The Life of Crime Quotes

“Catch-22, Joseph Heller sought ‘to dramatize the insanity of war and the stresses that drove people to madness by writing his very serious story using all of the tools of absurdist comedy”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“Jane Eyre was not only ‘a human document written in blood, [but] also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world’.”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“The conventional view, however, is that the first detective story was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, published in 1841. But should the credit go to Hoffmann, Müllner or Hansen, or an even more obscure candidate? The answer depends on slippery issues of definition. As Reginald Hill has said, there is no more a single starting point for the modern crime story than there is for modern society.”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators

“In Voltaire’s Zadig (1747), the title character makes brilliant deductions from physical evidence, almost in the manner of a Great Detective. This reflects, Greene argues, ‘the assumption of the Enlightenment that humans can find answers through reason.’ It was no longer enough to wait for God.”
― Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators