“It is Sunday afternoon, you put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose,” writes English historian, author, and TV presenter Lucy Worsley in A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession. “In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”
Worsley is onto something. Novels and TV programs about the most appalling of human crimes continue to fascinate and entertain us. Ordinary folks who wouldn’t kill a spider unless it was absolutely necessary—and then with a guilty conscience—relish all manner of grisly deaths, especially if they are set in the British Isles.
What is a British mystery? The obvious answer, of course, is mystery fiction set in the British Isles. A more nuanced answer would include the tropes and traditions of the genre—a seemingly impossible crime (usually murder); a remote or rural setting; a limited pool of suspects; a brilliant, often amateur detective; plenty of alibis, clues, and red herrings; and most importantly, a resolution reestablishing order and justice.
By this standard, a “British mystery” could be set in the Australian Outback or a small hamlet in the south of France. It could be found in a village deep in the forests of Quebec. Even in a coastal town in Maine called Cabot Cove.
The British mystery is as much a feeling as it is a setting.
The genre was born in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins and grew up in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, usually described as the years between the two world wars. British mysteries have delighted readers for almost two centuries.
Why is it that people on both sides of the Pond and around the globe still love them? The usual answer is the challenge of piecing together clues, unravelling motives, and solving the crime along with the detective. That’s true, but I think there’s more at play.
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The Comforting Familiarity
At least part of the reason we love British mysteries is the comforting familiarity. Most of us grew up with British crime fiction—Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham. I must have been ten or eleven when I “discovered” Agatha Christie in the stacks of my local library. I put down my Nancy Drew and never looked back.
Readers love spending time in a genre with reliably recurring elements. We know what to expect. In an interview for PBS, British crime novelist Anthony Horowitz said: “There is a sort of warmth about detective fiction, a sort of a comfort….[They] remind us of a different world, or a pace that is slower….At the end of the day, the whole journey from the murder to the investigation, to the final solution is a journey towards comfort.”
Is it nostalgia? Of course—at least in part. Psychologists tell us that human beings have a built-in affinity for what is familiar. We also like to be surprised.
The combination of a familiar structure with the stimulation of a clever, new puzzle is irresistible. Like discovering an old photograph at the bottom of a drawer or revisiting a happy childhood home, British mysteries remind us of a world seen through rose-tinted spectacles.
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The Deceptive Civility
Such a world rests upon the civility of its citizens. With the possible exception of the Japanese, the British are the only people who will apologize for bumping into a lamp post. Social anthropologist Kate Fox calls it the Reflex-Apology Rule. “‘In no country…is it easier to shove people off the pavement,'” she says quoting George Orwell and adding, “and if your shove appears to be genuinely accidental, they might even apologize as they stumble into the gutter.”
This gentle, outward civility is deceptive of course, and that’s part of the appeal of British mysteries. You never know what’s going on behind the famous British politeness. Author Richard Osman, who knows a thing or two about his countrymen, said:
The vicar? Murderer. The elementary school teacher? Murderer. The old lady collecting for charity in the park? Serial killer….In Britain, everyone is incredibly polite, right up until the moment they murder you. That’s how we operate… In a British crime novel, the more polite a person is, the more suspicious you should be of them. Which makes them a lot of fun to write, and a lot of fun to read.
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The Imaginary Reset
In the real world, murders, even when solved and the criminals are punished, create lasting emotional scars. Think of the recent horrific crimes on our nation’s transportation systems. Those images are burned on our collective psyche. Murder rips apart the social contract, and there is no glue that can piece together the torn edges.
Not so in British crime fiction. Three of the village’s elderly spinsters are poisoned with arsenic-laced tea. The local publican is crushed to death under barrels of pale ale. A schoolgirl is drowned while bobbing for apples. The body of a farmhand is found impaled on a pitchfork. Okay, so the actual crimes are committed off-stage, but hey—the perpetrators have been unmasked and are headed to prison. Everything’s good, right?
In British mysteries it is, because in every book in a series, in every episode on our flat screens, the sun is metaphorically shining, and the world is reset to its original factory setting. Crime is an aberration, not the norm. The dastardly perpetrator has been excised from society, and everyone can resume their lives in blissful ignorance of the murderous intentions lurking in the hearts of their fellow villagers.
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The Longing for a World that Never Existed
The popularity of British mysteries boomed after the carnage of World War One. In a civilization shattered by an estimated twenty million senseless, random deaths on both sides, “there was something reassuring about the detective’s ability to piece together all the broken fragments and ‘know just where to fix the guilt.'”
Against that trauma, detective fiction supplied clear motives, tidy explanations, and the triumph of good over evil. Independent scholar and critic Alison Light called it “the literature of convalescence.” Readers longed for a world that never existed.
Is it homesickness? Heartache? C. S. Lewis called it sehnsucht, a German word for “the inconsolable longing of the human heart for we know not what.” We glimpse perfection—in a glorious sunset, in the unfurling petals of a rose, in a landscape blanketed with new snow—but we cannot capture the moment for it does not last. The world should be a better place. We should be better people—and we would be if only we could return to that far-off country we’ve never visited.
In the meantime, since the world is powerless to provide what we long for, we can—for a few hours at least, while sitting in that armchair by the fire—visit a fictional world where wrongs are righted, where good triumphs over evil, and where life’s questions are met with clear moral answers.
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