Sorting Golden Age! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dorothy L Sayers

"Whose Body?" from 1923 is the first of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels. An inoffensive architect finds the body of a naked man wearing nothing but pince-nez, in his bathtub one morning. Whose body is it?

In this first book Wimsey is struggling with the problem that takes him a few books to get past - investigating crime, especially murder, is not a game, but a life and death business. His PTSD from the war (shell shock, in contemporary parlance) is very much in evidence.

A modern reader has a struggle, too. As in many works from this period, the casual antisemitism can be a little hard to swallow.

Answer: Ngaio Marsh

1941's "Death and the Dancing Footman" is from well into Ngaio Marsh's series about her gentleman policeman, Roderick Alleyn. Alleyn's character traits are well-established by this time - he's low key, intelligent, and does not let his scruples as a gentleman interfere with doing his job as a cop.

It's a nice little classic country house mystery - the host has assembled a house party of people who have reason to dislike or even hate each other, so he can sit back and see the sparks fly. They get snowed in, and sparks do indeed fly.

Answer: Dorothy L Sayers

By this tenth Lord Peter Wimsey novel, from 1935, Peter has become a character, rather than just the bundle of characteristics he was in the first few books. Both he and Harriet Vane are now well rounded people, not just to the reader, but to each other.

In "Gaudy Night", the mystery (violent and obscene vandalism in a women's college in Oxford) is tangled with the idea of the education of women, and indeed the entire place of women in society. Fittingly, in a book that examines the possibility that women are - who knew? - people, Peter and Harriet finally get together, and she accepts his proposal.

Answer: Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's 1932 "Peril at End House" brings her detective Hercule Poirot and his friend Hastings to the seaside in Cornwall, on vacation. Someone appears to be attempting to kill a young woman from a nearby house, and Poirot is determined to help her, though she somewhat poo-poos his concerns. But then, while fireworks explode off the headland, the body of a young woman is found, crumpled on the ground!

This is a well plotted, very fair mystery, but an astute reader can catch on to the clues early on, that unravel it. The characters are, as usual with Christie in this period, pretty much just cogs in the plot machinations - the fun of these books is the puzzle, not insight into humanity.

Answer: Agatha Christie

1942's "The Moving Finger" is one of my favourite Agatha Christies. A brother and sister rent a house in a village in order for him to recuperate from an accident in rural peace and quiet. The peace is soon disturbed by some very nasty poison pen letters, and then murder. Miss Marple arrives on the scene to figure it all out.

There's a fun and sprightly tone to this book, with our main characters, especially the sister, being quite the bright young things. It's as much a rom-com as a mystery, with everyone we like having a happy ending.

Answer: Ngaio Marsh

This 1938 novel from Ngaio Marsh introduces Alleyn's love interest and eventual wife, the artist Agatha Troy. It's set in a country house, but it's not quite the usual country house mystery of the era - the majority of the characters are artists attending a school being held there by the house's owner, Troy. The murder of a sexy model brings Alleyn into it, though he had met and become interested in Troy earlier in the book.

There's a nice ambivalence to Troy's attitude to Alleyn - she has a Bohemian distaste for and mistrust of the police, while still finding him interesting. Marsh does not plumb their romance to the extent that Sayers does that of Peter and Harriet - just a few books further on in the series we find them married, without having been witness to every bump on the road to love.

Answer: Dorothy L Sayers

"Murder Must Advertise" from 1933 has Lord Peter Wimsey spending most of the book in disguise working in an ad agency, investigating a murder that seems to be connected to the drug trade.

The plot's OK, but the real highlight of this book is the look at the ad biz - Sayers had been a copywriter and knew it well. The development of the "Whiffling 'round Britain" campaign for Whifflets cigarettes is a lot more interesting and realistic than the Harlequin antics that work to solve the mystery.

Answer: Ngaio Marsh

"Death in Ecstasy" was written in 1936, but honestly the spiritual cult/scam does not seem all that far removed from some of what you'd find on the fringes of the New Age now. The police are brought in to this pretty darn bogus set-up when one member is poisoned drinking from a ritual goblet of wine that all the others have shared.

Quite a lot of over the top fun to be had in this one. There are a pair of coded gay characters who come off better than you'd expect, given the date the book was written.

Answer: Agatha Christie

This is Hercule Poirot's 20th appearance, from 1938. An extremely nasty old woman is murdered during a visit to an archaeological site at Petra in Jordan, and Poirot undertakes to solve the mystery within 24 hours.

A not particularly difficult puzzle (I was able to guess the murderer, which is unusual for me with Christie), this novel has characters who act a little more like recognizable human beings than we sometimes see in her work. The bullied family members ring quite true, to my mind.

Answer: Dorothy L Sayers

An early Wimsey novel, which has one of my favourite of his characters, Miss Climpson.

Wimsey becomes interested in the death of an elderly woman due to a conversation with the doctor who had been attending her. Has a crime been committed? He sends Miss Climpson to poke around and see.

A couple of Sayers' trademark "odd fact that the reader may or may not know" plot devices are used to good effect in this book. There's a little more action than we are used to from this author, too, and Miss Climpson is in actual danger! (She is saved in the nick of time, if you don't mind a spoiler for a book from 1927).

Answer: Ngaio Marsh

"Overture to Death" (1939) is another favourite subset of Golden Age mystery, the village mystery. An ingenious device kills the piano player in a theatrical presentation in the village hall, and Alleyn and Fox are called in to investigate.

As in many of Marsh's books, this one just skirts being all out farce; it's definitely played for laughs, with a large cast of amusing village characters that most likely never actually existed in any village. Quite a lot of fun for anyone who likes this sort of thing.

Answer: Agatha Christie

This one is a Superintendent Battle mystery, from 1929. A death at Chimneys country house (previously the setting for "The Secret of Chimneys" from 1925) soon leads our intrepid bunch of young investigators onto the trail of a secret masked group of spies - or does it?

I find that Christie's spy thrillers don't hold up as well as her puzzle mysteries, but this book does have a good twist at the end. The secret masked society of spies or criminals was something of a favourite in thrillers at the time; "Seven Dials Mystery" at least makes more sense than Dorothy Sayers' attempt at the theme, the highly unlikely "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba" which is just ludicrous.

Answer: Agatha Christie

"A Pocket Full of Rye" is from 1953, but I think we can still class it as a Golden Age mystery, as it has all the necessary elements, including Miss Marple. She arrives rather late on the scene here, after the king in his counting house, the queen in the parlour and the maid in the garden have all been murdered. Miss Marple is full of righteous anger, and soon brings our murderer to justice.

I quite like this one. It has a feature that you see more often in Miss Marple stories than in other Christie books - servants and village people are as likely to be important players as are the gentry at the big house.

Answer: Ngaio Marsh

Published in 1945, "Died in the Wool" is set in 1942/43, during the war while Alleyn is in New Zealand doing something mysterious having to do with intelligence. An outspoken MP disappears, only for her body to be found weeks later inside a bale of wool. Alleyn is called in a year later, as her death might have been connected to a secret war weapon being developed on the farm.

The format here is quite unusual, as our detective doesn't show up until so much later. Several of the chapters are told from the viewpoint of the various characters, as Alleyn has to piece together what happened by talking to all of them. Marsh was originally from New Zealand and brings some local knowledge in, though I always find a bit of an undertone in her New Zealand books - a strange mixture of inferiority and chip-on-the-shoulder resentment about being a "colonial". At the time, there was still very much a paternalistic attitude in Britain towards the Empire, and she must have had to swallow a fair bit, when she moved to England.

Answer: Dorothy L Sayers

"Five Red Herrings" (1931) brings Lord Peter Wimsey to Scotland, to the artist colonies of Gatehouse and Kirkcudbright. An unpleasant and unpopular painter is found dead, apparently the victim of an accident, but Wimsey soon turns up evidence that it must have been murder. Hard to know who did it, as half the neighbourhood had a motive.

This is a beautifully plotted book, with extremely plausible scenarios for the guilt of every suspect. Lots of messing about with railway timetables and bicycles; everyone has a pet theory and happily beavers away trying to prove it. It's the kind of book that is a lot of fun for those who enjoy working out logic puzzles, and probably very annoying for those who don't.