Helping with enquiries

This remarkable brick of a book charts the history of crime writing from its earliest practitioners to the present day, and is packed with hundreds of names and titles, all bundled up into fifty-five short, punchy chapters. Many begin in distinctively Chandleresque style (as in, for example, The Big Sleep: “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain …”). Here we have: “On Christmas Eve, 1938, a bookish middle-aged man suffered an accident in his home city, Buenos Aires …”; or “On a hot morning in the summer of 1958, a twenty-six-year-old Dutchman jumped out of a taxi outside the wooden gate of a Zen monastery …”. We are immediately driven to find out how this arresting first sentence will relate to either the chapter’s subject(s) or their work (or both). There is usually a clue in the chapter’s subtitle. But the quirky always trumps the obvious: Patricia Highsmith probably rightly gets a chapter to herself, but her pet snails steal the show.

Analysis of one representative chapter will serve to demonstrate Edwards’s modus operandi. Entitled “Locked Rooms” and subtitled “‘Impossible crime’ mysteries”, chapter eighteen opens in typically compelling style: “Carnegie Hall in New York on 10 April 1927 was the scene of a musical catastrophe”. It is quite impossible not to read on. The chapter turns out to be largely about George Antheil, and the occasion to be the premiere of his avant-garde work Ballet Mécanique. Its Paris premiere had impressed Jean Cocteau, James Joyce and Erik Satie, while Aaron Copland reported that it “outsacked the Sacre”. (It’s hard to be sure what he meant by that.) But everything went wrong at Carnegie Hall – not least, for instance, that three aeroplane propellers of different sizes, an unconventional element in the orchestration, blew a powerful current of air straight at the audience, so that wigs, hats, handkerchiefs and programmes flew about. And why is Edwards telling us all this? Because the catastrophe drove Antheil to write a “locked room” mystery in revenge, with characters loosely based on the people he blamed for the Ballet Mécanique debacle.

Edwards makes no claims of literary quality for Antheil’s novel Death in the Dark (“cunningly concocted but clumsily written”), but notes that its title may have been influenced by a slightly earlier “locked room” mystery, Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham. And, as one might expect, the chapter continues with mentions of more familiar examples – by John Dickson Carr, for instance, and Gaston Leroux. Edwards places Antheil’s novel in the history of the whole genre, one tiny thread in a dense web of associations that makes up the vast range of crime fiction, and concludes with some thought-provoking analysis of the psychology and popularity of “locked room” mysteries.

The biographical element, always attention-grabbing, and often sensational, as in Antheil’s case, also plays a crucial part in setting up another fascinating nexus. Edwards has already name-checked admirers of Antheil’s music. But the composer was a friend of Ezra Pound, who apparently nicknamed him “infAntheil”, and had commissioned violin sonatas from him. Through Pound, Antheil met Yeats, who was a fan of detective fiction, and he also dabbled in science, collaborating with the actor Hedy Lamarr in the development of spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers. T. S. Eliot, no less, gave Death in the Dark rather qualified praise.

The extraordinary roll call of writers and artists in every chapter makes The Life of Crime a constantly surprising and irresistibly gossipy read. But it also reveals crime fiction throughout its history not as a fringe pursuit, but as enmeshed in a rich network of contemporary literature and history: we learn in chapter six that Arthur Conan Doyle was called in over Agatha Christie’s disappearance and intervened in a number of high-profile court cases. E. W. Hornung, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, based his criminal hero Raffles on Oscar Wilde (Raffles uses the pseudonym Maturin; Charles Maturin, the author of Melmoth the Wanderer, was Wilde’s great-uncle) and called his son Arthur Oscar. Graham Greene wrote a play about Raffles. More recently, A. S. Byatt is quoted as pointing to Margery Allingham as an influence on Iris Murdoch. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is married to the crime novelist Laura Lippman; as Evan Hunter, Ed McBain wrote The Blackboard Jungle. And so on, through all fifty-five chapters and, for good measure, the lavish and wide-ranging footnotes to each of them.

One of the mysteries of The Life of Crime, which has been revised and expanded for its publication in paperback, is how Edwards pulls off the trick of dovetailing themes and genres into a strictly chronological structure. Partly this is due to his easy and confident time leaps within individual chapters. Conan Doyle calls up Mark Haddon (the “curious incident”); Mary Elizabeth Braddon prompts mention of Jeffery Deaver (disabled detectives); Lupin, a Netflix binge-watch of 2021 with a modern setting, is mentioned in the same breath as Maurice Leblanc (who created the original Arsène Lupin). Edwards also makes clear how closely crime writing follows actual history (and sometimes actual crimes), providing acute and often highly illuminating commentaries on contemporary social conditions and the changes they quickly underwent. The title of Allingham’s novel The China Governess (“a mystery of today”) suggests a rather more distant social context than the year of its publication, 1963, might indicate; but in this London novel she was already alert to the alienating potential of tower blocks, even, as Edwards puts it, “while the concrete was still setting in the first wave of post-war town planning”. He suggests that Allingham was the first crime writer to involve computers – now a staple of crime fiction – in a plot (The Tiger in the Smoke, 1952). The era of the celebrated Golden Age of crime fiction came to an end with the Second World War, when, in Edwards’s words, “So many ordinary people had carried out so many monstrous crimes, [that] elegant and rational explanations for evil acts no longer seemed enough”. The Golden Age detective novel, he says, was buried by the critics; “it seemed like a body in a building bombed in the Blitz”.

You can read this book from cover to cover, straight through from beginning to end. In spite of its encyclopaedic scope and structure, it is certainly a page-turner. The author’s crisp and often witty verdicts on familiar books are invariably enlightening, and reveal an extraordinary degree of familiarity with the field, and skill in managing it. Edwards is also scrupulous about avoiding spoilers in his countless plot summaries, successfully negotiating one of the most difficult challenges facing reviewers of crime fiction.

But of course the most tempting strategy for a reader is to check the indexes for mention of one’s own favourite crime writers. Although Edwards makes clear from the outset that he has tried to avoid what he calls “recency bias”, I was disappointed that some of my favourites were not included – Don Winslow, for example, or Bill James – although I was glad to see that Mick Herron made it at least into the notes. And a crossover chapter might have been fun, and could have included, say, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. But for every neglected name there must be dozens of names here that are new to even the most devoted aficionados of crime fiction.

The Life of Crime will generate impossibly lengthy literary bucket lists and, being at the same time both urbane and learned, is an enormous pleasure to read. Martin Edwards is in total command of his huge field, and this book gives him the scope to demonstrate that.

Heather O’Donoghue’s most recent book is Beowulf: Poet, poem and hero, published in June. She has judged the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for contemporary thrillers, and spent many years as a judge on the CWA Gold Dagger prize for crime fiction

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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