The detective story, originated by Edgar Allen Poe, is over one hundred and fifty years old, so The Sixth Commandment has a lengthy pedigree. Hard-drinking Sam Todd is one of a long line of hard-boiled detectives that began in the 1930s and 1940s with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Since then the crime novel, in which the process of detection is less important than the depiction of violence, has exceeded in popularity the traditional detective novel. The Sixth Commandment is something of a throwback, for while the milieu in which Sam Todd works is grittier than that of, say, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, the novel remains focused on finding a solution to an old-fashioned mystery.

Of more recent novelists Sanders probably has the greatest affinity with Dick Francis. Although Francis restricts his mysteries to the insular world of horse racing, both writers...