D is for Detective

 

Even as a child I loved detective stories. Starting with Jennings Follows a Clue by Anthony Buckeridge, I graduated to Sherlock Holmes and then onto Mike Hammer. Favouring the less violent activities of European Detectives, I ran through John Creasey and a little of Georges Simenon and as I grew older, the more erudite approach of Inspector Morse. Somewhere along the line I hit on Poirot and Miss Marple.

Nowadays it's Chief Inspector Barnaby, Agatha Raisin, Libby Serjeant and Inspector Colbeck, DCI Frost and Dalziel and Pascoe, but still these novels grip my attention until the very moment when the killer/thief/blackmailer is unmasked.

I suppose it was only logical, then, that when I turned to writing novels, they would be detective stories.

It's puzzles, y'see. I've always enjoyed puzzles. I tackle cryptic crosswords, sudokus, jigsaws (online these days), logic problems and I can never get enough of them.

From my point of view, the detective novel is a giant logic puzzle. I'm not interested in forensics, in police procedures, and even if I do bring up paranormal angles in some of my work, they're only background to the story: they do not contribute directly to solving the puzzle.

And I never go for police stories. It would involve a shed load of research which I'm not prepared to carry out. I don't want my sleuth to crack the case through the minutiae of DNA testing, fingerprinting, and a million and one other scientific angles about which I know little and care even less. I want him/her to be faced with an intellectual/observational challenge whereby the tiny clues give away the miscreant. It's enough for me to have my sleuth unmask the villain. The cops can deal with proving it after I've typed THE END.

They're not easy tales to write. The surround stuff is. I can knock that out for fun. The actual crime is fairly easy, too, because more often than not, it is murder. It's the tiny things designed to give the game away which are the hardest pieces to construct. They must be installed so that the readers know they're there, but read right past them until they reach the denouement, smack their foreheads and say, "Of course. It's so obvious when you think about it."

I'm fortunate in that my editor, the inestimable Maureen Vincent-Northam, is a whodunit aficionado like me. When I get it wrong, she's quick to point it out; just like Sheila and Brenda are quick to smack Joe's legs when he gets it wrong.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords