The breadth and historical sweep of this book is awesome. An enormous amount of material, much of which is quite tricky to get into, is summarized elegantly and (so far as I can tell) accurately, for the intelligent non-expert reader.
There are two inevitable downsides to this: The first is that such breadth comes at the expense of depth. The second is that the authors' introductory and concluding remarks don't quite do justice to the subtlety and range of the topics they've covered.
The effect of reading this is, therefore, to prompt one to want to go and read more. And that, of course, is a good thing. I just wish the authors had provided some more specific advice… Read more
If you're keen on golden-age detective fiction then your heart will leap at the list of authors collected here, some of whom are old favourites, and some of whom were new to me (and with whom I'm now looking forward to getting acquainted). The several solutions offered here are -- with perhaps one exception -- good-humouredly clever and remarkably satisfactory (and yet also, of course, completely incompatible with one another). For me this was a much more enjoyable read than The Floating Admiral, which was interesting but which rather fell apart, having insufficiently strong threads to bind its intricate structure. The format of Ask… Read more
This is unquestionably a good book, but Steinmeyer's later book -- Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear-- covers more or less all of the material that's in this one. It's also a little bit better written, when considered as a piece of storytelling. Only true aficionados will need both, and if you're only going to buy one, the other one is better.
