Over at The American Culture, where my byline can occasionally be seen, scholar Curt Evans has posted two essays on the “Golden Age” of English mystery writing, refuting the common view that a few female authors are all you need to know about the period. He has posted a two-part essay, here and here, entitled “The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings”:
All four of the Crime Queens have been in print in paperback every decade since, while most of their male Golden Age contemporaries languished after their deaths.
It makes sense, then, that the idea of four Crime Queens has solidified over the last sixty years. Even so, this notion is chronologically ahistorical. Not until the very tail end of the Golden Age, or even just after, about 1938-1941, can all four Crime Queens truly have been said to have risen to dominance in the world of British crime fiction. Even Christie and Sayers, who appeared earlier on the mystery scene, in 1920 and 1923 respectively, really only began to tower over most of their male contemporaries in the 1930s, say 1930 to 1935.
There are some good reading suggestions here, if you can find the books.
Sayer’s Nine Tailers is the best mystery novel that I have read…highly recommend.
It’s one of my favorites.
My wife’s Christie and Sayer’s novels take up almost as much space in our library as my many shelves of Louis L’Amour. However, I’m getting to where I find the crime queens to be tedious if not laborious reading. I much prefer the David Suchet Poirot dramatizations than I do actually reading Poirot. That’s unusual because I normally like the book much better than the movie.
I used to really enjoy the cold war era British spy novels such as Len Deighton’s Bernard Sampson series or John LeCarre’s George Smiley. I haven’t found anything like them in recent years. Most of the recent spy adventure stories focus more on action than intrigue and bypass the idea of a hero to feature an anti-hero as protagonist, such as Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp. Who is producing the best intrigue nowadays?
I’ve actually never cared much for reading Christie (Sayers is another matter altogether). I find Christie kind of flat in terms of characters. But dramatizations of Christie are often delightful to me. The actors add the human interest her books lack. Chief among these is Suchet as Poirot. He is superb.
As for intrigue, I can’t say. That’s not a field I read in much.
Lars, I agree with your assessment of Christie. In my teens I though she was great, but my opinion of her work declined as I grew older for exactly the reasons you cite. Sayers, otoh, only grows in my affections.
Anyone read Brad Meltzer? I heard about his latest book on the radio, and it was a pretty good premise.
About Poirot, did y’all approve of Peter Ustinov’s performance? That was the first one I was introduced to, and I often think of Ustinov in that role.
My big problem with Ustinov was that he was, well, too big. Christie clearly described Poirot as a small, dapper man. He is portly, but his fatness is not the main thing about him. Ustinov was just too large to be as obsessively dapper as Poirot is.
I’m absolutely crazy about George Smiley.