I must acknowledge my particular debt to Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder and to The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing (Rosemary Herbert, editor). Fans of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) will recognize Thursday’s epigraph; Friday’s epigraph is from John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935); Saturday’s is G. K. Chesterton’s “How to Write a Detective Story” (1925); Sunday’s is Thomas De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827); and the Confession epigraph quotes Agatha Christie’s “Hercule Poirot—Fiction’s Greatest Detective” (1938).
