Charles Spencer - guest blog

Today, I'm pleased to host a guest blog post by Charles Spencer, sometime Daily Telegraph theatre critic and occasional crime novelist. I was pleased to hear that the Will Benson books are to have a fresh life under the Bello imprint, partly because I enjoyed them when they first appeared, and partly because Charlie and I go back a long way. All the way to student days, in fact. We attended the same college, though he was reading English, whereas I was grappling with the law (academically speaking, I hasten to add.) 

Charlie was in the year above me, and was the publicity manager for the Oxford Students' Arts Council, a post which I took over from him. Those distant days were a great deal of fun, and it's curious to think that we both later became published crime writers. The last time I saw Charlie was, in fact, at the Dead on Deansgate conference that he mentions very frankly below.. So I am all the more delighted that things have taken such a turn for the better in the intervening years, and I hope that one day we'll see a new Will Benson book. Over to Charlie... 

"I have been a fan of crime fiction for much of my life, with a special fondness for thrillers that combine a galloping plot with humour. Back in the 1990s I had a shot at writing such novels myself, with Edmund Crispin ( the pen name of Bruce Montgomery who was a close friend of Philip Larkin’s at Oxford) and Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai Trilogy among my influences. Like the books of Raymond Chandler and Dick Francis, they are first person narratives - though I would never dream of  claiming a place  in such august company

I was working as the Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic when I wrote them, but the books were inspired by the happy couple of years I spent on the theatrical trade paper The Stage in the 1980s when I delightedly discovered a world of talent contests, strip shows and filthy comedians. The books are, I hope, bawdy, funny, fast paced and at times touching, and they received some good reviews when first published though they never became the bestsellers I had fondly hoped for.

The hero, Will Benson, is a braver and more reckless version of myself, and there is a lot of booze and I hope laughter in the books.

The drink caught up with me in the end. When the third novel,  Under the Influence  was about to come  out  in 2000  I attended the Dead on Deansgate crime convention in Manchester and spent three days in a reckless blur of alcohol. If anyone reading this blog encountered me then, please accept my apologies. 

 I didn’t quite make it home on the day the convention ended, spending much of the night crashed out under a bush in a neighbour’s garden in the pouring rain.  My poor wife was worried sick until I was discovered in the early hours and drenched to the skin.  With her help and a fistful Valium I just about made it to the official book launch in London the following night  and the day after that  I checked into rehab at The Priory, Roehampton. With God’s grace, one day at a time, have not had a drink since then.

So the three novels – I Nearly Died, Full Personal Service and Under The Influence now seem to me to belong to a distant and more troubled past. But re-reading them before their reissue on Pan MacMillian’s Bello imprint of e-books and print on demand novels, I found that I enjoyed them. There were moments that made me wince, others that made me laugh, and some that moved me.  And I hope that will be the experience of readers  discovering the Will Benson stories for the first time."