Historical Mysteries: Between the Wars
The fourth and final part of my ongoing series on historical mysteries at the Barnes & Noble Review (Go here for parts One, Two, and Three) runs this week, zeroing in on recent and upcoming novels set between World Wars One and Two. Here’s how it opens:
worsen and encompass the entire world, it's hard to resist the urge to
look back to America's last big boom-and-bust period, the time between
World Wars One and Two. Out of the ashes of the Great War came the
freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the
decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing
halt with the Crash of '29 — triggering the Great Depression and the
New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for
another, greater war.
So much economic, sociopolitical, and cultural change within a
compressed period of time makes the "Between the Wars" period a
particularly inviting one for crime novelists. There's just enough of a
remove that the era seems attractively distant, but not so great that
an author lacks for primary sources — books, films, music and the like
— to consult for research purposes. And in a time when things got so
good, then so bad, motives for murder are easy to discern. What
follows, more or less in chronological order, are those mysteries
mining the "in-between" that are too good to let fall between the
cracks.