The Garston Murder Case

The Garston Murder Case, first published in 1930, is the first book in author H. C. Bailey’s series featuring hymn-singing criminal lawyer Joshua Clunk, who investigates stolen industrial secrets and a string of murders on the palatial estate of the Garston family and in the surrounding villages. Along the way, the viewpoints of Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Bell, a local police inspector, a Jane Eyre-like nurse, and a young student are also presented, making The Garston Murder Case a classic example of a ‘Golden Age’ British mystery. Prolific H. C. Bailey (1878-1961) was also author of the popular ‘Mr. Fortune’ detective series.

"Genuinely fascinating reading."—The New York Times Book Review "Diverting and patently authoritative."—The New Yorker "Grand and fascinating … a history, a compendium and a critical study all in one, and all first rate."—Rex Stout "A landmark … a brilliant study written with charm and authority."—Ellery Queen "This book is of permanent value. It should be on the shelf of every reader of detective stories."—Erle Stanley Gardner Author Howard Haycraft, an expert in detective fiction, traces the genre's development from the 1840s through the 1940s. Along the way, he charts the innovations of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as the modern influence of George Simenon, Josephine Tey, and others. Additional topics include a survey of the critical literature, a detective story quiz, and a Who's Who in Detection.

White provides the most comprehensive scholarly compilation of fictional work of legal suspense in existence. Primarily a bibliography of novels, it also annotates plays, scripts for film and television, novelizations, and short-story collections about lawyers and the law. The idea behind the principal of selection is to disdain labels that reduce the variety of the legal thriller to a subgenre of mystery fiction. Novels that range from suspense thrillers through science fiction to the philosophical novel are included if justice is thematically important. It is therefore an eclectic reference source beyond a compilation of books about lawyers as protagonists. Its biographical and scholarly information about authors, major and minor, and their novels or works is traditionally encyclopedic and objective regardless of whether the work has been genre-defined, or worse—deified as a classic or denigrated as a bestseller. Many novels included are long out of print, but historically interesting for their contribution to the lineage of the courtroom drama, showing that the history of the legal thriller is one of the major branches of modern literature since the Age of Reason. The criterion of justice denoted moves beyond the fact of lawyers and courtrooms to select seminal novels like Robert Travers' Anatomy of a Murder as well as the romantic potboiler. Among the more than 2,000 works are the Perry Mason novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, John Mortimer's Rumpole series, along with a staple of fiction by major authors of the genre like John Lescroart, Lisa Scottoline, Margaret Maron, Scott Turow, and John Grisham. There are also individual works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Kafka, Camus, and Twain delineating humanity's obsession with the law as its shining prop of civilization and, alternative, béte-noire of the common individual caught up in its maw. The appendices include comments by lawyer-novelist Michael A. Kahn, a historical introduction to the legal thriller, craft notes by writers and prominent trial lawyers responding to author and lawyer questionnaires, bibliography of critical sources and articles, series characters, and the legal terminology found in courtroom dramas and novels. An essential reference tool for scholars, researchers as well as the occasional reader of legal thrillers.

A bibliography of various mystery novels published between November 1976 and Fall 1992.

Bruce Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

There are hundreds of satisfactory and satisfying British mystery writers whose works should be studied both for their own individual accomplishments and for their comments on the society in which they were published, in the last 150 years, but who have not received any critical comment lately. This volume is designed to correct that fault in a dozen of those unjustifiably neglected British authors: Wilkie Collins, A.E.W. Mason, G.K. Chesterton, H.C. Bailey, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Nicholas Blake, Michael Gilbert, Julian Symons, Dick Francis, Edmund Crispin, H.R.F. Keating, and Simon Brett.

This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.