Martin Edwards's Blog, page 292

Crimefest 2010

I returned yesterday afternoon from a thoroughly enjoyable trip to Bristol, and I think everyone shared the view that Crimefest 2010 was a highly successful event. Congratulations are due to the hard-working team of volunteers who make sure that things go so smoothly, a tricky task accomplished with good humour and efficiency.

The superb weather was an added bonus and I took the opportunity to have a look round some parts of Bristol within walking distance. It's a rather appealing city, and...

Little Voice

Little Voice, the 1998 movie, is not a crime film – although it features several actors very familiar in roles from crime films or TV series – but has a screenplay which illustrates the interplay between story-line and characterisation. It is based on a play written by Jim Cartwright, and I thought it a well-crafted piece of work.

Cartwright's approach is to create vivid and memorable characters. Jane Horrocks is Little Voice, the almost mute young woman who is devoted to her late father, a f...

Where do crime writers come from?

My researches into the history of the Detection Club have been helped by a friend who supplied me with a list of club members dating back to 1932, not long after the august institution was founded. The committee members, led by G.K.Chesterton as President, were E.C.Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, G.D.H. and M. Cole, Edgar Jepson, Milward Kennedy, John Rhode and Dorothy L. Sayers.

But what really caught my eye was the addresses of the members. A very high proportion of them lived in London and...

Forgotten Book - Murder at Shots Hall

The reissuing of good detective stories that have long been out of print is always a cause for rejoicing, and Tom and Enid Schantz's Rue Morgue Press deserves special praise for reviving a number of very obscure titles, including the two detective novels written by Maureen Sarsfield.

I must confess that I had never heard of her, but Sarsfield was a British writer active for just a few years shortly after the Second World War; she also published a mainstream novel and (as Maureen Pretyman...

Crimefest

Today I set off for Bristol, and Crimefest. I've been looking forward to it, whilst worrying for some time that family health issues would prevent me from attending. Happily, this is not the case, and I am hoping that I'll find the week-end as restorative as I have done on previous occasions.

I'm moderating a couple of panels. 'I Fought the Law' on Friday morning concerns writers who write fact and fiction, and those involved include Frances Brody, Alison Bruce, Dan Waddell and Diane Janes.

On ...

Authenticity

We all want our books to be, and to seem, authentic – don't we? – but there is plenty of room for debate about what that really means. Robert Barnard tells a story about an American critic who praised his deep understanding of the backstage world of opera, when in fact Robert had no first hand knowledge of that milieu at all. But he wrote well enough to persuade the critic that he did.

A book or film that makes obvious mistakes of fact will tend to be panned, but a common experience is that...

Compulsion

The Leopold-Loeb case is one of the most famous American crimes. Two students – intelligent, but not as intelligent as they believed themselves to be – abducted and murdered a young man as a Nietzschean 'experiment' in committing the perfect crime in 1924. Of course, it was far from perfect. They were duly caught and convicted, but Clarence Darrow's advocacy saved them from execution. Loeb was murdered by a fellow prisoner, but Leopold was released after 33 years and died in 1971.

The story i...

Lewis: Your Sudden Death Question - review

Your Sudden Death Question, this week's episode of Lewis, was written by Alan Plater, which is usually a guarantee of high quality writing, and Plater did not let us down, with an entertaining story combining two of my favourite things, a quiz and an elaborate murder mystery.

The idea was that Marcus, played by Alan Davies (yes, Jonathan Creek himself) had organised a bank holiday quiz show, taking place in an Oxford college, in which pairs of contestants played for a £5000 prize. One of...

Beginnings

I've just watched The Leak, another episode in the Swedish TV series of Wallander, and it reinforced my view that the success of Wallander does owe quite a lot to the power of the opening scenes. In this one, a man is jogging through a forest. He comes across a chap with a gun, pauses for a look, and then jogs on. Unwisely, I thought, he stops for a breather, and is duly shot.

It's a chilling start to the story, and it's somehow rather typical of the Wallander series. Almost every episode...

Short Stories

Amongst other things lately, I've been co-judging the Mystery Women short story competition with my good friend Ayo Onatade, who happens not only to be a great fan of crime fiction, but also one of the most knowledgable and supportive readers around. We've found it far from easy to make our decision, but finally we've managed to do it.

I well remember entering my own work for competitions, before I ever had any fiction published. For example, I submitted an early version of what became the...