For others, the writing of mysteries and thrillers became a lucrative sideline to more respectable careers. John Buchan was a statesman and colonial administrator who eventually became Governor-General of Canada, but he is remembered now for the thrilling Thirty-Nine Steps. Cecil Day-Lewis was one of England's most respected poets, but the bulk of his income came from murder mysteries written under the name Nicholas Blake. (One reviewer suggested that he actually wrote better when he produced potboilers.) Michael Innes was a Cambridge don, Colin Dexter an Oxford one.
With so much talent and brainpower invested in this field, it is not surprising that many English mysteries transcended the genre and became literary works in their own right, as with E.C. Bentley's classic Trent's Last Case, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and Graham Greene's The Third Man. British mystery writers set standards for quality of writing and plotting that made them the undisputed masters of the genre. Readers began to demand and expect writing of the highest quality, and they got it, as they get it yet from writers like P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.
All this begs the question of why the British for so long have given some of their best writing talents to what is generally considered, even there, a relatively lightweight corner of the writing world.
There are any number of possible answers. One is that the British truly love a puzzle, as anyone who has ever tackled a British crossword will know. Unlike the more straightforward American variety, in which words are simply attached to definitions, British crosswords are fiendishly difficult and cryptic, involving puns, anagrams, palindromes, double meanings, and all other manner of wordplay. To solve a British crossword you may be required to work out that carthorse is an anagram of orchestra or that the letters of World Cup team can be arranged to form talcum powder. (How does anyone ever figure that out?) Spend 10 minutes with an English crossword and you will understand why the British were such accomplished code breakers in the Second World War. Mystery novels clearly touch the same impulse.
Then there is the matter of the famously reserved British temperament. In Britain, outward passion is permitted only for dogs, cricket, and steam trains. In all other circumstances, strong feelings are rigorously suppressed-perfect conditions for a tale of intrigue. It is a noticeable fact that nearly all English murder mysteries take place in small closed worlds-villages, cloistered universities, country houses-that seem outwardly calm, even idyllic, but where currents run deep and long-standing resentments can seethe and fester. The result is that nearly everyone in an English murder mystery is a suspect.
Oh, they all seem rational and calm, offering the inspector tea and clucking over the bewildering unlikelihood that anyone would want to poison dear old Professor Pooter. But then, of course, it turns out that Pooter was a tyrant and a cad with more enemies that Mussolini, and everyone who crossed his path had an itch to splash his tea with strychnine.
This reticence over the display of strong emotions applies as much to authors as to readers, incidentally. One common criticism of the modern British novel is that it is invariably parochial and small-scale, and that British novelists shy away from weighty, large-canvas issues that have absorbed modern American writers from Dos Passos to Bellow. It may be that a murder mystery offers British writers that chance to probe the darker recesses of the human psyche without becoming uncomfortably self-conscious about it. It is probably no accident that even serious works of fiction by writers like Ian McEwan and Graham Swift are often essentially just high-toned mystery novels.
Of course, it's possible that there is a much more straightforward explanation-that the English simply relish the vicarious pleasure of bumping people off. I once interviewed Colin Dexter about his Oxford-based detective series. Noting that a number of his murder victims are university department heads-the sort of people under whom Dexter had worked during a long academic career-I asked him if there might be some measure of wish fulfillment in his choice of victims.
"Oh, yes, absolutely!" he said with a highly contented smile, and went off to get us both another beer.
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