Martin Edwards's Blog, page 68

Returning to Rye

I'm just back from a lovely break in the south of England, which was blessed with astonishingly good weather. It was clear early on this year that I wouldn't want to be travelling overseas - although I look forward to the day when that's easy to do again! - and so I decided to concentrate on exploring England, especially rural England. I've also had in mind the potential for researching locations for my next novel and maybe one or two short stories. And I must say that it's been really good fun. There is so much to see. My latest trip encompassed two really good festivals, the first being Rye Arts Festival.

Because Rye is so far from Cheshire, it made sense to stop off along the way. This led to a first visit to Henley-in-Arden (not to be confused with the Henley of regatta fame), a charming old town, and a break in the journey at Cassington in Oxfordshire, which afforded a chance of a walk around the grounds of Blenheim Palace at the end of the day and to have a wander around Scotney Castle and the town of Battle in Sussex the next day.

Then it was on to Rye and three nights in the wonderfully historic Mermaid Inn. After my last visit to the Rye Arts Festival in 2019, I was tempted to reference the town in the storyline of The Crooked Shore, although no action scenes are set there. The town definitely has potential to feature in a Rachel Savernake story and I spent some time exploring its curious byways and trying to figure out what might happen where. 

'The Cryme Day' in which I took part at the Mermaid was really enjoyable. My fellow speakers were Andrew Wilson, Elly Griffiths, and Nicola Upson, all of whom are not only terrific writers but also very convivial companions. Special thanks go to John Case, who again organised everything with unobtrusive excellence. John's calm personality makes an event very agreeable, and given how challenging it has been to organise anything during the pandemic, I think he's done a quite brilliant job. 

For good measure, John recommended us to explore places such as Appledore, a village on the Romney Marsh (another good setting for Rachel!) and Hythe, a coastal resort I've never visited before. There is an astonishing ossuary in the church crypt at Hythe which is one of only two in England; seeing it was a memorable experience. There was also time for a steam railway trip to New Romney and a chance to look at the marsh from a different perspective.

So, plenty of promising raw material for mysterious settings, as well as a thoroughly enjoyable trip.  

 
 

Forgotten Book - Case with No Conclusion

Leo Bruce's third book about Sergeant William Beef, originally published in 1939, was Case with No Conclusion. The title is enticingly challenging - it suggests something very different from the conventional Golden Age mystery in which, so we are often told, order is disrupted only to be restored at the end. And there's no doubt that the central plot idea is a strong and attractive one.

Two features of the Beef series help the books to stand out from the crowd. Lionel Townsend is an entertaining narrator, constantly bemoaning Beef's failings, and just as consistently missing the point. He really is one of the most enjoyable and distinctive Watson surrogates in detective fiction. Add to this the plentiful references to the detective genre, and you have a sort of light-hearted metafiction which is very agreeable.

In this story, Beef has left the police and set up as a private investigator. But were his early successes in detection simply due to luck? This question lies at the heart of the story. Peter Ferrers engages his services in connection with 'the Sydenham Murder'. Peter's brother Stewart has been arrested in connection with the killing of an unpleasant character called Dr Benson. But was Stewart guilty? Beef becomes convinced that he was not, but he struggles to prove it.

The only reason why I don't rate this novel as a minor classic of its type is that I feel it sags in the middle, with a cross-Channel foray that seems rather like padding. I think that Bruce, like so many other Golden Age novelists (Richard Hull is an example that springs to mind) found it relatively easy to come up with clever ideas, but didn't always supply enough ancillary plot material (or strong characterisation) to make his novels gripping from start to finish. It might be harsh to say that here we have a brilliant idea for a short story, expanded beyond its natural length, but I do think the storyline would have benefited from further development and texture. But I don't want to criticise too severely, because it was an engaging read and confirmed my enthusiasm for Sergeant Beef.        

2.5 million and counting...

A little while ago, this blog passed a milestone of sorts - two and a half million pageviews. I've been a bit distracted lately, not least because of the sadness of learning of the loss of two old friends in Caroline Todd and Robert Richardson, but I guess that this figure is a cause for a modest celebration. One thing is for sure. The blog began back in 2007 and I still enjoy putting the posts together. I haven't become bored with it at all. And I like to think my readers haven't, either!

It's interesting to look back (the photo above was taken in Aberdyfi a few weeks before the first blog post). In 2007, I'd had a couple of award nominations and I'd published eleven novels over a period of sixteen years. I was working on Waterloo Sunset, the eighth Harry Devlin novel, and mulling over the concept of another Lake District Mystery, The Serpent Pool. I was still very much a full-time partner in my law firm and still stuck on the commuting treadmill. A great deal has changed in the interim. There's no doubt my writing career has moved in a very positive direction, and I've been fortunate in a number of other ways. I'm still a working solicitor, I should add, but on a very part-time basis. My main focus now is on writing, and you could say that's a dream come true.

The blog may not be responsible for these happy developments, but I think it's helped me in a variety of ways. Above all, it's brought me into contact with some wonderful people, both in the UK and much further afield. I greatly value your comments and also the emails and other messages that you send in.

So, my aim is to keep going with the blog for an indefinite period of time. And I hope very much that you'll continue to take an interest in it. Whilst I'm perfectly capable of talking to myself, it's much better to have a bit of company!

 

 

Diamond and the Eye by Peter Lovesey - review

It's one thing to be prolific. To be prolific and innovative is quite another. Yet Peter Lovesey, more than fifty years after he burst on to the crime writing scene, continues to try out new ideas. This literary ambition, this willingness to take risks, this refusal to be content with the same-old, same-old, is one of the qualities that distinguishes the best writers. Their number certainly includes Peter, who is the only living author in Britain to have received the CWA Diamond Dagger and also been made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America.
Now he's come up with Diamond and the Eye, the rear dust jacket of which carries a quote from this blog, which I was rather pleased and proud to see. It's the twentieth in his long-running series about Bath cop Peter Diamond, and he's celebrated by trying something very different and quite unexpected. To the third person viewpoint chapters featuring the police investigation are added chapters told in the first person by a character new to the series, Johnny Getz, who happens to be a private investigator based in Bath.
There is always a touch - and sometimes a generous helping - of humour in Peter Lovesey's novels, and here he focuses on having fun. In particular, he enjoys himself by parodying the style of the classic American private eye novelists, notably Raymond Chandler. Chandler is name-checked several times, and so are various other writers and gumshoes, including one of my own favourites, Amos Walker, created by Loren D. Estelman. The comedic ingredients also include a femme fatale in the unlikely shape of the much-married Lady Bede, who happens to be a member of the local police ethics committee.
The story begins with Johnny investigating the disappearance of a dealer in art and antiques and this forms the prelude to a convoluted case in which the equivalent of the Maltese Falcon is a work of art which, although fictional, has its origins in a piece of Bath's real-life history. This is a less serious mystery than the general run of the Diamond series, but I suspect that during the pandemic Peter was in the mood for light relief and I'm sure his many fans will feel likewise and welcome this good-natured jeu d'esprit

Forgotten Book - The Dream Walker aka Alibi for Murder

Charlotte Armstrong was a talented author capable of sharp psychological insight. She was also admirably ambitious, varying her approach to the task of telling a crime story with conspicuous regularity. Sometimes the result was extremely good, as in Mischief, sometimes more open to question. A case in point is The Dream Walker, first published in 1955. It's a novel with a very intriguing premise, but I must admit that I struggled with the use she made of her raw material.

It's one thing for a writer to have a good idea, quite another to make the best use of it. A conventional novel will often open with the discovery of a murder, but writers of psychological suspense often find a different and perhaps unorthodox starting point. In this book, I was surprised that the story (narrated by a young teacher called Olivia Hudson) began with a rather hurried account of a plot concocted by two men with a view to discrediting a saintly individual, Olivia's uncle, for the purpose of revenge. We don't identify with the bad guys, because they are not characterised in any depth, and more surprisingly we don't identify with the good guy, who is another cipher. I wondered if these characters would be more fully developed as the story progressed, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that they are not. And that did seem to me to be quite a defect.

The real meat of the story lies in the scheme hatched by the bad guys. From an early stage, we know that a woman called Cora, who seems to be in two places at one and the same time, is involved in the plot. Armstrong was aiming, I suppose, for the kind of suspense that you get - as in a Hitchcock thriller - where you know more than the people at the sharp end of the action. For me, however, it didn't work. And unfortunately I found Olivia irritating.

While battling rather wearily through the book, I checked to see what other people made of it. Interestingly, there is a positive review on an excellent blog, Mysteries Ahoy!. Aidan makes the point that Armstrong was indirectly referencing the McCarthy witch hunts, and he describes the book rather nicely as an 'inverted impossible mystery'. Aidan takes a more generous view of the characterisation and structure than I do. For once, though, I'm afraid I wasn't persuaded by his advocacy, skilful as it is. I felt that such a good premise deserved a more gripping presentation. Helen McCloy would, for example, probably have made much more effective use of it.

  

 

The Life of Crime

I've been pleased by the reaction on social media to my big news - the announcement in the Bookseller of my forthcoming history of mystery, The Life of Crime, to be published by HarperCollins. The sub-title is Unravelling the Mysteries of Fiction's Favourite Genre, and the book is due to land on the shelves on 12 May 2002. It will land quite noisily, because the book is no slim volume. It's about a quarter of a million words long, even after ruthless (believe me!) cutting.

I've been interested in the idea of writing a history of the genre for a very long time. In the 1980s, I kept a card index detailing authors, books, and topics of interest, but other things got in the way and the index gathered dust. Then, in the mid-90s, I had a conversation with fellow author Andrew Taylor, during a St Hilda's crime fiction conference, which stuck in my mind. He said to me that I really should try to write a book that was in effect an update of Julian Symons' Bloody Murder, the study of the genre that he and I greatly admire. Andrew is someone whose opinions I greatly respect. The fact that, even in those far-off days, he thought I was capable of such a feat stuck in my mind. I was flattered, but a bit daunted.

As things turned out, it wasn't until The Golden Age of Murder was published that I turned my mind in earnest to the idea of writing a history of the genre. I knew that it would be a mega-project, and by then I also knew that it would be a very, very different book from Bloody Murder. There are several reasons for this; one of them is that each chapter will begin with a vignette from the life of a particular writer. Symons, in contrast, didn't bother much with biographical details. One of the reasons why I chose this focus was that over the course of my career as a published novelist, I've given many talks on the theme of 'My Life of Crime' and I find that readers' appetites for information about writing careers is boundless. This book seeks to cater to that demand, but in a rather different way than did The Golden Age of Murder.

I'm very excited about this book. I realise that it's impossible to please all readers, or to say everything about every author and novel that deserves to be said. But Bloody Murder came out in 1972, and since then, there hasn't been anything comparable in terms of scope and influence. I've put a lot of energy and enthusiasm into The Life of Crime and I hope that, whether or not they agree with what I have to say, people will find it not only informative and interesting but an entertaining read.  

  

Robert Richardson R.I.P.

 

I was truly sorry to hear of the death of Robert Richardson, who – uniquely – served two distinct terms as Chair of the CWA. He also gave a great deal of support to Nancy Livingstone, whose stint as Chair was marred by serious illness. I was friendly with Robert and his charming wife Sheila for upwards of thirty years, and on the last occasion that we met, at a northern chapter lunch in Yorkshire shortly before the pandemic changed all our lives, I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting him with a Red Herring award in recognition of his distinguished service to the CWA and its members over the decades.

Robert was a journalist who moved from writing whodunits featuring an amateur sleuth to novels of psychological suspense. His first crime novel, The Latimer Mercy(1985), won the John Creasey Memorial Award for the best debut of the year. Firmly in the classic detective story tradition, it benefited from a cathedral setting (in Vercaster, a fictionalised St Albans), and an amateur detective who rejoiced in the name of Augustus Maltravers. Maltravers, a playwright, is an intelligent and likeable character, but three years passed before he returned and the mood in Bellringer Street (1988) is bleaker than in the first book. The Book of the Dead (1989), set in Cumbria, contains a lengthy – and well-wrought - Sherlockian pastiche. Memories of ‘Silver Blaze’ and the dog that did not bark in the night-time point Maltravers towards the solution to a murder mystery and help to prevent another killing. 

Maltravers appeared in three more novels before Robert published The Hand of Strange Children (1993), a book nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger. He blended extracts from news agency reports detailing the discovery of two bodies in a wealthy banker’s house with flashbacks so as to build considerable tension. Significant Others (1995), in which he made use of his knowledge of the newspaper industry, and Victims (1997), are also entertaining stand-alone novels.

After that, however, Robert produced no more mystery novels, a real shame, but I continued to see him regularly at CWA events, including our penultimate encounter, at the Lake District conference in 2019 when I came to the end of my own long run as CWA Chair. He presented me with a bottle of wine, ostensibly as a competition prize, but I suspect mostly just as a generous gesture of goodwill. He spent many years tormenting me gently about the misfortunes of Manchester City and in recent years he took it in good part when I retaliated as City gained the upper hand over their rivals, his beloved Man Utd. He had a fund of anecdotes and was a sparky character. I'll miss him. 

 

Forgotten Book - The Great British Torso Mystery

Today, for once, my forgotten book is a work of non-fiction. I first came across the name of Richard Whittington-Egan about forty years ago, when I started work in Liverpool. A local man, he'd published a number of books about his native city, and I later discovered that he was also an expert in true crime. I never met him, but we were in touch in the later years of his life, when he was living in the south west with his wife and literary collaborator Molly. He kindly read and commented on the manuscript of my novel Dancing for the Hangman and he told me about a book he'd written called The Great British Torso Mystery, which I duly acquired. Richard died in 2016 but I've recently reread the book, which is the only full-length study of a case that was, in its day, very high profile.

An unidentified and mutilated human trunk was discovered on the banks of the River Severn, not too far from Cheltenham, in 1938. The incident, and the mystery surrounding it, became a sensation. It was dubbed, rather wonderfully if not quite accurately, 'The Case of the Thousand Clues'. The legendary pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was consulted, but the torso was never definitively identified. It seems very likely, however, that it belonged to an individual called Captain William Butt.

A related discovery was made even before the torso was examined. A gigolo called Brian Sullivan was found to have gassed himself. He was an associate of Captain Butt, who had engaged the services of Sullivan's mother, Nurse Sullivan, to look after his mentally troubled wife. Butt, like Sullivan, was an unscrupulous fellow, and the nurse was also a strange character; her role in the story is important, but open to interpretation.

Did Barry Sullivan kill Butt and try to disguise the crime by mutilating the body? If so, why? If not, what really happened? A detective novelist of the day, Andrew Soutar, investigated on behalf of the Daily Mail, and although his reporting prompted a libel suit from Nurse Sullivan, perhaps his veiled hints that she was involved in the death of Butt were not too far off the mark. 

It's a case that I find intriguing in various ways and Richard's treatment of it is interesting. The book was published by a small press, and I do feel that it would have benefited from stricter editing. All the same, it's an interesting piece of research and the case is so extraordinary that I'm surprised that it isn't better-known.

Announcing The Traitor - a new Bibliomystery

This summer I undertook an interesting project, commissioned by Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. For the past few years, Otto has been publishing a series of limited edition stories which are 'Bibliomysteries' - concerned, in one way or another, with the world of books. A number of wonderful authors - the likes of Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, R. L. Stine, Jeffrey Deaver, Megan Abbott, and Joyce Carol Oates - have featured in the series, so I was flattered to be invited to join them. And as luck would have it, within hours of Otto putting the proposal to me, an idea flitted into my head...

The stories are short, but not very short. The requirement is that they must be at least 10,000 words long and to do with books, but otherwise, the author has free rein. This is liberating. I was conscious that I'd never written a story of this length - almost a novella, you might say - and so here was another interesting challenge. I realised that the story would need to be different from a conventional short story as well as from a novel. The story concept needed to have enough meat in it to justify the length. Luckily, the idea that had sprung to mind fitted the bill.

Otto sent me some illustrative examples of stories in the series, including an Edgar winner from John Connolly and Andrew Taylor's The Long Sonata of the Dead, which supplies a pleasing coda to his wonderful Roth Trilogy. The idea of the series is that they are only available from Otto's bookshop, and that there are limited signed editions as well as paperbacks. The pressure, of course, is to write something good enough to stand in such company...

The result of my labours was The Traitor. This introduces a new character, the 'book detective' Benny Morgan. When lockdown came to an end, my first trips included visits to Llandudno and Shropshire, and both settings feature in the story. It's a mystery concerned with obsessive book-collecting and I really did enjoy writing it. Publication is in September and further details may be found  here

 

 

Murder She Drew - A Japanese Perspective on John Dickson Carr

I've talked before about the pleasure I take in hearing from readers of my books, and of this blog, around the world. Some time ago, quite out of the blue, I received a message from Akira Moriwaki of Japan about a fascinating project of his connected with the works of the locked room king, John Dickson Carr. One thing led to another, and I'm now the proud possessor of an inscribed copy of Murder, She Drew: Notes of the Curious, by the Curious, for the Curious by Akira and two other talented Japanese Carr enthusiasts. What is more, I have a couple of maps of scenes from Carr's work, in London and New Orleans respectively, which are so lovely to look at that I've had them framed and they now hang on the wall alongside a number of other prints with crime writing associations. 

The authors are now branching out, and I'm delighted to host a short guest blog post from them about their latest activities. Over to Akira Moriwaki:

'Murder, She Drew: Notes of the Curious, by the Curious, for the Curiouswas the first attempt in the world to review John Dickson Carr's historical mysteries and illustrate it with crime scenes and maps. Fortunately, this project was unexpectedly well received, both in Japan and abroad. This was due, in no small part, to the fact that the illustrator, who was the 'She' in the title and had previously read very few of Carr's novels, was awakened to Carr's charms.

We are pleased to announce a new challenge: Carr Graphic. It is a far-reaching project to make Carr's works into a Graphic in the "SR (=Sealed Room) no Kai", the longest established mystery novel enthusiasts' group in Japan, to which the three co-authors belong. This is the result of the illustrator's love for Maestro Carr.

This project will be published in the SR Monthly magazine on even-numbered months and in the SR Blog on odd-numbered months. Both the paper and the blog will be linked together to form a series of pieces.

The first piece, It Walks by Night, was published last month in the June issue of SR Monthly.

The first SNS piece, The Lost Gallows, was published at the following address. http://sealedroom.blog.jp/