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CRIME FILES
British Murder Mysteries,

1880–1965
Facts and Fictions
Edited by
Laura E. Nym Mayhall
Elizabeth Prevost
Crime Files
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never
been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the radio, on
television and now in computer games, private detectives and p sychopaths,
poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine
criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators a
mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series
offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of
guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime
writing, from detective fiction to the gangster movie, true-crime exposé,
police procedural and post-colonial investigation, is explored through
clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and t heoretical
sophistication.
Laura E. Nym Mayhall • Elizabeth Prevost
Editors
British Murder
Mysteries, 1880–1965
Facts and Fictions
Editors
Laura E. Nym Mayhall Elizabeth Prevost
Department of History Department of History
The Catholic University of America Grinnell College
Washington, DC, USA Grinnell, IA, USA
ISSN 2947-8340 ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic)

Crime Files
ISBN 978-3-031-07158-4 ISBN 978-3-031-07159-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07159-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
The idea for this collection was born at the 2017 meeting of the North
American Conference on British Studies, when Kali Israel, Laura Mayhall,
Elizabeth Prevost, and Mike Saler gave a session on the “history and mys-
tery” of golden-age detective fiction to an audience that included many of
the other scholars who would contribute to this book. In May 2019, the
authors convened for a workshop at the University of Illinois Humanities
Research Institute, generously supported by Antoinette Burton and
hosted by the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. We wish to thank
the University of Illinois, along with other funders of this project, particu-
larly Grinnell College. For critical support at various stages of the manu-
script development, we are extremely grateful to the indefatigable John
Grennan, as well as to Clive Bloom, Arun Prasath, Allie Troyanos, and the
rest of the Palgrave editorial team.
Pace Josephine Tey and Robin Winks, the detective work of history is
an ongoing puzzle rather than an airtight solution; any mistakes here
remain our own.

Elizabeth Prevost
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Laura E. Nym Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost
Part I Fictive Facticity 25
2 Policing
in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock
Holmes: Myths, Monsters, and the Declining Reputation
of the Late-Victorian Detective 27
Amy Milne-Smith
3 Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes

Hamilton’s Fictions of Politics 51
Kali Israel
4 Domesticating
the Horrors of Modern War: Civil Defense
and the Wartime British Murder Mystery 73
Susan R. Grayzel
vii
viii Contents
Part II Genre Fluidity 95
5 Semicolonial
Horsewifery as Detective Fiction: “Trinket’s
Colt” and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M. 97
Antoinette Burton
6 “Magic
is My Business”: Raymond Chandler and Detective
Fiction as Modern Fairy Tale119
Michael Saler
7 “Indecently
Preposterous”: The Interwar Press and Golden
Age Detective Fiction143
Part III Conservative Modernity 163
8 Agatha
Christie in Southern Africa165
Elizabeth Prevost
9 Death
Haunts the Hotel187
Eloise Moss
Bibliography211
Index231
List of Contributors
Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA

Susan R. Grayzel Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA
Kali Israel University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Amy Milne-Smith Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Eloise Moss University of Manchester, Manchester, England
Laura E. Nym Mayhall The Catholic University of America, Washington,
DC, USA
Elizabeth Prevost Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA
Michael Saler University of California, Davis, CA, USA
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Laura E. Nym Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost
Over the last several decades, detective fiction has become a rich arena of
inquiry for literary critics, generating a virtual industry of articles and
books analyzing its engagement with modernism, its function as a form of
middlebrow fiction, and its renegotiation of social, gender, and genre
norms, to name only a few of the most recent themes explored.1 With
notable exceptions, however, detective fiction has not received the same
1
See Paul Peppis, “Querying and Queering Golden Age Detective Fiction: Gladys
Mitchell’s Speedy Death and Popular Modernism,” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3
(2017): 120–34; Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class,
Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Meghan Hoffman,
Gender and Representation in British “Golden Age” Crime Fiction (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016).
L. E. N. Mayhall
The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA
e-mail: mayhall@cua.edu
E. Prevost (*)
Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA
e-mail: prevoste@grinnell.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
L. E. N. Mayhall, E. Prevost (eds.), British Murder Mysteries,
1880–1965, Crime Files,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07159-1_1
2 L. E. N. MAYHALL AND E. PREVOST
attention from historians.2 The introduction to this volume poses the

question animating its production: What do the methods of the historian
add to analyses of detective fiction?
The eight chapters in this volume begin with the premise that detective
fiction is an archive, or a set of sources for historical analysis.3 Historians
are interested in genre and in form, but they are also attentive to the cul-
tural work that texts perform at a given moment in time. The chapters in
this volume thus employ detective fiction as an archive, a set of documents
and sources to be used for historical interpretation. Many of the chapters
draw upon other primary sources as well; the method applied here is not
to suggest causality by juxtaposing sources, but to illuminate linkages oth-
erwise unseen.
In this respect, the collection draws upon Robert Darnton’s under-
standing of folk tales as “good to think with.” In the introduction to his
formative collection of essays, The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton expands
upon Claude Levi-Strauss’s insight that “things are good to think with”:
…individual expression takes place within a general idiom, [and] we learn to

classify sensations and make sense of things by thinking within a framework
provided by our culture. It therefore should be possible for the historian to
discover the social dimension of thought and to tease meanings from docu-
ments by relating them to the surrounding world of significance, passing
2
For an excellent example of an historical treatment of detective fiction, see K.D.M. Snell,
“A Drop of Water from a Stagnant Pool? Inter-war Detective Fiction and the Rural
Community,” Social History 35, no. 1 (2010): 21–50.
3
This project has been inspired by Antoinette Burton’s thoughtful engagements with the
epistemology of the archive; see especially her Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing
House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
and Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005) as well as Robin W. Winks, ed. The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence
(New York: Harper & Row), 1969. Of course, while history is often portrayed as detective
work, Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant famously suggested that detectives also make good
historians in popular fiction. Daughter of Time (1951), a fictional investigation of the truth
behind the “Princes in the Tower” (Richard III’s alleged murder of his nephews in 1483),
was Tey’s last mystery novel; decades later, paperback reprints were still touting the New York
Times’s accolade (probably quoted from Anthony Boucher’s original review) that the book
was “one of the best mysteries of all time,” and “one of the permanent classics in the detec-
tive field.” Josephine Tey, Daughter of Time (New York: Colliers, 1988).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
from text to context and back again until he has cleared a way through a
foreign mental world.4
Darnton applies this approach to folktales, the currency of eighteenth-

century French culture. Further, Darnton has applied a Geertzean mode
of “thick description” not only to stories themselves but to their retelling
by readers, editors, and translators, revealing the hidden ways in which an
“archaic genre” (whether a detective story, a folk tale, or, in this case, a
commonplace book) was “used to impose order on experience in modern
times.”5 Our collection sees detective fiction, by analogy, as a form of
twentieth-century folktale, similarly used to “anatomize society’s
problems.”6
These chapters investigate how British murder mysteries from the late-
nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and were shaped by
their social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of
their authors and readers at critical moments in time. They also reveal the
surprising indeterminacy of the form and function of the genre, subjected
as it was to continual criticism, struggle, and redefinition. Contrary to
stereotypes of British mysteries as “soft-boiled” fantasies that enshrine an
artificially static English society, these case studies show that British detec-
tive novelists worked at the cutting edge of a constantly evolving genre
that reached across geographical borders and disrupted intellectual para-
digms. British detective fiction therefore was, and is, good for thinking
about the larger histories of gender, nation, race, and ideas. Contextualizing
and historicizing detective fiction in this way sheds new light not only on
those who wrote, published, and read detective fiction but also on the
cultural worlds in which these texts were produced and consumed.
4
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 6. Shani D’Cruze has done something similar, reading
interwar crime fiction as “a very productive nexus of ‘stories to think with’ among its middle-
class ‘interpretative community’”; see her “‘Dad’s Back’: Mapping Masculinities, Moralities,
and the Law in the Novels of Margery Allingham,” Cultural and Social History 1, no. 3
(2004): 256–79.
5
Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Perseus, 2009), 154;
see also Great Cat Massacre, ch. 6, and The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History
(New York: Norton, 1990), chs. 7–9.
6
Andrew Marr, “Detectives,” episode 1 of Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr’s
Paperback Heroes, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p040pvpp. Accessed January
15, 2022.
Our approach sees fact and fiction as contiguous rather than opposing
categories and combines historical analyses of particular texts and authors
with comparative explorations of genre and narrative. Thus, this volume
views detective fiction as both subject of and evidence for historical inquiry.
Together, the chapters in this volume offer new ways of conceptualizing
the historical development of modern British detective fiction by revealing
its engagement with real world events, its porousness to other genres, and
its essential yet contested Englishness. These themes run across and
throughout the chapters, but we have organized the collection to high-
light how certain chapters in particular address each theme.
Fictive Facticity
This section explores the interplay between fiction and reality through
chapters illuminating how detective stories shaped contemporaries’ under-
standings of police work, parliamentary political intrigue, and preparations
for war. Here our emphasis expands upon recent scholarship that has
explored how fictions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries
engaged with contemporary concerns. From Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant
Cuff, hobbled in his efforts to solve a crime within aristocratic circles by
his working-class origins (The Moonstone, 1868), to G.K. Chesterton’s
Gabriel Syme, recruited to infiltrate an anarchist society (The Man Who
Was Thursday, 1908), to James Hadley Chase’s Miss Blandish, kidnapped
and murdered through the ineptitude of her captors (No Orchids for Miss
Blandish, 1939), detective fiction has articulated anxieties about changing
configurations of class, gender, race, and politics. Detective fiction thus
acts as a vector of both historical realities and imaginative fictions.
This has partly to do with the genealogy of detective fiction, which
Lucy Sussex, among others, has argued, had “a various set of ‘multifari-
ous’ origins” in the nineteenth century. Rather than situating the origins
of the genre in an author or authors (Poe, e.g.), Sussex argues for a “poly-
genetic approach to the story of crime fiction’s origins and its develop-
ment in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”7 Sources of the
genre thus include crime narratives, the picaresque novel, newspaper
reporting, and melodrama.8 This approach jibes with the consensus that
7
Lucy Sussex, Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The
Mothers of the Mystery Genre (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6.
8
Sussex, Women Writers and Detectives, 6–25.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
has emerged in recent years that any accounting of crime fiction’s begin-
nings in the nineteenth century must include both sensational crime
reporting and sensation fiction, genres critics see as developing in parallel
and complementary formation.9
Crime reporting across the nineteenth century defies easy categories of
“truth” and “fiction.” As Joy Wiltenburg has argued of crime narratives of
the early modern period, “The representation of crime operates semi-
independently of crime itself. In all periods, discourses, and rituals of
crime, rather than direct experience of criminal acts, are the key determi-
nants of crime’s cultural impact.” Tracing the emergence of sensationalist
crime reporting across early modern Europe, she finds generic patterns of
crime reporting that “suggest a powerful interplay among texts, audi-
ences, and authors. Clearly, these texts were shaping broadly held expecta-
tions about how criminal violence was to be recounted and interpreted.”10
This pattern continued into the nineteenth century as various forms of
crime reporting recounted tales of actual crimes in formats suspiciously
fiction-like.
One of the most influential of these texts were the stories collected in
The Newgate Calendar. These accounts of real crimes committed by
inmates in the eponymous prison were published as broadsheets in the
early eighteenth century. Written by the chaplain of the prison, they took
the form of morality tales, demonstrating how a life of crime led to the
gallows. By the late eighteenth century, the broadsides were published in
anthologies and became a source of entertainment among the propertied.
Stephen Knight has shown how the stories recounted in the Calendars
were recycled across 50 to 60 years, creating formulaic tales of crime for
consumption by audiences long after the perpetrator had been executed.11
As Heather Worthington has noted, “With the repetition and rewriting of
long-past accounts, the ‘facts of the case’ became dubious, locating the
narratives more as fiction than fact and emphasizing their amusement
9
Dallas Liddle, “Anatomy of a ‘Nine Days’ Wonder’: Sensational Journalism in the Decade
of the Sensation Novel,” in Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, eds. Andrew Maunder
and Grace Moore (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), 4.
10
Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” American
Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1377, 1392.
11
Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6.
value.”12 These accounts were further spread—and fictionalized—when

publishers made pirated versions of the tales available to broader
audiences.13
The so-called Newgate novels of 1830s and 1840s further mixed fact
and fiction as authors drew upon stories from the Calendars, chronicling
the “adventures and escapes of independent, courageous criminals, often
legendary eighteenth-century robbers and highwaymen.”14 Critics decried
the novels’ creation of sympathetic criminal characters who were depicted
as either victims of an unjust system or heroic individuals stealing to redis-
tribute wealth.15 As Lyn Pykett has insightfully noted, these novels initi-
ated widespread debate in the 1840s as critics warned of their influence on
the behavior of middle-class readers—and, when adapted for the stage, on
working-class audiences—and denounced their effect of blurring hierar-
chies of taste as popular crime literature infiltrated middle-class homes.16
Literary critics see the intertwining of sensational crime reporting and
the sensation novel of the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a
key turning point in the development of detective fiction. The sensation
novel of the 1860s, like the Newgate novel of the 1830s, drew upon con-
temporary concerns to produce stories to horrify and titillate readers.
Once again, the line between fact and fiction blurred as novelists bor-
rowed elements from notorious crimes, either as plot points or as implicit
comparisons, which would have been understood by readers.17 One case
in particular, Constance Kent’s murder of her younger brother in 1860
(the case was unsolved until she confessed in 1865), influenced no fewer
than three sensation novels of the early part of the decade. Lady Audley’s
Secret (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1861), Salem Chapel (Margaret Oliphant,
1863), and The Trial (Charlotte Yonge, 1863) were all published before
12
Heather Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 105.
13
Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 51.
14
Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 35.
15
Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, 106.
16
Lyn Pykett, “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction, 1830-1868,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 31–32.
17
Martin Edwards argues that Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Mystery of Marie
Roget” (1842), “was the very first detective story based on a criminal puzzle from real life”;
see The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective
Story (London: HarperCollins, 2015), 97–99.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Kent’s confession, and each made parallels with newspaper coverage of the
1860 murder as a means of highlighting the emotional power of the
narrative.18
Unlike the Newgate novel, however, the sensation novel transferred
anxieties about crime in Victorian society from the streets to the drawing
room. While the former was written largely by men and treated the lives of
lower-class criminals, the latter was written mainly by women and engaged
with middle-class concerns. Critics attacked the sensation novel, then, not
for creating sympathetic portraits of criminals but for its revelation of
secrets and dysfunction at the heart of the middle-class family. As Jenny
Bourne Taylor has argued, “The sensation novel was seen as a collective
cultural nervous disorder, a morbid addiction within the middle class that
worked directly on the body of the reader and as an infection from out-
side, continually threatening to pollute and undermine its boundaries
through this process of metaphoric transference and analogy.”19 The con-
cern here was with the extent to which sensation fiction accurately por-
trayed middle-class lives as well as with the possibility that reading these
novels could stir middle-class readers to inappropriate action.
The relationship between fact and fiction in sensationalist crime report-
ing and the sensation novel continued into the twentieth century, even as
the detective novel emerged as a subgenre, and practitioners attempted to
distance it from its origins. Novelists found inspiration in actual crimes,
and we see reworkings of contemporary crimes in much of the detective
fiction of the first decades of the new century. Examples abound. Victoria
Stewart has analyzed a number of early twentieth-century detective novels
that revisit solved and unsolved Victorian crimes, including Marie Belloc
Lowndes’s The Lodger (1913) and Letty Lynton (1931).20 In The Documents
in the Case (1930), a collaboration between Dorothy L. Sayers and physi-
cian Dr. Robert Eustace, Stewart argues that the use of epistolary evidence
was inspired by the letters revealed in court during the Thompson-
Bywaters trial of 1924.21 In his account of the formation of the Detection
Club, a group of interwar novelists who combined forces to define the
18
June Sturrock, “Murder, Gender, and Popular Fiction by Women in the 1860s: Braddon,
Oliphant, Yonge,” in Maunder and Moore, Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, 73–88.
19
Jenny Bourne Taylor, The Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative,
and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), 4.
20
Victoria Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 32–33.
21
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 89.
parameters of the genre, Martin Edwards comments on a number of inter-

war novels inspired by actual crimes, including Anthony Berkeley’s (pseud-
onym, Francis Iles) 1929 novel, The Poisoned Chocolate Case, which drew
upon both the Constance Kent murder of 1860 and a lesser-known poi-
soning case of 1870.22 Arguably, part of the appeal of these novels was
their embeddedness in contemporary life—a reader’s recognition of paral-
lels to actual events gave the narrative a frisson of actuality.
And while we can read detective fiction as engaging with contemporary
issues—and there is a lot of evidence that it does—it also shaped reality as
it reinterpreted events through the lens of fiction. The chapters in this sec-
tion suggest that the relationship between fiction and reality could be
murky when it came to writing about crime. Amy Milne-Smith’s chapter,
“Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes: Myths,
Monsters, and the Declining Reputation of the Late-Victorian Detective,”
explores the Whitechapel murders of 1888 to reveal the complex dynamics
between the burgeoning field of detective fiction and media coverage of
police work in late-Victorian London. Juxtaposing contemporary newspa-
per coverage of the murders with subsequent accounts of the cases by
police detectives and officials in early twentieth-century memoirs, she
finds that the prevalence and popularity of detective fiction shaped the
public’s expectations of how quickly the police should solve crimes. In
memoirs written decades after the Ripper murders, police officials felt
compelled to defend themselves against the growing conception that their
earlier work had somehow been inadequate.
The relationship between fiction and reality is also at stake in Kali
Israel’s chapter, “Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes
Hamilton’s Fictions of Politics.” Contemporary critiques agreed that the
novel’s contribution was to capture the atmosphere of parliament. W.M.S.,
who reviewed the novel in the feminist paper, The Vote, rhapsodized:
For women interested in politics—and which of us is not?—the book has a

special fascination, because of the intimate picture it presents of the House
of Commons and the kind of life its Members lead. In addition, there are
many clever character-studies, some of which suggest politicians whom we
all know by sight. None of them is a full-length portrait, of course, but there
is just a suggestion here and there enough to keep us guessing! … But even
more remarkable than our author’s mastery of the technique of the detective
22
Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, 85–88.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
story, is the way in which she has captured the atmosphere of Parliament.
She presents us with a moving picture of the House during an all-night sit-
ting—the dining-rooms, the Terrace, the crowded division lobbies, the wea-
riness and boredom, the “morning after the night before” and those who
read this book will acquire a better understanding of our Parliamentary sys-
tem and a very human sympathy with our legislators.23
The novel’s verisimilitude for contemporaries had its limits, though; its
reviewer in the Labour paper, the Daily Herald, was quick to note that
“incidentally Mrs. Hamilton wrote the story before she lost her seat at the
General Election, the title mustn’t be taken to in any way imply vengeance
on the massed Tory members of the present Parliament.”24 Israel’s chapter
resists any easy biographical reading of Mary Agnes Hamilton’s novel,
arguing instead that it should be read as a catalog of “bigotries and ambiv-
alences” common among interwar middle-class socialist intellectuals, a
different kind of interaction between fact and fiction.
Fiction’s ability to shape reality comes into focus in Susan Grayzel’s
chapter, “Domesticating the Horrors of Modern War: Civil Defense and
the Wartime British Murder Mystery.” In an assessment of several detec-
tive novels written in the lead up to, and during, the Second World War,
Grayzel finds that the genre contributed to removing the horror from
newly introduced items for civil defense, the blackout drill and gas mask.
While evocative of the possibility of mass death, she argues that use of the
drill and the mask as plot points in novels renders them horrifying on a
personal, rather than social, level. By focusing on “local, domestic, and
deeply personal” killings, she argues, these novels collectively make the
“previously unthinkable” prospect of total war a “part of everyday life.”
Thus, although the wartime detective novel normalized the unfamiliar war
setting to an extent that other popular fictions could not accomplish, it
was nonetheless indebted to contiguous genres to serve that function—a
theme explored in the next section.
23
W.M.S., “Our Book Review,” The Vote, November 27, 1931, 386.
24
Roger Pippett, “Books of the Week,” Daily Herald, December 24, 1931, 6.
Genre Fluidity
This section addresses another primary concern of the volume’s contribu-
tors, the utility of the phrase, the “golden age” of detective fiction. Literary
scholar Stephen Knight has cataloged a “coherent set of practices” for
British detective fiction produced between the wars, which includes an
emphasis on rationality over emotion, murder as the crime most worthy of
investigation, and the use of circumstantial evidence made equally avail-
able to the reader and detective.25 The chronology of this volume, how-
ever, is cast intentionally to incorporate texts from the 1880s through the
1960s, in an effort to expand and redefine the parameters of that frame-
work. Perhaps most importantly, the chapters here engage with the con-
cept of the “golden age” less as an explanatory framework created by
literary scholars, and more as a way of thinking about detective fiction that
its contemporary authors created to differentiate their approach from the
more “sensational” novels of the earlier period. In other words, it under-
stands the “golden age” and its “coherent set of practices” as an artifact of
the interwar years, a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, attempt to police
the borders of genre.
Standard genealogies of detective fiction draw a bright line between
novels of the so-called golden age and crime fiction written before and
after the interwar years. Raymond Chandler set the terms of the debate in
his 1944 article, “The Simple Art of Murder,” published in the Atlantic
Monthly. In it, he critiques golden-age fictions as implausible and dishon-
est. He characterizes them thus: “They do not really come off intellectu-
ally as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are
too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world.”26 Postwar
critics were quick to pick up on this, emphasizing distinctions between the
cozies and the hardboiled, between “classic” detective fiction and noir.
Only recently have critics begun to see the limits of this categorization and
to explore the instability of genre in detective fiction of the early to mid-
twentieth century.
A key finding has been that the conventions of the detective novel as it
came to be known in the 1920s originated in the late nineteenth century.
25
Stephen Knight, “The Golden Age,” in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed.
Martin Priestman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77–94.
26
Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1944);
revised and reprinted in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1946), 231.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
Sensation novels had a greater influence on the development of the genre

than traditional accounts of early twentieth-century detective fiction have
acknowledged. Recent scholars point to Fergus Hume’s novel, The Mystery
of a Hansom Cab, as the originator of the crime fiction mystery novel.
Published in Australia in 1886, reprinted in London in 1887, its sales have
been estimated at 340,000 copies by 1888 and at 750,000 during the
author’s lifetime.27 Left out of the canon because it was considered “sen-
sational” by early writers on detective fiction, Hume’s book nevertheless
led the way to future developments in the genre.28 Stephen Knight calls it
“the first best-selling crime fiction mystery novel in English,” and “one of
those remarkable books which set a trend [and] focus a genre,”29 while
Christopher Pittard sees it as “a crucial point in the genre’s transformation
into detective fiction.”30 David Carter and Roger Osborne have argued
that the way the novel points “the crime genre towards detection emerges
in the way the crime itself is set up as a ‘puzzle’ or ‘riddle,’ not at all as a
moral issue; in the amount of realistic detail, not least the ‘real life’ frag-
ments of newspaper and court reports, through which the facts are estab-
lished; and in the nature of the detectives, who, as characters, are almost
wholly detectives and nothing else.”31 The novel’s combination of ratio-
nality and sensation would characterize the genre well into the twentieth
century.
We see this in the number of authors in the 1920s and 1930s who drew
inspiration from sensation novels. Victoria Stewart has identified several
authors whose crime novels, generally left out of the canon of the golden
age, combine elements of ratiocination and sensation. These include Marie
Belloc Lowndes, Joseph Shearing (Gabrielle Vere Long, who also pub-
lished as Marjorie Bowen), and Jessie Rickard (a founding member of the
Detection Club).32 Even authors typically understood as belonging to the
golden age made connections between their own work and that of the
27
David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American
Marketplace (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2018), 91–92.
28
Christopher Pittard, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction
(Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 62.
29
Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000, 52; Stephen Knight, Continent of Mystery: A Thematic
History of Australian Crime Fiction (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 69.
30
Christopher Pittard, “From Sensation to the Strand,” in A Companion to Crime Fiction,
eds. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2010), 108.
31
Carter and Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 93.
32
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 27-28.
sensation novelists. In her much-celebrated introduction to Harcourt

Brace’s 1929 Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers argued, “Taking
everything into consideration, The Moonstone is probably the very finest
detective story ever written. By comparison with its wide scope, its dove-
tailed completeness and the marvelous variety and soundness of its charac-
terization, modern mystery fiction looks thin and mechanical.”33 In the
early 1930s, critics Malcolm Elwin and T.S. Eliot concurred that Collins’s
“sensational” novel pioneered both the modern detective story and the
thriller.34
Yet, in the decades following, the sensational aspect of crime fiction
would become marginalized. Perhaps this was due to the seriousness with
which contemporaries—and scholars after—took attempts by writers of
the so-called golden age to establish rules for the genre. As LeRoy Panek
has noted, much of the criticism of so-called golden age detective fiction
focuses on novels produced by groups previously unrepresented. These
include women (Marjorie Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh,
Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey), academics (G.D.H. and Margaret
Cole, Michael Innes, Ronald Knox, and C.P. Snow), “bright young men”
(Nicholas Blake [Cecil Day-Lewis], John Dickson Carr, Anthony Cox,
and Philip MacDonald), and the so-called hum-drums (Freeman Wills
Crofts and John Rhode, whose plots hinged on railway timetables). These
authors wrote articles on detection (sometimes weighing in on real crimes
in the press), reviewed crime novels for major newspapers, and generally
rewrote the rules for the genre.35 These “golden age” practitioners sought
to legitimize their own work and differentiate it from the thriller, or sen-
sational novel, popularized by Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), Sax Rohmer
(1883-1959), and “Sapper” (1888–1937, pseudonym of H.C. McNeile,
creator of the feisty Englishman, Bulldog Drummond).36 Their attempts
to distinguish detective fiction from other “lesser” forms was both eco-
nomic and aesthetic in motivation.
33
Dorothy L. Sayers, “Introduction,” The Omnibus of Crime (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1929), 22.
34
Stewart, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain, 29.
35
LeRoy Panek, Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain, 1914-1940 (Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1979), 12.
36
Curtis Evans, Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills
Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart, and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2012), 30.
1 INTRODUCTION 13
From the perspective of publishers, differentiation in the market was

necessary to manage the growing numbers of publications aimed at popu-
lar audiences. This process had begun in the 1880s, when expansion and
specialization in the book trade created a “relentless fragmentation and
categorization of fiction.”37 Of this period, Clive Bloom has argued that
mass literacy in Britain did not produce a single mass market; rather, it
created new markets “divided and subdivided” into narrower groups.
“These markets,” he urges, “demanded fictions both diverse and plentiful
with consequences that were far reaching for both authorship and subject
matter.”38 The market forces acting on publishing dictated an ever-
increasing generic differentiation among novels, and authors were cer-
tainly aware of these pressures.39
In the mid-to-late 1920s, formal criticism of the detective novel began
to appear. Tellingly, it was practitioners themselves who produced these
analyses. Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1928 “Introduction” to Great Short Stories
of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (published in the United States in 1929
as The Omnibus of Crime) acknowledged detective fiction’s debt to The
Moonstone, but otherwise derided the “sensational” strand of its origin.
Sayers dismissed the “purely sensational” as a genre in which “thrill is
piled on thrill and mystification on mystification; the reader is led on from
bewilderment to bewilderment … it is never dull, but it is sometimes
nonsense.”40 Sayers’s explication of the genealogy of detective fiction was
one contribution to a growing body of criticism in the 1920s and 1930s
in which practitioners of detective fiction theorized its elements and
defined the parameters of the genre.41 Other anthologies delineated the
genre’s origins and prognosticated its future. As Maurizio Ascari has
argued, even before Sayers’s 1928 introduction, E.M. Wrong’s Crime and
Detection (1926) severed detective fiction’s sensationalist origins by
37
Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914
(London: Fontana, 1991), 340.
38
Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
39
Distinctions of genre pose problems for the classification of novels by libraries; see the
insightful article by Catherine Oliver, “Cozies, Capers, and Other Criminal Endeavors:
Utilizing Taxonomies of Mystery Fiction to Improve Genre Access,” Library Resources
&Technical Services 64, no. 4 (2020): 152–64.
40
Sayers, “Introduction,” 17.
41
For an analysis of the contributions of Sayers’s anthologies to the formation of the genre,
see Victoria Stewart, “Constructing the Crime Canon: Dorothy L. Sayers as an Anthologist,”
Literature & History 30, no. 2 (2021): 105–20.
r elegating all attempts prior to Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes

as “precursors” to the genre.42 Perhaps the most influential anthology was
Howard Haycraft’s 1946 collection, The Art of the Mystery Story, whose
second section, “The Rules of the Game,” made clear the role ratiocina-
tion played in the emerging genre.
And ratiocination is at the core of modern definitions of the “golden
age.” Stephen Knight emphasizes that in novels of the period, “detection
is rational rather than active or intuitional.”43 Yet the rules laid out in Van
Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928) and Ronald
Knox’s “A Detective Story Decalogue” (1929) seem to have described a
relatively small set of books published in the 1920s, those of the puzzle
type.44 Their shared aversion to emotion, intuition, magic, or coincidence
in the solving of fictional crimes seems oblivious to the many ways in
which the most celebrated of the golden age authors consistently violated
their rules. In fact, it is not at all clear that the “golden age” detective fic-
tion’s paradigm of rationality holds for the genre overall. How do we
reconcile the alleged extreme rationality of the genre when its authors are
highlighting the artificiality of reality, valorizing the absurd, and celebrat-
ing the carnivalesque as much as the rational?
Indeed, authors of detective fiction purportedly underwritten by these
rules themselves questioned the rigidity of genre. Sayers’s 1928 introduc-
tion suggested that future iterations of the novel would develop a more
flexible set of conventions, “linking it more closely to the novel of man-
ners and separating it more widely from the novel of adventure.”45 A good
deal of scholarship has revealed the extent to which fictions by Sayers and
Agatha Christie diverged from the golden age model. Critics point both
to its parallels with literary modernism and to its continuing affiliation
with sensation fiction. Laura Mayhall has argued that novels of three of the
so-called “queens” of interwar detective fiction—Margery Allingham,
Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers—moved “away from the strictly
golden age form of the genre to novels of manners; at the same time,
42
Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational
(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 167.
43
Knight, “The Golden Age,” 78.
44
S.S. Van Dine, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (1928),” and Ronald Knox,
“A Detective Story Decalogue” (1929), both reprinted in Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery
Story, 189–96.
45
Sayers, “Introduction,” 36.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
[they] exhibit the self-reflexivity of modernism.”46 Helen Conrad-O’Briain

has charted numerous similarities between Sayers’s 1934 novel, The Nine
Tailors, and classics of sensation and horror fiction. These include The
Moonstone, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand, and The House by the
Churchyard, as well as three ghost stories by M.R. James. The Nine Taylors,
Conrad-O’Briain concludes, realigned the detective genre to address the
theme of divine providence; the novel, she writes, “is not undifferentiated
Gothic, it is ecclesiastical Gothic.”47 And Victoria Stewart has noted both
Christie’s and Sayers’s engagement with spiritualism in their novels, which
she takes as a sign of “the flexibility of the detective genre, which has
tended to take lists of rules such as Knox’s and Van Dine’s as a challenge
rather than a guide.”48
All of the chapters in this collection suggest that instead of locating the
“golden age” of detective fiction in the interwar period, it is more appro-
priate to understand the development of the genre as constituting a “long”
golden age, from the 1880s through the 1960s. During these years, prac-
titioners posited and intentionally and unintentionally breached conven-
tions of the genre. The chapters in Section II question the standard
narrative of the development of detective fiction, revealing that narrative
itself to be an act of interpretation. These chapters examine the work of
authors not typically considered part of the detective fiction canon, sug-
gest new ways of interpreting the work of canonical writers, and juxtapose
the development of detective fiction with another prominent interwar
genre, newspaper crime reporting.
Antoinette Burton’s “Semi-Colonial Horsewifery as Detective Fiction:
‘Trinket’s Colt’ and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M.” submits that Edith
Somerville and Martin Ross’s Irish Magistracy stories can be read as a form
of detective fiction. Defining detective fiction as a genre working within “a
recurrent and formulaic structure in which a ‘crime’ is committed, [and in
which] the detective is charged with solving the mystery, and the precarity
of the social order is revealed as a result,” she provides a new way to think
about Somerville and Ross’s popular comic short stories of the fin de siè-
cle. Juxtaposing “Trinket’s Colt” (1899) with the more canonical Arthur
46
Laura E. Nym Mayhall, “Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in
Interwar British Fiction,” Journal of British Studies 60, no. 4 (2021): 783.
47
Helen Conrad-O’Briain, “Providence and Intertextuality: LeFanu, M.R. James, and
Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 9 (2011).
48
Victoria Stewart, “Spiritualism, Detective Fiction, and the Aftermath of War,” Clues 27,
no. 2 (2009): 83.
Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (1892), Burton sees
the protagonists of both stories linked by an inability to control the “crea-
tures” over which they rule. Conceptualizing the Irish R.M. stories as a
form of detective fiction, she urges that we see all imperial fictions as
detective stories.
Michael Saler’s “‘Magic is My Business’: Raymond Chandler and
Detective Fiction as Modern Fairy Tale” asks us to set aside what we
“know” about Raymond Chandler and instead consider his detective fic-
tion—and indeed, British detective fiction of the “golden age” more gen-
erally—as less rational and more porous to the fantasy and fairy tale
imaginings that traversed the Atlantic. Exploring the influences of human
psychology and relativistic approaches to epistemology, he argues that
Chandler’s mysteries sought to reconcile rationality and imagination
through the detective’s use of deduction and the author’s stylistic prose.
“The very idea that a logical order governed a world that had just under-
gone a catastrophic war, was now burdened by economic upheavals, and
appeared to be headed towards new geopolitical cataclysms,” he argues,
“seemed fantastical to some detective-fiction authors.” Little surprise,
then, that they would balance logic and intuition, rather than privilege the
former over the latter.
Continuing the theme of challenging existing understandings of golden
age detective fiction, Laura E. Nym Mayhall’s “‘Indecently Preposterous’:
The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction” argues that the
genres of interwar detective fiction and press coverage of crime shaped
each other. As the interwar press borrowed narrative forms from fiction to
make news more entertaining, detective writers adopted techniques from
journalism to add verisimilitude to their stories, with both media seeking
to provide morally satisfying narratives at a time of great uncertainty.
Rather than seeing newspaper crime reporting and detective fiction as
separate genres in the interwar years, Mayhall argues that they formed part
of a larger cultural field in which fact and fiction intertwined. Dependent
on “facts,” detective fiction and crime reporting alike provided entertain-
ing and cohesive narratives that both supported the rule of law and chal-
lenged the state to uphold it.
1 INTRODUCTION 17
Conservative Modernity
Perhaps the most vivid challenge to the notion of a stereotypically golden
age of detective fiction lies in the powerful expressions of modernity that
interwar practitioners and consumers located in murder mysteries. Alison
Light, who coined the term “conservative modernity,” led the way in
establishing Agatha Christie as a surprisingly modern thinker and story-
teller who could speak to the interwar anxieties of a changing British class
structure, gender order, and national community. Contrasting the ambig-
uous and uncertain brand of Englishness in the pages of Christie’s original
stories with the nostalgia at work in later adaptations, Light called for “a
more capacious kind of understanding” of conservatism than later “heri-
tage versions” of Christie could express or encompass.49 Since then, other
historicist literary scholars and cultural historians have followed Light’s
example, pressing against the conservative boundaries often attributed to
Christie and her peers. We would argue further that, in identifying and
reworking the dilemmas of its day, detective fiction’s spectrum of “moder-
nity” was no less expansive than its nebulous brand of conservatism.
Light’s understanding of conservative modernity centered especially on
the instabilities of British class society. Christie’s Hercule Poirot func-
tioned as the quintessential bourgeois detective, an “anti-hero” to the
prewar paradigms of honor, justice, and sacrifice that came under fire with
the Great War. In fact, it was not until the late 1920s that the delayed
trauma and lived experiences of war—in poetic, fiction, and memoir
form—reenter public view for psychological scrutiny.50 In the meantime,
detective fiction provided an appealing “anesthetic” through its well-
ordered plots and narrative resolution of the temporary aberration of vio-
lent death.51 Light therefore highlights Christie’s precocious role in
introducing the ironic and anti-heroic iconoclasms that would come to
characterize more mainstream literary modernism later in the interwar
period, inflected through the values and literary tastes of an expanding
bourgeoisie. “In Christie’s world,” emphasizes Light, “nothing is
49
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the
Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 63.
50
On war memory, trauma, and modernist culture, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and
Modern Memory, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Modris Eksteins,
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor
Books, 1989).
51
Light, Forever England, 65–75.
sacred.”52 In contrast, but no less importantly, the aristocratic detectives of

Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh’s literary creations showcased the authors’
ability to reinvent and reconstitute an interwar aristocracy under threat.53
Thus, cautious nostalgia for a traditional English social order served a
variety of modern purposes in the interwar imagination.54 Keith Snell
locates the elaboration of the “cozy” strains of golden age detective fiction
within a longer trajectory of naturalist writing and British rural identity,
which depended in part on an oppositional understanding of depersonal-
ized urban chaos and crime with the intimate networks of knowledge in
the country. At the same time, the village-based settings favored by many
interwar mystery writers deployed rationalist, empirical practices of obser-
vation and detection in which a broad stratum of traditional society could
participate in modern techniques of imposing order on the world.55
Light’s frame helps explain why it was that Poirot, a cosmopolitan Belgian
outsider, dominated Christie’s output in the interwar period—in contrast
to the quintessentially English and village-based Miss Marple, who was
introduced by Christie in 1928–1930 but then largely abandoned until
the postwar period when she came into her own as a different kind of
modern seer.56 Poirot, a Belgian refugee who relocated to the United
Kingdom during the Great War, routinely used his apposite stance and his
plodding sidekicks (notably Hastings) to comment on the peculiarities of
the English and throw their national traits into sharper relief.
Such formulations of “Little England” played a key role in Christie’s
and others’ generic engagement with questions of race and empire.
Despite the historical and literary concerns in recent decades to merge the
optics of metropole and colony, detective fiction has only sporadically
engaged this combined frame.57 (Robin Winks, the monumental historian
of not only detective fiction but also British imperialism, apparently did
52
Light, Forever England, 67.
53
Mayhall, “Aristocracy Must Advertise.”
54
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund
Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), ch. 5.
55
Keith Snell, Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750-2000
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ch. 6.
56
On the modernism of Miss Marple, see Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on
Miss Marple (London: Routledge, 1991).
57
See Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee,
Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
1 INTRODUCTION 19
not see a reason to bring the two together.58) Postcolonial studies of

detection, on the other hand, provide a rich template for interrogating the
mutually constitutive arenas of genre and colonial knowledge.59 In the
context of decolonization, Wendy Webster has identified the “domesticat-
ing” impulses of postwar cultural conservatism that developed in other
popular venues of knowledge production, particularly cinema, which
voiced the backlash against internal and external “enemies” that became
more visible due to mass migration to the metropole and violent conflicts
of insurgency and counterinsurgency on the colonial periphery.60 British
detective fiction reflected and refracted these tensions as well, as was evi-
dent from earlier periods of domestic and imperial uncertainty.
Christie’s and Sayers’s early work, for example, betrayed certain antise-
mitic tropes in their depictions of Jewish characters whose physiognomy
set them outside the English communities in which they were otherwise
socially and culturally rooted.61 Christie’s later encounters with empire,
however, from her vantage points in the Middle East, produced a different
set of representations that linked the investigative work of detectives,
archeologists, and imperial administrators through a modern orientalist
fascination with the ancient past—manifesting the most “conservative”
tendencies of her conservative modernity, which, according to Light,
nonetheless unsettle the “rational universe.”62 For Billie Melman, Christie’s
Middle East mysteries “strongly evoke modernity at the same time as
recovering the experience of archeology and digging in order to unsettle
58
Winks’s studies of crime fiction, including its resonance with/for historical method,
include Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage,
coedited with Maureen Corrigan (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1998); Colloquium on Crime:
Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work (New York: Scribner, 1987); Modus
Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1981); The Historian
as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). He also compiled an
important criticism reader in Haycraft’s vein: Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980).
59
See, for example, Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, eds., Postcolonial
Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (New York: Brill, 2006); Ed
Christian, ed., The Post-Colonial Detective (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001).
60
Wendy Webster, “‘There’ll always be an England’: Representations of Colonial Wars and
Immigration, 1948-1968,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (2001): 557–84.
61
Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke, Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), ch. 6.
62
Light, Forever England, 99–112.
notions about linearity, progress, and temporality.”63 In a discussion of

how crime affects the material reality of life as well as how one imagines it
should be led, Stuart Hall et al. argue that a particular understanding of
Englishness underlies the “traditionalist view” of crime, using images and
themes that resonated with both liberals and conservatives: respectability,
work, self-discipline, authority, neighborhood, and family.64 Thus, as
Kevin Davey reminds us, “Englishness has to be made and re-made in and
through history, within available practices and relationships, and existing
symbols and ideas.”65 Detective fiction, we argue, reworks “existing sym-
bols and ideas” to perform Englishness for a global audience, simultane-
ously making visible and challenging the tensions inherent in that identity.
This discourse of “availability” has also been marshaled to explain the
modern gender coding of detective fiction. Merja Makinen has explored
the range of “available femininities” modeled by Christie’s female actors—
including the flapper, the adventurer, the professional, the investigator,
the independent single woman, the married partner, and the violent crimi-
nal—that slid between and beyond normative constructions of gender,
society, and law in interwar and postwar Britain and the empire.66 These
intersubjective modes of identity coalesced particularly around domestic-
ity—one of Light’s central frameworks for historicizing conservative
modernity against bourgeois aspirations and anxieties—in a period when
renewed fears of women’s contingency and expanding female access to
and influence in the professions, formal politics, and education seemed to
threaten the middle-class sanctity of hearth, home, and family that many
wished to shore up after the Great War. Gill Plain has applied a related
frame to the “corporeal anxieties” that linked Christie’s construction of
the body—alive or dead—with that of her self-styled nemesis, Raymond
Chandler.67
In addition to questioning these gendered boundaries between sub-
genres (i.e., the soft-boiled feminine of the English countryside vs. the
63
Billie Melman, Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near
East, 1914-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 194.
64
Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London:
Macmillan, 1978), ch. 6.
65
Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-British Modernity (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 20.
66
Makinen, Agatha Christie, especially ch. 3.
67
Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010), chs. 1 & 2.
1 INTRODUCTION 21
hard-boiled masculine of urban California), Plain has also argued persua-

sively for a reperiodization of women’s detective fiction: situating Christie
and others within the genre fictions of the “long 1940s” rather than in
rigidly interwar/wartime/postwar camps reveals the full scope of authors’
creative response to massive upheaval.68 And of course, the literary per-
sonifications of authors in this period provided their own opportunity for
domesticating and reclaiming the unregulated and unfriendly marketplace
that professional women crime writers had to navigate. Christie’s Ariadne
Oliver, a successful but frustrated mystery novelist who helped Poirot sort
through many a case and whose creative process and personal habits bore
a striking resemblance to Christie’s, made her novel-length debut in Cards
on the Table in 1936.69 Sayers’s Harriet Vane first appeared in Strong Poison
in 1930 and evolved into Peter Wimsey’s companionate and professional
equal throughout the decade, while simultaneously showcasing the fragile
bastions of modern women’s authority and expertise, particularly the
Oxbridge women’s colleges where the specter of class danger threatened
to undermine gender solidarity at any time.70
Detective stories highlighted the difficult balancing act Sayers and her
closest circle had to navigate between their conservative political ideolo-
gies, their unorthodox relationships and lifestyles, their modest economic
resources, and their sincere belief in the democratization of talent and
opportunity in creative work, as Mo Moulton has traced.71 On the other
hand, detective fiction also provided Sayers a more flexible medium to
engage with these dilemmas of mass culture and mass politics, in pro-
nounced contrast to other elite writers’ circles whose modern sensibilities
68
Gill Plain, Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar, and ‘Peace’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2015), especially ch. 4.
69
Mrs. Oliver initially appeared as a “sensational novelist” in the employ of another private
detective, Parker Pyne, in the 1934 short story “The Case of the Discontented Soldier.”
Agatha Christie, Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 34.
70
Jasmine Y. Hall, “A Suitable Job for a Woman: Sexuality, Motherhood, and
Professionalism in Gaudy Night,” in Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction, eds.
Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 169–76;
see also Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Resistance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), ch. 2.
71
Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford
Circle Remade the World for Women (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Lillian S. Robinson,
“The Mysterious Politics of Dorothy Sayers,” in At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British
Women Write the 1930s, eds. Robin Hackett, Freda Hauser, and Gay Wahman (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2009): 222–33.
scorned popular genre fiction. As Richard Altick once put it, “The history
of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy.”72
Twentieth-century detective fiction writers and readers were keenly aware
that the expansion of this popular market and its audience had a danger-
ous leveling potential, and the common alignment of detective stories
with the British democratic and judicial tradition offered a way to distin-
guish it from contemporary totalitarian states that offered other pathways
for populist empowerment.73 Genre experiments thus had political conse-
quences, expressed as individual and collective imaginings of belonging.
As Michael Saler has shown elsewhere, the “re-enchantment” value of
detective stories and other genre fiction had a modern inflection of ratio-
nalist empiricism that mitigated against pure nostalgia or escapism, offer-
ing instead a dynamic palette for confronting the collective alienation
rendered by industrialization, war, economic depression, and international
instability.74
Section III contributes to a body of literature that has understood
“conservative” and “modern” as complementary rather than contradic-
tory frames for historicizing the genre. Its chapters, respectively, engage
two markers of detective fiction’s conservative modernity: the domestica-
tion of empire and the massification of tourism. In “Agatha Christie in
Southern Africa,” Elizabeth Prevost juxtaposes Agatha Christie’s 1922
travels to promote the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley with a read-
ing of The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) to propose that Christie’s fictions
of independent womanhood should be seen as “carving out a space at
once cosmopolitan and racially insulated.” Building on Light’s explora-
tion of Christie’s colonial and orientalist frames, this chapter suggests the
ways in which conservative modernity selectively occluded the British
Empire in the service of reordering femininity in the metropole. For
Christie, then, detective fiction served more of a personal than a social
recuperative function in the post–World War I context of imperial, sexual,
and familial disruption.
Fictional and social uncertainty characterized the postwar period as
much as the interwar period, but in different ways, as Eloise Moss shows
72
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading
Public, 1800-1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 3.
73
Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New
York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941), ch. XV.
74
Michael T. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual
Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
1 INTRODUCTION 23
in “Death Haunts the Hotel.” Historicizing the work of detective fiction

in (re)constructing normative boundaries of gender, class, race, and age,
Moss explores the relationship between “nostalgia, tourism, and domestic
social tensions” in interwar and postwar novels by Agatha Christie,
J.J. Connington, Henry Holt, and C.H.B. Kitchin, alongside analysis of a
1929 murder at the Margate Hotel. In reading these fictional and real
crime stories against each other, Moss not only recovers the forgotten
subgenre of the hotel mystery but also probes why detective fiction unset-
tled some social categories more than others. Extending the notion of
conservative modernity into the 1960s thus shows that the genre contin-
ued to be as commodious and unpredictable as the hotel spaces that hid
the culprits.
Conclusion
Chapters in this collection span the period from the 1880s until about
1965: a time of massive change for British state and society, in which the
world’s first industrial economy, empire, and social strata unraveled under
the pressures of war. It was also a time of dramatic, if uneven, change for
British literary culture. Our periodization challenges conventional narra-
tives of the evolution of detective fiction as moving from late nineteenth-
century sensation novels through an interwar “golden age” to mid-century
noir. Rather, these chapters show that from the late nineteenth century,
the genre of detective fiction shaped how contemporaries understood
their worlds, and, following the work of Michael Saler, in some cases,
became more “real” than fictive to readers.75 The chapters demonstrate
also the essential Englishness of much British detective fiction as well as its
various engagements with the idea of modernity, explored here less as an
engine of progress than as a response to technological, social, and political
change. Classic British detective fiction is often portrayed as formulaic and
predictable, but this collection shows it to be quite the opposite. Instead,
detective fiction emerges here as an archive of stories “good to think with”
for historians of modern Britain.
75
Saler, As If.
Laura E. Nym Mayhall is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic

University of America. She is the author of The Militant Suffrage Movement:
Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1869–1930 (2003, and in paper, 2020). She
is writing a book about aristocracy, celebrity, and print culture in late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth century Britain and has published on the function of aristo-
crats in “golden age” detective fiction.
Elizabeth Prevost is Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History at Grinnell

College, where she teaches modern British, imperial, and African history. She has
previously published work on mission Christianity, gender, feminism, and colonial
politics, and she is writing a book on Agatha Christie and the global export of
British detective fiction.
PART I
Fictive Facticity
CHAPTER 2
Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper

and Sherlock Holmes: Myths, Monsters,
and the Declining Reputation
of the Late-Victorian Detective
Amy Milne-Smith
A concerned citizen wrote to Scotland Yard in 1909 asking for help and
received the following response: “I am directed by the Commissioner of
Police of the Metropolis to acquaint you that Sherlock Holmes is not a
real person, but a character in fiction.”1 A version of this response was sent
to dozens of letter writers who contacted Scotland Yard and various
government officials seeking help from the legendary detective at the turn
of the twentieth century. Michael Saler notes that Sherlock Holmes is
1
Letter from A. Bathurst to C.W. Salowsky, April 14, 1909. The UK National Archives has
a collection of letters addressed to Scotland Yard between 1895 and 1923. Letter writers
across Europe wrote to the bureau, desperately wanting to know if Sherlock Holmes were
real and if they could contact him. MEPO 2/8449, National Archives.
A. Milne-Smith (*)
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
e-mail: amilnesmith@wlu.ca
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2022
L. E. N. Mayhall, E. Prevost (eds.), British Murder Mysteries,
1880–1965, Crime Files,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07159-1_2
28 A. MILNE-SMITH
perhaps the first character from fiction that not only children, but also
adults, accepted as a real person.2 One year after Arthur Conan Doyle
introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, a very real
killer haunted the streets of London, a rival more sadistic and elusive than
late-Victorian detective writers could possibly imagine. “Jack the Ripper”
was the moniker given to the murderer who stalked the streets of
Whitechapel, elusive to the police who tried to stop him.3 While the killer
left very real victims, with few clues and no credible suspects, “Jack” was
almost entirely a media invention—the ultimate bogeyman, a character
that embodied the latent anxieties of society.4 Holmes was a literary cre-
ation that people honestly believed could catch a very real killer who
would ultimately become more fictive than fact.
The association between the Ripper and scandal journalism has been
well established. Less well-studied is how detective fiction influenced
expectations of the Victorian police in their investigations and in defining
their legacies. Many have assumed that Sherlock Holmes’s shadow hung
over Victorian detectives to an oppressive degree. If one looks for criticism
of Scotland Yard in the 1880s, it is easy to find; however, this is not the
only narrative to discover. A century of reinterpretation and retelling the
police investigation of the Ripper murders has clouded our judgment as to
initial impressions of policing as the investigation played out. In the last 50
years at least, impressions of the case (reaffirmed by countless documenta-
ries, fictional representations, and pop histories) assume that the police
must have been deeply corrupt, incompetent, or uncaring to allow such a
gruesome series of murders to be left unsolved. They also assume that
Sherlock Holmes provided the model for comparison. “Ripperologists”
continue to believe that with enough investigation, the true killer can be
2
Michael Saler, “‘Clap if You Believe in Sherlock Holmes:’ Mass Culture and the
Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-c. 1940,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 3
(2003): 601.
3
The name “Jack the Ripper” first appeared in a letter sent to the Central News Agency.
As Christopher Frayling points out, the character of Jack the Ripper was an archetype of
contemporary moral panic, the manifestation of media and public fears rather than a reflec-
tion of any suspect. Christopher Frayling, “The House that Jack Built,” in Jack the Ripper:
Media, Culture, History, eds. Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007), 13–28.
4
Clive Bloom, Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (London: Palgrave
2 POLICING IN THE SHADOW OF JACK THE RIPPER AND SHERLOCK… 29
unmasked.5 Yet at the time, while there was certainly public frustration
over the inability to catch the killer, critics and defenders alike also played
into long-standing debates about the police. Opinions on the efficacy of
the Yard in the moment were shaped as much by politics and prejudices as
by the particularities of the case.
Scholars have increasingly revisited the degree to which relations
between the police and the public were strained over the course of the
nineteenth century. The diversity of region, time, policed communities,
and type of crime make it difficult to make overarching statements about
the support or efficacy of the Victorian police.6 The detective service was
tasked with establishing authority over growing politicized threats of mass
protest, working-class violence, and international terrorism. In the face of
these pressures, detectives faced the mystery of the Whitechapel murders.7
Contemporary responses to the policing effort ranged from hope through
to despair. One important reason that opinions were not as uniformly
negative as some scholars have portrayed has to do with a long-standing
police tradition of managing expectations in their abilities to fend off
criticism.
5
What often defines the “Ripperologist” is the desire to solve the case rather than the
study of events that took place on their own terms. Some of the prominent examples in the
field include: Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s, 2002); R. Michael Gordon, Alias Jack the Ripper: Beyond the Usual
Whitechapel Suspects (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2001); Bruce Paley, Jack the
Ripper: The Simple Truth (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1996).
6
See, for example, Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd ed.
(Harlow: Longman, 1996), 78–82; David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century
England: Crime, Conflict, and Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997),
126–27; David Taylor, Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in
Middlesbrough c. 1840–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 79; John E. Archer,
The Monster Evil: Policing and Violence in Victorian Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2011), 43–45; David Churchill, “‘I am Just the Man for Upsetting you
Bloody Bobbies’: Popular Animosity towards the Police in Late Nineteenth-Century Leeds,”
Social History 39/2 (2014): 250–51; David Taylor, “Protest and Consent in the Policing of
the ‘Wild’ West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1850–1875: ‘The Police v. the People,’” Northern
History 51, no. 2 (2014): 290–310; David Taylor, “Cass, Coverdale, and Consent: The
Metropolitan Police and Working-Class Women in Late-Victorian London,” Cultural and
Social History 12, no. 1 (2015): 113–36.
7
The mystery would provide an unprecedently long fascination. Drew Gray, “Exorcising a
Demon?: Why History Needs to Engage with the Whitechapel Murders and Dispel the Myth
of ‘Jack the Ripper,’” Humanities 2018, 7(2): 52.
30 A. MILNE-SMITH
The Victorian police tasked with solving the Jack the Ripper killings
were subject to unprecedented pressures. Both mainstream and sensa-
tional media covered the case in minute detail. Scandal journalists claimed
the police were incapable of figuring out who the killer was, and they
published their own wild and unverifiable claims as to the killer’s identity.8
Serialized detective fiction was published alongside real crimes in newspa-
pers reinforcing the idea that all crimes had an eventual solution and blur-
ring the lines between fact and imagination. To counter these pressures,
detectives working the case defended themselves in the media, and wrote
their own memoirs to compete with detective fiction. By the early twenti-
eth century, Whitechapel detectives were even able to use tropes of their
fictional counterparts to shore up their own reputations.
There is hardly a need for yet another chapter on Sherlock Holmes, nor
another addition to the countless investigations into the Ripper murders.9
Instead, this chapter interrogates a moment when the line between fact
and fiction was blurred, and before hindsight became the dominant lens
used to explore the Ripper murders. The rise of detective fiction enhanced
public appetites for crime stories and provided models for how to solve
them, and this had direct consequences for the real police service over
time. In the immediate moment, the Whitechapel murders were a media
sensation, though commentators were divided on what they said about
the actual quality of policing. In the decades that followed, detectives
wrote their own narratives, crafting their identities to establish themselves
8
When there was a gap between the killings, between October and November 1888, the
media ramped up its speculation to fill copy and keep the story alive. See L. Perry Curtis, Jack
the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 29.
9
For excellent work by literary historians on Sherlock in the last five years alone, see: Janice
M. Allan and Christopher Pittard, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Clare Clarke, Late-Victorian Crime Fiction
in the Shadows of Sherlock (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Stephen
Knight, Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century
World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017); James F. O’Brien, The Scientific
Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013). While there has been some good scholarly work on the Whitechapel murders
of 1888, much is the domain of “Ripperologists.” The following is a selection of some of the
excellent scholarship available. Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women
Killed by Jack the Ripper (London: Doubleday, 2019); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful
Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago 1992);
Sarah A. Winter, “‘Two and the Same’: Jack the Ripper and The Melodramatic Stage
Adaptation of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and
Film 42(2) 2015: 174-94.
as professionals and experts with reference to actual events and expecta-

tions raised by fictional detectives. In order to get a sense of public opin-
ion about policing in the aftermath of the Whitechapel killings, it is
important to get a fuller picture of public perception that was informed by
the media, detective fiction, and police memoirs.
Media Stories of the Police in the Autumn

of Horror
The Whitechapel scandal built slowly. The murder of Mary Ann Nichols
the night of August 31 was horrible and unexplained but did not cause
any panic. It was not the first unsolved murder of a woman in Whitechapel
that year, and the public generally accepted that the murders of a few poor
and marginalized people might go unsolved.10 Initial reports of the inves-
tigations into Nichols’s death were generally positive in detailing the
detective work. Stories about “energetic efforts” to seek out clues and
large numbers of detectives “specially engaged upon the case” generally
gave the impression of a police force mobilized to solve the crime.11 Even
the radical, London-based Reynolds’s Newspaper could find no fault with
the Nichols investigation, and was impressed by detectives’ early theories
about the murder.12 In fact, while the press could certainly set themselves
up as rivals to the police, they also published many reports to help the
police squash public speculation.13
There were signals of things to come, however, when a week had passed
and there were still no arrests. While agreeing with police that the killer
must be a lunatic and assenting it was unlikely the killer could escape, one
East End paper started introducing doubts about the ability of the police
alone to catch the killer. There had been more than one unsolved murder
that year in the East End. Until the killer was found, the East London
Advertiser could not support the idea of just waiting and trusting the
10
Beyond the canonical five victims of “Jack the Ripper,” Emma Elizabeth Smith was
brutally assaulted by a gang and died in April, and Martha Tabram was stabbed in August.
“Coroner Wynne Baxter on the Whitechapel Murders,” Penny Illustrated Paper, September
28, 1888, 11.
11
Sheffield Evening Telegraph, September 1, 1888, 4; “The Whitechapel Murder,”
Edinburgh Evening News, September 1, 1888, 3.
12
“Barbarous and Mysterious Murder,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, September 2, 1888, 1.
13
“The Brutal Murder in Whitechapel: What the Police think about the Crime,” Pall Mall
Gazette, September 3, 1888, 7.
32 A. MILNE-SMITH
authorities. It was an urgent matter of self-protection, and they encour-

aged readers “to become a sort of unauthorized detective continuously on
the alert.”14 Such sentiment had less to do with mistrust of the detective
service than with an assumption that the perpetrator was a criminal lunatic
whose crimes had no motive and no reason.
As more women were murdered in increasingly brutal and brazen ways,
the inability to catch a killer was troubling. The crowded nature of the area
would seem to make it impossible for the police not to have a viable clue.
The infamous cartoon in Punch of criminals playing blind man’s bluff with
a police officer is just one in a series of cartoons and articles painting the
police and detective units as out of their depth at best and incompetent at
worst.15 In one cartoon entitled “The latest Whitechapel Murder. Where
are the Police?” a hulking brute has just killed a rather respectable-looking
young woman on the sidewalk. The policeman, in the distance, appears to
be examining a lamp rather than the crime happening behind him.16 With
swirling rumors of evidence, arrests, and contradictory reports, it is no
surprise that the public grew frustrated. As one reporter noted, “the effect
upon a public already well-nigh goaded into exasperation at the continued
non-success of the police to hunt down the murderer was indescribable.”17
The longer the mystery went on, the less willing the papers were to extend
the benefit of the doubt to the police.
Police authorities had little success attempting to defend their actions
and reputations in the moment. And no one’s standing was more dam-
aged by the Ripper murders than Sir Charles Warren.18 Warren’s tenure as
commissioner of Scotland Yard was brief and contentious.19 Warren was
14
“The Whitechapel Murder,” East End Local Advertiser and Tower Hamlets Independent,
September 8, 1888, 5.
15
John Tenniel, “Blind-Man’s Buff.” Punch, September 22, 1888, 138; Arthur A’Beckett.
“A Detective’s Diary à La Mode,” Punch, September 22, 1888, 135; [Arthur A’Beckett],
“Cave Canem! A Page from a Diary kept in the Neighbourhood of Whitehall,” Punch,
October 20, 1888, 191.
16
“The Latest Whitechapel Murder: Where are the Police?” Bristol Magpie, October 6,
1888, 11.
17
“The East End Crimes,” The Sheffield and Rotherdam Independent, October 5, 1888, 5.
18
“Sir Charles Warren,” Globe, October 4, 1888, 1.
19
Warren was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police during the murders, reporting
directly to the home secretary. He resigned in November of 1888, and was replaced by James
Monro. Monro had resigned from his position as assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police after a struggle with Warren. For senior police officials, asserting their efficacy during
the murders and their insider information about the crimes was as much about internal
power struggles as actual information. Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner, The Jack
the Ripper A to Z (London: Headline, 1991), 298–301, 468–71.
quick to defend himself and his service during the investigation. In doing
so, he was not afraid to offend. He deflected blame from his force by
blaming the victims. He claimed the police could do little to stop the mur-
ders “so long as the victims actually, but unwillingly, connive at their own
destruction.”20 He subsequently published a defensive, tone-deaf maga-
zine article in the middle of the Ripper murders that effectively ended his
career.21 The fact that he wrote such a self-justifying piece without even a
reference to the ongoing Whitechapel investigations was a surprising over-
sight given the media furor of the time.
Despite Warren’s ineffective writings, not all reports of policing were
negative. Critiques are well known and correspond to our own modern
stereotypes of incompetent Ripper policing. However, to only address
these negative stories is to cherry-pick results from a complex and evolving
media coverage. The police always had defenders even amid the horrors.
The fact that there were no real clues and no solid leads meant that it was
difficult to blame any failures on police inattention or lack of skill.
Testimony to the overall faith the public had in the police is that with
each death even publications critical of policing expressed renewed hope
that a clue or witness might emerge and the police would catch their killer.
After the death of Mary Jane Kelley, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette
still believed “that the ingenuity of our detective force will succeed in
unearthing this monster.”22 The media was just as likely to make fun of
people playing at detectives as they were the real force.23 Punch may have
published cartoons critical of the police, but they were equal-opportunity
critics. They singled out sensation journalists as actively impeding the
detective’s work.24 They published a comical libretto along with a cartoon
20
“The London Tragedies: Aldgate and Whitehall Crimes, Whitechapel Murder,” The
Daily Telegraph, October 4, 1888, 5.
21
Charles Warren, “The Police of the Metropolis,” Murray’s Magazine, Vol IV,
November 1888.
22
“The Murder in Hanbury-Street, Whitechapel: Remarkable Statement by the Coroner,”
Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1888, 10.
23
In this case, a rather buffoonish character who seems to spend more time drinking than
solving anything. Cumberland Leed, “Manias: The Man with a ‘Private Detective’ Mania,’”
Moonshine, March 31, 1888, 148.
24
In their cartoon “Is Detection a Failure?,” Punch shows a scandal-monger dogging the
heels of a detective, shining a light on him, and obstructing his ability to investigate. He later
smugly sits reading his own sensational stories in his home. The press was happy to spin
stories about suspects, no matter the cost to the investigation. Christopher Frayling, “The
House that Jack Built,” in Jack the Ripper, Warwick and Martin Willis, eds., 20.
34 A. MILNE-SMITH
that came to the defense of the poor detective. It claimed it was the news-
men and “Sensation-mongers” who were the real enemies. Hounded by
the crowds, Commissioner of Police Charles Warren is depicted taking
control and asserting the authority of the police force. He shames the
crowds by singing:
When no clue on the surface is seen,

And the trail is obscure and effaced,
Do you think the Detective’s so green
As to let you know all he has traced.25
The implication here is that the police were working hard behind the
scenes. One can find this idea reiterated in a letter to the editor that used
past police success as justification for faith in their future success.26 In such
interpretations, the public was only privy to a fraction of what the police
were doing, and thus an outsider could not judge the merits of the
investigation.
As the autumn of 1888 ended and Jack the Ripper remained elusive,
media coverage of the policing of the Whitechapel murders was mixed.
While one can easily find criticisms of the force, these were balanced by
those who supported and defended the police. And in some ways, Warren’s
dismissal provided a scapegoat for police failures. There was no devastat-
ing critique or fundamental distrust of the detective bred by the Ripper
murders. Those who were critical of police in 1887 were equally, if not
more, critical in 1889; however, those who supported the police were as
supportive as ever. Media detractors turned quickly to structural policies
rather than any specific failures in the Ripper case of either police officers
or detectives. In November 1888, Home Secretary Henry Matthews
declared that he was confident that the police were neither overworked
nor understaffed.27
25
[Gilbert A’Beckett], “The Detective’s Rescue,” Punch, October 20, 1888, 180.
26
D. “The Detection of Crime,” The Times, October 11, 1888, 3.
27
United Kingdom, House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, November 13,
1888, 330.
The Lure and Limits of Detective Fiction

The role of sensation media in the Ripper crimes has long been recognized
as key in explaining their cultural relevance.28 The Whitechapel police and
detective force also had to contend with the expectations fueled by the
growing body of detective fiction. There were some explicit comparisons
to fictional detectives during the Whitechapel murders criticizing the
police for their inability to follow clues and make deductions.29 By 1888,
detective fiction was an established if diverse genre, the offshoot of a long
history of novels focusing on crime and murder. The fictional detective
was overwhelmingly a private citizen or amateur detective, able to work
outside of the structures of law, government, and reality.30 Just as a full
appraisal of media reports demonstrates a mixed reaction to the quality of
policing, so too did contemporary detective fiction elicit conflicting ideas
of the potential and limitations of the police. The evolution of detective
fiction influenced people’s expectations of police, their understanding of
clues and detection, and the preceived efficacy of the Whitechapel
investigations.
The evolution of detective fiction was marked over the second half of
the nineteenth century. Early stories of policing were grounded in the
reality of the everyday, introducing middle-class readers to the dark side of
the urban environment through hardworking police and detectives.31
However, the detective hero was still emerging as a clear type in works of
fiction into the 1880s. The mute detective Joseph Peters is able to solve
the mystery of Montague Harding’s murder in Mary Braddon’s The Trial
of the Serpent, but only after many years, while a wrongfully suspected man
languishes in a lunatic asylum.32 Wilkie Collins’s detectives are rarely
28
See especially: L. Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001); Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight.
29
“The Whitechapel Murders,” London Daily News, September 24, 1888, 4; “The Police
and the East-End Tragedies,” The Star, September 25, 1888, 2.
30
The number of private detectives increased in the nineteenth century, but never to the
levels of fictional representations. The greatest fiction, of course, is that private detectives
ever investigated murder. This was only true in works of fiction. Haia Shpayer-Makov,
“Revisiting the Detective Figure in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: A View from the
Perspective of Police History,” Law, Crime and History 1, no. 2 (2011): 165–66.
31
Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular
Fiction (Houdsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 148, 161.
32
M.E. Braddon, The Trail of the Serpent; or, the Secret of the Heath (London:
W.M. Clark, 1861).
36 A. MILNE-SMITH
mythologized, and either fail to solve the case, solve it by chance, or solve
it after a number of errors.33 In Great Porter Square, B.L. Farjeon’s detec-
tives are employed to search out clues and track people’s movements; they
are diligent, but hardly geniuses.34 As Franco Moretti notes, as genres
develop it is not always clear which icons or tropes will become the domi-
nant norms.35 Thus, while detective fiction bred an interest in crime in
1888, it didn’t necessarily set out unrealistic expectations.
In the everyday stories of crime and detection, solutions were often the
result of simple perception and dogged application to following clues.36
Writing for the Saturday Review about the state of detective fiction as a
genre in 1886, one author explicitly stated that real detectives should not
be compared to their fictional counterparts. “It is only in pages of fiction
that the detective almost invariably triumphs. The reality falls far short of
the idea; and the scientific deductions, the Protean disguises, the general
fertility of resource, exist rather in the perfervid imagination of poetic
writers than in prosaic everyday life.”37 Ronald Thomas has shown that
even in the most escapist of detective fiction, authors often integrated the
most specialized and up-to-date police and scientific knowledge “to con-
vert disturbing historical facts into a new kind of narrative.”38
There was an awareness on the part of some commentators that per-
haps comparisons were not fair. One Times reporter felt there was no com-
parison to be made between the Whitechapel murders and the greatest
crime stories. As he notes, “Nothing in fact or fiction equals these out-
rages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have
produced upon the popular imagination.”39 Novelist and editor James
Payn was impressed by real police work during the Whitechapel murders
and had no desire to turn to amateur sleuthing like many of his
33
Ellen Harrington, “Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females: Wilkie Collins, Arthur
Conan Doyle, and the Detective Short Story,” Journal of the Short Story in English [Online],
45 (2005).
34
B.L. Farjeon, Great Porter Square: A Mystery (London: Ward and Downey, 1885).
35
Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Literature Quarterly
61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27.
36
“Betrayed by a Glove,” Boys of England: A Journal of Sport, Travel, Fun and Instruction
for the Youths of All Nations, September 24, 1886, 126.
37
“Detective Fiction,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art,
December 4, 1886, 749.
38
Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.
39
“The series of shocking crimes perpetrated in…” The Times, September 10, 1888, 9.
contemporaries. “I am not one of those who cry shame upon the police
because they have failed to discover what half the intelligence (and all the
folly) of London has failed to disclose.”40 When there were no leads and
few clues, it seemed unlikely that any detective could crack the case. “All
the detectives in the world, Vidocq, Lecoq, M’Govan and Pinkerton com-
bined, might well fail when motive is entirely wanting, and when conse-
quently there is no clue to follow.”41 In this case the author grouped all
detectives together, whether real or fictional, further blurring the bound-
aries between fiction and fact.42 Another journalist emphasized that one
could only judge the efficacy of the police force against other national
forces, not against works of fiction.43
This ambivalence about the ability of detective fiction to supersede the
powers of actual detectives is reflected in the earliest fictional accounts of
the Whitechapel murders. The first fictional retellings of the Whitechapel
murders did not fit the genre of detective fiction; instead, authors pro-
vided supernatural or satanic explanations to the crimes. Such criminals
made the inability of detectives to solve the crimes relatable, and under-
standable.44 J.F. Brewer’s The Curse Upon Mitre Square was published
before the final victim died in November 1888. The murderer is discov-
ered to be a resentful, incestuous monk, and the story bore no relation to
any actual evidence or leads of the contemporary investigation.45 An
American dime novel, The Whitechapel Murders; or, On the Track of the
Fiend, followed not British but American and French detectives’ pursuit of
a killer whom the author represented as a deranged Russian murderer.46 In
1894, one story posited the murderer as a vaporous demon.47 Even on the
eve of the First World War, Marie Belloc Lowndes’s most well-recognized
fictionalization of the Ripper story The Lodger is a far cry from a detective
40
James Payn, “Our Note Book,” Illustrated London News, October 13, 1888, 418.
41
Burnley Express, November 17, 1888, 5.
42
“The series of shocking crimes perpetrated in…” The Times, September 10, 1888, 9.
43
“The Latest Horror,” Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, November 10,
1888, 2.
44
Mark Jones, “Jack the Representation: The Ripper in Culture,” in Neo-Victorian
Villains: Adaptations and Transformations in Popular Culture, Benjamin Poore, ed. (Leiden:
Brill, 2017), 164.
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Elyssa Warkentin, “A Bloody Pulp: Women in Two Early Fictionalizations of the Jack the
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detailed; nor is there any authentic source from which any facts can
be derived, as to the subsequent incidents of his life. All that is
related of him in the Acts, is, that after his separation from Paul, he
sailed to Cyprus; nor is any mention made, in any of the epistles, of
his subsequent life. The time and place of his death are also
unknown.
JOHN MARK.
Of the family and birth of this eminent apostolic associate, it is
recorded in the New Testament, that his mother was named Mary,
and had a house in Jerusalem, which was a regular place of
religious assembly, for the Christians in that city; for Peter on his
deliverance from prison, went directly thither, as though sure of
finding there some of the brethren; and he actually did find a number
of them assembled for prayer. Of the other connections of Mark, the
interesting fact is recorded, that Mary, his mother, was the sister of
Barnabas; and he was therefore by the maternal line, at least, of
Levite descent. From the mode in which Mary is mentioned, it would
seem that her husband was dead at that time; but nothing else can
be inferred about the father of Mark. The first event in which he is
distinctly mentioned as concerned, is the return of Paul and
Barnabas from Jerusalem to Antioch, after Peter’s escape. These
two apostles, on this occasion, are said to have “taken with them,
John whose surname was Mark;” and he is afterwards mentioned
under either of these names, or both together. The former was his
original appellation; but being exceedingly common among the Jews,
and being, moreover, borne by one of the apostles, it required
another distinctive word to be joined with it. It is remarkable that a
Roman, heathen appellation, was chosen for this
purpose;――Marcus, which is the true form in the original, being a
name of purely Latin origin, and one of the commonest praenomens
among the Romans. It might have been the name of some person
connected with the Roman government in Jerusalem, who had
distinguished himself as a friend or patron of the family: but the
conjecture is hardly worth offering.
After returning with Paul and Barnabas to Antioch, he was next

called to accompany them as an assistant in their apostolic voyage
through Cyprus and Asia Minor; but on their coming to Perga, in
Pamphylia, he suddenly left them and returned to Jerusalem;――a
change of purpose which was considered, by Paul at least, as
resulting from a want of resolution, steadiness, or courage, and was
the occasion of a very serious difficulty; for Mark having returned to
Antioch afterwards, was taken by Barnabas, as a proper associate
on the proposed mission over the former fields of labor; but Paul
utterly rejected him, because he had already, on the same route,
once deserted them, when they needed his services, and he
therefore refused to go in his company again. This difference was
the occasion of that unhappy contention, the incidents of which have
already been particularly detailed in the Life of Paul. Mark however,
being resolutely supported by his uncle, accompanied him to Cyprus;
but of his next movement, as little is known as in respect to
Barnabas. The next occasion on which his name is mentioned, is by
Paul, in his epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, as being
then with him in Rome; from which it appears, the great apostle had
now for a long time been reconciled to him, and esteemed him as a
valuable associate in the ministry. He is not mentioned in the epistle
to the Philippians, which therefore makes it probable that he had
then gone to the east. In the second epistle to Timothy, Paul
requests that Mark may be sent to him, because he is profitable to
him for the ministry; which is a most abundant testimony to his
merits, and to the re-establishment of Paul’s confidence in his zeal,
resolution, and ability. Whether he was actually sent to Rome as
requested, does not appear;――but he is afterwards distinctly
mentioned by Peter, in that epistle which he wrote from Babylon, as
being then with him. The title of “son,” which Peter gives him, seems
to imply a very near and familiar intimacy between them; and is
probably connected with the circumstance of his being made the
subject of the chief apostle’s particular religious instructions in his
youth, in consequence of the frequent meetings of the brethren at
the house of his mother, Mary. This passage is sufficient evidence
that after Mark had finally left Rome, he journeyed eastward and
joined Peter, his venerable first instructor, who, as has already been
abundantly shown in his Life, was at this time in Babylon, whence, in
the year 65, he wrote his first epistle.
“It is thought by Benson that Mark departed because his presence was required by the
apostles for converting the Jews of Palestine. But why then should Paul have expressed
indignation at his departure? The same objection will apply to the conjecture of others, that
he departed on account of ill-health. The most probable opinion is that of Grotius, Wetstein,
Bengel, Heumann, and others, that Mark was, at that time, somewhat averse to labors and
dangers; this, indeed, is clear from the words, καὶ μὴ συνελθόντα αὐτοῖς εἰς τό ἔργον. Thus
ἀφίστημι is used of defection in Luke viii. 13. 1 Timothy iv. 1. It should seem that Mark had
now repented of his inconstancy; (and, as Bengel thinks, new ardor had been infused into
him by the decree of the Synod at Jerusalem, and the free admission of the Gentiles;) and
hence his kind-hearted and obliging relation Barnabas wished to take him as a companion
of their present journey. But Paul, who had ‘no respect of persons,’ Galatians ii. 11, and
thought that disposition rather than relationship should be consulted, distrusted the
constancy of Mark, and was therefore unwilling to take him. This severity of Paul, however,
rendered much service both to Mark and to the cause of Christianity. For Mark profited by
the well-meant admonition, and was, for the future, more zealous and courageous; and the
gospel, being preached in different places at the same time, was the more widely
propagated. Nor were the bands of amity between Paul and Barnabas permanently
separated by this disagreement. See 1 Corinthians ix. 6. Nay, Paul afterwards received
Mark into his friendship. See Colossians iv. 10. 2 Timothy iv. 11. Philemon 23.” Kuinoel.
(Bloomfield’s Annotations, Vol. IV. p. 504, 505.)
his gospel.
The circumstance which makes this apostle more especially

eminent, and makes him an object of interest to the Christian reader,
is, that he is the author of an important portion of the historical
sacred canon. Respecting the gospel of Mark, the testimony of some
very early and valuable accounts given by the Fathers, is, that he
wrote under the general direction and superintendence of his
spiritual father, Peter; and from this early and uniform tradition, he
accordingly bears the name of “Peter’s interpreter.” The very
common story is also, that it was written in Rome, but this is not
asserted on any early or trustworthy authority, and must be
condemned, along with all those statements which pretend that the
chief apostle ever was in Italy. Others affirm also, that it was
published by him in Alexandria; but this story comes on too late
authority to be highly esteemed. Taking as true, the very reasonable
statement of the early Fathers, that when he wrote, he had the
advantage of the personal assistance or superintendence of Peter, it
is very fair to conclude, that Babylon was the place in which it was
written, and that its date was about the same with that of the epistle
of Peter, in which Mark is mentioned as being with him. Peter was
then old; and Mark himself, doubtless too young to have been an
intelligent hearer of Jesus, would feel the great importance of having
a correct and well-authorized record prepared, to which the second
generation of Christians might look for the sure testimonies of those
divine words, whose spoken accounts were then floating in the
parting breath of the few and venerable apostles, and in the
memories of their favored hearers. As long as the apostles lived and
preached, there was little or no need of a written gospel. All believers
in Christ had been led to that faith by the living words of his inspired
hearers and personal disciples. But when these were gone, other
means would be wanted for the perpetuation of the authenticated
truth; and to afford these means to the greatest possible number,
and to those most especially in want of such a record, from the fact
that they had never seen nor heard either Jesus or his personal
disciples,――Mark chose the Greek as the proper language in which
to make this communication to the world.
His gospel is so much like that of Matthew, containing hardly a

single passage which is not given by that writer, that it has been very
confidently believed by many theologians who suppose an early date
to Matthew’s gospel, that Mark had that gospel before him when he
wrote, and merely epitomized it. The verbal coincidences between
the two gospels, in their present state, are so numerous and striking,
that it has been considered impossible to account for them on any
other supposition than this. But these and other questions have filled
volumes, and have exercised the skill of critics for ages; nor can any
justice be done them by a hasty abstract. It seems sufficient,
however, to answer all queries about these verbal coincidences,
without meddling with the question of prior date, by a reference to
the fact that, during the whole period, intervening between the death
of Christ, and the writing of the gospels, the apostles and first
preachers had been proclaiming, week after week, and day after
day, an oral or spoken gospel, in which they were constantly
repeating before each other, and before different hearers, the
narrative of the words and actions of Jesus. These accounts by this
constant routine of repetition, would unavoidably assume a regular
established form, which would at last be the standard account of the
acts and words of the Savior. These, Mark, of course, adopted when
he wrote, and the other evangelists doing the same, the
coincidences mentioned would naturally result; and as different
apostles, though speaking under the influence of inspiration, would
yet make numerous slight variations in words, and in the minor
circumstances expressed or suppressed, the different writers
following one account or the other, would make the trifling variations
also noticeable. The only peculiarity that can be noticed in Mark, is,
that he very uniformly suppresses all those splendid testimonies to
the merits and honors of Peter, with which the others abound,――a
circumstance at once easily traceable to the fact that Peter himself
was the immediate director of the work, and with that noble modesty,
which always distinguished the great apostolic chief, would naturally
avoid any allusion to matters which so highly exalted his own merits.
Otherwise, the narrative of Mark can be characterized only as a plain
statement of the incidents in the public life of Jesus, with very few of
his discourses, and none of his words at so great length as in the
other gospels; from which it is evident, that an account of his acts
rather than his sermons,――of his doings rather than his sayings, is
what he designed to give.
“Among all the quotations hitherto made from the writings of the most ancient Fathers,
we find no mention made of Mark’s having published his gospel at Alexandria. This report,
however, prevailed in the fourth century, as appears from what is related by Eusebius,
Epiphanius, and Jerome. It is first mentioned by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History, lib. ii.
cap. 16. It appears from the word φασιν, that Eusebius mentions this only as a report; and
what is immediately added in the same place, that the persons, whose severity of life and
manners is described by Philo, were the converts which Mark made at Alexandria, is
evidently false. Epiphanius, in his fifty-first Heresy, ch. vi. gives some account of it.
According to his statement, Mark wrote his gospel in Rome, while Peter was teaching the
Christian religion in that city; and after he had written it, he was sent by Peter into Egypt. A
similar account is given by Jerome in his ‘Treatise on Illustrious Men,’ ch. viii. Lastly, the
Coptic Christians of the present age consider Mark as the founder and first bishop of their
church; and their Patriarch styles himself, ‘Unworthy servant of Jesus Christ, called by the
grace of God, and by his gracious will appointed to his service, and to the see of the holy
evangelist Mark.’ The Copts pretend likewise, that Mark was murdered by a band of
robbers, near the lake Menzale; but if this account be true, he was hardly buried at
Alexandria, and his tomb in that city must be one of the forgeries of early superstition.”
(Michaelis, Vol. III. pp. 207‒209.)
That it is not wholly new to rank Mark among the apostles, is shown by the usages of the
Fathers, who, in the application of terms, are authority, as far as they show the opinions
prevalent in their times. Eusebius says, “that in the eighth year of Nero, Anianus, the first
bishop of Alexandria after Mark, the apostle and ♦evangelist, took upon him the care of that
church.” Πρωτος μετα Μαρκον τον αποστολον και ευαγγελιστην, της εν Αλεξανδρειᾳ παροίκιας,
Ανιανος την λειτουργιαν διαδεχεται. Church History, I. 2. cap. 24. (Lardner’s Credibility of
Gospel History, Vol. III. p. 176.)
♦ “avangelist” replaced with “evangelist”
Of the later movements of Mark, nothing is known with certainty.

Being evidently younger than most of the original apostles, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that he long survived them; but his field of
labor is unknown. The common tradition among the Fathers, after
the third century, is, that he went to Alexandria, and there founding a
church, became bishop of it till his death;――but the statement is
mixed up with so much that is palpably false, that it is not entitled to
any credit.
LUKE.
Very little direct mention is made of this valuable contributor to the sacred canon, in any
part of the New Testament; and those notices which seem to refer to him, are so vague, that
they have been denied to have any connection with the evangelist. The name which is
given in the title of his gospel is, in the original form, Lucas, a name undoubtedly of Latin
origin, but shown by its final syllable to be a Hebrew-Greek corruption and abridgment of
some pure Roman word; for it was customary for the New Testament writers to make these
changes, to accord with their own forms of utterance. Lucas, therefore, is an abridgment of
some one of two or three Roman words, either Lucius, Lucilius or Lucanus; and as the
writers of that age were accustomed to write either the full or abridged form of any such
name, indifferently, it seems allowable to recognize the Lucius mentioned in Acts and in the
Epistle to the Romans, as the same person with the evangelist. From the manner in which
this Lucius is mentioned in the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, it would seem that
he was related to Paul by blood or marriage, since the apostle mentions him along with
Jason and Sosipater, as his “kinsman.” In the beginning of the thirteenth chapter of Acts,
Lucius is called “the Cyrenian,” whence his country may be inferred to have been the
province of northern Africa, called Cyrene, long and early the seat of Grecian refinement,
art, eloquence and philosophy, and immortalized by having given name to one of the sects
of Grecian philosophers,――the Cyrenaic school, founded by Aristippus. Whether he was a
Jew by birth, or a heathen, is not known, and has been much disputed. His birth and
education in that seat of Grecian literature, may be reasonably considered as having
contributed to that peculiar elegance of his language and style, which distinguishes him as
the most correct of all the writers of the New Testament.
His relationship to Paul, (if it may be believed on so slight grounds,) was probably a
reason for his accompanying him as he did through so large a portion of his travels and
labors. He first speaks of himself as a companion of Paul, at the beginning of his first
voyage to Europe, at Troas; and accompanies him to Philippi, where he seems to have
parted from him, since, in describing the movements of the apostolic company, he no longer
uses the pronoun “we.” He probably staid in or near Philippi several years, for he resumes
the word, in describing Paul’s voyage from Philippi to Jerusalem. He was his companion as
far as Caesarea, where he probably staid during Paul’s visit to Jerusalem; remained with
him perhaps during his two years’ imprisonment in Caesarea, and was certainly his
companion on his voyage to Rome. He remained with him there till a short time before his
release; and is mentioned no more till Paul, in his last writing, the second epistle to Timothy,
says, “Luke alone is with me.” Beyond this, not the slightest trace remains of his history.
Nothing additional is known of him, except that he was a physician; for he is mentioned by
Paul, in his Epistle to the Colossians, as “Luke, the beloved physician.” The miserable
fiction of some of the papistical romances, that Luke was also a painter, and took portraits of
Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, &c. is almost too shamelessly impudent to be ever mentioned;
yet the venerable Cave, the only writer who has heretofore given in full the Lives of the
Apostles, refers to it, without daring to deny its truth!
(That Luke was also regarded by the Fathers as an apostle, is shown by the fact that, in
the Synopsis ascribed to Athanasius, it is said, ‘that the gospel of Luke was dictated by the
apostle Paul, and written and published by the blessed apostle and physician, Luke.’)
his writings.
But a far more valuable testimony of the character of Luke is found in those noble works
which bear his name in the inspired canon. His gospel is characterized by remarkable
distinctness of expression and clearness of conception, which, with that correctness of
language by which it is distinguished above all the other books of the New Testament,
conspire to make it the most easy to be understood of all the writings of the New Testament;
and it has been the subject of less comment and criticism than any other of the sacred
books. From the language which he uses in his preface, about those who had undertaken
similar works before him, it would seem that though several unauthorized accounts of the
life and discourses of Jesus were published before him, yet neither of the other gospels
were known by him to have been written. He promises, by means of a thorough
investigation of all facts to the sources, to give a more complete statement than had ever
before been given to those for whom he wrote. Of the time when he wrote it, therefore, it
seems fair to conclude, that it was before the other two; but a vast number of writers have
thought differently, and many other explanations of his words have been offered. Of his
immediate sources of information,――the place where he wrote, and the particular person
to whom he addresses it, nothing is known with sufficient certainty to be worth recording.
Of the Acts of the Apostles, nothing need be said in respect to the contents and object,
so clear and distinct is this beautiful piece of biography, in all particulars. Its date may be
fixed with exactness at the end of the second year of Paul’s first imprisonment, which,
according to common calculations, is A. D. 63. It may well become the modern apostolic
historian, in closing with the mention of this writing his own prolonged yet hurried work, to
acknowledge the excellence, the purity, and the richness of the source from which he has
thus drawn so large a portion of the materials of the greatest of these Lives. Yet what can
he add to the bright testimonies accumulated through long ages, to the honor and praise of
this most noble of historic records? The learned of eighteen centuries have spent the best
energies of noble minds, and long studious lives, in comment and in illustration of its clear,
honest truth, and its graphic beauty; the humble, inquiring Christian reader, in every age
too, has found, and in every age will find, in this, the only safe and faithful outline of the
great events of the apostolic history. The most perfect and permanent impression, which a
long course of laborious investigation and composition has left on the author’s mind, of the
task which he now lays down, exhausted yet not disgusted, is, that beyond the apostolic
history of Luke, nothing can be known with certainty of the great persons of whose acts he
treats, except the disconnected and floating circumstances which may be gleaned by
implication from the epistles; and so marked is the transition from the pure honesty of the
sacred record, to the grossness of patristic fiction, that the truth is, even to a common eye,
abundantly well characterized by its own excellence. On the passages of such a narrative,
the lights of ♦ criticism, of Biblical learning, and of contemporary history, may often be
needed, to make the sometimes unconnected parts appear in their true historic relations.
The writer who draws therefrom, too, the facts for a connected biography, may, in the
amplifications of a modern style, perhaps more to the surprise than the admiration of his
readers, quite protract the bare simplicity of the original record, “in many a winding bout of
linked” wordiness, “long drawn out,”――but the modernizing extension and illustration,
though it may bring small matters more prominently to the notice and perception of the
reader, can never supply the place of the original,――to improve which, comment and
illustration are alike vain. When will human learning and labor perfect the exposition and the
illustration of the apostolic history? Its comments are written in the eternal hope of
uncounted millions;――its illustrations can be fully read only in the destiny of ages. This
record was the noble task of “the beloved physician;” in his own melodious language――“To
give knowledge to the people, of salvation by remission of sins through the tender mercy of
our God, whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us,――to give light to them that
sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,――to guide our feet in the way of peace!”
♦ “critiicism” replaced with “criticism”

♦ERRATA.
♦ All errata noted in this list has been corrected in the foregoing text.
Page 7, line 32, for ‘Griechische’ read ‘Griechisch.’

Page 9, line 7, for ‘verse 7,’ read ‘verse 2.’
Page 10, line 22, for ‘15’, read ‘25.’
Page ♦14, line 38, for ‘Indus,’ read ‘Euphrates.’
♦ “11” replaced with “14”
Page 18, line 36, for ‘Pertuensis,’ read ‘Portuensis.’

Page 25, line 36, for ‘dreams,’ read ‘dream.’
Page 38, line 33, for ‘not,’ read ‘only once.’
Page 45, line 17, delete ‘the number of’.
Page 65, line 23, for ‘after,’ read ‘over;’
line 37 for ‘was,’ read ‘were.’
Page 67, line 39, for ‘avert,’ read ’snatch.’
Page 78, line 2, for ‘have,’ read ‘has;’
line 26, for ‘accounts,’ read ‘account.’
Page 107, line 26, before ‘not,’ read ‘he.’
Page 110, line 22, for ‘an hour,’ read ‘three hours.’
Page 140, line 28, for ‘proposition,’ read ‘preposition.’
Page 220, line 44, for ‘Or that,’ read ‘And by.’
Page 224, line 20, after ‘sake,’ insert ‘of.’
Page 225, line 25, for ‘of any,’ read ‘by any.’
Page 242, line 28, for ‘Aegian,’ read ‘Aegean.’
Page 249, line 34, for ‘as early as A. D. 200,’ read ‘before A. D. 100;’
line 35, after ‘books,’ read ‘supposed to have been written before that
translation.’
Page 262, line 15, for ‘inherits,’ read ‘inherit.’
Page 288, line 25, for ‘second,’ read ‘third.’
Page 312, line 27, for ‘or,’ read ‘and.’
Page 508, transpose ‘Lois,’ in line 31, with ‘Eunice,’ in line 35.
Page 522, line 24, for ‘Nereid,’ read ‘Naiad.’
Page 45, line 9, before ‘baptizer,’ insert ‘his.’
Page 10, line 61, in the second Hebrew word, the final letter should be not ‫ ה‬but ‫ח‬.
The statement on page 339, respecting the exposition of the Apocalypse by Clarke,
appears, on a more careful investigation, to represent his views rather too decidedly as
favoring the ancient interpretation. His own notes are such as unquestionably support that
interpretation; but he has so far conformed to popular prejudice, as to admit on his pages
some very elaborate anti-papal explanations from an anonymous writer, (J. E. C.) which,
however, he is very far from adopting as his own. The uniform expression made by his own
clear and learned notes, must be decidedly favorable to the ancient interpretation, and the
value of his noble work is vastly enhanced by this circumstance.
The view on pages 355 and 361, of the locality of Philip’s and Nathanael’s conversion, is
undoubtedly erroneous. I overlooked the form of the expression――“The next day, Jesus
would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip,” &c. This shows that he was still at Bethabara
when he called both Philip and Nathanael.
materials.
In the narrative of the lives of the twelve, the author has been driven entirely to the labor
of new research and composition, because the task of composing complete biographies of
these personages had never before been undertaken on so large a scale. Cave’s Lives of
the Apostles, the only work that has ever gone over that ground, is much more limited in
object and extent than the task here undertaken, and afforded no aid whatever to the author
of this work, in those biographies. Both the text and the notes of that part of the work are
entirely new; nothing whatever, except a few acknowledged quotations, of those
biographies, having ever appeared before on this subject. A list of the works which were
resorted to in the prosecution of this new work, would fill many pages, and would answer no
useful purpose, after the numerous references made to each source in connection with the
passage which was thence derived. It is sufficient in justice to himself to say that all those
references were made by the author himself; nor in one instance that can now be
recollected, did he quote second-hand without acknowledging the intermediate source. In
the second part of the work, the labor was in a field less completely occupied by previous
labor. But throughout that part of the work also, the whole text of the narrative is original;
and all the fruits of others’ research are, with hardly one exception, credited in the notes,
both to the original, and to the medium through which they were derived. In this portion of
the work, much labor has been saved, by making use of the very full illustrations given in
the works of those who had preceded the author on the life of Paul, whose biography has
frequently received the attention and labor of the learned.
The following have been most useful in this part of the work. “Hermanni Witsii
Meletemata Leidensia, Part 1. Vita Pauli Apostoli.” 4to. Leidiae, 1703.――“Der Apostel
Paulus. Von J. T. Hemsen.” 8vo. Goettingen, 1830.――“Pearson’s Annals of Paul,
translated, with notes, by Jackson Muspratt Williams.” 12mo. Cambridge, 1827.――Much
valuable matter contained in the two first, however, was excluded by want of room.
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British Murder Mysteries 1880 1965 Facts and Fictions Laura E Nym Mayhall Full Chapter

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British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965:

Facts and Fictions Laura E. Nym

British Murder Mysteries,

ISSN 2947-8340 ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic)

Cover illustration: © SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Laura E. Nym Mayhall

Part I Fictive Facticity 25

3 Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes

Part II Genre Fluidity 95

Part III Conservative Modernity 163

Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA

Laura E. Nym Mayhall and Elizabeth Prevost

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

attention from historians.2 The introduction to this volume poses the

…individual expression takes place within a general idiom, [and] we learn to

Darnton applies this approach to folktales, the currency of eighteenth-­

value.”12 These accounts were further spread—and fictionalized—when

parameters of the genre, Martin Edwards comments on a number of inter-

For women interested in politics—and which of us is not?—the book has a

Sensation novels had a greater influence on the development of the genre

sensation novelists. In her much-celebrated introduction to Harcourt

From the perspective of publishers, differentiation in the market was

r­ elegating all attempts prior to Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes

[they] exhibit the self-reflexivity of modernism.”46 Helen Conrad-O’Briain

sacred.”52 In contrast, but no less importantly, the aristocratic detectives of

not see a reason to bring the two together.58) Postcolonial studies of

notions about linearity, progress, and temporality.”63 In a discussion of

hard-boiled masculine of urban California), Plain has also argued persua-

in “Death Haunts the Hotel.” Historicizing the work of detective fiction

Laura E. Nym Mayhall is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic

Elizabeth Prevost is Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History at Grinnell

Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

as professionals and experts with reference to actual events and expecta-

Media Stories of the Police in the Autumn

authorities. It was an urgent matter of self-protection, and they encour-

When no clue on the surface is seen,

The Lure and Limits of Detective Fiction

After returning with Paul and Barnabas to Antioch, he was next

The circumstance which makes this apostle more especially

His gospel is so much like that of Matthew, containing hardly a

♦ “avangelist” replaced with “evangelist”

Of the later movements of Mark, nothing is known with certainty.

♦ “critiicism” replaced with “criticism”

Page 7, line 32, for ‘Griechische’ read ‘Griechisch.’

♦ “11” replaced with “14”

Page 18, line 36, for ‘Pertuensis,’ read ‘Portuensis.’

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

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1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full

Part I Fictive Facticity 25

3 Murder in the House of Commons (1931): Mary Agnes

Part II Genre Fluidity 95

Part III Conservative Modernity 163

Darnton applies this approach to folktales, the currency of eighteenth-

r elegating all attempts prior to Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes