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Features

Who killed murder?

A detective writer lines up the suspects on the mysterious worldwide decline of murder and robbery

19 March 2016

9:00 AM

19 March 2016

9:00 AM

Pity the poor crime writers. Our earnings, like those of all authors, are diminishing for reasons far beyond our control. Our fictional criminals and detectives are being outsmarted by genetic fingerprinting, omnipresent security cameras and telltale mobile phones. Who needs Sherlock Holmes to solve a tricky crime when you have computers, with their unsporting ability to transmit and analyse enormous quantities of data and identify culprits? But the bigger problem for us novelists (if not for everyone else) is that murder itself is dying.

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Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is The Ashes of London. Andrew Taylor is a winner of the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifelong excellence in crime fiction, and a regular crime reviewer for The Spectator.

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