Martin Edwards's Blog, page 236

CWA Northern Chapter - Silver Jubilee Week-end

I had a memorable week-end attending the Silver Jubilee celebration of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association in Pickering, North Yorkshire. Our convenor, recently retired former DI Roger Forsdyke, didn't allow a torn achilles tendon to interrupt his arrangements for what began as a celebratory lunch and turned into a rather longer and thoroughly enjoyable celebration that was blessed with excellent weather.



I attended the first meeting of the Northern Chapter back in 1987 - along with my then fiancee, now my long-suffering wife. That meeting was set up by our first convenor, another ex-cop, Peter Walker, who is most famous as author of the books on which the enormously successful TV series Heartbeat was based. And it was great to see Peter, along with his wife Rhoda, this week-end. The idea that partners of writers should be made welcome was Peter's original concept, and a very good one too. It has helped to enhance the social aspect of the Chapter, and has generated many long-lasting friendships.

Peter and Margaret Lewis, two authors and also publishers, were also at that first meeting and not only did they become great friends, a few years ago they actually published one of my books - Dancing for the Hangman. Meg Elizabeth Atkins and her husband Percy Moss were also founder members of the chapter, and it was lovely to see Peter, Margaret, Meg and Percy once again. Sadly, Robert and Louise Barnard, whom again I met that first time 25 years ago were unable to attend due to Bob's poor health, but Bob did write to Roger.to wish all his friends well - sentiments that were very warmly reciprocated. We also remembered the great Reginald Hill, who with his wife Pat was another founder member.



A highlight of the week-end (in addition to the excellent hospitality of the White Swan Inn) was a superb talk about an extraordinary double murder case by Detective Superintendent Steve Smith from North Yorkshire Police, who is pictured at the top of this post along with Roger. Special thanks to Roger and his wife Penny, as well as their son Toby, another police officer, for arranging such a tremendously enjoyable event. Amongst many others, it was great to catch up with Stuart Pawson, Lesley Horton and Sherlock expert David Stuart Davies. We look forward to the next 25 years!

Forgotten Book - Death in a Little Town

I’ve previously covered R.C.Woodthorpe in the Forgotten Books series, and today I’m returning to this currently obscure writer who was, for a few years, quite close to the top of the tree. But Woodthorpe’s career was short, and it’s symptomatic of the neglect into which he has fallen that, although he was an early recruit to the Detection Club, he has been missed off the list of members for a number of years!
Death in a Little Townwas the first of two books he published in the mid-Thirties which featured Miss Matilda Perks (the other is A Shadow on the Downs, which I haven’t yet tracked down - this one is available on the Hathi site and I am really indebted to Christos for directing me to it.) Miss Perks is a sharp-tongued former schoolteacher who lives with her brother Robert and a loquacious parrot called Ramsay Macdonald. She does not, however, operate in this story as an amateur sleuth in the Jane Marple mould, though she is perceptive and inquisitive. When, ultimately, she discovers the truth, she keeps quiet about it.
The story concerns the battering to death, by a spade, of an unpleasant wealthy man called Bonar. He is a landowner in the Sussex town of Chesworth, and it is pretty clear that what really interested Woodthorpe was portraying the town and its people, rather than setting an elaborate puzzle to be solved. The key characters include a novelist and an eccentric bachelor, but no attempt is made to characterise Bonar, and thus it is difficult to care about what happened to him.
Woodthorpe was, I think, not a natural detective novelist. He was primarily interested in social comedy. There is a lot of dialogue in this book that does not take the story forward, though to some extent it portrays the people of the story entertainingly and amusingly. That, I’m afraid, wasn’t enough for me to love this story, but Woodthorpe could write well, and it’s a pity that inspiration started to desert him after only a handful of books.

Hunted - TV review

Hunted, a new BBC TV drama, the first episode of which I've just watched, is described in some quarters as being in the same vein as the long-running series Spooks. But I never saw Spooks - combining writing with working full time as a lawyer meant something must give, and for me that has usually been television series. But life is changing for me, and I thought I'd watch the start of this new series, on the basis that I might just manage to keep tuned if it proved entertaining.

I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed the first episode a good deal. It's pacy, action-packed stuff, and if you like James Bond, you'll probably like Hunted. The story began in Tangier, and within a very short time, an exceptionally attractive woman had killed an assortment of bad guys and apparently (but not actually) killed by a rooftop sniper. You don't mess with Sam Hunter, that is for sure. The part is played by Melissa George, and she turns out to work for a private security firm that involves itself in a variety of murky dealings.

Sam's whereabouts are betrayed to yet more bad guys, and she is again apparently killed, but - guess what! - she survives miraculously. Not so fortunate is her unborn child - the father is one of her colleagues, whom she suspects of being the traitor. A year or so later, and physically recovered, but scarred both in body and mind, she returns to her job, and becomes involved in a a case involving a wealthy gangster (played as creepily as ever by the splendid Patrick Malahide - how on earth was this born villain ever cast as that toff of a cop, Roderick Alleyn?).

Sam cunningly infiltrates the gangster's household, posing as a young American (apart from her lovely looks, amazing combat skills, and mastery of languages, she is also brilliant at acting and probably everything else you could imagine) but her secret is uncovered - again, the question arises: which of her colleagues is a double agent? - and the episode ended with her coming face to face with a sinister assassin. Did I mention, by the way, that Sam experienced a terrible trauma in her childhood? Yep, all the ingredients have been thrown into the mix. Hokum, perhaps, but very well done, and I shall make a point of tuning in next week. Thank goodness for part-time working....[image error]

Tideline - review

Tideline is a first novel, by Penny Hancock, that has quickly achieved a great reputation. I met Penny at Crimefest in May, when we were on the same panel, moderated by Peter Guttridge. What she had to say about her debut sounded interesting, and at last I've caught up with it. Suffice to say that the accolades are well-earned - this is going to be the rave review I promised yesterday!

The story-line interweaves two connected narratives. Sonia tells her story in the first person, and it soon becomes clear that she is rather disturbed, possibly as a result of a tragic incident in her past involving somone called Seb. A 15 year old boy comes to visit her in her intriguing home on the banks of the River Thames - and Sonia decides that she doesn't want to let him leave.

An alternative perspective is provided by a third person narrative featuring Helen, the aunt of the missing boy. Helen has her own problems, compounded by a taste for alcohol, and her life disintegrates as the police investigate the boy's disappearance, and suspicion grows that she may have had a hand in it.

Years ago, I talked to a literary agent about the success of Minette Walters; she attributed it to a combination of excellent plotting and excellent writing. The same can be said of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vne, and with Penny Hancock's debut, the blend of story and style is again very impressive. The setting is superbly evoked, and though the plot has some echoes of The Collector and Misery, this is not a weakness, for the author has a very different approach from that of John Fowles and  Stephen King, and the result is a very different book. I really enjoyed this one - it's the best recent debut I've read since Belinda Bauer's Blacklands.[image error]

Four: movie review

Four is a British film, described as a "psychological thriller" which came out a year or so ago. Reading a snippet about the plot, which seemed interesting (a rich man hires someone to teach a lesson to his wife's lover) I was encouraged to watch it. Unfortuntely, it took only the first few lines of dialogue for me to start worrying about the script, and from an unpromising beginning, things went from bad to worse. There are four characters, none of them appealing or credible, and the acting, though on a slightly higher level than the plotting, characterisation and dialogue, was never going to trouble the Academy Award judges. It is a short film, less than 90 minutes in all, but it felt much, much longer. 

I thought I ought to check out what other reviewers have made of this film. The Guardian said it "isnt' terrible, just confusing and boring", while Britflicks said it was "atrocious", The Times and The Sunday Times were both scathing about the dialogue. I'm sure there must be kinder reviews of the film out there somewhere, but these reactions were enough to convince me that I hadn't missed too many subtleties.

And yet. There is something that troubles me a lot about publishing a negative review. I think that, when one admires or simply enjoys a book, a play, a film or anything else, it's entirely reasonable to point out any aspects of that don't work quite as well as others. Relentlessly piling on admiring superlatives can be unsatisfactory and pointless. Balance is surely a Good Thing. But there's a potential for unkindess about castigating a work of art that one or more people have worked hard on that should surely give one pause for thought, especially in the case of a low budget film like this. Returning to yesteday's topic, if J.K. Rowling is criticised by reviewers- however unfairly - she has at least the consolation that she is one of the great best-sellers of all time, someone who will be remembered long after most of us are forgotten. I definitely have some sympathy for those who (like me) are far, far, below that level of success. Bad as I thought this film was, in the end, I only decided to publish this review because I'm interested to seek people's opinions on severely negative reviews, and whether they can ever be justified. (I'm talking about reviews where, as here, the reviewer has no personal axe to grind, not the cases much in the news recently where negative reviews have been published, sometimes anonymously, primarily to denigrate fellow writers - I can see no excuse for that practice at all.)

Anyway, this blog is not meant to have a negative slant. It's a means of sharing my pleasure in the crime genre. So as a penance, tomorrow I will write a rave review of an excellent book I've just finished and which I loved from page one to the end!

Daring to be Different

It was inevitable that J.K. Rowling's decision to move away from Harry Potter and write something very different, The Casual Vacancy, would receive a huge amount of media attention, quickly followed by extremely mixed reviews. I've not read it as yet, though I've just read a depressingly negative review of the book in The Sunday Times. I'll return to the topic of negative reviews in the next day or two, but my theme today is the author's need to vary what they write.

Rowling could, quite safely, have written another book in the same vein as the hugely successful and enjoyable Harry Potter series (I've only read a couple, though I've seen most of the films, and I found them highly entertaining and well deserving of their success.) But it's entirely reasonable that she should have felt the urge to try her hand at writing a very different kind of book, and I'm glad that her new publisher has encouraged this. (Her new editor, David Shelley, was by the way the person who encouraged me to try my hand at a new crime series with a rural setting, so I have him to thank for the inspiration for the Lake District Mysteries; until then, I'd only written urban books, but David had faith that I could write a different sort of book, and to this day, I'm grateful for the confidence he showed in me.)

Just as, for instance, Paul McCartney can never escape the Beatles, but sill keeps writing fresh, and often inventive music, sometimes with great success, sometimes not, other artists and authors who have enjoyed success with one type of work, like Rowling, may come in for criticism when they move in a fresh direction. But a truly creative person is bound to want to keep stretching their talents in fresh directions.

Reginald Hill was a strong believer n varying what he wrote from book to book and his works included war-time books, spy thrillers, sci-fi and psychological suspense as well as whodunits . Until late in his career, he never wrote two successive novels n the Dalziel and Pascoe series. And his work remained fresh and exciting till the end of his life - largely as a result of this restlessness, and reluctance to write, continually, "more of the same".

At a much less exalted level, I feel I've benefited from writing two stand-alone novels, as well as my series books. And I'm tempted to try something different once again in the next  year or two - perhaps after one more Lake District book. Mind you, I 'm not sure what it would be as yet! Whether any resulting effort would achieve publication would be uncertain (not something J.K. has to worry about, of course) but I do believe that fear of failure, or bad reviews, should not deter a writer from avoiding the trap of formula. It's got to be a good thing, in the long run, to have dared to do something different.

Forgotten Book - The Man in the Net

I’ve covered a couple of enjoyable Forgotten Books published under the name of Q.Patrick, aka Quentin Patrick– a collaboration which later adopted a slightly varied pen-name, Patrick Quentin. Over the years I’ve read quite a few novels under both names, written from the early 30s to the late 50s, and I have to say I haven’t read a poor one yet. No wonder critics such as Julian Symons and Francis Iles rated them so highly.
The Man in the Net is a relatively late effort, dating from 1956, and it is a high quality thriller, with strong elements of psychological suspense coupled with a good whodunit plot. All the action is seen from the point of view of a struggling artist, John Hamilton, who lives in a stifling New England community, and an even more stifling marriage.
Linda Hamilton is a secret drinker, attractive yet unreliable and dishonest. She presents a charming image to outsiders, while making Hamilton’s life increasingly stressful. Hamilton, though a bit weak in some respects, is portrayed as a good and kind man, who gets on well with a group of children (who ultimately play an important part in the story-line). And no, there is never a hint of child abuse, which features in so many modern books.
Linda goes missing, and the evidence suggests she is dead and that John killed her. Pursued by the angry locals, John goes into hiding, and tries to work out how to save himself, and discover what happened to Linda. This is a short book by modern standards, and gripping from start to finish. It was turned into a film – no surprise, because it is such a vivid story. And there’s even a theory that “The Net”, a song by John Ashley on the recently released CD “Long Ago Last Summer”, a compilation of obscure, and sometimes eccentric, early Bacharach songs, was inspired by the film. Whatever the truth of that, this is a book that undoubtedly deserves to be remembered.

The House of Silk

I’ve loved the Sherlock Holmes stories ever since I first saw the Basil Rathbone films when I was eight or nine years old, and, not long after that, devoured first the short stories and then the (generally less satisfactory) longer stories. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the only one of the novels that really worked for me, and even that is structurally flawed. Among other things, it’s far too easy to spot the culprit.
Why did Conan Doyle find it more difficult to write longer stories about Holmes? I think that the answer is, at least in part, due to the fact that many of the elements of Holmesiana that so appeal to us work most effectively in the context of a short story. We don’t worry too much about depth of characterisation; what counts is a dazzling set-up, and the atmospheric quest for a solution to the mystery, with Watson always lagging several steps behind the Master.
The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz, is therefore an ambitious venture – an attempt, approved by the Conan Doyle estate, to put Holmes in a novel that is true to the original, but compelling and well-structured from start to finish. Horowitz is a very talented writer, and his way of solving the problems that defeated Conan Doyle is to weld together two very different stories. One concerns a threat to an art dealer who has recently been mixed up with a criminal gang in America, the other involves the killing of a young recruit to the Baker Street Irregulars.
I found this book a fast and agreeable read. Watson’s style of writing is always appealing, and I enjoy trying to imitate it myself. The Sherlockian pastiches I write from time to time are always a lot of fun, though I’ve never been brave enough to try my hand at a Holmes novel. There are, inevitably, a few quibbles (would Watson use the phrase “at the end of the day?”, would Moriarty really have acted as he did?) and one impersonation stunt did stretch my credulity to breaking point. At least one reviewer has argued that this is a mixture of a detective story with inadequate clues and a thriller with a easily foreseeable outcome, and there is some truth in this, although I should also add that most reviews have been hugely positive. Overall, I was left with the feeling that Horowitz had enjoyed writing the story as much as I enjoyed reading it – that is, a great deal.

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The Girl on the Stairs - Louise Welsh

I first came across Louise Welsh almost a decade ago, when her debut novel, The Cutting Room, made a considerable stir. Original and creepy, it manifested a distinctive talent. I have come across one or two less enthusiastic reviews of her later books, but when The Girl on the Stairs came out recently, I determined to give her work another try, and I'm certainly glad I did.

The setting is Berlin, and events are seen from the point of view of Jane, who is pregnant and entering a new phase of her life with her partner Petra. They have moved into a new flat, and the city is vividly portrayed. So is the rather sinister place where they live, and the atmosphere darkens after Jane meets a neighbour, the seemingly amiable Dr Mann, and his bolshy teenage daughter Anna. Jane comes to believe that Mann is abusing his daughter, but nobody is keen to share her concerns, even though another neighbour claims that,years ago, Mann killed Anna's mother, a former prostitute called Greta.

The real pleasure of this book lies in the gradual build-up of suspense and fear. It is very subtly done - a far cry from all those fat, blockbusting books in which serial killers murder victim after victim, inflicting so many indignities on the corpses that the reader starts to feel almost as abused as the deceased. The relationship of the lesbian couple expecting their first child was sensitively portrayed and seemed wholly credible.

I was less sure that the merits of the final pages of the book matched the quality of what had gone before. Despite a flurry of action, there was almost a sense of anti-climax. Suffice to say that the plot is not the most significant element of the book, and one could argue that it's not really meaningful to describe this as a "crime novel", even though crimes are committed in it. Overall, though, it's an extremely well-written story that, despite the lack of action in some parts, is quite haunting. Louise Welsh is a novelist of genuine talent, skilled not only at the description of people and places but also at conveying complex emotional reactions to events that are ambiguous yet undeniably macabre. This last is a gift that surely any writer - not just in the crime genre - would love to have.    [image error]

Veronica's Room by Ira Levin

Mention the name of Ira Levin, and most people will think of Rosemary's Baby, his stunning novel,which was turned into an equally stunning film. Many will think of The Stepford Wives, a thriller with a brilliant central idea, and a good number will mention The Boys from Brazil. Ask about his plays, and it's a racing certainty that the one to spring to mind will be the highly successful Deathtrap. Ask about his mystery fiction and a good number of folk will recall A Kiss Before Dying, a superb story with a terrific plot twist which has twice been filmed.

Very few people, I guess, will associate Levin's name with his 1973 play Veronica's Room. It was a commercial flop, although it has been revived from time to time, and it has never been filmed. Arguably, it's too unsettling to have been a commercial success. I've never seen it staged, but I've read it twice, once about thirty years ago and again the other day. Each time I was greatly impressed.

Susan, a 20 year old woman who is out on a date with a new boyfriend meets a much older couple. They are struck by her resemblance to Veronica, someone who died almost 40 years earlier, and they explain how it would be a huge benefit to a dying woman if Susan would agree briefly to impersonate the late Veronica. Susan allows herself to be persuaded.

Naturally, things take an unexpected turn. Could it be that Susan really is Veronica, and that the events of this play is taking place in the Thirties rather than the Seventies? Who is playing games with whom? The audience doesn't quite know whom to believe. The climax is quite shocking, and I can imagine that many found it a turn-off. But I rate Veronica's Room as one of the cleverest and most memorable crime plays I've ever read. I'd love to see it performed on the stage one day.[image error]