Death in Filmland: British Film Studios and 1930s Detective Fiction

British film studios enjoyed unusually high prominence in the 1930s, both as places where popular culture was produced and as elements of popular culture in their own right. It is unsurprising, then, that authors of crime fiction chose to set murder mysteries in film studios, exploiting these facilities’ position in the popular imaginary to appeal to fans of both films and detective stories. This article explores a number of studio-set detective novels published in the 1930s, and shows that because the spaces of film production enjoyed ambiguous connotations – at once glamourous and dangerous, fascinating yet unknowable – they afforded authors of crime fiction specific advantages, not least in that they were sites where time and space were approached in an essentially ludic manner, and where identity was mutable and unstable.