Forgotten Book - Dream of Fair Woman

I've discussed several books by Charlotte Armstrong on this blog over the past eight years or so. Armstrong (1905-69) was an Edgar-winning suspense novelist whose books often had strongly visual ingredients, making them popular sources for film and TV adaptation. My favourite of her books is Mischief, which is relatively straightforward, but genuinely gripping.

Armstrong had a number of other strengths as a writer. She didn't repeat herself - all the books of hers that I've read are very different from each other, and they often have intriguing ideas at their heart. And she had the knack of using her stories to make interesting social points. She took risks as a writer, and I find that admirable. Unfortunately, if perhaps inevitably, those risks didn't always come off.   

Dream of Fair Woman is, I think, a case in point. The book was originally published in 1966, towards the end of her career, although the copy I read was (like some of her other books) published in the interesting paperback reprint line Keyhole Crime, which flourished for a while in the early 1980s without ever really establishing a distinct identity, perhaps because the choice of authors and titles was so curiously random. 

The story begins with an intriguing premise. A mysterious but very attractive young woman rents a room with Peg Cuneen, but she is clearly unwell and soon finishes up in hospital in a coma. Who is she? This is the question that confronts Peg's son Matt and young Betty Prentiss. Betty fancies Matt, but he pays her less attention than she deserves, being fascinated by the woman in the coma who never speaks. Eventually it becomes clear that Armstrong has some interesting points to make about the role of women in society, including the way that women may be taken for granted by men. 

The trouble is that the plot - which involves identical sisters - is fairly barmy, and I began to lose interest early on. I got the impression that Armstrong had a good central idea for a book, but found it difficult to structure the material satisfactorily. And that meant that I cared about the characters much less than I should have done.    

Reversal of Fortune - 1990 film review

When Claus von Bulow died six years ago, the BBC report about his passing carried the headline: 'Socialite cleared of trying to murder his wife dies aged 92'. Well, 92 is a good innings in terms of longevity, but that isn't the greatest of epitaphs. The term 'socialite' (a common description of von Bulow) seems to me to be freighted with negative implications, and there's no doubt that his trial is what almost everyone, including me, remembers about him.

Only now, though, have I caught up with the film about the von Bulow case, Reversal of Fortune, which dates from 1990. Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for his performance as von Bulow, while Glenn Close played his wife Sunny. Sunny's real name was Martha, and in the light of what happened, the name Sunny seems tragically inapt. She was another socialite, immensely wealthy, but deeply unhappy and apparently fuelled by drink and drugs. The rich are different, for sure, but sometimes not in a good way.

The film is based on shocking events, and it's really a stranger-than-fiction story. Sunny was found at home in a diabetic coma in December 1980. A year earlier, she'd been revived after falling into another coma. At first it seemed like a domestic tragedy, sad but relatively straightforward. However, suspicions were aroused about her husband Claus, who was, to say the least, a strange individual. He was found guilty of attempted murder and hired the lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz for the (ultimately successful) appeal. The film is based on Dershowitz's book; he is played - very well, I think - by Ron Silver.

I found the way that Dershowitz and his team were portrayed to be slightly comical; they kept announcing to each other great breakthroughs that would surely have been fairly obvious in reality. The process certainly bore no resemblance to the work of any legal team I've ever encountered, but then again, I've never had any involvement with the American criminal justice system - thankfully. 

I've always found the story of what happened to Sunny von Bulow to be both sad and extraordinary. She remained in a vegetative state for almost 28 years, which seems unimaginably terrible and that's the main reason I haven't watched the film before now. I've no idea what the precise truth about the incidents that led to her death was, of course. But for all the brilliance of Jeremy Irons' portrayal of the man, I'm glad I never met Claus von Bulow. 

Strange Darling - 2023 film review

I'm not absolutely sure what to make of Strange Darling - a 2023 film that has received excellent reviews - although I do think the title is quite appropriate. To some extent, this is because it's a film which uses non-linear chronology, and I'm tempted to take another look at to see if I missed something the first time around (although, given that I anticipated the key plot twist, perhaps I didn't...)

The story is told in six chapters, plus an epilogue, and we are presented with the material in this order: chapters 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, 6 (and then the epilogue). It's a pretty good way of telling a story if you get it right, and arguably the writer-director JT Mollner does get it right. The only member of the cast I'd seen in anything previously was Barbara Hershey, who plays an ageing hippie very convincingly. However, the acting throughout is of a high standard.

This is especially true of Willa Fitzgerald, who is compelling in a role that is extremely challenging. She plays 'the Lady', a sexy but mysterious and perhaps deeply troubled young woman, while Kyle Gallner is quite menacing as a character known as 'the Demon'. I'm surprised to have read that film executives thought about replacing Fitzgerald and having the story told in a conventional, linear way, because if they'd done so, they would have sacrificed the film's strongest ingredients.

So there is plenty to admire in Strange Darling. Yet there were moments of graphic violence that didn't appeal to me one bit, and I felt that the ingenious structure masked a certain lack of subtlety in the writing. On the whole, though, I think this is a good film, even if it has been over-praised. And Willa Fitzgerald is excellent, an actor of real potential.

  

Forgotten Book - Invisible Green

John Sladek's brief but brilliant career as a writer of locked room mysteries came to an end with Invisible Green (1977). in which his Great Detective, an American living in London called Thackeray Phin, made a triumphant return after his successes in Black Aura. Apparently Sladek didn't make enough money for writing more books of this kind to be worthwhile - a real shame.

With this book, he moved publisher from Jonathan Cape, who published Black Aura, to Victor Gollancz. The front cover of the first edition bore a typical Gollancz summary: 'A real, classical detective story that might have been written in the ingenious days of the last century, or of the first quarter of this, with an amateur detective from the same mould, but a puzzle to tax the most up-to-date minds'. And this is all perfectly true.

The book begins with a Prologue set in August 1939 and featuring a group of mystery fans with the pleasing name of the Seven Unravellers. We then move forward to the present with one member of the group, Dorothea Pharaoh, planning to organise a reunion of the seven keen puzzle-solvers. When she is confronted by a troubling problem, she calls on Phin - with whom she has been playing postal chess - to help.

There are some genuinely funny moments in this story, as well as some neat mysteries to fathom. We never learn much about Phin (where does his money come from? I kept wondering) but the story moves at a brisk pace and intrigues from start to finish, and although I did figure out the culprit in good time, some aspects of the solution eluded me. Very good light entertainment and a book that deserves to be back in print.

  

A Most Wanted Man - 2014 film

A Most Wanted Man is a film from 2014 based on a novel published by John le Carre eight years earlier. I haven't read the book, but apparently it is at least in part a critique of the American policy of 'extraordinary rendition'. This aspect of the story is present in the film but somewhat downplayed, and in fact it is overall quite a low-key movie, although one that has won quite a few admirers as well as one or two less favourable reactions.

The stand-out element of the film is undoubtedly the central performance, by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what turned out, sadly, to be his last major role before his untimely death aged 46. Hoffman plays Gunther Bachman, who runs a covert German intelligence unit, and I think that - even though he wasn't the obvious person to cast as a German spy - he is convincing, because of the humanity his nuanced performance brings to the role.

The story is about Issa Karpov, a refugee from Chechnya, who arrives illegally in Germany and is helped by an idealistic immigration lawyer, well played by Rachel McAdams. Bachman is leading an investigation into a Muslim philanthropist who is suspected of channelling money to a terrorist organisation and when it turns out that Karpov is entitled to a vast amount of money held in a German bank, Hoffman persuades the banker Tommy Brue (William Dafoe, who is always good to watch) to help him snare the bad guy. But of course, in the grubby world of espionage, especially as presented by le Carre, we can always expect there to be luckless casualties of double-dealing.

I watched this film shortly after watching The Bourne Identity for the second time, and it certainly lacks the excitement of many a more straightforward thriller. It takes an age for the story to click into gear, and I feel that the script - although certainly competent - could have been pacier. However, the later stages of the film are gripping, and in any event it's worth watching for Hoffman alone.

A book event in Wigtown and touring south west Scotland

Last year I spent a few days at the cottage of my old school friend Stephen in Monreith, which is in the Machars, a peninsula in Dumfries and Galloway and I'm just back from another trip there. One of several highlights was an evening spent in conversation with Ruth Anderson of Well Read Books in Wigtown, a sell-out event in the book town's delightful community pub, The Wigtown Ploughman. Given that pubs everywhere seem to be under threat, this kind of enterprising venture is one that I hope will become more common.

Ruth's bookshop is fun to explore, and I picked up a few titles during my trip to Wigtown, even though I tried to exercise restraint (not easy when it comes to acquiring books). I also discovered that Wigtown has a rather charming harbour area, a relic of the past before the river Cree silted up. Thanks to Stephen's hospitality I also enjoyed travelling around in the area and visiting Newton Stewart as well as the beautiful Glenwhan Gardens, villages like the Isle of Whithorn (really, a peninsula on the tip of a bigger peninsula, the Machars) and the Rhins, another peninsula which ends in the southernmost point in Scotland. I got the glimmerings of an idea for a short story set in the area - probably to be called 'The Scares', after splendidly named local rocks. The main challenge will be finding time to write it...

At the Mull of Galloway, there is a lighthouse which featured in that dark but compelling film The Vanishing, which I wrote about on this blog three years ago (in the film, the lighthouse is on an island). We were lucky with the weather and there are some delightful off-the-beaten-track places. On the way home, I enjoyed looking round Threave Gardens and the Threave Nature Reserve. A great little trip. But now it's back to writing the novel...

Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife - the first review

It's an exciting time as I look forward to my puzzle mystery Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife coming out in hardback on 11 September in the UK and appearing a few weeks later in the US. I very much enjoyed my experience recording some of the audiobook and here are one or two photos taken in the studio by the lovely Head of Zeus publicity team.

I'm also excited about the UK launch at Serenity Books in Romiley. If you happen to be in the vicinity of north Cheshire, south Manchester, on the evening of 11 September, do come along. Details here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/serenity-booksellers/miss-winter-in-the-library-with-a-knife-an-evening-with-martin-edwards/e-ogzqpy

Nowadays it's becoming commoner for reviews to appear before actual publication. Goodreads, for instance, features early reviews, but in the case of this book, the reviews that have appeared so far have been of an early, advance version of the book (or, in most cases, just a part of it). So it was with some holding of breath that I awaited the first magazine review of the final version...

And a US publication, First Clue, which I gather is run by librarians, has come up with that first review, and I'm very pleased with it: 'In a clever standalone homage to Agatha Christie and other Golden Age authors, Edwards (Rachel Savernake series) invites “external observers” (i.e., readers) and “analysts” (reviewers) to participate in an interactive puzzle mystery-within-a-mystery set in a remote, snowbound Yorkshire village. The mysterious Midwinter Trust has brought six down-on-their-luck people with connections to crime fiction (including washed-out author Harry Crystal and laid-off book publicist Poppy de Lisle) to Midwinter village in the rugged Pennines to solve a fictional murder over the Christmas holidays under the close supervision of six Midwinter Trust employees. But the game soon goes awry...a fun, diverting read.'

Forgotten Book - Nightmare

Nightmare is a novel by Anne Blaisdell, but the author - who went on to enjoy a highly prolific career - is better known as Dell Shannon (not to be confused with the American pop singer) and as Lesley Egan, and her real name was Elizabeth Linington. Linington (1921-88) was a pioneering female exponent of the police procedural, but this book, which is one of her earliest, and dates from 1961, is very different. I gather that it was later published under the name Lesley Egan, as - apparently - were some later books which appeared in the UK under the Blaisdell name; her bibliography seems quite complicated.

Nightmare was published in the UK by Victor Gollancz, and the jacket was dominated by a wordy encomium from Nancy Hale, of whom I must admit I'd never heard - it turns out that she was a highly regarded short story writer of the time. The story is set in Wales and concerns an attractive young American woman, Pat Carroll, who decides to splurge her inheritance on a trip to Britain. She plans to meet the mother of her dead fiance, Stephen, but before doing so she bumps into a writer called Alan Glentower, who takes a shine to her.

She agrees to meet Glentower again, but her visit to Mrs Trefoile does not go well. The old lady (not that old - just about sixty!) turns out to be a religious fanatic who decides to imprison Pat so as to preserve her purity and who is assisted in this task by two servants whom she has been blackmailing for years. I didn't find the premise especially convincing, but the author does handle it effectively, ratcheting up the tension chapter after chapter. As a dark novel of suspense, it works pretty well. And the Welsh setting is captured competently; I only noticed one tiny bit of dialogue that struck me as pure American. On this evidence, Linington was certainly a very capable storyteller.

Nightmare was filmed in 1965 as Fanatic, which has the less than subtle alternative title of Die! Die! My Darling and benefited from a script by Richard Matheson as well as from an eclectic cast including Tallulah Bankhead, Donald Sutherland, Stefanie Powers, Peter Vaughan - and Yootha Joyce. And the 2010 Broadway play Looped is, I gather, based on Bankhead's performance in the film. 

    

Phil Lecomber - guest blog post

 

I've met Phil Lecomber, with whom I share an agent, a number of times over the past year or so. I enjoy his company, and asked him to talk about the background to his books. Here's his guest post: 

'For inspiration for my Golden Age crime series, Piccadilly Noir, I turned to a collection of books with a distinctly local provenance. After all, unlike the American milieu of Raymond Chandler, my protagonist, George Harley, inhabits a peculiarly British world – one of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, and Gold Flake cigarettes.

To establish the base flavour, I began with some classic London aromatics. Dickens, of course – particularly in his Sketches by Boz phase; Thomas Burke, whose problematic racial stereotypes might now obscure his otherwise fascinating depictions of the city; and that great biographer of London, Peter Ackroyd.

To bring out the interwar period flavour, I turned to Patrick Hamilton, whose novels – with their petrichor of disappointment and cast of troubled lodgers – provided a rich stock for my world-building. I added further depth with some more obscure works, including Storm Jameson’s Here Comes a Candle, Philip Allingham’s Cheapjack, and Hippo Neville’s glorious Sneak-Thief on the Road.

Now to the meat of the stew: the works of the great Gerald Kersh – chiefly Night and the City, but also Fowler’s End, Prelude to a Certain Midnight, and The Angel and the Cuckoo. Now sadly mostly forgotten, Kersh was once among Britain’s highest-paid writers, living a life as colourful as his characters. A blend of Night and the City and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was exactly the flavour I was aiming for when I first began creating Harley’s world.

For a little extra spice, I turned to a handful of gritty 1930s novels, including James Curtis’s The Gilt Kid; Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work; and Grierson Dickson’s Soho Racket. And so, I believed, I had arrived at the perfect recipe for a hard-boiled British noir series.'

Recording Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife

If you've read The Life of Crime, you'll know that the lives of crime writers are full of ups and downs, but it's fair to say that, in my experience, the ups far outweigh the downs. You simply never know what is around the corner. For instance, I had a brand new experience just last Tuesday. I recorded part of my own audiobook...

Some time ago, my editor Bethan suggested that I might like to record some parts of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife for the audiobook version. Given that we'd already agreed on two excellent actors, Mark Elstob and Candida Gubbins, to do the recording, this took me aback. But Bethan thought that it would be fun - and this is a book that's definitely meant to be fun - if I were to read certain parts of it, including the 'Rules of the Game' at the beginning, and the Cluefinder.

Given her confidence in me, I thought I should give it a go and so I travelled down to London to the Chatterbox studio in Camden Town, where Chris Ahjem, who has produced over 200 audiobooks, was in the studio. It's never possible to judge one's own work, especially in an unfamiliar context, but I did enjoy the whole experience, and it was nice to meet Zoe, from Head of Zeus publicity, who came along to take photos and videos as part of the publicity push surrounding the book.

Publication is drawing nearer. The book finally sees the light of day on September 11 and there will be a launch at Serenity Books in Romiley, near Stockport. If you're interested in coming along, please get in touch for detais.

Forgotten Book - Shadow Run

Desmond Lowden is a writer who interests me more as I find out more about the man and his work. He was far from prolific, publishing just eight novels between 1969 and 1990, as well as several screenplays. He achieved considerable success, and today's Forgotten Book, published in 1989, won the CWA Silver Dagger (an award that no longer exists). In other words, it was judged to be the second best crime novel of the year. When you consider that the winner was Colin Dexter (with The Wench is Dead) that is quite something. Yet after publishing just one more book, in the following year, he never published another novel. I do find that hard to understand.

The Shadow Run is a thriller which counterpoints two sets of relationships. One concerns a 'fat boy', a young lad at a private school called Joffrey, and his school friends. Joffrey has a troubled family background and he tells a lot of fibs. So when he spots blood coming from a van, nobody believes him. But this time he is telling the truth.

The other relationships involve a hardened criminal called Haskell. He's a man who uses people for his own ends and is determined to make a lot of money from an ambitious robbery. The details (which explain the title) are complex, but since they are related to the technology of the late 1980s, they are also now out of date. This lessens the impact of the later stages of the story for a modern reader, I think, as the worlds of Joffrey and Haskell converge.

The first part of the book is excellent, as Lowden establishes his characters in short, snappy chapters, with crisp dialogue and intriguing incidents. Lowden also makes good use of his great interest in music (Joffrey and some of his pals are members of a choir that sings in a cathedral). I can see why the book attracted such favourable attention at the time, but like so many books which rely on cutting-edge technical detail, it has lost a bit of its allure. Nevertheless, I was glad to read it, and I'm definitely curious as to why Lowden gave up on writing novels so soon after this one earned the Silver Dagger.