Cyril Hare

In the Golden Age crime novel, you've got the ingenuity of Christie.

You've got the elegance of prose in people like Dorothy Alseas and Cyril Hare.

You've got the originality of Josephine Tay's plots and the modern feel of her writing, the evocative sense of place in Marjorie Allingham's work in a novel like The Tiger and the Spoke, all coming together under that banner of detective fiction.

And I think there really was the sense of, in that period that the crime novel could be and do anything.