Queens of Crime 1: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars.

Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War. The public needed order and diversion. Highly regulated games became popular - contract bridge, crosswords, Mah Jong - and so did detective fiction. These games indeed frequently appear in As the initiation ceremony to the Detection Club shows, detective fiction was a sort of literary game - with clear rules of engagement and a puzzle for the reader to unravel.

In this mini-series on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction we’re looking at what happened after Roger Ackroyd. As the 1930s darkened with the great depression, the rise of fascism and - dare we say it - the rather bleak view of human nature contained within Freudian psychoanalysis, so too did detective fiction. At the forefront of these changes were the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.

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