The standout read among the books I read in the third week of September; a tour de force parcours through 50 years of British crime writing (from 1900 to 1950), with sidelights on authors and books published in the U.S., continental Europe, Argentina and Japan. Martin Edwards is concurrently President of the Crime Writers’ Association and the Detection Club, but more importantly for present purposes, he was the Detection Club’s first archivist: In my first reading status update I compared this book to what it would sound like if you get a walking encyclopedia talking, and to the print equivalent of having your favorite actor reading the phone book, but what could easily have been bone-dry in another author’s hands makes for a more than compelling read in Edwards’s.
Though the “100 books” (in effect, 102) chosen to exemplify the various stages and aspects of British crime writing as it emerged in the first half of the 20th century are the primary narrative vehicle, each section of the book has a short introductory chapter, and it’s these in particular that make your head spin, because they’re jam-packed with references to all manner of crime fiction, from the unduly forgotten to the justly remembered — on average, no less than 20 books per chapter (and in some chapters, over 40). In fact, it is this “cramming” that ultimately made the book a tiny fraction less than a 5-star read for me: I’d either have appreciated more space to explore some of these other books at greater leisure, too, or, as this would probably have blown the book up by the hundredfold, maybe in the end less would occasionally have been more after all.
That all being said, I’m doubtlessly going to refer back to Edwards’s book frequently from here on out when exploring the countless new authors, Great Detectives and series I’ve been introduced to, and I’m also OCD enough to have created reading lists on Google and BookLikes for all the books mentioned by Edwards (NB: in the Google version, later amplified by the books Edwards mentions in The Golden Age of Murder):
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books & The Golden Age of Murder: List of all books referenced
The BookLikes Breakup:
The “100 Books” Presented
Reading Status updates:
98 of 357 pages
158 of 357 pages
219 of 357 pages
357 of 357 pages
Other Books Mentioned:
Part 1: Chapters 1 – 5
Part 2: Chapters 6 & 7
Part 3: Chapters 8 – 10
Part 4: Chapters 11 – 15
Part 5: Chapters 16-20
Part 6: Chapters 21-24
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