Masters Of Mystery by
Martin Radcliffe
hbk out June 04
Published by Do Not Press
at £15
This gathering of notable crime stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries opens with a short introduction surveying the development of the genre.
Radcliffe claims, with a good deal of justification, that the closing decade of the
nineteenth century was 'the true Golden Age of Crime Fiction'. I am not persuaded
that, to make this plausible case, he really needed to dismiss the years between the
two world wars as producing 'limp and largely unoriginal' work - but if he did, why
include at the end of the book Ronald Knox's ten commandments of detective fiction,
dating from 1929? This quibble apart, the collection pleasingly brings together some
of the best-loved Victorian mystery writers - not just Dickens, Collins, Conan Doyle
and Hornung, but also the splendid J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu is represented by
one of his vivid shorter tales, 'The Murdered Cousin', a precursor of his classic novel
'Uncle Silas'. Israel Zangwill's masterly 'Cheating the Gallows' is also included. It is
difficult in compiling an anthology of this kind to escape the shadow of Michael
Cox's masterly 'Victorian Tales of Mystery & Detection' (1992), which covered
similar ground, and many of the same stories. Radcliffe seeks to differentiate his book
by including post-Victorian stories from writers such as Chesterton, Futrelle, Bramah
and R. Austin Freeman. The result is a chunky and reasonably priced volume that is
will, one hopes, enthuse a fresh generation of readers for stories and authors that
deserve to be long remembered.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
Masters Of Mystery by
Martin Radcliffe
