Social Negotiations: Class, Crime and Power

Abstract

Popular preconceptions of these six novelists and, indeed, the whole detecting genre tends to associate their works with conservative politics and against the democratising forces of modern society. Crime fiction implies naming and capturing a criminal. This, in turn, suggests the restoration of both a moral and social order. Such a restitution can easily condense into a social conservatism which manifests itself as a nostalgic re-forming of social classes. The elements of such a structure are perceptible in five of the six authors, Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh and James, but it is heavily compromised in the golden age quartet by their distinguishing self-referentiality. By portraying detecting as a self-consciously fictional ‘game’, golden age writers both democratise the form in promoting reader participation and, crucially, permit a self-critical depiction of social class embedded in the genre.