Crime writing has evolved at tremendous speed over the last century. The Holmes stories (1886-1927) epitomise a Golden Age, centred on the short story and more interested in the super sleuth hero than in policing or sociology. That bias extended into a second Golden Age, centred on the novel and the ‘Queens of Crime’, Christie, Sayers, and Allingham, but while Christie stuck to formula, the others struck out in new directions.
Sayers shifted focus from episodic crime to the inner life of the investigator. Some find Wimsey annoying, but in the books featuring Harriet Vane, culminating in Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), Sayers developed the criminal novel of manners and laid the basis for most later series. We will look at Gaudy Night, as concerned with women’s education as with crime, and studded with Renaissance epigraphs signalling a new literary self-consciousness for the genre.
Allingham’s breakthrough came later. Her investigator, Campion, began as a parody of Wimsey, and in her earlier novels crimes and settings are Golden Age, but The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is the first great British novel of urban crime and psychopathic violence. Allingham’s departure reflects hard-boiled, Chandleresque developments in the genre, and anticipated the current generic norm of overstretched policing in a grim cityscape.
Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series is the finest, funniest series of recent decades. The second novel, An Advancement of Learning (1971), revisioning Gaudy Night, reconsiders education in a new university rather than hallowed Oxford, with murder and a police investigation in foreground focus. But Sayers’s concern with inner life remains, and her habit of resonant allusions, underpinning exciting mystery with a concern extending to society and culture.
Ian Rankin is among the most popular living writers, primarily for his series featuring DI Rebus. His breakthrough came with Black and Blue (1997), combining current problems and an old, real case, the Bible John murders of 1968-9. The title, from the Rolling Stones, refers to colours of bruising, oil, and policing, and the novel is a Tartan noir state-of-the-nation assessment of Scotland on the verge of devolution.
Running through all are shifting attitudes to policing, women, sex, violence, and corpses that allow crime fiction to chart social history more closely than any other genre.