The new edition of The Golden Age of Murder - and Happy Blog News!

 

I'm truly delighted to have received an early copy of the new, 10th anniversary edition of The Golden Age of Murder. This edition is substantially expanded from the original. When I was kindly invited by HarperCollins to produce a second edition, the one condition I laid down was that it needed to offer real value for money even for those who already have the original edition. There is a great deal of new material - over 200 additional books and authors are mentioned - so I think we did manage to achieve this aim. Official publication date is 8 May and copies will be widely available (I hope!) in good bookshops; they can also be pre-ordered here.

I've also had some good news about this blog. Over the past weekend it passed 4.5 million pageviews. There has been a huge surge in numbers since December. Last month alone there were over 180,000 pageviews. I'm not exactly sure what has triggered this upsurge, but I'm quite happy!

And I've also been advised that the blog has just been ranked #9 in an international list of crime fiction blogs, (the Top 80 crime fiction blogs, listed here), which they assess in relation to 'relevance, authority, social media followers and freshness'. Gratifying! 

 

Forgotten Book - Bother at the Barbican

Judy Piatkus was a publisher with an eye for talent. I say that slightly with tongue in cheek, since she took me on when I was a new writer, but it's still true. Among others, she took on Judith Cutler and Kate Ellis at the start of their careers, and the Piatkus name is now a respected imprint of Little, Brown. My first novel, All the Lonely People, appeared in 1991 and in the very same year Judy published Guy Cullingford's final novel, Bother at the Barbican, although she did tell me a while back that she could not, after so many years, actually recall it.

I've mentioned my enthusiasm for Cullingford before. She (the name was a pseudonym for Constance Taylor) tried to do something different with every book. And here, she mines her own experience of life in a flat in the Barbican complex in London to interesting effect. Oddly enough, I have some knowledge of flat life in the Barbican since back in the late 70s, Michael Shanks, a lovely man whose daughter later became Mrs Edwards, and who had a flat in the Barbican, kindly let us stay there for a week while we explored London. Very memorable.

So what about the story? We begin in what you might call Celia Fremlin territory. Bertha Harris, recently widowed, leads a solitary life in her flat, but finds her niece and three nephews suddenly taking an interest in her. She suspects, quite rightly, that they have inheritance in mind. Her anxieties grow, and before long she wonders if one of them might be contemplating her murder.

This is a slow-burn novel. Cullingford was born in 1907 and this is a book about an old lady that is evidently written by an old lady. And yet, there's something insidiously seductive about the storyline. Eventually, I realised that this is the closest thing I've ever read to Francis Iles' story about a born victim, Before the Fact. Except that it's much more obscure - I've never even come across a review of the story. The ending is perhaps rather too peremptory, especially considering the very steady pace of the build-up, but this is an interesting and unusual story which I enjoyed reading. Like so much of Cullingford's work, it deserves to be better knonw.