History of Mystery — Max Allan Collins

Footprints, a smoking revolver, broken glass . . . Whodunit? Get to the bottom of things with Max Allan Collins, who puts the enigmatic, endlessly fascinating world of the mystery genre under the magnifying glass in THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective Dupin, Collins tracks the modern detective story from its birth in Allan Pinkerton's Memoirs to its fullest flowering in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald. Collins widens his scope to explore the rich narrative and visual history of detective comics and the legacy of mystery in radio, television, and film noir. This stunning volume presents a magical selection of pulp and dime-novel covers of the thirties and forties, gats-and-gals paperback covers of the fifties and sixties, the Sunday strips' yellow-trenchcoat-clad Dick Tracy, and portraits of the terribly proper and totally astute television dynamos Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Jessica Fletcher. En route, Collins reveals true tidbits about some of mystery's leading lights, like the little known fact that Dashiell Hammett was persecuted during the McCarthy era and opted for jail over betraying a friend, and that Nancy Drew posed for Playboy magazine. Arguably the most comprehensive survey ever published, THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY is sure to please the most discriminating sleuth.