[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

It seems to me that much of what was written between the wars in the UK was an escape from the fairly grim realities of life for many people, and I see the romantic notion of charming aristocrats such as Lord Peter very much in that vein.

I have been reading The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards. He is the current President of the Detection Club. He was also the club's first Archivist.

Spoiler:

Can you imagine being a fly on the wall at one of their dinner parties?! To quote Wikipedia for those who aren't aware:

The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R. Austin Freeman, G. D. H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E. C. Bentley, Henry Wade, and H. C. Bailey. Anthony Berkeley was instrumental in setting up the club, and the first president was G. K. Chesterton. There was a fanciful initiation ritual with an oath probably written by either Chesterton or Sayers, and the club held regular dinner meetings in London.

I borrowed the book from an Overdrive library. The second chapter is biographical details about Dorothy L. Sayers. There were a few passages that I would like to share that support Bookpossum's post. I think it's also interesting to consider how the detective story in this period was evolving.

The movers and shakers in the Detection Club were young writers who at first pretended to write according to a set of light-hearted ‘rules’. This symptomized the ‘play fever’ that swept through Britain after the First World War, when games as different as contract bridge and mah-jongg captured the popular imagination, and crossword puzzles were all the rage. After the loss of millions of lives in combat, and then during the Spanish flu epidemic, games offered escape from the horrors of wartime – as well as from the bleak realities of peace. Economic misery seemed never-ending......Detective stories offered readers pleasure at a time when they feared for the future. As the Wall Street Crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering end, writers prided themselves on coming up with fresh ways of disguising whodunit or howdunit, but the most gifted novelists itched to do more, to explore human relationships and the complications of psychology.

Sayers, a woman as forceful as she was erudite, believed the detective story could become something more than mere light entertainment. ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said shortly after its formation, ‘it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’

Her intentions were satiric rather than snobbish. A detective who was not a professional police officer, she reasoned, needed to be rich and to have plenty of leisure time to devote to solving mysteries. She conceived Wimsey as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, and found it amusing to soak herself in the lifestyle of someone for whom money was no object......Having fun with Wimsey offered relief from the depressing reality of life on a tight budget. The rent for her flat was seventy pounds a year, and she struggled to make ends meet. As she told her parents, in one of her innumerable frank and entertaining letters, writing about Wimsey ‘prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want, and see no chance of getting ...’ If the novel did not sell, she intended to abandon her literary ambitions, and take up a permanent job as a teacher.