I have written about a number of literary cliches which I’ve come across in my reading of murder mysteries from the golden age of detective fiction, the 1920s and 1930s. There was the ever nimble fat man, and the sinister “deal table”.
Also, I have alluded to the “elephant in the room” cliché/trope. Today we explore the maid servant, depicted, who upon discovering the corpse, stereotypically descends into hysteria. Now, is this cliché due to laziness or is this gratuitous slanging of the servant class? I suspect the former, but those with more insight suggest it is/was done to show off the stiff upper lip of the gentry vs. the emotionally unstable lower classes.
After all, the Quality, as they were called, came of families listed in Debrett’s Peerage and were educated at elite boarding schools while the servants were schooled, if that, in council schools and were likely the off spring of servants. Butlers rarely deigned to exhibit their emotions since doing so would class them with the run of the mill (95% female) servants. And, of course, the butler was often found at story’s end to be the “perp” of the dastardly deed (another cliché or trope in the detective fiction of the day: “The Butler Did It”).
The reader is no doubt ready for the habeas corpus, if you will – the evidence of my claims – so let me provide several examples of sobbing servants. Cooks were less likely to melt down, but would succumb to hysteria as required by the novelist:
Edgar Wallace: “Here he came into a group of three hysterical maid-servants and a woman who was evidently the cook, and who proved to be the calmest and most intelligible, though she could give little information ….”
Agatha Christie: “Out of the dull green light Mary’s voice came, breathless, hysterical. ‘Oh, ma’am, oh, ma’am, there’s a body in the library!’ And then, with a hysterical burst of sobs, she rushed out of the room again.” (As illustrated.)
Dorothy L. Sayers: “The maid who had found the body was still in a highly hysterical condition, and the cook was occupied in giving her burnt feathers to sniff.”
S.S. Van Dine: “Hemming, the maid, was in a state of hysterical collapse, and we could hear her moaning and crying in the kitchen below.”
Agatha Christie: “The maid, Ellen, was no use at all. She had gone into hysterical fits, and I had to send the gardener for the doctor.” (Emphasis added.)
Margery Allingham: “The girl was completely hysterical, her voice rising to a thin, bird-like pipe that made my own nerves crawl.”
Georgette Heyer:“The cook, who had discovered the body, had been removed to her bedroom in an hysterical condition, and could be heard even in the hall, giving vent to loud, rhythmic sobs.”
Now, it is not my purpose to do a Marxist class and gender discrimination study of those halcyon days (for detective fiction), and I won’t.
But one should note that servants, back in those days, often lived on the estate and were expected to work seven days a week with one afternoon off. Pay was minimal but room and board were usually included. Nevertheless, they were economically inferior to the master class. Not infrequently, female servants, probably males as well, were sexually harassed.
Many servants, if thrifty, made good money from tips from visitors (some of these visitors would stay for weeks) and/or from a grift in kickbacks from the grocer, the baker, the butcher and other merchants supplying the household.
For me, “hysterical servants” are a lazy writer’s convenient stereotype to what his or her readers expected and assumed about servants. Just like the cliches about scudding clouds and nimble fat men. Compared to the lower classes, the Quality, with its stiff upper lip – however dastardly as individuals – were always depicted as unruffled, barely raising an eyebrow when confronted with a corpse in the cupboard.
Of course, PG Wodehouse embarrassed many royals with his comical exposes of the foolish and inbred antics of the elites, viz the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster books.
Yes, the servants do freak out in the murder mysteries, but they almost never (with the exception of the butler, the “Prime Minister of the Manor,”) do the deed. But, in many cases they provided to the ‘tec some of the most malicious and juicy gossip imaginable about their mistresses and masters.
N.B. For other essays on numerous topics on leadership and literature and fables go to my Nucleus archive from 2010-early 2025.
© Copyright all commentary by John Lubans 2026