Now that civil war has broken out in Dallas, we turn our attention to quieter methods of disposing of one's foes. We look back fondly to the good old days, when Britannia ruled the world and only criminals and country squires had guns. The so-called Golden Age of murder mysteries ran between World Wars I & II, roughly 1920-39, and that can hardly have been a coincidence. One must always have a certain quota of death in one's daily routine. Nostalgic for life before Hitler, one turns indolently to The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins, $28) in hopes of losing oneself in the arcana of well-plotted demise. One is disappointed.
There are many things to recommend The Golden Age . Its title, for one, which suggests a broad and exhaustive study, a search for clues political and aesthetic, a delving into the psychology behind the urge to commit serial murder literarily, and some hunches as to why the vast reading public still curls up with "a good murder" instead of, say, a nice book of improving verse. A truly worthy study would include not only English but American, not to mention French �" or as the insular Brits say, Continental �" forays into the genre. The ideal tome would be logically ordered, with diagrams and in-depth analysis, ruthless, witty, efficient, and seductive.
Alas, The Golden Age fails to live up to its title, which was no doubt slapped on by a hopeful publisher. Hidden in plain sight, appended as a mere subtitle, is the author's slightly more realistic description: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story. A more accurate title still would be, The Detection Club of London, from its inception in 1928 to the onset of World War II, plus any old thing I, Martin Edwards, decide to throw in, in order to meet deadline and satisfy my contract. This last I deduce from the scattershot writing, an inability to stay on topic, and that dead giveaway: large font. Alarmingly, footnotes appearing at the end of each chapter, in the same large font, are neither numbered nor otherwise marked in the text proper.
"The mystery" alluded to in the subtitle concerns the failed private lives of some, but not all, of the well-published names in English detective novels in the interwar period. That's a cute concept that Edwards fails to follow through on. He spends most of his time on Dorothy Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, who between them devised and led the Detection Club, but is perhaps forced to include Agatha Christie, who ended up as its president after the other two abandoned the genre. Christie never faltered, turning out genre-defying and -defining classics year after year. How annoying that must have been. How they must've wanted to kill her. Unfortunately, some wonderful British mystery writers who were never invited to join the Club, because their books diverged from its strict criteria, are similarly excluded from The Golden Age.
As one slogs through Edwards' disorganized jumble sale of biographical sketches (including some writers you'll never read, or hear of again), plots of novels Edwards randomly selects, true crimes that spellbound the British public, arcane details of the Detection Club's rites and rituals, photos of Club members and a facsimile of its Constitution and rules from 1932, gossip and shallow character analysis, and countless digressions leading up blind alleys like so many red herrings, one forms the vague impression that life between the wars in England was a bittersweet business. Murder between friends in polite surroundings seems the ultimate tribute to a disappearing way of life in a declining civilization unsuited to industrial warfare.