Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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.

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] Certain conventions and clichés were established that limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the details of the plot and, primarily, to the identity of the murderer.

The majority of novels of that era were "whodunits", and several authors excelled, after misleading their readers successfully, in revealing the least likely suspect convincingly as the villain.

"[9]: 65 Attacks on the genre were made by the influential writer and critic Julian Symons, who was dismissive of postwar detective fiction in Bloody Murder,[2] Edmund Wilson ("Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

[11] Len Deighton wrote the spy thriller The IPCRESS File to be "ragged and untidy, as life is", and an inversion of "the detective novels of the Thirties".

David Lehman writes: "Every so often somebody reprises Edmund Wilson's famous put-down of detective novels, 'Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?'

Recent writers working in this style include Sarah Caudwell, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Peter Lovesey and Simon Brett.