British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.
Author(s): Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Elizabeth Prevost
Series: Crime Files
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 241
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Fictive Facticity
Genre Fluidity
Conservative Modernity
Conclusion
Part I: Fictive Facticity
Chapter 2: Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes: Myths, Monsters, and the Declining Reputation of the Late-Victorian Detective
Media Stories of the Police in the Autumn of Horror
The Lure and Limits of Detective Fiction
Writing Back against the Failures of Whitechapel
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Fictions of Politics
Chapter 4: Domesticating the Horrors of Modern War: Civil Defense and the Wartime British Murder Mystery
Poison Gas and Civil Defense in 1930s Science Fiction
Civil Defense, Detective Fiction, and the Domestication of Fear
Conclusion
Part II: Genre Fluidity
Chapter 5: Semicolonial Horsewifery as Detective Fiction: “Trinket’s Colt” and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M.
Chapter 6: “Magic is My Business”: Raymond Chandler and Detective Fiction as Modern Fairy Tale
Chapter 7: “Indecently Preposterous”: The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction
The Golden Age
Law and Order
Detective Fiction and the Press
Conclusion
Part III: Conservative Modernity
Chapter 8: Agatha Christie in Southern Africa
I
II
III
Chapter 9: Death Haunts the Hotel
Hotel Nostalgia
The Margate Hotel Murder (1929)
Hotel Mysteries and the “Color Bar”
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Newspaper Sources
Printed Sources
Index
