The Discreet Charm of Murder – why the ‘country house’ whodunnit retains its power to enthrall…

In his review (Guardian 12.04.14) of a 1946 novel by Gladys Mitchell (Here Comes a Chopper, published by Vintage’s new crime fiction imprint), Nicholas Lezard considers the enduring – and, to some readers, baffling – appeal of the English country house murder mystery. Alluding to Chandler’s celebrated distinction, in The Simple Art of Murder, between realistic or ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction – of the kind Chandler himself wrote – and what the latter saw as the contrived mechanisms of many English murder mysteries of the same era, Lezard concludes that, sixty years after Chandler’s essay was first published, ‘there is room in the world for both the hard-boiled and the soft-boiled.’ The fact is, says Lezard, that – ‘hackneyed’ or not – these novels by Agatha Christie and her peers, of which Mitchell was one, are ‘simply enjoyable’. Like P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, they reflect a world that is long vanished, and yet whose elements are intimately known to us through the medium of the written word.

Given that I am midway through the second of a proposed series of detective stories, set in the late 1920s, I could not be more heartened by this vote of confidence in a genre which has always been a favourite of mine as a reader

http://www.christinakoning.com/archives/category/detective-fiction

– and to which I am now about to add. I have to confess here to a conflict of interest. Because much as I love the classic ‘whodunnit’, with all its ingenuities – and occasional improbabilities – of plot, I don’t really see my books like that at all. For while Line of Sight (published this month by Arbuthnot Books) is about a murder – and one, moreover, which occurs in a country house – I like to think it is as far from being a traditional ‘cosy’ as… well, as one of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. Chandler, who saw himself as pre-eminently a realist, portraying the ‘mean streets’ of mid-twentieth century urban life in all their violence and squalor, was also a brilliant (and much parodied) stylist. It’s this combination of tell-it-like-it-is realism and literary virtuosity that has become the default setting for much contemporary crime fiction, up to and including the recent publishing phenomenon of ‘Scandi-Noir’.

And while my writing is nowhere near as graphic in its depiction of violence as that of, say, Jo Nesbo, I would place it in a realist tradition. In writing about the period immediately after the First World War, I’ve tried to show a society deeply damaged by that conflict, in which people still carried the scars – physical and psychological – of the hellish experiences they’d been through. Like Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, my central character has been directly affected by the war, and is living, to some extent, ‘among the ruins’ (in D H Lawrence’s resonant phrase). Nor is he the only one of my characters to have been thus affected; all of them, in one form or another, are seen to have been casualties of ‘the war to end all wars’ – from the woman (a minor character), whose shellshocked husband has to be left with a neighbour, while she goes out to work, to the war profiteer whose nefarious activities have made him a target for murder.

In writing Line of Sight, I wanted to show the world as it was then – very close to our own in many respects, as well as being, in others, light years distant from it. Nuances of language, as well as details of clothes, cars and setting, were important to get right. I wanted to show how these people thought and felt, as well as how they looked. Nor was I interested in writing pastiche: the murder mysteries of the ‘Golden Age’ cannot be improved upon, in my view. To write ‘in the style’ of Christie, Sayers et al would only be to invite invidious comparisons. What did seem worth illustrating was the connection – obvious once you look for it – between the wider social disintegration brought about by the Great War and the more specific social break-down evinced by the act of murder. The ‘discreet charm’ of the murder mystery for readers of the 1920s and afterwards owes something to this, I feel. After the ‘cataclysm’, with all its millions of deaths, what more comforting kind of fiction could there have been than one in which individual death takes precedence – in which bodies are found in the libraries of country houses, butlers are suspected, and in which, with a little ‘order and method’, the perpetrator can be brought to justice, and the status quo restored?