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C hapter 1: Introduction and overview -- Chapter 2: Policing in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: Myths, Monsters, and the Real Limits of the Late-Victorian Detective -- Chapter 3: Pot-stirring or Pot-boiling? Crises, crime, and other contexts for Mary Agnes Hamilton's Murder in the House of Commons (1932) -- Chapter 4: Domesticating the Horrors of Modern War: How Interwar Sensation and Detective Fiction Faced the War to Come -- Chapter: 5 Agatha Christie in Southern Africa -- Chapter 6: Time is always guilty’: Narratives of Progress and Decline in Interwar Detective Fiction -- Chapter 7: Death Haunts the British Hotel, 1918-1965 -- Chapter 8:Semi-Colonial Horsewifery as Detective Fiction: ‘Trinket’s Colt’ and the Mysteries of the Irish R.M -- Chapter 9: Magic is My Business’: Raymond Chandler and Detective Fiction as Fairy Tale -- Chapter 10: Indecently Preposterous’: The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction. British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.
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