The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

New and updated edition.

A gripping real-life detective story, The Golden Age of Murder investigates how Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie and their contemporaries both competed and collaborated to turn the genre into a literary powerhouse that still dominates popular fiction today. Written in times of social and political turmoil, their books cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to the authors’ darkest secrets and their complex and sometimes bizarre private lives.

Ten years since its first publication, Martin Edwards – now the Detection Club’s President and author of subsequent award-winning publications including Howdunit and the monumental The Life of Crime – revisits the story with major updates, new revelations and four brand new chapters that no crime connoisseur will want to miss.

Outside a London theatre a throng of people wait expectantly for the last performance of a popular musical. But as the doors open at last, something spoils all thought of entertainment: a man in the queue is found murdered by the deadly thrust of a stiletto...

The Man in the Queue was first published in 1929.

Ambling along the lanes of a sleepy village in the Downs, passing cosy Tudor cottages rustling with wisteria, a novelist imagines the sordid truth hidden behind the quaint, rustic facade. Her musings are confirmed when a spate of anonymous poison pen letters shocks the community, turning neighbour against neighbour and embroiling everyone from the rector and the ‘queen of the village’ Decima Asprey to the high-born Scudamores. With venom in the air, the perpetrator a mystery, and dark secrets threatening to come to light, a shadow of shame and scandal stretches over the parish, with death and disaster following in its wake.

Revelling in the wickedness that lies beneath the idyllic veneer of village life, White’s 1932 mystery is an inventive interwar classic and remains one of the foundation stones of the village mystery sub-genre of crime fiction.

Fear Stalks the Village was originally published in 1932.

Solving the world's most puzzling mystery novel just got even more fiendish in this gorgeous new hardback collector’s edition – with the final solution sealed in an envelope at the back of the book! Can you crack all the clues and catch the killer before you unseal the ending?

Ten strangers are lured to an island mansion on an isolated rock near the Devon coast. Cut off from the mainland, with their generous hosts mysteriously absent, they are each accused of a terrible crime. When one of the party dies suddenly, the guests realise they may be harbouring a murderer among their number.

And Then There Were None was originally published in 1939.