John Sutherland

No sex, please, in the Detection Club

The Golden Age of crime writing is over and all the great fictional detectives are gone. Call it Inspector Lestrade’s revenge, says John Sutherland

‘The crime novel,’ said Bertolt Brecht, ‘like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’ He was thinking of the detective story and the tribute was truest in the ‘golden age’, between the great wars; the period covered, hugely readably, by Martin Edwards.

Edwards’s primary subject is the Detection Club, whose members included the giants of the genre — G.K.

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