How World War One Gave Rise to the Traditional Mystery

Picture it: 1928, and the country estate of Lord Foulton-Flewkes . . . gentlemen in dinner jackets and spats, bright young flappers with their hemlines swishing just below their knees, perhaps a grande dame or two who remember the World Before. Inevitably, someone is murdered—perhaps the colonel in the library with the candlestick—and if it does seem inevitable, one wonders how anyone survived the murderous years between the two World Wars.

This was the “Golden Age” of detective fiction. This was the time of Christie and Sayers and Allingham and Marsh, when the genre really came into its own and exploded in popularity.

It wasn’t invented in this era, though. Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was written in 1841 and is generally cited as the first modern detective story. Other detective stories appeared in the decades leading up to the First World War; Sherlock Holmes predated the War, and he remains perhaps one of the most iconic of fictional detectives. So, could there have been something about the First World War that made detective fiction especially attractive to the public? Was there something about the genre itself that appealed to the time?

Everyone knows what a detective story looks like. A crime, usually murder, is committed. It is an intrusion on the happy lives of the characters, and the canny detective, through his or her own wit and determination, spends the bulk of the story endeavouring to set things right again. The perpetrator gets his or her just desserts—whether it’s the hangman’s noose or a full cover-up—and the offensive, intrusive elements of the crime are eliminated. The world breathes a figurative sigh of relief, and even if life after the resolution doesn’t look entirely like life before, it’s at least peaceful in a way that it wasn’t while the spectre of the crime still hung over everybody’s heads.

As a narrative about the restoration of the status quo, the detective story parallels the situation engendered by the War. Like the crime that sets the detective story going, the War was an intrusion into what must—in juxtaposition with all the bloodshed, loss, and devastation—have seemed like an idyllic past. One wants to reclaim it, to set the upheaval of the War aside and go back to those peaceful times. One can never really go back, of course—the world after the War was different from the world before—but it was peace again, at least . . . Or was it? There was still that lingering desire to see the destructive intrusion defeated and the world made right again.

But this sort of narrative is not unique to detective fiction. If it was detective fiction in particular that gained popularity in that time, then it was because detective fiction offered something more than just a parallel narrative; it was because of what the parallel narrative said or implied about the world, and how it achieved its ends.

Let’s take a moment to look at the First World War. It was monumental in scope, larger and more devastating than anything in anyone’s experience. The factors leading up to it were a confusing tangle of alliances, feuds, and rivalries, and the ordinary person might be hard-pressed to say just what they were fighting for. So many had died, and for what?

We’ve talked about how the detective story paralleled the arc of the War, but just as importantly, it mirrored the War on a much smaller and more intimate scale. Instead of weighing the fates of nations, the detective story was concerned with the fate of a single closed group of people—people with names and faces and histories. It put a personal spin on the crisis, made it relatable, and allowed the reader to feel the tragedy without being overwhelmed by it. It made the crisis manageable.

The personal scale of detective fiction demanded a particular focus on character motivation. In any other sort of story, character motivation exists to bring characters to life and give the story depth; in the case of the detective story, character motivation is also a part of the game, integral to the crisis and its resolution. It’s one thing to defeat a villain and restore the status quo, but the puzzle aspect of the detective story required readers to sort through multiple motives and identify the one at the root of the crisis. It fulfilled a need, exacerbated by the War, to understand tragedy.

I’ve just described the detective story as a puzzle and a game, and this was a defining factor of the genre in the Golden Age. No one really expected to solve a Holmes mystery ahead of Holmes himself, but that was before the War. After the War, it was the mysteries that played fair with their clues and gave readers the opportunity to solve the puzzle themselves that succeeded the best. The detective novel was a game, with its own rules of engagement, and the rules said that readers, players of the game, had to feel that they could win. This was more than about making the crisis manageable: this was about telling readers that they had power and agency over the crisis. It was empowerment for a people who’d been overwhelmed by the War.

And in the end, of course, came the resolution, the return to the status quo (or an improved approximation thereof). The world after the resolution is never quite the same as the world before the crime itself. If the crime was a metaphor for the War, then the resolution was a metaphor for the future; after a novel’s worth of subliminal parallels, that’s an inevitable conclusion. And because the detective story ends with justice meted out and some recovery achieved, the implication was that the post-War world held the same: peace restored, or better. Any uncertainty arising from the post-War paradigm could be smoothed over with the reassurance that things really had worked out for the best.

That was what the detective fiction of the period offered: a vision of a crisis that was manageable, understandable, and ultimately empowering. It reassured the reader that recovery was not just possible but inevitable. For a public still reeling from the devastation of a crisis and its aftermath, that was a fantastically attractive message, something the world needed to hear. And a whole genre of literature exploded to meet that need.