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The interwar years in Britain are regularly referred to by historians and literary commentators as the Golden Age of detective fiction (c. 1920–1940). This article focuses on the Collins imprint the Crime Club, established in 1930. It assesses the significance of this imprint in the context of the Golden Age, with a focus on its commercial animus, drawing on theories about class-based markets and the commercialization of print culture. The article examines the marketing methods used by the Crime Club to promote its titles, such as newsletters and card games, and takes into consideration the arguments of 1930s literary critics. It aims to show that detective fiction had a significant role in the commercialization of print culture during the 1930s and that its success heavily relied upon the support of a middle-class readership.
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Bradford, R., 2015. Crime Fiction: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Crime Club Bulletin, 1930. At: Oxford, Bodleian Library. Available through: John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera.
Crime Club News, 1931. At: Oxford, Bodleian Library. Available through: John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera.
Edwards, M., 2015. The Golden Age of Murder: The mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story (London: HarperCollins).
Faber, G., 2019. ‘A Publisher Looks at Booksellers’. in Print Cultures: A reader in theory and practice, ed. C. Davies, pp. 102–105 (London: Red Globe Press).
Herbert, R., 1999. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hilliard, C., 2014. ‘The Twopenny Library: The book trade, working-class reader, and “middlebrow” novels in Britain, 1930–42’, Twentieth Century British History, 25 (2), pp. 199–220.
James, R., 2017. ‘“Literature Acknowledges No Boundaries”: Book reading and social class in Britain, c.1930–c.1945’, Journal of Social History, 51 (1), pp. 80–100.
Knight, S., 2010. Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, death, diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Leavis, Q. D., 2019. ‘The Book Market’, in Print Cultures: A reader in theory and practice, ed. C. Davies, pp. 93–101 (London: Red Globe Press).
Mandel, E., 1984. Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story delightful murder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Phillips, B., 2016. ‘Crime Fiction: A global phenomenon’, Journal of Literature and Librarianship, 5 (1), pp. 5–15.
Plock, V. M., 2019. ‘The New Reading Public: Modernism, popular literature and the paperbacks’, in A History of 1930s British Literature, ed. B. Kohlmann and M. Taunton, pp. 134–146 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Rzepka, C., 2005. Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity).
Scaggs, J., 2005. Crime Fiction (London: Routledge).
Strachey, J., 1939. ‘The Golden Age of English Detection’, Saturday Review, 7 January, pp. 12–14.
Symons, J., 1972. Bloody Murder: From the detective story to the crime novel (London: Faber & Faber).
Thacker, A., 2019. ‘Circulating Literature: Libraries, bookshops and book clubs’, in A History of 1930s British Literature, ed. B. Kohlmann and M. Taunton, pp. 89–104 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
The Times, 1935. ‘The Making of a Crime Story’, 28 May, p. 22.
Unwin, S., 1926. The Truth about Publishing (London: George Allen & Unwin).
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The interwar years in Britain are regularly referred to by historians and literary commentators as the Golden Age of detective fiction (c. 1920–1940). This article focuses on the Collins imprint the Crime Club, established in 1930. It assesses the significance of this imprint in the context of the Golden Age, with a focus on its commercial animus, drawing on theories about class-based markets and the commercialization of print culture. The article examines the marketing methods used by the Crime Club to promote its titles, such as newsletters and card games, and takes into consideration the arguments of 1930s literary critics. It aims to show that detective fiction had a significant role in the commercialization of print culture during the 1930s and that its success heavily relied upon the support of a middle-class readership.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 252 | 73 | 8 |
Full Text Views | 39 | 8 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 67 | 30 | 2 |