Martin Edwards | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Martin Edwards’s lifelong fascination with crime fiction has resulted in twenty novels, including Mortmain Hall and The Crooked Shore, and a library that threatens to take over his home in Cheshire. He has also appeared on our podcast, Episode 33, ‘The Golden Age of Crime Writing’.

www.martinedwardsbooks.com

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The Man Who . . .

Martin Edwards on the crime novels of Julian Symons

The only fan letter I ever wrote was to Julian Symons (1912–94). A polymath – poet, editor, biographer, historian, novelist and reviewer – his non-fiction books encompassed Dickens, Carlyle, Wyndham Lewis, the General Strike and the Gordon Relief Expedition, but what fascinated me were his crime novels and his critical insights into the genre.

Death by Chocolate

Martin Edwards on Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case

Five years ago, I visited Pablo Neruda’s former home in Valparaíso, now a museum. La Sebastiana is perched on a hillside with marvellous views out over the Pacific. When I reached the poet’s study at the top of the house, the audio tour commentary mentioned the ‘thrillers’ that he’d enjoyed, some of which were gathering dust on the lowest shelf of a bookcase. My lifelong fascination with detective stories made it inevitable that I would get down on hands and knees and explore the books to see if Neruda and I shared any tastes. There were a couple of dozen paperbacks, including – to my delight – dog-eared green Penguins written by a favourite author of mine, Anthony Berkeley.

Episode 33: The Golden Age of Crime Writing

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Diamond Dagger award-winning crime novelist and president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards and Richard Reynolds, crime buyer for Heffers Bookshop and member of the Crime Writers’ Association, lead our investigation in this month’s literary podcast. Together with the Slightly Foxed team, they take a magnifying glass to the Golden Age of crime fiction, tracing its origins to the interwar years when the Detection Club was founded and discussing why the genre continues to thrill. From relishing The Poisoned Chocolates Case and resurrecting Death of a Bookseller to the mystery of E. C. R. Lorac’s missing manuscript and meeting Baroness Orczy’s Teahouse Detective, the plot twists and turns as we collect British Library Crime Classics and celebrate Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and others along the way. Whether enjoyed as well-crafted puzzles, social documents or guilty pleasures, detective fiction is laced with nostalgia as well as cyanide. To tie up loose ends, we finish with a visit to Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, a house fit for Hercule Poirot, and the setting of a Devonshire murder hunt in Dead Man’s Folly.

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