The club continued for six decades, and authors made famous by the list included Philip MacDonald, Freeman Wills Crofts, John Rhode, and New Zealander Ngaio Marsh. Members received quarterly newsletters that listed the best new releases as selected by a panel of experts, and within a year the club had 20,000 subscribers. When an up-and-coming author named Agatha Christie published her first Collins novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in 1926, a flood of bestsellers followed that positioned her as “the acknowledged queen of crime fiction the world over.”Ĭapitalizing on this, Collins established the Crime Club imprint in 1930. William Collins and Sons published its first crime fiction title in 1919-Bernard Capes’s The Skeleton Key. By the early twentieth century, increased urbanization in America and Europe, coupled with growing demand for accounts of real-life crime, led to the evolution of crime fiction into a distinct genre. In 1860, Harper & Brothers had paid Wilkie Collins £750 for The Woman in White, which heralded the publisher’s entry into the crime and mystery genre.
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