The Life of Crime
Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of four major prizes for the best critical/biographical book related to crime fiction: the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating Awards; and shortlisted for both the Agatha and Gold Dagger Awards.
‘Martin Edwards is the closest thing there has been to a philosopher of crime writing.’ The Times
In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction.
Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association and series consultant to the British Library’s highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars.
The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative – and readable – study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors – from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell – into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.
About the author
Martin Edwards has published twenty crime novels, including series set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He has won the CWA Short Story Dagger and CWA Margery Allingham Prize, and his book The Golden Age of Murder won the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and H.R.F.Keating awards. Martin is consultant for the British Library's Classic Crime series, archivist of the CWA and President of the Detection Club. He has edited 30 anthologies, published about 60 short stories, and written seven other non-fiction books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edwards (The Golden Age of Murder), an archivist for the Crime Writers' Association, puts his expertise to good use in this magisterial history of crime fiction. The author traces the roots of crime fiction beyond where most scholars start; while he credits Edgar Allan Poe as the father of detective fiction, he identifies a lesser-known figure, William Godwin , as having written the "first thriller about a manhunt" with his 1794 novel Things as They Are. Each chapter opens with an anecdote from the life of a consequential author, putting their literary efforts in the context of their lives. For example, Marie Belloc Lowndes "used mysterious real-life crimes" among London's early 1900s social elite "as source material for her fiction," and Kinsey Millhone creator Sue Grafton had been fantasizing about murdering her husband before channeling that anger and hatred into a mystery novel. Edwards doesn't hesitate to criticize weaknesses even in works by prominent authors (Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet is "flawed," for example), and unlike other major studies of the genre, gives plenty of space to non-Anglo authors and writers of color. The result is an encyclopedic and consequential volume, a must-read for readers who've wondered who-, how-, or whydunit.
