How Writing a Mystery Helped Me Rediscover the Joy of Golden Age Detective Novels

Could I solve a murder?

As a dedicated mystery reader since I picked up my first Agatha Christie (The Seven Dials Murder) around the precocious age of eleven, I’ve often wondered how my skills of detection would stack up in a real case. I’d like to think that I’d at least know a little bit about how to secure a crime scene and interview suspects, although I’m happy to concede that the likelihood of me ever having to test out that theory is slim at best. However, using those skills to write my first murder mystery? That’s an entirely different matter. 

When I sat down to write the book that would eventually become my debut historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, I set it in the secretive world of Winston Churchill’s underground World War 2 bunker where the murder of a typist wouldn’t just trigger the hunt for a killer, but also a dangerous mole who could cost Britain the war. I decided my amateur sleuth would be Evelyne Redfern, a young woman and typist who the investigators called in to catch the murderer and would—very foolishly— under-estimate. This doubt in Evelyne’s abilities wouldn’t just be because she’s a woman in the 1940s, but because she has a unique quality they never imagined could be helpful: she’s a reader. 

I gave Evelyne a voracious appetite for the novels of what we would now call the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and others rank among some of her favorites, but she is always willing to try a new author in the hunt for mysteries that can fool her until the end.

I wanted A Traitor in Whitehall to be sprinkled with references to books and detectives Evelyne admires. I set about writing with the confidence that I had read widely enough in the genre to do just that. 

I was, it would turn out, very wrong.

Let’s take Christie’s backlist, for instance. Now, I’ve read quite a few of her novels, and I’ve seen about 45,000 hours* of Poirot. However, the bulk of my Christie reading years were between the ages of 11 and 18. Given that I haven’t been a teenager for a long time, I quickly realized I had some catching up to do, especially considering that A Traitor in Whitehall is set in 1940, meaning that a great deal of Christie’s backlist wouldn’t be available to me as it hadn’t existed yet.

The only solution, I reasoned, was to crack a few spines and do some serious—and very enjoyable—remedial reading. 

I began by going back to some of the big series that I’d either neglected for a long time or had never tackled. Along with re-reading Christie’s Death on the Nile and her much later Dead Man’s Folly, I read my first Roderick Allen books: A Man Lay Dead and Enter a Murderer by Ngiao Marsh, the second of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I picked up Sayers again, returning to Whose Body? and also reading Clouds of Witness for the first time. 

With those books under my belt, I dove into some of Allingham’s short stories, and onto my nightstand went Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley and The Poison Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley. While not strictly a Golden Age detective novel, I also devoured Plain Murder by C.S. Forester. And while I purchased Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth, I am ashamed to say that it is still waiting in my to-be-read pile. 

A great companion on this re-reading project was The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, as well as various short story collections from the British Library Crime Classics, which Edwards also edits. 

Ultimately, mentions of six British detective novels and one American novel made their way into A Traitor in Whitehall. However, as I continue to write Evelyn Redfern’s second case, I’m still expanding my reading and seeking out the kind of books that taught my amateur sleuth everything she knows.

If you would like to explore any of the mysteries mentioned in A Traitor in Whitehall, you can find all of the titles here:

• Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
• Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh
• The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• The Poison Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

*Number only slightly exaggerated for comedic effect.

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