by Violet Woolf On Golden Age Detective Fiction, Contemporary British Class Politics, And The Comfort Of Genre
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Monday, April
I have spent the week rereading Dorothy L. Sayers, specifically The Nine Tailors (1934), which is a novel about campanology — the art of bell-ringing — and a murder in the fens of East Anglia, and which is also a novel about class, the rural English community, and the specific texture of 1930s English provincial life that Sayers documents with more sociological precision than she is usually given credit for. I am rereading her because the news has been particularly loud this week and detective fiction from the 1930s is the literary equivalent of a very long bath.
What Sayers’s 1930s England and 2026 England share: an anxiety about the direction of the country that is real and unresolvable in the short term, expressed through political arguments that are ultimately about the same underlying question: what kind of country do we want to live in, and who gets to define the answer? The 1930s version of this question had fascism on one side and its own set of anxious democrats on the other. The 2026 version has Reform UK on one side and its own set of anxious democrats on the other. The bell-ringing continues in both periods. The murder mystery continues to be solvable by the end of the novel, which is more than can be said for the political mystery.
The Genre’s Function
Detective fiction in periods of political anxiety serves a specific function: it asserts that the world is ultimately ordered, that crimes have perpetrators who can be identified, that reason applied to evidence produces correct conclusions. This is either comfort or denial depending on your assessment of the world’s actual orderliness. Bohiney covers the comedy. The Prat covers the politics. McSweeney’s covers the genre essays.
Satire Disclaimer: Satirical diary entry. Further reading: India Satirical Journalism: Regional Voices and National Targets.
More comedy: The Daily Mash
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