As Northern Hemisphere summers get increasingly sweltering — I wrote this post during the heatwave that the U.K. underwent in late June 2026 — let’s enjoy 18 tales of people murdering, cheating, lying to, and generally mistreating each other, selected for our enjoyment once more by the fabulously knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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A collection of 11 non-canonical takes on Sherlock Holmes by eleven different authors, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1985) has lingered long on my shelf, and its day in the sun is finally here.
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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?!
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Fifteen tales of murder and mystery centring around various athletic pastimes would, you imagine, be a fairly difficult undertaking to assemble, and so Martin Edwards is to be commended for finding enough to fill the pages of Settling Scores [ss] (2017) for the British Library Crime Classics series.
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A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.
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Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.
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I tend to read multi-author anthologies over — if I’m honest — a couple of months, to better ameliorate the often wild changes in style and content of each tale. In recent times I’ve sped this process up, so that I’m able to review the annual Bodies from the Library (2018-present) collections on this very blog, so let’s see how I fare doing the same for the latest Martin Edwards-edited collection in the British Library Crime Classics range, eh?
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Another year, another collection of forgotten or unknown tales from the luminaries of detective fiction’s Golden Age brought to us by the tireless efforts of Tony Medawar. So how does Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) stack up?
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We’re all prone to speculate at times about how wonderful it would be to discover a previously-unpublished work by a beloved Golden Age author, and for today’s podcast episode Tony Medawar rejoins me to tempt you with two forthcoming collections of hard-to-find material from two of the genre’s titans — John Dickson Carr and Freeman Wills Crofts.
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Okay, now we get down to it, the one rule of Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction that people actually know. Or think they do.
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