Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

2.2Golden-Age Detective Fiction

The main characteristics of the Golden-Age detective story are in contrast with the realism of the late nineteenth century detective fiction. While the nineteenth century detective story was set in cities such as London or Paris and the detective was mostly just a thinking machine, in the detective fiction in the Golden Age the setting is usually an isolated house (either by the surroundings or by weather conditions, such as in Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas) in the countryside, with an emphasis on well-developed characters and conversations between them. The number of characters was usually rather low, which was necessary for the reader to get to know all of them well. According to Alison Light, the absence of great violence was welcomed by the readers, who were hungry for light reading after the First World War (Light 66). The main goal of reading the story is solving the puzzle, who committed the crime and how.

Most of the authors who wrote in the Golden Age were British. In 1930 they formed the Detection Club, a club for mystery fiction writers, which still operates nowadays and which had its own set of rules and an oath to follow:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God? (qtd. in Goodman 193).

The set of rules the authors swore to follow was established by Father Ronald Knox, and it is known as the “Ten Commandments” of detective fiction (Smith). It includes rules such as “The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow” or “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.” The ninth rule, “The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader,” caused controversy in 1926, when Christie published her The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the sidekick (and also the narrator, therefore someone whose thoughts the readers are allowed to know, thus breaking the first rule), is in fact the murderer.

There were many authors writing detective stories in the Golden Age, however, probably the most famous (among female writers) are four authors who were dubbed the “Queens of Crime”: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie. Their works were, according to Anthea Trodd, more than just a masterly constructed mystery and they often broke the “rules”, as mentioned above. (Trodd 129-130).

With the outbreak of the Second World War the popularity of Golden-Age detective fiction started to decline. The readers wanted the stories to be more credible and authentic, which gave way to the American hard-boiled school, which, according to John Scaggs, had three characteristics: “Californian setting”, “American vernacular” and “the portrayal of crimes that were increasingly becoming part of the everyday world of early twentieth-century America” (Scaggs 57). Authors such as Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler created detective stories where the protagonists were tough, cynical detectives from the streets who were not afraid to confront the criminal themselves with their fists: a trend which was not seen in the Golden-Age detective fiction. Raymond Chandler was not a big fan of the Golden-Age style detective fiction, he even wrote a critical essay The Simple art of Murder where he said that murder should go back to the “alley” where it belongs.

[Detective stories] do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too

contrived and too little aware of what goes on in the world. […] But if

the writers of this fiction […] wrote about the kind of murders that happen,

they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.

(Chandler 4)

In spite of the view of Chandler and other hard-boiled detective fiction authors, the detective stories written in the 1920s, 1930s England remain among the most popular ones ever written and Agatha Christie is frequently considered the true queen of the genre.

2.3Agatha Christie

During the First World War, Agatha married Archibald Christie, who was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. However, the marriage did not last (following her husband’s infidelity, Christie even disappeared and was found eleven days later in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she was staying under a different name – she never explained her disappearance and there is no mention of it in her autobiography) and in 1930, she married Max Mallowan. Mallowan was an archaeologist and Christie often accompanied him on his expeditions, which provided her with inspiration for her later novels such as Murder in Mesopotamia or Death Comes in the End, which takes place in ancient Egypt.

In 1956 Christie was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1971 she was promoted Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was president of the Detection Club from 1957 until her death in 1976. Agatha Christie died of natural causes at the age of 85, leaving behind 66 novels and numerous short stories which have become classics of detective fiction.

As mentioned above, Christie’s first novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. She went on to have a very successful writing career lasting for fifty-six years (her novel Sleeping Murder was the last one to be published - posthumously, even though it was written thirty-five years earlier), some of her prominent works are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ten Little Niggers (which featured no detective and almost no detection at all) or Murder on the Orient Express (where the murderer is actually almost everyone on the train). Soon enough she found her own unique style of writing, but in the beginning of her career she “borrows freely from Conan Doyle” (Light 68), especially in the collection of short stories Poirot Investigates (1925), where Poirot runs around hunting criminals and has adventures very similar to the ones of Sherlock Holmes.

As of her detectives, Christie created many of what are now classic stereotypes of great detectives. Her most famous one is arguably Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian police officer, who is described as “an extraordinary-looking little man […] [whose] head [is] exactly the shape of an egg […] [and] his moustache [is] very stiff and military” (The Mysterious Affair at Styles 21) by his friend and sidekick Arthur Hastings. Poirot is also described as a very neat man, and Hasting says this of him: “The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.” (The Mysterious Affair at Styles 21). Poirot often speaks of the necessity of having “little grey cells” in order to solve crimes. He uses a lot of French words when he speaks – Christie was fluent in French because she spent her teenage years in Paris, being educated in three pensions.

Christie’s other famous detective was Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster who lived in the village of St. Mary Mead, and who had a unique talent for discovering and solving crimes. Miss Marple’s technique of solving crimes is based on her lifetime’s experience with human nature; she always seems to find similarities between the characters of the people involved in the crime in question and someone else from her past, for example in the short story Tape-Measure Murder the murderess and the victim remind her of two of her cousins, and this helps her solve the crime. In her autobiography, Christie describes Miss Marple as “[…] the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my step grandmother’s Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl.” (An Autobiography 449).