Why are crime writers so weird?

What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself, but on the evidence of this magisterial but wickedly entertaining book the conclusion is inescapable.

As you turn the pages, the evidence mounts up. One crime writer has been considered a serious candidate for sainthood and another has been convicted of murder. Wilkie Collins simultaneously maintained two mistresses and their children but never bothered to marry either. Mary Roberts Rinehart, an early 20th-century queen of American suspense fiction, narrowly escaped being murdered by her chef because she wouldn’t promote him to butler. Agatha Christie famously engineered her own disappearance, and Dorothy L. Sayers spent most of her adult life pretending that she didn’t have an illegitimate son. At one point, Patricia Highsmith had 300 snails, some of which she smuggled through customs in her bra. And so on.

Perhaps wisely, Martin Edwards tends to be more discreet about the private lives of living authors, and this book is primarily a history of crime fiction from the 18th century to the present. He is himself a crime writer (and a winner of the genre’s highest award, the Diamond Dagger), and he also has an impressive track record as a critic and editor. He sets out to tell the story of how crime fiction has developed over the years.

The ghost of Julian Symons hovers over the pages. Symons, a distinguished crime novelist whose sales never matched his glowing reviews, published Bloody Murder, his influential history of the genre, in 1972, followed by two revised editions over the next 20 years. It is much more acerbic in tone than The Life of Crime, and less biographical in content. Where Symons preserved a critical distance from his subject, Edwards frankly revels in it.

More than 20 years ago, as Edwards acknowledges here, I encouraged him to write his own version of Bloody Murder.