My Weekly Book

Here’s something that caught my eye from The Times - a piece that looks at Charles Dickens as a crime writer after a collection of his detective stories is published. I’ve not read a lot of his novels but I have got absorbed in the essays, journalism and travel writing - and would recommend them for a fascinating read. So I’ll almost certainly be getting this new book and, in the meantime, here’s an excerpt from and link to the article - just as icing on the cake, it’s written by PD James:

[Search for Charles Dickens' books on eBay]

Inspector Morse’s grandad

CHARLES DICKENS CAN justly be regarded as the founding father of the modern detective story, but his influence on the popularity of the genre and its development has been largely understated by critics of his work and of crime writing.

In this book Peter Haining does much to redress the balance, both in his admirable introduction and by his judicious selection from the novels and short stories. The book is, however, oddly arranged. It would have been more helpful if information about the genesis of each selection, including the date and circumstances of the original publication, preceded the extract rather than having to be sought in the introduction. A reader coming to Dickens for the first time, who begins the book with the piece entitled Nemesis, may be puzzled to find himself reading not a short story but a passage from Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens, like his friend Wilkie Collins, was fascinated by the seductively dangerous undergrowth of crime and in the work of the police, particularly the detective branch of Scotland Yard formed in 1842. He observed life in the section houses, accompanied detectives down the mean and violent streets of the metropolis, drew on real murders, both in his novels and in short stories, and portrayed in his fiction detectives whom he had met, creating from experience and imagination the most innovative, varied and vividly drawn police officers in English literature. Read on here…

[Search for PD James' books on eBay]

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 10:12 pm and is filed under 2006 news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.