Edwardian British Fiction: The Roots of the Golden Age

When people think of classic British crime fiction, there are names that spring naturally to mind: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers etc, and an era also suggests itself: the interwar decades of the 1920s and 30s. But the real seeds of the crime fiction genre were sown a decade or so earlier during the reign of King Edward VII. This was the Edwardian era (officially 1901 to 1910 but often stretched to 1914) and it was this time that gave crime fiction its first true boom, and it could be said, laid the groundwork for all the crime fiction that followed.

The Detective Becomes a Star

Sherlock Holmes had already made his debut in the late Victorian era, but it was during the Edwardian period that the ‘gentleman detective’ really took off. Writers rushed to create their own sleuths. G.K. Chesterton introduced Father Brown, an unassuming priest whose insight into human nature let him solve crimes through empathy rather than pure logic. Baroness Emmuska Orczy created Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, one of the earliest female detectives in British fiction, along with her armchair sleuth ‘The Old Man in the Corner’. R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke brought forensic science to the page, years before it became a genre staple. Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt offered a more grounded, working detective as an alternative to the eccentric genius archetype. Some of these authors and their creations are relatively unknown to us now, but a few others have endured. This collection of Edwardian detective stories is a great starting point if you want to sample the era's sleuths in their original form.

This period created a subgenre: the short crime story, perfect for serialisation in popular magazines. There was an insatiable reading public at this time, and the writers who catered to this group produced story after story.

Real Crime Inspired the Fiction

One notable aspect of this crime fiction tidal wave is that true crime in Edwardian Britain inspired the stories they wrote. There was perhaps the most famous murder case of the time: the 1910 Dr Crippen case, in which Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was chased across the Atlantic when he tried to flee and was caught partly because of the new technology of wireless telegraphy. This case captured the public imagination and blurred the line between true crime and thriller in a way that felt thrillingly modern at the time. Sensational trials and tabloid coverage of the era fed directly into the appetite for fiction that fused detection with high drama. Book Riot has rounded up some of the best Edwardian true crime reads if you want to explore the real cases that shaped the genre. 

Creating the Template

It was in the Edwardian age that the formula for Golden Age whodunnits was set. This era’s stories established the nature of the detective (brilliant, idiosyncratic, a little bit odd), the stupid and endlessly baffled police, the fair-play clues for the reader. The writers of the twenties and thirties didn’t have to invent the whodunnit genre; they simply refined the literary conventions earlier Edwardian writers had put in place.
 
For anyone interested in the roots of British crime fiction, the Edwardian era is well worth exploring. It's less polished than the Golden Age proper, often stranger and more varied, but it's where the detective story truly found its footing as a form the public couldn't get enough of.