The Golden Age of Murder

The new and updated 10 year anniversary edition

Winner of the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating crime-writing awards, this definitive account of the secretive Detection Club and its trail-blazing founders told for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective fiction between the two World Wars.




‘Few, if any, books about crime fiction have provided so much information and insight’ THE TIMES



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.



‘Illuminating and entertaining – provides a new way of looking at old favourites’ LEN DEIGHTON