I'm delighted to announce the publication on April 18 of my new Golden Age mystery map of Britain, This Deadly Isle. Yes, it's a bit of a departure from my usual line of work (and it won't be the last such departure this year) and putting the material together really was a great deal of fun. A winter project that I much enjoyed.
This Deadly Isle is published by Herb Lester Associates, who have produced a number of interesting and very attractively designed mystery-related maps, for instance a nice Agatha Christie map by Caroline Crampton, who hosts the excellent Shedunnit podcast. I've covered several of these maps on this blog previously and it was a great pleasure to be asked to prepare one myself.
Golden Age fans tend to like maps. I certainly do and I'm always pleased to find an old novel with a map of the area where the events unfold. In creating This Deadly Isle, my aim was to offer a wide variety of locations across the country and to feature an equally wide range of stories and authors. So the usual suspects are present and correct, but there are also plenty of titles that many people will be unfamiliar with. If you fancy a copy, ordering details can be found here.
I've never created anything like this before and naturally one wonders what the artist will make of the raw material. I'm very impressed by the images I've seen so far and I am really looking forward to receiving my own map...
Hi Martin,
ReplyDeleteIt was my 75th birthday on St. George’s Day and guess what my darling partner Maureen gave me. Yes, it was ‘This Deadly Isle’, your amazing Golden Age mystery map of the UK.
Just opening it I detected a whiff of mystery. And now, making fascinating discoveries in every entry, I’m loving it!
Never would I have imagined that T. H. White, author of ‘The Sword in the Stone’, ‘The Once and Future King’ and so on, might have written a murder mystery. But now, in your Derbyshire entry (No 31), I find that he did indeed pen one, ‘Darkness at Pemberley’.
And in your Edinburgh University entry (No 48), I like the way you have so deftly linked Mary Kelly, author of ‘Dead Man’s Riddle’, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
It was a great birthday altogether, which we spent in Conwy. The sugar and lemon crépes and rum-and-raisin ice creams from Parisella’s were wonderful!
Best always
Paul
Hello Paul - first, many congratulations on that special birthday and I'm so glad you enjoyed This Deadly Isle. Conwy's a great place to celebrate and I look forward to seeing you - and Maureen - again before too long.
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