The Detective in British Fiction

I have been commissioned to contribute a number of essays to The Harcourt Encyclopaedia of Crime Fiction, edited by Barry Forshaw (whose Rough Guide to the genre came out earlier this year, and who edits ‘Crime Time’.) Barry and the publishers have agreed that I can release the essays (which I am adapting slightly for the purpose) on my website, and my account of the detective in British fiction has just appeared there.

Of course, the toughest challenge in writing an essay on such a broad topic is: what do I leave out? For there is enough material to fill several books. The need to be selective, and to simplify the account of the historical development of the detective character, is a challenge familiar to me from writing books on various legal topics. With legal subjects, I’m always conscious that any mistake would have my professional readers up in arms. When writing about crime fiction, it is the need to make – inevitably subjective - judgments that is sometimes controversial. When one reads some of the criticism of such a gifted and authoritative commentator on the genre as the late Julian Symons, it’s a little daunting. It’s all a question of personal opinion, I guess. Incidentally, I’ll be talking further about Julian shortly.

Back to the website. My webmaster, young Jonathan Edwards, turns 17 over the Christmas break and I’m hoping to learn from him a bit more about how to run the site (not least bearing in mind that he will disappear off to university one of these fine days..) I have an aspiration (a word borrowed from politicians wary of breaking promises!) to update the site, and add fresh content, once a week in 2008, while continuing to update this blog more or less daily. Whether that proves over-ambitious when I get stuck into the next novel, we’ll see…