Penning Poison (and Wicked Little Lies)

The psychology of people who write poison pen letters is very interesting to anyone who dabbles in criminology. I've touched on this subject several times in my novels and short stories and in fact poison pen letters have been a trope in the crime fiction genre for upwards of a century, though few mystery novels handled the subject as deftly as the very first example I read in my youth, Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger.

Penning Poison is an extremely worthwhile study of the subject, and it ranges far and wide, with a focus on the period 1760-1939. After that, Emily Cockayne argues, 'study of anonymous communications...is increasingly complicated by burgeoning methods of despatch'; in addition, there was a flood of cases from the late 1930s on. She even wonders if publication of The Moving Finger in 1943 contributed to this.

There is a great deal of material in this book that I found interesting and thought-provoking, and even if I don't necessarily agree with all the author's conclusions, they invariably deserve careful consideration. Inevitably there are some examples from murder cases (the Edmunds and Luard cases are among those that spring to mind) that I think would have been worthy of mention, but that isn't really a criticism. As I know well myself, when writing a wide-ranging book, you simply have to be selective, and overall the treatment of the subject struck me as thoughtful.

This is quite a densely written book, with an academic edge, and this may account for the fact that it didn't make the longlist for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction - a pity, because I think it was a worthy contender. This is a book that I'm sure I will return to - perhaps when looking for story ideas! However, I wasn't quite so impressed by the author's complaint that 'it is very difficult to write on top of a "teaching-only contract"'. But this is the real world that 99% of authors have to contend with. Anyone who is funded to write or given paid research leave is in a very privileged position indeed. Perhaps not all recipients of such largesse know quite how lucky they are?

In any event, the author did get a presumably lucrative gig as a consultant to the film Wicked Little Letters, a film about the Littlehampton Libel Case which has an excellent cast headed by Olivia Coleman and featuring Timothy Spall, Eileen Atkins, and Jason Watkins. Suffice to say that with such ingredients, I felt that the film should have been much better than it was.