The Queens of Crime

The golden age of detective fiction refers to the period between World War I and World War II, roughly from the 1920s to the early 1940s, when the genre flourished in Britain and the US. The era was marked by a surge in popularity for the classic “whodunit,” a type of mystery that emphasized clever plotting and logical deduction while offering readers a fair chance of solving the mystery. Popular conventions for detective novels and short fiction in the golden age often included isolated country settings, closed circles of suspects, and crimes that unfolded in the upper classes, giving the stories a blend of charm and suspense. While earlier detective fiction, like the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, focused on the brilliance of the central detective, Golden Age writers refined and formalized the genre into a literary puzzle governed by specific rules.

These rules were formalized through the creation of the Detection Club, a society for mystery writers founded in 1930 by a group of writers including Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. The club served both to support writers of detective fiction and to ensure adherence to the genre’s rules of “fair play,” which member Ronald Knox formalized.