Golden Age;

the term conventionally refers to the popular escapist crime fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, which avoided any attempt at social realism and offered in its place a highly stylized, closed setting mystery. Typically, a murder was solved by the intuitive and deductive skills of a personalized detective, entertaining the reader by a teasing display of false trails (‘red herrings’) before the revelatory final scene. The best examples of these ‘clue-puzzle’ stories came from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in the UK and S. S. Van Dine in the USA. See also detective fiction.