Writing can be a lonely profession. Once a book or story exists, it can be a highly sociable thing.

The author is interviewed about it, appears at events, and these days can always

be available to talk to their readers online. But the period of creation is one of solitude, just you and the page, alone in the process of finding

the right words to put on it. In the late 1920s, one writer of detective fiction was feeling this aloneness acutely.

Anthony Barclay had published several novels and was enjoying some success with them

as detective fiction surged in popularity during what we now call its Golden Age.

But he was feeling the lack of colleagues with whom he could

celebrate and commiserate over the minutia of their shared occupation. So he

invited some writers over for dinner.

Eventually they would call themselves the detection club

and that's what we're going to learn about today.

Welcome to She-Danit. I'm Caroline Crampton. For all the formality in ritual it adopted later, the Detection Club had quite casual origins.

Well, the Detection Club was formed in 1930, but it sprang out of a series of dinners that Antley Barclay had hosted from

1928 onwards at his home in Watford.

This is Martin Edwards, the current president of the detection club and the author most recently of the novel Mortmain Hall. Over the years of his involvement with the club, he's made a study of its history, and he published some of that research in his book, The Golden Age of Murder, which was a big inspiration for me when I was starting this podcast.

In that book, Martin explains that it's actually quite difficult to pinpoint exactly when those early dinners at Barclay's house took place or who was there, because naturally nobody kept a proper record.

I mean, who does keep carefully filed lists of their

dinner guests? However we do still have access to some of Barclay's motivations at

that time via his letters. His idea at that time was that detective novelists really didn't know each other socially at all.

They were all working in isolation and he thought it would be good to get together with fellow writers and talk about matters of mutual interest,

whether it was real life crimes of the day, whether it was dealing with publishers or anything else.

Although we don't know who exactly was there when, I think it's reasonable to guess that

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