4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
The Thursday Murder Club, Agatha Christie and Poker Face: Why millions of us are turning to cosy crime for comfort
As fans await the arrival of the screen adaptation of Richard Osman's first novel starring Pierce Brosnan, Henrietta McKervey looks at the genre's enduring popularity
A century ago, the crime fiction industry was flourishing. In 1925, Agatha Christie published her fifth book, The Secret of Chimneys, while her third Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – voted the best crime novel ever by British Crime Writers' Association in 2013 – was serialised in the London Evening News.
The House without a Key, by Earl Derr Biggers, launched the Charlie Chan mysteries. Whose Body?, Dorothy L Sayers' first novel to feature Lord Peter Wimsey (which, thrillingly for the time, opens with the discovery of the naked body in a bathtub) had been flying off the shelves since 1923. In 1926, Freeman Wills Crofts, the Irish railway engineer and writer later described by Raymond Chandler as, 'the soundest builder of them all when he doesn't get too fancy,' published his second Inspector French novel, The Cheyne Mystery.
