When I got married almost 39 years ago, I took with me from my parents house just a few shelves of books. Most of them had something to do with Sherlock Holmes. One such was The Murder Book: An Illustrated History of the Detective Story. I think my future wife gave it to me when we were dating.
Written by the Danes Tage la Cpir and Harald Mogensen, The Murder Book was published in English in 1971, so I must have acquired it soon after. I own many longer and more scholarly histories of the detective story than this 192-page coffee table book, but this may be the most fun.
It's a great book to page through, full of photos, movie stills, and cartoons conveying the history of the detective story around the world, from Edgar Allen Poe to Georges Maigret, with due respect afforded to Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, the hard-boiled school, etc.
Sherlock Holmes gets his own section, a generous 12 pages including a full page devoted to the Hound of the Bakervilles. There's also a comic strip, photos of major cinematic and dramatic portrayals of the great detective, and some familiar illustrations from the Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele.
But Holmes cannot be contained. He shows up in 11 other pages throughout the book, often in illustrations.
Yes, I still enjoy looking at this volume after all these years. But I especially like the Valentine's Day card that I found inside, which is old as the book. That was a wonderful surprise, and something that will never happen with an e-book.
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