British literature

Early twentieth-century

Among significant writers in this genre in the early twentieth-century were Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands 1903, who wrote spy novels, Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy) author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, an historical romance which recounted the adventures of a member of the English gentry in the French Revolution­ary period, John Buchan, who wrote adventure novels like PresterJohn (1910). Novels featuring a gentleman adven­turer were popular between the wars, exemplified by the series of H. C. McNeile with Bulldog Drummond 1920, and Leslie Charteris, whose many books chronicled the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint.

The medieval scholar M. R. James wrote highly regarded ghost stories in contemporary settings.
This was called 'the Golden Age of Detective Fiction'. Dame Agatha Christie, a writer of crime novels, short stories and plays, is best remembered for her 80 detec­tive novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Other female writers dubbed “Queens of crime” in­clude Dorothy L. Sayers (gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey), Margery Allingham (Albert Campion - sup­posedly created as a parody of Sayers’ Wimsey^[152]) and New Zealander Dame Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn). Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre, and also wrote detective fiction.
A major work of science fiction, from the early 20th cen­tury, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920,^[153] and was a central

Dame Agatha Christie
influence on C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.^[154]
J. R. R. Tolkien

From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford were The Inklings. Its lead­ing members were the major fantasy novelists; J. R. R. Tolkien and Irish writer C.S. Lewis. Lewis is known for The Screwtape Letters 1942, The Chronicles ofNarnia and The Space Trilogy, while Tolkien is best known as the au­thor of The Hobbit 1937, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.

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