In The Golden Age of Murder Martin Edwards investigates the real-life detective story of how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction.
Detective stories of the Twenties and Thirties have long been stereotyped as cosily conventional. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Golden Age of Murder tells for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective fiction between the two World Wars. A gripping real-life detective story, Edwards investigates how Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie and their colleagues in the mysterious Detection Club transformed crime fiction. Their work cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors’ darkest secrets, and their complex and sometimes bizarre private lives.
Crime novelist and current Detection Club President Martin Edwards rewrites the history of crime fiction with unique authority, transforming our understanding of detective stories, and the brilliant but tormented men and women who wrote them.
Martin Edwards contributed to the Slightly Foxed podcast Episode 33: The Golden Age of Crime Writing.
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. 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
