Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain, 1914-1940

This is a series of essays on the 'writers of the "Golden Age" of Anglo-American mysteries, trying to define the characteristics of the genre more concretely than has been done in the past. After a general introduction on the defining qualities of the mysteries of the period, it shifts to a sequence of discussions of individual writers --E.C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, A.A. Milne (for The Red House Mystery) Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley Cox (writing as Anthony Berkeley), Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, and Ngaio Marsh. I don't always agree with it, but the writer knows the books of that era well and has clever things to say about them.

For me the best book on the English detective novel of the Golden Age, though I vehemently disagree with his seeing Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode only as hangers-on. For the sake of the argument that the English detective story is best understood as a reaction against the thrillers of Le Queux, Oppenheim, Buchan etc. Panek marginalizes an important part of this tradition.