"Murder goes on forever"

Really, I should not spend so much time on detective stories and matters related but Martin Edwards's recent book on the Detection Club and its denizens is good enough and important enough to merit a long posting on the secondary blog.

The last lines of Mr Edwards’s book are:

The last word belongs to Christie. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when she could not know if she or her family and friends would survive for long, she inscribed a copy of Sad Cypress: “Wars may come and wars may go, but MURDER goes on forever!”

How right she was. Furthermore, despite all predictions to the contrary, traditional murder and detective fiction go on forever. Nothing could prove that more clearly than the popularity of the British Library series of reprints, first of Victorian but more recently of various half-forgotten Golden Age detective novels and collections of short stories, all of which have been immensely popular.

Martin Edwards’s role in publishing and publicizing the series cannot be overestimated. He has chosen the books, provided highly knowledgeable introductions to a number of them and edited collections of short stories. While doing all that he has been writing his own books and running a blog about detective fiction that is to be recommended to anyone who is even half-way interested in the subject. His greatest achievement to date, however, is this massive volume, a history of the Detection Club in the thirties and forties, a collection of biographies of the extraordinary people who were its members and, incidentally, a history of the genre in the period. That is what I call a useful book.

The rest of this posting is here and the details of the book are:

Martin Edwards:                     The Golden Age of Murder

The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story

2015                                        London

                                                HarperCollinsPublishers

And here is Dorothy L. Sayers with Eric the Skull: