Martin Edwards's Blog, page 151

Cold Earth by Ann Cleeves

A couple of weeks ago, I spent an enjoyable evening at the British Library. Mark Lawson was interviewing Ann Cleeves and me on the topic of "the return of the Golden Age of crime fiction". Ann is a contemporary writer working in the vein of the traditional mystery, and very successfully too. She talked about her take on Golden Age writers - though she's not such a fan of Agatha Christie as I am, for instance - and about how, on occasion, there are GA elements in her work. An example is The Glass Room, a very good book featuring Vera Stanhope.

The event came, for her, at the end of a hectic tour promoting her new book, part of the Jimmy Perez series this time, Cold Earth, which is published by Pan Macmillan. This is her 30th novel, and Maura, her publicist, arranged as a surprise a video with contributions from a wide range of writers, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and her colleagues in Murder Squad, congratulating her on the milestone. A nice touch. When recording my snippet, I took the opportunity to take a look again at her very first novel, which was certainly in the GA tradition, and it was pleasant to reflect on the progress she's made since those early days.

In Cold Earth, excellent thematic use is made both at the start and the end of the story of earth as a powerful elemental force. The book opens vividly with a landslide on Shetland which coincides with the funeral of a character encountered previously in the series, and which causes considerable havoc. When rescue operations get under way, a body is discovered. But, surprise, surprise, the deceased did not die of natural causes. The corpse belongs to a woman, and there is some mystery about her true identity.

A key feature of the book is the development of the relationship between Perez and his boss Willow Reeve. In this story, we get a fuller picture than before of Willow s personality, and it is an appealing one. There is some debate - especially among people who like Golden Age fiction - about whether modern writers spend too much time on exploring the personal lives of our detectives. Some people prefer us simply to get on with the story.

I agree that one can over-do the tormented personal lives of one's detectives, but, like Ann, I find that the development of the detectives' lives is an integral part of a crime series. There is no reason in principle why this should prevent us from getting on with the story. Admittedly Poirot and Miss Marple never changed during their long careers, but look at the emphasis Dorothy L. Sayers laid on the evolving relationship between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter: she set the pattern that we follow today, I reckon. The key to success is to balance character, plot, and setting. This is easier said than done, but in Cold Earth, Ann does just that with her customary skill.;

Forgotten Book - Murder by Matchlight

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E.C.R. Lorac was not one of the Golden Age's most famous Crime Queens, but she was, perhaps, a Crime Princess. Not quite Christie, Sayers, or Allingham, but a very good writer of detective fiction nonetheless. My parents enjoyed her books in the Fifties, and I used to buy old copies for them when I came across them in catalogues or shops. Having eventually inherited the books, I'm now working my way through them. Fellow Lorac fan Geoffrey McSkimming told me that Murder by Matchlight is one of his favourites, and it's my Forgotten Book for today.

The first thing to say is that Geoffrey is a good judge. This short and snappy novel is a very good read indeed. A well-structured detective story in its own right, it also gains immeasurably from its wonderful presentation of life in wartime London during the blackout. Lorac wasn't the only crime writer to make good use of the blackout as a setting for murder, but I doubt it was often better done, and better integrated into the plot, than here. (So do let me know if you have any favourite rival candidates.)

A young analytical chemist is at a loose end one evening after his girlfriend is unavoidably detained elsewhere. He wanders into Regent's Park, and when someone strikes a match to light up the darkness for a moment, in the matchlight he sees a man with an unusual face. He also hears a thud - and guess what? Someone turns out to have been murdered.

Lorac's regular cop, the amiable but persistent Macdonald, leads the investigation, and finds that the deceased was himself a man of mystery, masquerading under an assumed name. A varied cast of suspects includes a conjuror called Rameses, who lived in the same building as the dead man; fellowtenants also come under Macdonald's microscope. Suspicion shifts around from nne person to another until a satisfying solution is put together. A good mystery.

A High Mortality of Doves

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the launch, at Simply Books in Bramhall (a very good indie bookshop, by the way) of Kate Ellis's new book.A High Mortality of Doves is published by Piatkus, part of the Little, Brown group. My companions included fellow crime writers Margaret Murphy and Chris Simms, who are, like Kate and me, members of the Murder Squad group (see below photo). It was a convivial occasion; the photos, by the way, were taken by Kate's son Tom.

Kate is a friend of mine, and so you would expect me to be favourably disposed to her work, as I am. For a good many years, I've believed that she is a writer whose ability to develop the traditional detective mystery story in interesting ways is under-valued. Years ago, I thought the same about some of my other favourite writers - Peter Robinson, Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin, and Andrew Taylor .That quartet are all bestsellers now,and deservedly so. I look forward to Kate joining their ranks.

A High Mortality of Doves marks a departure for her. It's set in the aftermath of the First World War, and the backdrop is Derbyshire, a gorgeous county, home of lovely landscapes (and unlucky cricketers). I know that, in researching the book, Kate visited the military hospital exhibition at Dunham Massey, a marvellous National Trust property near Altrincham, which told the story of how wartime casualties were treated. I visited Dunham Massey too, and found the whole experience very moving.

I don't want to say too much about the plot of the book, which boasts a dramatic revelation at the end. I didn't see it coming, even though I'd anticipated one aspect of the solution. When the book has been widely read, I look forward to debating the craft involved in coming up with that particular twist. In the meantime, watch out for A High Mortality of Doves. I suspect that it will be Kate's breakthrough book.  

Motives for Murder

On Thursday evening I had the pleasure of presiding over an unforgettable evening at the Dorchester Hotel. It was the Detection Club's November dinner, which proved to be a sell-out, with a speech from distinguished former crime fiction editor Hilary Hale and the induction of two new members - James Runcie and Mick Herron. Guests included visitors from the US and members of the family of Ronald Knox, one of the Club's founders.

We also celebrated the recent 80th birthday of that wonderful writer Peter Lovesey, who has been a member of the Club for over 40 years. I admired Peter's books long before I met him, more than a quarter of a century ago, and when I suggested to Club members that we celebrate him in a practical way by producing a book in his honour, the response was overwhelmingly positive. And the result has just been published - a book called Motives for Murder.

The UK edition, published by Sphere (front cover above), was presented to Peter by David Shelley, once my own editor (and now J K Rowling's!) and the man who first commissioned my Lake District series. The US edition, published by Crippen and Landru (front cover below), was presented to Peter by Doug Greene whose own contribution to the genre includes a splendid biography of John Dickson Carr.

Len Deighton has written a foreword to the book, and Peter himself has supplied a fascinating afterword, detailing his memories of his early years in the Detection Club. Ann Cleeves, Len Tyler, Kate Charles, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Susan Moody, Andrew Taylor and Liza Cody are among the galaxy of talented writers who have written brand new stories for the book - while Simon Brett contributed a sonnet. An added twist is that the stories (and the sonnet) are connected to Peter's life and work in one way or another. The result is one of the most satisfying anthologies I've been concerned with, and a fitting tribute to one of life's good guys (who treated us on Thursday night to a wonderful rendition of his witty poem about autopsies...) It was a truly memorable occasion.

Paranoid, The Moonstone, and Dark Angel - crime on TV

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Paranoid came to the end of its eight-week run on ITV last week, and I've just caught up with its final episode of. Bill Gallagher's conspiracy thriller. It felt like a guilty pleasure. Yes, there were massive plot holes, and the behaviour of the three lead detectives made it seem wildly unlikely that they'd ever hold the bad guys to account. But the rural Cheshire locations delighted me (quite a lot of the action took place in Dusseldorf, but never mind) and the pace of the story compensated, by and large, for the wackiness of some of the twists.

The idea was that a bunch of cops based in "the back of beyond" stumble across a terrible secret while investigating the bizarre shooting of a local doctor (filmed in Tatton Park). There was a dramatic cliffhanger scene set at night on Anderton Boat Lift, a fantastic choice of location, and even a scene set five minutes' walk away from my house, in the centre of Lymm. I loved all of this, even if Indira Varma, Robert Glenister and their German colleague, the mesmeric Christiane Paul, were all such mavericks as to make Morse look like Dixon of Dock Green. There was a great in-joke in the first episode, when the cops are promised back-up from the forces of Cuddington and Waverton - two tiny Cheshire villages. Will there be a second series? I rather doubt it. Another global conspiracy centred around places like Knutsford, Northwich, Lymm, and Frandley would be testing credibility even more than this story did. But we live in interesting times, so you never know....

The Moonstone, a five-part daytime BBC drama, also had counter-intuitive elements. I liked the idea of the black butler, Gabriel, a brave concept that worked well, though I felt his chumminess with his employers was less than realistic. Terenia Edwards (no relation) was a convincing Rachel Verinder, and though I felt that the story was rather stretched out to fit the five episodes, it was all in all a decent version of one of the great Victorian novels of sensation.

Dark Angel (not to be confused with various other stories with the same title) was a two-part ITV show about Victorian serial killer Mary Ann Cotton. Joanne Froggatt played her very well, and Alun Armstrong was good, as usual, as her step-father. Mary Ann had a penchant for putting arsenic in people's tea, and she did this so often that the attempt to stay true to her criminal career verged, unintentionally, on the comic. Again, though, I stayed with this to the end. Like the other two shows I've mentioned, for me it had quite an appeal, despite occasional flaws in the scripts.

Forgotten Book - Death of a Banker

Anthony Wynne had a knack of dreaming up excellent "impossible crime scenarios", as readers of his enjoyable British Library Crime Classic Murder of a Lady know. So I approached his 1934 novel Death of a Banker with high hopes, and found that the story opens brilliantly. We are presented with the central problem in the first chapter, during a conversation between the "Giant of Harley Street", Dr Eustace Hailey, and the Chief of the C.I.D., Colonel Wickham.

A banker called Hall takes part in a hunt in Northumberland. He is seen to fall from his horse in the middle of a grass park, in front of fourteen witnesses, and when they reach his body, they find that he has been stabbed to death. How could he possibly have been murdered? As the despairing Wickham says, it's "one of those new ideas in killing".

Duly tantalised,I read on. Before long, however, I began to fear that the superb opening would be as good as it got, and so, I'm sorry to say, it proved. Wynne, who was very interested in economics, had a lot to say about the way that bankers behave, and many of us would agree with his reservations about them. But, interested though I am in the impact of politics and economics on Golden Age fiction, the part played by international finance in the storyline soon becomes intensely tedious..

There are two distinct recurrent features in poor Golden Age mysteries. One is the presence of American gangsters - here, at least, Chicago gunmen are mercifully absent The other is the presence of political leaders from a fictitious European state on the brink of revolution, and here we have a prince whose position as head of state is threatened by those pesky Communists. I found the plot involving the prince tedious in the extreme, and I kept reading simply to learn the solution to the impossible murder. But even that was plucked out of thin air.

There are a few nice lines, such as: "Since Europe became the slave market of money-lenders, loyalty has almost completely disappeared as the basis of government", and it's clear that Wynne was keen to write about topical issues. But I don't think it works, and I doubt it worked even in 1934. Suffice to say, I felt this book was markedly inferior to Murder of a Lady.

Crimson Snow

                                             This week sees the publication of Crimson Snow, the latest British Library Crime Classic. It's an anthology of winter mysteries that I've put together on behalf of the Library, and I'm delighted that early orders have been very impressive. There's a special edition for Waterstones, with a slightly different colour selection for the cover. And in the Library's Classic Crime pop-up shop you can even find bags and coasters emblazoned with the cover artwork. All very gratifying..
But what of the content of the book? After all, despite all the lovely enthusiasm for Classic Crime cover artwork, content remains the most important thing.There are a dozen stories - slightly fewer than in other BL anthologies, but that is because one of the stories is more like a novella, meaning that it's actually a chunky volume. The long story in question is "Death in December" by Victor Gunn, and I'm confident it will be familiar to very few readers.
The same is true of some of the other contributions, including "Murder at Christmas", a Ludovic Travers story by Christopher Bush, and "Off the Tiles" by Ianthe Jerrold (this may well appeal to readers who have enjoyed her crime novels, reissued in recent times by Dean Street Press). There are also some major names, including Margery Allingham, Edgar Wallace, and Julian Symons. 
When I put together Silent Nights, an anthology of Yuletide mysteries, for the British Library last year, I didn't envisage that there would be enough material to justify another seasonal collection like this. But once I started researching I was pleasantly surprised. And there's a nice bonus, too. Thanks to information given to me by Jamie Sturgeon, I was able to include "Mr Cork's Secret", by Macdonald Hastings, a Christmas puzzle mystery which originally appeared in "Lilliput" magazine. Prizes were given and the solution to the puzzle was printed in a subsequent issue. No prizes this time - you'll have to enter the "Murder at Magenta Manor" competition at the Library itself to win some books - but the solution is printed at the back of the book. All in all, I'm very hopeful that crime fans will find in Crimson Snow, and also in Silent Nights, plenty to enjoy, as well as a pleasing solution to their Christmas present-giving dilemmas!                                                         

Forgotten Book - Dawn of Reckoning

Dawn of Reckoning, by James Hilton, definitely qualifies as a Forgotten Book. Originally publisheed in 1925, it's not really a crime novel. When it was issued in paperback (following Hilton's rise to fame in the 30s) it was, significantly, produced in an orange rather than a green Penguin edition. Hilton did venture once into the field of detection, at first under a pen-name, Glen Trevor,, but he was not primarily a mystery writer.

He was, however, an accomplished mainstream novelist, and books like Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon were hugely successful. He had a real gift, not least for conveying emotion. Interestingly, in 1941 Dawn of Reckoning was (very, very freely, I understand) adapted into an American film noir called Rage in Heaven: the screenplay was co-written by Christopher Isherwood, and the impressive cast was led by Robert Montgomery, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders. I'd like to see the film one day.

Hilton was in his early twenties when he wrote this book, and it shows. There are many clues to his rich storytelling talent, but there is still something not entirely satisfactory about the story. We begin with a boat trip taken by Mrs Monsell and her son Philip, which is rudely interrupted by an attempted suicide .A young Hungarian girl has tried to kill herself, but she is rescued, Mrs Monsell takes a shine to her, and brings her back to England. The girl, given the name Stella, settles into British life and she and Philip take a fancy to each other.

Eventually, the pair marry, and Philip plans to embark on a career in politics. Things start to get complicated when his old friend from student days, Ward, re-enters his life. Stella and Ward become emotionally entangled, and at a late point in the book, there is a sudden death. A murder trial follows, and there is also a race against time to prevent injustice - these are the elements in the story familiar to crime fans, though they are clearly peripheral to Hilton's main concerns, and have a slightly tacked-on feel. The material is strong, but handled unevenly, almost as if the young author lost interest in the characters who are important early on, notably Mrs Monsell, and turned his attention to other aspects of his story. A flawed novel, then, but one that provides an interesting insight into the literary apprenticeship of one of Britain's premier popular novelists of the Thirties.

Christie and Company

Today I'd like to talk about some of the excellent Golden Age-related publications available from Harper Collins. We're hoping that people with GA fans in their lives will consider giving them copies of The Golden Age of Murder as Christmas presents, naturally! And if there's any cash left in the kitty, trust me, there are plenty of other options. Good ones, too...

Agatha Christie's Complete Secret Notebooks by John Curran is among them. I should say that this is not a brand new book, given that it combines John's two earlier volumes about Christie's journals, the virtues of which I've extolled on this blog before now. I find the insights into Christie's approach to her craft fascinating. John has also taken the opportunity to amend and update the text and commentary. I strongly suspect that John, like me,is one of those authors who is always keen to revise and improve what he has written. It's an endless task, and you have to draw a line somewhere, but he (like me) has benefited from our editor's admirable willingness to allow improvements to be made. (When The Golden Age of Murder appears in paperback in the UK next year, it too will incorporate some revisions, reflecting in particular new information that has come to light).

Harper Collins' Detective Story Club reprint series continues to yield some interesting titles. Freeman Wills Crofts' first (and some say, his best) book, The Cask, came out recently, and Hugh Conway's Darker Days has been issued in a Christmassy cover (you can bet that Waterstones and other bookshops will be overflowing with Yuletide-themed book covers in the coming weeks as everyone tries to emulate the Mystery in White effect!) In the new year, incidentally, Anthony Berkeley will feature in this series, notably with that early serial killer story The Silk Stockings Murders.

Harper Collins have also revived the Crime Club imprint, which I think is good news, and titles include Lord Dunsany's short story collection Two Bottles of Relish. The title story is an acknowledged classic, and although Dunsany never surpassed it, his imaginative story-telling doesn't deserve the neglect into which it has fallen.

The Ups and Downs of a Crime Writer's Life - guest blog by Christine Poulson

Long-time readers of this blog know that I'm fascinated by the rollercoaster nature of the writing life. Few if any authors enjoy unrelieved success - and even those who produce one bestseller after another are often prey to self-doubt. For almost every writer, there are ups and downs, and sometimes the downs are depressing - they can even become career-ending. My firmly held belief is that one has to face up to this reality, rather than ignoring it, because if one accepts that rough patches are inevitable with one's writing (as with one's life generally), one has a better chance of surviving them. With that in mind, I asked my friend Christine Poulson to talk about her own experiences, knowing that she is a writer of real distinction who has not had as many lucky breaks as she deserves. But I am optimistic that they will come her way. Meanwhile, here is what she has to say:


"When Martin suggested that I write about the ups and downs of crime-writing, I hesitated. The ups, yes - the thrill of publication, the pleasure of nailing a complicated plot, the satisfaction when a day’s writing goes well, the friends I’ve made among other crime writers, meeting people who have actually read your novel. I wasn’t so sure about sharing the downs. To lose one agent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.
But perhaps my story could be regarded as one of those morality tales the Victorians were so fond of in which hard work and perseverance win the day - or else as an awful warning. Because it all started so well. I found an agent with relative ease. Bob was a lovely man, a legendary agent of the old school, already over eighty when he took me on. He sold the first two novels in my Cassandra James series to Robert Hale in the UK and to St Martin’s Press in the US. But then the crime fiction editor left to go to law school (the irony of it!). She’d loved my novels and the new editor wasn’t interested. They decided not to take the third one. In the UK I was still with Hale, but with small prints runs and no paperbacks, things weren’t looking rosy.
Perhaps it was time to write a bigger, more ambitious novel. To that end, I acquired a young, ambitious agent. Too ambitious as it turned out. Before I’d even finished the novel, she’d quit to join a TV talent agency.
It can be harder to get an agent in mid career than when you are setting out. Suffice it to say that years went by and the pages listing agents in my copy of The Writers and Artists Yearbook had come unglued by the time I gave up and decided to try to place the novel myself. In the end a small independent press took Invisible, my standalone suspense novel, but only as a print on demand paperback and an ebook. For my next novel self-publishing seemed preferable and though there is no shame in that, it wasn’t what I wanted."
And then it happened: in September last year at the funeral of a old friend (who had nothing whatsoever to do with publishing) I got talking to a woman who asked me what I did. When I told her, she said, ‘You must talk to my husband. He’s an editor . . .’ By Christmas I had a two book deal with Lion Hudson. Deep Water came out on 21 October (27 January in the US), I’m hard at work on the second, and I couldn’t be happier with my new publishers.
My story isn’t at all unusual (though I would advise new writers not to bank on meeting an editor at a funeral). Luck in one form or another does play a part in publishing – your manuscript has to land on the right desk. But so does sticking at it and I don’t know if I would have done that without the support of other writers who shared their own stories of disappointment and rejection and told me not to give up (yes, I’m looking at you, Martin!). It helped to know that I wasn’t the first writer who’s had to reinvent themselves. I certainly won’t be the last.