Together with Sam Twentyman, his friend and erstwhile airplane engineer, he hopes to launch a flying school on his family’s ancestral estate. It’s the spring of 1919, and 27-year-old James “Max” Maxted, previously of the Royal Flying Corps, is finally back in England following two years of service on the front and another 18 months spent in a German POW camp. The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard (2013) Thankfully, time’s passage has made it easier for authors to incorporate the events and ramifications of World War I in their fiction.To commemorate this weekend’s centenary, I’ve compiled a variety of crime and espionage stories whose action occurs within the first half-decade of the war’s finish. Sayers made wartime remembrance crucial to her plot, and only in 1937 did war hero Henry Wade (aka Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher) employ an episode of battle-born shame as a central ingredient in The High Sheriff. But it wasn’t until 1928’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club that Dorothy L. Yes, Hercule Poirot’s sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings, had been invalided home from the Western Front, and Lord Peter Wimsey was left with PTSD after being virtually buried alive by a shell blast. Still, years passed before many mystery-makers felt emotionally prepared to revisit the war years. The war changed writers’ approaches to horror fiction, but even more profoundly affected mystery fiction, ushering in its so-called Golden Age. Staggered by what was originally called the Great War, politicians, authors, and other idealists declared it “the war to end all wars”-a promise broken two decades later by the onset of World War II. The map of the continent was drastically altered by that catastrophic clash of powers, with whole empires vanishing and the war’s economic fallout being felt long after the bombing had quit and front line trenches were filled in. Almost four years of battle across Europe had cost the lives of more than 8 million soldiers, with another 21 million of them wounded, and tens of thousands left with “shell shock”-what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This Sunday will mark 100 years since the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, an occasion still celebrated (in France, Britain, and elsewhere) as Armistice Day.
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