The Golden Age: Fun with Words

 The serious writers of the so-called Golden Age between the wars worked hard to avoid the triteness and shoddiness of pulp fiction. At the same time, they disliked the highbrow fiction of the modernists which broke with the techniques of realism to emphasize inner states of mind, the unconscious, the subjective, and passion over reason (remember: detective fiction is largely a celebration of reason). Instead of using experimental language (as James Joyce did, for example), the Golden Agers strove for 'purity of language.'

They didn't quite mean what linguists call 'purism', since English is far from a 'pure' language, borrowing as it does from so many other languages. It had more to do with plain, realistic speaking. Members of The Detection Club of England, founded in 1930 with members such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Austin Freeman and EC Bentley, vowed with a hand upon Eric the Skull to 'honor the King's English', even while in America Dashiell Hammett was murdering it with clipped dialog and street slang.

(Pictured:  Sayers with Eric the Skull). While they disliked 'experimental' word use, Golden Agers became fascinated with word play. They offered clues in their titles, like Ellery Queen's "The French Powder Mystery" (1930). They gave their detectives a sense of wit in their words, especially Sayers' Lord Peter. Even Christie had linguistic fun with Poirot's fractured and French-ified English (he was Belgian, it should be noted).

Word play was a literary fad that found its way into detective fiction through puns, literary allusions, cultural slang (such as hunting terms), malapropisms, jokes and songs. Detective stories became very 'talky' and dialog dominated the page.

Another reason for this may be that detective novels operate like plays with small groups of actors under stress, set in a limited location, with dialog-driven scenes of interrogation. The characters are often stereotyped and easily identifiable: the ingenue, the vamp, the comic foreigner, the stiff-upper-lip butler, and such. As it turns out, most Golden Age writers were dramatists. AA Milne (despite Pooh) was a serious playwright whose work included mysteries. John Dickson Carr wrote radio plays for the BBC. Sayers' last novel was actually an adaptation of a play. Christie wrote plays her whole life and one of them, "The Mouse Trap," was a thriller that was the longest running play in history. Queen began his novels with a list of 'dramatis personae' like plays do. Going to plays was popular among the middle class in the 1920s, and detective stories brought plays into their homes.

In a sense, Golden Age detective stories follow Aristotle's rules for drama closely, as outlined in his "Poetics". They occur in a limited locale: the village, the country house, the train, the hotel. The closed setting eliminates the possibility that outsiders did the crime. They provide what Aristotle called 'unity of place'. In addition, Aristotle says 'unity of time' is important, so the detective story generally takes place within a matter of hours or days. This may also explain why the mystery is so well-suited to TV.

A second feature of the Golden Age writers was the way they expanded the short form successfully. More on this next time.