Scene of the Crime

A comprehensive guide to the places associated with classic British detective fiction. Based on interviews and extensive research, it should be of interest to crime addicts everywhere.

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Great writers of crime fiction not only create memorable detective heroes, they also firmly establish them in a setting. The home counties town of "King's Markham", for example, is the perfect "patch" for Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford and Ellis Peter's Brother Cadfael is as inseparable from the cloisters of medieval Shrewsbury as John Harvey's D.I. Resnick is from the mean streets of modern Nottingham. Addicts of the British detective story should enjoy this gazetteer. With it in their hands they can navigate the streets and alleyways of Edinburgh where Sherlock Holmes sprang to life in Conan Doyle's imagination and where Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus now tracks down villainy (and a dram or two). They can explore the desolate coast of East Anglia, a favoured venue for P.D. James' Adam Dagliesh and the home of Margery Allingham, who also set many of the adventures of her enigmatic Albert Campion amid the Essex marshlands. In Oxford, they can tread in the footsteps of Inspector Morse or pay homage at the site where, in "Gaudy Night", Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey embraced - at long last - his Harriet Vane.
The many black and white and colour photographs evoke the atmosphere and history of these and many other settings with which hundreds of thousands of readers will already be familiar in their imaginations. Based on interviews with leading writers and extensive research, and fuelled by the authors' enthusiasm for Britain's most popular literary form, this book should be an interesting read for all crime addicts.