Crime fiction and science fiction

After watching the film Village of the Damned last weekend, I started to think about the links between sci-fi and crime fiction (or should I say cri-fi?) The film is based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, someone whose books I devoured as a teenager. Wyndham, like H.G. Wells, was a writer who tends to appeal to readers who aren’t really sci-fi buffs, as well as enthusiasts for the genre. The film might be rather dated (I saw the 1960 version, not the re-make) but I thought it well-done, with plenty of suspense, and one or two nice mysteries. It’s a long time since I read the novel, but the adaptation is, I think, reasonably faithful to the original.

I don’t read much sci-fi (though I’m an avid watcher of Dr Who), but in Waterloo Sunset, I have used science fiction as one of the background elements. The reasons for this relate to the theme, as well as the plot. Harry Devlin spends quite a lot of time in a (fictitious) bar called the Stapledon. I named it after Olaf Stapledon, a Merseyside man who wrote well-regarded science fiction books in his spare time. (Has there ever been another Scouser called Olaf? I wonder.) He went to the same Oxford college as me and worked in a shipping office in Liverpool close to my own office. Nevertheless, I haven’t yet got round to reading any of his novels. Perhaps a treat in store?

Back to John Wyndham. His first literary executor was a friend of mine, a solicitor who was a marvellous companion, but confessed – to my amazement, for in all other respects he was a civilised fellow of fine judgment – to having no interest whatsoever in fiction. Maddeningly, when I interrogated him about what John Wyndham was like, and what he had to say about his books, he could recall very little. Wyndham was evidently a quiet and private individual, pleasant but not inclined to open up too easily.

I did, however, recently discover a little known fact - that, in the 1930s, Wyndham wrote a detective story called Foul Play Suspected, under the name John Beynon. It’s a rare book, which cropped up on eBay a while back and was sold for a sizeable sum.

There are plenty of other writers who have crossed over between sci-fi and crime. Isaac Asimov is an obvious example, and the excellent Fredric Brown achieved success in both genres. Among detective writers who have dabbled are W.J. Burley and P.D. James, while a good many novels combine elements of both genres. I’ve never tackled sci-fi myself, but I would like to have a go one of these days – in a short story, not a novel.