Playing at Murder: The Collaborative Works of the Detection Club

Abstract

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.