Talk:Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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Original research?[edit]

This is both a charming and fairly accurate evocation of Golden Age mysteries, but doesn't this qualify entirely as original research? And the country-house mystery, while admittedly predominant, was not quite the only type of Golden Age mystery to achieve success. There's Freeman Wills Crofts and his Humdrum compatriots like G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, for instance, and Edgar Wallace and the Golden Age thriller writers, who may have outsold everyone mentioned here combined, and the Had-I-But-Known school exemplified by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Ethel Lina White. I'm going to try to dig up a copy of "Snobbery With Violence" and see if I can flesh this out a bit. Accounting4Taste 18:01, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ther are also the forensic/legal mysteries of R. Austin Freeman (well known enough in the period that they are refered to at least twice in the Lord Peter Wimsey books) which do not follow this outline at all. There re other sub-genres as well. For the matter of that the later Dorothy L. Sayers works dot't follow this at all closely. DES (talk) 00:36, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have, with regret, removed the original research portion of this article... I just couldn't justify leaving it in place since it was impossible to reference. If someone can come up with a way to tie this to third-party references, by all means return it, I did and do think it's charming and clever, just inappropriate. Accounting4Taste 15:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The article must necessarily be vague about when the Golden Age was, and which writers were part of it, and cannot satisfy everybody. The seven rules and 20 rules, it seems to me, are not really that relevant as they apply to detective stories in general, and not just those from the Golden Age. This article has some difficulties... There are anthologies, certainly, and there may be one with a scholarly treatment of when, who and what. If someone can find one, then this article would not have to contain such monstrous waffling as "The Golden Age proper is in practice usually taken to refer to a type of fiction which was predominant in the 1920s and 1930s but had been written since at least 1911 and is still being written — though in much smaller numbers — today." 24.27.31.170 (talk) 02:03, 27 September 2011 (UTC) Eric[reply]

Quite unacceptable definition of Golden Age[edit]

There must be some misunderstanding in the author's mind about the duration of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction: it quite simply cannot be limited to the years 1920 to 1937. The Yahoo Group GAD Fiction, dedicated to aficionados of the genre, accept it as lasting from 1910 to 1960, which seems about right given that Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room came out in 1907 and a number of writers such as Ngaio Marsh continued into the late 50's.

The quotation from the introduction to the Brand book makes absolutely no sense: "From the first of Christie's books to the last of Sayers'" So does two thirds of the output of the greatest GA writer of them all, Christie, fall outside the Golden Age just because Sayers stopped writing in 1937? Two thirds of Carr's and Queen's output would be similarly guillotined and three-quarters of Marsh's, not to mention the entire output of Anthony Boucher, Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin, Michael Gilbert and on and on and on. It is prima facie utterly absurd. Please have someone authoritative rewrite this article or Wikipedia will have egg all over its face.

Owenburns 21:27, 26 September 2007 (UTC)Owen Burns[reply]

I trust that you will find the recent emendations sufficiently authoritative; please feel free to add your own quotations from objective third-party critics on the topic. Accounting4Taste 03:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]


I think the recent emendations are perfectly satisfactory. The bell curve may have peaked around 1935 but it started around 1910 and continued until 1960, attenuating all the while.

Owenburns 02:14, 28 September 2007 (UTC)owen burns[reply]

"No Chinaman must figure in the story"[edit]

WTF -- Where did this come from. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.159.97.130 (talk) 05:46, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"This was not a display of racism on the part of the good Father, but simply his reaction to what was one of the most hackneyed ploys of cheap detective stories." -- footnote in Josef Skvorecky, Sins for Father Knox, tr. Kaca Polackova Henley. 91.107.132.142 (talk) 11:17, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also, Agatha Christie, often seen as one of the best-known names of the Golden Age, frequently broke the "no twins/identical doubles" rule, for example in A Murder is Announced and Lord Edgware Dies (in LED, there's an imitator actress, but Christie exaggerates her ability to fool an entire dinner party for hours, which would be a whole different kettle of fish than imitating someone for ten minutes up on a stage). 192.121.232.253 (talk) 14:05, 11 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"No Chinaman must figure in the story"

Where's that leave Earl Derr Biggers or Marquand who set at leat one Moto in China? James Lee Wong? I think Van Dine had one Chinese character in the Kennel story. I was told Goodchild set his early stories among Chinese n Limehouse. This "rule" sound ridiculous. 100.0.196.219 (talk) 04:20, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Read the footnote. It's of a commentary on cliched racist writing of the time. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 11:42, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest that some of the above comments take Knox's rules much too seriously. They were written very much tongue in cheek: a satire on some of the clichés that were common at the time. Knox never expected them to be followed. Mike Marchmont (talk) 08:50, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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