Abstract:

Gladys Mitchell's first-published and still-neglected detective story, Speedy Death (1929), productively re-illuminates modernism's relations with popular culture. Published nearly a decade into the interwar period now known as the "Golden Age" of British detective fiction, Speedy Death appears just when the genre's conventions are being defined by writers like S.S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox. As these authors codify the genre's "rules of the game," Speedy Death queries and queers those rules, parodying, interrogating, and innovating the conventions it also employs. Mitchell's novel should be regarded not only as an inventive golden age whodunit that warrants more recognition but also as a significant example of popular modernism that works from inside a popular genre to make it new.