Retrieving the Jewish Presence in British ‘Golden Age’ Detective Fiction (1920-1960)

• In Event: The “Hidden” Jewish Presence in 20th-Century Fiction

Abstract

In this paper, I will ask what role Jewish characters play in British Golden Age detective fiction, and why the most significant roles are taken by men. Although largely critically unacknowledged, Jewish figures are omnipresent in these works, by writers ranging from Agatha Christie, C.S. Forester and Georgette Heyer to E.C.R. Lorac, Anthony Berkeley and Ngaio Marsh. Yet critics have seen the Jewish-identified characters simply as crude ‘caricatures’ typifying the era (Turnbull 1999, Ivry 2020, Worsley 2022).

I claim rather that the presence of Jewish characters in Golden Age fiction is multifaceted and indispensable for detection’s portrayal. While Jewish women exist on the novels’ periphery as refugees, servants and jurors, the details of the Jewish men’s lives, including clothing, professions, utterances and, most crucially, bodily attributes, are central to the social context and suspense. In many cases, the mystery can only be solved through these details.

Retrieving the occluded significance of Jewish characters in Golden Age novels exposes the history of the Jews in Britain and beyond, including the discourses of their representation (Cheyette 1993) and its gendered embodiment. My examples show the spectrum of such imagery over the years of the Golden Age, including Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body (1923), Agatha Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of Twelve (1940), Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman (1942), Patricia Wentworth’s The Key (1946) and Cyril Hare’s An English Murder (1951). I conclude that, most significantly, such retrieval shows Jewish life’s foundational place in British culture.

Author

• Sue Vice