‘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.
...
(read more)
