Merry Christmas!

Warmest wishes to anyone who takes a glance at this blog on this special day!

The answer to yesterday’s quiz question was indeed Ian Brown, formerly of the Stone Roses. It was through getting to know Ian that I decided to feature the Stone Roses’ 'I Wanna Be Adored' in the eighth and most recent Harry Devlin mystery, Waterloo Sunset, at a moment when Harry is rescued from a very tight spot.

Waterloo Sunset takes its name, of course, from a wonderful song by Ray Davies, who also first made his name as part of a group – the Kinks – but is now widely acknowledged as one of the finest of all British songwriters. There was a very good programme about him in the excellent ‘Songbook’ series on Christmas Eve, which featured the great man talking about the composition of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, as well as performing it splendidly in the studio. If you like Sixties music and you get the chance to see this programme, I can recommend it unreservedly. The insight Ray Davies gives into his craft is, despite his self-deprecating manner, utterly fascinating.

Christmas Thoughts

I’d like to wish all readers of this blog a happy and peaceful Christmas, and all the very best for 2010 – may it be full of good things for you and your families.

I have very much appreciated the comments people have contributed to this blog since last Christmas. I’ve had the chance to meet a number of you, and that’s been an enormous pleasure, but I’ve also relished the ‘virtual friendships’ spanning the globe, to which participating in online communities give rise. This interaction, and your enthusiasm for the blog, has been very motivating for me in a year that has included many happy moments, as well as some that were more difficult. I’ve not written as much fiction as I meant to this year, especially during the past six months, but writing the blog posts has kept my hand in. And the blog posts will continue during the holiday period.

The weather here in Lymm right now is ‘seasonal’ – a euphemism for very cold. I thought I’d share a few photos from yesterday and set a quick quiz question. The photos show my next-door-but-one neighbour and his son taking advantage of both the snow and the slope of our drive. Suffice to say that he too is active in the arts world – but he is much more famous than me. His name will be revealed tomorrow, but can you guess it in the meantime?

Events

I’ve enjoyed being involved in a wide range of events during the past twelve months, ranging from convention panels to a workshop for aspiring writers at Harrogate, the Crimefest Mastermind competition, bookshop and library talks, and various performances of ‘Who Killed George Hargrave?’

One of the pleasures of these events is the chance to meet readers (and potential readers – a much larger category!) and, of course, some of those who read and comment on this blog. I hope very much that 2010 will enable me to make the acquaintance of more of you.

My webmaster has now updated the Events page on my website to include details of next year’s events, so far as they have been scheduled. The first, on 30th January, is to take place at Ormskirk Library. It’s been arranged by Jenn Ashworth, herself an author and blogger of note. For the first time in several years, I’m teaming up with that fine writer Sophie Hannah. We last met in the autumn, when Sophie was inducted into the Detection Club, and I’m looking forward to working with her again.

CADS 57

There are many, many good things in the latest issue of CADS – issue number 57, in fact, of this ‘irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective stories’ edited by Geoff Bradley, whom I first met at a Bouchercon held in London almost two decades ago.

Liz Gilbey writes about Adam Diment, a trendy and very successful writer of the Swinging Sixties, who literally disappeared from sight. What on earth happened to him? Marvin Lachman contributes a long list of obituaries concerning crime writers or those otherwise connected with the genre. There are articles on a range of tiopicesby seasoned commentators such as Philip Scowcroft, Mike Ripley and Bob Adey. B.A. Pike, who knows a great deal about Golden Age mysteries, contributes a piece about an Irish writer unknown to me, Sheila Pim, who published four novels between 1945 and 1952 – he makes them sound well worth searching for.

Pim apparently included ‘erudite footnotes’ in her work, and ‘Footnotes in Crime and Detective Stories’ is the title of a fascinating article by David Ellis. He covers footnotes in the work of Poe, and the pseudonymous early crime novelist Charles Felix, in Golden Age stories, and in modern books by the likes of Somoza and Mark Haddon.

I find articles on quirky subjects, such as Ellis’s, thoroughly enjoyable as well as informative. Geoff Bradley, the editor of CADS, does a great job in bringing these pieces together in a form where they can be widely appreciated. For anyone interested in the genre, especially in mysteries of the past, I can recommend this magazine without any reservations whatsoever.

Time and the Detectives

Time management is an important consideration for authors of mystery series, even though we don’t always pay it enough attention when our series characters start out on their fictional journeys. I’m not talking here about time management in the sense of how does one find the time to write the books, but rather in the sense of connecting the chronology of the series to real time.

The classic illustration of the problem is the obituary of Hercule Poirot in The New York Times – ‘by conventional reckoning, Poirot must have been over 130 years old when he solved his last case’). Similarly, Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford was already a senior cop when his first case was published in 1964. It’s sometimes said that authors should start out with young detectives – but ageism isn’t a great solution to the problem! We need and want senior sleuths to figure in series!

So what is an author to do? My own method – I don’t for a moment suggest it’s perfect, but it’s the best I can do – is to elide time somewhat. An example in the Harry Devlin series is the way I dealt with the passage of time between the events of First Cut is the Deepest, and those of Waterloo Sunset. I acknowledge very specifically the passage of time in Harry’s life, and in the redevelopment of Liverpool. But I reduced (in effect) the length of the interval between books. Harry was 32 when All the Lonely People was published; that was my age when I started writing the manuscript. Suffice to say that he’s aged much better than me.

So far, time pressures haven’t been acute in the Lake District Mysteries. But I am planning to deal with them in much the same way. This is fiction, after all. Of course, I’d be interested in the views of others on this tricky subject – it’s one where, I suspect, the right answer is that there is no right answer.

Him

Reading other people’s blogs is fascinating, I find. And on one memorable occasion, a blog link provided me with the key that helped me to solve the mystery of The Serpent Pool. I’d been puzzling how to deal with a central element in the story, and the book didn’t quite seem to work. Then one day I took a look at a very appealing blog called Letters From a Hill Farm – and there I found a link to an old Youtube video.

The video featured Rupert Holmes, an excellent singer-songwriter, performing a song called ‘Him’ that I greatly enjoyed when it was a Top Ten hit in the UK, about 30 years ago. The story of the song gave me an idea for the book – and from that moment, the writing seemed to go much more easily.

There were a couple of added bonuses. First, Rupert (now an estimable crime writer as well as a composer) permitted me to reproduce a portion of his lyric in my novel – something for which I’m very grateful. Second, the appearance of the blonde-haired singer in the video gave me a picture of the appearance of a character in my story who had, until then, rather eluded me.

So there you have it. An odd little anecdote, perhaps. But an illustration of the way in which the online community can exert an influence over the creative process that is completely unexpected by all concerned. I bet there aren't that many crime novels that have been influenced by a blog link. But maybe one day it will become commonplace!

Bloodline

BBC 4 has resumed its series of the Swedish version of Wallander, starring gruff but appealing Krister Henriksson as the detective, and Johanna Sallstrom as his daughter. I’m not sure why the series, shown to considerable acclaim (not least among crime bloggers!) earlier this year, was interrupted – but then, the scheduling of television programmes is an arcane process, as difficult to fathom as the Duckworth-Lewis method of calculating victory targets in a rain-affected cricket match.

The latest episode, Bloodline, opens with a man and a woman quarrelling on board a boat. The man storms off, but some time later, a masked individual comes on board, and brutally murders the woman. It’s a dramatic beginning, very much in the style we associate with Wallander.

When the police investigate, their inquiries soon take them to a group of people at a farm commune. Needless to say, there are various secrets to be uncovered, and the mystery is satisfyingly done. As always, however, the interplay of the characters is the great strength of the show. The relationship between Wallander and his daughter is very well done indeed. In fact, I’m not sure if I can think of any detective-and-daughter relationship in the genre that is more compelling.

Forgotten Book - The Blackheath Poisonings

Once again, my pick for Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books is a title by the late, great Julian Symons. The Blackheath Poisonings is one of his ventures into Victorian crime – Sweet Adelaide, based on the real-life Adelaide Bartlett case, is another – and it carries a particular memory for me.

During the 1990s, Nottingham was the place for crime fans to visit, during the annual Shots on the Page convention. The convention was, so far as I know, the brainchild of Maxim Jakubowski, who worked closely with film specialist Adrian Wootton. I missed the first of the conventions, but attended all the others and found them most enjoyable. They paved the way for Nottingham to host Bouchercon itself – quite a coup for Maxim and his colleagues, and the last time that Bouchercon crossed the Atlantic.

One year, the convention hosted an advance screening of an adaptation for TV of The Blackheath Poisoinings. The small screen version was excellent, benefiting from a first rate cast that included Zoe Wanamaker, Judy Parfitt and Ronald Fraser, as well as a screenplay that was sympathetic to Symons’ original story.

And a very good story it is, with a sharp eye on the sexual complexities lying just beneath the surface of late Victorian society. A respectable family is torn apart by poison, and poisonous suspicion. One of the characters is tried for murder, but before the story is concluded, there will be another death, and the revelation of an unsuspected criminal.

Julian Symons inscribed my copy of this novel (which is a hardback reprint, published not long before his death from cancer)when we were together at a CWA conference in Brighton. Characteristically, he added a question: ‘A good Victorian crime story?’ The answer is an unequivocal yes.

(P.S. - For unfathomable reasons, at present, I am able to send but not receive emails, so if you've emailed me in the past three days, please don't think the absence of a reply means I'm ignoring you....)

Skeleton Hill

Reading a novel by Peter Lovesey is rather like settling down to watch a favourite tv show or film, in good company and with a bottle of wine and box of chocolates within easy reach. You just know you are going to have a good time. So it is with his latest Peter Diamond novel, Skeleton Hill.

Lovesey never writes the same book twice, and this one is structured very differently from the last Diamond, The Secret Hangman. What both have in common is an intriguing and unusual motive for crime. Here, the motive strikes me as pretty much unguessable (or do I just mean that I didn’t come close to guessing it, even though I did figure out the culprit in good time?)

The basic set-up is that, during a Civil War re-enactment in Bath, a lecturer comes across a hidden bone. Someone was murdered, years ago. But then the lecturer goes missing, too. Diamond investigates, and along the way, we learn a great deal about the history of Bath, as well as something about the equine world.. It’s a pity that a map of Lansdown is not included by the publishers, as this would have helped readers to visualise the geography of key incidents, as well as chiming with the traditional mood of the story.

The build-up to the sequence of surprises and revelations that occur late in the story is elaborate and quite leisurely. My impression was that there was rather more about police procedure, and relationships within the investigating team, than in previous Diamond novels. The structure of the book means that, necessarily, the pace of the narrative is not as quick as in many Loveseys, but there is much pleasure to be gained from the author’s easy way with character and incident. I’m a confirmed Lovesey fan, and this rather unorthodox book from one of our leading detective novelists is another winner. Recommended.

Trap for a Lonely Man

One of the stand-out memories of my teenage theatre-going was a trip to Chester’s Gateway Theatre to see a production of a play called Trap for a Lonely Man, involving a chap whose wife disappears and is replaced by a stranger. It proved to be an excellent thriller, with a classic final twist. Fast forward to the present, and I’ve tried to find out more about the play. It seems that it is something of a staple of provincial theatre even now, and it was written by a Frenchman, Robert Thomas.

A little more digging revealed that the play has been adapted into no fewer than four films. I haven’t seen any of them, although I’ve put in an order for Chase a Crooked Shadow, a version starring the young Richard Todd, who died recently. It also seems that Hitchcock planned to film the play, and I can well imagine that the premise would appeal to him, although he was evidently beaten to it.

The story-line is strongly reminiscent of the work of those French masters Boileau and Narcejac. I’ve mentioned before that group of writers, including Montheilhet, Arley and Valmain, who followed in the footsteps of Boileau and Narcejac, and this notable play suggests that Robert Thomas should be added to the list.

But who was Robert Thomas and what else did he write? So far, I’ve not come up with any detailed information about him, but surely he wasn’t just a one-hit wonder?