Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-131
Author(s):  
Alex Davis
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

Playing at Murder: The Collaborative Works of the Detection Club

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Andrew Green ◽  
Roger Dalrymple
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age

This paper explores the inter-war collaborative works of the Detection Club as a source of commentary and insight on the ludic and dialogic nature of Golden Age detective fiction. Less well known than the single-authored works of Detection Club members, the multi-authored Behind the Screen, The Scoop, The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman and Six Against the Yard capitalise upon the genre's capacity for intertextual play and self-conscious engagements with literary formula and convention. By adopting a range of collaborative approaches and working in different combinations, the joint authors (including Berkeley, Christie, Crofts, and Sayers) construct playful textual ‘spaces’ that foreground gameplay and dialogism as key dynamics in the writing and reception of detection fiction. The discussion deals with the texts and their games in two groupings, showing the appositeness of Barthes' notion of the ‘writerly text’ and Bruner's concept of subjunctivity to the first grouping, and of Bakhtinian dialogism and ‘carnival’ to the second. Attention is thus drawn to the richness of these texts as a source of commentary and illustration of the signature playful dynamic of Golden Age detective fiction.

scholarly journals ‘Tale Engineering’: Agatha Christie and the Aftermath of the Second World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Gill Plain
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Second World

The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing world and evolving fashions in genre fiction. Engaging with grief, demobilisation, gender, citizenship and the new fears of the atomic age, Christie proves unexpectedly attentive to the anxieties of a new modernity.

Detective Fiction, Nostalgia and Rian Johnson's Knives Out: Making the Golden Age Great Again

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
Eric Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Agatha Christie

The Golden Age is back with a vengeance: reprints, re-boots, and adaptations of interwar detective fiction and its off-shoots have proliferated in the twenty-first century, as have works more loosely, but nonetheless substantially, inspired by the clue-puzzle format developed and perfected by authors like Agatha Christie. This resurgence of the ‘whodunnit’ mystery is something of mystery itself, as the centre of gravity of crime writing has long shifted away from this ostensibly dated and aesthetically limited form. This paper explores this unexpected development, looking in particular at the role of nostalgia in relation to new Golden Age mysteries. While nostalgia is frequently, and quite justly, viewed in negative terms as a personally and politically regressive phenomenon, in some cases, as in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), examined here, it can be used not simply as a dubious marketing or aesthetic strategy, but as part of a broader social critique in which one form of nostalgia is used to critique another.

The Collins Crime Club

LOGOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
Sophie Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Card Games ◽  
Marketing Methods

Abstract The interwar years in Britain are regularly referred to by historians and literary commentators as the Golden Age of detective fiction (c. 1920–1940). This article focuses on the Collins imprint the Crime Club, established in 1930. It assesses the significance of this imprint in the context of the Golden Age, with a focus on its commercial animus, drawing on theories about class-based markets and the commercialization of print culture. The article examines the marketing methods used by the Crime Club to promote its titles, such as newsletters and card games, and takes into consideration the arguments of 1930s literary critics. It aims to show that detective fiction had a significant role in the commercialization of print culture during the 1930s and that its success heavily relied upon the support of a middle-class readership.

scholarly journals Discipline and Murder: Panoptic Pedagogy and the Aesthetics of Detection in J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-90
Author(s):  
Cornelia Macsiniuc
Keyword(s):  
Parental Care ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
The Real ◽  
Detection Process ◽  
Paradoxical Effects ◽  
Mediated Presence ◽  
The Way

Abstract My essay proposes a reading of J.G. Ballard’s 1988 novella Running Wild as a cautionary crime story, a parable about the self-fulfilling prophecies of contemporary urban fears and about the “prisons” they create in a consumerist, technology- and media-dominated civilization. Interpreted in the light of Foucault’s concept of panopticism, Ballard’s gated community as a crime setting reveals how a disciplinary pedagogy meant to obtain “docile bodies,” masked under the socially elitist comfort of affluence and parental care, “brands” the inmate-children as potential delinquents and ultimately drives them to an act of “mass tyrannicide.” Ballard uses the murder story as a vehicle for the exploration of the paradoxical effects of a regime of total surveillance and of mediated presence, which, while expected to make “murder mystery” impossible, allows for the precession of the representation to the real (crime). The essay also highlights the way in which Ballard both cites and subverts some of the conventions of the Golden Age detective fiction, mainly by his rejection of the latter’s escapist ethos and by the liminal character of his investigator, at once part of a normalizing panoptic apparatus and eccentric to it, a “poetic figure” (Chesterton) relying on imagination and “aestheticizing” the routines of the detection process.

‘All the Laws in the Book’: The Transgressive Impulse of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-112
Author(s):  
Matthew Paul Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Detective Stories

Scholars of detective fiction have long acknowledged Dashiell Hammett's crucial role in the formation of the American hard-boiled style. However, a closer look at his third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), reveals the extent to which Hammett self-consciously engaged with the generic conventions of the Golden Age mysteries that had dominated the previous decade. By partially following the rules, Hammett continually toys with the reader's expectations, charting a new course for detective fiction while simultaneously offering a self-reflexive commentary on the genre's history. In addition to providing a fresh reading of The Maltese Falcon, this essay contextualises Hammett's efforts by showing how he responds to contemporary crime novelists, especially the American Willard Huntington Wright (better known by his pseudonym S. S. Van Dine). In 1928, Wright published his famous ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ in an attempt to define the genre's specific appeal, creating a pact between author and audience. The Maltese Falcon explores the nature of that pact and ultimately violates it through a series of reversed expectations. By showing just how deeply embedded this transgressive impulse is in The Maltese Falcon, this essay sheds new light on a pivotal moment in both Hammett's career and in the evolution of detective fiction.

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