What were the most popular mystery novels in the first forty years of the twentieth century, encompassing both the brief Edwardian era and the between-the-wars period of the Jazz Age and the Depression? Well, there were eight mystery novels and thrillers which made the annual yearly top ten bestseller lists between 1900 and 1940. What do you think they were? Never fear, I won't keep you in suspense!
Here they are:
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| "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" The first top ten yearly mystery bestseller of the 20th century. |
1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle (No. 7)
1909: The Man in Lower Ten, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 4)
1910: The Window at the White Cat, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 8)
1920: The Great Impersonation, E. Phillips Oppenheim (No. 8)
1928: The Greene Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)
1929: The Bishop Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)
1930: The Door, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 6)
1938: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 4)
1939: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 3)
How many of these books have you read? I have actually read them all, though it has been quite a while in some cases. All of them, I believe, are still in print today, which is more than you can say for a great deal of vintage bestselling fiction. What distinguished these particular mysteries, we may ask, and made them so popular?
There were two books by male Britishers from the Victorian/Edwardian eras, Conan Doyle and Oppenheim. Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most famous mystery novels of all time and was published when Sherlock Holmes fiction was at its popular peak, when people were panting for new Holmes tales. They got a good one with Hound!
The Oppenheim book, Great Impersonation, is by far his most famous tale, but probably today even a lot of vintage crime fiction fans have not read it. It's an espionage story, a tale of a German spy up to no good in England, which I think owes its success to its being topical with the Great War.
This was a time when Germany was not exactly held in high esteem in much of the western world. E. Phillips Oppenheim was an extremely popular writer on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the 1910-40 period, though he is mostly forgotten today.
And then we have two Americans, Mary Roberts Rinehart and S. S. Van Dine. Rinehart's first two top novels come from the Edwardian era, when she was just starting her writing career.
Rinehart had hit it big in 1908 with The Circular Staircase, the novel which is widely considered to have started the so-called HIBK (Had-I-But-Known) school of feminine suspense, which has proven popular right to this day with books like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train (both 21st century bestsellers).
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| With The Door Rinehart was back in the top ten with a mystery after two decades. |
I think Lower Ten and White Cat, which are rather more backward-looking books, benefitted from the rolling success of Circular Staircase, which did not actually making the yearly top ten bestseller list. In 1930 Rinehart returned to the foreboding female narrator style with The Door. It should be noted that Rinehart also made the yearly bestseller lists as well in nine additional years as well, but with mainstream fiction. She was a tremendously popular author in general.
Then we have something of an anomaly, S. S. Van Dine, who for about a decade with his novels and the films adapted from them personally incarnated for Americans the "pure" detective novel of ratiocination.
All of the other books above elevated atmosphere, character and writing to a great extent, even Hound of the Baskervilles, which is a true detective novel also. They are, in short, novels of considerable suspense. The Van Dines are rather drier affairs, though Greene and Bishop are his most outre tales and represented the peak of his popularity in the United States.
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| a cover as dry as detection |
Finally we have Daphne du Maurier, the youngest writer of this select group, by a full generation or more. (Conan Doyle was born in 1859, Oppenheim 1866, Rinehart 1876, Van Dine 1888, du Maurier 1907). Her classic Rebecca, which was so popular that it made the yearly bestseller lists for two years in a row, was a full-scale Gothic novel, rather a return in style to the sensation novels of the Victorian era. Along with Conan Doyle's Hound, it remains the most widely known of these books today. Du Maurier would continue to make the yearly bestseller lists into the Swinging Seventies.
Ture detective fiction, popular as it was, tended not to produce yearly bestsellers. Even Agatha Christie had only two top ten bestsellers, in 1975 and 1976 at literally the end of her life, with the much-publicized Curtain and Sleeping Murder. Christie made her fortune in paperbacks sold in drugstores, railway stations and airport stalls.
Now I'm off the dream again of Manderley. Happy New Year's!
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