A British Library Weekend

In my online writing course Crafting Crime, I make the point that confidence counts for a good deal in writing. But confidence is fragile (there are plenty of lived examples in The Life of Crime, some of them rather poignant) and writers often find their morale needs boosting. Well, having just returned from London after an exhilarating weekend, I can say that I'm in very good heart, for a host of reasons. One of these, I must say, is that it was fantastic to see so many copies of my books (not to mention my Golden Age map, This Deadly Isle) for sale in the British Library shop. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen so many of my own books in a shop, anywhere....

At first, though, it seemed that things might go seriously awry. An event was planned for Friday, which would involve me, the Rev. Richard Coles and Laura Wilson in conversation at the British Library. Many tickets were sold, and I was really looking forward to it. But then disaster struck. As a result of a couple of electrical fires, it became impossible for the show to go on as planned. It was to be livestreamed, but during the course of a convivial lunch with John and Jonny of the Library's publications team, I learned that this was not going to be possible. So it became a recorded event, and part of it would involve me giving an impromptu presentation. It was all very unexpected, but I drew fresh energy from a convivial afternoon get-together with Moira Redmond, Jim Noy, Chrissie Poulson and others, and as things turned out, all went well. Richard, whom I'd never had a chance to talk to previously, but whose new detective novel I read over the weekend, was not only charming but generous in his comments about my writing, and Laura did a great job. I gather that everyone who paid for tickets will be refunded and the event will be made available on an open access basis. 

The following day, Bodies from the Library was due to take place after a three-year absence (though as with Alibis from the Archive, there was an online-only version last year). The volunteer team and the British Library staff worked tirelessly to make sure that it could go ahead, even though it was no longer possible for the Knowledge Centre to be used. The whole event was held in a rapidly reconfigured Terrace Restaurant. And it went really well. Jake Kerridge, Moira, Chrissie, Tony Medawar, Caroline Crampton, John Curran, and David Brawn were all very good and I enjoyed my session, talking to Chrissie about The Life of Crime. 

It was also wonderful to see so many old friends and to meet some nice people for the first time, including fellow Head of Zeus author Tom Mead. Online events are invaluable and, I'm sure, here to stay, but you can't beat the personal contact that comes with a live event. Twenty-five or so of us got together on Saturday evening for drinks and a meal, a nice way to round off a day that almost didn't happen, but - thanks to the hard work and dedication of those who turned potential disaster into a triumph - proved to be a great success. 

  

Murder at Magenta Manor

It's been a crazily busy but hugely enjoyable week. The CWA Daggers Dinner, very glitzy, was a great success, and I had a wonderful time the following evening, after zipping up from London to Yorkshire. I was hosting a Yorkshire supper at the legendary Betty's Tea Room and gave a talk about Gil North, and rural detective fiction for the Ilkley LitFest. And then, on Thursday, it was back to London again. I had a truly fantastic time, as I opened a new Classic Crime pop-up shop at the British Library.

This shop is dedicated to classic detective fiction (and yes, it sells my books too!) and it will be open until the new year. And it has a very special feature, which for all I know is unique in British retailing. The Library offers visitors the chance to participate in a murder mystery competition, with prizes. And guess who was commissioned to write the murder mystery?

When the Library first mooted the project earlier this year, I was intrigued, but slightly daunted by the challenge. The puzzle has to interest customers, but also not be too fiendish, otherwise people will not be able to escape from the shop for hours as they struggle to solve it... But after much thought and trial and error, I came up with the story of Murder at Magenta Manor, the puzzle of who killed Murdo Magenta - and how. Almost inevitably, poisoned chocolates are involved. But what was the poison?

The Library told me they loved the plot. Very encouraging. As a next step, I met the specialist designer from Spain who was tasked with turning my concept into a 3-dimensional shop design. And she and her team did a brilliant job. When, on Thursday, I walked into the shop, I was blown away. The clues are artfully hidden in the shop, and there are all manner of wonderful presents, quite apart from books, to tempt people hunting for Christmas presents. (There are bags bearing the Poisoned Chocolates Case cover artwork, and bags and coasters featuring the artwork for my new winter anthology, Crimson Snow). It really is the most unusual and extraordinary writing

project I've ever worked on.

Thursday was a Press evening, and the Library team were delighted by reaction. The excitement even attracted the interest of two real life police officers who came in for a look around and proved very entertaining visitors, happy to enter into the spirit of the mystery. No photos of them on the blog, for obvious reasons, but they made their own contribution to an unforgettable occasion.

More Crime Classics from the British Library

The British Library has just issued its catalogue for the second half of 2015, and it features half a dozen new Crime Classics,together with two Classic Thrillers. One of these books is an anthology that I've compiled, and I've contributed introductions to the other seven titles,so I cannot pretend to be impartial. That said, I'm very optimistic that fans of traditional mysteries and thrillers will find that at least one or two titles, if not more, whet their appetite.

Of the novels, I'd like to highlight Death of an Airman, which I've blogged about previously, and The Z Murders, by J. Jefferson Farjeon. They are both fascinatingly original. The Farjeon book is an early example of the serial killer mystery that I found extremely gripping. There are also two books written by Alan Melville in his younger days; he later become a well-known TV personality and humorist. His detective stories are light and witty, and have long been neglected.

Silent Nights is an anthology of Christmas mystery stories, the third of five collections that the British Library has commissioned me to compile. As usual, my aim has been to bring together a range of stories that show the very different ways in which inventive crime writers may tackle a particular theme. The contributors include Dorothy L. Sayers, but there are a couple of exceptionally obscure stories, including one by Farjeon that was kindly unearthed for me by Golden Age expert Monte Herridge when it emerged that not even the British Library had a copy. I've written an intro to the book, and also a piece preceding each story; my aim, however, has been to try to avoid repeating myself, so that there are items of fresh information even in relation to authors whom (as with Farjeon) have featured previously in the Crime Classics series.

Crime fans will be heartened to know that there's more to come from the British Library. Much,much more. This past week-end, I put the finishing touches to the fifth Classic Crimes anthology, and also completed two intros for excellent thrillers, as well as working on intros for two more rare and accomplished novels of psychological crime from the Thirties. And I gather that a deal may be in the offing that, if concluded, may lead to the publication of one of my all-time favourites. Can't wait...
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Antidote to Venom - another Crime Classic

It's less than two years since I wrote on this blog about Freeman Wills Crofts' novel Antidote to Venom, and expressed the view that it was a book definitely worth seeking out. Well, anyone who likes the sound of the book will now find it much more easily, as it has just been republished as part of the British Library's Crime Classics series.

I mentioned on Monday that the publication of my British Library anthology Capital Crimes has been brought forward because of the scale of advance sales, and the same is true of Antidote to Venom. I've supplied this edition with an intro which outlines why I like the book, but it's perhaps worth adding a few words here.

One of the things I admire most in a writer is a willingness to abandon one's literary comfort zone, and try something different, and ambitious. I've often given the example of Anthony Berkeley, who in his Francis Iles novels in particular was trying to write a crime story of a new sort. A book like Before the Fact is deeply flawed, but for me, it's still worth ten pedestrian detective stories, because it was such a daring story idea.

The same is true here - and not only because of the very intriguing zoo setting. Crofts was being very ambitious with this book, and I don't regard it is a total success. But I found it a gripping read, and I am impressed that such a successful author was prepared to try to write about complex issues of good and evil in the context of an elaborate murder mystery. This is the reason why I was so keen for the British Library to republish the book.

I should say that in my role as Series Consultant, I come up with many book and author suggestions that aren't viable for one reason or another, and the Library also keeps digging into the vaults and finding books I wasn't aware of. But although Crofts was, in his day, a bigger name than Charles Kingston, say, or Mavis Doriel Hay, I'm glad that this book (and soon, The Hog's Back Mystery) are enjoying a new life. He was an interesting writer who deserves to be remembered.

Capital Crimes - publication day!

Today sees the official publication of Capital Crimes, my anthology of London Mysteries for the British Library's series of Crime Classics. The book was scheduled for publication in March, but the amazing success of the Crime Classics series has led to...early release by popular demand! As I understand it, getting towards 5000 copies of the print edition had been bought already in advance of publication. Having edited more than 20 anthologies over the past twenty-odd years, books featuring some of the world's great contemporary writers (Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Lawrence Block et al) I can only say that I've never encountered pre-publication sales figures like this for an anthology previously.

If you define "the Golden Age of Murder" as the period between the two world wars, then the timespan of this collection extends beyond the Golden Age, in both directions. We begin with Conan Doyle (but his entry is not a Sherlock Holmes story) and continue until reaching a post-war story by Anthony Gilbert.

The connecting theme is the London setting of the stories, but my aim has been to go for variety. There is an obvious difficulty with putting together a collection of short stories from the past. Some if not all of the contents will be familiar to die-hard fans. It would be wildly optimistic to hope for over a dozen completely forgotten gems. And the need to trace copyright owners for stories that are still in copyright adds a further level of complexity.

All the same, with this anthology, and with others I've been working on for the British Library, I've endeavoured to include at least a couple of stories that I don't think will be familiar to most connoisseurs. In this book, I felt it would be folly to resist the temptation to include such classics as "The Tea Leaf" and "The Avenging Chance", even though they have been anthologised numerous times, because many enthusiastic fans of the Crime Classics series have come quite fresh to traditional detective fiction.

But hands up how many people have read such stories as "They Don't Wear Labels", "Cheese", and "You Can't Hang Twice"...I'm hoping that even many of the well-read followers of this blog will not have come across some or all of this trio of stories before. I've also included a Victorian serial killer story by John Oxenham, and abridged it slightly so that it could be fitted in - a slightly different version of the story has been anthologised in the past, but it's still quite obscure. All in all, I hope that this is a book which will entertain readers who, like me, are fascinated by London life -and by mysterious crimes.

And the latest runaway bestseller is....

I was truly delighted to read a terrific and very timely article in today's Independent, telling the story of Mystery in White. Sales of the book are now already at 60,000 - in a matter of weeks. I've talked previously about this extraordinary phenomenon, but I do think that it illustrates that fiction, like so many other things in life, is subject to the vagaries of fashion.

Take Scandi crime, for instance. I was reading Sjowall and Wahloo, and the (still) much less well known Poul Orum in my teens, and remember wondering why so few people seemed to take an interest in them. It's really only in the last few years that a combination of good books, good publishing, television, and a little luck have combined to make Nordic Noir seem to be omnipresent. A reaction is setting in now, possibly, but even as public tastes shift, it will remain true that there are many very fine Scandinavian novels out there - and not just those published in recent times.

In Britain and the US, and to some extent elsewhere, the "Golden Age" between the wars saw an explosion of interest in well-plotted whodunits (and some that weren't so well plotted). Countless people had a go at writing them. The reaction, when it came after the Second World War, was correspondingly severe. Apart from Christie and a few other "Crime Queens", Golden Age auhtors and their work generally fell out of favour.

I've always loved them, though, and I began thinking about the book that eventually became The Golden Age of Murder a good many years ago (so long ago, I kept a card index at one time of my researches; that "system" didn't last!) I suppose the success of the British Library Classic Crime books shows that, if one is patient for long enough, the roulette wheel of public taste will move in one's favour. It's a shame that J. J. Farjeon is not around to see how popular his book has become in the 21st century, but it's nevertheless a heart-warming story - a reminder to authors that the books we write may, just possibly, enjoy a good life long after we are gone.

Mavis Doriel Hay

Mavis Doriel Hay's detective fiction seems to be making more impact now than it did on its first appearance in the 1930s. This is thanks to the British Library's very welcome decision to reprint her three long-neglected novels in their Crime Classics series. I've previously talked about The Santa Klaus Murder, and in today's post I turn my attention to the two books that preceded it, Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell. They both benefit, by the way, from nice intros by Stephen Booth, who spoke enthusiastically about them on the Forgotten Authors panel at Crimefest.

Mavis was a student at Oxford at roughly the same time as Dorothy L. Sayers, and although she was an alumna of St Hilda's, rather than Somerville, it may be that their paths crossed. Did this influence Sayers' warmly positive review of Murder Underground? I very much doubt it - Sayers was not someone who said things about books that she didn't mean, and some of her reviews of friends' work were scarily acerbic. Sayers liked "good English", and Mavis was a stylish writer - it is this that lifts her novels out of the common run of Golden Age stories, and helps to explain why the British Library have chosen to republish her books. That said, I don't rate Murder Underground as highly as her two later novels. As the title suggests, the killing of an elderly spinster takes place at a Tube station (maps are provided), and the manner of the story-telling is light and amusing. It's a pleasing period piece. The plot, and in particular the solution, are however rather slight.

Mavis created a fictional Oxford college, Persephone, plainly influence by St Hilda's, for Death on the Cherwell. Again, we have a map of the scene of the crime, and a victim who is an unlovely spinster. A group of young female students find the body of the college bursar in a canoe floating down the river - shades of the beginning of The Floating Admiral. There is a lot to enjoy in this book, and Mavis's light touch is more expertly deployed than in her debut. Again, there is a shortage of suspects (not a mistake she made in The Santa Klaus Murder, which has a dauntingly large cast) and the "surprise twist" is foreseeable. But the story is fun.

In judging this writer, and these books, I think it's important to keep in mind that she was an inexperienced novelist, and this accounts for some of the flimsiness of plot and structure. Given her fluent writing style, I think that, had she kept writing mysteries, she might have developed into a notable contributor to the genre. It was not to be - she seems to have lost interest, although she wrote non-fiction later and lived until the Seventies. But it's marvellous to see these books given a new life, in very attractive editions, and they are being very successfully marketed by the British Library. The Golden Age is in vogue at long last!

The Santa Klaus Murder

Ever heard of the crime writer Mavis Doriel Hay? Neither had I until I received a review copy of a book she published in 1936 and which has just been reprinted by the British Library, as part of its rather exciting programme to make available again some very rare crime stories from the Victorian era and also the Golden Age between the wars.

The Santa Klaus Murder is one of three novels she published, although she also wrote non-fiction on the subject of rural handicrafts. On the evidence of this novel, I'm guessing that she enjoyed the conventions of the Golden Age and in the post-war era did not feel tempted to return to the idea of game-playing mysteries. But I'm guessing, as I know very little about her.

So what of The Santa Klaus Murder? The first thing to say is that it's a nicely produced book, as you'd expect from the British Library. And it also ticks a number of Golden Age boxes - the setting is Flaxmere, a country house, a floor plan is provided, and a Chief Constable is heavily involved in the detective work in the way typical of the period (think J.J. Connington in particular) but would now seem rather extraordinary.

One very strong positive about the book is that the story is told from multiple points of view, almost like The Moonstone, though the Chief Constable's perspective predominates once murder is done. The victim is Sir Osmond Melbury, the wealthy patriarch. Agatha Christie had a similar victim in a Yuletide mystery that post-dates this one, Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Each member of the large cast of characters has a motive for murder, and my one reservation about the book is that there are too many people, so that focus blurs after the crime is committed, with too much space is devoted to the question of means and opportunity. But Hay could write, and her other two novels are to be published by the British Library next year.

Sir Osmond has proposed to change his will - a Golden Age stand-by - and of course this impacts on motive, and a fragment of a piece of paper about the legacies is again included, another element that you just don't find that often in modern books, but which is the sort of device that Christie used to love to play with. Overall, I found this an enjoyable novel, and the familiar ingredients are lifted out of the ordinary by a pleasing touch of humour. Mavis Doriel Hay may not have made a great name for herself in the genre, but this book shows that she does not deserve to be forgotten. A nice Christmas gift for a Golden Age fan.

Murder in the Library

I've been meaning for ages to visit the British Library, and I finally achieved this ambition the other day, although I only had time to pop in very quickly before catching a train from nearby Euston. However, the brief visit was not only long enough to whet my appetite for this impressive place, but also to allow me to look round a small but interesting exhibition, Murder in the Library: an A to Z of Crime Fiction.

As the title suggests, the exhibition is organised on alphabetical lines, rather than thematically or chronologically. This is a perfectly sensible idea for a small-scale look at the genre. It goes without saying that it cannot hope to be comprehenive - even a multi-volume set of books about the genre could not be. But I found it entertainingly and sympathetically presented, with some fascinating items and rare manuscripts, including one from Conan Doyle..

Above all, I was pleased to discover a number of items that were completely unfamiliar to me. These included The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, and a modern Georgian equivalent of the Dennis Wheatley "crime dossiers", called Mr Deaxley's Silent Box. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has come across either of these fascinating-looking works.

I also had a bonus when I went into the British Library shop - and found plenty of copies of All the Lonely People on display. That doesn't happen so often that I'm indifferent about it! And there were also copies of the new edition of Ask a Policeman. Yes, my first visit to the British Library was entirely positive, and I hope to spend more time there before too long.