The Golden Age of Murder

Description

Winner of the 2016 EDGAR, AGATHA, MACAVITY and H.R.F.KEATING crime writing awards, this real-life detective story investigates how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction. Detective stories of the Twenties and Thirties have long been stereotyped as cosily conventional. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Golden Age of Murder tells for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective fiction between the two World Wars. A gripping real-life detective story, it investigates how Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie and their colleagues in the mysterious Detection Club transformed crime fiction. Their work cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets, and their complex and sometimes bizarre private lives. Crime novelist and current Detection Club President Martin Edwards rewrites the history of crime fiction with unique authority, transforming our understanding of detective stories, and the brilliant but tormented men and women who wrote them.

Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime novelist whose Lake District Mysteries have been optioned by ITV. Elected to the Detection Club in 2008, he became the first Archivist of the Club, and is also Archivist of the Crime Writers' Association. In addition to 17 crime novels, he has published eight non-fiction books and is a noted commentator on the genre. Renowned as the leading expert on the history of Golden Age detective fiction, he won the Crimefest Mastermind Quiz three times, and possesses one of Britain's finest collections of Golden Age novels, including unique inscribed books and manuscripts, notably the previously unknown handwritten study made by Dorothy L. Sayers of the case of Constance Kent and Inspector Whicher.

'Few, if any, books about crime fiction have provided so much information and insight so enthusiastically and, for the reader, so enjoyably' THE TIMES 'Illuminating and entertaining - provides a new way of looking at old favourites. I admire the way that Martin Edwards weaves the sometimes violent, sometimes unlawful, and always gripping true stories of these writers with the equally wild tales they tell in their books.' LEN DEIGHTON, author of SS-GB 'Forensically sharp and exhaustively informed... Crime fiction is driven by death. In this superbly compendious and entertaining book, Edwards ensures that dozens of authorial corpses are gloriously reborn.' MARK LAWSON, GUARDIAN 'Edwards knows his business. He understands how to parcel out the clues and red herrings so as to feed the reader enough information to keep a variety of possibilities open, while making sure to prepare for a satisfying solution.' SEATTLE POST 'You can learn far more about the social mores of the age in which a mystery is written than you can from more pretentious literature. I mean, if you want to know what it was like to live in England in the 1920s, the so-called Golden Age, you can get a much better steer from mysteries than you can from prize-winning novels.' P. D. JAMES