Anthony Berkeley books

Anthologies

Roger Sheringham Cases Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Anthony Berkeley Cox published under two names. As Anthony Berkeley, he wrote the Roger Sheringham series of traditional detective novels from 1925 through 1934, featuring an amateur detective whose confidence frequently outpaces his accuracy. Sheringham was a deliberate critique of the infallible Great Detective type, and Berkeley used him to question the conventions of the genre even as he worked within them. He also helped found the Detection Club in 1930, alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

As Francis Iles, Berkeley wrote something quite different: psychological crime novels that told the reader from the outset that a murder had been committed or was going to be, then asked them to watch the minds of the people involved rather than puzzle out a solution. Malice Aforethought (1931) follows a doctor who has decided to kill his wife; Before the Fact (1932) follows a woman who gradually realises her husband is a murderer. Both books were years ahead of their time and influenced the shape of psychological crime fiction for decades.

Hitchcock adapted Before the Fact as Suspicion in 1941, changing the ending in ways that Berkeley found unsatisfying. His output declined through the 1930s and he stopped writing fiction entirely around 1939, though both the Francis Iles novels and the better Sheringham books have been consistently reprinted and remain in print today.