‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’

       (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre,

       ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929)

I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what  scholarship there was then about its history and development, its types and practitioners. So I am probably an atypical reader (and reviewer) of these two books. I read them with the pleasure of familiarity and recognition, being reminded of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. No little part of that pleasure lies in seeing how others assemble and weigh the components of this genre’s history.

Both of these books are excellent one-volume guides to the large literature and long history of crime fiction. They are the product of an explosion of scholarly attention to crime fiction since 1980. Stephen Knight and Martin Priestman are both professors of English literature, and Priestman’s contributors are academics in English or related disciplines. Knight’s book (2004) cites Priestman’s (2003), and Priestman’s has a chapter by Knight. The books relate a similar story and cover much the same ground, and in so doing provide a snapshot of contemporary academic orthodoxy on their subject.