The post-war turmoil experienced in Britain after the Armistice was succeeded by the misery of an economic slump, and then by the growing threat posed from overseas by Nazism and Fascism. It is no coincidence that the Twenties and the Thirties became the 'Golden Age of Murder', when novelists such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley crafted complex and original puzzles of whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit that tested readers' wits and earned their authors fame and fortune. There was something unashamedly escapist about much detective fiction written during the Golden Age, but it is also true to say that the better books reveal far more about the society of the time than critics have acknowledged. That escapism regularly took engaging but wildly unlikely forms, with impossible crimes taking place within locked rooms, vital clues being hidden by way of complex cryptograms, and mysterious 'dying messages' uttered by murder victims who could never bring themselves to take the more obvious step of simply naming their killers.
( Martin Edwards )
[ Resorting to Murder: Holiday ]
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