The received image of British crime fiction is still at odds with its current reality. The giants of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ – in particular Agatha Christie – cast long shadows, encouraged by a television industry which continues to produce ever more lavish remakes of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories. But there are very few books being written today which the practitioners of the 1920s and 1930s would recognise as being part of the same genre.
Building on the writing of earlier pioneers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made an inestimable contribution to the development of the crime novel. In Sherlock Holmes he invented the amateur sleuth (a character who, incidentally, has never existed outside fiction). In Dr Watson he invented the brilliant narrative device of the plodding sidekick, whose slow perception helps readers to keep up without insulting their intelligence. And in his stories, which start with a crime and end with a logically deduced solution, he virtually invented the whodunit. Conan Doyle also injected a lightness of touch into his detective fiction. Yes, people got murdered, but the readers didn’t engage emotionally with their sufferings. A death was merely the key to set in motion a clockwork toy of investigation.
This new story-telling format was seized with enthusiasm by Agatha Christie and the other writers of the twenties and thirties, who developed it in ways Conan Doyle would never have dreamed of. Every sort of device was used to bamboozle the reader. The book where the narrator was the murderer, the one where the crime was a conspiracy of all the suspects, books featuring identical twins and assumed identities – not to mention ever more deviously ingenious murder methods – these all originated in that Golden Age. It’s no coincidence that the development of the crime novel coincided with the introduction of the crossword and other linguistic games. For whodunit readers of the 1920’s and 1930’s the puzzle element was paramount. The opening murder was a gauntlet thrown down, and the rest of the book became a battle of wits between writer and reader. All the relevant clues must be in the text and the solution must make intellectual sense. And then at the end, to tie all the loose ends together and to avoid niggling hindsight, the death penalty ensured a reassuring justice and closure for readers whose intellects had been challenged, but whose emotions had remained unengaged.
Inevitably, if crime writers of the time were to keep all these spinning plates of logic in the air, characterisation in their books could not be too deep, and it was at this time that the rift between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘category fiction’ widened. Crime novels, the intelligentsia insisted, might be entertaining, but could not be regarded as real literature, because they existed in a cloud-cuckoo-land of weekend country house parties, a Cluedo world where stereotypes like Colonel Mustard would be gleefully brained with Lead Piping in the Conservatory.
The Second World War wrought many changes, and its effects were definitely felt in the world of crime writing. With most families in the British Isles having either lost a relative or knowing someone who had lost one, the breezy attitude to unnatural death which had floated the Golden Age whodunit began to feel distasteful. Death was too real to play games with.
The War brought social changes too. Massive country estates could not be kept up with the same ease, and the large number of servants who had serviced them – such a useful supply of suspects and witnesses – could no longer be afforded. Coinciding with these changes, writers of traditional whodunits came to realise that there weren’t many puzzle storylines left. All the good ones had been done.
The threat to the genre at that time could be compared to the challenge to representational painting posed by the invention of photography. In the same way, the art form of crime novel had either to go under or to change.
Fortunately, it changed. The whodunit element became less pivotal, and to the surprise of some authorities, rather than restricting the imaginations of crime writers, this had a liberating effect. Characters no longer had to be mere counters in a board game. They could become living, breathing human beings. And their crimes were more than just a trigger for a bit of light-hearted sleuthing. Crime writers started to think about the causes of crimes and the motives of those who committed them. The whodunit element became much less important than the whydunit.
Post-war scepticism played its part too. The reaction against the regimentation of life in the armed forces started to question other institutions of authority too. The anarchy expressed in , the satirical probing of and created a climate in which it was permissible to challenge our system of justice and the people who enforced it. Crime and punishment were no longer black and white, moral issues had become universally grey. The police detective was as fallible a human being as the criminal he arrested. And the abolition of the death penalty for murder in 1965 removed another ingredient from the traditional whodunit. The loose ends of cases could no longer be tied up with a neat little bow. Miscarriages of justice could be investigated, and crime fiction seized with both hands the opportunity to investigate the untidy aftermath of murder.
All of these changes – and many more that followed - have led to a greater variety than ever before in British crime fiction. I once heard Reginald Hill, the creator of Dalziel and Pasco, say that writing crime novels had never stopped him from writing what he wanted to write about, and many other practitioners would echo that. Though healthily restricted by the demands of plot – which in almost every case begins with a crime and ends in a solution – today’s crime writers take whichever route they please between those two points. Some concentrate on a profession – like Dick Francis with horse racing or Michael Ridpath with City intrigues. Others highlight a geographical location – Colin Dexter’s Oxford, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Humour still survives in my own books and those by writers like Ruth Dudley Edwards. Val McDermid, Mo Hayder and others investigate the horrors of forensic pathology. Ruth Rendell anatomises the psychopathology of the criminal mind. P. D. James continues to use the form of the traditional whodunit, but with an insight into character and quality of writing to which few of the Golden Age authors would have aspired.
These are only a few examples of the rich diversity of contemporary British crime fiction. It’s a pity that round the world those last three words still conjure up the image of Agatha Christie. She was brilliant at what she did, but the genre has moved on.
Simon Brett's latest novel is published in 2006.
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