About this item
Highlights
- The new and updated 10 year anniversary edition 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.
- About the Author: Martin Edwards has published eighteen crime novels, including series set in Liverpool and the Lake District.
- 608 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Literary Figures
Description
About the Book
The new and updated 10 year anniversary editionWinner 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.
Book Synopsis
The new and updated 10 year anniversary editionWinner 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
Review Quotes
'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
About the Author
Martin Edwards has published eighteen crime novels, including series set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He has won the CWA Short Story Dagger and CWA Margery Allingham Prize, and his latest book, The Golden Age of Murder, won the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and H.R.F.Keating awards. Martin is consultant for the British Library's Classic Crime series, as well as Chair of the CWA and President of the Detection Club. He has edited 30 anthologies, published about 60 short stories, and written seven other non-fiction books.