Abstract
In the first decade following the end of World War II, Britain saw thorough political changes: the independence of India and Pakistan signalled the end of the British Empire. The newly elected Labour Government initiated a number of social reforms, but general living conditions were poor: the pound was devalued, and until 1954, consumer goods remained rationed. To the conservatively inclined readers of detective fiction, the destabilization of the formerly rigid class structure presented a considerable threat. In her novel A Murder Is Announced, Agatha Christie had Miss Marple complain that you no longer knew who people were — numerous people had become dislocated by the war, and family ties and institutions that had formerly helped to place people socially had broken away:
Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come — and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.1
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Notes
Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced (London: Collins, 1979), 127.
Arthur Nicholas Athanason, “The Mousetrap Phenomenon,” Armchair Detective 12:2 (Spring 1979), 152–157, 154f.
Michael Hutton, Power without Glory — A Play in Three Acts (London: French, 1948), 5.
Gordon Glennon, Gathering Storm — A Play in Three Acts Dramatised from Reyner Barton’s Novel “Envy My Simplicity” (London: Rylee, 1948), n. p. From a present-day perspective, the move from the drawing-room to the kitchen may not seem a very radical shift, but in the drama of the time, it was obviously something new, since the plays written in the wake of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley were later dubbed “kitchen sink drama.”
Ludovic Kennedy, Murder Story — A Play in Three Acts with an Epilogue on Legal Killing (London: Gollancz, 1956), 149.
Cf. Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama, 1890–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 95.
J. B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls — A Play in Three Acts (London: Heinemann, 1947), 57.
John Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times (New York: Crown, 1963), 409.
Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama — A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 272.
Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama1890–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 377.
J. B. Priestley, Bright Shadow — A Play of Detection (London: French, 1950), 11.
Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap, in: The Mousetrap and Selected Plays (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 285–366, 304.
Kinematograph Weekly, 17 November 1960. Quoted from Agatha Christie, Spider’s Web — A Play (London: French, 1956), n.p.
Arthur Marwick, British Society Since1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 40.
Lesley Storm, Black Chiffon — A Play in Three Acts (London: English Theatre Guild, 1950), 78.
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© 2015 Beatrix Hesse
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Hesse, B. (2015). From the End of World War II to 1955. In: The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463043_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463043_4
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