Martin Edwards's Blog, page 281

The Living of Jericho

I first read Colin Dexter's Morse novel The Dead of Jericho in the early 80s, and I remember enjoying the TV version a few years after that. It is classic Dexter – convoluted, yet highly entertaining.

Dexter's Jericho is an area of Oxford, a short walk from the city centre, yet possessing a distinctive character of its own. My main memory of Jericho from student days is of occasional visits to the cinema there, sometimes to see arty films, sometimes to see something ultra-commercial – the far ...

The Mouse that Roared

The late American writer Leonard Wibberley occasionally ventured into the crime genre, but he is best remembered for the series of satirical books starting with The Mouse that Roared, set in the tiny European country called the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. I've just seen the 1959 film version of the book, which (despite its fame) I'd never seen all the way through before.

I'm glad I did, for the Cold War satire has worn surprisingly well, given the passage of more than half a century. The premise o...

Ellis Peters memories

I mentioned Crippen & Landru the other day in connection with their new book by Philip Wylie. A few years back, I co-edited one of their books, a Lost Classic, featuring obscure stories by Edith Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters - The Trinity Cat and Other Mysteries.

My co-editor was Sue Feder. She was someone I never met, but she was a great fan of, and expert in, the work of Ellis Peters. Doug Greene introduced us via email and we corresponded about the various unpublished (in volume form) stories ...

Solving Mysteries

The world of mystery readers divides into two broad categories – those who like to try to solve the mystery themselves, before the solution is revealed, and those who simply enjoy the story and make no serious effort to work out what is going on. Many people I know, including some crime writers, are in the latter camp, but I'm firmly in the former group.

In the Golden Age of complicated plots and ingenious if unlikely solutions, I suppose many readers liked to figure out the answer to the...

Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments

I've just received my copy of the latest title published by Crippen & Landru, a wonderful American small press. This is Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments, by Philip Wylie, a writer of whom I must admit I've never heard. But Doug Greene, who created Crippen & Landru, is a sound judge, and I'm sure it is a book packed with interest.

My confidence is reinforced by a fascinating short introduction to the book by Bill Pronzini. I've never met Pronzini, but I've read some of his stories, and also his ...

The Damned United

David Peace is known for a number of dark books with crime themes, but The Damned United is something rather different. It's about the 44 days that the controversial football manager Brian Clough spent in charge of Leeds United. I haven't read the book, but I recently watched Tom Hooper's 2009 film of the story, and much enjoyed it.

Brian Clough was a larger than life individual, and a very suitable character for fictional interpretation. He was both brilliant and deeply flawed (as so many...

Forgotten Book - Heart to Heart

My latest entry for Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten books is another novel co-written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Heart to Heart was published in the UK In 1959, in a translation by Daphne Woodward – not long, that is, after Hitchcock turned one of the duo's earlier books into Vertigo.

Heart to Heart is rather different from other Boileau-Narcejac novels that I have read – in fact, their ability to ring the changes and their willingness to take risks are aspects of their writing ...

Rivalries

Tony Blair's newly published memoir, A Journey, looks as though it will sell a few more copies than any of my efforts. One of the main themes of Blair's book, inevitably, is his love-hate relationship with Gordon Brown (more hate than love, it would seem.) I'm utterly fascinated by that relationship, and have been for years, now not least because the nature of rivalry is a core theme of the book I'm currently writing.

The Blair-Brown rivalry is one of the all-time classics, because it is so...

Gilda Revisited

I posted a while back about Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. It was a film I watched rather casually one evening, and I liked it without thinking it was a great masterpiece. But some rank it as a 'landmark in world cinema', and on that basis, BFI Classics have published a study of the film by Melvyn Stokes, which I found very interesting.

Stokes provides a short account of the film's narrative, wisely paying little attention to the rather barmy story-line involving a 'tungsten...

Avatar

While I was on holiday, the chance arose to see James Cameron's acclaimed movie Avatar in a large shipboard cinema, and so – although I hadn't planned to watch the film any time soon- I grabbed the opportunity. And I'm very glad I did, even without 3-D glasses to admire the amazing special effects.

It's essentially an adventure story, with various classis elements. In 2154, a paralysed ex-marine, Jake Sully, replaces his recently deceased twin brother in a mission to distant Pandora, a...