http://anglisztika.ektf.hu/new/index.php?tudomany/ejes/ejesdokumentumok/volume13

Nostalgia resurfaced with a vengeance in classic British detective fiction after the First World War due to war traumas and the coming of modernity. Crime stories in the Golden Age period, and even after, reflect the nation's cultural, collective memory of itself, most importantly that of the English middle class. A closer study of Margery Allingham’s or Josephine Tey's crime fiction enables a novel approach to the genre by focusing on the memory crisis in modernity. As their primary preoccupation is loss, the novels are treated as lieux de mémoire. According to Pierre Nora, lieux de mémoire are needed when a nation has no natural contact with its past. Fearing that they lose their class roots, the writers feel urged to reconstruct middle class Englishness by creating symbolic figures. In the analysis of such characters, I will rely on Alison Light’s proposition, calling Golden Age crime fiction the 'literature of convalescence'. Allingham’s Mr Campion and Tey’s Robert Blair are both amateurs, bridging the gap between the now and then, and their investigation contrast old and new values