A very good read but a little repetitive as to Edwards' other books.

I appreciate that Edwards is attempting to cater to different people, and that may make the difference for some.

Still, in my mind a great read

Big Ship

8 April 2024 ( )

I learned some interesting information about British Crime fiction and got lots of good recommendations, but reading this book from cover to cover was very dry. Better to think of it as a reference book for spot reading. ( )

This is what I imagine a bibliography in narrative form would look like. I don't know how else to describe it. I'd go so far as to say that there's no actual 'story', as the title implies, because there doesn't seem to be a cohesive ... point (message/timeline/etc.) between chapters. Each chapter represents some facet that Golden Age Crime books took on: locked-room mystery, country-house mystery, political mystery, etc. and begins with the narrative bibliography of notable works. This is followed up with 2-4 longer essays, each giving closer attention to books that the author believes best represents that facet.

None of that is to say that it wasn't excellent - it was. But this is a book for the serious mystery lover, not a reader with a casual curiosity about the evolution of crime writing. Or anyone trying to curb their TBR piles. I have so many new (old) books and authors to start hunting down it's overwhelming. I might actually have to resort to a spreadsheet; I hate spreadsheets, but there's just too many appealing treasures here and Edwards sells them up, even when he's trying not to.

I deducted a star because I found some of the writing sort of clunky (this is a cultural thing, I'm sure) but mostly because the chapter openings were just too crammed full of goodness; at times there could be as many as three titles and authors mentioned in a single sentence, with more immediately following. It got to be too much at times and I'd catch myself just glazing over, without really taking in what I was reading.

This is definitely going to be a life-long source of reference for me, as well as a source of income for the used book sellers. ( )

As the title suggests, this book spotlights 100 (or so) novels in the crime fiction canon that illustrate its development as a genre. The list is mostly British books, but the book does include chapters on American and non-English-language books. This can be seen as an update of or successor to Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder, especially because the internet allows Edwards to provide more certain biographical details of some of the authors. A fair number of the books featured here are also published by the British Library Crime Classics, or at least their authors are, leading this reader to hope that more of the books mentioned in its pages will be reprinted at some point. I enjoyed this a great deal and look forward to going back through it to track down as many of the books as possible—even the ones just given a line or two in the chapter introductions. ( )