Was classic British detective fiction always concerned with class?
In the golden age, it was rather taken for granted in the English village and everybody knew their place. One could say Dorothy L. Sayers was an intellectual snob and Ngaio Marsh was a social snob. I think it’s very different now. In my own books, most of my stories go right across class. I think it’s very important to have characters from all walks of life. But some people think it’s a snobbish genre because, on the whole, writers find it more interesting to have a murderer who comes from a privileged background. Then you think, “What leads a man with all those privileges to cross that invisible line that divides the murderer from the rest of us?” What role do you think television has played in keeping detective fiction popular? Television has been incredibly powerful. On the whole, it does better with crime than it does with detection because with crime there is always something happening. With detection, a lot of it is cerebral. What television does best is to use detectives who hav
