Читать книгу The Detection Collection - Филлис Дороти Джеймс, Филлис Джеймс, Simon Brett - Страница 6

This volume of crime stories was originally published in 2005, arguably to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Detection Club. At that time I used the word ‘arguably’, not because the occasion did not qualify for celebration, but because there is argument about the precise date of the Club’s inauguration. (For further details of this, consult The Detection Club – A Brief History at the back of the book.)

So this new edition could be said arguably to celebrate the Club’s eighty-fifth anniversary. But in all those many years of existence, the primary distinction of the Detection Club has not changed. When founded in 1930 – or 1929 or 1932, according to different authorities – its membership comprised the cream of British crime-writing talent, and that is still the situation today. As a result, The Detection Collection has an extremely distinguished list of contributors.

In my role as editor – and, incidentally, the Club’s president – I had the great pleasure of being the first to read the stories as they were delivered. And I remember being delighted, not just by the quality, but by the variety of the contributions. Each one reflected the unique voice of its author.

There were stories of devilish cunning, as one would expect from the minds of P.D. James and Colin Dexter. There were lighter-hearted contributions from H.R.F. Keating, Lindsey Davis and Robert Goddard. Michael Ridpath presented a story of skulduggery in the corporate world he knew so well. Robert Barnard’s skills as a literary historian were focused on a slightly fictionalised incident in the life of Henrik Ibsen. Clare Francis provided a chilling character study.

And some of the contributing authors wrote new stories about well-loved serial characters. Margaret Yorke went back to the beginning of her distinguished crime-writing life with a story featuring her academic investigator Patrick Grant. John Harvey revived the career of jazz-loving Charlie Resnick, and Reginald Hill provided the delicious rarity of a story featuring Dalziel without Pasco.

Sadly the passage of the years means that some of the contributors are no longer with us. H.R.F. Keating, Margaret Yorke, Reginald Hill and Robert Barnard will not be delighting us with any new investigations, but they do live on through the quality of their work

And they all added to the wonderful mix of The Detection Collection, which still represents the very best in contemporary crime fiction. I am confident that you will get as much pleasure from the stories as I did when I first read them.