Back From The Dead: The Golden Age Revival by Tom Mead

In a field as diverse as crime fiction, “Golden Age” means different things to different people. To some, it’s an intractable term for murder mysteries written between the World Wars. Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, John Dickson Carr, E.C.R. Lorac, Christianna Brand, et al are all exemplars of the Golden Age crime novel. But to others – myself included – it is in fact a considerably looser term which refers to a certain style of murder mystery, and one which has been enjoying a well-deserved renaissance in recent years. 

To me, the Golden Age is synonymous with the puzzle mystery, where a detective is tasked with identifying a criminal through the use of logic and deduction. There are bonus points, too, if the reader is able to play along and have a crack at solving the case themselves. 

Even after the Golden Age officially ended, this type of mystery did not go away. Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, several high-profile authors produced numerous works that fall within that category. For example, Simon Brett’s Fethering mysteries feature amateur sleuths in a village setting – thematically speaking, pure Agatha Christie. Meanwhile, Paul Doherty’s mysteries are set hundreds or even thousands of years in the past, but nonetheless employ classic Golden Age plotting techniques, such as the “closed circle” of suspects, the sifting of alibis, and the “impossible crime.”

Other authors have interpolated Golden Age-style puzzle plotting in contemporary police procedurals. Think of Peter Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series, Martin Edwards’s Lake District mysteries, or Kate Ellis’s Wesley Peterson series. All of these bear the deductive hallmark of the Golden Age, albeit subtly. 

As for my own experience, I grew up in a house full of Agatha Christie novels; they were among the first "grown up" books I actually read. So the Golden Age was a constant presence throughout my formative years, both in book form and on TV thanks to the ITV Poirot adaptations, plus the frequent repeats of films like Murder on the Orient Express. But when I went to university and studied English lit and creative writing, there was a tendency to lean away from "genre" fiction and toward the more overtly literary. 

However, the Golden Age has a funny way of creeping back into your conscious mind. Inevitably, I delved into the past, and returned to the authors I’d loved when I was younger. To my surprise and delight, I found that I enjoyed them more, not less. But not only that; there were heaps of “new” authors (new to me, anyway) whose works had been out-of-print for almost a century but were now enjoying posthumous rediscovery. Authors I’d never heard of before, like John Bude and J. Jefferson Farjeon. 

This boom in Golden Age reissues over the last ten years or so has been largely spearheaded by Martin Edwards’s British Library Crime Classics series and Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series. Coupled with certain high-profile critical reassessments by genre scholars like Edwards himself (The Golden Age of Murder), John Curran (The Hooded Gunman), Curtis Evans (Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery), and Jeffrey Marks (Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography) – not to mention A-list Hollywood movies like Knives Out – it’s fair to say the Golden Age whodunit is back with a vengeance. 

Anthony Horowitz, for instance, has recently commenced a wonderful new series which is not only Golden Age in style, but about the Golden Age. I’m talking about Magpie Murders, where a vintage mystery pastiche is coupled with a present-day murder plot, perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the revival. Meanwhile, authors like Janice Hallett and Vaseem Khan write complex puzzle mysteries which offer the same level of reader satisfaction as the classics. Pleasingly, the trend appears to be global, with authors such as Sulari Gentill (Australia) and Ovidia Yu (Singapore) combining the puzzle plot and the historical fiction milieu to excellent effect. Additionally, the way in which the Golden Age style is evoked can be startlingly diverse – ranging from the cosy crime of Robert Thorogood to the Scandi-noir of Ragnar Jonasson.

Whichever way you look at it, there is a steadily growing crowd of authors who are endeavouring to recapture the style, the distinctive characters, the period detail, and the great plots that made the Golden Age golden. My own books Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel are my attempts to engage with this revival. As both a writer and a reader, I’m eager to see where we go from here. 

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus) Out of Now

In London, 1938, young and idealistic lawyer Edmund Ibbs is trying to find any shred of evidence that his client Carla Dean wasn’t the one who shot her husband dead at the top of a Ferris Wheel. But the deeper he digs, the more complex the case becomes, and Edmund soon finds himself drawn into a nightmarish web of conspiracy and murder. Before long he himself is implicated in not one but two seemingly impossible crimes.

First, a corpse appears out of thin air during a performance by famed illusionist “Professor Paolini” in front of a packed auditorium at the Pomegranate Theatre. Then a second victim is shot dead in a locked dressing room along one of the theatre’s winding backstage corridors. Edmund is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and attracts the suspicion of Scotland Yard inspector George Flint. Luckily, conjuror-turned-detective Joseph Spector is on the scene. Only Spector’s uniquely logical perspective can pierce the veil of deceit in a world of illusion and misdirection, where seeing is not always believing.

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 12th October at £20

More information about Tom Mead and his work can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook and on X @TomMeadAuthor and on Instagram @tommeadauthor