The Detection Club: A new Golden Age Mystery series

Britbox has announced a new detective drama, The Detection Club, a 10-part mystery series. It's just begun filming, so no news on when it will air, but the show looks very promising. As well as talented actors and writers, it has a terrific premise. Who doesn't love a golden age mystery? Hats off, too, to our friend Simon Brett for the original idea!

From Britbox:

Set against a backdrop of literary glamour, social change and deadly intrigue, The Detection Club follows the mysterious society formed by three of Britain's most celebrated crime writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton, as they are drawn into a series of real-life murder investigations.

Produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions and filming across the West Midlands, The Detection Club stars Miles Jupp (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Napoleon) as G.K. Chesterton, Bryony Hannah (Call the Midwife, Rivals) as Agatha Christie, Cara Theobold (Downton Abbey, The Syndicate) as Dorothy L. Sayers with Viraj Juneja (Little English, Get Duked!) as detective D.I. Greenway.

Created for television by Kit Lambert (Father Brown, Cooper & Fry, Whitstable Pearl) and based on an original idea by acclaimed author Simon Brett, the series, set in 1930s London, follows the legendary crime writers as they hone their craft within the hallowed walls of a secret London location. After receiving an invitation that leads them to their first real murder case, our famous trio work together to solve a series of exciting mysteries.

Their amateur sleuthing brings them into the path of D.I. Greenway, an out-of-his-depth young police detective whose determination to prove himself is both helped and hindered by our writers’ extraordinary instincts.

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THE ORIGINAL DETECTION CLUB: 

The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers and still exists to this day. They meet up several times a year to socialize, compare notes and share ideas.  Historically, the Detection Club not only helped each other with technical aspects of their individual writings, but they also wrote a number of works together, with members of the club contributing one or more chapters in turn. G.K. Chesterton was the original president from 1930. Dorothy L. Sayers was President of the Detection Club from 1949 until 1957. She was followed by Agatha Christie who held the post until her death in 1976. 

The Art Heist: Guest Post by Claudia Hagadus Long

I have a really hard time killing anyone.

For a normal person, not being able to murder would be, well, expected. Or at least hoped for. But for a mystery writer, it’s a real challenge. 

Mysteries need a certain framework: there’s a killing. Dead people don’t tell tales (though as many forensic mysteries have taught us, their bodies do!) There’s a sleuth. If it’s a police procedural, we learn how a brilliant homicide detective solves the killing, against the interests of his department superior. If it’s a “retired, damaged cop/investigator/PI” we watch as the sleuth overcomes his or her personal demons to uncover Truth. And when it’s an amateur sleuth, we follow her through the unwilling stage, the compelling part, and the final-danger-discovery, to bring the malefactor to justice in time to feed her cat. 

But every one of those stories needs a body.

What’s a deeply empathetic mystery writer to do?

Enter the Art Heist. Art Heist mysteries are a hoot to write, and a pleasure to read. 

A heist mystery may have a body somewhere, but it’s the theft of the precious art object that starts the ball rolling. Something valuable, possibly well-known, certainly well-guarded, emphatically precious, is going to disappear. Sometimes, the plot allows us to side with the thief: maybe the object was originally theirs, or their people’s, and was taken unfairly or with malice. If the thief or thieves are charismatic enough, if the plan to steal the art is complex enough, and the current owner is on the wrong side of virtue, we root for the success of the heist. Think Oceans 11.

If the thief is a villain, though, then thwarting the theft, at great personal risk, or recovering the object after the theft, also with great personal danger, becomes the engine of the story. Justice still has to prevail and a real villain must be brought to justice.

All three of the Zara and Lilly adventures are heist mysteries. In Nine Tenths of the Law, Zara and Lilly chase a menorah, stolen from their mother in 1939 by the Nazis, through modern-day New York City. It had been shown at a museum, and before they could make a claim, it had disappeared. Zara and Lilly learned more about their mother’s past, and their own relationship, than they could ever have dreamed of in that chase. In Our Lying Kin, a vengeful thief seeks the recovery of the Archives of Degenerate Art, journals belonging to the Reich. 

In the newest Zara and Lilly adventure, Sisters at an Exhibition, a Caravaggio sketch is declared a fraud. 

Before the curator who authenticated it can defend her findings, the Caravaggio, and the curator, disappear. Zara and Lilly find themselves drawn into the chase, which takes them from San Francisco to New York City, and then to Alsace, France, where another story lies buried deep below a farmhouse that was burned to the ground during the War.

Is there humor? Well, Lilly never met a man—or a scam—that she didn’t at least wink at! And cynical, methodical Zara’s sarcastic tongue may get them in more trouble than they can handle. (Just wait until you read about the change in Zara’s hairstyle…) But interlaced with the humor, the heist and the hair, there is a twisted tale of a journal kept by the “children of the forest” (children, mostly boys, who hid in the forests to try to survive during World War II), the realities of rebuilding a life torn apart by loss, and the love that binds the sisters, no matter what their differences. 

Maybe with so much loss, there’s no need to have a murder. Certainly, there can be a mystery, and amateur sleuths, and a complex plot full of danger, without adding to the toll of bodies in literature. 

There’s even a cat.

Come for the art heist, stay for the family stories!

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Claudia Hagadus Long is a lawyer and bookstore owner in Calistoga, California. Her nine novels the Zara and Lilly mystery series, including SISTERS AT AN EXHIBITION (Sibylline Press) and NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW (Kasva Press); and the Simpato Mysteries, BEYOND A REASONABLE DUCK, TRUCK A DUCK, and MURDER WITHOUT A DUCK (Sibylline Press Digital First), humorous mysteries with cannabis-cookie-selling nuns and plenty of duck puns! www.claudiahlong.com