A Very British Crime Wave: Detective Stories Captured the Imaginations of the British Middle Classes in the 20th Century. William D. Rubinstein Looks at the Rise of Home-Grown Writers Such as Agatha Christie, How They Mirrored Society and Why Changes in Social Mores Eventually Murdered Their Sales

Rubinstein, William D., History Today

Between around 1910 and 1950 England was in the grip of a genteel crime wave; a seemingly endless output of murder mysteries, generally set among the upper and upper middle classes and usually solved by a brilliant amateur detective rather than by the police. They were read enthusiastically and with an insatiable appetite by British middle-class readers. The 'golden age' of the English detective story during this span of 40 years or so is an important and often overlooked feature of English popular culture, as significant in its way as the dance bands and the early BBC.

The detective story long predates this apogee, however, and is normally said to have begun in the fertile brain of the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), especially in the three stories of his Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841); The Mystery of Marie Roger (1842); and The Purloined Letter (1845). From 1859 Dupin had a French counterpart in Moniseur Lecoq, created by Emile Gaborian (1832-73). Despite these American and French origins, it was to England that detective fiction migrated, took root and flourished, becoming a characteristically British genre.

This transition occurred because of one author and his great detective. The most famous of all fictional detectives is, of course, Sherlock Holmes, introduced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) in 'A Study in Scarlet' in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 and the subject of four novels and 56 short stories. Sherlock Holmes has been called one of the three most famous characters in fiction (Hamlet and Don Quixote were noted as the others). Few writers in history have had such an impact as Conan Doyle. For millions around the world, late Victorian England is the world of hansom cabs, gaslight and fog described in his books, a world where, as Vincent Sterrett, author of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933), wrote, 'it is always 1895'.

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As a seminal landmark in detective fiction the Sherlock Holmes stories have many distinctions that influenced scores of other writers. Holmes is a brilliant private detective, categorically better than the plodders and mediocrities of Scotland Yard, who constantly turn to him when they are baffled, their normal state. This in itself is pure fiction: in real life there were never any brilliant private detectives to whom Scotland Yard turned when they failed and the Yard's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had a remarkable clear-up rate and has always been highly competent. Indeed, the most famous real-life British detectives of the 20th century, such as Walter Dew (1863-1947) and Robert Fabian (1901-78), were Scotland Yard inspectors. Holmes is memorably eccentric, with a range of endearing and less endearing habits (he is a drug addict), a …

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Publication information: Article title: A Very British Crime Wave: Detective Stories Captured the Imaginations of the British Middle Classes in the 20th Century. William D. Rubinstein Looks at the Rise of Home-Grown Writers Such as Agatha Christie, How They Mirrored Society and Why Changes in Social Mores Eventually Murdered Their Sales. Contributors: Rubinstein, William D. - Author. Magazine title: History Today. Volume: 60. Issue: 12 Publication date: December 2010. Page number: 43+. © 2009 History Today Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

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