Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The critic writing about American crime fiction published during the first half of the twentieth century faces several daunting challenges. Quite apart from the huge number of short stories and novels in the genre published during this period, there is also significant diversity in terms of types of American crime fiction. That is, the genre itself is not a single entity, despite certain overlapping conventions and themes, but rather an amalgam of competing accounts of such subjects as crime, morality, gender roles, and violence. At one extreme, there are those writers who are influenced by British classical mystery fiction. The work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British crime writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (himself inspired by Edgar Allan Poe) and G. K. Chesterton, and more particularly that of “Golden Age” mystery writers of the 1920s and 1930s such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Margery Allingham is often characterized by upper-class characters, rural (often country-house) settings, a limited number of suspects, unusual murder methods, an eccentric (usually amateur) detective, and a vast number of (frequently false or misleading) clues ultimately leading to the unmasking of the murderer by the detective in a climactic final scene. Violence in such narratives is usually limited to the murder or murders that form the focus of detection, and the ... log in or subscribe to read full text