Book review – detective fiction
Philip Marlowe’s last case? Only to Sleep, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed
Only to Sleep is the third Philip Marlowe novel written by someone other than Raymond Chandler and while the authors…
Corpses, clues and Kiwis in Ngaio Marsh’s posthumous novel
Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even…
Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
An unorthodox detective novel about Waitrose-country paedos
W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he…
Philip Marlowe returns with bark but no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
