Jessica Mann R.I.P.

 

I'm truly sorry to report the death, on Wednesday, of Jessica Mann, a crime writer and reviewer of distinction. It's only a month ago that she played a full part in the Alibis in the Archives weekend, talking with her customary fluency and passion about female crime writing, and then joining a panel of authors for a wide-ranging discussion about the genre. A fortnight ago, she was - as so often - a convivial guest at a Detection Club dinner. And only last week I received a parcel of books from her. It was, therefore, with great shock and much sadness that I heard the news from her daughter Lavinia yesterday. 

Jessica lived a full life of high accomplishment, and I’ll remember her with huge affection not just as a talented author but as someone who was always ready, willing, and able to give younger colleagues, myself included, a great deal of help and encouragement. I first met her in the late 1980s, some years after I first read her books, but it's really been in the past ten years that she and I became friends. She followed this blog and emailed me regularly to urge me to keep busy, travelling and writing. We'd even talked recently about collaborating on a book together. She was a great believer in making the most of life, a philosophy that stood her in good stead.

Jessica Mann was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied archaeology, and Leicester University, where she took a degree in law; she became a barrister, but did not practise, although she later served as an employment tribunal member. Over the years, she served as a planning inspector as well as serving on numerous committees – including the CWA committee – and as Secretary of the Detection Club. A week after she completed her finals at Cambridge, she married the distinguished archaeologist and historian Charles Thomas; they had two sons and two daughters. Jessica and Charles lived in Cornwall for many years, but after his death two years ago she came back to London, the city of her birth.

Jessica’s first crime novel, A Charitable End, appeared in 1971; her penultimate book, Dead Woman Walking took her career full circle, as it reintroduced one of the characters from her debut, as well as the psychiatrist Dr Fidelis Berlin, who appeared in a handful of earlier novels, perhaps most memorably the superb A Private Enquiry, which was shortlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger. Her final novel, The Stroke of Death, saw the reappearance of perhaps her most popular character, the archaeologist Tamara Hoyland, after an absence, regretted by many readers, of a quarter of a century. 

Jessica’s non-fiction included Deadlier than the Male, an excellent study of female crime writing, and she was in much demand as a journalist and broadcaster from the time she first appeared on Radio 4’s Any Questions in the 1970s; she also featured on Question Time, Start the Week, Stop the Week, and the Round Britain Quiz . For many years, she reviewed crime for the Literary Review. For about fifteen years, she’d coped with Parkinson’s, which must have been very difficult, but her spirit was indomitable. Her life advice to me, regularly repeated and much appreciated, was very simple: “Do it now!”  Jessica was, you see, a wise woman as well as a good friend and a fine writer. She will be much missed.

Dead Woman Walking by Jessica Mann: review

Jessica Mann is a thoughtful and thought-provoking writer whose primary reputation is as a crime novelist. Amongst other things, she's written a study of the "Crime Queens" of the Golden Age, Deadlier than the Male. She's also written outside the genre, and her latest novel, Dead Woman Walking is a reminder of the breadth of her interests.

It's also a peculiarly fascinating book because she's done something unusual and appealing. Just as Agatha Christie, having started her career with A Mysterious Affair at Styles, took Poirot and Hastings back to Styles Court in her excellent and under-estimated novel Curtain, so here Jessica Mann has delved back into her own literary past.

As she explains in a note at the end of the book, the woman who narrates part of the story, Isabel, appearead in her very first novel, A Charitable End. Another major character, the memorably evoked Fidelis Berlin, appeared in an excellent mystery, A Private Inquiry, as well as in two subsequent books which I haven't read as yet. And Jessica is kind enough to say in the note that a suggestion from me inspired her to write a "sort of sequel" to her debut novel, forty years on. Very gratifying from my perspective (especially as she is a writer whose books I enjoyed long before I ever met her), and suffice to say that she's done something unusual and distinctive with that initial idea. The result is a book to savour.

This is a relatively short novel (published by The Cornovia Press, based in Yorkshire) and there are plenty of switches of scenes, as well as (mainly in the early part of the book) switches of period. So we begin with a preamble set in Nazi Germany, move forward to Scotland in 1964, then go to the present day, and so on. The catalyst for the story is the discovery of the body of a woman who disappeared half a century ago, but there is also a dramatic mix of ingredients, ranging from Fidelis' quest for the truth about her own identity to an ingenious method of murder, the abduction of children, and Satanic rituals.

There is a very striking climax, but this is also a novel of ideas, about feminism, family and literature. In addition, I suspect that there may be a number of semi-autobiographical elements. As you would expect with Jessica Mann, it's a very well-written as well as a poignant book. I'm delighted to have read it, and to be able to confirm that after a slight delay in publication date, it's now available generally..

How Jessica Mann's crime writing career began

I was really pleased when Jessica Mann responded to my suggestion that she write something about how she got started as a writer. It's the sort of topic I find really interesting, and I'm especially keen that we hear more about writers past and present who - like me - are by no means household names.

'When Martin emailed saying he had acquired a pristine first edition of my first novel, A Charitable End, I read it again myself and found a story I’d forgotten in a tone of voice I hardly recognize. Then Martin asked me to write something about how I got started as a crime novelist.

In my head, I’d been a writer ever since I could read and was determined to be the youngest published novelist ever. I was broken-hearted at seventeen to discover that Pamela Brown had been only sixteen when The Swish of the Curtain was published. All the same, to write a novel and get it published was still my ambition though deferred and deferred again as I went to Cambridge, got married, moved to Edinburgh where my archaeologist husband was a university lecturer and had children.

Many writer friends have told me that they always felt, exactly as I did, that holding a hardback volume with one’s own name on the spine was more than a simple ambition or life-plan, it was something without which life would have been meaningless. But I had still produced little more than random scribbles when Charles was appointed to a chair at Leicester. I suddenly realised that it was now or never: write that novel before we moved south or accept that it wasn’t ever going to happen. So, at last, I got down to work, half-an-hour here and half-an-hour there, whenever I could get away from our three (at the time) small children. I have had an irregular working timetable ever since.

A Charitable End was finished shortly before we left Scotland. I sent the manuscript to Collins and got it back almost by return of post. Then a friend introduced me to an agent who took me on and sent the book back to Collins who bought it, not quite by return of post, and published it in 1973, to encouraging reviews. On republication in 1992 Gwendoline Butler wrote that the book is “a story of the secrets that can lie hidden behind a respectable façade.” (She also kindly called it “a wickedly funny picture of manners and morals in the Scottish capital, a fascinating mystery and also an understanding and sensitive novel about the position of women.”)

Why crime fiction? Partly because that was what I liked reading; partly because I was interested in what happens when the thin ice of civilised society cracks or breaks; and partly because it was a genre that was by definition not autobiographical. I had no wish for my writing to be any kind of emotional strip-tease. As I was to realise when I wrote a book about women crime writers (Deadlier Than The Male, 1981) the grandes dames of crime fiction all used it as a kind of barrier between themselves and self-revelation.

A Charitable End came out in 1973. In various ways it’s become a period piece. First of all, at 60,000 words it’s less than half the length of most 21st century crime novels. It’s written in a less colloquial style than is usual now. And it’s about middle class people.

It has become fashionable to suggest that crime fiction can only be regarded as realistic if it concerns gritty low-lifes, and investigation is only worth following if it’s performed by cops. The Edinburgh that Ian Rankin and Quentin Jardine describe or the Edinburgh of the current new wave of Scottish noir, is a very different place from the city in which A Charitable End is set, in the beautiful Georgian New Town where we lived ourselves amidst middle class respectability. Our friends were lawyers, doctors, journalists, academics (all men) and their wives who, in those pre-liberation days, didn’t have jobs, but probably did voluntary work – do-gooders, as they would later be derisively termed (would a do-badder be preferable?). I was writing about a society and a setting familiar from my own experience. But I’ve always insisted that everyone and everything else in the book was pure invention.

Or was it? With several decades of hindsight, I can see that I did borrow (probably unconsciously) aspects of people, places and predicaments that really existed; and I can recognize the naïve thought processes of the person I once was, a young woman who had been bounced into a kind of premature maturity by marriage and motherhood. A Charitable End reminds me of a happy period and lovely place, but there is much more I could and should have said about them. Perhaps, forty years on, my first book should have a sequel.'

Now, wouldn't it be great if a bit of blogging could inspire a sequel to a book dating back four decades?!

Milward Kennedy's Big Mistake

When I bought Jessica Mann’s A Charitable End from Jamie Sturgeon recently, he told me a story that I never knew before. We were discussing Milward Kennedy, an interesting writer whom I’ve blogged about recently, and he mentioned a libel case in which Kennedy featured. The story is told in a true crime book called The Ordeal of Philip Yale Drew. It’s written by Richard Whittington-Egan, a chap of immense knowledge, whom I’ve never met, but to whom I’ve chatted on the phone several times. He was very helpful indeed when I was writing Dancing for the Hangman, and was kind enough to read and comment on the manuscript. Apparently, a novel that Kennedy wrote featured a thinly disguised version of Drew. The snag was that, though Drew had been suspected of murder, and was grilled at a coroner’s inquest, he was never tried and the case was never solved. Drew sued Kennedy and his publishers, Gollancz, for libel. The case was settled at the last minute before the trial, as often happens. The compensation didn’t do Drew much good, however, as he died only three years later. Kennedy’s barrister was H.C. Leon, who later became well-known as a writer under the name Henry Cecil. This mishap rather messed up Kennedy’s career as a crime writer, or so it would seem. Until the court case, he had been prolific, a rising star of the genre. Afterwards, though he lived for thirty years or more, he only published four more books. A sobering story, to my mind. And a reminder of why it’s a good idea to try not to libel anyone. The trouble is, avoiding accidental libel is by definition rather difficult.

A Charitable End - review

A Charitable End was Jessica Mann’s first novel, published back in 1971. I was pleased to find a first edition in Jamie Sturgeon’s last catalogue, and couldn’t resist the temptation to snap it up.

The novel was a Collins Crime Club title. So many splendid books were produced under that imprint over the years. I still can’t understand why the publishers abandoned it after the retirement of the legendary editor, Elizabeth Walter. She had an eye for talent, and clearly she took to Mann’s elegant prose style.

The setting is Edinburgh, and a middle-class world where well-off people pursue charitable activities in their leisure time, before the cosy status quo is shattered by a sudden death, and a sequence of poison pen letters. The narrator is a young woman who has been conducting an affair with the deceased’s husband, and Mann examines the tension s beneath the surface calm with some accomplishment.

The narrative is far from orthodox, but it never sinks into self-indulgence. The main focus is on the lives of the female characters, rather than on detection, but in the end, the mystery is rather neatly unravelled. At the time, naturally, Mann was feeling her way as a crime writer, but the assurance of her debut promised good things to come, a promise on which, in the intervening years, she has delivered.

I’ve quizzed Jessica Mann about the background to this book, and to my delight she has agreed to write a post for this blog which will say a bit more about it. Watch this space!