The Murder Game: Play, Puzzles and the Golden Age is an exhaustive, encyclopedic monograph of detective/crime fiction and all the subgenre curated by Dr. John Curran. Released 27th Jan 2026 by HarperCollins on their Crime Club imprint, it's 480 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout, particularly valuable for a book which is extensively annotated.
The author is a prodigious resource, full of information about the history and genesis of crime fiction from the very beginning of the narrative mystery story. He is appealingly meticulous, building a solid basis for his timelines, with lots of examples and some interesting asides. This is, primarily, a nonfiction resource, and should find a home in the collections of libraries and fans of mystery fiction. Despite being meticulously annotated, and given that the author is an academic, it's surprisingly, robustly, warm, accessible, and entertaining.
The author manages to balance lots (and LOTS) of factual historical information with an inviting and entertaining style of writing. It can be enjoyed cover to cover, but as a historical resource, readers would be well advised to read with a notebook to hand to jot down the hundreds (thousands?) of enticing lesser known mysteries to add to an ever burgeoning ToBeRead list.
The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 13 hours 20 minutes and is capably read by the author himself. He has a warm, professionally cultured speaking voice, undoubtedly a product of an upper class education, but appealingly, never losing the imprint of his Irish background. Sound and production quality are high throughout the read.
The annotations, chapter notes, and bibliography are likely worth the price of admission alone. This is a seminal work. Highly recommended for public or post-secondary school library acquisition, as well as the for the home reference library.
Five stars. It's difficult to imagine how it could've been done better, with the understanding that this volume concentrates on mysteries written (and read) in the English language, and doesn't cover, for example, more modern Scandi-noir in any detail at all.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
