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

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.