Spectator readers know Andrew Taylor from his reviews of crime fiction. Many will also know him as an admirable writer of the stuff. In a recent issue, however, he remarked that there are fewer murders now, and added that this made things difficult for crime novelists. Detection has been taken over by the scientists, DNA providing the solution more reliably than Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells. Find a suspect and DNA will tell you if he dunnit.
This is boring. So it’s not surprising that for crime writers the future looks to be the past, where science is primitive and the police have no computer database — where indeed there may be no regular police force at all.
London is burning. It’s 1666, not 1940; it’s the Great Fire, and St Paul’s is ablaze. Marwood, a young man who narrates part of the novel, watches fascinated and then pulls a young boy from the flames.
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