British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.

• modern British history
• detective fiction
• genre studies
• women and gender
• Englishness
• race and empire

• Department of History, The Catholic University of America, Washington, USA

  Laura E. Nym Mayhall

• Department of History, Grinnell College, Grinnell, USA

  Elizabeth Prevost

Laura E. Nym Mayhall is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic University of America, USA. She is the author of The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1869-1930 (2003, and in paper, 2020). She is currently writing a book about aristocracy, celebrity, and print culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain and has published on the function of aristocrats in “golden age” detective fiction. 

Elizabeth Prevost is Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History at Grinnell College, USA, where she teaches modern British, imperial, and African history. She has previously published work on mission Christianity, gender, feminism, and colonial politics, and she is currently writing a book on Agatha Christie and the global export of British detective fiction. 

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