One of the most significant male contributors to manners mystery fiction at this time was E.R. Not all of these crime fiction courtiers, if you will, were women. These novels were, on the whole, rapturously received by crime fiction critics, and other mystery writers rushed to flatter with imitation these ascendant monarchs of manners mystery. Marsh in the 1938 detective novels Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie introduced a love interest, artist Agatha Troy, for her posh detective, Roderick Alleyn, to pursue and win, over a much wider social canvas than the author had heretofore painted, while Allingham in Dancers in Mourning (1937) and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) intensively explored the social worlds of, respectively, musical theater and the fashion industry.

Sayers’s sister Crime Queens Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham followed Sayers’s example in their own mystery writing. Sayers had identified and powerfully boosted the manners movement both in her Thirties mystery criticism and her own detective novels, particularly Gaudy Night (1935), which was so concerned with the romantic relationship between Sayers’s detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and his beloved, popular mystery writer Harriet Vane, and the question of women’s place in society that some puzzle purists of the day complained actual detection became incidental to the novel. By this time the influential English crime writer Dorothy L. Punshon published Suspects-Nine, his twelfth Bobby Owen detective novel.

So-called manners mystery-the conscious use of the detective fiction form to explore social mores in the fashion of the nineteenth-century novel of manners-was enjoying great prestige in 1939, the year E.R.

Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh