WHEN I was in my teens and didn’t know any better I dreamed of writing crime novels. I started one. The sleuth was a middle-aged milkman who as he did his early morning round stumbled across a body, as dog walkers tend to do nowadays. My milkman, let’s call him Ernie, was as smart as Poirot and as hardbitten as Marlowe. Through the litter-free streets of leafy suburbia Ernie – the creme de la creme of his profession – would trundle in his cart, telling witnesses and suspects they’d better not bottle things or else. He had his eye on a housewife called Ethel who, in her floral Terylene apron and fuscia-coloured brothel creepers, was the local femme fatale. I could go on but even I could see that having a milkman as a hero was stretching credulity. It was at that point I decided to become the new Dylan Thomas.

But I did not stop reading crime fiction which my local library shelved apart from more literary fare. I read Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, unaware that they were classics of the genre. I soon got bored of them, though, and moved westwards, rampaging my way through the much-spunkier oeuvres of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James L Cain and Ross Macdonald. Whereas English detectives tended to be eccentric amateurs, their American counterparts were professionals, like bounty hunters, whose job it was to bring miscreants to justice. They totted guns and from to time to used their fists to get information. Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple didn’t do that. In American crime fiction, moreover, the victims were sleaze balls and the filthy rich, wannabe movie stars and mobsters. It was a far cry from The Murder at the Vicarage.

In The Story of Classic Crime, Martin Edwards, who has a freehold on the crime patches of Liverpool and the Lake District, makes only passing mention of American writers. Nor is he concerned much with what was being written in countries other than the UK. Simenon is duly lauded, as are the Swedes Wahloo and Sjowall and the Swiss Durrenmatt but they are the exception rather than the rule. The focus here is on British crime writing and, in the main, English. The period covered is the first half of the twentieth century when crime short stories gave way to the crime novel and publishers began to appreciate the commercial potential of the genre.

The first great crime writer was surely Arthur Conan Doyle who, though born and bred in Edinburgh, was responsible for making foggy, gas-lit London “the pre-eminent setting for detective fiction”. Edwards rightly believes The Hound of the Baskervilles to be Doyle’s best but even it is not beyond criticism. Its structure, notes Edwards, is “unsatisfactory” and Holmes is allowed to disappear from the page for too long. It is also relatively easy to identify the villain. Having said that, as Edwards generously acknowledges, Doyle was not writing “a tightly plotted whodunit of the kind that was to become popular during the Golden Age of crime fiction”.

Its birth came in 1913 with the publication of EC Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, in which the solution offered by the eponymous hero turned out to be completely wrong. Thus the notion of the infallible detective was turned on its head. Soon after the end of the First World War there emerged writers – and characters – whose popularity remains undimmed. Most notable among them was Hercule Poirot, the painstakingly punctilious and priggish Belgian who first appeared in 1920 in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The onus was now on readers to identify the killer before he (or she) was unmasked by the detective. Not everyone, however, thought this was a game worth playing.

WHEN in 1926 Christie published her third Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the least likely person was identified as the criminal, the American critic Edmund Wilson thundered: “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Wilson’s bigger point, however, was that standard of writing by crime writers was generally abysmal. He was unconvinced, for instance, by crime aficionados who insisted that Dorothy L Sayers was worthy of serious attention. Wilson tried The Nine Tailors and thought it one of the dullest he had ever encountered “in any field”.

It is a common complaint of the crime genre and one which I myself am happy to uphold. Certainly, today’s crime writers are no better stylistically than Sayers, Christie et al and many are worse. It is a genre that tolerates bad writing and which readers of it have grown uncritically to accept. Edwards’ well-researched, clearly written and beautifully illustrated book is aimed at those who like to read about crime as others like to gorge themselves on family-size sacks of crisps. Their appetite is insatiable and they may find many recommendations here on which to feast.

Among the few Scots listed are Michael Innes – the pseudonym of literary novelist and academic JIM. Stewart – who set his whodunnits in Oxford long before morose Morse appeared on the scene, Josephine Tey, aka Elizabeth Mackintosh, whose The Franchise Affair is worth re-reading, and JJ Connington, who in 1923 as Alfred Walter Stewart, a Glaswegian chemistry professor, wrote a well-received dystopian novel, Nordenholt’s Millions. Connington’s detective fiction was apparently highly influential and much-admired by, among others, TS Eliot.

Numerous of his titles appear still to be in print, which just goes to show that there is no accounting for taste.

The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books; by Martin Edwards is published by The British Library, priced £25.00