Defining Detective Fiction in Interwar Britain (2013)

In autobiographical anecdote, the British novelist Jeanette Winterson describes how she was awakened to after being sent to the public library to collect some books for her adoptive mother, who, apart from religious tracts, read only detective fiction:[O]n the list was Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. [Mrs Winterson] thought it was bloody saga of homicidal monks.I opened it-it looked bit short for mystery story-and sometimes library books had pages missing. I hadn't heard of T. S. Eliot. I opened it, and . . . read . . . and I started to cry. Readers looked up reproachfully, and the Librarian reprimanded me, because in those days you weren't even allowed to sneeze in library, and so I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day.This story is framed as, in part, paean to Britain's continually under-threat public library services, reminder that they are not just the providers of weekly haul of detective stories for like Mrs Winterson (Winterson), but can also introduce literature-deprived youngster like Jeanette to high culture. In this story, the joke is on Mrs Winterson for her mistake; her desire for escapism inadvertently provides different sort of escape for her daughter. What has to be omitted in this tale of the opening up of the world of proper to the young Winterson is the extent to which Eliot himself, especially during the 1920s, engaged with the kind of writing that Mrs Winterson enjoys: the title of Murder in the Cathedral is not unknowing reference to similarly-named detective novels of the period (Chinitz, T. S. Eliot 135). The dichotomy between popular and high culture is less extreme than Winterson makes it in order to give force to her story, and their purposes for their may indeed, as she shows, be similar. Discussions about the nature of detective fiction at the time of its emergence as dominant cultural force show that although contemporary commentators attempted to locate detective fiction and modernism at very different points on the cultural map, this separation often proved untenable. Interwar debates about detective fiction were no less vigorous than debates about modernism at the same period and indeed, I will argue, were continuous with them.Winterson's exile from the library to read the play on the steps outside and her description later of hoarding forbidden literary fiction under her mattress at home echo the secretive and even shameful sentiments that are sometimes associated with the reading of detective fiction. In essay published in 1929, Marjorie Nicholson, American academic, admitted that, tired out by the brain-work demanded of them by complex modernist texts, readers, particularly scholarly readers like herself, turned with relief to something lighter at the end of the day, and that detective fiction, admittedly escapist, was an escape not from life, but from literature (113). This scenario is echoed in Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948) in which the narrator's father, supposedly at work on modernist novel, passes his time by reading detective fiction (Smith 35). Ostensibly, as Maria DiBattista argues, for Nicholson detective fiction displays a healthy suspicion of the high modernist's preoccupation with besieged, often purposeless and erratic subjectivity. Its interest in human beings is sensibly confined to the question, Whodunit (Di Battista 178). Nicholson suggests that detective fiction has objectivity and straightforward appeal to the intellect that is lacking in other contemporary fiction (114), but this did not make it immune from similar kind of scrutiny to that which more highbrow writing was receiving, as Nicholson's essay itself shows.Nicholson was writing at the end of decade which had seen the rise of new experimental and challenging authors such as Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, as well as the emergence of what later came to be termed the Golden Age of detective fiction, with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. …