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Elusion Aforethought provides significant new material on the work of crime and detection fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox, a popular and prolific English journalist, satirist, and novelist in the period between World Wars I and II. Cox has been called one of the most important and influential of Golden Age detective fiction writers by such authorities as Haycraft, Symons, and Keating, yet he occupies a surprisingly ambivalent position in the history of the crime genre.

Portrayed as dubious moneylenders, underworld operatives, megalomaniacs, Bolshevik saboteurs, or unscrupulous war-profiteers, Jewish characters have surfaced in English detective fiction from the very beginning. Starting with Conan Doyle, and focusing on the Golden Age of the genre, Tunrbull uses multiple examples to trace the evolution of Jewish caricature in British crime writing, and examines fictional representations of Jews in relation to burgeoning antisemitic sentiment within British society. Attention is paid to crime writers as wide-ranging as Baroness Orczy, Sydney Horler, R. Austin Freeman, Ngaio Marsh, and S. T. Haymon, and the depiction of Jews by Golden Age giants Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Anthony Berkeley Cox.