Everett Carr and The Mystery of The Golden Age

By Matthew Booth

I find the trappings of the Golden Age of crime fiction irresistible: a gifted amateur sleuth, the closed circle of suspects, the isolated country house, the 1930s setting. There is something about those books by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Anthony Berkley, and their contemporaries that resonates with me. It is all to do with the puzzle element, I suppose, the game between reader and author to solve the case before the solution is given, but I think it also has something to do with the restoration of order. The Golden Age (and those modern practitioners of it) was careful to make sure that the guilty were punished and the innocent saved, and after the upheaval and chaos of murder, the world was put back to normal. There was – and is – something very comforting about that.

But is it all a little too cosy?

Several years ago, after decades of having short stories published and radio plays performed, I decided it was time that I wrote a novel and, not surprisingly, my mind drifted towards an homage to the Golden Age detective novel. I didn’t want to write a pastiche nor did I want to send up the genre.  That is too easy to do.  But nor did I want it to be a cosy novel. Don’t get me wrong: I have no issue with cosy mysteries. They are very popular and they have a wide audience. But I didn’t want to write a novel where the crime centred around a dog, a cat, or a canary; nor did I want to write a murder mystery that was just as concerned with baking, painting, or pottery making as it was about violent death.

Instead, I wanted to write a serious novel set within the confines of a detective story.  P.D. James had done it so well – her novels were, in effect, Golden Age stories, but they were populated by believable people, whose lives were affected by the murder concerned.  I became fascinated with the idea of writing a traditional whodunit with realistic undercurrents, where the suspects would be relatable people, with feelings and emotions a reader could recognize.  Their motives and secrets, uncovered during the investigation, would be serious human conundrums and problems, not simply the embezzlement of church funds.  They would touch the darker recesses of the human soul.

All this pondering resulted in the first book in my Everett Carr mystery series, A Talent for Murder. That first novel was typically Golden Age: a closed community of characters, isolated in an English country mansion, and a locked room mystery to boot. A locked room mystery is an artificial construct, but it must make sense in its own terms. A criticism of John Dickson Carr, the doyen of that particular type of detective story, is that his solutions are sometimes so contrived and unwieldy that they can be unsatisfactory.  I wanted my locked room to be believable despite its artificiality.  By blending this fictional construct with the realism of believable characters and motives, I hope that the Everett Carr mysteries give a contemporary twist on traditional Golden Age tropes.
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It seemed appropriate to honour Dickson Carr, so I named my amateur sleuth after him.  Everett Carr is a former High Court judge, who retires when his wife is murdered in a failed assassination attempt on Carr himself.  A stray bullet is lodged in his knee, leaving him lame and serving as a physical reminder that his wife died in his place.  Carr’s pain is both physical and mental. But a character cannot remain stagnant – they must progress and develop. Each book, I hope, tells something new about Carr and his world, not least in his psychological trauma. Although his physical wound remains constant, the books show Carr’s mental trauma over the death of his wife begins to deepen, as he comes to realise that he is manifesting the symptoms of what would later become known as Survivor’s Guilt. How he manages with this consequence of his personal tragedy is a developing and progressing subplot to the novels – which I hope is another way of elevating the Carr mysteries from simple whodunit puzzles to novels of some character depth.   

Since the publication of A Talent for Murder, Carr has investigated several Golden Age whodunits. He has braved The Dangers of this Night, the second in the series and he has tackled A Killing Amongst the Dead, which is the third. This year, in the latest mystery, he comes face to face with The Serpent’s Fang, due for release in March. This latest case involves the murder of a faded actress and Carr’s attempts to save a woman from the gallows.

Everett Carr is my homage to sleuths such as Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Gervase Fen. He is also my attempt to make such a character psychologically interesting to a modern audience. 

I hope he and I have done the Golden Age proud.

The Everett Carr Mysteries are published by Level Best Books and are available in paperback and e-book formats.

As a lifelong aficionado and expert on Sherlock Holmes, Matthew Booth is the author of several books and short stories about the famous detective. He wrote a number of scripts for a Holmes radio series produced by Jim French Productions in Seattle, as well as creating his own series about a disgraced former barrister investigating crimes for the same production company.  

He is the creator of Everett Carr, an amateur sleuth in the traditional mould, who appears in his debut investigation in the book, A Talent for Murder, a traditional whodunit, which offers a contemporary twist on the format.  

An expert in crime and supernatural fiction, Matthew has provided a number of academic talks on such subjects as Sherlock Holmes, the works of Agatha Christie, crime fiction, Count Dracula, and the facts and theories concerning the crimes of Jack the Ripper.  

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and is the editor of its monthly magazine, Red Herrings. He lives with his wife in Manchester, England.