Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
This is a book that has been needed for many years.
From 1933 to 1935 Dorothy L Sayers wrote a weekly review of detective stories for the Sunday Times (although no one knew it at the time, perhaps including Sayers herself, she had almost come to the end of her novel writing career). She usually reviewed three or four titles, on rare occasions as little as one, but when holiday seasons were approaching her column consisted of mass recommendations, paragraphs grouping titles by subject (sometimes the way the crime was committed, or subject such as murders on a golf course – there were quite a lot of those), or author (publishers did not seem to mind some of their authors producing two or three titles a year under the same name).
Sayers is always specific about her criticisms: that the timing is out, or that something is left to coincidence, for instance. In his long introduction (called a ‘Commentary’) Martin Edwards calls this ‘an eye for accuracy’. The Commentary is divided into fifteen sections, and each one is fascinating (I found this section better than Martin Edwards’ new book THE STORY OF CLASSIC CRIME IN 100 BOOKS’ as a study of detective fiction). Headings include, apart from accuracy, ‘Fair Play’, ‘Tropes of the genre’, ‘Motive’, ‘Pushing at the boundaries’, ‘American detective fiction’ and ‘The future of the genre’.
Since she produced those round-up articles mentioning a lot of titles, Sayers must have been reading five or ten books a week, and the two or three she mentioned in a normal week must have stood out. In fact, they continue to stand out: there are very few weeks in which at least one of the books she discussed has not come to be regarded as a classic. Frustratingly, some of them continue to be almost impossible to come by: some aspiring publisher should proceed through this volume and issue each title that is not in print, if they can.
There has been only one compilation like this before: THE DETECTIVE FICTION REVIEWS OF CHARLES WILLIAMS, 1930-1935, but that is a smaller volume. Simon Brett, Martin Edwards, the Dorothy L Sayers Society and Tippermuir Books are all to be congratulated.
