Martin Edwards's Blog, page 296

The House on Carroll Street

The House on Carroll Street is an enjoyable film, directed by Peter Yates, and starring Kelly McGillis. It's set in the America of the early 50s, and kicks off with the McGillis character, Emily Crane, being interrogated relentlessly by an un-American Activities committee because of her idealistic attachment to civil liberties. The bad guy is rather charmingly played by Mandy Patinkin, better known to me as a singer.

Emily loses her job, and takes up a rather thankless task, reading to a...

John J. Walsdorf and Julian Symons

The relationship between writers and their readers is a fascinating subject in itself. Like most authors, I enjoy meeting readers at events and I'm always pleased when people who have enjoyed my books send me an email or come up to say hello at a convention. John J. Walsdorf was a reader who became so enamoured of the writing of Julian Symons that not only did he get to know him well, he went so far as to produce a very impressive bibliography of this prolific writer – based on a massive...

Too Much Information?

A work colleague once startled me by saying that he judged a novel by how much he learned from it, in terms of information that he hadn't previously known. He felt that he didn't have much time to invest in reading fiction, and so he wanted an extra dividend, apart from the pleasure of the narrative. This way of looking at reading fiction had never occurred to me before, but I've thought of it many times since.

Lately, I've been reminded of it while reading a new book by Stephen Booth, Lost...

Talking Heads

Alan Bennett has never, so far as I know, ventured into writing crime fiction. When I listened recently to the audio version of his acclaimed dramatic monologues, Talking Heads, however, I thought several times how well his skills would be suited to the genre, should he ever decide to give it a go.

Although Talking Heads dates back to the 1980s, I never saw the original TV version, and I have to admit that I've never paid much attention to Bennett's work. What a treat I have been missing, if t...

Wallander - The Revenge: review

I've just caught up with the first episode of the second series of Wallander, in its Swedish incarnation, with Krister Henriksson as the weary detective. The Revenge is a story which begins slowly, as the plot is unveiled in a slightly predictable fashion, but the second half is gripping and impressive.

The story begins with a black-out of the power system in Ystad. This rudely interrupts a crayfish party in which Kurt Wallander is enjoying himself, having just bought a nice house by the sea. ...

Forgotten Books - Detection Medley

My latest contribution to Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten Books is another volume produced under the aegis of the Detection Club. Detection Medley was published in the UK in 1939; it appeared the following year in the US under the title Line Up.

John Rhode edited the book and supplied a foreword (although it is debateable whether his account of the historical date of origin of the Club is correct), while A.A. Milne, himself a member of the Club, contributed a short introduction.

Milne, of...

The Ambassador's Boots

A while back, in posting about The Secret Adversary featuring Francesca Annis and James Warwick as Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence, I enquired about the TV series Partners in Crime, in which the duo starred. Happily, ITV 3 has been screening some episodes from that series, and (once I realised) I managed to record some of them.

The first that I've seen is 'The Ambassador's Boots'. This is a story with a nice central idea, somehow typical of Christie. An ambassador's boots are taken, but t...

Following the Detectives in Oxford

Last week-end I returned to Oxford, subject of the second of my essays for Maxim Jakubowski's forthcoming book on scenes of crime fiction, Following the Detectives. In the April sunshine, the city of dreaming spires was looking at its photogenic best.

One of the most intriguing developments in Oxford's recent past is the transformation of the city prison into a luxury hotel. It featured in an episode of Lewis a while back. The castle is also accessible nowadays, and for the first time ever I h...

The Website is Back!

I'm very grateful to those people who kindly alerted me to the fact that my website started carrying various dire warnings about dangerous viruses. The problem seems to have been a messing up of the website codes, rather than anything truly sinister, and I'm glad to say it's now been fixed. But needless to say, if anything similar occurs in the future, it is very helpful to be alerted to it. Once again, many thanks.

Following the Detectives in Shropshire

Maxim Jakubowski's book Following the Detectives should appear later this year, and as I've mentioned before, I've contributed a couple of essays to it. By coincidence, over the past two week-ends, I've revisited the scenes of crime fiction that I've discussed in Maxim's book.

On the way down to the CWA conference in Abergavenny, we drove through Shropshire, one of the greenest and pleasantest of counties. Ellis Peters, a native Salopian, was passionate about Shropshire, and that passion...