That very title prompted in me a little Proustian epiphany. I was abruptly transported back to the mid-Fifties when, a swotty little creep, I would stow away my completed homework, switch on what we called the wireless and tune in to the Third Programme. For readers too young to have known that august institution, a typical evening’s edification might consist of, precisely, an illustrated lecture on detective fiction (although not, of course, by P. D. James — Jacques Barzun, perhaps, or Ronald Knox), sandwiched between a performance of Christopher Fry’s The Dark is Light Enough and a concert of Schütz motets.
And nothing changed when I opened the book. There they all were, the usual suspects — or, rather, the usual detectives — Auguste Dupin, Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, etc. There, too, were all the usual generic subsets: the pioneers (Poe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton); the so-called Golden Age (Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Bentley, although no John Dickson Carr); a brief, single-chapter detour paying lip-service to the American hard-boiled tradition of buddies, baddies and bodies (Hammett, Chandler and James’ own personal favourite, the now rather forgotten Ross Macdonald, although no Horace McCoy, no James M.
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