Look to the Ladies

Abstract

22 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 crime & mystery WORLDLIT.ORG 23 T his summer the British Library held another of its highly successful Bodies from the Library days celebrating the Golden Age of crime fiction. We had papers on Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and Georgette Heyer (her crime, not her Regency, novels), all favorite writers of mine, plus papers on male detective novelists. The only one I’d heard of was G. K. Chesterton with his Father Brown stories. The following week in Waterstones, I saw a new set of Josephine Tey’s crime novels. I started thinking about the longevity of the female Golden Age crime novelists. Over the last twelve years, Vintage has republished most of Margery Allingham. Agatha Christie has never been out of print, nor has Dorothy L. Sayers. Why have the Golden Age female crime novelists survived to enjoy a renaissance , where the males have not? I was nudged toward an answer by Martin Edwards’s excellent book, The Golden Age of Murder, a study of the founding of the Detection Club in 1930 and its members during the period up to 1949. Created by Anthony Berkeley Cox, one of the leading detective novelists of the period, it provided a social network and support for crime writers he admired. Of the forty-one members elected between 1930 and 1949, there were twenty-nine men and twelve women. Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founding members; so was Agatha Christie. Margery Allingham was elected in 1934. The detective novel rose to popularity in the 1920s, in a society with a passion for games and game playing, and detective novels of the period provided “puzzles.” Authors presented situations that seemed impossible , “locked-room mysteries” abounded, and readers pitted their wits against the author. One of the foremost proponents was John Dickson Carr, whose The Hollow Man (1935; US title: The Three Coffins) presents three puzzles in one story, all seemingly impossible, until Dr. Fell sweeps aside the illusions and trickery and presents the solution . It is perhaps the acme of the “puzzle” detective novel. American crime writer S. S. Van Dine wrote, “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event.” In 1928 he drew up a list of “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories .” In 1929 Ronald Knox, a founding member of the Detection Club, produced a somewhat shorter list. The rules were mainly founded on the “fair play” principle , such as insisting that the detective shared clues with the reader­ —and that the detective was not to have committed the murder. It was said to be an attempt to legitimize detective fiction as a respectable literary genre. Detective novelists played lip service to the “rules” and almost immediately proceeded to break them (see WLT, Nov. 2015, 16­ –18). Detective novels of the 1920s concentrated on the investigator assessing details of the crime and the “unbreakable” alibi of the prime suspect. Floor plans, clocks that were fast or slow, hidden passages, and secret rooms often featured. “How” the murder was committed was often more important than why or by whom. I began reading crime fiction at an early age. My mother would ask me to choose her reading matter from the local library. She liked detective novels, and eventually I started to read them myself. Mother liked Agatha Christie, but I am sorry to say that I found her stories simplistic. I returned to her after I started writing crime novels myself and was taken aback by the fluidity of her writing, her ability to set out story and characters in a way that seemed simple and entertaining but in fact concealed a fiendishly clever plot. The book that grabbed me was Gaudy Night (1935), by Dorothy L. Sayers. It’s the tale of a campaign of poison-pen letters and other disturbing events in an Oxford college. Unusually for a crime novel, murder is narrowly avoided. I was captivated by the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane and the tensions in the college atmosphere. I began to read Sayers’s other books. Then I lit on Margery Allingham. I first read Look to the Lady...