The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels of similar patterns and styles, predominantly in the 1920s and 1930s. The Golden Age proper is in practice usually taken to refer to a type of fiction which was predominant in the 1920s and 1930s but had been written since at least 1911 and is still being written.
In his history of the detective story, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, the author Julian Symons heads two chapters devoted to the Golden Age as "the Twenties" and "the Thirties". Symons notes that Philip Van Doren Stern's article, "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley" (1941),[1] "could serve ... as an obituary for the Golden Age."[2] Authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh have been collectively called the Queens of Crime.[3][4]
- ^ Stern, Philip Van Doren (1941). "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley". Virginia Quarterly Review. 17: 227–236. Reprinted in Haycraft, Howard (1976). Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (Revised ed.). New York: Biblio and Tannen.
- ^ Symons, Julian (1974). Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. London: Penguin Books. p. 149. ISBN 0-14-003794-2.
- ^ "Four Queens of Crime". Oxford University Department for Continuing Education.
- ^ Medawar, Tony (June 2019). "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: An A to Z of the Golden Age of Crime and Detective Fiction". Sidelights on Sayers. 66. Dorothy L. Sayers Society: 10–11. JSTOR 48609853.