British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Elizabeth Prevost

   Abstract

   Detective fiction has become a rich arena of inquiry for literary critics, but it has not received the same level of attention from historians. The introductory chapter to this volume poses the question animating its production: What do the methods of the historian add to analyses of detective fiction? Specifically, the chapter conceptualizes the book’s approach to detective fiction as an archive, that is, a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation; frames the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices that served different purposes in particular times, places, and contexts; and historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, sexuality, nation, and empire that have commonly been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Highlighting the volume’s organizing themes—fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity—in this manner demonstrates the need to think both with and beyond the “golden age” paradigm of British murder mysteries.

3. Fictive Facticity

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 2. Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes: Myths, Monsters, and the Declining Reputation of the Late-Victorian Detective

      Amy Milne-Smith

      Abstract

      This chapter traces how the real Victorian police tried to solve crimes and defend their reputations in the face of sensational real-life crimes and increasing expectations fueled by fictional detectives. It follows the initial depictions of the Ripper crimes, the rise of detective fiction, and how real-life detectives and officials crafted their own memoirs and accounts, both to defend against charges of incompetence and to compare their own skills and experiences against the fictional detective. Opinions on the efficacy of Scotland Yard in the moment were shaped as much by politics and prejudices as by the particularities of the unsolved Ripper murders or the rise of Sherlock Holmes. The rise of detective fiction enhanced public appetites for crime stories and provided models for how to solve them, and this had direct consequences for the real police service over time. Foregrounding the historical context of the rise of detective fiction highlights a deep instability in the lines between fact and fiction in its very origins. This was established by the 1890s and continued to evolve through the “golden age” of detective fiction.

   3. Chapter 3. Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Fictions of Politics

      Kali Israel

      Abstract

      Mary Agnes Hamilton’s 1931 novel, Murder in the House of Commons, may invite readings as a political roman-a-clef. However, its politics are less about the details of party politics than about the ways in which class, race, ethnicity, and nationality undermine and complicate Hamilton's overt commitment to democratic socialism and to feminism. The murder plot of the novel is incoherent in its own terms, but the book provides material for seeing some middle-class intellectuals’ deep attachment to assumptions about their own superiority and the naturalness of social and political hierarchies.

   4. Chapter 4. Domesticating the Horrors of Modern War: Civil Defense and the Wartime British Murder Mystery

      Susan R. Grayzel

      Abstract

      This chapter explores how popular fiction represented civil defense and related preparations for modern war. By examining the appearance of the artifacts and rituals of civil defense in genre fiction, starting with science fiction novels of the mid-1930s and culminating in a study of detective fiction from 1939 and 1940, the chapter focuses on how key elements of civil defense like blackout drills and gas masks, designed to protect populations against the weapons of modern war, could provide new venues for the more everyday violence of crime. What becomes horrifying in such detective fiction where the crime takes place during a civil defense gas drill is not the gas mask, but the vile actions of the murderer. In these detective novels, the gas mask exists as the lurking symbolic reminder of mass death, but killing in these mysteries remains local, domestic, deeply personal, and above all, able to be rationalized. The mass deaths anticipated in the war offer no mystery to solve and no one individual to punish, so that the containment of murder in detective fiction offers a way to incorporate militarized objects and rituals into everyday life and, thus, to manage the anxiety circulating about modern war.

4. Genre Fluidity

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 5. Semicolonial Horsewifery as Detective Fiction: “Trinket’s Colt” and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M.

      Antoinette Burton

      Abstract

      Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (a.k.a. Violet Martin) were Irish cousins who co-wrote short stories and novels in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Their most popular and lucrative series, about an Irish Resident Magistrate (R.M.), is a comical account of Major Sinclair Yeates’s attempt to master the challenges of his Irish county seat. Yeates is routinely bested by a cast of local characters who show him up to be the naïf he is—and who demonstrate, in the process, the limits to British imperial hegemony in fin-de-siècle Ireland. Though scholars have recently taken up Somerville and Ross’s work, they have not understood the Irish R.M. stories as detective fiction: a recurrent and formulaic structure in which a “crime” is committed, the detective is charged with solving the mystery, and the precarity of the social order is revealed as a result. This chapter examines this pattern in one of the R.M. stories, “Trinket’s Colt,” and compares it with a contemporary Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” My readings emphasize the role of the horse in queering the project of colonial settlement and the power of “detection” as a lens for troubling empire history.

   3. Chapter 6. “Magic is My Business”: Raymond Chandler and Detective Fiction as Modern Fairy Tale

      Michael Saler

      Abstract

      Golden age detective fiction of the interwar period, from the “cozy” mystery tradition in Great Britain to the “hard boiled” private eye genre in the United States, is usually understood as focusing on rational puzzles that readers are encouraged to solve alongside the detective. In this regard, interwar detective fiction seemed to exemplify the “disenchantment of the world” that sociologists like Max Weber attributed to Western modernity. Yet contemporary mystery writers, critics, and readers also defined detective fiction as a form of fairy tale, folklore, or archetypal myth. Using the life and works of the American-born, English-educated writer Raymond Chandler as a case study, this essay argues that golden age detective fiction critiqued the modern ideals of science and reason as often as it extolled them. Interwar crime novels should be seen as an important expression of the re-enchantment of the world, based on the longer tradition within this genre—notably in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle—of combining the Enlightenment's stress on reason with Romanticism’s valorization of the imagination.

   4. Chapter 7. “Indecently Preposterous”: The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction

      Laura E. Nym Mayhall

      Abstract

      This chapter contributes to the project of rethinking golden age detective fiction by examining its overlap and intersection with another genre of interwar crime writing, that of newspaper crime reporting. It begins by examining the ways in which press coverage of crime and detective fiction coexisted within the interwar cultural field, and it concludes with an exploration of the 1926 novel Clouds of Witness, in which Dorothy L. Sayers borrows techniques from journalism to tell a story of murder, suicide, and adultery. It argues that as the interwar press borrowed narrative forms from fiction to make news more entertaining, detective writers adopted techniques from journalism to add verisimilitude to their stories, both media seeking to provide morally satisfying narratives at a time of great uncertainty. And most significantly, rather than seeing newspaper crime reporting and detective fiction as separate genres in the interwar years, it argues that we should see them as conjoined – and part of a larger cultural field in which fact and fiction intertwined. Dependent on “facts,” detective fiction and crime reporting alike provided entertaining and cohesive narratives that both supported the rule of law and challenged the state to uphold it.

5. Conservative Modernity

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 8. Agatha Christie in Southern Africa

      Elizabeth Prevost

      Abstract

      In 1922, Agatha Christie accompanied her first husband on a year-long commercial tour of the Dominions, to promote the upcoming British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The first port of call was South Africa, where the Christies’ stay unexpectedly coincided with a labor crisis that threatened to unhinge the Union government and the imperial mining industry, and that later formed the backdrop for Agatha’s fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit. The only one of Christie’s books to be set in sub-Saharan Africa, it introduced various imperial themes that Christie would later utilize in her better-known mysteries set in the Middle East, and narrative devices that she would perfect in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But though the book was a product of a very particular context, it was the masking of that context that would resonate most for Christie and her readers—specifically, by creating new imperial outlets to offset domestic anxieties, and employing racialized tropes to stabilize gender uncertainty. This chapter examines the relationship between Christie’s imperial imaginary and lived experience, situated against the post-World War I backdrop of an expanding market in detective fiction and a contracting demand for female professionalism.

   3. Chapter 9. Death Haunts the Hotel

      Eloise Moss

      Abstract

      Death of his Uncle, by barrister-turned-novelist C.H.B. Kitchen, chronicles the adventures of amateur detective Malcolm Warren around the “seedy” seaside hotels of Cornwall on the hunt for a murderer. Leading Warren to interrogate an endless round of hotel porters, managers, maids, and guests, the novel skillfully portrays the static nature of social relations and notions of “service” within the hotel system. This essay explores the motifs of conservatism and nostalgia in hotel mysteries, an understudied subgenre of the detective novel. During the interwar and postwar decades, hotel mysteries satirized the efforts of guests to disguise their class roots and showcased hotels’ commodification of romanticized, “bygone” versions of British national identity within their architecture, infrastructure, and marketing—demonstrating the enduring salience of these ideas in British popular culture. Situating the hotel mystery alongside archival research into the 1929 Margate hotel murder, the essay interrogates how these cases exposed the tension between guests’ anonymity and the legibility of their socioeconomic status to hotel staff.

6. Backmatter