mystery like John Dickson Carr’s Te Hollow Man (1935) may be cardboard, but the puzzle makes it worth reading. Carr was the master of the
“impossible crime”, the howdunit, and once said that in his stories he had devised 83 different solutions to the problem of how a murder victim could be found alone in a locked room. “His reader feels more than the ordinary pressure of suspense… There is an almost painful curiosity besides, a looking for deliverance from the incredible,” wrote Kingsley Amis.
MURDER MOST FOUL Writers with an academic background such as Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin took the genre down a delightful cul-de-sac by popularising the rarefied, ultra- literary mystery sometimes known as the “don’s delight”. Tese funny and lively displays – a favourite of mine is Innes’ Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) – push the detective story towards farcical parody. Although some of these writers
soldiered on with style unchanged as late as the 1980s, the Golden Age was already on the wane by the time Raymond Chandler launched a blistering attack on its weaknesses in his 1944 essay ‘Te Simple Art of Murder’. Chandler excoriated “the flustered old ladies—of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages—who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty”, and praised the realism of writers such as Dashiell Hammett (and by extension himself) who “gave murder back to
the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.” Te British detective story began
to resemble the realistic American model, becoming more accurate in its representation of police procedure, more preoccupied with deviant psychology, and more bloody. Nonetheless, there
were still new writers keeping things cosy. H.R.F. Keating (beginning in 1964 with Te Perfect Murder) wrote charming stories about Indian detective Inspector Ghote. Colin Watson brought a little light sex and satire to the genre in Te Naked Nuns (1975). And Sarah Caudwell channelled the spirits of Innes and Crispin in her marvellous series – the first is Tus was Adonis Murdered (1981) – narrated by the epicene academic lawyer Hilary Tamar, who never reveals what sex he or she is. Some so-called serious crime
writers began to ever-so-slightly patronise their cosy colleagues. In P.D. James’ novel Devices and Desires (1989), one character, distressed by a series of brutal murders, seeks escape in one of Keating’s books: “Ghote… would get there in the end because this was fiction: problems could be solved, evil overcome, justice vindicated, and death itself only a mystery which would be solved in the final chapter.” Cosy writers have been defiant in
response and many would echo Simon Brett’s proud declaration that
he writes “solely to entertain”. Brett’s feather-light novels, notably the sequence featuring the struggling actor and heroic boozer Charles Paris – the first is Cast, in Order of Disappearance (1975) – are unpretentious and genuinely funny. Te same is true of M.C. Beaton’s series about the caustic retired PR agent Agatha Raisin, which began in 1992 with Agatha Raisin and
the Quiche of Death. For these writers,
the emphasis is not on the
solving of ingenious puzzles but on humorous characterisation. Gone are the aristocratic private detectives; today’s cosies oſten star ordinary people, not unlike their readers, who stumble reluctantly into mysteries.
SOCIAL ISSUES As many crime writers are now engaging with serious social issues in a way that literary fiction fails to, many readers long for murder to be the stuff of escapism once again. J.B. Priestley made the point in
his essay ‘Reading Detective Stories in Bed’. “We are hemmed in now by gigantic problems that appear as insoluble as they are menacing, so how pleasant it is to take an hour or two off to consider only the problem of the body that locked itself in its study and then used the telephone.” Aſter dutifully reading those
crime writers who look the world’s gigantic problems square in the face, what a relief to plump up the pillows, snuggle down with Brett, Beaton, and their forebears and, in Priestley’s phrase, “make the mind as cosy as the body”.