Читать книгу The Golden Age of Murder - Stephen Bach, Martin Edwards - Страница 16

In one account, she identified the setting for the ritual as Grosvenor House; in her biography, written in old age, she said it was the Dorchester.

The former version of events, referred to by Joanne Drayton, in Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, seems more reliable than Marsh’s later recollection in Black Beech and Honeydew. The ritual has been held at a variety of prestigious venues in central London over the years. By coincidence, it currently takes place at the Dorchester.

Sigmund Freud, himself a detective fiction fan

Freud ‘relished in particular Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express’: Paul Roazen, ‘Orwell, Freud and 1984’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1978.

‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club,’ she said

In Christianna Brand’s Introduction to the 1979 edition of Sayers’ The Floating Admiral.

the term ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’ was popularised … by John Strachey

The first use of the term seems to be in Strachey’s ‘The Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, The Saturday Review, 7 January 1939. Another Marxist critic, Ernest Mandel, echoed Strachey forty-five years later in Delightful Murder: ‘The inter-war period was the golden age of the detective story.’ Over the years, there has been extensive debate about the distinction between ‘detective stories’, ‘crime novels’, and ‘mysteries’, but precise and satisfactory definitions of the differences between them have remained elusive. For the sake of simplicity, the terms are treated broadly as synonyms in this book.