Elusion Aforethought: The Life and Writing of Anthony Berkeley Cox

by Malcolm J. Turnbull

Description

"This book provides significant new material on the work of crime and detection fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox, a popular and prolific English journalist, satirist, and novelist in the period between World Wars I and II. Cox has been called one of the most important and influential of Golden Age detective fiction writers by such authorities as Haycraft, Symons, and Keating, yet he occupies a surprisingly ambivalent position in the history of the crime genre. To enthusiasts he has show more attained cult status, and rates among the all-time greats, including Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, but to others he is a little-known and unjustly underrated figure - in part because of his preoccupation with anonymity." "In addition to Cox's contribution to popular literature of a genre now undergoing close scholarly attention and a wide general readership, he wrote comic material, detective puzzles, and studies of the criminal mind, assuming a different pseudonym for various styles of writing - in this case, suggesting the writer's delight in enigma and his direct participation in it. Turnbull examines the full range of this writer's achievement in his three literary personae."--BOOK JACKET. show less