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The Golden Age Of Detective Fiction

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The period of the 1920s and '30s is generally referred to as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. During this period, a number of very popular writers emerged, mostly British but with a notable subset of American and New Zealand writers. Female writers constituted a major portion of notable Golden Age writers, including Agatha Christie, the most famous of the Golden Age writers, and among the most famous authors of any genre, of all time. Various conventions of the detective genre were standardized during the Golden Age, and in 1929 some of them were codified by writer Ronald Knox in his 'Decalogue ' of rules for detective fiction, among them to avoid supernatural elements, all of which were meant to guarantee that, in Knox 's words, a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end." Many of the most popular books of the Golden Age were written by Agatha Christie, who produced long series of books featuring her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others, and usually including a complex puzzle for the reader to try to unravel. Christie 's novels include, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and And Then There Were Noe (1939). Also popular were the stories featuring Dorothy L. Sayers 's Lord Peter Wimsey and S. S. Van

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