22 January -That corpse you planted last year in your garden’: T. S. Eliot and Golden Age Detective Fiction
Professor Alex Davis, UCC
School of English and Digital Humanities
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
O'Rahilly Building, 2.12, UCC
This paper examines T. S. Eliot’s poetry and drama of the 1920s and early to mid 1930s in the context of his contemporaneous reviews of and essays in detective and ‘melodramatic’ fiction, many written for his magazine The Criterion. An enthusiastic admirer of two of the most popular crime writers of these decades, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts, Eliot is exemplary of the close interaction between modernist authors and the burgeoning mystery fiction of the inter-war period.