The Golden Age of Murder

I'm very much looking forward to the publication next spring of The Golden Age of Murder. This week, I completed work on the final edit of the manuscript, and I've been impressed with (and hugely grateful for) the care lavished on the book so far by Harper Collins. Their enthusiasm really is good for morale, and as all writers know, morale does matter.

The cover artwork is, at the moment, still "work in progress", but with my editor's okay, I thought I'd share with you the latest version, as some readers may be interested in gaining an insight into the thought processes of a major publisher when working on such things.The jacket is envisaged as being in matt black,with the figures picked out in gloss varnish, and the gold areas foiled, to give the book a rather sumptuous feel and reflect the 'Golden' aspect of the 'Golden Age'. The hope is that it will not only look good, but stand out in the bookshops.

Only a minority of readers will, perhaps, spot the fact that the artwork also reflects the Golden Age in another way - this is a twenty-first century take on the artwork used back in the Thirties for the Colliins Crime White Circle paperback series. This strikes me as a lovely idea. And here, by way of illustration, is a White Circle cover from one of the most famous of all detective novels...

Breaking News....The Golden Age of Murder

I'm probably as excited about this post as about any of the others (nearly 2000!) that I can remember adding to this blog. So excited, in fact, that I'll let the press release do the talking for me - for the time being, anyway...


"In a world rights deal HarperCollins has acquired from James Wills of Watson, Little Ltd the publishing rights to The Golden Age of Murder, a real-life detective story investigating how Agatha Christie and her colleagues in the secretive Detection Club transformed crime fiction, writing books that cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their own darkest secrets.

The book is written by the award-winning crime-writer Martin Edwards, author of 17 crime novels and 8 non-fiction books. Edwards is Archivist for both the Detection Club and the Crime Writers’ Association, and is a renowned expert on Golden Age detective fiction.

David Brawn, Publisher of Estates at HarperCollins, commented: ‘This ground-breaking study of detective fiction from between the wars captures how the social and political turbulence of the times impacted on authors and the appetites of their readers. Martin’s revelations about many of these colourful and turbulent writers, whose risky private lives inspired their more daring novels, provide a whole new insight into the generation of authors who created the prototypes for books we all still love today.’

Martin Edwards said: ‘The Golden Age of Murder seeks to overturn familiar stereotypes, and look at classic detective fiction in a fresh way. The years of research felt just like detective work, as I set out to solve the mysteries surrounding the Detection Club and its members. The best novels of the Golden Age are among the most popular and influential entertainments ever written, and the people who wrote them were even more fascinating. As interest in their fiction reaches new heights, this is the perfect time to reveal their untold stories.’

The Golden Age of Murder: Solving the Mysteries of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story will be published in hardback in May 2015."

Ask a Policeman

I've blogged ,previously about the Detection Club's collaborative novel Ask a Policeman, and now I'm delighted to say that this fascinating book is to enjoy a new life in an edition to be published by Harper Collins on 30 August. This edition is reproduced from a first printing and beneath the appealing new dust jacket (see above) the binding replicates that of the original edition. It follows on from Harper Collins' extremely successful reissue last year of The Floating Admrial.

I'd be glad to see the book reappear in any circumstances, but there are a couple of features that I'm especially happy about. First, this edition contains an essay written by Agatha Christie about her fellow detective novelistss, which is truly insightful, especially as she writes with an unexpected candour (the essay was written for publication in Russia and did not appear in the UK at the time).

And second, the book contains a brand new introduction, commissioned by Harper Collins - and written by me! Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that this truly was a labour of love. I'm delighted to be associated with a book that is a classic of its kind and which will, I hope, amuse a new generation of readers as much as it did on its original appearance.

The contributors to the narrative, by the way are some of the great names from the Golden Age: Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, Helen Simpson, Milward Kennedy and John Rhode.