In The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards, who writes mystery stories set in Liverpool and the Lake District, takes as his scope the first half of the twentieth century in primarily British crime fiction. “I see it as a tale of the unexpected,” he writes—what breaks the previous mold in “achievements and sometimes limitations.” I like this take on writers hoping to fashion an uncommon mystery and a novelty each time they begin.
The 100 books are neither the absolute best nor necessarily his favorites, but each helps him tell a story. This may be disingenuous, but his choices certainly don’t match up with the lists of the best compiled by Haycraft, the Crime Writers Association (of which Edwards was chair at the time of writing), or the Mystery Writers of America. I had read only a third of the hundred books he chooses to write about in detail—that is, about 500 to 600 words each. I was inspired to read many of his choices through Edwards’s convincing arguments for their contribution to the genre, but more by his recommendation of their good writing: Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig, Philip MacDonald’s The Rasp, and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man being several examples. With Edwards I have confidence that he’ll tell me if something has historical importance, but is dull, and he does so with Freeman Wills Crofts’ The Cask, for instance. This candor counts for much.
The organization of the book is muddled. He starts with several chronological chapters and then switches to thematic ones—mysteries set in the countryside, locked-room mysteries, mysteries about law courts, politics, or professors, and so on. Then near the end he treats American mysteries in one brief chapter, then the rest of the world in another, and he ends with another historical round-up and a look at new developments.
These chapters each mention briefly many more than the 100 books treated in detail, so that Edwards talks about more than three hundred titles in all, another positive for a book that gets mixed marks. On the one hand Edwards seems trustworthy in his assessments of the readability of mystery books and in measuring their importance. On the other hand, he hasn’t written a very coherent book. But if you are a mystery fan you will find much in Edwards to like, and you will not mind that it’s a book to dip into and read a chapter or two rather than a cohesive narrative.
Seven years after writing The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards published a more comprehensive history of the genre, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (2022). Until I read this book, I did not know that Erskine Childers, the author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which exposed an actual threat posed by German war preparations in the Friesian Islands, had been executed as a spy by the Irish Free State and at the time of his death was considered a traitor by them as well as the British. Edwards’s method is to intersperse stories about authors’ lives within his history of the books they wrote, and it is an interesting approach, though it extends his book to over seven hundred pages. Edwards tells the story of Poe’s mysterious death, informs us that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was involved in a scandal that echoes some of her bigamy plots, and gives us a good deal of gossip about the love lives of Golden Age authors of the thirties.
Edwards frequently quotes Julian Symons’s history, Bloody Murder, which he considers the best of its kind, though in need of updating after its third revision in 1992. He tries to be comprehensive, and the result is a somewhat fragmented narrative of short chapters and what often seems merely a list of authors and titles. He tells us about radio mysteries, Borges and the postmodern mystery, parodies of mysteries and comic mysteries, writing on criticism and history of crime fiction, and he devotes the beginnings of chapters to Ellery Queen, P. D. James, Raymond Chandler, and others, then going on to look at authors who worked similar territory. It’s rather a slog to read very much of The Life of Crime at a stretch, but as a source for information and for Edwards’s always perceptive take on a given author or a strain of mystery fiction, the book is at its most useful.
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