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The Rise and Fall of the British Detective Novel (2010)
ptured the imaginations of the British middle classes in the 20th century. The fortunes of home-grown writers such as Agatha Christie reflected Britain’s social changes.
Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman were young doctors who turned to writing fiction while they awaited their patients; Crofts was a railway engineer in Northern Ireland; Chesterton and Berkeley were journalists; Cecil Street a career army officer. There were many echoes in America of Britain’s ‘golden age’ detective fiction in the works of such writers as S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright, 1888-1939); John Dickson Carr (1906-77); Rex Stout (1886-1975); Ellery Queen (the pseudonym used by Frederick Dannay, 1905-82) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-71). But even the most recent writers who use an independent amateur detective to solve a crime with a cast of suspects, such as Simon Brett’s fine Charles Paris novels and the works of Peter Lovesey, routinely employ more sex, violence and abnormal psychology than was imaginable in Britain before 1939.
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