Saturday, September 21, 2013

THE QUEENS OF DETECTIVE FICTION

from We Love This Book


Historian and A Very British Murder presenter Lucy Worsley on Christie, Sayers and Allingham 

“By the 1930s, the murder rate had fallen to the lowest level Britain had ever seen. Those crimes that did take place were usually linked to poverty, alcohol or domestic violence. And yet it seemed that more and more killings – usually in genteel and pleasant surroundings – were taking place in the pages of books. In 1934, about one-eighth of all the books published were crime novels. The decades between the two world wars saw a great explosion of fictional death by the novelists of the so-called 'Golden Age' of detective fiction. Their stories were ever more remote from real-life violence and true crime. In them, murders became tidy and domesticated, apparently causing little more upset than a lost cat.”  
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