When it comes to classic and traditional mysteries, the old manor house in a remote part of England is a classic of the genre: isolated, often impoverished, and filled with suspicious characters. It’s easy to picture Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer in the parlor, surrounded by suspects.
In fact, English manors, villages, cities, and boarding schools are fodder for many a modern mystery, with present-day British authors having just as much with the settings as their historical counterparts.
But British authors aren’t the only ones who love a creepy moor or crumbling manor house. Authors writing whodunits from the United States seem just as likely to choose British locations for their mysteries, even if the closest they’ve ever been to those spots is rereading every Miss Marple mystery a dozen times.
Why is it that so many American crime writers love British manors—or villages, or cities, or boarding schools—so much?
The Influence of the Classics
Many modern crime writers were first exposed to the genre through the classics from the Golden Age of detective fiction—that period between the two World Wars when British crime novels exploded in popularity. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Margery Allingham, and many more British authors whose crime fiction laid the groundwork for the modern crime genre.
Certainly there were many mystery authors at the time who weren’t British. Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander, and the authors behind Ellery Queen were American. (Though Ngaio Marsh herself wrote about the very British Chief Inspector Allyn.) And some American writers, like Raymond Chandler, went for a pulpier, more hard-boiled style than what we think of as the traditional mysteries of the time.
But the classics of the genre that are still wildly popular today were mostly written by the British writers of the era, particularly the Queens of Crime. They set the style and conventions for traditional and fair play mysteries. That style is still influential today.
And the modern mystery writers who, like me, grew up watching Masterpiece Mysteries on PBS with their parents before starting to read in the genre? Well, we were all watching adaptations starring Poirot and Miss Marple, set in various British manors and villages with shockingly high body counts.
The British setting feels like a natural fit for so many modern American authors writing traditional or historic. In many ways, the genre was created there. When we start imaging out our stories, we gravitate towards those same, familiar manors and villages dotting the British countryside.
Confronting the Past
Often, as we plot out our murders and reveals, we wander into the past to do it. Many of the genre’s most famous sleuths, from Sherlock Holmes to Phryne Fisher, live a hundred or more years ago. It’s fits the genre of a traditional mystery to gravitate towards settings and characters in the past.
But writing in the past is tricky. If American writers set their books in the United States, they have to confront America’s past. Without realizing it, a lot of us shy away from that.
I ran into this head on with my own first series. I had set it in Regency-era London. It was the first place I pictured my characters living, and a natural fit for the story I wanted to tell.
But it wasn’t until someone asked me why I hadn’t set it in the States that I started thinking about what that would entail.
If I had set it in, for example, Washington, D.C. in 1815 instead of London, I would have had to tackle the issue of slavery in America head on. I was instantly relieved that I ended up in London instead.
I hadn’t hesitated to bring up issues of racism, classism, and feminism in the Regency era. But the thought of addressing those same problems in my own country’s history was far more daunting. It wasn’t until I started my second series that I had the courage to do it.
There are many crime writers out there creating stories that are deeply insightful on issues ranging from the role of women to the way immigrants are treated. That’s one of the best things about genre fiction: it lets you talk about tough issues through the lens of a mystery, or the lens of the past, while still producing a fast-paced, engrossing story that keeps readers hooked as they try to stay one step ahead of your sleuth.
But confronting those things in your own history is often ugly, difficult work. It’s much easier, after all, to point out someone else’s flaws than to admit your own.
At the same time, that distance can sometimes allow us to say things that might otherwise come across as pedantic or preachy. There’s enough common ground there that we see ourselves in the characters and their history. And that can produce some very thoughtful moments for both readers and writers, even while our main focus is on discovering whodunit.
Familiar and Foreign
That common ground plays into the final reason that there are, I think, so many American writers happily writing British mysteries. And it’s because that familiarity is very real—and also very misleading.
Britain, after all, isn’t the United States. And the American writers producing so many British murder mysteries may or may not have ever been to the places they’re writing about. (I’ll admit I’ve been to some, but not all.)
In many ways, setting a mystery in Great Britain, whether in the past or present, is the perfect blend of what feels familiar and what is actually foreign.
British villages aren’t really like American suburbs or small towns when you get down to it — not in the present and not in the past. Those old manor houses are far from the everyday lives of both American writers and readers. (They are also absent from the lives of most modern Brits, of course.)
And when you have the chance to throw in a titled character or two, modern or historical, real or fictional? That’s icing on the cake of the excitingly foreign. A lot of Americans are still fascinated by British aristocracy and titles because they aren’t part of the American experience. Just look at the continued coverage the British royal family receives in the American press, or the success of shows like Downton Abbey.
But at the same time, there is enough overlap in both history and culture between Great Britain and the U.S. that those manor houses and villages feel accessible. We understand why the people there behave the way they do. We have a sense of what their social expectations might be. We know how their families relate to each other, how their work is carried out.
A mystery novel set in the U.K., whether past or present, is foreign enough to be exciting. And at the same time just familiar enough that both writers and readers can comfortably imagine themselves there—a big help when you’re trying to put together the clues before the sleuth does.
Detective stories set in England fill the shelves of libraries and bookstores because readers and writers alike find them a lot of fun. From new versions of Sherlock Holmes wandering the streets of London to bodies in locked rooms on lonely moors, there’s something about the setting that feels connected to the long history of crime fiction
When it comes to traditional mysteries, it’s almost impossible to resist playing around with the conventions of a mystery set in England at least once—no matter where you, the author, actually live.
***
