Coming Soon: Ten Little Mysteries

Two exciting things are coming up this week in the world of Golden Age Mysteries Limited:

1. Our third Golden Age of Crime conference, this time at Florida State University’s London Study Centre, from Friday 12 to Saturday 13 September. We have over twenty fantastic speakers sharing new insights to familiar and less well-known aspects of vintage crime fiction. The focus this year is on crime fiction and trauma and we are honoured to welcome Prof Jessica Meyer as our keynote speaker.
2. Our first book! We’re so excited to be publishing Ten Little Mysteries, a collection of new stories (and a screenplay) inspired by the Golden Age of detective fiction. The striking cover was designed by Rich Obrien of Devilish Creative, and behold our roll-call of fabulous writers: J.S. Savage, Anya Page, Arthur Bernard, J.C. Bernthal, Jorge Molina, Claire Tyler, David Hill, M.E. Reynard, Nic Whittam, and Jonathan Ruffle.

Please check out goldenagemysteries.co.uk for more details of both.

I’d like to share an extract from our introduction to Ten Little Mysteries:

Several sets of ‘rules’ for detective fiction were produced between the First World War (1916-1918) and the Second (1939-1945), a period of time in which ‘detectivist’ Dorothy L Sayers once claimed, ‘half the world is setting riddles for the other half to solve.’ One of the best-known sets of rules is the ‘Decalogue’, a so-called ‘Ten Commandments’  for writing by Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest and crime writer. Knox published the Decalogue in 1928. These are tongue-in-cheek, not actual prescriptive rules. At their heart is a sense of fair play in the contract between writer and reader, but they are also snobbish – they poke fun writers who took short cuts, and mock the clichés of the genre.

The rules (paraphrased) are:

1. The criminal must appear early in the story. It was common in 1928 as it is now for readers to despair at writers who introduce the murderer towards the end of the action, making the gameplay aspect seem unfair.
2. Nothing supernatural can appear in the story. A ratiocinative genre requires everything to be explained in logical, worldly terms.
3. No more than one secret passage or room. Carolyn Wells (1864-1942) was infamous for including floorplans and maps in her novels, omitting to mention passages between them which made impossible crimes possible.
4. No secret, undetectable, or unknowable poisons are allowed. Like Rule 2, a poison unknown to science is a cheap shot, not in the spirit of Golden Age detection, because it denies the reader the chance to work out the truth.
5. No ‘Chinaman’ must figure in the story. This is a reference to the racist ‘Yellow Peril’ stereotype pervading magazine and thriller culture in the 1920s. Taken as a general point, it refers to the use of lazy stereotypes and sensationalism.
6. The detective must solve the case, not be helped by accident or intuition. The easiest rule to break while preserving fair play, Rule 6 is based on the idea that the mystery novel is a game and competition – the detective cannot have an advantage over the reader.
7. The detective cannot be the criminal. Otherwise, players of the game are not evenly matched because the detective is withholding knowledge.
8. The detective must ‘declare any clues’. Again, this is straightforward fair-play. It also reflects a difference between Golden Age fiction and the earlier Sherlock Holmes school. Holmes can declare that he identified the owner of a hat because of initials sewn into the brim, of which Watson and the reader learn only after the deduction (‘The Blue Carbuncle’, 1892) but a Golden Age reader would expect to see those initials.
9. The detective’s sidekick should be slightly stupider than the average reader, and should not conceal their thoughts. Again, this is about fair play and there is a clear reference here to a rather famous novel of 1926.
10. No twins unless the reader is ‘duly prepared’. The use of an identical twin to establish an alibi or how someone could be in two places at once was then, as now, a cliché. It is also lazy. Unless it’s done well.

Critic Howard Haycraft summarised the rules as: ‘(1) The detective story must play fair. (2) The detective story must be readable.’ Of course, most writers broke most if not all of these rules, at times, but the best ones kept the spirit. So, too, do the writers in this neo-Golden Age volume.

This book contains ten original mysteries, from an international assortment of skilled authors, each inspired by and indebted to the Golden Age of Detective fiction. The influences of Christie, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, and their peers are clear to see, and so are the those of the films and legacies this genre inspired.

‘Deal in Death’ by J.S. Savage takes us to a local pub in 1926, where a card game provides a cover for secrets. Gameplay was a hallmark of the Golden Age, with the fundamental premise of a puzzle – a battle of wits between reader and detective – animating much of its appeal during a complex geopolitical age. Thematically, bridge and other gambling games form a cornerstone of the genre, most famously in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table (1936), where four people sit down to play a few rubbers. A fifth sits and watches and, by the end of the evening one of the four has murdered him. Savage takes us far beyond the game, though, into a world of smuggling, a shipwreck, and emotional ghosts, and brings us a new case for his detective, Inspector Graves.

Anya Page’s ‘A Gathering at the Grange’ gives us an atmospheric portrait of a tragedy-laden country house in the First World War. Page was inspired by looking into the war’s influence on Golden Age mysteries with the writing group Wolsey Writers, and ‘meandering down research rabbit holes’. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’ shell-shocked Lord Peter Wimsey, Page’s characters play out the consequences of war while facing their own complex issues in a tightly-woven mystery.

Moving to the 1930s in Arthur Bernard’s ‘Ding Dong Dell’, we encounter the marvellous medium-cum-sleuth Miriam Lazarus, Spiritualism and mysticism were extremely fashionable in the interwar period and in part popularised by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, a true believer. Many Golden Age writers incorporated it into their plots, always ‘playing fair’ (there had to be a rational explanation!). For example, John Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders (1934, written as Carter Dickson), concerns the murder of a spiritualist who is apparently killed by the ghost of a seventeenth-century executioner. Bernard was inspired particularly by Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery (1931) and Dumb Witness (1937) and the film Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard (1939), noting: ‘In these stories the supernatural element turns out to be illusory, but what if the sleuth had a genuine gift? … The story remains a true whodunnit, but with the solution confirmed by magic.’

J.C. Bernthal’s ‘The Body in the Bathtub’ takes us to a country house in the 1920s, with a locked room. In recent years, ‘locked room’ seems to have become a catch-all term for ‘closed circle of suspects’ but in the Golden Age it meant what it said: this subgenre of murder mysteries referred to seemingly impossible crimes where the body is found in a sealed room to which apparently no one had access. Carr was the master of this format, and The Hollow Man (1935) is his most famous example.

‘Midnight Blue Sonata’ by Jorge Molina taps into two golden ages at once: those of detective fiction and of cinema. As Molina says, ‘[b]oth have an air of glamour, style, and other-worldly escapism that I feel really lacks in modern entertainment’. But it isn’t an old-fashioned story: the detective-sidekick pairing in ‘Midnight Blue Sonata’ brings the subtext among the smoke and glitter of the movies. Molina also engages with one of the key tropes of Golden Age mysteries – but to say which would be to spoil it.

Claire Tyler’s twisty ‘Murder on the Honeymoon’ offers a picturesque setting for an apparent suicide that is not what it seems. While the jury is out over how ‘escapist’ crime fiction really is, there is an inevitable, intimate connection between holidays and interwar detective novels, particularly those set in vacation locales. As crime writer Martin Edwards has claimed, Golden Age authors ‘found that stories with holiday settings helped to create a sense of distance and unreality’. Tyler’s choice of detective, and the touching conclusion, show that this ‘unreality’ can enable Golden Age nuance at its best.

‘Vaulting Ambition’, a contemporary detective story from David Hill, takes us into the sporting world, with Golden Age influences including a closed community, a seemingly impossible crime, and a killer twist. Hill’s victim receives threatening text messages, which calls to mind the poison pen letter, a trope commonly linked to the Golden Age. It is significant that nearly all the great detective writers of the time relied, to a greater or lesser degree, to such a literary device in their stories, including Christie (The Moving Finger, 1942), Carr (Night at the Mocking Window, 1950), Sayers (Gaudy Night, 1935), J. J. Connington’s (For Murder Will Speak, 1938), Edmund Crispin (The Long Divorce, 1951), and Elizabeth Ferrars (The Stop that Wouldn’t Clock, 1952). The device shows uniquely how close to the surface tensions simmer beneath our clean plotting and social facades.

M.E. Reynard’s ‘The Cookery Show Conundrum’ provides a definitively twenty-first century backdrop for a classically-inspired mystery: a reality television show. With its closed community of suspects in a unique setting, it follows a tradition established by the Golden Age greats. Food and cookery have always been there in Golden Age mysteries – what was poisoned in Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930)? Would Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe solve anything without a good meal or a fine beer? Cookery is an intensely personal and an intensely social thing – and when it mixes with family tensions it can be a recipe for murder.

‘Tapestry’, Nic Whittam’s multigenerational mystery, is an excellent example of exploring big themes via a tightly plotted puzzle. Whittam started with a piece of art: a cross-stitch that got her thinking about the artist, ‘the person who’d had the patience to complete the piece.’ The intrepid sleuth, determined not to let sleeping murder lie, is a hallmark of the Golden Age, and, like ‘Tapestry’, some key works of the period, like Christie’s Five Little Pigs (1944), hide the truth in conflicting testimonies.

We close with something different. Jonathan Ruffle, best known for creating BBC Radio 4’s Tommies, presents a screenplay, for a truly unique project, ‘The Bureau of Impossible Crimes’. Transporting us into an alternative reality, where T.E. Lawrence has faked his death to join a mysterious government bureau, Ruffle brings us ‘The Case of the Vanishing Spitfire’, which could change the course of the upcoming war. Disappearance lies at the core of Golden Age detective fiction. From people (Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, 1936) to weapons (G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Oracle of the Dog’, 1926) to rooms (Carr’s ‘The Crime in Nobody’s Room’, 1940) or even buildings (Ellery Queen’s ‘The Lamp of God’, 1935), anything or anyone can suddenly vanish into thin air. When this occurs, it generally happens under circumstances that seem, at a first look, utterly impossible. But, even in an alternative reality, we know we’ll get an explanation.

Each of these ten little mysteries is supremely creative, inventive, and engaging. Did the authors adhere doggedly to Knox’s ten commandments? No – nor should they have. Like the pioneers of the Golden Age, these ten authors show that the genre and its legacy have never just meant one thing.

Moving, comic, and always mysterious, these tales are sure to keep you guessing – and reading.

I have been truly honoured to work with these authors, who have each brought something new to a genre that, after so many decades in the spotlight, could easily have gone stale. With eccentric characters, engaging mysteries, and insights into ten different worlds, this was a treat to edit and equally a treat to read. It’s also inspiring, both as a reader and as a writer, to revel in these authors’ sheer creativity.

A final note on my own contribution, ‘The Body in the Bathtub’, which is a country house mystery, and a locked room one – you can probably guess which room is locked! The detective, a governess called Dorothy Snape, may be familiar. She is one year away from working for a local newspaper in ‘Confess Your Secret!’, my story published in Crippen & Landru’s Double Crossing Van Dine. I wonder what work Dot will find next…?