A confession: my own shelf leans rather heavily toward the Regencies with a body in them. There is something irresistible about a murder conducted amid such impeccable manners. But the history that makes these mysteries possible is genuinely fascinating, and worth a few minutes before you draw the curtains and begin.

A world before the police

Here is the fact that surprises most newcomers: during the Regency, London had no police force. None. The Metropolitan Police, with their familiar blue coats, were not founded until 1829, after our period proper, by Sir Robert Peel — which is why English constables are still called “bobbies” and “peelers” to this day. Before then, the keeping of order was a patchwork of parish watchmen, often elderly and frequently asleep, and private thief-takers who were paid by results and not always honest about how they got them.

For the novelist, this absence is a gift. With no professional detective to call upon, the solving of a crime falls to whoever happens to be clever, curious, and present — very often a gentleman or, more delightfully, a lady who is not supposed to be meddling in such things at all.

The Bow Street Runners

There was one bright exception, and you will meet them often in the genre: the Bow Street Runners. Attached to the magistrate’s office in Bow Street, founded by the novelist Henry Fielding and his blind brother John back in the previous century, the Runners were the nearest thing the age had to detectives. They investigated, pursued, and gave evidence, and a wealthy victim might engage them for a fee. They are the ancestors of every fictional sleuth who came after, and a Runner at the door is one of the genre’s most reliable pleasures.

The Bloody Code

Regency justice was savage in a way that lends real stakes to any mystery. Under what later generations called the Bloody Code, well over two hundred offences carried the death penalty, including a great many we should think trifling — certain thefts, forgery, poaching by night. Newgate, the great prison beside the Old Bailey, was a byword for misery, and public hangings drew crowds. Juries, mercifully, often refused to convict when the punishment seemed monstrous, and many sentences were commuted to transportation to the far side of the world. But the shadow of the gallows hangs over Regency crime, and a wrongly accused character has everything to lose.

Smugglers, scandal, and secrets

Not all the intrigue was murder. The long war with France made smuggling a thriving trade along the coasts, brandy and lace and silk run ashore by moonlight, and many a respectable village had a hand in it. Scandal, too, was its own kind of crime in a society where reputation was everything; blackmail flourished, because a single letter in the wrong hands could ruin a family. Mystery in the Regency need not mean a corpse at all — sometimes the deadliest thing in the room is a secret.

Why the Regency suits a mystery so well

When you set all this together — no police, savage laws, a society obsessed with appearances, and a great gulf between the gleaming surface and what lies beneath — you have the perfect conditions for detection. The amateur sleuth must rely on wit and observation rather than fingerprints and forensics. The suspects are all on their very best behaviour, which means everyone is hiding something. And the stakes, thanks to that pitiless code, could not be higher. Add a romance to the mix, as the best of our authors do, and you have an evening I would not trade for any other.