We are delighted to learn that a Golden Age Detective Fiction novel is top of the Christmas Bestseller lists. The surprise chart topper is Mystery in White by long-neglected author Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
We are even more pleased that it is published by the British Library with whom we share an interest in this era and features an excellent introduction by a like-minded modern British crime writer Martin Edwards whose knowledge of this genre is, dare we say it, encyclopaedic.
We are sorry to learn of the death of PD James at the age of 94. She grew up in the Golden Age era of detective fiction and when she began writing herself, at the comparatively mature age of 42, she inherited the mantle of the great women authors of that era. She established herself as a writer who managed to convey both a sense of place, often setting her books in the eerie wide open spaces of the Suffolk coast, and of character. Her detective creation, Adam Dalgliesh, is one of the finest and most sensitively drawn protagonists in the genre, bringing a literary dimension to what is often a field that suffers from snobbish disdain by the critics. She will be greatly missed.
