Maxim Jakubowski May 2015 Highly Recommended.
For a change, my highly recommended choice of the month is not a work of fiction, but a splendidly pleasing work of literary detection that sometimes reads as fast as a novel as it unveils the real world behind the pages of mystery fiction. Himself an esteemed practitioner of the English school of crime, Edwards is also the archivist of the famed Detection Club, and pouring through its archives he has reconstructed its history and the lives of all the famous writers who joined it and participated in it for decades (it is still active to this day but if I were to reveal details of its events, I would be committing a crime...). If you thought crime writing was sometimes far-fetched, you should read about the secret lives and personalities rersponsible for some of your favourite novels! Feminists, gay and lesbians, Socialists, Marxists, solicitors and rakes, clerks and adventurers: the social strata behind what is now considered the Golden Age of British Crime proves fascinating and Edwards' detective work is invaluable. It will make you want to read Christie, Chesterton, A.A. Milne and so many others all over again. Which is a good thing in my book. ~ Maxim Jakubowski
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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Winner of the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating crime-writing awards, this definitive account of the secretive Detection Club and its trail-blazing founders told for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective fiction between the two World Wars.
'Few, if any, books about crime fiction have provided so much information and insight' THE TIMES
A gripping real-life detective story, The Golden Age of Murder investigates how Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie and their contemporaries both competed and collaborated to turn the genre into a literary powerhouse that still dominates popular fiction today. Written in times of social and political turmoil, their books cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to the authors' darkest secrets and their complex and sometimes bizarre private lives.
Ten years since its first publication, Martin Edwards - now the Detection Club's President and author of subsequent award-winning publications including Howdunit and the monumental The Life of Crime - revisits the story with major updates, new revelations and four brand new chapters that no crime connoisseur will want to miss.
'Illuminating and entertaining - provides a new way of looking at old favourites' LEN DEIGHTON
The Golden Age of Murder features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Crime and Mystery, eBooks of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Fiction, Recommendations
The Golden Age of Murder is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Golden Age of Murder was written by Martin Edwards and published by Collins Crime Club an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
The Golden Age of Murder has 528 pages
£13.49
