''The Golden Age of Murder'' is a book written by Martin Edwards and published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...

on 7 May 2015 which later went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Critical / Biographical Work in 2016.

A history of mystery

As he explains in the Introduction, when Edwards himself became a published author of mystery fiction he was thrilled to be invited to join

The Detection Club The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British Mystery fiction, mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Louisa Rickard, Jessi ...

, about which he had first learned from the pages of

Julian Symons Julian Gustave Symons (originally Gustave Julian Symons) (pronounced ''SIMM-ons''; 30 May 1912 – 19 November 1994) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. He was bor ...

' history of mystery writing

Bloody Murder ''Bloody Murder'' (also known as ''Scream Bloody Murder'' in the United Kingdom) is a 2000 American teen slasher film directed by Ralph E. Portillo and written by John R. Stevenson. It stars Jessica Morris, Crystalle Ford, Peter Guillemette, and ...

. Subsequently he was made the club's archivist - only to discover that there ''were'' no archives; the club's only known minute-book had disappeared in the Blitz, and its priceless library had been sold off. Inspired by his deep love of detective fiction, he set out to reconstruct some part of the club's history, of that "... elite but mysterious group of crime writers over which Sayers, Christie and Symons presided for nearly 40 years." In so doing, he discovered that the members themselves and events surrounding them were at least as fascinating as anything they had written about.

External links

As featured
on

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Golden Age of Murder 2015 non-fiction books Edgar Award-winning works