More Golden Age Mystery Tropes

 

The beauty salon is the centre of the drugs trade – the stuff is hidden in cans of talcum powder.

The amateur detective is rude to police, suspects or witnesses and this is supposed to be funny.

A suitcase full of children’s books keeps turning up (Mr Standfast, Mystery Mile, N or M?).

An amateurish daub hides a Rubens.

Drug addicts have either pinpoint or dilated pupils.

A female character pretends to powder her nose so that she can observe people behind her.

Dubious male characters “hold up a perfectly manicured hand”.

An uneducated detective appreciates Wagner, unlike his tin-eared colleagues. He also instinctively recognises the worth of modernist buildings, impressionist paintings etc.

The detective and his sidekick refer to female suspects they don’t like as “the Smithson”, or whatever their name is.

The pearl necklace that is or isn’t genuine. (De Maupassant, Maugham, Edgar Wallace)

He met a stranger – she said she was his wife – he played along because... (Agatha Christie’s Destination Unknown)

The unset gems are hidden in plain sight, stuck onto a stage costume among rhinestones and silver paper – you’d need very strong glue.

People with horrible scars, or fiery eyes, always turn out to be harmless. (Inspector Pirberry, Sunset over Soho, Gladys Mitchell A very odd book that may be “all a dream”.)

Seemingly supernatural events being given a rational explanation followed by an ambiguous - for lack of a better word - ending. (Xavier Lechard on Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady)

Weird cultists, dope ring, similar stock props. (Contemporary review of Ngaio Marsh’s Spinsters in Jeopardy)

The "dossier" style prose that many authors use at the start of a novel e.g. a government official is telling a subordinate/superior all about the protagonist. Usually finishing with the listener saying "I see." (Alan Cassady-Bishop. If a TV episode, there is byplay with cardboard files.)

The Birlstone Gambit: murderer is person you thought had died in chapter four. Gambits are related to “types” of mysteries, like “locked room” or “Had I But Known”. (Noah Stewart)

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Golden Age Mystery Tropes

The gifted painter who is forced by his grasping wife to paint slick academic portraits a la Boldini or De Laszlo. (Agatha Christie wrote a short story on this theme. It also features the “other woman” who is not rich or beautiful but appreciates the artist’s real work. De Laszlo is getting a London show soon.)

Treasure-hunt clues.

The projectile that was stabbed into the victim, not launched or thrown.

The victim is stabbed or clouted with an unlikely weapon that can then be left casually lying about – in someone else's house.

Too many victims have antique or oriental daggers scattered over the furniture.

Minnie Lawson, the companion, is presented with all the contempt that this society seems to have held for such women: she is silly, superstitious, goes unnoticed by most people, and bears her employer’s tyranny with sheep-like acquiescence. (ahsweetmysteryblog)

Common or tasteless people have family photos all over their walls, and cluttering up the furniture. But retired nannies and governesses are allowed silver-framed photos of past charges – Miss Silver and others.

The buttoned-up businessman/barrister/scholar who finds himself losing his temper and punching villains, and/or rescuing the heroine from dastardly evil-doers.

The blind man who pretends he can see; the seeing man who pretends he is blind.

Margery Allingham tropes: the perpetually smiling policeman, the brutal fight with an unknown assailant in the dark.

WH Wright (SS van Dine) in 1927 in his introduction to The World's Great Detective Stories asserted that only an ‘inept and uninformed author’ would any longer use such ‘fashions and inventions of yesterday’ as the cipher message containing the solution, the murder committed by an animal, the phonograph alibi, the discovery of a totally distinctive cigarette, a dagger shot at a distance from a machine, the locked-room murder committed after someone had entered the room, and so on. (Amazon review of ER Punshon. Phonograph alibi: But I was playing the piano in the great hall the entire time!)

Two characters meet by chance, exchange life stories, and do an identity swap.

Policemen never have proper notebooks but scribble on the backs of envelopes which they stuff into their pockets. At least Nigel Bathgate the journalist (Ngaio Marsh) always has a shorthand book and can take down conversations.

The one person who doesn’t react to the shot/car crash/entrance of the police.

Cottages are miles from anywhere, without sanitation, heating or running water, and are used by the villain to dispose of the body/an artist’s oeuvre. Or else used as an alibi: a faithful friend swears the two of them were living in the remote cottage for weeks – while the murder was being done.

That old classic – a family heirloom that turns out to be a fake. (Past Offences on Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge)

No less than four stories incorporate the scenario of a captive or compromised protagonist sending a coded message to the outside world, and one which needs to be interpreted correctly by outsiders in order for help to arrive... This last story concerns a distressed doctor's curious prescription to a drugstore proprietor, complete with a Latinate message... A male gold-digger – here, an ersatz nobleman... Samuel Hopkins Adams takes the overstuffed approach to tell the fevered story of "The Seven Curses": a car accident victim drags himself to the bushes of a haunted house, and then watches a trio of robbers try to break in only for two of them to die an agonizing death. Fortunately, the wounded man shares a hospital room with the third robber, and the strange truth comes out. (Jasonhalf.com on a 1932 collection of US mystery stories)

"And if the telephone rings, take care it isn’t the mysterious summons to the lonely warehouse by the river, or the bogus call to Scotland Yard." "All right. And if the door-bell rings, beware of the disguised gas-inspector and the plain-clothes cop without a warrant-card. I need scarcely warn you against the golden-haired girl in distress... or the distinguished grey-haired man wearing the ribbon of some foreign order." (Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers)

Murder method: wait till victim has pneumonia, then leave a window open by their bed on a freezing night.

Golden Age detective stories sometimes feature a household that lives in the 19th century (in the 30s). (Police at the Funeral, Margery Allingham) Detectives Miss Silver and Miss Climpson are both survivals – wearing the fashions of their youth, and in Miss Silver’s case living in a “Victorian” flat and quoting Tennyson. Miss Marple frequently reveals that the Victorians knew as much if not more about psychology than the moderns. And a survival can come out with “moral maxims” that a modern young person of the 30s couldn’t.

Murderer leaves a trail of clues that on the face of it implicate himself, is arrested, cops work out that he couldn’t/wouldn’t have done it that way. Cops then find second trail of clues implicating the murderer’s ex-wife, rival or whomever he wants to target.

The sleepy, lazy smile. The carpet that is so luxurious that your feet sink into it. (Both Margery Allingham writing as Maxwell Marsh.)

The man with the nondescript features who can impersonate anybody. Character changes their face with stage makeup and fools people in daylight or electric light – just draw lines on your face with an eyebrow pencil and you're a little old lady. (Might have worked with candles and lamps.) Christie does it better with the switch from mousy to over-made-up plus wig or big, striking hat, or hiker outfit to garden-party outfit.

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More here, and links to the rest.