Lands of Hope and Glory? Englishness, Race and Colonialism

Abstract

These six queens of crime are not chroniclers of Britain when it comes to the negotiation of national identity. The kingdoms of Wales and Scotland rarely merit a murder. Northern and western regions of England occasionally appear as remote areas in which wealthy southern settlers fail to evade nefarious pasts. These six novelists are artists of the dominant region of English political culture in the twentieth century, the southern and eastern lands radiating from London. The detection of crime in the English hearth and home almost obsessively concentrates on what are still known as the ‘home counties’. Therefore this chapter will look at the novels in the context of the construction of a dominant form of Englishness, still deeply imbued with class structures (see Chapter 3), but nevertheless formed in tension with a constant preoccupation of twentieth-century Britain: race and the legacy of colonialism.