Top Ten Favourite Books About Crime Fiction

Prompted by a question posed by Lisa Shevin on the very informative Golden Age Detection Facebook forum, I've put together a list of my favourite books about the crime genre. Of course, such lists should never be taken too seriously, especially when I'm responsible for them, since I'm perfectly capable of changing my mind in a matter of hours, or forgetting titles that really should be unforgettable.

I've limited myself in three ways. First, by including only one book per author. Second, by excluding any book to which I've contributed, which rules out quite a few that I'm very fond of. Third, by excluding books about Sherlock Holmes - so many exist that they deserve a list of their own. Even so, there are many excellent books that I have enjoyed and learned from, including quite a number by good friends, that aren't on the list. So, with all those caveats (but then, I am a lawyer...), here goes:

10. The Letters of Dorothy L Sayers, vol. one. Edited by the estimable Barbara Reynolds, and the first of five remarkable collections of Sayers' correspondence,this book provides great insight into the mind and life of an extraordinary writer.

9. Whodunit? ed. H.R.F. Keating. This is a likeable book, a mixture of author bios, essays by various hands, and much more besides. I referred to it constantly in the 80s and 90s and it introduced me to some terrific novels.

8. Murder for Pleasure by Howard Haycraft. An early study of the genre, which contains bags of information, but presents it in an extremely readable form (something that can't always be said of othewise excellent books.)

7. John Dickson Carr: the man who explained miracles, by Douglas G. Greene. I was first urged to read this many years ago by Peter Lovesey, and his recommendation was spot on. Excellent about Carr, and also about the Detection Club; Doug's research was most helpful when I was working on The Golden Age of Murder.

6. A Catalogue of Crime by Barzun and Taylor. This book contains pithy paragraphs about countless otherwise obscure novels, short stories and anthologies, and more besides. The opinions are sometimes maddening,and I still marvel that they thought Knutsford (more famous as the setting for Cranford than as the town of my birth) is in Ireland. But then, all books about the genre contain mistakes - a recent example is the "academic" book that describes Ronald Knox as an American. The real test of merit is whether the book enthuses the reader, and I love this one, for all its faults.

5. Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks by John Curran. John's detective work in deciphering the notebooks and putting them into context is quite riveting. No book gives a more revealing insight into the creation of classic detective novels (though there's a brilliant chapter in Barbara Reynolds' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers that is also gripping.).

4. The Collector's Guide to Detective Fiction by John Cooper and Barry Pike. This contains lots of information about (mostly) Golden Age writers, and is a real treasure trove, with fantastic illustrations of old jackets that I find irresistible. The authors are two British doyens of writing about the Golden Age whose insights I've long admired, and learned from..

3. Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. John Reilly. The first two voluminous editions of this book again taught me a great deal about many writers I'd never heard of before. There is some fascinating stuff here, and I devoured it in my younger days. Two later editions, with different editors, did include essays by me, but Reilly's version was in many ways definitive.

2. Locked Room Murders by Robert Adey. This is sheer fun - an account of pretty much every locked room/impossible crime story -with solutions in a separate section. I sometimes read extracts during library talks, and the audiences really enjoy the snippets. Masterly research, superbly and economically presented.

1. Bloody Murder by Julian Symons. This has to be my number one. As will be seen when The Golden Age of Murder is published, I challenge quite a few of Julian's opinions, and he is apt to be criticised by some Golden Age fans. Part of this is due to his trenchancy, more of it is due to the fact that he was covering a vast amount of material in a short span - you simply can't cover every base in a book that purports to cover even a fraction of the history of crime fiction, let alone the whole of it. But it is supremely readable and well-written, and I know many people, otherwise not really interested in books about the genre, who love it. Symons was writing for the 'typical' reader rather than the specialist (and that, to be truly successful, demands a higher level of accessibility and readability than writing for specialists) but he manages to cover a vast amount of ground with aplomb.

Jacques Barzun R.I.P.

There's an excellent tribute on Curt Evans' blog to Jacques Barzun, who has died at the ripe old age of 104. Curt says most of the things I'd like to mention about Barzun,a crtic of whom I first became aware through reading Julian Symons' Bloody Murder. Symons disagreed with Barzun about many aspects of crime fiction, but I'm certain both men had a great deal of respect for each other.

A Catalogue of Crime is a fascinating reference work, and long ago I invested in both editions. Barzun and his collaborator Taylor comment on many books that were otherwise ignored in reference works about detective fiction, and I suspect they would be delighted to know that "forgotten books" of the type they enjoyed are finally emerging from obscurity thanks to digital publishing and internet commentaries. It is, mind you, an idiosyncratic text, and like all reference books it contains the occasional howler (such as locating Knutsford in Ireland). But it's a terrific book to dip into, and one I strongly recommend.

One does not have to agree with all (or even most) of what Barzun wrote about the genre to recognise the value and importance of his contribution to crime fiction criticism. His love of classic detective fiction became unfashionable, but - even though I'm more in the Symons camp in many ways - I think that the best of the books that he lauded will endure for as long as crime fiction is read, and his acute assessments of many of those books will remain indispensable not only for confirmed Golden Age fans but also for others who come to recognise the merits of the classic mystery, as well as its potential limitations - a group that is, I sense, growing quite rapidly, something of which Barzun would surely have approved.

Forgotten Book: A Collection of Reviews

Something a bit different for today's Forgotten Book. Today others are focusing on Donald Westlake, but as it's a long time since I read one of his books (the wonderful novel on which that great movie Point Blank was based) I've opted for a book by another American, who was at least as talented as Westlake. It's a slim volume by an author who, long after his death, remains well known and well regarded. But this particular book is itself unfamiliar to most, being produced (I think exclusively, but I stand to be corrected on this) as a signed limited edition. It's A Collection of Reviews by Ross Macdonald.

Macdonald was one of the finest of all writers of private eye novels. I've enjoyed several of them, though I don't count myself as an expert. My favourite of those I've read is The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which is very good. On the whole, I think his wife, the brilliant Margaret Millar, was a superior writer, and her books were certainly more varies. But Macdonald was still very good.

This collection covers a wide range of subjects, starting with A.E. Murch's history of the genre, which includes "a youthful likeness of the lady I love" - nicely put! He is rather more cutting about Barzun and Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime, a massive tome which I really like - but with countless reservations. Macdonald doesn't like it all, and much of his criticism is understandable, even to someone who sees many more positives in a book which does, at least, comment on countless books that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Macdonald is most comfortable writing about someone with whose work he is in sympathy, like James M. Cain, whose work he analyses splendidly. As he says, in Double Indemnity, Cain shows he knows how to "dispense with everything inessential". It is quite a skill, that's for sure. Overall, despite its brevity, this book is a thoughtful and interesting read, and you can tell that Macdonald must have been a thoughtful and very interesting man.

Forgotten Book - A Catalogue of Crime

Patti Abbot’s series of Forgotten Books focuses this week on non-fiction. I’ve enjoyed collecting books about the genre for years, so I’m spoiled for choice, but I’ve opted for A Catalogue of Crime by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor. This monumental volume first appeared in 1971, and a revised and enlarged edition came out in 1989. not long after Taylor’s death. Barzun is now aged 102 – a remarkable man, by all accounts, and someone with whom I’d have loved to converse.

And A Catalogue of Crime is, beyond doubt, a remarkable book. It’s described as ‘A reader’s guide to the literature of mystery, detection and related genres’ and the second edition is nearly 1000 pages long. There are several sections, but the meat of the book is in the massive collection of brief summaries of thousands of crime novels, many but not all dating from the Golden Age. There is also a vast amount of information about short stories, both singly and in collections and books about the genre, as well as material about true crime and Holmesiana. The whole book is a gathering of the fruits of two lifetimes of avid reading, and this accounts for the rather random nature of the choices.

Barzun and Taylor are fans of the classic puzzle, and tend to be dismissive of ‘psychological suspense’. Many of their judgments are controversial, and some of them seem to me to be perverse. But never mind. Their opinions are intelligent and usually well-reasoned, and even when they are infuriating, they command attention. And there is a wealth of information here that is indispensable for trivia lovers. Of course there are mistakes in a book of this size and range. How on earth could they believe that Knutsford, town of my birth and model for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford is located in Ireland? Such glitches shake one’s faith – but they certainly should not destroy it, for this is a marvellous book, and a labour of love that, for all its failings, deserves to be cherished by anyone who is fascinated by the history of the mystery.