The Lineup

Poetry and crime fiction may seem to be strange bedfellows, but there are plenty of poets who have written crime fiction (or crime writers who have tried their hand at poetry). More surprisingly, there are quite a few poems with a crime fiction theme.

Fellow blogger Gerald So recently sent me a pdf of The Lineup, a collection of poems about crime. He has put it together along with Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Navaez and Anthony Rainone.

Gerald says in his introduction: ‘Before I ever thought to write poetry, I was a fan, editor and writer of crime fiction. I especially enjoy how every paragraph, every sentence, every word has purpose: to plant clues, reveal character, move towards resolution. I’ve come to appreciate the same purpose in poetry…’

Suffice to say there is some powerful material here from a range of contributors, including Gerald himself, and Sandra Seamans, whose blog I found (via David Cranmer’s excellent blog) a few days back, and which I’ve now added to the blogroll.

There is, of course, one famous detective who is also a poet – P.D.James’ Adam Dalgleish. I once heard James say in an interview that the late W.H.Auden (a fan of the classic detective story) had offered to write a poem for Dalgleish to be included in one of her novels; she thought she might have had much mischievous pleasure from people who criticised her poetic skills, only to find that the verse was the work of one of the greats. A lovely story, I think. A pity it never happened. We still await sight of Dalgleish’s work.