Golden Age of Detective Fiction - Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall

The outbreak of the Second World War is often taken as a beginning of the end for the light-hearted, straightforward "whodunnit" of the Golden Age. But 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.

Despite beginning his career as an author of several successful collections of Golden Age stories, the influential critic Julian Symons became highly dismissive of the classical detective story and probably did as much to kill it as anyone, extolling in its place 'psychological' stories like those of Francis Iles, usually based in suburbia and involving allegedly 'realistic' lower-middle-class characters. "If we consider the crime story only as a puzzle, nothing written in the last twenty years (before 1972) comes within trailing distance of the best Golden Age work, although it should be said that little attempts to do so. ... "

Other attacks have been made by Edmund Wilson ("Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?") and Raymond Chandler ("The Simple Art of Murder"). But in sheer number of sales — particularly those of Agatha Christie, its leading light — modern detective fiction has never approached the popularity of Golden Age writing.

Every so often somebody reprises Edmund Wilson's famous put-down of detective novels, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Wilson regarded the genre as terminally subliterary, either an addiction or a harmless vice on a par with crossword puzzles. But the truth is that for every Edmund Wilson who resists the genre there are dozens of intellectuals who have embraced it wholeheartedly. The enduring highbrow appeal of the detective novel ... is one of the literary marvels of the century.