More from the British Library

Still looking for those Christmas gifts? Well, of course I hope you'll be stocking up with lots of copies of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife! The ideal present, I'd say 😉But there are plenty of other good options and today I want to talk about more of the books published by the British Library. 

Let's start with a book that I'm involved with, the new special edition of Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon, which was such a massive bestseller when it was reissued way back in 2014. I've written a new intro for this edition and in this, I make special mention of Rob Davies, who not only had the idea of reprinting this book but was also the man who came up with the brilliant idea of using railway poster artwork for the covers of the Crime Classics.

Anyone who has read Miss Winter will know that I love games, and so I was naturally attracted to Caroline Taggart's The Philosophy of Board Games. There's not actually much philosophy in this one; rather, it's a short and delightfully illustrated overview of the history of board games, an introduction to the subject, rather than an in-depth study, but a good stocking-filler.

Land of Mist and Magic by Philip Parker is a meaty, but concisely written, account of 'the myths and legends that shaped Britain' - everything from stories about Joseph of Arimathea, through Hereward the Wake and Robin Hood, to Lady Godiva, plus many more. A pleasing compendium.

And finally, Secret Maps, the book of the current British Library exhibition, again showcases the Library's brilliance when it comes not only to producing interesting books but also to illustrating them superbly. The compilers, Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko, all of whom are curators at the Library, have done a great job.

 

Newcastle Noir

 

I'm back from a quick trip to the north east, where I took part in Newcastle Noir. This is a festival that has been running for quite a few years now, and it's the third time I've taken part. As ever, the work done by the people who make these events possible deserves to be applauded, so huge thanks to Jacky Collins and her team. I was very pleased to be part of the event.

I took part in a panel called Dangerous Games, skilfully moderated by Rosie White, and my fellow panellists were Marnie Riches and Olga Wojtas; from my perspective, this felt like a lovely blend of personalities, writing styles and opinions, and we had a good time, with some thought-provoking questions from the audience as a bonus. It's always nice to sign copies of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, of course, and I'd popped into the Newcastle Waterstones as well, where (as has happened quite a few times recently, but not previously in my career as a novelist) the book was prominently displayed on one of the tables at the front of the shop. I've been really happy with the commercial success to date of the book, and it's been nice to see that the hardback, heavily discounted, is also doing very well on Amazon at the moment. And of course it makes a great Christmas present!

One of the pleasures of these events is the chance to socialise with friends and also people one may not have seen for a long time or met previously. I had a very pleasant dinner with Christina Koning and then lunch with Ann Cleeves, which also gave me the chance to ask them to inscribe my copies of their latest books (both of which, of course, I can recommend). 

This has been a year of many events and it isn't over yet. This coming week I'm doing a series of talks with Kevin Durjan and Simon Dinsdale for American subscribers to Adventures Online, while on Wednesday evening it's my last in-person event of the year, organised by Mold Bookshop and taking place at Mold Museum and Library. I'll also be sending out my December newsletter - you can subscribe (free) here: https://substack.com/@martinedwardsbooks

Forgotten Book - The Sleeping Tiger

D M Devine, a Scottish writer who later published under the name Dominic Devine (although his actual name was David Macdonald Devine), was one of the most talented detective novelists to emerge from the Collins Crime Club during the 1960s. His death in 1980 at the early age of 60 cut short an interesting career and one feels that he might well have written a good many more books of high calibre, had he lived.

The Sleeping Tiger was described by the Crime Club on publication in 1968 as 'a tour-de-force of characterisation, plotting and excitement'. Publishers' hype? Well, actually I think they were right. This is a novel that I really enjoyed and in its exploration of middle-class society in the Sixties, I'd say it's at least on a par with some of the books Julian Symons wrote for the Crime Club, such as The End of Solomon Grundy.

At the start of the book we learn that John Prescott is on trial for a double murder. The two crimes were six years apart, but Devine conceals the victims' identities, so this novel can be regarded as a sort of 'whowasdunin' as well as a whodunit. There are extensive flashbacks which describe the creation of the tangled web in which Prescott - a solicitor, but not the brightest I've ever read about - now find himself trapped. Flashbacks are tricky devices, but I'd say that Devine handles them well.

He also shows great skill in constructing the mystery. I was kept guessing and I felt that Devine handled the 'fair play' aspect of the storyline with considerable skill. Although Prescott's behaviour infuriated me at times - his capacity for self-harm is considerable, and even worse, he slaps a woman, albeit under provocation - the author's aim was to show how a man with significant flaws can get a grip on himself, and eventually solve a baffling puzzle. Devine gives us a picture of a vanished era, and more than that, he spins a very good yarn. Luckily, this book is easier to find than some of his others, because it appeared as an Arcturus Crime Classic, an excellent if short-lived imprint with which I had some involvement. 

The Mackintosh Man - 1973 film review

Desmond Bagley was a very good thriller writer. My Dad was a big fan of his novels, and although I never met Bagley (who was always known as Simon to his friends) I did meet his widow Joan, an extremely pleasant lady who lived in Guernsey and who remained in touch with the crime writing world after her husband's regrettably early death at the age of 59. One of his best books was The Freedom Trap (1971) which was one of the five novels of his to be filmed or televised - a very impressive success rate, given that he produced only fourteen novels prior to his death in 1983, with some titles appearing posthumously.

Two years after publication, the novel reached the big screen as The Mackintosh Man. The film was directed by John Huston and the cast was headed by Paul Newman. The supporting cast included James Mason, Michael Hordern, Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, and Peter Vaughan. The soundtrack was composed by Maurice Jarre. With such credentials, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, this is an okay film but it's not the masterpiece that one might have hoped for. Walter Hill's script isn't as engaging as Bagley's writing, though many elements of the original story remain. Newman plays Joseph Rearden, a criminal who has started working for British intelligence. As part of a cunning plan, he goes into prison only to be sprung from jail - in a scene that works very well and is arguably the highlight of the film. It's easy to see that the story was inspired by the legendary escape from prison of the spy George Blake.

The story bowls along at a pretty good pace (Huston was, of course, a first-rate director), but without ever gripping or exciting as much as it should do. One of the problems is that a key character, 'Mrs Smith', is played by Dominique Sanda, who gives a depressingly wooden performance; her CV suggests that she is an actor of real talent, but there isn't much evidence of that here, alas, and there's zero chemistry between her and Newman. But much as I like Paul Newman, I'm not convinced that he was the right actor for Reardon, either. Somehow his natural likeability isn't integrated into the storyline as well as it should have been. And I think this is why the film wasn't a critical or box office success. Walter Hill said he never bothered to watch it, which rather says it all.

Tales of the Weird

 

A leading dealer in rare books told me recently that supernatural and other weird fiction is highly collectible at present, and a glance at prices on the second hand market confirms this. Luckily, if this kind of writing is your cup of tea, you don't need to break the bank in order to feast on an eclectic mix of short stories (plus the occasional novel), because the British Library's Tales of the Weird is following the Crime Classics list in attracting a wide readership for attractive but competitively priced paperbacks featuring some fascinating writers and stories.

I'm not involved with Tales of the Weird, but I do enjoy reading them and (very occasionally, but perhaps more often in future) writing them. A number of recent titles are well worth looking at, and I'll glance at them briefly today with a view to saying more about one or two entries in the series at a later date.

The Haunted Library, edited by Tanya Kirk, offers a very interesting mix. There are well-known stories such as 'The Tractate Middoth' by M.R. James and also some unexpected contributions - notably 'The Revenant Typewriter', by none other than Penelope Lively, which dates from 1978, and which as Tanya Kirk puts it, shows how the trashy and modern threaten the scholarly and historic.

Phantoms of Kernow: Classic Tales of Haunted Cornwall, edited by Joan Passy, offers another nice, themed mix of the familiar and the deeply obscure. Eden Philpotts' 'The Iron Pineapple' falls into the former category, and there are also stories by such noted authors as Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as a story by E.R. Punshon (much better-known as a detective novelist) and several writers otherwise unknown to me. 

The Lost Stradivarius is a short novel by J. Meade Falkner, whose three books (Moonfleet and The Nebuly Coat are the others) are all of high quality, yet very different from each other. I am a Falkner fan and I hope someone reprints The Nebuly Coat before too long, though it's not a tale of weird. In the meantime, this is a story well worth reading - as is the introduction by the doyen of British anthologists, Mike Ashley.

Forgotten Book - The Dead Mouse

The Dead Mouse is an odd title for an odd book. It was published in 1930 by Austen Allen, the second of four detective novels that he produced in the course of a short crime writing career. I don't know much about Allen, but I can imagine that he was dismayed that his publishers managed to spell his first name Austin on the dust jacket of this one, although they did get it right on the spine, the binding, and the title page. These things happen...

Allen's first novel, Menace to Mrs Kershaw, introduced his series character Inspector Ord and earned good reviews, including one from Arnold Bennett, who did quite a bit of crime reviewing for a while. Allen was praised for originality of concept, of murder method, and for pairing his cop with a novelist, a young woman called Sabina Gibson, who 'reconstructs' the past of key characters, so that clues to what has happened come to light.

These qualities are present in The Dead Mouse (which, unlike its predecessor, doesn't seem to have been published in the United States) and I get the impression that Allen was an ambitious writer who wanted to do something different with the detective novel. This is praiseworthy, although I don't think the result is anything like a complete success, despite being quite well-written, with a focus on characterisation that was far from common in detective stories at the time.

Two people, Major Henry Pinder, and Miss Monica Vine, are found dead in Wimpole's Turkish Baths on the same day. Ord suspects murder, but the way he goes about his investigation is unorthodox, to say the least. He spends much more time discussing things with Sabina than with his colleagues at Scotland Yard, and his approach to the inquiry seems haphazard at best. A dead mouse found at the Baths gives a clue to what has happened, and Monica Vine is also, metaphorically, a 'dead mouse'. There is a lengthy chapter reconstructing Pinder's life and a shorter (but still long) chapter doing the same for Monica. This method of storytelling is unusual (Henry Wade did something slightly similar in The Lonely Magdalen, but with only one flashback section, and his story was constructed much more elegantly) and it slows things down in a rather curious and discursive way. 

The end of the story is strange and quite interesting, although it feels underdeveloped, because we know nothing about one significant character: whether he reappeared in Allen's later mysteries, I'm uncertain, because Allen's books are hard to find. I was drawn to this one mainly because I had the chance to buy an inscribed copy at a reasonable price, and I'm glad I did. Allen (1887-1958) enjoyed success as a playwright, and one of his plays, Pleasure Cruise, was filmed in 1933. He gave up on detective fiction quite quickly, and I haven't found any reviews of his mysteries online. So, definitely a forgotten book. But a book that is, despite its flaws, rather interesting. 

 

The Sketch Artist - 1992 film review

The Sketch Artist is an unpretentious American thriller dating from 1992 and written by Michael Angeli, a capable screenwriter whose other credits include Monk. The film also benefits from the presence in the cast of two highly accomplished actors, namely Sean Young and Drew Barrymore. The lead actor, however, is the much less well-known Jeff Fahey, who plays a sketch artist called Jack Whitfield who is working for the police.

When a prominent fashion designer is murdered, a witness comes forward. She believes she can identify a woman at the scene who was involved with the crime. Jack's job is to sketch this person from the witness's description. Unfortunately, as he works on the drawing it becomes clear that the woman who is being described bears an uncanny resemblance to his own wife Rayanne (Sean Young).

Jack challenges Rayanne, who is defensive but persuasive. She knew the deceased and, given that her marriage to Jack is going through a rough patch, he is fearful that she knows more about the murder than she is prepared to admit. But the complications increase when he goes to the witness's apartment late one night and she isn't there. Before long, she turns up dead.

I thought the plot twists in this film were well above average. The storyline pre-dates the extensive deployment of DNA testing but it's quite gripping. In contrast, I started watching an eight-part TV crime series just before watching this film, which was a rather tedious experience, and I was glad of the pace of Angeli's script. A good time-passer.

Blow Out - 1981 film review

Popular culture is awash with homages of varying merit. In the film world, Brian de Palma has long been renowned for paying tribute in his own movies to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and because I'm a Hitchcock fan, I've long been drawn to de Palma's work, although it is much more variable in terms of quality. With Blow Out, he combines various hat-tips to the Master of Suspense, but even more significantly this film is a riff on Antonioni's Blow Up, a memorable movie from the Swinging Sixties.

The premise is fairly simple. John Travolta plays Jack Terry, who works on sound effects at the trashier end of the film business. While working on a slasher film, he goes out one night to play around with sound effects, and finds himself witnessing (and recording) a car crash. The car plunges off a bridge and into a creek. Jack jumps into the water and rescues an attractive young woman, but her male companion is dead.

It turns out that the dead man was a prominent politician, who was regarded as a potential President. The girl (Nancy Allen, who was at the time de Palma's wife) is an escort. When Jack checks his recording, he discovers that there was a gun shot prior to the car crash. The story that the crash was caused by a blown out tyre was a cover for a political assassination.

De Palma doesn't get involved in the politics of the storyline. Instead he focuses on melodrama, and this is a pretty good decision. A bond develops between Jack and the woman he saved, but it soon becomes clear that dark forces are at work and that someone is desperate to avoid the truth coming out. There are some good action scenes and an ironic finale. This isn't a masterpiece - it's markedly inferior to Coppola's much subtler The Conversation, for instance - but it's become something of a cult favourite: Quentin Tarantino is a big fan, for instance. I'd say it's one of de Palma's better films.  

Forgotten Book - His Own Appointed Day

His Own Appointed Day, first published by Collins Crime Club in 1965, was D.M. Devine's fourth crime novel. The paperback edition came out three years later and the back cover included this review from Julian Symons in The Sunday Times: 'A real detective story in the classical tradition...The answers in the final chapter came as a total surprise.' High praise from someone who was supposed not to be keen on classical detective stories.

So I had high expectations when I started reading and I can say right away that I was not disappointed. This is a book which shows not only Devine's considerable skill as a writer of whodunits but also his ability to create interesting characters and unusual scenarios. It really is surprising to me that his work is not better known. The only explanation that springs to mind is that he was writing at at time when ingenious plotting had fallen out of fashion. He also (like Symons) perhaps suffered from the lack of a regular series character.

We begin with a sixteen year old schoolboy called Ian Pratt. He's clever but difficult, and there are some indications that his behaviour has changed recently for the worse, although we don't know why. He is determined to leave school and home behind him, but then he disappears. The lack of interest in his disappearance at first is quite striking, but once a cop called Nicolson takes an interest in the case (and also in Ian's sister Eileen). a puzzling set of circumstances emerges. 

Devine is very good here - as he was in The Sleeping Tiger - at shifting suspicion from one suspect to another, and doing so quite credibly. He published thirteen novels prior to his relatively early death at the age of 60, first as D.M. Devine and then writing as Dominic Devine. I've read less than half of them so far, but I've enjoyed everything of his that I've read and I'm keen to discover the rest of his work.  

Forgotten Book - The Death of Amy Parris

T.R. Bowen, also known as Trevor Bowen, has had a successful career as both an actor and a screenwriter. He has written scripts for the Miss Marple, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Lovejoy series among others. And in 1998 he became a novelist with The Death of Amy Parris. This book was published was Penguin, who described it as 'a tense, atmospheric mystery in the tradition of Ruth Rendell'. Penguin also published Black Camel, its successor, which I haven't read but which also featured the main detective characters John Bewick and Gio Jones.

After that, there were no more Bewick books and as far as I'm aware Bowen never wrote another novel. My guess (and it's no more than that) is that he's an example of an author who obtained a good publishing deal and a two-book contract from an excellent publisher, but found that sales and reviews were not what had been hoped. Perhaps he wasn't offered another deal; perhaps he became disillusioned, perhaps both. 

What is clear to me is that Bowen had the literary skills to have become a reasonably successful novelist. The Death of Amy Parris is capably written and his experience as a scriptwriter helped him to create some vivid set-piece scenes. However, even though the setting of this book is Rendell territory, East Anglia, he wasn't in quite the same league as a writer. Then again, few people are.

Unfortunately I think he needed a much more ruthless editor. This story struck me as too long. It could easily have been pruned and it would have held my interest better than it did (after a reasonably good start). I also found Bewick less entrancing than did his creator, who gives us not one but two gorgeous women who swoon over the man, while his old pal Gio is full of admiration for him. All this is overdone. As for the plot, it's serviceable, but I'm afraid I spotted the culprit right away; three hundred plus pages it turned out that my assumption was correct. It's almost as if Bowen had a checklist of ingredients that he thought would work, perhaps hoping for TV adaptation, and threw all of them into the book, when a more selective approach might have worked better. A pity, but on this evidence - and despite the merits of the book - I won't be in a hurry to read Black Camel.