The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards

      Sayers loved the Holmes tales, and admired the way Conan Doyle enriched English literature with countless memorable lines. There is a striking resemblance between lines from ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ and a passage in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, while the success of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the television show Sherlock demonstrate that Holmes-speak still appeals in the twenty-first century.

      Sherlock Holmes’ leading rivals were created by three contrasting writers – a socially mobile Cockney, a rural dean, and a Hungarian baroness – who would become Detection Club members. Arthur Morrison, son of an engine fitter, exploited his literary gifts to escape London’s slums. A journalist, he hit his stride with Tales of the Mean Streets¸ but could scarcely have guessed that ‘mean streets’ would become a phrase associated with American private eyes. Morrison depicted the East End with an insider’s expertise, but became embarrassed by his humble origins. He even falsified data on the national census to conceal his date and place of birth. It is a pity he was so sensitive, since the strength of his writing lies in an understanding of working class life that Berkeley, Sayers and Christie could never match.

      Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, a lawyer turned private investigator, was meant to fill the gap left by Holmes’ plunge into the Reichenbach Falls. Portly and good-natured, Hewitt was too ordinary to outshine the sage of 221b Baker Street, dead or alive. More distinctive was Horace Dorrington, a suave villain who plans a murder at the start of The Dorrington Deed-Box. His scheme fails, and although he escapes justice, his intended victim discovers the records of several cases in which Dorrington combines work as a private inquiry agent with shameless criminality. Morrison abandoned Dorrington after one book, but had created the literary ancestor of the murderous charmer Tom Ripley, created by Patricia Highsmith, herself a member of the Detection Club, and of Jeff Lindsay’s serial killer Dexter Morgan.

      Thorpe Hazell was another eccentric Great Detective. Hazell is a specialist railway detective, a vegetarian and health fanatic. After solving the puzzle of ‘Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture’, he declines Sir Gilbert’s offer of a cooked lunch. He has already ordered lentils and salad to eat at a railway station, and starts to perform his ‘physical training ante-luncheon exercises’. As the bewildered baronet watches him ‘whirling his arms like a windmill’, Hazell explains, ‘Digestion should be considered before