Historical Crime Fiction vs. Modern Crime Fiction: What's the Difference?

Crime fiction is one of the biggest genres, especially in Britain, and not just in books. Just turn on the telly and you'll find show after show of police dramas, domestic thrillers and cosy murder mysteries. The police TV show has been going strong since Dixon of Dock Green; the domestic thriller has become hugely popular really only this century, and the popularity of what we now term 'cosy mysteries' has waxed and waned throughout the last century and this.

Police procedurals

Despite the current fondness for the cosy mystery, it seems to me the British as a whole much prefer police dramas, and I'm no exception. I can quite happily read an Agatha Christie, but I find I can't get into the modern 'cosy'; they just seem too light, too unrealistic for me. On the other hand, I'm not overkeen on reading modern police procedurals; they are a little too violent sometimes for me, and I'm not really interested in the unavoidable modern elements: internet, surveillance, social media etc. I like the confines of policing the early 20th century. I just need to inject some modern-day realism into my writing.

So, I've married the two worlds in my Inspector Stannard books: the 1930s era with fully rounded characters (I hope you'll agree), believable motivations and long-term consequences. But why are the books of the Golden Age writers so different to modern crime fiction?

The private investigator or amateur sleuth

Possible reason number 1: Britain has never had a culture of the private investigator in real life in the same way America has. Historically, our private investigators (or private enquiry agents, as they were then termed) were mostly used by individuals to facilitate divorces, photographing a spouse in flagrante to prove infidelity, and were therefore grubby little men with cameras under their raincoats (sounds rather like Columbo!). They certainly weren't bourgeois gentlemen like Poirot or Holmes, or aristocrats like Lord Peter Wimsey. But no one in the 1920s or 30s wanted to read about grubby little men, so the sleuths were all eminently respectable, highly intellectual and more importantly, not only tolerated by the professionals (i.e. the police), but actively welcomed by them, because frankly the police are often portrayed as too stupid to solve the crimes themselves. It's hard to imagine a modern policeman inviting a man like Poirot to walk all over his crime scene, contaminating evidence and interviewing suspects. To be honest, it's hard to imagine a 1930s policeman doing it either. It simply is not realistic in either age.

The Golden Age of Crime Fiction: Puzzles Over People

And that's the point. Golden Age crime fiction wasn't supposed to depict murder realistically like modern crime fiction. The murder wasn't a crime; it was a puzzle to be solved, rather like a crossword puzzle in the newspaper, a brief diversion, something to exercise the brain and not the heart. The sleuth was little more than a walking, talking brain, showing the reader the clues and inviting them to join the dots.

The style of the fiction was very different from modern crime fiction, too. Violence almost never happened 'on screen' but 'off stage'. The victim as a person was mostly irrelevant; they were simply a plot device and were rarely fully developed characters. There was very little grief over the corpse; the victims were usually rotters whom nobody mourned.

These stories followed strict conventions: a closed set of suspects, a fair-play promise that all clues were visible to the reader, and a tidy resolution that restored the social order. Crime was an aberration to be solved and neatly wrapped up. CrimeReads has a great piece tracing how these conventions developed, if you fancy going further down the rabbit hole.

Modern Crime Fiction: Character and Consequence

In contrast, modern crime fiction is far more interested in psychology, trauma and moral ambiguity. Contemporary crime writers spend as much time on the inner lives of detectives, victims and even killers as they do on the mechanics of the crime itself. The genre shifted partly as a reaction against the tidiness of the Golden Age, absorbing influences from literary fiction, using unreliable narrators, non-linear timelines and deep character studies.

Depicting violence on the page is no longer shied away from; it is shown in all its horror. Modern crime fiction acknowledges the pain murder causes, not only to the victim, but also to their relatives and friends, and the wider world. Social issues like policing, class, addiction and gender and sexual violence are often woven into the plot, used for motives and red herrings, rather than kept at arm's length.

Structure and Pacing

Golden Age novels tend to be tightly plotted and relatively short (I believe the average Agatha Christie novel is no more than 65,000 words), built around a single central mystery. Modern crime fiction is often more sprawling, weaving in subplots and multiple points of view. Pacing has also changed. Modern crime thrillers often start with a shocking opening scene – the murder itself or the discovery of the body – whereas Golden Age murder mysteries built suspense more gradually.

Why Did This Change Happen?

Simply because society changed. The public is less trusting, more cynical and more aware of institutional workings. Readers have grown up on gritty crime dramas and true crime documentaries, and they want realism in their fiction rather than tidy resolutions. Today's crime readers want to know why a killer did what they did, not just how they did it.

But despite these differences, I believe both types of crime fiction share a core appeal: the desire, or indeed the need, to make sense out of chaos. Whether it's Poirot bringing all his suspects together in a drawing room to unveil the murderer or a modern police detective piecing together seemingly random clues, crime fiction remains so popular because readers/viewers have faith that the killer will be found and punished and life will return to normal.