Martin Edwards's Blog, page 99

Crime Fiction: a Reader's Guide, by Barry Forshaw

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Christmas is coming and for those of you looking for a present for the crime fan in your life, Barry Forshaw's Crime Fiction: a Reader's Guide, published by Oldcastle Books in paperback at the price of £12.99 is definitely an attractive solution. This is a book that is concise yet wide-ranging, and is particularly well-suited for crime fans who are looking for fresh titles to add to their to-be-read list. For good measure, there is a short intro from Ian Rankin.

I don't claim to be wholly impartial about this book. Barry is someone who has done a great deal of good for many, many crime writers over the years, and I'm in that long list of beneficiaries; specifically, this book includes a nice piece about Gallows Court. Two of the things I've always liked about Barry's writing about the genre are his enthusiasm and his positivity. He is, like me, a fan of crime fiction as well as someone who writes about it, and at a time when critical negativity often seems depressingly fashionable, his constructive approach comes as a breath of fresh air.

Right at the start, Barry acknowledges that in a book like this, there are bound to be many omissions. Of course, that is absolutely unavoidable, and would still be unavoidable if the book was even longer. The publishers (almost inevitably) claim that this is 'a truly comprehensive survey with definitive coverage', and I wouldn't go that far. What is beyond doubt is that, in the space available, few writers could have covered so much ground, particularly as regards books written in the twenty-first century.

The kernel of this book was the earlier (and much shorter) Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, a point which Barry acknowledges. So if you're familiar with that book and/or Barry's newspaper reviews, you shouldn't expect something totally original, but you will find a great deal of material here that wasn't in the book's earlier incarnation. Even if you have the original volume, therefore, you will find that this one is a worthwhile purchase.

The emphasis of the book is on relatively recent titles, and Barry's expertise in the field of translated crime means that books originally written in languages other than English receive excellent coverage. One of the charms of the layout is the juxtaposition of titles. So in the section about 'Cops', you get in quick succession books by the following slightly unlikely bedfellows: Martyn Waites; Martin Walker; Joseph Wambaugh; and Sarah Ward. There are many other examples of Barry's flair for spotting the common threads in superficially different works of fiction. I've really enjoyed dipping into this volume randomly to discover new-to-me titles, and I am sure many other crime fans will take equal pleasure from it. 

The Mortmain Hall cover and the Gallows Court monthly deal

The hardback cover of Mortmain Hall, the sequel to Gallows Court, has just been unveiled. What do you think? The artist, Edward Bettinson, was appointed by Head of Zeus in view of his track record of producing top class cover artwork for a whole range of writers. It's often said that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but there's no doubt that covers count for a great deal in book marketing.


I've told the story before of how, when my first book was published, I was startled to be told by a Transworld rep that covers counted for more than content in his experience. I'd like to think that in the long run, that is not true (and I really don't believe it is) but in the short term, a cover helps to attract interest and to sell books. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Edward's design meets with widespread approval. 
Mortmain Hall is published in the UK in April and I'll be telling you more about it nearer the time.
On another note, I'm pleased to say that Gallows Court has been selected for the Kindle monthly deal. So if you're interested in an ebook version at very modest cost (I think this promotion is limited to the UK, by the way), now is your chance... 

Forgotten Book - Marion, aka Murder Off the Record

I've discussed several of John Bingham's regrettably forgotten books on this blog during the past year or so, and today I'm turning my attention to a novel he published in 1957, when his reputation was at its height. This is Marion, and it's an interesting example of a post-war British novel of psychological suspense and irony, a sort of lineal descendant of Francis Iles' ground-breaking books from the 1930s.

Right at the start of the story, we are told the name of the killer, and also his alias; this is rather in the tradition of Malice Aforethought, but Bingham was a writer who liked to experiment, and his novel is quite original and distinctive. The narrator is a youngish journalist (Bingham himself had previously worked as a  journalist) who is recently married to the alluring and eponymous Marion. (Eponymous in the British edition, anyway; the alternative title Murder Off the Record doesn't strike me as a good one, even though it takes time for Marion's role in the story to become clear).

The narrator is, in fact, a conspicuously naive and pig-headed chap, and I soon found my tolerance of stubbornness waning, especially when he confesses to a crime that he didn't commit, and actually serves a short prison sentence because of it. He is besotted with Marion, but some of his actions, not least his evasiveness when the police interview him in connection with a murder, are not only stupid but irritating in the extreme. As in several of his other early books, Bingham handles the relentlessness of police investigations well, and one of the merits of his approach to writing is that you can never be quite sure what is going to happen next. I do find this appealing.

To an extent, Bingham was exploring the areas that the great Margaret Millar was examining in her novels of the Fifties, on the other side of the Atlantic. his work was popular, and Marion was adapted, as Captive Audience, for Alfred Hitchcock's TV series. Bingham wasn't as professional a writer as Millar, and this is evident in much of his work, but the intermittent waywardness of his narratives does have that charm of unpredictability. His portrayal of the relationships between men and women is very dated now, but this story doesn't deserve the oblivion that has been its fate for the past thirty years or so.

Bodies from the Library 2, edited by Tony Medawar

The title and contents of this HarperCollins anthology are inspired by the Bodies from the Library conference, which has for the past five summers been held at the British Library and brought together fans of Golden Age detective fiction from all over the world. Tony Medawar, who has been researching the genre for a good thirty years, has conceived the idea of a series of books gathering stories (and radio plays) which he has, in many cases, rescued from obscurity.

Tony is a particular expert on Agatha Christie and the first Bodies book included an excellent rare story by the Queen of Crime. She features again in this book, which I think represents an advance on its predecessor in terms of the overall range and quality of content. There are two particular stand-out contributions, one a long-lost Lord Peter Wimsey story and the other a novella by Edmund Crispin. Rare finds indeed.

The Dorothy L. Sayers story is called, simply and splendidly, "The Locked Room". There is, arguably, a question mark over one aspect of the plot, which may explain why the story (which evidently dates from the late 20s) wasn't included in the Wimsey collections. It's a mystery to me why Crispin's "The Hours of Darkness" disappeared from sight. It's a very pleasing case for Gervase Fen, which is not even mentioned in David Whittle's magisterial biography of Crispin.

The other contributions are a very diverse assortment. So there's a story by S.S. Van Dine,and three others by American authors: Clayton Rawson, Jonathan Latimer (not an author normally associated with the Golden Age, a term which has to be interpreted broadly in the context of this book), and Q. Patrick, whose work in various incarnations I've always enjoyed. The Patrick story is also a novella.

There are several other notable names in the book, such as Margery Allingham and E.C.R. Lorac, but I particularly liked "No Face" by Christianna Brand and the characteristically amusing "Before and After" by Peter Antony. There's even a previously unpublished play by John Rhode, "Sixpennyworth", which Tony speculates may have been written for a local am dram group.

An Air That Kills by Christine Poulson - guest blog

Christine Poulson is a friend of mine whose crime fiction deserve to be much better known, and I'm delighted to host a guest blog post from her to celebrate the publication by Lion Hudson of her latest novel, An Air That Kills. I can recommend her blog A Reading Life, by the way, which is full of characteristically thoughtful observations.  
"‘Where do you get your ideas?’ That’s a question that writers are often asked, and in truth they can come from anywhere. They can be ripped from today’s headlines or they can have lain dormant in your memory for decades. In the case of my new novel, An Air That Kills, it was both.
At the beginning of 2018 I was casting around for an idea for the third in a series of novels featuring medical researcher, Katie Flanagan. In the second, Cold, Cold Heart I had sent her to a remote research station in Antarctica. That was going to be a hard act to follow.  And then on 10th February I saw this headline on the front page of the Guardian: ‘Blunders exposed scientists to killer bugs.’ The piece that followed made hair-raising reading. It claimed that breaches of protocol had led to dengue virus - which kills around 20,000 people worldwide every year - being sent through the ordinary post and to students studying live meningitis pathogens that they mistakenly thought had been killed by heat treatment. As soon as I read it, I knew where Katie was going next: I was going to send her undercover to a high security lab where the scientists were as deadly as the diseases.
The article made such an impact, I think, because it triggered a memory from many years ago. It was 1978 and I was a postgraduate student at Birmingham University. On 11 August Janet Parker, a medical photographer in the anatomy department, fell ill with what was at first was thought to be chickenpox. It was in fact smallpox and she died a month later. Hers was the last recorded death from the disease. In 1980 the World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated. It seemed certain that she must somehow have contracted the disease from the research lab on the floor below, though strangely the exact means of transmission was never established.
I followed this terrible story as it unfolded in the local paper. I don’t remember fearing for my own safety. All those who had been in contact with Janet Parker were quarantined. But to be so close to the scene of such a tragedy did leave a lasting impression. I thought of it often as I planned and wrote An Air That Kills."

Shanghai and Mystery Games

I'm back from an utterly unforgettable trip to Shanghai, where I was guest of honour at the first International Mystery Game Expo last weekend. My first trip to China proved to be a brilliant and at times surreal experience. Surreal? Well, for one thing, I never imagined that I'd ever be interviewed on stage by a Chinese magician wearing a Spiderman mask who happens to be a vlogger with a million-plus subscribers. Or that I'd witness two eminent locked room mystery novelists, one Japanese, one French, crooning Beatles songs ("Michelle" and "Yesterday") to a Chinese audience in English. But these were among the memorable moments of a short but action-packed visit.



What was it all about? I was pleasantly baffled when the original invitation came to attend. I was told that offline murder mystery games are massively popular with millions of young Chinese people. And these games are heavily influenced by the classic detective novels of the likes of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. Locked room mysteries are very popular in China (as they are in Japan) and at least twenty Carr books are now in print in China. The expo involved a large number of game-sellers exhibiting their wares to fans. The organisers were keen to strengthen the connection between mystery game enthusiasts and present day exponents of the classic mystery.


So they invited a number of guests, French board game designer Guillaume Montagi, Japanese author Soji Shimada (author of the Tokyo Zodiac Mystery) and Paul Halter, French author of about forty locked room mystery novels, as well as myself. Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, sent a video message, and copies of EQMM were available to attendees. I must admit that I had some anxieties in advance of my trip. It felt very much like a venture a long way outside my comfort zone in more ways than one. But my hosts looked after me royally. I was flown out business class, taken on sight-seeing trips and also had the pleasure of visiting the home of Elliot Han, whose collection of signed and inscribed classic crime is quite breathtakingly impressive. A number of rare inscribed classics by the likes of Christie, Carr, Queen, Stout, and E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case, a first edition inscribed to John Arlott of all people) were on display at the expo.




The expo was attended by thousands of people (up to 5000, I was told, on the Saturday alone) and what struck me very, very forcibly was their youth. I hardly met a single Chinese person under the age of 35, and believe me, I met a lot of people in the course of a short trip. Their enthusiasm for mystery fiction and the classic examples of the form is palpable. It's really quite exciting. As for the mystery games, Paul, Soji, and I each took part in one of these games. They can last for up to seven hours, but ours were restricted to two hours. It was very much an interactive experience - this is clearly part of the appeal: the games have a social side. I played with a group of four women and one man (the games are equally popular with men and women) and they were good companions - that's us, below, with the game's designer. Suffice to say that the game was highly convoluted, and I struggled to keep up...



As well as my appearances on stage with Paul, Guillaume, and Soji, I was asked to give a short talk on British mystery games at the Guoman Hotel, where I was staying, and a lecture on classic UK fiction and the Detection Club. The latter was held in the historic Sinan Mansions, and I was startled to be greeted by a packed, standing-room-only crowd. Watching people queue up before the doors open from our vantage point in a coffee shop across the road was quite an experience. Thankfully, I had a very capable and charming young translator.





My hosts were delightful. Special thanks to Fei Wu, who went to great lengths to make sure I had a great time - and that the meals suited my rather narrow tastes perfectly. Fei Wu is himself a crime writer to watch. He was the first from China to contribute a story to EQMM and he has just produced his first novel, The Lost Winner, which is a highly innovative book. I hope to host a guest post from him in due course to tell you more about it. I was, of course, pleased to meet Paul and his wife Martine and Soji and to ask them to sign my copies of their books. The group who worked hard to look after us included Daisy Suo, Zheng Liu, Fan, Mr Weird the magician and vlogger, and Elliot, and I met a good many pleasant crime fans. All these young people made a great impression on me, and I feel that the detective story in China is not only safe in their hands but also promises to have an exciting future.

Forgotten Book - The Eighth Circle

Is The Eighth Circle a truly forgotten book? After all, it did win the Edgar from the MWA for best novel in 1959 and by then, when he was still in his early 40s, he'd already won two previous Edgars, for short stories. In later life, he'd become an MWA Grand Master. So this was a major book by a highly successful author. And it would be wrong to describe it as obscure. But I think it's fair to say that nowadays, it's far from well-known, and I must admit that I've owned my copy, a tattered green Penguin, for a long time without feeling moved to read it.

But finally I've done so, and although I don't think it's an absolute masterpiece - not as stunning as some of Ellin's brilliant short stories, such as "The Question", for example - it's a very good novel, a private eye story with a difference. Written at the same time that Ross Macdonald was establishing himself as the heir to Raymond Chandler, it's an attempt to get away from the traditional American p.i. story. And at the time of its appearance, I'm sure it struck a fresh note.

We see events from the perspective of Murray Kirk, a good-looking and successful gumshoe, who runs a highly successful agency. Ellin portrays the business, authoritatively, as being similar to many other forward-looking office-based firms of the late 50s, filing cabinets and all. Kirk's a cynic, not least about women, and has a rather strange relationship with a women called Didi whom he met through a case.

His life changes when he is persuaded to take on a case involving an allegation of police corruption. Murray's basic assumption is that the police are corrupt, and when he falls in love with the girlfriend of his ultimate client, a rather unappealing cop, he sets about trying to prove to her that the man is crooked. Things do not, however, go according to plan.

It's a long novel, and there isn't a huge amount of action or convoluted plotting. Nor are there as many snappy lines as you find in the Ross Macdonald books. Nevertheless, it's consistently engaging, with some very well-defined characters. I enjoyed it, as I always enjoy reading Ellin. He was a highly accomplished crime writer, and I think there's a simple reason why his reputation has faded a little. It's just because he never repeated himself. He wasn't a series writer, and he never followed fashion or a formula. Admirable. 

Hazell

I've rhapsodised more than once about Talking Pictures TV. In addition to bringing back a host of minor but often interesting B-movies, they have screened a number of interesting British TV series from the past. I've enjoyed Scotland Yard and the Edgar Wallace anthology series, while the recent Shadows of Fear series (which I'd never even heard of before) was very good. Now they have started to show Hazell.

Hazell is one of the most interesting of British private eye series. It was co-written by Gordon Williams (best known as the author of the book that was made into Straw Dogs) and the former England footballer and manager Terry Venables. They used the pen-name P.B. Yuill, which Williams had previously adopted for his weird yet intriguing stand-alone novel The Bornless Keeper .

The books were successful, and were published in paperback by Penguin. There were, alas, only three of them, but they spawned a TV series with Nicholas Ball, then quite a big star, as James Hazell, the Cockney answer to Philip Marlowe. There were over 20 episodes, and I saw a few of them at the time, but now I've caught up with the first in the series.

Hazell Plays Solomon is based on the first of the novels, and it benefits from a strong and engaging plot. Our lad is hired by a flash lawyer to trace the daughter of an American client (played by Jane Asher) and gets into personal and professional complications. It's rather snappily done, and I enjoyed it. Whether the rest of the series lives up to the promise of the first remains to be seen, but this one has worn relatively well, despite all the flared trousers and macho 70s attitudes.

Forgotten Book - They Never Looked Inside

They Never Looked Inside (US title - He Didn't Mind Danger) was Michael Gilbert's second novel, and it was originally published in 1948. It represents a major departure from the setting and style of his debut, Close Quarters, even though it again features Inspector Hazlerigg, who thus became the first of Gilbert's long list of series detectives. Whereas the first novel was a whodunit in the classic style, the second is an action thriller about a criminal gang.

The contrast between the two books is explained by the fact that Gilbert started work on the first before war broke out, although it was only published in peacetime. The second bears witness - as do many of its successors, such as Death in Captivity and Death Has Deep Roots - to Gilbert's wartime experience. The plot and many of the characters are derived from the experience of the Second World War, and despite Hazlerigg's presence in the story, the most intriguing character is the recently demobbed Major Angus McCann, who acts as an amateur sleuth, and whose intrepid nature gave the book its American title. (To explain the curious British title would require a plot spoiler, I'm afraid.)

The book opens with a robbery that goes wrong, and it soon emerges that this is one in a long sequence of crimes with which Scotland Yard is grappling unsuccessfully. McCann becomes involved in trying to figure out what is going on, and his bravery and pig-headedness are characteristics which are evident in a good many of the protagonists of Gilbert's later books.

Returning to this book for the first time since I was a teenager, I felt that it was interesting in itself, but mostly as a portrayal of its time (and be warned, this includes some racism on the part of some of the ex-soldiers in particular) and as a prototype for many of Gilbert's later books. In its day, it was very well reviewed, but really it's an apprentice work, and I have to say that the revelation of the criminal mastermind's identity (such as it is) comes as an anti-climax. Gilbert quickly became a highly accomplished storyteller, and if you haven't read him before, I'd recommend that you start with one of the books he wrote after this one.

The Looking Glass War - 1970 movie review

I became a John Le Carre fan in my early teens, devouring his first three books with a great deal of enthusiasm. Then I read The Looking Glass War, and simply didn't "get" it. With hindsight, that was probably due, at least in large measure, to my tender years. Le Carre has said that he aimed to write a satire about spying, but I think it's fair to say that it's a long way short of his best work. I thought about giving it another go, and then the film version, made in 1970, turned up on Talking Pictures TV so I decided to take a look at it.

The film has a strong and varied cast, although today, perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that the young son of Avery (Anthony Hopkins) is played by Russell Lewis, who is now renowned as the creator and sole writer of the excellent Endeavour and has written many other crime scripts for television.

The story begins with the murder in Finland of a British spy (Timothy West). Back home, a motley crew of secret service men, including Hopkins and Sir Ralph Richardson, persuade Leiser, a good-looking young Polish man (an oddly cast American actor, Christopher Jones) to undertake a mission at considerable risk to himself. So far, so good. Unfortunately, at this point Frank Pierson's screenplay begins to drag. And it continues to drag, apart from one or two interesting moments, right to the end. By that time, I really didn't care about the outcome. It's not nearly as good as another Le Carre film, The Deadly Affair, which I reviewed recently, far less the superb and much more recent TV series The Night Manager.

So the cast - including such stars as Susan George, Ray McAnally, Maxine Audley, and Anna Massey, as well as Pia Degermark (whose later life has apparently seen as much unhappiness as did the unfortunate Jones') - is largely wasted. The soundtrack by Wally Stott is a kind of poundshop Bacharach effort that simply isn't strong enough; Wally Stott (who later became Angela Morley) was talented, but he was neither Bacharach nor John Barry. Given Le Carre's fame and brilliance, I wonder if there is scope for a remake of this film. Perhaps. But if there is, it will need a much sharper script.