Aussie Lovers of Crime/Mystery/Thriller/Suspense discussion

So everyone knows Agatha Christie, but has anyone realised that she was only the James Patterson of her time and that there were other much better writers amongst her contemporaries?

It was only in the last year that Leah and I really discovered Dorothy Sayers for example who Leah assures me is 1000 times more talented than Christie.

Or Josephine Tey perhaps? I've got customers who assure me that Margery Allingham and Patricia Wentworth make Christie look like an amateur in comparison.

P.D. James in Talking About Detective Fiction also mentions Ngaio Marsh and being from New Zealand we've all probably heard of her to some extent in this group but opinion differs as to whether she was actually any good. My boss gets excited every time somebody sells us more books from her but they don't sell anywhere near as well as the others mentioned.

So who is your favourite author from this classic period of whodunnits? Did I forget anyone? Or do you think that they are not even worth considering as more than historical pieces that reflect their times and provide no real value as crime writing?

Thanks for this Toby, some wonderful information here! I read and owned lots of Agatha Christie when I was much younger, and am very interested in what you say. I haven't read any of the others you mentioned (I don't think!) so I'll have to check them out!

Leah is my wife. She's the real lover of the period of the two of us. Me, in an ideal world I'd be able to give you an answer but I'm more of a hardboiled guy. When I was ten however there was nobody in the world I wanted to read more than Ms Christie. This is why I'm reading through the titles in Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books.

What I really wanted to do with the post was to get people chatting and thinking about the subject when so much was written and largely forgotten. And it's already worked, you've provided us with R. Austin Freeman, somebody who I've never even seen mentioned. But if you really don't see a distinction between Christie and to pick a name out of the air, Bolano then I'm not sure how much further that aspect of the conversation can go.

My favourite book that comes close to this classic whodunnit period is The Moving Toyshop but that is more of an evolution of the genre than truly belonging to the period.

I have Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel on my shelf and I'm very much looking forward to what an acknowledged master (and fan) of the genre has to say on the subject.

Sadly the book is chronological (poe, doyle, collins) and ends in 1987 with PD James. Theres a full list here: http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/ke... but its not as much fun without his commentary.
Like you i wouldnt call myself a fan of his novels BUT as you noted he was perhaps more famous as a scholar of the genre and reviewed for the guardian for many years so i thought "if anyone is going to be able to do this and have a chance at being accurate it'll be keating"

I'm Leah!
Like most people, I read a lot of Agatha Christies growing up, finding them on bookshelves at other peoples' houses and so on; it's only been since I started working in a secondhand bookshop that I began to discover her contemporaries.

I think what Cliff says is interesting, that Toby forgot 95% of these. This may be indicative of their long-term value (or lack thereof) as literature, or just the state of affairs most popular authors can look forward to.

Dorothy Sayers is by far my favourite - I have reviewed five or six of her books now, and I never fail to be impressed by her wit and research, and the utter charm of her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey. She managed to keep detective fiction unique and interesting while Christie just wrote the same two or three plots over and over.

I really enjoyed The Daughter of Time, but mostly for its fascinating historical aspect, and the unexpectedness of it as a detective story.

I've read one Fletch novel and hope to find more, but I think the movie is one of my all time favourites.

I can't seem to find Margaret Millar in any bricks and mortar shops but that's a really interesting piece of trivia about her being the wife of Ross MacDonald.

The book I'm most intrigued by (purely because of the title) is Young Man, I Think You're Dying.

Leah wrote: "I'm Leah!
Like most people, I read a lot of Agatha Christies growing up, finding them on bookshelves at other peoples' houses and so on; it's only been since I started working in a secondhand books..."

Welcome to the group Leah...enjoy:)

I also grew up reading Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers. Georgette Heyer also wrote a few crime novels and I remember them as being quite good too.

Cliff we're sort of old fashioned in the way we consume books. Between one device and another people have a screen in front of them almost all day. Aside from our natural distaste for Amazon and their Kindle it's nice not to have to interact with a screen to relax with a book. So ebooks are currently a no for me.

As for buying online, I appreciate your links but I try to leave it as a very last resort. Being a natural collector with a disposable income I could just buy all of the books I wanted instantly online but there needs to be little bit of fun in finding the book in some dusty old shop AND most importantly a method of control so that I don't just spend all of my money on filling my house with books that I'll almost certainly never get to read.

Maggie I knew from the second I made that post that I had missed one of the Big 5 ladies in golden age whodunnits. Georgette Heyer was certainly prolific and in most cases it seems you either love her romance or you love her detective novels but only very rarely do you love them all.

In selling these books I had the pleasure of talking to people about the writers and recommending the others of the customer hadn't heard of them, Heyer was the one that got the most amount of people turning their noses up at her crime. But then she's still being republished en masse so she can't be as unpopular as my customers would have me think.

Sadly the secondhand bookshop i work in here in Perth is not one of those nice old shops but is bright and clean and frequently confused for a new bookshop. My fun comes when a more senior staff member (read manager) doesn't realise the rarity of a particular book and prices it at $1 instead of $10 for example.

As for the golden age as a term I imagine it has its roots in classical Greece and is something that can only be applied in retrospect. That article mentions that Philip Van Doren Stern's article, "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley" (1941) "could serve ... as an obituary for the Golden Age." and if we acknowledge that the period after Doyle and pre-WW2 served as period of great growth in the genre both in terms of content and popularity it becomes easier to pin dates and names to it.

You mentioned in an earlier post They had had too much experience of 'gritty realism' in their own lives to want to write about it in their fiction. but I would suggest that the opposite was true for the end of the golden period. After the horrors of war something as light as a toff poisoning his wife in an elaborate way so that he could run off with her sister and blame the gardener (is this a plot from an actual mystery? probably) can't have had much appeal and so the rise of the Chandlers and Hammetts and Goodis mirrored this need in the readership for novels better reflecting their darker reality.

Great find Cliff. I'm not sure how I feel about books written by multiple authors, it sounds like it would be jarring with all the different styles.

That appendix sounds like a fantastic text for researchers.

I just read the Chandler essay Simple Art of Murder in which he discusses the popularity of that book and the implausible nature of the mystery. It's also available as a free ebook on GR i believe.

Cliff wrote: "Tfitoby wrote: "I just read the Chandler essay Simple Art of Murder in which he discusses the popularity of that book and the implausible nature of the mystery. It's also available as a free ebook ..."

I think he has a fair point about the unreal nature of them but completely ignores the fact that they are an entirely different type of story to what he and Hammett were attempting to produce.

Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael's Penance