Stry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan ferghana state university

1.2. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction:
A period which covers the two decades between the two world wars

The so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is most commonly defined as a period which covers the two decades between the two world wars. In the Golden Age, short stories gradually gave way to the detective novel because the plots were becoming more complicated and more developed. Symons explains this shift to be linked to the social and economic changes after the First World War: “The emancipation of women which took place during the War played a large part in the creation of a new structure in domestic life, particularly in Europe, through which women had more leisure, and many of them used it to read books” (Symons 86). Therefore the need for more developed, and thus longer, stories emerged. The emancipation of women played its part not only in the readership but also concerning the authors of these novels as the best known detective novels of the Golden Age were written by the so-called “Queens of Crime”: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham.

Each of the Queens of Crime created a unique series of novels as well as distinctive Great Detective characters and Christie’s and Sayers’s creations will be now further introduced, as they will be referenced later in the thesis. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is a Belgian ex-policeman whose modus operandi famously includes the usage of “little grey cells” (The Mysterious Affair at Styles 145). In her autobiography, Christie describes the creation of Poirot and lists the character traits the detective would have: he would be an inspector, so that he would have some knowledge of crime, he would be tidy, always arranging things, he would be extremely brainy, and he would have an unusual name (An Autobiography 263-264). These characteristics stuck with the detective for more than fifty years of Christie’s writing career. She also defines the universal plot of the stories she would write: “The whole point of a good detective story was that [the culprit] must be someone obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it.
Though really, of course, he had done it” (An Autobiography 262). This pattern is the most used in her stories and has become the best recognised pattern of the Golden Age itself. As Julian Symons puts it, “Christie’s first book is notable because it ushered in the era during which the detective story came to be regarded as a puzzle […] It was the beginning of what came to be known as the Golden Age”
Christie was also one of the only detective novelists of the Golden Age who created a female Great Detective – Miss Marple. This elderly spinster greatly differs from other detectives of this period: she is an ordinary lady, living in an ordinary village, does not have any eccentric qualities (except for, maybe, an inclination to gossip), and does not solve crimes with her “little grey cells” but only with the help of her knowledge of human nature. The first novel in which she appears is The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Christie continued to write stories about her for the next forty-six years; in fact, the last Christie novel ever published was a Miss Marple novel. However, female detectives were a rare sight in Golden Age detective fiction. Before the beginning of the Golden Age era, in 1910, Baroness Orczy published a short story collection about a female Scotland Yard investigator Lady Molly, and Christie later published stories about Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, where at least a half of the main duo is female, but other than that, female characters in Golden Age detective fiction in general were “either sidekicks or cheerful crusaders-in-arms to the dominant male hero, serving either as a Watson or a love interest, or both. Miss Marple, being neither of these things, is a rare Golden Age creation.
Dorothy L. Sayers’s creation is Lord Peter Wimsey, an English aristocrat whose hobby is to solve murders which baffle the police. Julian Symons talks about him very critically in his Bloody Murder, saying that he is a caricature of an English aristocrat whose great many qualities are not endurable for the reader (Symons 101). The detective is paired with a Jeeves-like character, Bunter, who serves as a sort of sidekick to Wimsey, although later this part is undertaken by the famous detective novelist Harriet Vane. The plots of Sayers’s novels follow the classic whodunit pattern where the culprit is revealed at the very end by the Great Detective. Wimsey, just like other Golden Age detectives, relies on his wit rather than fists, and although Sayers, as a feminist, created a female sidekick for him, it is always Wimsey who plays the dominant part.
The Queens of Crime, along with many other detective fiction writers of the Golden Age, were members of the so-called Detection Club. Founded in 1930 and still in operation today, it was formed to join together writers of detective fiction who followed (and sometimes broke) a set of rules for writing detective stories established by Ronald Knox. The rules Knox came up with, dubbed the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction”, were the following: “The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the narrative but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. All supernatural agencies are ruled out. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. No hitherto undiscovered poison should be used or any appliance which needs a long scientific explanation. No Chinaman must figure in the story. No accident must help the detective, nor is he allowed an unaccountable intuition. The detective himself must not commit the crime or alight on any clues which are not instantly produced for the reader. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, should be slightly, but no more than slightly, less intelligent than the average reader and his thoughts should not be concealed. Twin brothers and doubles generally must not appear unless the reader has been duly prepared for them”. These rules were more or less followed by the writers of the Golden Age. A famous case of a rule being broken is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where not only the narrator’s, the “Watson’s”, thoughts are concealed but he is in fact revealed to be the murderer.
Another case is Christie’s Curtain in which there are two crimes which need solving and one of the murders is committed by the dying Hercule Poirot.
The settings of Golden Age detective stories vary: in Christie, it is most frequently a rural setting; in Sayers, it is London; but the most important characteristic of the setting is the fact that there is a limited number of suspects. Agatha Christie was a master of the “closed-circle mystery”: Christie’s Death on the Nile takes place on a luxurious ship which no one else apart from the people travelling on it could board. Her Death in the Clouds goes even a little further because the murder takes place in a flying airplane.
There are a number of other Christie novels which use this pattern, such as Cards on the Table, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, or And Then There Were None. Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Five Red Herrings is an example of a closed-circle mystery as well, taking place amongst a group of artists where the murderer must be a painter because they finished the victim’s painting for him. The village setting of detective stories might make the crimes depicted a little incredible; however, it has a purpose: “The single body on the drawing room floor can be more horrific than a dozen bullet-ridden bodies down Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, precisely because it is indeed shockingly out of place”.
Detective novels of the Golden Age are concerned the most with the puzzle. The mystery of “who has done it” is much more important than realistic depictions of the crimes. Bodies of people who have died under the most cunning circumstances one could come up with pile up in peaceful English villages whose homicide rate is much more above average, but realistic depiction of death is not the point of these novels. As
P. D. James states,
[…] they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on the library floor. And in the end […] all will be well. […] All the mysteries will be explained, all the problems solved, and peace and order will return to that mythical village.
In other words, we must solve the puzzle behind the story – or, if the solution is beyond our capacity, let the Great Detective tell us what happened – and life can go back to normal.