There's a good deal about the early dime-novel heroes, such as Old Sleuth and Nick Carter, whose adventures were sold for a nickel and a dime and were the predecessors of the pulp magazines.Įveryone you'd expect to find is mentioned, as are some authors and books you might not expect in such a huge overview. He then goes on to Allan Pinkerton, who had the best adventures of his famous detective agency ghostwritten (again with less devotion to reportage than one might have wished). Inevitably, because of the enormous range covered between these covers, it mostly skims the surface of the entire genre, but it's all nicely presented.Ĭollins begins with the famous 18th-century French detective Vidocq, founder of the Sûreté and author of memoirs that are more fiction than fact, and moves quickly to the true inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe. It's not hard to tell when a writer, rather than a scholar, is doing the writing. The History Of Mystery's text, by the fine mystery writer Max Allan Collins, is a joy to read. Well, I wish I did, because this group of books includes some of the most beautiful and exciting mystery reference books ever produced. Penzler Pick, December 2001: It may start to look as if I have stock in Collectors Press because I've praised one of its books for three months in a row ( The Great American Paperback in October and Pulp Culture in November).
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