The nine eclectic essays in this book examine how British murder mysteries published over a span of eighty-five years “both shaped and were shaped by their social, cultural, and political contexts and their lived experience of their authors and readers at critical moments in time” (3). The editors argue that the essays “suggest that instead of locating the ‘golden age’ of detective fiction in the interwar period, it is more appropriate to understand the development of the genre as constituting a ‘long’ golden age, from the 1880s through the 1960s” (15). It is far from easy to discern any justification for this claim in the essays themselves. The supposed “long golden age” excludes Wilkie Collins’ major novels, which predate it, and the novels of Colin Dexter and almost the whole output of P.D. James, which post-date it. What are the important common factors which unite the extraordinarily diverse detective stories written during those eighty-five years while distinguishing them from those written before and after the chosen period? The contributors’ intriguing but apparently random choice of subjects provides no answer. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this notion of a “long golden age” is of minimal value in analyzing mysteries written during that time. Yet if the overall premise of the book is artificial, there is nevertheless a good deal of interest to be found in some of the individual chapters.

The approach of the contributors is varied. Kali Israel examines a single novel, Murder in the House of Commons by Mary Agnes Hamilton (1931); her criticisms of the book are generally sound, although they will hardly encourage readers to seek it out. Antoinette Burton's essay, “Semicolonial Housewifery as Detective Fiction: ‘Trinker's Colt’ and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M.,” which discusses the once-popular stories of Somerville and Ross, also deals with a niche subject, arguing that “when it comes to historicizing colonial detective fiction, we need a multi-species approach” (100). However, the essay does not make a persuasive case that there is much to be gained from regarding Somerville and Ross as writers of detective fiction.

Several essays which tackle broader (if often neglected) topics are more successful. Amy Milne-Smith discusses policing “in the shadow of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes,” while Susan R. Grayzel offers a thought-provoking and well-researched discussion of civil defense and the wartime mystery. Grayzel demonstrates how detective novelists shortly before and during the Second World War took horrifying subjects such as the use of poison gas in warfare and domesticated them, showing that murder and death on a personal level could be solved, punished, “and seemingly contained” (83). Her examination of novels by J. Russell Warren, Douglas G. Browne, and Max Dalman leads her to conclude that “the gas mask is the lurking symbolic reminder of mass death, but the deaths in these mysteries are local, rooted in interpersonal entanglements, and very individual…The horror is no longer that one has to carry a gas mask, but that there is cyanide in its container” (94).

Co-editor Mayhall writes about the connections between interwar detective fiction and the press and, making a comparison with the objectives of modernism, argues that “detective fiction…took from newspaper reporting a mass of chaotic facts and attempted to make it into something coherent” (162). Especially insightful is Eloise Moss's study of hotels in the context of detective fiction. She is right to point out that surprisingly little attention has been paid to the use of hotels as a popular and often highly effective setting for detective stories. The novels discussed include J.J. Connington's The Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928) and several titles by Agatha Christie, although a curious omission is Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase (1932), one of the most renowned and atmospheric hotel mysteries of the Golden Age.

In a book of this kind, it is almost impossible to avoid error, but it is disappointing to note that a few mistakes are of an elementary nature. The Daughter of Time (1951) was not Josephine Tey's “last mystery novel,” while it is well-established that the Detection Club was founded in 1930, not 1928 (148), and the surname of Julian Symons, a prominent historian of the genre, is mis-spelled twice.

The editors contend that the essays support them in challenging conventional narratives of the evolution of detective fiction, but the attempt to weave the disparate ingredients of this book into a coherent whole by reference to the “long golden age” lacks conviction. Nevertheless, there is enough of merit in this book for it to reward readers who seek to broaden their understanding of the crime genre, and also to justify the editors’ less ambitious but more pertinent claim that “Classic British detective fiction is often portrayed as formulaic and predictable, but this collection shows it to be quite the opposite. Instead, detective fiction emerges here as an archive of stories ‘good to think with’ for historians of modern Britain.”