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.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery.

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.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery.

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.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery.

Those writers whom the gods would destroy, they first tempt into trying to imitate another writer who has influenced them.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery.

Joseph Kanon’s summer potboiler is a weak whodunnit set in the seedy splendor of post-war Venice.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Thrillers.

“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.”

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Thrillers, Writers.

“I guess liking mysteries goes back to Aristotle, who said we read or watch tragedy because the bad stuff happens to someone else and we feel relieved that we’re still alive, and the perpetrator takes the blame for what happened. It’s a catharsis.”

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Writers.

“I believe that people are very interested in reading about the ordinary things of life. One can make a very simple situation seem interesting — often it is very simple matters that arouse most passions in people.”

This article is filed under Africa, Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Writers.