Golden Age Whodunits Are Back—And a Sign Of Our Times

Pull out the knife was the last movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic started, and the first in 20 years that I seriously considered hiding in the bathroom and sneaking back into it right away. I don’t sneak—hardly—but I’m looking forward to Friday Netflix’s debut Onion, Pull out the knifesequel to the anthology, with enthusiasm far beyond my expectations of anything else this Christmas season.

And it’s not just about this one movie. I’m taking the success of the first, enough to justify the sequel, as confirmation of what I’ve been hoping for years now: The Golden Age of unit is back, and just in time to appease such a prominent cultural moment as the genre’s creative scene.

firstly the Golden age of detective fiction appeared a century ago, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. Arthur Conan Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927, and Agatha Christie’s debut novel Hercule Poirot, Mysterious case in stylescrapped in 1920. The Discoveries Club was founded in London in 1930, including mysterious British greats including Christie, Dorothy Sayers and GK Chesterton among its members.

Importantly, 1929 saw the publication of The Commandment of Knox, decals of the genre that all club members agreed to write and continue to define the mysteries of the golden age to this day. “When we say detective stories have rules, we don’t mean rules in the sense that poetry has rules, but rules in the sense that crickets have rules,” their author, Robert Knox, explain. “The man who wrote an ‘unfair’ detective story was not simply accused of being guilty of taste. He committed a foul and the referee asked him to leave the field.”

Hence: No clues not mentioned or unexpected twins. Not discovered through chance or intuition. There are no homicide detectives. No supernatural explanation is allowed, nor may it resort to racist stereotypes and convenient attribution of crimes to an out-of-group character.

The stories of the heyday are derided as “cozy” murders because these boundaries push the story into a familiar setting with ordinary characters with whom the reader can identify. But it is not comfort for its own sake. The rules of the game—rather than preference for the rich and/or British in comfortable surroundings—are what often create a village or manor as a crime scene.

Onion on its own won’t be enough proof that this whodunit style is making a comeback. But it’s one of the few movies and TV shows based on this legacy that has come out in recent years. Logically, this trend has been heralded by the revival of Sherlock Holmes: Housepremiered in 2004, the Robert Downey Jr. films. in 2009 and 2011, Sherlocklaunched in 2010, and elementarystarting in 2012. But Holmes has always been popular, a character so ingrained in British and American pop culture that it’s hard to find a decade without a major adaptation of his stories. he.

20th century fox

However, the new attention given to Christie is notable after years of relegation in BBC replays. Kenneth Branagh begins her Poirot series with Murder on the Orient Express 2017, released Death on the Nile this year, and yes an adaptation by Christie’s Halloween Partychange name to Haunting in Veniceexpected in 2023.

BBC made a limited series of Christie’s And then there’s no one here and Partners in crime 2015 series, Witness for the prosecution in 2016, and Challenged by innocence and (with John Malkovich appearing as Poirot) ABC murder in 2018. Famous names joined: Glenn Close and Gillian Anderson led a 2017 film by winding house; Rufus Sewell to star in 2020 bland Horses, and Hugh Laurie did Why didn’t they ask Evans? this early year.

Perhaps more intriguing than these, however, are the new attributes: Pull out the knife and Onionyes, but also See how they run (2022), Only murders in the building (going to shoot third season), after party (2022), and for children, Films by Enola Holmes on Netflix. The fifth season of Veronica Mars—Tantalizing by creator Rob Thomas is “a mystery in a snow-covered manor or on a boat that puts Veronica in a setting very much like Agatha Christie, albeit modernized”—would fit right in if it were. not cancelled.

Hulu

They may not explicitly acknowledge their debt to the Discovery Club ban “the use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or God’s Act,” but all of these titles work well within that tradition.

For those who don’t share my enthusiasm for the genre, the more interesting question might be: Why now? I suspect the answer goes back to Knox’s decals in two senses.

First, the rules of the heyday detective novel required that the guilty party be one of “us,” not a vague outside threat, but a sinner among us. Our friends, maybe even our family. Crime is not just murder, but betrayal, deception, distrust—and the disconnect it causes. Innocent characters can’t be left unscathed even if their names are removed—indeed, like WH Auden argument in 1948main “interest in detective stories is the dialectic of innocence and guilt,” and the typical reader is “someone who carries with it a sense of guilt.”

This is why murder must take place in a “closed society”, as Auden put it: “so that the possibility of an outside killer (and therefore a completely innocent society) is ruled out. .” A foreign or personally unknown assassin is literally an interesting story for a time of high confidence, culture, especially in a society that is relatively homogenous or at least humorous. peace. But in a recession institutional and personal beliefsdeepen negative partisanfear of traitors and invaders lurking among us, the mysteries of the golden age are more appropriate.

And they fit, too, because of another big guarantee of the rules: The mystery will be solved. The problem has a solution. We do not need to wonder whether guilt is exposed and innocence vindicated. Our hopes of the birth of renewed trust and restored order will not be in vain. The past cannot be erased, but justice is coming.

This is not necessarily a cold justice, but always an honest justice. Chesterton’s Father Brown investigates, as Auden wrote, “not for his own sake, nor even for the sake of the innocent, but for the sake of the murderer, who could save his soul if he confessed and repent.” The Promised Resolution Can Participate in Mercy—my only critique of after party is its cruel conclusion: When the killer’s pathetic motives are revealed, the other characters scream with joy — but it will certainly be true and justifiable.

Auden concludes: “The illusion that detective addicts indulge in is the illusion of being back in the Garden of Eden, back in a state of innocence where he can know love is love and not law.” Auden concluded. This is a true fantasy, in a way that myths can tell the truth—and a fantasy with new resonance in a decade of clarity. do rhyme with the confusion and skepticism of the interwar years.

Happily, it’s also a fantasy that Hollywood seems prepared to fulfill.