A variety of psychoanalytic readings of late-Victorian and early-twentieth century crime fiction often place the detective at the centre of their analysis, depicting them as a conduit through which readings of other aspects of the genre can be articulated. Samantha Walton, for example, explores the idea that the ‘the detective [acts as the] diagnostician of the self’, and goes on to argue that ‘[t]he central place of psychological discourses in the golden age novel both incites and responds to specific cultural anxieties about selfhood’ (2015: 275). Consequently, however, the psychological effects of performing the role of ‘detective’ remain under-examined. Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes performs his detection under constant scrutiny from those around him who fail to understand his mental processes. In the early twentieth century, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey struggles to reconcile the tension between his position as ‘aristocrat’ and ‘detective’, and also has difficulty with disassociating his activities as a detective with his experiences in the First World War. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s ‘othered’ position as of a different nationality to most other characters psychologically isolates him, whilst his compunction for the domestic does not mesh with his activities as an externally-othered figure. This article performs a reading of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and Christie’s Hercule Poirot and offers a tentative exploration of how these classic ‘detectives’ are often physically, socially, narratively and psychologically isolated by performing their role.

The Golden Age of detective fiction, usually delimitated between 1914 and 1940, coincides with the Golden Age of theatrical magic. Mystery and magic are linked by various elements such as the persistence of the challenge (between writer and readers or between magician and audience), the power of suggestion, the role of the stage and the attraction towards the impossible. Mystery writing and stage magic both rely on conjuring tricks, devices and misdirection. Starting from this premise, I will discuss two different ways in which theatrical magic has influenced Golden Age writers. While writers such as John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Clayton Rawson – mostly from the United States – would thematise magic, others made an “illusionistic” use of language and narrative in order to confound and misdirect the readers. This technique – which is ultimately rooted in Edgar Allan Poe’s work – recurs in Agatha Christie’s books, where “the quickness of the hand deceives the eye”.

This essay provides new insights into the development of interwar crime fiction by investigating how, and to what extent, two such apparently irreconcilable subgenres as the classic detective story and the psychological thriller interact and intertwine in the work of often- neglected Golden Age writers.