Some iconic crime fiction series like the influential Série Noire constituted, in the aftermath of WW2, a canon of existential (ist) literature in the guise of noir fiction. Continue reading
The Penguin operation in America was started in 1939, four years after the successful launch of Penguin in Britain. The collection retained the green colour code for crime Fiction books which had characterised the British covers since the 1935 publication of Penguin no. 5 (the first crime published in the collection, Dorothy L Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club). But the American market was not prepared for the sobriety of the non illustrated British covers. The illustrations make the American covers instantly recognisable. Continue reading
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A simple wordcloud, when it displays hierarchically structured information, can tell instantly something both very significant and onerous to establish otherwise. One would have to browse through hundreds of bibliographical data and to sort them, before being able to discover what the cloud above suggests simply and immediatly.
The author who published the most books in the Penguin Crime Club, the famous British pocketbooks publisher’s subseries devoted to the classics of crime fiction, is actually not Agatha Christie, nor a member of the detection club, nor any British author. Neither is it one of the prolific American masters, such as Ellery Queen, or Erle Stanley Gardner. It is actually Georges Simenon, with 48 books published under the universally recognised green cover.
International Crime Fiction Research Group 