This brand-new guide is a much-expanded, revised and updated edition of The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books – winner of the Macavity award from Mystery Readers International for best book about the crime genre and shortlisted for four other awards in Britain and the US. Now drawing on 125 works of vintage crime, acclaimed author and editor Martin Edwards tells the story of how crime developed as a literary genre in Britain during the first half of the 20th century.

Over the past ten years, there has been a massive increase in enthusiasm for vintage crime fiction and a corresponding desire to learn more about it. And as the Crime Classics series demonstrates, the scope of vintage mysteries is incredibly diverse. The main aim of detective stories is to entertain, but the best cast a light on human behaviour and display literary accomplishment as well as ambition. And there is another reason why millions of modern readers appreciate classic crime fiction. Even unpretentious detective stories, written for unashamedly commercial reasons, can give us clues to the lives that people lived in the past, and help us to better understand a long-vanished world.