Abstract
Hoffman’s introduction argues that depictions of women in British golden age crime fiction are ambivalent, advocating a modern, active model of femininity while also displaying with their resolutions an emphasis on domesticity and on maintaining a heteronormative order. The introduction highlights the book’s key point, which is that female characters in golden age crime fiction are used in ways that question and renegotiate social, gender and genre norms. Hoffman explains that she will examine the themes of single women, courtship and marriage, education and the workplace, as well as depictions of women’s bodies, in the works of British golden age women crime writers including Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth.
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Notes
- 1.
How these conventions might be complicated when that detective figure is a woman will be discussed to some extent in this book and has already been examined at length elsewhere in works such as Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan’s The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (1981) and Karla T. Kungl’s Creating the Fictional Female Detective: The Sleuth Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890–1940 (2006).
- 2.
This is certainly not to say that constructions of masculinity were not also under scrutiny in these narratives, but the primary focus here is on representations of women.
- 3.
Other critics have also argued for the importance of reading crime novels in light of the possibilities they reveal within their formulaic conventions rather than the limitations of those conventions. For instance, Gill Plain writes of the crime genre that ‘these texts cannot be reduced to the sum of their resolutions; they must also be considered in the light of the conflicts and tensions that they mobilize en route, and, in exploring these tensions, the possibility must be considered that crime, like its counterpart respectability, is seldom quite what it seems’. Gill Plain, Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 6.
- 4.
The term ‘modern’ is used here and throughout this work to refer to the culture and social mores contemporary with the narratives that are being examined.
- 5.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 10.
- 6.
Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (London: Peter Davies, 1942), pp. 112–58, 181–206.
- 7.
Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 93–4.
- 8.
Light, Forever England, p. 10.
- 9.
Light, Forever England, p. 17.
- 10.
Light, Forever England, p. 61.
- 11.
Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), p. 119.
- 12.
Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, p. 133.
- 13.
For instance, The Lady Investigates acknowledges the social factors that shaped depictions of femininity in golden age crime narratives and that overt feminism does not always play into representations of femininity. Craig and Cadogan write of the wives of well-known male detective figures that: ‘Active feminism [in the 1930s] was considered old hat and soon became a source of irritation to those preoccupied with more pressing issues like the war in Spain and threatening developments in Germany. It had acquired a ridiculous aspect, and so a fashionable author was forced to adopt a bantering tone on the subject, displaying at the same time an awareness of apparently fundamental traits and incapacities in each sex. But it was impossible to revert to the prewar system of restrictions in women’s lives.’ Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 207.
- 14.
Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1.
- 15.
Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.
- 16.
Of the writers included in this book, only Christie and Sayers are included in Howard Haycraft’s identification of the ‘big five’ most significant writers of British detective fiction (1942). Allingham and Marsh are both subjects of short sections in Murder for Pleasure, but other women writers such as Wentworth are only briefly commented upon. Mitchell is mentioned as a writer of detective fiction characterised by a ‘lighter tone’. Murder for Pleasure, p. 195. Haycraft also names Inspector Lamb as the detective figure connected to Wentworth’s work. However, Lamb is in fact a police officer who often works with the primary detective figure, Miss Silver, of whom Haycraft makes no mention. Murder for Pleasure, p. 204.
- 17.
Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in particular have been included in virtually every work on the history of crime fiction and significant critical works have been produced on each writer. In addition to Makinen’s Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (2006), Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick’s Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction (1982), Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker’s Reflecting on Miss Marple (1991), R.A. York’s Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion (2007), as well as several biographies have been written on Christie and her work. Various articles and chapters within well-known critical works on crime fiction and/or women’s fiction have also been written on Christie, including Stephen Knight’s ‘“…done from within”—Agatha Christie’s World’, in Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980), Alison Light’s ‘Agatha Christie and Conservative Modernity’ in Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991), and Gill Plain’s ‘Sacrificial Bodies: The Corporeal Anxieties of Agatha Christie’, in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001). Sayers has also often been the subject of study, with Janice Brown’s The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers (1998), Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis’ Conundrums for the Long Week-end: England, Dorothy L. Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey (2000), and Crystal Downing’s Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers (2004), as well as Susan J. Leonardi’s chapters ‘Unnatural by Degrees: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Overachieving Murderess’ and ‘Of Catteries, Colleges, and Whimsical Weddings’, in Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (1989), SueEllen Campbell’s ‘The Detective Heroine and the Death of Her Hero: Dorothy Sayers to P.D. James’, in Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (1995), and Gill Plain’s ‘Safety in Sanctity: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Marriage of Convenience’, in Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (1996). Susan Rowland includes Christie and Sayers, as well as Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, in her psychoanalytic study of the lives and work of six women crime writers, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (2001). In comparison with Christie and Sayers, Allingham has received relatively little critical attention, but still significantly more than writers such as Brand, Marsh, Mitchell, Tey and Wentworth.
- 18.
Torquemada, ‘These Names Make Clues’, The Observer (London, UK: 2 October 1938), p. 7, Proquest Historical Newspapers: The Guardian and The Observer (1791–2003), Web, 30 October 2011.
- 19.
The critical works that include Mitchell tend to focus on Mrs Bradley as a detective figure, including in Craig and Cadogan’s The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (1981) and Kungl’s Creating the Fictional Female Detective: The Sleuth Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890–1940 (2006). Elizabeth English provides an interesting and convincing queer reading of Mitchell’s Speedy Death in Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (2014), and in Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (2015), Samantha Walton discusses Mitchell’s work in the context of the psychiatric and psychological discourses that influenced the medical, legal and popular understandings of mental illness and criminal responsibility in the first half of the twentieth century.
- 20.
Julian Symons identifies the golden age as spanning the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that the end of the Second World War marked the change from ‘detective story’ to ‘crime novel’. Bloody Murder, pp. 18–19.
- 21.
Knight is more liberal than critics such as Haycraft and Symons in his definition of ‘golden age’; while acknowledging that the phrase is usually used to describe ‘the period between the two world wars’, he argues that the period might more accurately be dated from 1908 (with the publication of Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room in translation, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase and Carolyn Wells’ The Clue) until ‘well after 1939’, as ‘many of the classic writers of the so-called “golden age” went on writing in their familiar modes’. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 85–6. Humble argues that ‘although the feminine middlebrow as I understand it is clearly a product of the inter-war years, its form, themes and successes were not immediately disrupted by the Second World War. In defining my period as running from the end of the First World War to the mid-1950s, I challenge the prevailing convention that would see the Second World War as effecting a decisive ideological and cultural break, and offer a revision to the way we currently map the changing politics of femininity and the domestic in the twentieth century.’ The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, pp. 3–4. Samantha Walton similarly writes in Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction that ‘The perimeters of the golden age need to be extended into order to avoid misguided characterization of the golden age as “homogenous” … Although the years between the wars provide a neat demarcation, and the commencement of the Second World War a reason for literary tropes and generic expectations developed during the interwar years to become somewhat less than “golden”, many later works test these expectations.’ Samantha Walton, Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 8.
- 22.
Stephen Knight, ‘The Golden Age’, in Martin Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 77.
- 23.
Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 402.
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Hoffman, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53666-2_1
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