff. Because his general lack of consideration and deliberate rudeness antagonized all his fellow artists, his absence does not unduly distress them. In fact, the other artists simply breathe a collective sigh of relief and go back to their own work. However, Lord Peter Wimsey, who happens to be in the area, does not believe that the man’s death was an accident. He alerts the police to his suspicions and then begins his own investigation. He discovers that six people in the community had strong reasons to kill the dead man. Wimsey’s strategy is to eliminate five of these suspects, the “five red herrings” of the title. He then identifies the one remaining as the murderer.

Victims and Detectives

Theoretically, since clue-puzzles were essentially intellectual exercises, it was thought inappropriate for authors to encourage readers to indulge their emotions. Readers were thus not expected to empathize with any of the stories’ characters, not even the victims. One way to prevent developing sympathy for victim was to get the murders out of the way as soon as possible, thereby not giving readers time to become attached to the victims before they die.

It was also considered important that detectives have no emotional ties to the victims. Ngaio Marsh typically begins one of her books by setting the scene, briefly introducing a few characters, then proceeding to the discovery of a victim. At that point she switches to the office of her detective, Roderick Alleyn, at Scotland Yard. Since it is assumed that the murder case would tax the talents and the resources of the local police, Alleyn is given a cursory briefing and dispatched to the scene, often along with his subordinate, Inspector Edward Fox. Alleyn’s social standing makes it almost inevitable that some of the people involved in the case will know members of his family, but these tenuous connections do not prevent him from dealing with the case in a purely professional manner. Moreover, Alleyn can sometimes acquire useful information from his friends and relatives that would not be available to someone outside that social circle.

Christie’s amateur detectives are as dispassionate as Marsh’s professional. Hercule Poirot is a pleasant man, especially sympathetic when a pretty young woman is involved. However, once a murder takes place, it is Hastings, not Poirot, who allows his feelings to affect his mental processes. For example, in Death on the Nile (1937), Linnet Doyle tells Poirot that she feels threatened by her new husband’s previous fiancé, but when Linnet is killed, Poirot is not too emotionally involved to undertake a rational investigation. It takes more than a shipboard conversation for him to establish a friendship. In Peril at End House (1932), Poirot is present when an attempt is made on the life of another attractive young woman. Although he seems to take her statements at face value, his analytical mind is actually always at work, weighing her assertions and evaluating the evidence. At the end of the novel, when Poirot politely exposes her as a liar, it is evident that he has remained rational and dispassionate, while Hastings, and probably many readers, have been taken in by the woman’s charms.

When victims are close friends or relatives of detectives, the structure and the tone of the novels are very different. The first fifth of Marsh’s novel Death in a White Tie (1938) is devoted to establishing Lord Robert Gospell as a sympathetic character. When Roderick Alleyn calls upon Gospell for help in a blackmail case, it is obvious that the two men are close friends, that Alleyn trusts Gospell implicitly, and that they share the same code of ethics. Most of what follows in the initial chapters is seen through Gospell’s eyes; his function as the voice of the author ends only with his death. When Alleyn is called out to examine the body of his friend, he trembles, utters a violent oath, and then has to ask for a moment to collect himself. As he proceeds with the investigation, Alleyn manages to mask his emotions, but he admits to those close to him that he is not simply doing his duty but seeking justice for his dead friend. It is to his credit that Alleyn controls his emotions. Nevertheless, by permitting the victim to become a real person and a sympathetic character and by allowing her detective to be motivated as much by his feelings as by his professional duty, Marsh makes Death in a White Tie something other than a clue-puzzle that is supposed to be merely an intellectual exercise. It is significant that this is also the book in which Marsh shows Alleyn at his most desperate in his desire for Agatha Troy. Most readers find Troy’s capitulation to Alleyn at the end of the novel as satisfying as the detective’s success in tracking down his friend’s murderer.

Villains and Suspects

Members of the Detection Club also agreed on what kinds of murderers are acceptable in mystery novels. For example, they thought that master villains belong in thrillers, not in mysteries. Moreover, they wanted every murder to be committed by a single person; it was not appropriate to have a murder committed by a gang. Moreover, murderers should be seemingly respectable members of respectable social groups. Thus, there would be multiple suspects, each seemingly as unlikely as another. Sometimes the basic philosophy of Golden Age writers is stated in terms of a social equilibrium: If a society shares a moral code, the detective’s task is to discover which member of the group has violated that code so that the culprit can be exposed and expelled, thus restoring the moral order. Foolish, superficial, and arrogant characters may populate a Golden Age mystery, but the novel will not contain any blanket indictments of society.

The rules of Golden Age detection included warnings against probing too deeply into the psychology of murderers, as writers did not want their readers to feel some sympathy for the offenders and perhaps even hope that the offenders would escape punishment. However, as Ngaio Marsh pointed out, the ban on psychological analysis made it difficult for writers to create plausible characters. Some critics insist that clue-puzzle mysteries emphasized plot at the expense of characterization. This charge has some merit. Freeman Wills Crofts was considered the most meticulous plotter of his time, but he rarely managed to bring his characters to life. Perhaps for that reason, his books are no longer well known. In any case, after the 1950’s, writers of mysteries felt free to include psychological analysis in their novels and sometimes made character studies, rather than detection, the primary purpose of books that were still classified as mysteries.

One issue that the Detection Club did not address was how many suspects a mystery should have. The answer seems to have been determined in part by settings, in part by story lines. Sometimes a plot dictates the number of suspects. For example, in Marsh’s first mystery, A Man Lay Dead (1934), five guests at a country house party are playing a game of “Murder.” When one of them is killed, the other four all become suspects. In Margery Allingham’sPolice at the Funeral (1931), the setting is a manor house, but it is not quite so easy to determine the number of suspects. However, since all of the victims are members of the same family, the detective, Albert Campion, can at least limit his list of suspects to people who are still alive and who are connected in some way to that family.

When one of Christie’s novels featuring Miss Marple is set in St. Mary Mead, a village so tiny as to have only one main street, its suspect pool is almost as small as it would be in a country-house mystery. Murder at the Vicarage (1930) is a good example. By contrast, in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Christie offers Poirot a wide variety of suspects from a number of different countries. Most of the travelers at least profess to have no secret involvements with one another. After the murder occurs, Poirot is able to limit the suspects to those passengers on one specific coach that is traveling from Istanbul to Calais. Moreover, since the train got stuck in a snowbank a half hour before the murder, Poirot can be certain that the murderer is still aboard. However, that still leaves him with a dozen suspects in what is one of his most complicated cases.

Closed-World Settings and Closed Societies

A typical Golden Age mystery has a closed-world setting, that is, it takes place in a place where a small number of characters, all of whom know one another, are brought together in a limited area. After a murder occurs, everyone remains in place until the murderer is identified. This kind of setting has a number of advantages. Both the author and the detective can systematically map the characters’ activities and check their alibis. Sometimes a map is be included in the book, so readers can follow the characters’ movements. Closed-world settings make it possible to limit the numbers of suspects. For example, in a country-house murder, the only suspects are usually the people who live in the house and a relatively small number of guests who are present for a long weekend.

Because the conventions of the genre almost never allow servants to commit murders or even to be considered as suspects, suspect pools are limited socially as well as geographically. The cozy mysteries written by the four major women writers of the Golden Age—Allingham, Christie, Marsh, and Sayers—are all set in closed societies in which both servants and masters subscribe to the same codes of behavior, which they follow in the most minute details, at least publicly. Moreover, the primary detectives are always ladies or gentlemen, who have been reared to adhere to the same rules and to observe the same conventions. As H. R. F. Keating has pointed out, in a well-run country house no mere murder is allowed to interfere with the serving of breakfast, lunch, or tea, and no respectable sleuth, amateur or professional, would expect the hallowed routine to be altered. In these settings, standards must be upheld.

Writers sometimes found ways to make it impossible for the suspects to leave the closed-world setting until the murderers are identified and exposed. For example, in Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman (1941), set in an English country house, a snowstorm cuts off access to the outside world. Similarly, in Marsh’s Photo Finish (1980), which is set at a New Zealand retreat accessible only by boat, a violent storm prevents anyone from leaving until Alleyn finds out who has killed their mercurial hostess. Less dramatically, writers may have police officers called in to make sure that no one leaves the places where crimes occur. Ships, planes, and trains can also function as closed-world settings when their passengers cannot disembark.

John Dickson Carr and Locked-Room Mysteries

Although the four “Queens of Crime” are regarded as having ruled unchallenged during the Golden Age, a number of British and American men also wrote excellent mysteries during that period. One was John Dickson Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. A Pennsylvanian by birth, Carr moved to England in 1930, when he was twenty-four. Under his own name, he wrote twenty-three novels about the hugely overweight, eccentric Dr. Gideon Fell, a lexicographer and the consultant to whom Scotland Yard turns in seemingly hopeless cases. In both his appearance and the high quality of his intellect, Fell was said to resemble the writer G. K. Chesterton. As Carter Dickson, Carr published an additional twenty-two full-length mysteries and a novelette that featured Sir Henry Merrivale, another imposing figure, who was said to be a composite of the British statesman Winston S. Churchill and the author himself.

Carr is best known for his “locked room mysteries,” so named because they present seemingly impossible situations. This form dates back to 1841, when Edgar Allan Poe published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The victim in that tale is found dead inside a locked room with the key on the inside. In the decades that followed, other authors wrote stories in which murderers manage to penetrate rooms that are sealed in some way. Among these authors were Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes faced such a situation in “The Adventures of the Speckled Band” (1892), and G. K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown encounters his first locked-room problem in “The Wrong Shape” (1911).

However, Carr himself was the acknowledged master of the form. Among the many locked-room mysteries he wrote, The Three Coffins (1935) is probably his most famous, in part because it contains Dr. Fell’s famous lecture on the locked-room mystery. Fell points out to his assembled friends the various tricks and devices that can be used to commit such a murder. In this novel, the murderer enters the study of Professor Grimaud, shoots him, and then vanishes, leaving the only door to the room locked from the inside. There is no indication as to how the killer left, no footprints in the snow on the ground outside the window or on the roof above it. Another of Carr’s sleuths, Sir Henry Merrivale, confronts locked-room puzzles in The Peacock Feather Murders (1937), and The Judas Window (1938), and many other stories.

Like his fellow members of the Detection Club, John Dickson Carr believed that mysteries should be constructed as clue-puzzles and that writers should always practice fair play. As the acknowledged master of the locked-room form, Carr stood for the intellectual challenge that defined the Golden Age mystery. However, in his admitted liking for gruesome details and in his habit of having his murderers motivated by mental instability, rather than more rational desires for social or financial benefits, Carr resembles the mystery writers who emerged later in the century.

The American Golden Age

Carr was not the only American to write mysteries that followed, at least to some degree, the conventions established in the British Golden Age. Ironically, one of the earliest of these other American writers, Earl Derr Biggers defied one of Knox’s rules by making his detective-hero Chinese. Biggers’s Sergeant Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police first appeared in The House Without a Key in 1925 and immediately attained great popularity. Although Biggers’s mysteries differed in setting and ambiance from those being produced in Great Britain, Biggers did attempt to utilize the clue-puzzle format, and to some extent he succeeded.

S. S. Van Dine was an American writer who helped formulate the rules by which mystery writers should be governed. Nevertheless, he unashamedly bent and even broke many of those rules. Van Dine’s primary interest was in character, not plot, as he demonstrated by focusing on Philo Vance, his erudite, well-to-do amateur detective and a darling of New York society. Vance first appeared in The Benson Murder Case (1926) and by the sheer force of his personality dominated the nine mysteries that followed. Critics have been puzzled about Van Dine’s attitude toward his hero, whom he modeled, in part, on Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. Some critics believe that Van Dine was as charmed by Vance as were his readers; others, that he was simply satirizing a character whom he viewed as overly verbose and pretentious. However, it is generally agreed that the series’ loss of popularity during the 1930’s should be ascribed not to any loss of interest in Vance but instead to the new enthusiasm for hard-boiled fiction.

The writing team known as Ellery Queen was more successful in adapting to changes in taste. Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (both pseudonyms) were cousins living in Brooklyn, New York, who decided to write mysteries under the pseudonym of Ellery Queen, which they also made the name of their fictional sleuth. They were highly successful. During the 1930’s and the early 1940’s, Ellery Queen may have been the most famous American detective.

Queen first appeared in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) as a handsome, brilliant young dilettante who is often called in as a consultant by his father, an inspector with the New York Police Department. In The French Powder Mystery (1930), for example, Queen is asked to help find out why and how a corpse turned up in the window of a New York department store. In The Devil to Pay (1938), after moving to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, Queen finds himself investigating crimes instead of pursuing his new vocation. In Calamity Town (1942), Queen is in Wrightsville, a fictional town in either New England or upstate New York, where again he finds his attempts to write interrupted by calls on his sleuthing talents. However, Queen develops a lasting affection for Wrightsville. Even after his return to New York City, he goes back to Wrightsville from time to time to solve particularly baffling crimes. Meanwhile, during the late 1940’s, his creators show him taking an interest in urban social problems such as juvenile delinquency and class hostility. By remaining flexible as to setting and situation, the creators of Ellery Queen were able to adapt to social change and to changing tastes without having to discard their popular hero or abandon their adherence to the clue-puzzle format and the fair-play principle.

The Classical Tradition

During the 1930’s, a number of other American authors wrote mysteries in what is now often called the classical tradition. However, although they flourished during that decade, almost all of them are now forgotten. The most successful new writers to appear during the decade combined the older clue-puzzle techniques with some of the elements of the new hard-boiled detective story. One of the best known of these writers was Erle Stanley Gardner, who introduced the lawyer Perry Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933). In what became an extremely popular series, Mason, his secretary Della Street, and Paul Drake, a private detective, eventually appeared in eighty-six novels. The courtroom scenes, in which Mason identified and confronted criminals in the latter parts of each mystery, made Gardner’s stories ideal for film and television, and they were still being shown on television in the twenty-first century.

Another important series began with the publication of Rex Stout’s novel Fer-de-Lance (1934). Even though Nero Wolfe is a professional private investigator, he almost never surveys actual crime scenes. Instead, he remains in his New York City brownstone, reading, cultivating his orchids, and indulging his immense appetite, while his employee Archie Goodwin, who narrates the series, does the legwork for him. Goodwin eventually assembles suspects in Wolfe’s office, where the great man recapitulates his investigations and turns the murderer over to the police. Like Mason, Wolfe was adapted to television and thus lived on into the next century.

Although for a time the hard-boiled style of mystery writing prevailed, especially in America, and as the century progressed, thrillers, fantasies, science fiction novels, and horror stories gained worldwide popularity, the writing conventions of the Golden Age were never totally ignored. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, readers who had tired of gritty realism sought mysteries that recaptured the restrained tone and the intellectual emphasis of the British Golden Age and the American classical tradition. Although their detectives might not be aristocrats, writers of the “cozy domestic” subgenre avoided gratuitous gore and explicit sex, choosing instead to present readers with seemingly insoluble puzzles, then to challenge them to proceed, clue by clue, to their solutions and identification of the murderers.

Bibliography

Delamater, Jerome H., and Ruth Prigozy, eds. Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Contains essays titled “Theoretical Approaches to the Genre” and “Agatha Christie and British Detective Fiction.” Index.

Dubose, Martha Hailey. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists, with Additional Essays by Margaret Caldwell Thomas. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. A section on the Golden Age subtitled “the Genteel Puzzlers,” includes studies of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Josephine Tey. Bibliography and index.

Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Comprehensive reference work that includes separate entries on “The Golden Age Short Story,” “The Golden Age Novel,” “The British Golden Age Tradition,” and “The American Golden Age Tradition.” Also contains entries on character types, plot patterns, and settings, along with biographies of writers and descriptions of major characters in their works. Includes some bibliographies, a glossary, and an index.

Keating, H. R. F. The Bedside Companion to Crime. New York: Mysterious Press, 1989. Collection of witty observations by an acclaimed famous British critic and author, including many references to the Golden Age writers and their society.

Knight, Stephen Thomas. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Knight argues that early crime fiction, such as that of the Golden Age, was primarily analytical, while later works were first preoccupied with death and then focused on diversity. Chronology and extensive bibliography.

Knight, Stephen Thomas. “The Golden Age.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Demonstrates how one plot pattern, the “clue-puzzle,” dominated the mysteries of the period.

Mills, Maldwyn. “Home Is Where the Hearth Is: The Englishness of Agatha Christie’s Marple Novels.” In Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction, edited by Ian A. Bell and Graham Daldry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. The Marple novels are shown as typical of the English Golden Age mysteries, reflecting Christie’s society in the most minute particulars.

Murphy, Bruce. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 1999. Contains an excellent summary of the Golden Age. The writer also provides a wealth of biographical information, summarizes works and identifies major characters, defines terms, explains plot patterns, and lists film adaptations. Bibliographical information and extensive cross-references.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. 3d ed. New York: Mysterious Press, 1992. Final revision of a work first published in 1972 that was primarily responsible for the admission of crime novels to the literary canon. The author devotes four chapters to the Golden Age.