Editing Anthologies

I was pleasantly surprised, last week, to see that Blood on the Tracks, my anthology of classic crime stories with a railway theme, had become a number one Kindle bestseller. And this prompted me to reflect on my unexpected but now quite lengthy career as an editor of anthologies. It dates back long before my involvement with the British Library - to the early 1990s, in fact.

At that time, I suggested to my colleagues in the northern chapter of the CWA that it would be nice if we could produce an anthology of our work. Before I knew it, I'd been elected to edit the book and find a publisher for it. It proved to be great fun. I enlisted the help of a small press, Didsbury Press, and I remember a fun weekend staying with Ann and Tim Cleeves, and meeting up with fellow contributors Reg Hill, Bob Barnard, Chaz Brenchley and Val McDermid to discuss the project. The book that resulted, Northern Blood, did pretty well and earned some nice reviews. And that appeared to be that.

Except that I was then asked to collaborate with members of the East Anglian chapter on an anthology called Anglian Blood; the contributors included P.D. James and Alan "George Gently" Hunter. Another fun project with another small press, though I have to say that the cover artwork was about the most horrible I've ever seen - I was never brave enough to ask Phyllis James her opinion of it!

One thing led to another, as it so often does in life. A year or two later, I was asked to take over as editor of the national CWA anthology, and (again) to find a new publisher for it. More than twenty years later, I still sit in the editorial chair. The experience of editing the book nearly every year has been hugely rewarding - what could be better than being the first person to see a new story by Ian Rankin, or Christopher Fowler, or Liza Cody, or Simon Brett, or...well, you get the idea. It's also been fascinating to take on stories by relatively unknown (at the time) writers such as Sarah Hilary and Mick Herron, who have proceeded to become hugely successful.

As a reader of anthologies as well as an editor, I do feel that it's desirable for each book to have a personality of its own. Typically this comes from a unifying theme, even if it's a relatively broad theme. I've read anthologies that are really just random collections of stories, and that approach isn't for me. That said, I do think it's inevitable that not every story in a book will appeal equally to all readers.

In a few days' time, I'll be taking part in a panel at the Florida Bouchercon which concerns anthologies,and I'm looking forward to it. The joy of an anthology comes from the blend, in my opinion, the combination perhaps of the well-known and the much less well-known, a range of writing styles, and so on. So the editing process does seem to me to be a highly subjective one; but then, that's the nature of writing. This career as an anthologist is something I never anticipated all those years ago. But for me, it continues to be genuinely enjoyable. 

Fen Country

East Anglia is the setting for some marvellous crime fiction, but it's a part of England that I've seldom visited. This is quite a confession, given that in the 90s I co-edited, with Robert Church, Anglian Blood, a CWA anthology of East Anglian crime fiction; the local chapter invited me to become involved, not because of my knowledge of the area but because of my interest in short stories. That book boasted a cover that I really did not like, but thankfully, the contents were better than the artwork, and the book contained a couple of stories that were short-listed for CWA Daggers. Suffice to say that I felt that a return trip to Fenland was long overdue.

So, on a September Sunday as lovely as any we've had all year, my webmaster and I headed from Cambridge to Ely - a place I've never been to before, but of which I've heard good things.In a nutshell, the praise Ely receives from its fans is well-deserved. We had a terrific day, which included a walking tour and a trip to the top of the remarkable octagonal tower of the utterly stunning cathedral.

I suppose the most famous East Anglian detective novel is Sayers' The Nine Tailors, which most people would acknowledge is a classic of the genre (though after re-reading most of her work earlier this year, I decided I preferred the very appealing Murder Must Advertise.) She captures the atmosphere of the Fens very effectively. P.D. James also loves the area, and Devices and Desires in particular benefits from an evocative setting.

The late Alan Hunter - who created Inspector George Gently and who, like P.D. James, contributed to Anglian Blood - was another East Anglian crime writer of note. It's sad that his books were not televised until after his death. Among present day practioners, Jim Kelly is especially good at Fenland settings, and I'm a fan of his enjoyable puzzle Death Wore White. My trip to Ely and Fenland, although very brief, helped me to understand why the landscape has made such a strong impression on writers over so many years. It's a fascinating place, and I shall aim not to leave it too long before exploring it more extensively.

Inspector George Gently

It’s a tragic irony that Alan Hunter’s novels about George Gently should only be televised subsequent to his death, at the age of 82, back in 2005. The Gently series began in 1955, and Alan went on to write roughly one a year for over forty years. I never met him, though we were in touch briefly when he contributed a story to Anglian Blood, an anthology I co-edited with Robert Church. It was, in fact, a story he’d originally written before that first novel appeared, at a time when he was working as a book-seller and was known as a poet rather than a crime writer.

I’m not sure what he’d have made of Inspector George Gently, and my own feelings about it are rather mixed. I saw the pilot episode, but missed a couple of episodes shown last year. This story, Gently and the Innocents, featured the murder of an elderly man at his large, dilapidated home, which was just about to be bulldozed to the ground to make way for a building development.

Gently is played by Martin Shaw, in a performance I thought strongly reminiscent of his interpretation of Adam Dalgleish, another widower capable of being both sharp and benign. Shaw has a compelling presence, but the casting decision strikes me as unadventurous. I’m also baffled by the decision to move the setting from East Anglia to the North East – and then to film on location in Ireland!

The script was written by the acclaimed Peter Flannery and it was something of a curate’s egg. The ending was strong and effective – Flannery did a very good job of drawing out the theme and implications of the story. The story was set in 1964, and the period was well conveyed for the most part, although there were a couple of jarring notes. But I did experience despair when the Chief Constable threw Gently off the case for no good reason – only, of course, for Gently to carry on investigating and solve the mystery. One can only conclude that Flannery believes this cliché is a compulsory plot element in all television police dramas. And the moment it was revealed that the dilapidated house had once been a children’s home, I had a sinking feeling that child abuse would loom large in the unravelling of the mystery. And guess what?

Despite the flaws, Inspector George Gently is a well, and no doubt expensively, made show, and I shall watch it again. But I hope that the detection part of the script has a fresher feel to it next time.