Dustjacket illustration to Ngaio Marsh, Singing in the Shrouds (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1958)
“The mystery remains box-shaped,” Margery Allingham wrote, “at once a prison and a refuge.” Its four walls: the murder, the mystery, the enquiry, and the satisfying resolution.
Queens of Crime follows four women mystery writers working in England and the English literary market from the aftermath of World War I through the later twentieth century. Murder was a saleable commercial genre, in a period which saw the peak of the monthly illustrated magazine and the emergence of the illustrated popular novel. Murder filled the commute; it sold advertisements for Cadbury’s Cocoa and Pear’s Soap; it moved between the household and the workplace in bags and pockets and envelopes.
Each of these authors is remembered through the detectives they created, figures with the capacity to bring the mystery to its resolution over and over and over again. Agatha Christie was immortalized for her Belgian detective, waxing his moustache and sipping his sirop de cassis. Dorothy Sayers: the aristocratic Peter Wimsey; Margery Allingham, her Albert Campion; Ngaio Marsh, her Robert Alleyn. This longevity was achieved through the most ephemeral of commercial media: the illustrated magazine story, the popular novel, the television series.
Queens of Crime examines the twentieth-century arc of the murder mystery and its four iconic women authors and their detectives. Like a prison and a refuge, Margery Allingham wrote of the murder mystery. The four walls of the genre like: the home? Or: the room of one’s own? Or, for some, the familiar and rigidly bounded space in which murder could take place and be resolved.
Queens of Crime: Four Authors & the Pulp Detective
Lillian Goldman Law Library, Lower Level 2
February 17 - April 29, 2026
