Clive James is inspired by Sherlock and Endeavour to reflect on the great traditions of the British TV detective drama

In The Moonstone, Collins invents a number of characters, situations and strategies that would shape thousands of detective novels to come. He brought us the professional bumbling policeman who is forced to give way to the detective of superior genius; the gifted amateur sleuth and his less perceptive sidekick; the party at an isolated country house which becomes the scene of an inexplicable crime; the beautiful but perverse heroine; the battle between rationality and superstition; and the notion of fair play for the reader in the presentation of clues. It's true that a reader schooled by nearly 150 years of subsequent detective fiction won't have much trouble sorting out whodunit, but how they did it is quite ingenious, more than worthy of any later master of the genre.

That ITV1's ratings are in decline is no great surprise - since this is the inevitable upshot of digital fragmentation. But one of the most worrying aspects of its current performance is the lack of upmarket viewers it attracts.

Jack the Ripper was a forgery invented by journalists to link a series of unrelated murders and sell newspapers, according to a new book.

How an ordinary woman’s persistence led to justice for the victim of a brutal murder

The man who, unwittingly, set me off on the track of writing a book about the Dambusters was the actor George Baker, whose birthday is today. In an interview on the BBC Radio Today programme in December 2005 he told the story of how he had been cast to play the part of my uncle, David Maltby, in the 1955 film The Dam Busters.

Sean O'Brien on the ups and downs of thriller writers.

Raymond Chandler: literary genius is all about hard work. How do you create a masterpiece? With a lot of graft and heartache, according to the crime fiction master

"Tom first stepped into view in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” written in six months in 1954. He was 25 years old, which means he celebrates his 80th birthday in 2009. If only one could be present at Belle Ombre, his chateau like home near Fontainebleau, to join in the party."

Shocking crimes in Whitechapel

The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics. So why is Scandinavian crime writing suddenly the hottest genre in town?

He has sold the house once already, in the early 1990s, to none other than Ruth Rendell, one of our most successful and most prolific crime writers, who also used it as a holiday home

...there are similarly cuddly pictures of PG Wodehouse, Barbara Pym, Robert Graves, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Atwood (with "Fluffy") and on and on and on.

He is a bank robber, she is a lost soul - a volatile man, a suggestible woman. Don DeLillo on the sad, complex 1970s movie Wanda, the first and only film made by writer, director and actress Barbara Loden.

Scandinavia's fondness for crime thrillers is partly thanks to the long winter nights and partly the law-abiding atmosphere, writes Gwladys Fouché.

"Grade ought to know that the modern media landscape was actually shaped, almost entirely, by technologists..."