These days the historical mystery buff can choose from works featuring Owen Archer, Prioress Eleanor, Petroc of Auneford, Mathew Shardlake, and many others. From a brief survey of the genre, it’s a wonder that anyone noticed when the Black Death took hold, as the inhabitants of Britain had apparently been offing each other in industrial numbers right through the medieval era.
The “golden age” of detective fiction, which began roughly with Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, occupied the years between the first and second World Wars – anything but a golden age for Britain, and one in which British society was undergoing massive and lasting changes. The experience of total war, which moved women into the munitions factories, and domestic servants into the army, caused serious questioning of the established social order. The assumed codes of deference and conduct never quite recovered. Country estates were shut up or sold, and the rural economy was destabilised by wage increases after the labourers returned from the front, or didn’t. Crime fiction, however, was busy denying that anything had changed, keeping the experience of death safely within rational and domestic confines where it could be explained away.
Clocks, with their symbolic freight of time and plot, can serve as weapons with which the murderer and the detective attempt to impose their will on the world. In changing a clock’s hands, falsifying an alibi, or cheating a timetable, the killer tries to take control of time, and it is up to the detective to wrest it back from him by proving that time is logical and relentless.
The locked room mystery has been a staple of detective fiction since Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue presented Auguste Dupin with two corpses and apparently no way for the murderer to have entered or left.
Those writers whom the gods would destroy, they first tempt into trying to imitate another writer who has influenced them.
Joseph Kanon’s summer potboiler is a weak whodunnit set in the seedy splendor of post-war Venice.
“I have a general idea where I’m going, but Tally and Company take me there. They often surprise me, which is the great fun of writing fiction.”
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