For the detective story is and always has been essentially a democratic institution; produced on any large scale only in democracies; dramatizing, under the bright cloak of entertainment, many of the precious rights and privileges that have set the dwellers in constitutional lands apart from those less fortunate.Footnote 1
—Howard Haycraft, Murder for PleasureAs a genre, detective fiction was remarkably popular in the 1920s and 1930s, both in Britain and the United States. From the perspective of the early 1940s, the detective novel had experienced a golden age in the two decades following the Great War, in which narrative and generic conventions were debated and established.Footnote 2 Following the Second World War, however, prominent detractors of these earlier novels emerged. In an article in the New Yorker in January 1945, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” critic Edmund Wilson famously dismissed the genre as a waste of paper, concluding that “the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”Footnote 3 Indeed, Crime Noir as a genre emerged as an explicit critique of golden age fiction as unrealistic and simple-minded. In a 1944 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Raymond Chandler homed in on A. A. Milne's single foray into the genre, The Red House Mystery (1922), noting that “the detective in the case is an insouciant gent named Antony Gillingham, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cozy little flat in London, and that airy manner. He is not making any money on the assignment, but is always available when the local gendarmerie loses its notebook. The English police seem to endure him with their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.”Footnote 4
Chandler lands on the “insouciant gent” by design, for the stereotypical detective of the golden age of the genre was the gentleman sleuth. Even a cursory survey of transatlantic interwar detective fiction reveals a disproportionately large number of amateur, elite crime solvers, beginning in 1913 with E. C. Bentley's Philip Trent in Trent's Last Case and including H. C. Bailey's Reginald Fortune, Anthony Berkeley Cox's Roger Sheringham, and Miles Burton's Desmond Merrion. American versions of the type include S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe.Footnote 5 Amateur detectives after Trent collectively exhibit the Holmesian qualities of “penetrating observation, highly developed logical powers, wide knowledge, and a brilliantly synthetic imagination,” filtered through the sensibility of the English gentleman.Footnote 6
Like other ephemera, much interwar detective fiction is long out of print, but the work of one group of writers, the so-called Queens of Detection—Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers—endures. Agatha Christie's 1920 publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles is generally acknowledged as inaugurating the golden age of detective fiction, with Christie, Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers defining the genre for subsequent decades.Footnote 7 Most of these authors’ books have been reissued multiple times; many have remained continuously in print.Footnote 8
Significantly, three of these four authors, whose books have sold millions of copies over the past eighty years, found success with aristocratic heroes. In 1929, Allingham introduced Albert Campion, whose noble origins are obscure but possibly royal. He featured in ten novels and two short-story collections before the Second World War.Footnote 9 Sir Roderick Alleyn, Marsh's series detective, emerged in 1934. The younger brother of a baronet, a “hardworking, untitled professional” and “gentleman detective,” Alleyn solved nine cases between 1934 and 1940.Footnote 10 Perhaps the best known of these aristocratic detectives, and to a large extent the prototype for them all, was the diffident aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey, whose exploits Sayers chronicled in a dozen novels and twenty-four short stories between 1923 and 1937.Footnote 11 By contrast, Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, as Alison Light illuminated two decades ago, came from outside the British class system and spoke to and for an explicitly bourgeois audience.Footnote 12 All four writers’ books were consumed avidly by middle- and upper-middle-class readers—and perhaps by working-class readers, too—but the popularity among readers of novels featuring aristocratic detectives qua aristocrats—among American and British readers across classes—bears further scrutiny.
Readers and Publishers
The golden age of detective fiction coincided with a revolution in publishing and the broad expansion of readerships for popular fiction. Major restructuring of the British publishing industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth made popular fiction available to much larger audiences than previously possible. Yet accurate sales figures for fiction published in the interwar years are hard to find, and those figures that can be found are not especially helpful. Even middle-class readers purchased few books in the first four decades of the twentieth century, as the standard price for a hardcover detective novel throughout the 1930s, 7s.6d, priced these books out of most household budgets. The great majority of middle-class Britons obtained reading materials through subscription libraries such as those run by Mudie's, Boots, Harrod's, and W. H. Smith.Footnote 13
A better measure of the ubiquity of detective fiction in the interwar years can be seen in the figures that W. H. Smith issued for popular fiction available through its library service in the fall of 1939. Running to some 13,500 titles, they could be categorized roughly as half romance and a quarter each adventure and crime novels.Footnote 14 Working-class readers’ consumption of detective fiction is harder to track, but recent work suggests that working-class readers read many of the same middlebrow novels that middle-class readers borrowed through subscription libraries, only later, and in used copies.Footnote 15 Analysis of library loans reveals Christie in the top ten bestselling adult fiction authors and Allingham and Marsh in the top one hundred.Footnote 16 Sayers never sold as many books, but her more self-consciously literary style made her the critical favorite. In the 1930s, Allingham's books were marketed through the Doubleday Crime Club (New York), and Sayers's and Marsh's through Collins’ Crime Club (Britain).Footnote 17 Sales of detective fiction increased when Allen Lane inaugurated the Penguin line of paperbacks in 1935; Sayers's 1928 Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, reprinted at 6d, was among the first ten titles issued by the press.Footnote 18 Book buying became much more prevalent after the launch of Penguin paperbacks, and sales figures are more reliable after the Second World War. Both Allingham and Marsh sold enough books to warrant inclusion in Penguin Books’ postwar project. The company undertook to publish one hundred thousand copies of ten of each author's titles; the “Marsh Millions” were published in 1949, Allingham's in 1950.Footnote 19
There is as yet scarce evidence of readers’ responses to this literature. Historians of reading have yet to mine the correspondence and reading diaries of individual readers to determine how they responded to the worlds created by authors of detective fiction. Nor have they fully explored the possibilities of letters from readers to authors. Scholars have, however, provided a variety of explanations for the popularity of these three detectives, and of the genre of detective fiction in general, in the interwar period. A consensus has emerged that the ’tec novel, as it affectionately became known, was a nostalgic and backward-looking genre, a place where Britons could find glimpses of the prelapsarian world of preindustrial Britain, where aristocrats ruled a compliant polity and all lived harmoniously.Footnote 20 Historian Alison Light famously describes the genre as “a literature of convalescence,” a therapeutic treatment necessary to heal the nation's traumatic experience of the Great War.Footnote 21 Others see in it a more generalized assertion of traditional values. David Grossvogel understands the form as an inherently conservative assurance that law, order, and property are protected, while Marxist literary critic Ernest Mandel argues that the detective story legitimizes bourgeois society and its values.Footnote 22 Most critics concur that class anxiety lies beneath the popularity of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s, with some seeing the aristocratic detective satisfying aspiring middle-class ambitions and responding to middle- and upper-class nostalgia for a return to an ordered world.
More recently, literary critics posit the genre of detective fiction as playing a key role in interwar discussions about culture and mass media, an analysis that depends on an understanding of the genre's change over time, from the puzzle and locked-room mysteries of the 1920s, to the 1930s, when novelists increasingly used the form to illuminate contemporary social issues.Footnote 23 These critics suggest that the golden age of detective fiction “is an attempt, in some cases discreetly muted, in others glaringly explicit, to articulate a vision of social reconstruction . . . in which the desire to conjure up a new reading public becomes part of a wider project of imagining a whole new set of relationships between men, women, and social classes.”Footnote 24
This emphasis on social reconstruction points toward another, and more nuanced, understanding of the significance of the era's aristocratic detectives. Rather than viewing the prevalence of the gentleman detective in the popular genre as evidence of the triumph of a conservative and backward-looking political and social vision, we might instead look to the fragility of the social worlds constructed in these novels, and at their engagement with various forms of the modern, imagined in all of these authors’ works as democratic and consumerist.Footnote 25 Each author uses the genre to explore changing meanings of class in modern Britain (and in Marsh's case, the emerging Commonwealth, as she sets a number of Alleyn's stories in her native New Zealand) and to imagine social worlds in which certain aristocratic values remain essential to the maintenance of the social order. Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers, all middle- and upper-middle-class writers, used their detective fiction to comment on possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage.Footnote 26 They used similar plot devices and generic strategies in the production of serials that sold impressively large numbers to readers from varying class backgrounds. Part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion, these novels shaped how a certain segment of the British reading public would come to see the ongoing significance of a class whose cultural influence and imaginative resonance in the first half of the twentieth century has been underestimated by historians.Footnote 27
Repurposing Aristocracy
Any discussion of aristocracy in the age of universal suffrage must begin with the fact that Britain, virtually alone of European countries, emerged from the First World War with its monarchy and aristocracy intact. Political discourse around aristocracy in Britain after 1917 was tinged with the fate of the Russian monarchy and aristocracy, lending a sometimes strident tone to its defense. Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin used the language of democracy to build conservative consensus into the nation's identity, and this sensibility infuses the work of all three novelists.Footnote 28 Having stared into the abyss of world war, revolution, and regicide, interwar Britons frequently viewed domestic political problems in catastrophic terms,Footnote 29 which may explain why repairing rents in the social fabric became a feature of middlebrow fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. However, much interwar detective fiction, for all its invocations of the rural and the country house, takes place largely in an urban—and urbane—world, with London at its center. And at the center of London stood “society,” by 1919 a porous, confused intermingling of aristocratic, plutocratic, and industrial influence.Footnote 30
That confused intermingling speaks to a broader feature of the age—the inability of traditional markers of class distinction to function as such in an increasingly mediated mass culture. Recent work on the interwar period by historians Lucy Bland, Matt Houlbrook, and Angus McLaren, among others, sees in the interwar years a fundamental shift in the meaning of selfhood. Rather than understanding themselves as defined by class affiliations, they argue, men and women increasingly viewed themselves through their relationships with consumer culture, where appearances could be deceiving.Footnote 31 And what Nancy Ellenberger has characterized as the late Victorian “emergence of a social elite based on celebrity status and wealth, rather than breeding alone,” opened avenues of social mobility to those who could appear wealthy through careful consumer choices.Footnote 32
Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers all grapple with the remnants of traditional aristocratic identity through the figure of the gentleman sleuth. The British aristocracy historically had provided social cohesion through disinterested governance and the dispensation of charity and hospitality;Footnote 33 in the early years of the twentieth century, professionalization of state function and a widening electorate challenged these traditional means of maintaining aristocratic influence. Professionalization, however, also offered a way to repurpose traditionally aristocratic values. Professional associations justified their leadership on the grounds of both skill and service to the greater good. The gentleman sleuth as portrayed in these novels thus promotes a kind of meritocracy binding the aristocracy and the middle classes and downplaying class conflict.Footnote 34
Novels by Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers participate in remaking aristocracy by reinterpreting its traditional purposes. Through the genre of detective fiction, these writers created worlds that offered aristocrats new roles that simultaneously served the function of protecting and legitimating the social order—arguably detective fiction's main imperative—and navigating the treacherous terrain between the aristocracy's traditional role as disinterested amateur and its new identity among the professional classes. Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers—three middle-class novelists—thus repackage a traditional role in the new polity for the aristocracy by drawing on its historical social functions in the interest of facilitating social cohesion. Each writer created fictional detectives who made meaningful contributions to society because they were aristocrats and could bring special skills and perspectives to the task.
Read serially, the novels reveal an evolution in each author's thinking about both the role that aristocrats could play in British political culture and the wider conversations about the utility of the aristocracy as a class. Sayers and Allingham began writing in the 1920s; when Marsh introduces Alleyn in 1934, he enters a conversation underway already for a decade, which explains partially why his characterization is so different from the beginning. Both Wimsey and Campion start out in the so-called Silly Ass tradition shaped by P. G. Wodehouse's facetious stories of Jeeves and Wooster. Bertie Wooster, archetypal upper-class twit, negotiates the social world of his class largely through the assistance of his wise and practical manservant, Jeeves. Wodehouse published the first collection of these stories in 1919, and a second appeared in 1923, the year that Sayers published her first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, in which Wimsey is drawn into the mystery surrounding the appearance of a naked dead man in the bathtub of a middle-class household. Wimsey waltzes through the investigation, defying the unimaginative Inspector Suggs and utilizing his personal connections to gain access to witnesses and evidence. Sayers pointedly describes Wimsey with reference to his caricature in Labour papers “as a typical aristocrat.” Wimsey's primary mien is garrulous and imbecilic: he quotes poetry to police inspectors, recalls limericks by way of analogy, and trades on his family history as he collects information about possible suspects.Footnote 35
But we can also see in Sayers's early novels a parody of this portrayal of the aristocracy. In Whose Body?, she replays a scene familiar to readers of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories, in which Wimsey's valet, Bunter, reprovingly challenges his choice of trousers for a luncheon with Lady Swaffham.Footnote 36 Sayers pokes fun at stereotypes about the aristocracy, something few critics note.Footnote 37 She also portrays Wimsey sympathetically, as a victim of shell shock suffered in the trenches on the Western Front. A number of scholars have commented on this aspect of Wimsey's characterization, seeing in it the creation of an antihero, an aristocratic male so traumatized by the violence of war that he is in some sense emasculated.Footnote 38
Allingham's Albert Campion debuts in 1929 as a parody of Wimsey, described in The Crime at Black Dudley by a fellow guest at a house party as “a lunatic . . . just a silly ass.” He is a “fresh-faced young man with tow-colored hair and foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles,” a “slightly receding chin,” and a mouth “unnecessarily full of teeth” through which he speaks in an “absurd falsetto drawl.”Footnote 39 But Campion's pedigree is much less transparent. While Sayers introduces Wimsey's origins in the third Wimsey novel, Unnatural Death (1927), by reproducing his entry from Debrett's Peerage, the oft-consulted guide to Britain's social hierarchy, Allingham leaves us to guess at Campion's lineage. The primary clue we are given in The Crime at Black Dudley comes at the end, when the man Campion has assisted asks him, “Who are you?”
Mr. Campion leaned over the side of the car until his mouth was an inch or two from the other man's ear, and he murmured a name, a name so illustrious that Abbershaw started back and stared at him in astonishment.
“Good God!” he said. “You don't mean that?” “No,” said Mr. Campion cheerfully, and went off striding jauntily down the street until, to Abbershaw's amazement, he disappeared through the portals of one of the most famous and exclusive clubs in the world.Footnote 40
More is revealed in the second novel featuring Campion, Mystery Mile (1930), in which we see his flat, just off Piccadilly and over a police station, through the eyes of a visitor in distress: “It was tastefully, even luxuriously furnished. There were one or two delightful old pieces, a Rembrandt etching over the bureau, a Steinlen cat, a couple of original cartoons, and a lovely little Girtin”—revealing simultaneously his connoisseurship, his modernity, and his Englishness.Footnote 41
Campion remains largely a Silly Ass until Flowers for the Judge (1936), when Allingham's characterization of her detective undergoes a transformation. In the earlier books, she portrayed in Campion a caricatured “good” versus the evil forces he battled. In the 1930s, her works came to resemble more closely the predominant strain in detective fiction of the time, where the sleuth engages in a battle of skills against a formidable opponent.Footnote 42 Yet the reader is always aware that Campion, like Wimsey, plays to type to distract from his purposes of detection. In The Crime at Black Dudley, this obfuscation becomes explicit when Campion makes a salt cellar disappear from the table only to reappear from under a servant's waistcoat—all while relieving the man of his gun. Later, when another character admiringly comments on Campion's skill as a “pickpocket” in the service of disarming the villain, Campion modestly replies, “Let's call it léger de main, shall we?,” elegantly encapsulating his method.
Following Arthur Conan Doyle's model of Holmes and Watson, both Wimsey and Campion have male confidants. Wimsey's valet, Bunter, his batsman in the First World War, has become his partner in solving mysteries. Sayers gestures toward Wodehouse, with Bunter dressing Lord Peter and acting as his consultant on appropriate dress and etiquette. The analogy ends there, however, for rather than working behind the scenes to save Lord Peter from himself, Bunter and Wimsey fundamentally work as a team. Bunter navigates the world below stairs, displaying technological prowess in his use of state-of-the-art equipment to collect fingerprints, soil samples, and other evidence in each case while Wimsey negotiates the upstairs. Campion's manservant, Magersfontein Lugg, is the anti-Jeeves. A working-class felon with upper-class pretensions, he serves throughout the series as a figure of fun. Mystery Mile introduces Lugg as a large and “lugubrious individual . . . a hillock of a man, with a big pallid face which reminded one irresistibly of a bull-terrier. He was practically bald, but by far the most outstanding thing about him was the all-pervading impression of melancholy that he conveyed. He was somewhat unconventionally clothed in what looked remarkably like a convict's tunic, apparently worn as a house-coat over an ordinary suit.” Even Lugg recognizes his limited utility to the course of detection when he observes to a visitor that Campion “keeps me as a pet about the ’ouse, ’e does.”Footnote 43
Both detectives also collaborate with professional detectives, Wimsey with Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard, and Campion with Stanislaus Oates, detective inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department. Both of these men are staunchly middle class, but both are equal to the educated gent with whom they work—notably Parker, who quotes Wordsworth and Shakespeare with a facility equal to Wimsey's. Both policemen serve to ground the enthusiasms of the gentleman sleuth in the real-world consequences of their detection: the serving of justice. And they prod the aristocratic sleuths toward a middle-class, professional view of the world, as in Parker's admonition to Wimsey in the first novel not to apply outmoded ideals to detecting: “You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can't do it like that. Life's not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can't be a sportsman. You're a responsible person.”Footnote 44 For Parker, aristocratic notions of “fair play” fail to fulfill what Harold Perkin has called the “professional social ideal,” a commitment to a society bound more by “career hierarchies of specialized occupations, selected by merit and based on trained expertise,” than to class-based notions of noblesse oblige.Footnote 45
Roderick Alleyn enters the conversation somewhat later, in 1934, when both Allingham and Sayers were rethinking their main characters and what they represented.Footnote 46 Alleyn is no amateur; when the series begins, he is a detective chief inspector, a professional sleuth at Scotland Yard. Marsh is intentionally opaque on the question of Alleyn's class. The reader has to glean his aristocratic origins from reading the novels in succession, and Marsh uses other characters’ inability to read Alleyn's class background as a sign of his modernity. Clinging to outmoded notions of class hierarchy, those encountering Alleyn in his professional capacity insist that the upper class adhere to a set of codes they can read; confronted by Alleyn, they cannot understand how he fits into that world. Alleyn confounds class expectations up and down the social scale. Received at Lady Cicely O'Callaghan's in The Nursing Home Murder (1936), Alleyn bewilders the butler: “At Catherine Street he [Alleyn] was received by Nash, who stared like a boiled owl at the inspector. Nash, who carried in his head a sort of social ladder, had quietly decided that police officers of all ranks were to be graded with piano-tuners. Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn did not conform, in appearance or in manner, to this classification. Nash performed a reluctant mental somersault.”Footnote 47
And in Death in Ecstasy (1936), after Alleyn questions Miss Wade, an elderly gentlewoman, she engages him in a conversation about his social origins:
“Have you been through the Police College?”
“Not precisely, madam.”
“Indeed?” said Miss Wade, squinting curiously at him. “But you speak nicely.”
“You are very kind.”
“A superior school perhaps? The advantages—”
“My parents gave me all the advantages they could afford,” agreed Alleyn solemnly.
“Chief Detective-inspector Alleyn, ma'am,” began Fox with surprising emphasis, “was—”
“Fox,” interrupted Alleyn, “don't be a snob. Get Miss Wade a taxi.”Footnote 48
That Alleyn is the younger son of a baronet is revealed to us gradually across the novels; we know initially only that he turned down a career in the diplomatic service to become a policeman. As a member of the aristocracy, he is uniquely positioned to solve mysteries among the elite, for he is largely accepted among them. But he is very clear that it is his working-class colleague, Inspector Fox (whom he refers to affectionately as Brer Fox), who navigates arenas inaccessible to one of his status. Fox initially serves as a figure of fun—particularly in his early attempts to learn French through listening to recorded lessons—but as he eventually masters enough elements of the language to use it in solving crimes, it becomes evident that Fox hides behind his lower-middle-class origins to obscure his professional intelligence.
Fox's masquerade points to a critical element of all three authors’ depiction of their aristocratic sleuths: these three novelists, all from the middle classes, created three aristocratic detectives who utilize their class position as a kind of mask as a means of navigating social difference to discover the truth underneath. Elements of an earlier literary figure, the flâneur, the man-about-town, or the male aristocrat transgressing class boundaries in search of pleasure, also shape their portrayal.Footnote 49 The difference here is that the transgression of class in detective fiction is in the service of justice. Tellingly, these aristocrats convey discomfort with their class positions. Wimsey is apologetic about his privilege; Campion eschews it (while his butler parodies it); and Alleyn is uncomfortable with it but uses it to his advantage. The predominant aspect of aristocracy revived in these novels is service: the detective as a public servant, acting in a disinterested fashion. Privilege of birth as such is either satirized, as in the early Wimsey novels, or rejected, as in Alleyn's demeanor, or masked, as in Campion's obfuscations, but all three men essentially put the public good above personal interest.Footnote 50
Together, the novels point toward the transformation of their detectives’ status from amateur to professional. We see through these tales a microcosm of the larger phenomenon underway in the 1920s and 1930s: the gradual integration of the British aristocracy into the professional middle classes.Footnote 51 Fundamentally, each sleuth grapples with the question “What is a gentleman?” The term itself had become ambiguous as it shifted from its older association with the service and disinterestedness of a non-commercial class to a more middle-class understanding of the gentleman as one who subscribed to a particular set of values and behavior.Footnote 52 Significantly, it is these sleuths’ ability to detect social distinctions in the solving of crimes that confirms their positions as gentlemen, bringing together aristocracy's traditional emphasis on family and rank with a middle-class professional appreciation of skill and training, all in the service of justice.
A further widening of the definition of the gentleman is the authors’ reconciliation of the modern aristocracy with the upper-middle class by uniting representatives of each in marriage. Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh all eventually violate the golden age dictum against romance, furthering their protagonists’ ability to serve their main function as an agent of social cohesion.Footnote 53 In the tradition of the comedy of manners, marriage in these novels between members of the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes becomes a means by which class tensions are relieved. Wimsey, Campion, and Alleyn each marry a “modern” woman who underscores his own potential for modernizing his own class. Wimsey's romance with the middle-class detective novelist Harriet Vane is a subtext in Sayers's novels from Strong Poison (1930) onward. Feminist scholars have made much of this relationship over the years,Footnote 54 but few have commented on the other significant romantic relationship of these books, that cultivated by Wimsey between his younger sister, Lady Mary, and Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard. Wimsey is the catalyst for this relationship as he identifies Parker's feelings for his sister—and hers for Parker—and encourages the two to set aside class differences and marry. Roderick Alleyn, who meets, falls in love with, and marries an upper-middle-class painter, Agatha Troy, also develops into something of a matchmaker. In several of the books written in the 1930s, Alleyn facilitates romance between members of the lower aristocracy and the upper-middle classes. Campion here is the exception that proves the rule: Allingham provides much less insight into his emotional life as he meets and ultimately marries a woman of an impoverished aristocratic family who supports herself professionally, as an engineer.Footnote 55
Wimsey's and Alleyn's romances especially betray their authors’ ambivalence about the genre in which they are based. We see in all three authors a movement away from the strictly golden age form of the genre to novels of manners; at the same time, these novels exhibit the self-reflexivity of modernism. A tension between manners and modernism characterizes the work of all three writers in the interwar period. Sayers most famously experimented with the detective novel's form; in 1937, she argued “If the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began in the hands of Collins and Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle.”Footnote 56 Indeed, a key critique of Sayers's novels focuses on their fidelity to the form—the novel of manners notoriously commenting upon social hierarchy through gentle critique rather than biting satire.Footnote 57 Yet a reading of golden age detective fiction as novels of manners has to be juxtaposed with its authors’ realization that, in Allingham's words, crime fiction was “the most essentially modern (if, also, one of the most odd) forms of literature the language has yet produced.”Footnote 58 As Jacques Barzun noted in 1961, “enjoyment of detective stories requires a superior sophistication,” because readers are constantly aware that they are reading fiction.Footnote 59 Detective fiction of the genre's golden age employs a variety of literary devices to reinforce the form as fiction, with its endless references to other detectives, its limited scope, both geographical (the locked room, the house party) and temporal (most are resolved in a matter of days), and its inclusion of room plans, architectural drawings, and village maps to situate the reader.Footnote 60
This self-referential aspect draws attention to what Richard Martin has called the “fictionality” of the story.Footnote 61 Repeatedly, the reader is reminded that the novel is a constructed world operating according to the logic of the genre. We see this in Sayers's first Wimsey novel when Inspector Parker, commenting on the crime scene, observes, “Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning.”Footnote 62 Eleven years later, in her first Roderick Alleyn novel, Marsh reiterates the fictionality of the world she creates in a dialogue between two characters:
“They say the Yard is never wrong in its inferences, though it sometimes fails to get its results. Do you believe this?”
“My only information is based on detective fiction,” said Nigel.
“So is mine,” Rosamund laughed . . . “And nowadays they make their Yard men so naturalistic that they are quite incredible.”Footnote 63
Juxtaposing the novel of manners and the modernist elements of golden age detective fiction can be read too easily as a traditional form doing battle with a modern one; most critics see in the work of these three authors strong tendencies toward the earlier model. Yet the tension between the two forms can be read also as an ambivalent engagement with modernity, likely understood by contemporaries as critique of advertising or modes of capitalist accumulation.Footnote 64
Aristocracy and Democracy
These broader generalizations about the novels require elaboration. A close reading of three novels in particular can shed light on the interwar discussion of the future of the aristocracy within the British polity: Sayers's Murder Must Advertise (1933), Marsh's Death in a White Tie (1938), and Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin (1945). These novels come relatively late in their series, making them a mature realization of their authors’ thinking on the subject, and all grapple in various ways with the problem of the aristocracy: which of its traditional roles should be kept? Sayers is the most positive of the lot; Marsh comes close to despair. Allingham suggests that the aristocracy's values are archaic but stops at deeming them downright criminal. However, all three evidently believe that perpetuation of the aristocracy's traditional role as an arbiter of justice is necessary to the smooth functioning of postwar British society.
Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, published in June 1933, was the ninth novel in her Lord Peter Wimsey detective series; by July 1939, the book had gone through ten editions and had sold over twenty thousand copies.Footnote 65 As the series grew in popularity, Sayers made adjustments to Wimsey's characterization. In her 1937 essay, “Gaudy Night,” she explained that after she had completed Strong Poison, the fifth book in the series, she realized that the character of Wimsey “remained, as it were, extraneous to the story and untouched by its spiritual conflicts.” She went on: “This was correct practice for a detective hero, but not for the hero of a novel of manners.” At this point, Sayers tells us, she undertook an operation on her patient to develop his “embryonic buds of a character of sorts”: she “laid him firmly on the operating table and chipped away at his internal mechanism through three longish books,” Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night. By the early 1930s, then, Wimsey had evolved into a more fully dimensional character, one whom Sayers deemed worthy of a novel of manners rather than a mere ’tec story.Footnote 66
Sayers spoke and wrote quite explicitly on the need for detective fiction to mature as a genre. The first step was for it to take itself seriously as a literary form. In her lecture “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” delivered in March 1935 at Oxford, her alma mater, Sayers observed that “where there is no beauty there can be no catharsis; an ill-written book, like an ill-compounded drug, only irritates the system without purging. Let us then see to it that, if we excite evil passions, it is so done as to sublimate them at the same time by the contemplation of emotional or intellectual beauty.”Footnote 67 She saw Murder Must Advertise as “the first real attempt at fusing the two kinds of novel”; in it, “for the first time, the criticism of life was not relegated to incidental observations and character sketches, but was actually part of the plot, as it ought to be.”Footnote 68
Murder Must Advertise is set in an office—Pym's Publicity, Ltd., a London advertising agency—where Wimsey goes undercover as Death Bredon, cousin of Lord Peter Wimsey, to investigate an accidental death. The novel begins with the introduction of Bredon as a new copywriter in the agency. We suspect, but are not told until chapter 5, that Bredon is Wimsey himself, after which he assumes yet another persona, that of a dissolute aristocrat hobnobbing with a hard-drinking and -drugging demimonde. The novel juxtaposes, in Sayers's words, “two cardboard worlds—that of the advertiser and the drugtaker”; in both, Lord Peter Wimsey assumes a disguise in order to infiltrate a world otherwise not open to him.Footnote 69 His colleagues in the advertising agency as a whole are more sympathetic than the people he meets among the demimonde; however, the effects of advertising are seen as pernicious and damaging, so much so that at one point Wimsey agrees with his brother-in-law, Superintendent Parker of Scotland Yard, that “all advertisers are dope-merchants.”Footnote 70
Sayers satirizes the genre of detective fiction to draw attention to its limitations as a form. Both Sayers—as narrator—and her characters operate quite self-consciously within the genre as such. References to novels by the popular crime writer Edgar Wallace abound,Footnote 71 and characters understand their own situations in terms of detective fiction's clichés. Superintendent Parker returns home after “a long day at the Yard—no thrills, no interesting disclosures, no exciting visitors, not so much as a dis-diamonded rajah or a sinister Chinaman.”Footnote 72 At one point, when Wimsey realizes he's being followed by gang members who have already killed two people, Sayers writes, “Absurd and romantic plans flitted through his mind. He would lure his assassins into some secluded spot, such as the Blackfriars subway or the steps beneath Cleopatra's Needle, and face them there and kill them with his hands.”Footnote 73 When Wimsey shares his fears about his safety with his sister, Lady Mary, she warns him as she prepares to go out, “And if the telephone rings, take care it isn't the mysterious summons to the lonely warehouse by the river, or the bogus call to Scotland Yard.”Footnote 74 One of the novel's more engaging characters, Ginger Joe, an office boy at Pym's Publicity enlisted by Wimsey/Bredon to establish alibis for members of staff, enters the narrative in his guise as a detective. A fan of Sexton Blake, the detective hero of a long-running serial, Ginger Joe eagerly embraces the opportunity to help Bredon in his investigations and integrates his duties into “that nightly narrative [he told himself] in which he was both author and hero.”Footnote 75 Even Wimsey is drawn into Ginger Joe's world as he uses Sexton Blake's legendary exploits to tease Superintendent Parker, whose collarbone is broken in an attack meant for Wimsey: “It beats me the way these policemen give way over a trifling accident. In the Sexton Blake book that my friend Ginger Joe has just lent me, the great detective, after being stunned with a piece of lead-piping nearly to the bone, is taken by boat on a stormy night to a remote house on the coast and flung down a flight of stone steps into a stone cellar.” Sexton Blake, Wimsey goes on to relate, manages to escape his bonds, outwit the villain's attempt to flood the cellar with gas, and pursue the murderers by airplane, at one point grappling with one of the villains—who is holding a grenade, no less!—on the wing of the plane. Wimsey concludes: “And here is my own brother-in-law . . . giving way to bad temper and bandages because some three-by-four crook has slugged him on his own comfortable staircase.”Footnote 76
This self-consciousness about genre highlights the artificiality of identity in the novel. This is seen clearly in Wimsey's two personas: as Harlequin (a mysterious and dissolute aristocrat) and Bredon (a gentleman reduced to working in an advertising agency). As Wimsey navigates these two worlds, advertising and dope dealing, he is always in disguise. Throughout, however, we are clear that he is in character and a character. As Death Bredon, he is described by a female copywriter at Pym's as “a cross between Ralph Lynn and Bertie Wooster” while a typist at the firm notes that his “tongue runs on ball-bearings.”Footnote 77 And when Parker warns him against mixing with the drug crowd, even in disguise, Wimsey assures him, “Oh, I went incog. A comedy of masks.”Footnote 78
These two masks conceal something essential about Wimsey's character, and by extension, his class. Here, Sayers's comment on the novel after it was published is apposite: “The idea of symbolically opposing two cardboard worlds—that of the advertiser and the drug taker was all right; and it was suitable that Peter, who stands for reality, should never appear in either except disguised.”Footnote 79 Two moments in the novel suggest what that “reality” looks like. In the first, Bredon engages in an extended discussion about public schools with Ingleby, an Oxford-educated copywriter at Pym's, and Mr. Smayle, group-manager of a major account at the firm. Mr. Smayle, smarting over a snub from another group-manager, confides in the two men:
“I suppose Tallboy thinks I'm not worth speaking to, just because he's been to a public school and I haven't.”
“Public school,” said Mr. Bredon, “first I've heard of it. What public school?”
“He was at Dumbleton,” said Mr. Smayle, “but what I say is, I went to a Council School and I'm not ashamed of it.”
“Where's Dumbleton?” demanded Ingleby.
“I shouldn't worry, Smayle. Dumbleton isn't a public school, within the meaning of the act.”
Bredon and Ingleby continue, with Bredon—an Eton man—allowing that Eton and Harrow—Ingleby's school—both count. Rugby, however, according to Bredon is a “railway junction,” and Marlborough gets “a terrible set of hearty roughs down there.” Immediately following this sardonic dismissal of most public schools, Bredon suddenly says, “Look here, Smayle, if only you people could get it out of your heads that these things matter a damn, you'd be a darn sight happier. You probably got a fifty times better education than I ever did.” Mr. Smayle, gracious but not mollified, thanks Bredon for trying to reduce the social distance between them.Footnote 80
We catch another glimpse of what Sayers wants us to see of Wimsey's “true” nature in a comment made about him following a cricket match between Pym's and one of its clients, Brotherhoods, Ltd., purveyor of boiled sweets and nonalcoholic beverages. When Wimsey is arrested—as Bredon—for the murder of one of the Bright Young Things with whom he'd been known to associate, his innocence is attested to by the elderly Mr. Brotherhood. A cricket aficionado, Brotherhood recognizes Wimsey's distinctive late cut on the pitch from the latter's career at Oxford twenty years earlier. Brotherhood insists to Superintendent Parker that Bredon is “innocent. Innocent as day . . . Did you see him play? He's a damned fine cricketer and he'd no more commit a murder than I would.”Footnote 81 Both of these episodes reveal elements of Wimsey's character—in the Victorian sense—that Sayers wants us to see. In his ability to make others comfortable despite social distance, and his evident prowess on the sporting field, Sayers asserts that he is a gentleman, in every guise.
But what is a gentleman in 1933? A number of scholars have pointed to the remarkable elasticity of the term by the late nineteenth century. Peter Mandler has noted that by the first years of the twentieth century, the term hinged on the ideal of social harmony, and it could apply equally to members of the middle classes and aristocracy.Footnote 82 In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey upholds the code of the gentleman, the ideal of fair play, by allowing the murderer to exercise the gentleman's out—to let his evil compatriots kill him rather than face the law. The murderer then is allowed to act like a gentleman by surrendering to his fate, rather than exposing his wife and child to the ignominy of a murder trial. Murder Must Advertise thus refashions the nobility by adapting its virtues to a new age. Marsh's 1938 Death in a White Tie (1938), however, questions if those virtues were ever real.
Death in a White Tie, Marsh's seventh Inspector Alleyn novel, is set in society and follows the rituals of the London season. Like many of the Alleyn novels, the mystery is set within a dramatic frame, with the “characters in the tale” introduced as if in a playbill, each representing a social type: Lord Robert Gospell (“Bunchy”), “A relic of Victorian days”; Mrs. Halcut-Hackett, “A social climber”; Lucy, Dowager Marchioness of Lorrimer, “An eccentric old lady”; Sir Daniel Davidson, “A fashionable London physician”; Colombo Dimitri, “A fashionable caterer”; Captain Maurice Withers (“Wits”), “A Man About Town”; and Lady Evelyn Carrados, “A London Hostess.”Footnote 83 Marsh includes a map of the mansion in which the ball takes place, highlighting the artificiality of the proceedings: a stage set with characters.Footnote 84
In this novel more than any other, Marsh critically examines the aristocracy as a class, revealing an institution uneasy with modernity. The overriding sense of the aristocracy is of a rotting institution, and the idea of the gentleman has become a cover for incivility and greed. At the center of the novel is a crime seen as quintessentially ungentlemanly—blackmail—culminating in murder. While investigating a case of blackmail involving Lady Carrados, “a Society hostess,” Alleyn enlists his good friend and “Victorian relic,” Lord Robert “Bunchy” Gospell. In the course of his investigations, Bunchy makes a phone call to Alleyn revealing he knows who the murderer is and is overheard and subsequently murdered. Alleyn confronts a set of suspects and their motives, including Donald, Bunchy's heir, threatened with disinheritance; Captain Withers, a unscrupulous gambler and one-time heroin dealer; and Colombo Dimitri, who comes under suspicion largely because he is a foreigner. Marsh plays with her readers, leading them through the suspects and focusing on Withers and Dimitri.
Following Bunchy's murder, Alleyn and Fox interview Withers, who lives in “a large block of rather pretentious service flats.” The two inspectors find themselves
in a mass-production furnished sitting-room with a divan bed against one wall, three uniform armchairs, a desk, a table and built-in cupboards . . . On the wall hung a framed photograph of the sort advertised in magazines as “artistic studio studies from the nude.” On the bookshelves guides to the Turf stood between shabby copies of novels Captain Withers had bought on the Riviera and, for some reason, troubled to smuggle into England . . . [on the wall in the bedroom was] a second masterpiece that may have been a studio study but appeared to be an exercise in pornographic photography.Footnote 85
Alleyn and Fox's interactions with Withers confirm what the description of his dwelling suggests about the coarseness of the social climber. Marsh goes further as narrator, drawing a distinction between Withers and Alleyn that rests upon class markers: “Withers was the sort of man who breathes vulgarity into good clothes . . . Yet in spite of these defects he was a powerful dominant animal with a certain coarse arrogance that was effective. Alleyn, by contrast, looked fine-drawn, a cross between a monk and a grandee. The planes of Alleyn's face and head were emphatically defined, the bony structure showed clearly. There was a certain austerity in the chilly blue of his eyes and in the sharp blackness of his hair.”Footnote 86
Here, the ground on which Withers engages with Alleyn is that of the gentleman. When Alleyn attempts to verify Withers's alibi at the time of the murder, Withers refuses to reveal the name of the woman with whom he claims to have been at the time. He observes to Alleyn, “You seem to be a gentleman. One of the new breed at the Yard, aren't you? I should have thought you'd have understood.”Footnote 87 The effect of this on the reader is to throw further suspicion on Withers; his appeal to that identity while refusing to provide an alibi alerts us to his duplicity, and hence his potential for murder.
Yet Withers is not the only faux gentleman whom Alleyn suspects of murder: Dimitri is similarly portrayed. We hear Alleyn's analysis of the caterer: “He's looking sulky. Not a good head. Everything's a bit too narrow. He's got a mean look. No fool, though. Expensive clothes, fishy hands, uses a lot of hair oil. Honey and flowers. Ears set very low. No lobes to them. Less than an eye's width between the two eyes. I fancy the monocle is a dummy. Dents by the nostrils. False teeth. A smooth gentleman.”Footnote 88 This evaluation is confirmed by Fox, who tells Alleyn that Dimitri has been rattled enough by his interview with the detectives that he “doesn't know if he's Mayfair, Soho, or Wandsworth.” The implication here is that the layers of Dimitri's carefully constructed persona are unraveling, taking him down the social scale as he moves south through the geography of London.Footnote 89
In the end, the mastermind behind the blackmail—and the murder—is revealed to be Sir Daniel Davidson, the society physician interviewed early in the novel and seemingly dismissed as a suspect. Davidson's Harley Street office is described as “a beautiful and expensive room, crying in devious tones of the gratitude of wealthy patients.”Footnote 90 Alleyn expresses interest in Davidson, whom he characterizes as “a poseur who called himself a man of the people and spattered his conversation with French and Italian tags, who was at once so frankly theatrical and so theatrically frank.”Footnote 91
Aristocracy carries complicated meanings in this novel. Bunchy, described in the dramatis personae as a “Victorian relic,” is also described as “Regency” and “Edwardian,” all terms pointing to the archaic qualities he embodies. Yet it is Bunchy's voice that produces the most trenchant critique of the aristocrat in modern society. As he enters the ball at which he will be murdered, Marsh elaborates on Bunchy's distance from members of his own class:
He suddenly felt as if an intruder had thrust open all the windows of this neat little world and let in a flood of uncompromising light. In this cruel light he saw the people he liked best and they were changed and belittled . . . And he wondered if the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been no more than freakish incidents in this history of society and if their proprieties had been as artificial as the paint on a modern woman's lips. This idea seemed abominable to Lord Robert and he felt old and lonely for the first time in his life.Footnote 92
We, like Alleyn, are left wondering if Bunchy is the last decent aristocrat. That Alleyn considers the question alerts us to Marsh's positioning of him as the real future of the aristocracy; this is confirmed in formal terms, as Alleyn's own marital prospects develop and reach fruition in the novel. Alleyn emerges as both conservative and modern: he holds dear the values of a passing age, while his great affection for Bunchy is displayed in a suitably ironic and fictive fashion, as he frames his murder investigation within the trope of the “relentless detective who swears he'll get his man if it takes him the rest of his life.” Alleyn claims affinity with those professionals “who follow up all the dreary threads of routine without any personal feeling or interest,” but he is clear that it is his respect for the values embodied by Bunchy that motivates his investigation.Footnote 93
Alleyn also displays a kind of self-consciousness about his own class position and how it positions others. His “wave of sudden compassion” at the realization of the social costs of the loss of status experienced by the family of Lady Carados's secretary, Miss Harris, and his discomfort with Mrs. Halcut-Hackett's snobbery over his rank, point to a sophisticated understanding of where he fits into the social structure by birth, and a rejection of birth as the basis of nobility.Footnote 94 This novel, set up as a drama in several acts, thus serves as a kind of morality play, a critique of privilege, the lesson being that the aristocracy has been gutted by the inclusion of those who fundamentally do not understand its values—the plutocracy. By laying the murder at the feet of the upwardly mobile physician and not the immigrant caterer, Marsh here fulfills S. S. Van Dine's 1928 rule of detective fiction that a servant could not be the culprit, as the murderer had to be someone “decidedly worth-while.”Footnote 95 Marsh plots the murderer as having social standing but not truly possessing it. In the end, the values of the aristocracy are personified in Alleyn, who both embodies those values and takes a critical stance towards them.
It is not clear from Margery Allingham's engagement with the aristocracy in Coroner's Pidgin (1945) that the aristocracy, or indeed, the nation, can rely upon its elite for moral standing. Having begun life as a Silly Ass in the 1920s, by the mid-1930s Albert Campion emerges as a sober-minded man working in the service of the nation. In Coroner's Pidgin it is revealed that he has spent the past several years in service to His Majesty's Government, as a spy engaged in a series of covert missions for the nation during the war. Unexpectedly home on leave for the first time in four years, Campion appears at his Piccadilly flat to find that his manservant Lugg has assisted Lady Carados in moving a corpse into his bedroom. Campion finds himself drawn into the case, first when he interrogates the two about the story behind the body, and then when he is kidnapped and dumped in a warehouse in south London. By the time he has regained consciousness, he discovers that Lady Carados has presented a different version of where the corpse was found to the police from the one she originally gave him, leaving him to wonder why she would lie.
Allingham then leads the reader on a strange journey through wartime London and its myriad opportunities for crime. We are introduced to Johnny Carados, son of Lady Carados and formerly the center of a lively group of interwar socialites, now a dashing commander in the Royal Air Force. The novel puts forward two main suspects in the murder, Lady Carados and Johnny, and the reader is led eventually to the position that Lady Carados committed the murder, and Johnny is prepared to accept responsibility for it to protect her. Eventually we are introduced to a motive for the murder through the revelation of a sustained campaign of looting during the war, presumably by German agents preparing for an eventual invasion.Footnote 96
Campion, like Alleyn in Death in a White Tie, spends a good deal of the novel grappling with the assumptions of nobility and their implications for British society. Upon discovering the corpse in his bedroom, he comments to Lady Carados's companion, Eve Snow, that “Lady Carados would appear to be one of those women who have an original view of law and order, all probably based on the fact that she used to tip the Home Secretary half a crown when he was at Eton . . . By sheer bad luck the man she picked to help her is one of the few people on earth who are used to doing the unconventional when so directed. Lugg's got a bee in his bonnet about the aristocracy—they go to his head.”Footnote 97 Here Campion points both to the aristocracy's assumption of privilege and the embrace of that privilege by the greater public, personified in Lugg. Yet Campion himself questions aristocratic privilege, recalling an incident from his childhood when the nurse of the young boy who had just pushed him into a pond had defended that boy by asserting “he's a Duke”: “At the age of four and quarter, Mr. Campion had taken a poor view of the excuse and did so now, with the added advantage of knowing that ninety-nine per cent of the world agreed with him. All the same, he found it interesting to note that the remaining one per cent still existed, and was at large.”Footnote 98
Conclusion
What purpose, then, do these fictional aristocrats contribute to the broader conversation about the future of their class? All three—Wimsey, Alleyn, and Campion—emerge as resourceful, modern men, capable of shape-shifting and code-shifting in order to accomplish their goals: the protection and maintenance of the established order. As aristocrats, they alone are capable of negotiating all the social worlds of the novel: each can track down the social scale as well as up; each understands the role he is expected to play; and each displays a basic decency born of noble birth but lacking the elitism implied in it.Footnote 99
It is telling that the authors of these fictions were themselves middle class. Some see Sayers's characterization of Wimsey as of a piece with her conservatism.Footnote 100 But biography alone does not explain these three characters nor their enduring appeal. Embedded in these fictions is a great deal of anxiety, both at the generic and societal level. Detective fiction, after all, engages the reader in a quest for answers that the author works assiduously to conceal (wherein lies the pleasure of the text). Of the three novels, Sayers's Murder Must Advertise most explicitly addresses interwar anxieties about the disjunction between appearances and reality through its critique of the role of advertising in convincing the public to purchase goods they are taught to desire rather than those they need. Marsh's Death in a White Tie suggests a profound unease with a social order in which elites continue to use their status to mask rank ambition. Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin proposes, however, that by 1945 at least, only a small minority—1 percent—still cling to a belief that nobility inheres in the aristocracy by nature, or, more accurately, in its blood.
It has become axiomatic that British aristocracy's political influence weakened precipitously beginning in the 1870s. That aristocratic power declined in real terms is evident.Footnote 101 Yet historian Andrew Adonis has persuasively shown that there are “too many exceptions to prove a rule that the peerage had, even by the eve of the Second World War, been eliminated as a political class that counted.”Footnote 102 Detective fiction is but one example of how British interwar print culture offered aristocrats new opportunities even as their traditional bases of power in property and privilege eroded. Generated and consumed for the most part by members of the middle classes in the 1920s and 1930s, detective fiction presented sympathetic portraits of “working” aristocrats who helped mediate the transition of the old to the new. With the end of monarchies across Europe, the phenomenal growth of the mass press, and the advent of universal suffrage, Britons struggled to make sense of traditional class distinctions and sought to shape what they perceived as new opportunities for mobility. Particularly vexing was what to do with the aristocracy. Middle-class novelists like Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham relished the challenge of raising the status of the genre of detective fiction while simultaneously offering opinions on the modern utility of Britain's aristocracy. Even as the lines demarcating the aristocracy from the upper classes blurred—with portions of Britain's social elite increasingly resembling a plutocracy rather than a traditional aristocracy—certain values and responsibilities of the aristocracy remain vital.Footnote 103 Detective fiction was a key arena where the possibilities for aristocrats could be considered. Alison Light's plea that “we consider the whodunit as a form of popular modernism”Footnote 104 is apposite as these fictions simultaneously look backward and forward, imagining a society in which the values of the gentleman sleuth are more broadly shared. In this respect, positing aristocratic detectives as upholders of the law reaffirms a traditional value of the aristocracy, at the same time offering it a revised role in political culture in an age of universal suffrage.
