Bloody Murder
Julian Symons
270 pages with index
published in 1972, partly revised in 1974

The subtitle of this book is From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. However, I found it to be little more then a summing up of crime and detective writers divided into eras.

The general outline of history as given by Symons will come as no surprise to anybody reasonably read in the genre. We move briskly through the usual ancestors like Poe and Dupin, to the Victorean writers, Sherlock Holmes, the Golden Age of Detective Stories in the twenties and thirties, the hard boiled US school, to modern times with its decline of the detective story and the coming of the socalled crime novel.

Of course, published as it was in 1972, it can hardly help but be out of date, but even so, this could have been a far better history if Symons hadn't contented himself with just a litany of writers and novels. He shows the big outlines in each chapter, examines in some detail the major writers (according to him) of each period, then treats the lesser writers in a few paragraphs or less.