The Crime and Mystery Book: A Reader’s Companion

This is a slightly odd book: always interesting, occasionally fascinating and certainly attractively designed and illustrated, but rather odd. It does not seem to know whether to be a straightforward history and criticism of the genre ‐ as which it actually works pretty well ‐ or to be a handbook into the bargain, in which case it does not quite succeed. Or perhaps the author has so much information to pass on that he could only include a certain amount of it in the text and so put the rest into a series of appendices or fact boxes. If I...