The Classic Era of Crime Fiction by
Peter Haining
hbk out September 02
Published by Prion Books
at £17.99
This is a large, profusely illustrated book designed for the coffee table market, but
unexpectedly, as well as covering the usual suspects in the evolution of crime fiction
– Poe, Doyle, Christie and so on - it contains a great deal amount of material that will
be unfamiliar even to keen fans of the genre. For example, Hugh Conway is an author
who hardly ever gets a mention even in those surveys which focus on Victorian
thrillers, but his novel 'Called Back', about a blind man who witnesses a killing,
caused a commercial sensation in its day and launched the era of the 'shilling
shockers'. The book is still quite readable today, and it is good to see that Haining,
unlike most historians of the genre, pays proper tribute to the achievements of a writer
who, had he not died young, might conceivably have been ranked as one of Conan
Doyle's major contemporaries. Inevitably, the book is selective in its coverage – the
omission of Anthony Berkeley, a writer of great historical importance, is especially
hard to understand – but overall it offers much of interest to the specialist as well as to
the casual reader.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
