Bodies from the Library 5

Classic crime fiction's 'Indiana Jones' Tony Medawar unearths more unpublished and uncollected stories from the Golden Age of suspense, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Julian Symons and Dennis Wheatley. The end of the First World War saw the rise of an insatiable public appetite for clever and thrilling mystery fiction and a new kind of hero — the modern crime writer. As the genre soared in popularity, so did the inventiveness of its best authors, ushering in a "Golden Age" of detective fiction — two decades of exemplary mystery writing: the era of the whodunit, the impossible crime and the locked-room mystery, with stories that have thrilled and baffled generations of readers.