Untitled Books

Murder mysteries, once looked down on, are now fit for the literary elite

It was the titles that first lured me in. Shroud for a Nightingale. The Black Tower. The Skull Beneath the Skin. An Unkindness of Ravens. Every time I passed my mother's bookshelves as a child, these were the books that sent a delicious shiver up my spine, beckoning to me as if with bony fingers, the very titles promising something unknown, macabre, mysterious. When I picked up PD James's A Taste for Death at the age of 12 and read the opening pages, it was the beginning of a teenage love affair with crime fiction.