Even Tey’s first full-length detective novel, The Man In The Queue, is most impressive, memorably describing the bleakness of an investigation in which the police know almost nothing, not even the identity of the victim.Īll the Queens made use of humor, with that lightness of touch that characterized the best of writing between the wars.

Such titles should be taken with a grain of salt, but the book (which examines the guilt of King Richard III, popularly understood to be one of history’s great villains) stays with one for years after reading. Her classic The Daughter Of Time was voted the best detective novel ever written by a Sunday Times survey. It is the four Queens who have stood the test of time and become the equivalent of household names in the world of crime fiction.

Tey’s output was limited in quantity, but was of outstanding quality. Allingham challenges our sense of ethical integrity there is a certain ambiguity about her detective, and on at least one occasion we are invited to believe that he has resorted to killing the murderer himself because he despairs of the ability of the prosecution service to bring the killer to justice. Sayers was probably the weakest plotter, yet her prose is magnificent, and generations of readers have fallen in love with Lord Peter Wimsey. Agatha Christie was a consummate plotter, though some find some of her characters a bit wooden. It is a difficult question to answer in general terms since, as might be expected, each has her own strengths. Yet it is the four Queens who have stood the test of time and become the equivalent of household names in the world of crime fiction. GK Chesterton, Anthony Berkeley, Edmund Crispin, and Nicholas Blake spring to mind at once, and an honorable mention should go to Freeman Wills Crofts, who not only could make a railway timetable seem positively interesting, but was the first of the Golden Age writers to introduce a professional police detective as a protagonist. Of course there were male writers too, and good ones at that. In fact many of these books were written well after the Second World War, but they continued to follow the traditional pattern and to make use of such much-loved literary devices as mistaken identities and mysterious foreigners, not forgetting the convenient side door which is customarily left unlocked. By way of background, the Golden Age is commonly taken to be the period between the two World Wars although this is more a convenient label than an accurate description.

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