I Introduction

The history of the detective story proper begins in 1841 with Edgar Allen Poe's Murder at the Rue Morgue. Since then, detective fiction has become one of the most popular literary genres. It has often been denounced as 'literature for the masses', yet throughout its existence, its most remarkable feature was its popularity in all stratas of society. If diversity of audience was a meter for a genre's significance, the literary description of crime, its investigation and solution would rank among the most important writings of our time. Unfortunately, however, detective fiction is judged by its subject rather than its execution, and the subject is admittedly light. On the other hand, the topic of love has been covered by mass-production writers of inferior standing (and judged accordingly), yet few would deny that other authors have produced outstanding literature based on this subject. The same principle applies to any theme: it can be handled artistically and turned into significant literature, or it can be generated by the thousands without any imagination. It may be the most obvious commonplace, but the distinction between 'high art' and 'entertainment', the latter being always tainted with the brush of mediocrity, should in my opinion be obsolete. Undoubtedly, 'trash' in literature exists, but the quality of a text is neither determined by its subject nor by the self-important criticism of a chosen few. A literary canon that excludes any literature on the grounds of popularity and calls it trivial commits the fatal error of narrow-mindedness. Entertainment, light reading, easy listening is not necessarily equivalent to inferiority. In their time, both Shakespeare and Mozart (to name only two) have been accused of triviality, yet today they are considered among the greatest. Who is qualified to decide what is 'good' and what is 'bad'? Learning and culture consist of all aspects they creatively produce, and time and a continuity of reception is the only criterion for their quality. Some works of art, fiction or music survive despite (or because of) their alleged triviality, and a lasting success, more than anything else, elevates the product into significance.

In the case of detective fiction, its prosperity as a genre remains undiminished until this day. Yet some of its authors enjoy a longer stay on the bookshelves than others, and some have to be counted among the outstandingly great. A list of persisting winners, covering the first one 100 years since the genre's 'invention', would have to contain (in chronological order): Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Dame Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. I would consider these the six pillars of detective fiction between 1841 and 1940 (excluding the American school of 'hard-boiled' detection) and would add, as supporting figures, E.C. Bentley, Dame Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Josephine Tey.

The 1920s are considered and called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. reducing the list above to these years, an overwhelming dominance of women writers becomes apparent. Apart from E.C. Bentley, whose novel Trent's Last Case (1913) is regarded as the first 'classic' of the Golden Age, and Edgar Wallace, who was very much in the tradition of earlier detective fiction, the most important writers of that era are women; among these, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers are indubitably the most prominent. Looking at the genre at that time, this fact impressed me as significant, and almost immediately, the question formed itself why this should be so. What are the factors that enabled women to invade and conquer the genre at that particular time? Throughout its history, detective fiction had been dominated by male writers, particularly in Great Britain. The first recorded woman to write a detective novel under her own name, in 1874, was an American, and her novel was not a success. But Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh and Tey, the 'Quintet of Muses' of the Golden Age, were successful, both at their time and today. Why should this be so?

To answer that question, I have examined the two earliest and most prominent writers of the 1920s: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The basic assumption behind the present study is that the social situation of women, its changes through the war years, and the rising emancipation of women are the moving factors underlying the rise of the female detective novelist after the First World War. This general development, however, encases various components that bear little superficial significance to each other. In the following treatise, I will try to answer the question of women's success in the field of detective fiction by taking three fields into consideration: Socio-historic developments, the two authors' biographies and the literature they produced. I have eliminated the other three writers of the 'Quintet of Muses' on the grounds that their respective careers, launched in the late 1920s and early 1930s, were already influenced by other socio-politic factors than the First World War.

In the first chapter, I will take a look at the situation of women between 1900 and 1925. Before, during and, to some extent, because of the First World War, the position of women within society, their rights and options, changed dramatically. By the end of the war, it can be said with little exaggeration that a woman had emerged who was vastly different from the generation before her. All five prominent women writers of the Golden Age were born between 1890 and 1905; they developed as individuals at a time when their sex struggled against centuries of oppression and gained historical victories in their fight. I maintain that this development cannot have failed to form the authors discussed here.

To emphasise this point, I will examine two writers who remain outstanding among their prosperous contemporaries: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. First I attempt to relate their individual lives to the situation of women in the larger society, then I will compare the two authors and highlight their similarities and differences. Finally, and most importantly, I will investigate how this development is borne out in the literature.

Before I briefly outline the core of my thesis, I would like to point out that the area of overall interest covers the years from 1900 to 1925, while the study of relevant literature only begins in 1920, when Agatha Christie published her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I also have to, in all fairness, admit my own bias in favour of Dorothy L. Sayers, whom I always thought the more appealing, more diverse, more readable of the two authors, or any other author of contemporary detective fiction. I will elucidate the reasons for this bias in the course of the treatise.

The argument I will present in the following pages is based on two different aspects, the first of which is again subdivided into two parts. The reasoning is comparable to a number of single threads, relatively meaningless by themselves but, if woven into a throng, forming a rope. It is not straightforwardly simple, but rather mosaic in character, and I have attempted to exhibit the strands separately before braiding them into the conclusion.

The two aspects of the argument consist first and foremost of the hypothesis that the emergence of the female detective novelist after the First World War was caused by each author's individual development. Alleging what I consider a general truth, this, in turn, involves a personal and a socio-historic side, as any person is formed by two influences, namely her or his biography and her or his exposure to society in general. The socio-historic basis is the first to be examined in the following treatise, and I will relate how social, political and historical changes affected the role and status of women in British society, of whom Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were undeniably a part.

As a second step, I will then summarise the two author's biographies, separately first and then combined under the aspect of significant similarities and differences. In their individual evolution, their accumulation of experiences and disappointments, their consecration into values and beliefs lies the second driving force behind their literary career.

The second part of the argument rests on the literary reflection of the socio-historic and biographical aspects of the thesis and thus constitutes the evidence to justify the basic notion that the first two aspects, taken together, enabled these women to produce detective fiction that outshone their male colleagues' and achieved world-wide success.

Finally I would like to warn all readers that I could not prevent giving away some plots.

1 Some Definitions

The nomenclature available to categorise detective fiction is prodigious. To clarify my own usage and differentiate between several common terms which are often used collaterally, I will briefly define at least those categories I have come across in the course of my research.

To begin with, there seems to be little dispute about the term 'crime fiction' as a headword; it covers virtually every text, short story, epistolary novel, prose composition or even drama that concerns itself with the commitment, the obscuring and/or the detection of criminal activity. This includes, as sub-categories, the detective story (or 'whodunit'), the suspense story, the police story, and the spy story. The detective story deals with a crime that is "[...] committed by one of a group of people; the puzzle of the criminal's identity is finally solved, through a process of investigation, observation, and deduction, by an expert detective [...]"^[1]. The expert detective may be a policeperson; in this case, since all the complications of a democratic legal system (search warrants, habeas corpus etc.) gain importance, it is usually called a 'police story'. The detective story includes the focal point of the following study, the classic detective story, but also the hard-boiled detective story, with its scion, the penny dreadful, and the modern psychological crime story. The spy story, in turn, with such prominent representatives as John le Carré, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming or Jack Higgins, is "[...] concerned with a battle of wits and violence between two sides known to the reader from the start [...]"^[2]. Finally, in the suspense story, "[...] it is generally the innocent who are attempting to escape from the criminals."^[3] The terms 'thriller' and 'mystery', though employed in the following, have no distinct definition any more and are used in a most general sense, side-by-side with 'crime novel'.

Classic detective fiction, the central concern of this treatise, is normally defined as the crime fiction predominantly produced in the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which starts in 1913 and ends in the 1930s. However, classic detective fiction was and is produced beyond that date. The classic detective story features a highly intelligent amateur detective of independent means who solves the crime exclusively by ratiocination. The criminal whose identity needs to be disclosed is a single person, usually almost as intelligent as the detective; the 'rules' of the classic detective story demand that she or he is rationally motivated, single or, at most, equipped with one accomplice. Since ratiocination is the detective's prerequisite, readers are expected to follow her or his train of thoughts. To facilitate this, the author must ascertain that all the clues available to the detective are also available to the reader. Therefore, clues are artfully hidden in plain view. In classic detective fiction, the "[...] rules of fair play between author and reader in the game of puzzle-solving were formulated, and generally adhered to [...]"^[4].

^[1] The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th Edition, Oxford, 1985, p. 269

^[2] ibid, p. 269

^[3] ibid., p. 269

^[4] ibid., p. 270