GREAT BRITISH FICTIONAL DETECTIVES

This book is a must-have for every aficionado of detective fiction. The main part is a gazetteer of 400 fictional detectives, from Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn to Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, taking in familiar and less familiar figures new and old along the way. Marsh was one of the big four golden age inter-war women writers who were heavily influenced by the deliberations of the Detection Club, started by Dorothy L Sayers and adhering to the 10 commandments of crime writing set out by Ronald Knox. Chief of these was the fair play rule that all clues known to the characters should also be revealed to the reader. In fact, few golden age writers observed these rules, certainly not Agatha Christie and the other member of the big four which also included Margery Allingham. Postwar detectives, for instance Crispin's Gervase Fen, made fun of the rules. The tortured heterosexual private life seen in the novels of Sayers and those she influenced, including P D James and Elizabeth George, gives way in the later 20th century to the lesbian Lindsay Gordon by Val McDermid and Saz Martin by Stella Duffy. Sherlock Holmes was followed by a generation of brilliant and eccentric detectives, including Poirot and Mrs Bradley, but Christie's and Sayers's second-string detectives, Miss Marple and Montague Egg, initiated a tradition of quiet, slow-but-sure detection represented by Burley's Superintendent Wycliffe, James's Cordelia Gray, Tey's Alan Grant, Harvey's Frank Elder and Peters's Brother Cadfael. Monastic sleuths include Sister Fidelma, Abbess Helewise and Hildegard of Meaux. The opening chapters provide a brief history of the genre including locked rooms, golden age humour, class barriers, cosy mysteries, the procedural, and the scientific investigator. 240pp, illustrations on most pages in colour and black and white, timeline, TV and cinema detectives, list of sidekicks.