This book provides significant new material on the work of crime and detection fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox, a popular and prolific English journalist, satirist, and novelist in the period between World Wars I and II. Cox has been called one of the most important and influential of Golden Age detective fiction writers by such authorities as Haycraft, Symons, and Keating, yet he occupies a surprisingly ambivalent position in the history of the crime genre.

To enthusiasts he has attained cult status, and rates among the all-time greats, including Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, but to others he is a little-known and unjustly underrated figure - in part because of his preoccupation with anonymity.

1. In addition to Cox's contribution to popular literature of a genre now undergoing close scholarly attention and a wide general readership, he wrote comic material, detective puzzles, and studies of the criminal mind, assuming a different pseudonym for various styles of writing - in this case, suggesting the writer's delight in enigma and his direct participation in it. Turnbull examines the full range of this writer's achievement in his three literary personae.