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

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.