Nicolas Freeling: Criminal Convictions (UK 1994)

From the Publisher:
'Unfailingly original, with a bouquet as subtle and welcome as a good Chablis... I, for one, would be lost without my regular fix of Freeling'-- Sunday Telegraph

For Nicolas Freeling, acclaimed creator of the Van der Valk and Henri Castang novels, crime fiction is a refreshingly broad genre. In a series of dazzling chapters, Freeling pursues those earlier writers who have helped to shape his own work as a crime novelist. Never at a loss for words, nor diffident about his judgements, he is here at his most provocative and outrageous.

No one interested in crime fiction, and the writers who gave practised it, should miss this original, eclectic book.
Contents
Introduction
Crime and Metaphysics
Stendhal
Charles Dickens
Joseph Conrad
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Rudyard Kipling
Raymond Chandler
Dorothy L. Sayers
Georges Simenon
Apologia pro vita sua

Jacket design by Iain Stuart, from George Cruikshank's illustration,
'Fagin in the condemned cell', to Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

Nicolas Freeling: Criminal Convictions. Freeling on the Crime Novel. Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License. London: Peter Owen, 1994, ISBN: 0720608732, 224 p., £17.95.