W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he claimed was similar to an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. He suggested among other things that the genre allows the addict to indulge in a fantasy in which our guilt is purged, and we are restored to a state of innocence, to the Garden of Eden.
When literary novelists turn to crime fiction (as they so often do these days), the results are not always happy. Susan Hill is a welcome exception. Her Simon Serrailler novels have developed into a series whose appeal stretches beyond its genre.
Why? Perhaps Auden gives us a clue. At the heart of the Serrailler novels is a very English form of the Garden of Eden —Lafferton, a cathedral city somewhere in the south of England, deep in Waitrose country.
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