Perhaps the biggest conundrum at the heart of Golden Age detective fiction fandom is precisely when the Golden Age was. Some people say it started in 1913 with Trent’s Last Case (1913) by E.C. Bentley, but I’d argue that the relative paucity of titles between then and 1920, another suggest starting point, renders that book an outlier.
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Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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All I really knew about To Catch a Thief (1943), published by Craig Rice under the nom de plume Daphne Sanders, was that it represented something of a change from the work she’d done to that point in her career. And having read most of the work she’d done to that point in her career I can reaffirm that position. Not only is the focus of this rather more stern than we’ve seen elsewhere, it’s also less-tightly constructed and decidedly more in the Pulp-y vein than anything I’ve seen from this wonderfully talented writer, and in that regard it came as something as a disappointment. It scores some good points along the way, but overall the Rice non-completist can dodge this one.
Back in 2020, as part of my occasional Adventures in Self-Publishing undertaking, I read two stories by Jamie Probin — the novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the much shorter ‘The Adventure of the Nine Monets’ (2020) — and followed this up a few years later with two of Probin’s further short stories, ‘The Heir Affair’ (2022) and ‘Body of Matter’ (2022).
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Featuring fifteen felonious fables from phrontistery factions, Lessons in Crime [ss] (2024) is another collection in the British Library Crime Classics range edited by the acme of appreciation of this era, Martin Edwards.
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One final visit for this month to the reading of my past, as I revisit the crime and thriller novels which paved the way into the Golden Age obsession that fills my every waking moment.
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I was quite excited to return to this week’s Going Home book, since it feeds into a key part of what I’ve come to enjoy about classic mystery and detective fiction.
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Another collection from the British Library Crime Classics range, edited by Detection Club President Martin Edwards, this time focussing on mysteries based around books — what’s not to love?!
Continue readingLook, it took me a long time to appreciate the intelligence of the inverted mystery, in which we know who committed the crime and have to watch both them struggle over it and their eventual discoverer working out the threads of the case. But the important thing is that I got there in the end.
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Having now read — and in some cases, reread — all eight of Leo Bruce’s novels to feature sometime Sergeant William Beef, my ordered mind inevitably moves to ranking them.
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