It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war.

The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk.

You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the news of the world.

Roast beef in Yorkshire or roast pork and apple

sauce, followed by suet pudding and driven home as it were by a cup of mahogany brown tea,

have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft

underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful

circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder. This isn't the

opening of a detective novel from 1932, although you could be forgiven for thinking so. This is

George Orwell writing in 1946,

conjuring a cozy atmosphere ideal for the reading of horrible murder stories.

His pipe-smoking householder is buried in a tabloid newspaper,

not a murder mystery novel.

But nonetheless, Orwell's critique of post-war media consumption about crime has plenty to tell us

about detective fiction in the first half of the 20th century, too.

Let us consider then the decline of the English murder. Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton. All Wales' essay, Decline of the English Murder, was published in Tribune on the 5th of February

1946.

The Second World War had not been over a year, and the author was enjoying one of the most successful

moments in his career to date.

Animal Farm had been published in the UK the previous

summer and was forthcoming in the US. The novel's huge success had led to a renewed interest in

Allwell's writing and 1946 was an especially prolific year for him. As his title would suggest,

...