Winner of the 2016 EDGAR, AGATHA, MACAVITY and H.R.F.KEATING crime writing awards, this real-life detective story investigates how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction.

‘Few, if any, books about crime fiction have provided so much information and insight so enthusiastically and, for the reader, so enjoyably’ THE TIMES ‘Illuminating and entertaining – provides a new way of looking at old favourites. I admire the way that Martin Edwards weaves the sometimes violent, sometimes unlawful, and always gripping true stories of these writers with the equally wild tales they tell in their books.’ LEN DEIGHTON, author of SS-GB ‘Forensically sharp and exhaustively informed… Crime fiction is driven by death. In this superbly compendious and entertaining book, Edwards ensures that dozens of authorial corpses are gloriously reborn.’ MARK LAWSON, GUARDIAN ‘Edwards knows his business. He understands how to parcel out the clues and red herrings so as to feed the reader enough information to keep a variety of possibilities open, while making sure to prepare for a satisfying solution.’ SEATTLE POST ‘You can learn far more about the social mores of the age in which a mystery is written than you can from more pretentious literature. I mean, if you want to know what it was like to live in England in the 1920s, the so-called Golden Age, you can get a much better steer from mysteries than you can from prize-winning novels.’ P. D. JAMES

• The first full-length study of detective fiction written between the wars, and captures how the social and political turbulence of the 1930s impacted on Agatha Christie and her colleagues.• Agatha Christie’s connection with the drowned gay actor Frank Vosper and her fascination with the mystery of his death has never been explored previously.• Dorothy L. Sayers’ notes on the Constance Kent case are newly discovered.• Anthony Berkeley’s bizarre private life has until now been shrouded in mystery, and his secret relationship with E.M. Delafield are revealed for the first time.• Richard Austin Freeman’s coded private journal has never been revealed before.• Explores astonishing real life murder mysteries which inspired Club members, along with many unjustly forgotten detective novels.• Martin Edwards shows how the best books challenged miscarriages of justice, the legal system, and police brutality.• Martin Edwards is the Detection Club’s Archivist and Britain’s leading authority on Golden Age fiction. He has contributed essays to The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing and British Crime Writing: an Encyclopaedia and has been commissioned by Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan and the British Library to write introductions to reissues of Golden Age novels.• A CWA Dagger-winning writer of fiction, he has also published 8 non-fiction books, including one about real life murder cases and crime detection techniques.• Interest in Golden Age fiction is now greater than ever. Agatha Christie is a global phenomenon, while digital publishing makes long-lost classic mysteries available again for the first time since the Thirties. Competition: Family Matters (British Library Crime Classics); Trial And Error; Verdict Of Twelve (British Library Crime Classics); Capital Crimes; A Death In The Islands. Agatha Christie;Freeman Wills Crofts; Anthony Rolls; Anthony Berkeley; Raymond Postgate; Margery Allingham; Mike Farris;