There was a growing recognition that people read detective stories for their puzzle value, to try and reason out the conclusion before it is revealed by the author. One important issue that occupied the Detection Club was that of fair play. The Detection Club, formed in London in 1930, became a forum for professional detective fiction authors to share their ideas and views. The most popular author with the British public in those days was Edgar Wallace, who turned out dozens of racy thrillers and many passable detective stories: some of the best of these are collected in The Mind of Mr J.G. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s first novel, was published in 1921 it was regarded as a good beginning but did not stand out dramatically from those around it. Much longer than this, and either the plot becomes too complex to follow or the author has to resort to padding.
It was during this period that an ideal size for a detective novel was established at somewhere between 180 and 220 pages.
More important was the change in publishing formats – short story magazines became less common and novels became much shorter novels appearing in the 1920s were only a half to a third the size of their Victorian counterparts. Unlike the Second World War, the First World War made little impact on detective fiction as we have seen, Freeman was able to ignore it altogether. Berkeley, Anthony - The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1928)ĭevelopments in Detective Fiction, 1914-1930
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