The year 1929 was unusually grisly. At a gloomy country pile an old man was stabbed to death with a slender, jewel-encrusted Italian dagger during a game of murder in the dark. In London, a box of maraschino chocolates laced with nitrobenzene mailed to a playboy baronet was mistakenly snarfed by a housewife who died in agony a few hours later. Then a famous explorer was discovered in the bath — dead and, doubly mysteriously, transformed into a woman. In the West End, while queuing for a ticket to a hit musical, a young man collapsed to the pavement, a stiletto dagger protruding from his grey tweed coat. And pottering about her garden in St Mary Mead, a fluffy-haired, deceptively scatty old spinster was about to poke her nose into a mysterious death at the vicarage.
This virtuosic (fictional) crime spree was not the work of a single madcap genius, but a whole gang of twisted minds whose work is collectively immortalized as the golden age of detective fiction. A striking number of them were women. The Scottish playwright Josephine Tey and 25-year-old Margery Allingham both debuted their detectives (Alan Grant in The Man in the Queue and Albert Campion in The Crime at Black Dudley). Meanwhile, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie were knuckling down to the first full-length adventures for Harriet Vane and Miss Marple, two lady sleuths who would change crime fiction.
