![]() ![]() ![]() Symons had some interesting things to say about this list not long before his death in the introduction to his essay collection Criminal Practices, published in 1994:Įarly in 1958 I received a note from Leonard Russell, literary editor of the Sunday Times, asking if I would like to become the paper's crime reviewer, writing two pieces a month for L600 a year. This would certainly be in keeping with Symons' view, expressed in his genre history Bloody Murder, that writers began moving more and more away from classic detection at that time. ![]() When we get to the Forties, however, classic detection very much moves to the back seat, with only a few titles really qualifying. ![]() A fan of Victorian/Edwardian crime fiction might argue that the first 123 are underrepresented compared to the last 37.įrom the Twenties and Thirties we find a pretty comprehensive mix of detection and thrills, with some crime novels thrown in. It includes 12 books from the Twenties and 25 books from the Thirties (confirming my view that everyone talks about the two decades as the Golden Age of detective fiction, but they like the Thirties much better), as well as 16 from the Forties and 23 from the Fifties, for a breakdown of 37 from the Twenties and Thirties and 39 from the Forties and Fifties. See for yourself what you think of the list. Here is a link to Julian Symons' 100 Best Crime Stories, from William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) to Quiet Horror by Stanley Ellin (1957). ![]()
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