.The last case has been solved. The suspects have gathered, the clues have fallen into place, and somewhere behind us a drawing-room door quietly closes.
For decades, the Golden Age turned murder into an intricate game of observation and deduction. We wandered through country houses and quiet villages, followed footprints across library carpets, studied railway timetables, questioned alibis and confronted crimes that sometimes seemed impossible. We met celebrated detectives and forgotten ones, famous authors and writers whose names nearly disappeared, along with others who hid behind names that never belonged to anyone at all.
But detective fiction was never going to remain safely inside the drawing room.
Outside, the world is changing.
The comfortable house recedes behind us. The streets grow crowded. Night falls. Rain shines on the pavement beneath streetlamps and neon signs. Somewhere a telephone rings in a cheap office. A police siren cuts through the traffic. Behind the doors of bars, hotels and apartment buildings are gangsters, crooked businessmen, desperate people and secrets that cannot always be neatly explained away.
The detective changes with this world.
Good manners will not get him very far here. Neither will waiting patiently for everyone to assemble in the library. He will have to walk the streets, knock on doors, follow people who do not want to be followed and discover just how close the investigator can come to the crime before some of its darkness rubs off on him.
The puzzle is not gone.
But the world surrounding it has become harder, dirtier and considerably more dangerous.
The Golden Age is behind us.
Ahead lie the mean, dark streets of hard-boiled, noir and pulp fiction.
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