1890's: The end of the Victorian Era, with her Diamond Jubilee celebrated in 1897. It is the Gaslight era, with houses and streetlights all powered with flickering gas lamps. Horses and horse-drawn carriages dominate the streets and the railway was a primary form of long distance travel. Steamships with steel hulls crowd the docks carrying passengers and goods across the globe, bringing silk, spices, manufactured goods from India, Kenya, and Hong Kong and making trips between London, New York, and Melbourne a regular occurrence. The British empire is active in India and Africa
This is the setting for Sherlock Holmes, working in London and the surrounding community. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone was published in 1868. It is a thrillingly chaotic and unsettling era of a late-Victorian London pervaded by greed and crime. Jack the Ripper wanders the streets, as did Bram Stoker's Dracula. Occultism experienced a surge in notoriety.
1900 - 1910: The brief time of Edwardian England with highly and rigidly stratified social classes divided into the Upper Class, the Middle Class, and the Working Class. Men and Women's roles were also sharply divided, but this era saw the emergence of the Women's Suffrage movement. It was a time of technological development, with advances in airplanes, automobiles, and electricity. Expect to find stories of X-rays, untraceable poisons, flying contraptions and radio waves.
Arthur Conan Doyle continues with the Sherlock Holmes series, while, RA Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke is a forensic scientist, and Maurice Leblanc introduces Arsene Lupin, the gentleman burgler. It is the age of the powerful industrialists known as the Robber Barons. In the US, it is the culmination of the Gilded Age, a period of fabulous and unrestricted wealth, over a base of unrelieved poverty, sometimes given an example in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.
1910 to 1920: Long term factors like nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and complex alliance systems lead to the horror of World War I from 1914 - 1918, which overshadowed the period. Many mysteries explored themes of espionage, family tragedy, and social upheaval caused by the conflict. It is a transition period from the more innocent and civilized period of the previous decade to a more hard edged post-War world.
GK Chesterton writes about Father Brown in 1911, AC Doyle writes the last of Sherlock Holmes stories (Including Valley of Fear, 1915). It is a period where exotic adventure stories dominate, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie, and Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Gray. The Book of Wonders by Lord Dunsany and offers an early glimpse of fantasy while a series of stories by John Buchan (Thirty-Nine Steps) place British intelligence officers against German spymasters in World War I.
1920's: The 1920s, known as the “Roaring Twenties,” were a decade of decadence, jazz, flappers, and prohibition. This period between the wars hosts the Golden Age of detective novels, with notable authors such as Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers.
1930's: The 30's added Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh to the ranks of the Queens of Crime as the Golden Age continued.
In the U.S., however, the trend of the Hard-Boiled detective began to take prominence, with Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1929) and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Hammett also crossed over to the lighter side with The Thin Man (1933). Prohibition came to an end, but Organized Crime had already established a foothold. Erle Stanley Gardner began his prolific Perry Mason series
1940's: This was firmly the era of World War II (1939 - 1945). While Agatha Christie continues her work, other authors such as Rex Stout begin their own long journey. While there are a number of novels set during the war, there is also a distinct Post-War period where the authors aim to put the war behind them. With the world already at the sharp end of the Second World War, people didn't want to read about more death and destruction. They wanted to read about love and making a new start on a better life.
1950s: The 50s continue with more psychological and thriller style plots. Serialized detectives such as Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe were staples of the era
