Bringing Up The Bodies: Golden Age Detective Fiction and the buried past, 1920-1970

Abstract

Detective fiction of the ‘Golden Age’ begins after the First World War. The sense that this severed the present era from a formerly continuous narrative of history can be seen in the language of the decades after the war: full of gaps and cleavages, of never-healing wounds. I read the popularity of detective fiction between the wars as a symptom of this perceived chasm in history, as a form that repetitively played out a wound to community and history before closing it again. Detective fiction offered what historians and war-books could not and did not: a refuge in narrative, in a specific and particular Englishness which denied that any fragmentation had ever taken place. When this denial could not be maintained, it employed the detective as historian to construct a narrative in which disconnected evidence could be accurately emplotted to restore the past event as it really happened. The interwar period was a time in which the genre channelled most effectively the anxious imagination of the British public, providing a reassuring narrative in which confusions were untangled, senseless death was explained, and anxiety was resolved and purged, but following it into the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as its popularity begins to decline allows me to register a similar decline in the role of historian-detective. Without ceasing to register a concurrent and persistent need for the consolatory narrative offered by detective fiction, its offered closures and historical recuperations move from earnestly attempted historical convalescence to a recuperative process that is self-aware and self-conscious about its own desire for the past. Using five writers whose work falls between the 1920s and the 1970s, I examine the way their fiction makes imaginative links with history, and the different way this manifests depending upon the period in question. The medieval village was a structure used to insist that life in the country could still be lived in continuity with the forms, functions, and patterns of a way of life which stretched back to the medieval past. The Elizabethan past – usually specifically the Shakespearean past – became particularly resonant after the Second World War in an attempt to reconstruct a consolatory self-image of Britain. In contrast, the nineteenth century is not invoked between the wars out of any desire to establish continuity; rather, the Victorian past in these novels is neither dead nor alive, and still in need of ontological fixing. The First World War as an event is usually deferred and avoided whenever possible, but in novels where it must be confronted, attempts to use existing methodology to contain and address the war prove inadequate.