Cricket is my favourite sport, even ahead of football, and I'm quite sure that no other sport has a comparably impressive literature. There are plentiful connections between cricket and crime fiction - Lord Peter Wimsey's cricketing feats in Murder Must Advertise and the Ted Dexter/Clifford Makins thriller Testkill are just the tip of the iceberg.
J.Jefferson Farjeon, for instance, was a keen cricket fan (he wrote an intro to a cricket book by his brother Herbert) and cricket features recurrently in his crime fiction. This feature of his work is highlighted in an insightful piece about Thirteen Guests in Cricket County
The author of that article, Arunabha Sengupta, is also the author of the recently published, Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of the Ashes, published by Maxbooks, which begins, rather wittily I think, "To Sherlock Holmes, it was always the match".. It's a snappy, well-researched,story, and the humour is a bonus. I should also mention briefly a book I've just received but not had time to read, The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Australia's Jock Serong (Text Publishng), which is described as being in the tradition of Peter Temple.
Finally, and with no connection to crime - except that if you are a cricket fan it would be a crime to miss it! - I'd like to mention In Their Own Words, by Steve Dolman, aka blogger Peakfan (Pitch Publishing). The book gathers together interviews with Derbyshire cricketers over the years, including several of my boyhood heroes, such as Harold Rhodes the most successful wicket-keeper in history, Bob Taylor. and Peter Gibbs, author of that wonderfully entertaining novel Settling the Score. I found it absolutely riveting, and I'll treasure my copy, signed by several of those heroes. And even if you're not a cricket fan, the insight into the everyday lives of county cricketers, especially in the twenty five years or so after the Second World War, is full of interest.
