End of the Golden Age

 I thought I might expound upon Ellery Queen and The Golden Age in America in this posting, but there's plenty about "Manny and Danny" elsewhere. I'd like to focus instead on why the Golden Age ended with World War II and how detective fiction changed after the war.

The chief assumption of the Golden Age was that human beings were ruled by reason. Crimes were committed by wayward individuals, tearing small holes in the fabric of civilized life. These aberrant individuals were exposed, the rips mended, and the detective -- representing order -- triumphed through the use of reason. This belief was applied to nations, too; wayward nations could be reasonably disciplined by a League of Nations and war could be avoided.

Fascism and WWII, however, showed that brute force could overwhelm reason. Irrational people and doctrines could rule over people and nations. Mass murder could be committed by madmen, political strongmen and the people who succumbed to their demagoguery. Suddenly, the comfy world of housemaids and white gloves gave way to a world of air raids, death camps, and The Bomb. Golden Age writers struggled to survive the war.

For one thing, the so-called "Great Detective," the eccentric independent, began to look absurd. Scientific and forensic advances aided police detection and crime-solving. The idea of the inept police coming to the quirky amateur to solve a baffling problem began to look silly. But Christie could not give up Poirot, Allingham could not abandon Campion, and Ellery Queen could not let go of--well, Ellery Queen.

There's a story that Dashiell Hammett, the hard-boiled detective writer, once introduced "Ellery Queen" to a lecture audience by asking, "Mr. Queen, would you be good enough to explain your famous character's sex life, if any?" Such a question was improper for the Golden Age. Holmes distrusted women (having been outwitted once by a beautiful woman), Poirot was an elderly bachelor, Wimsey a gentleman with Harriet Vane and then a faithful husband, Queen a friend to women but never emotionally involved (not even noticing the fluttering eyes of his assistant, Nikki Porter). "Mr. Queen's" answer was that writing about such a thing would upset loyal readers.

Queen's REAL answer was to remove Ellery Queen from the real world in 1942 and put him in the small town of Wrightsville, a place of "complacent elms, wandering cobbles, crooked side-streets nestled in the lap of a farmer's valley, and leaning against the motherly abdomen of one of New England's most matriarchal mountain ranges." Notice how non-sexual, how completely parental the setting is described as being. Queen returns to the safety of the womb, without his pinc-nez glasses and without his Dad in tow, but curiously out of place, an anachronism. Manny and Danny's plotting became more complex and improbable, and eventually Queen was left out of the story altogether. In "The Glass Village," 1954, the members of a small town capture a murder suspect and try him for murder themselves, in a comment on McCarthyism.

Poirot changed a little. He trimmed his mustaches, and, as Christie put it, he became "more of a private investigator and less an engaged enquiry agent." She did, however, remove Poirot as a character from all her plays. She finally tired of him and killed him off (something Doyle tried to do with Holmes and failed). Miss Marple, already in a small village, continued to knit her way through cases.

Dorothy Sayers stopped writing Lord Peter stories altogether, saying she "had tired of a literature without bowels," and turned to translating Dante. She insisted that she had always considered the Wimsey stories as tales of manners, not mysteries.

Margery Allingham changed her main character Campion from a Wimsey-like figure to a more serious man with a deeply lined face. Elements of brooding suspense and horror became more important in her stories. But Ngaio Marsh, another Golden-Ager, refused to change her recipe of taking three characters and adding a murder.

Along with the loss of the "Great Detective" was the abandonment of other Golden Age traits: sketches of the house and murder room, the body in the library, the use of strange poisons and bizarre weapons (such as an icicle). The new writers began to produce "WHYdunnits" rather than "whodunnits" by being more interested in the psychology and social background of the killer and victim. Police changed from being charmingly inept but honest to being corrupt and sometimes cruel, living on the hard edge of society. Some were portrayed as harried, hard-working men who didn't always resolve their cases, such as the I'm-glad-to-be-home-what's-for-dinner-where's-my-pipe Maigret (Georges Simenon, a lifelong student of psychology, was really interested in the mystery of  motives).

The same happened to private detectives, who became tough but adhered to a knightly code of honor. Rape, porn, and explicit violence became more common plot elements. Series detectives became less common, as the post-war public distrusted 'supermen' and publishers felt that the focus on a single, unchanging character hindered the exploration of important social ideas.

In the 1950s, then, there was talk about the detective story being dead. But it wasn't. As British writer Edmund Crispin noted in 1959, "Mrs Christie still has butter to put on her bread, Mr Carr seems confident of being able to support his wife and family. There is happily no hint from America that Mr Queen is feeling the pinch."

But he was. Carr and Queen lost their audiences, replaced by Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. More about them next time.