The Rise and Fall of the British Detective Novel (2010)
Between around 1910 and 1950, England was in the grip of a genteel crime wave; a seemingly endless output of murder mysteries, generally set among the upper and upper middle classes and usually solved by a brilliant amateur detective rather than by the police. They were read enthusiastically and with an insatiable appetite by British middle-class readers. The ‘golden age’ of the English detective story during this span of 40 years or so is an important and often overlooked feature of English pop