Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of detective fiction in the 1920s and 30s (also see Golden Age). Most of its authors were British: Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Josephine Tey (1896 - 1952), Anthony Berkeley (aka Francis Iles) (1893 - 1971), R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943), Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957) Philip MacDonald (1900–1980), Michael Innes (1906–1993), and many more; some of them, such as John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, were American but had a British touch. Certain conventions and clichés were established that limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the twists and turns within the plot and, primarily, to the identity of the murderer. The majority of novels of that era were whodunnits, and several authors excelled, after successfully leading their readers on the wrong track, in convincingly revealing the least likely suspect as the villain. There was also a predilection for certain casts of characters and certain settings, with the secluded English country house and its upper-class inhabitants at the top of the list.

A typical plot of the Golden Age mystery followed these lines:

• A body, preferably that of a stranger, is found in the library by a maid who has just come in to dust the furniture.
• As it happens, a few guests have just arrived for a weekend in the country – people who may or may not know each other. They typically include such stock characters as a handsome young gentleman and his beautiful and rich fiancée, an actress with past glory and an alcoholic husband, a clumsy aspiring young author, a retired colonel, a quiet middle-aged man no one knows anything about who is supposedly the host's old friend, but behaves suspiciously, and a famous detective.
• The police are either unavailable or incompetent to lead the investigation for the time being.

The thickening often followed these lines:

• As the detective soon finds out, the household staff consists of an old and faithful butler, known to the employer from childhood; a well-nourished female cook who, for some reason or other, knows all about poisons and food poisoning in general; a not-so-bright gardener who stumbles upon some mischief done to his plants and equipment; an ex-convict chauffeur, and one or two maids secretly in love with someone and possibly pregnant.
• Finally, there is the host, who has been busy welcoming his guests and tending to his young wife. The detective may also find that nobody has yet seen his wife.
• While the detective is pondering the facts, wild things happen. One of the maids almost faints when she sees the young author for the first time, but she quickly regains her composure.
• The Colonel complains that several pages have been torn from his diary while he was having a bath or dressing for dinner.
• The aging actress is seen near the garden shed, gesticulating in an exaggerated manner while arguing with the seemingly imbecile gardener, and a slip of paper with some cryptic message is found.
• Some time later, just as the guests are having supper, the lights go out. There is commotion in the darkened room. When the blown fuse has been mended and the lights come up again, it is only to find the beautiful young heiress stabbed in the back with a pair of pruning shears, her face in the bowl of soup in front of her, her eyes wide open.
• Now it suddenly occurs to all the people present, that the murderer is still in the house: he (or she) is one of them. People now start talking behind each other's backs, suspecting, fearing and denouncing each other.
• As the noose around the murderer's neck tightens, he (or she) is prepared to bump off anyone who has found out his (or her) guilty secret. A third and fourth murder may be committed anytime.

The denouement may be directed as follows:

• Just before the worst comes to the worst, the detective, having made use of his "little grey cells" (as Poirot calls it), assembles the whole party in the library and minutely reconstructs the real chain of events from beginning to end.
• At first, what he says sounds absolutely incredible. Of course everyone accused vehemently objects to all the allegations. At the end of his closing statement, the detective zooms in on the only person – very often the least likely suspect – whose actions cannot be accounted for.
• Often the detective admits having no evidence of any kind to prove his theory; sometimes he bluffs the murderer by pretending he does. Eventually, the murderer is trapped, and has just three options left: be arrested without further resistance, try to escape, or commit suicide on the spot.

The rules of the game – and Golden Age mysteries were considered games – were codified in 1929 by Ronald Knox. According to Knox, a detective story

"must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."

His "Ten Commandments" (or "Decalogue") are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

The outbreak of the Second World War certainly was some kind of caesura as far as the light-hearted, straightforward whodunnit of the Golden Age was concerned. As Ian Ousby writes (The Crime and Mystery Book, 1997), the Golden Age

"was a long time a-dying. Indeed, one could argue that it still is not dead, since its mannerisms have proved stubbornly persistent in writers one might have expected to abandon them altogether as dated, or worse. Yet the Second World War marked a significant close, just as the First World War had marked a significant beginning. Only during the inter-war years, and particularly in the 1920s, did Golden Age fiction have the happy innocence, the purity and confidence of purpose, which was its true hallmark.

Even by the 1930s its assumptions were being challenged. [...] Where it had once been commonplace to view the Golden Age as a high watermark of achievement, it became equally the fashion to denounce it. It had, so the indictment ran, followed rules which trivialized its subject. It had preferred settings which expressed a narrow, if not deliberately elitist, vision of society. And for heroes it had created detectives at best two-dimensional, at worst tiresome."

Gilbert Adair's 2006 whodunit The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is an evocation of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The board game Cluedo relies on the structure of the country-house murder.