Agatha Christie and the truth about detective fiction’s Golden Age

A hundred years ago, the Golden Age of detective fiction was taking off. In the years that followed, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their contemporaries wrote classics that still delight readers today. But the great crime books of the inter-war years – and the politics of the people who wrote them – have long been misunderstood.

Critics routinely dismissed the stories as cosy, conservative, and conventional. Lavish TV and film adaptations reinforced the stereotype. The reality is that many fascinating writers of classic crime fiction were left-wing or even – like Bruce Hamilton (the godson of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and his better-known brother Patrick – Marxist. Their books reflected their politics in a variety of ways. 

Even the twentieth century’s leading historian of the genre, Julian Symons, fell into the trap of thinking otherwise. In his influential Bloody Murder, he argued that ‘Almost all the British writers of the twenties and thirties…were unquestionably right-wing.’