Forgotten Book - Suddenly at His Residence

Recently I attended a meeting with colleagues from the Publications Department at the British Library. We were discussing forthcoming titles in the British Library Crime Classics series as well as other projects, and I was delighted to learn that the books - both the novels and the anthologies - are selling as well as ever. I also had the pleasure of meeting the team member responsible for selling translation rights and it seems that the books are doing increasingly well in different parts of the world. So all the signs are that the series will flourish for a considerable time to come. The main challenge is choosing which books - among the hundreds of worthwhile possibilities - to include so as to maintain and enhance the series' reputation for variety and quality.

I'm the consultant to the series, but of course I'm not the decision-taker and the ultimate responsibility for negotiating on rights and so on rests with others - thankfully! But it's pretty clear that a series like this succeeds by combining popular favourites (albeit relatively recently discovered ones in some cases, E.C.R. Lorac being a good example) with stories that are unknown even to many long-term fans of classic crime (such as Billie Houston's Twice Round the Clock). Among the writers who has made a strong impression on returning to print is Christianna Brand and another of her titles, Suddenly at His Residence (aka The Crooked Wreath) will feature in the series next summer. The Library has given it a new sub-title: A Kent Mystery.

This book makes ingenious use of several tropes of Golden Age fiction. So we have a family tree, a cast of characters and a note indicating that the cast includes two victims and a murderer. There are multiple solutions and not one but two impossible crimes. There's also a final reveal right at the end of the story. Oh, and a rather likeable Great Detective in Inspector Cockrill.

One of Brand's greatest strengths as a crime writer was her commitment to playing fair with her reader. So the clues are supplied, but she disguises them so craftily that it's far from easy to figure out exactly what is going on before Cockrill reveals all. This is a novel published after the Second World War, but it's set in wartime and that background reality makes an important contribution to the storyline. All in all, a pleasing mystery and I'm delighted that it will, before too long, become available again to a very wide readership. 

Forgotten Book - The Honey Harlot (and The Vanishing - 2018 film)

Today, something slightly different. It's fair to describe The Honey Harlot as a forgotten book. Even though it was written by a well-known author, Christianna Brand, I've never come across any significant discussion of the story, but when Catherine Aird kindly passed me her copy, I was glad to give it a go. And having done so, I want to connect my comments with my thoughts on a recent film, The Vanishing.

The Honey Harlot was first published in 1978 and I don't think there was a paperback edition, though it did appear in large print and there was a kindle edition nine years ago. It appeared towards the end of her career and I imagine Brand must have been very disappointed by its evident lack of impact. Part of the reason for this is, perhaps, that it's not an easy novel to classify. Although murder is committed, it's above all a historical novel of a rather unusual kind. Really, it's a curiosity and worth reading on that basis.

Brand aims to provide a fictional solution to one of the great mysteries of all time - that of the Mary Celeste. She does so in the form of a first-person narrative; the story is told (many years after the event) by the widow of the captain of the ship. The driving force for the story is a prostitute, the 'honey harlot' of the title, who - as imagined by Brand - is smuggled on board, with disastrous consequences.

This is a well-written novel with some interesting characters and above all a fascinating basic situation. Yet somehow I didn't warm to the story. A key reason for this is that I didn't care too much for the narrator, despite the sympathy I had with her predicament. Come to that, I didn't warm to Briggs or even the glamorous stowaway, either. And this meant I felt a certain lack of engagement throughout; this wasn't fatal to my enjoyment, but it was a pity. 

The Vanishing, like the even more recent The Lighthouse, is a dark historical movie, focused on a tiny group of lighthouse keepers on a remote island. What it is has in common with The Honey Harlot is that it's a fictional attempt to explain a classic mystery about missing people, this time the disappearance in 1900 of the Flannan Isle lighthouse crew. As with The Honey Harlot, the aim is not to provide an explanation that is likely to be true, but simply one that is, taken on its own terms, believable and compelling. The film succeeds in that aim in a way that the book doesn't really manage, mainly due to the atmospheric camera work and the sturdy performances of Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan, and Connor Swindells which bring the characters to life and encourages an empathy that I didn't feel towards Mrs Briggs and the crew of the Mary Celeste in Brand's novel. 

Forgotten Book - Cat and Mouse

 I first read Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse a very long time ago - probably in the early 80s. I knew Julian Symons had extolled the book in Bloody Murder as her best (I believe he was also a fan of a later novel, The Rose in Darkness) but I confess I was underwhelmed. Having forgotten pretty much everything about the story except for the fact that it's set in Wales, I've had another go. And, as sometimes happens, my judgment this time was considerably more favourable.

I've always been a fan of Brand, but at the same time I've had reservations about some aspects of her characterisation. She does set out, clearly, to create people who are much more than mere ciphers, and that is admirable. The snag, at least for me, is that her characters are often highly-strung and overwrought. Given the nightmare of being involved in a murder case, that's fair enough up to a point, but at times I think Brand overdoes the hysterics so that the angst becomes a bit irritating. That said, I suspect this is a minority opinion, at least among Golden Age fans.

Cat and Mouse is unusual in her repertoire in that it sets out very deliberately to conjure up melodrama. There is an entertaining dedication to 'Mary Lewis' (this was Brand's married name!) which references Northanger Abbey, and this sets the context for the story. What we have here is an overt homage to Austen's splendid novel (I read it as a schoolboy and loved it; time for a re-read) in terms of the melodrama. 

The catalyst for the mystery (which Brand took from a real life incident) is a set of letters received by a journalist on a magazine by a woman who calls herself Amista. It seems that Amista has married a glamorous chap called Carlyon and the journalist, while in Wales, attempts to look up the happy couple. But there is no sign of Amista and it is soon clear that Something Is Up. What follows is a twisty puzzle that is rather unorthodox and, despite those overwrought bits, intriguing and enjoyable.

Forgotten Book - Heads You Lose

I have a vivid recollection of my first encounter with Christianna Brand's Heads You Lose. As a fourteen year old schoolboy, I raced to the local library one Saturday morning in September and borrowed it (in a reprint edition introduced by Michael Gilbert) before nipping back home and settling down to watch my favourite cricket team play their first cup final on television. Alas, my heroes were thrashed, and I was in a very grumpy mood for the rest of that weekend.

My humour wasn't improved by the fact that I felt Brand's novel didn't play fair with me as a reader. I'd greatly admired Green for Danger, but I felt that this village mystery was a let-down. I'm afraid that I'll forever associate it with a day when my juvenile dreams were dashed! However, I was encouraged to give it another go by a thought-provoking discussion of the story in Samantha Walton's Guilty but Insane, which deals with the treatment of psychological disturbance in Golden Age fiction.

On a second reading, my revised conclusion is that the book is a curate's egg. Brand skates over thin ice more cleverly than I appreciated in my youth. There's a pleasing false solution, but this was only her second novel, and it's well short of her best. It introduced her main character Inspector Cockrill, aka "Cockie", but I must admit I've never found him quite as engaging as do some fans. The book was published in 1942, and one of the characters, who is Jewish, is presented in sympathetic fashion - yet he still has to put up with a good deal of casual antisemitism before the story reaches its end.

On the plus side, there's a nice map and a neatly contrived "closed circle" of suspects. Samantha Walton's discussion has given me greater insight into Brand's handling of homicidal psychology, and is an uncommon example of an academic study which actually enhances the pleasure of reading Golden Age fiction. I still don't think Heads You Lose is really a fair play mystery, but I also think I judged it too harshly on first reading. As for that cricket match, well the scars run deep, but back then, I never dreamed that one day I'd become friendly with my team's opening batsman, Peter Gibbs, and that we'd go to a Society of Authors meeting together. Peter told me that they just froze on the big occasion. Oh well, even heroes are human...

The Long Arm of the Law

We tend to associate classic crime fiction with amateur sleuths, Wimsey, Sheringham, Marple, and company. In reality, though, police stories abounded during the first half of the twentieth century. The "police procedural" may be thought of as a concept of the Fifities onwards, but Freeman Wills Crofts and others were writing books about meticulous police investigations long before the days of Lawrence Treat, Ed McBain, and Maurice Proctor.

Classic police stories are celebrated in my latest anthology in the British Library's Crime Classics series. The Long Arm of the Law charts the development of the police story over more than half a century. The first entry is a very obscure one, "The Mystery of Chernholt" by Alice and Claude Askew. And we come right up to the (relatively) modern era with Sergeant Cluff featuring in "The Moorlanders" by Gil North.

I really enjoyed putting this book together. It is, believe it or not, the third of my anthologies that the British Library have published this year alone - and there's one more still to come! - and I like to think that this reflects an increasing interest in short crime fiction. Books of this kind, though I say it myself are a great way of discovering new writers and new detective characters. Anthologies are always a mixed bag, and I do aim for quite a high degree of variety, but there's sure to be something for every crime fan - or so I hope.

This book contains, it's fair to say, a higher number of obscure stories than my other anothologies in the series, although several of the authors are well-known names - Crofts, Henry Wade, Christianna Brand, John Creasey, and Nicholas Blake among them. My researches benefited enormously from help given by a number of experts, including John Cooper, Jamie Sturgeon, and Nigel Moss. I leave it to readers to judge the result, but I'm optimistic that this book will provide crime fans with a great deal of entertainment, and some truly fascinating new discoveries.

The Poisoned Chocolates are back!

Today sees the publication of the latest title in the British Library's series of Crime Classics, and for me personally, it's the most pleasurable moment so far of my association with the series as consultant. The book is Anthony Berkeley's Golden Age classic The Poisoned Chocolates Case. And this special edition includes not only an introduction in which I set the context of the book, but two special extras.

As many Golden Age fans already know, the novel is famous for the six different solutions to the mystery of who killed Joan Bendix that are proposed by members of the Crimes Circle, presided over by Roger Sheringham. One of those solutions, put forward by Sheringham himself, is the same as that in Berkeley's short story "The Avenging Chance", which features essentially the same plot. In the novel, however, things turn out very differently indeed...

In the 70s, Berkeley's friend Christianna Brand, herself a noted plot-weaver, wrote a seventh solution which featured in an American reprint of the book. That edition only had a relatively limited circulation, however, and most British fans of the genre haven't read it. The British Library edition does, however, include the Brand solution.

And what's more, it includes a completely new solution - written by me. I found writing this new "epilogue" to the story hugely enjoyable - a challenge, yes, to write in Berkeley's style and to find a fresh way of twisting the mystery, but one I loved undertaking. I know that it's high risk to write in the style of the masters of days gone by, but I've enjoyed writing new Sherlock Holmes stories, and this project was great fun. What others will make of it, time will tell..

Bodies from the Library

I'm back home - briefly -after an exhilarating trip to London for the second Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library. This was a highly successful event, one in which I was delighted to take part, and during the afternoon coffee break one of the attendees made things even more memorable by kindly telling me that she'd just heard that The Golden Age of Murder has been shortlisted for the Macavity award from Mystery Readers International. Not so long ago, if you'd told me that a book of mine would win three awards and be listed for three more, I'd have thought you were pulling my leg in a rather cruel way. But yes, it has actually happened...

Less of a surprise were two announcements about personal projects of mine which I'm very excited about. For one day only, copies of the new edition of Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a title in the British Library's Crime Classics series, were on sale - official publication is in October. And this edition contains not only an intro that I've written, but more importantly, a seventh solution (in addition to the six solutions Berkeley came up with) by Christianna Brand, first published in the US in the 70s. And there is a brand new solution written by me. This is a project that was, for me, enormous fun, and a large number of copies of the book were sold on the day. More about this one in October...

During my conversation with Rob Davies of the British Library, we also announced that next year will see the publication of my new non-fiction book The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books. This book has occupied a good deal of my time over the past 18 months, and I recently finished work on the manuscript. It's very different from The Golden Age of Murder, even though there is an element of overlap in terms of the period covered, and I hope that crime fans will find it full of interesting - and often unexpected - material.

The first session of the day featured another book with which I'm very happy to be associated. This is The Sinking Admiral, by the Detection Club. Simon Brett, who masterminded the book, discussed it with me, and two other contributors, Janet Laurence and Stella Duffy. It was also announced that Stella has been awarded an OBE, and that she has been engaged to write a completion of an unfinished Ngaio Marsh novel: something to look forward to. As for The Sinking Admiral, it sold out by mid-morning.

Tony Medawar talked about Anthony Berkeley, while Len Tyler and Susan Moody championed Philip MacDonald and Georgette Heyer, and Barry Pike discussed the work of H.C. Bailey. Dolores Gordon-Smith focused on G.K. Chesterton, while Jennifer Henderson, biographer of Josephiine Tey, talked about Tey as a Scottish writer. John Curran discussed the Collins Crime Club - and his book on the subject is another that will be eagerly anticipated. Finally there was a group panel in which we picked favourite screen adaptations of Golden Age novels.

Dinners on the Friday and Saturday evenings provided plenty of opportunities for socialising, and I was delighted to meet Taku Ashibe, from the Honkaku Mystery Writers' Club of Japan, (modelled on the Detection Club) who presented me with several books, including one of his own. Saturday itself was extremely hectic, and although I had the chance to chat to a number of attendees, there simply wasn't time for as many conversations as I'd have liked. But you can't have everything, and overall this was a wonderful day, full of good things, and pleasant people. What more could you want?

The photo at the top of this post appears on an account of the day on Puzzle Doctor's splendid blog, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel. Further perspectives on the day may be found on the similaly enjoyable Past Offences blog and Cross Examining Crime.
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Forgotten Book - Tour De Force

Tour De Force by Christianna Brand, first published in 1955, is today a Forgotten Book, perhaps because, after it appeared, the author turned away from the genre for a number of years. But many connoisseurs think highly of it.

The novel features Brand’s most regular detective, Inspector Cockrill, and also a character who appeared in an earlier mystery (and therefore seems by definition to be an unlikely killer)  but the setting is unusual – a fictitious island off the Italian coast. Cockrill is part of a tour party, and Brand clearly enjoyed writing about the island, as she set a subsequent book there as well.

A member of the tour party is found dead. She has been stabbed to death with a dagger, and there is a suggestion that she may have liked to indulge in blackmail. She was also at the centre of some romantic convolutions, involving one of the suspects, Leo Rodd. Rodd is a one-armed musician who appears highly attractive to women, although he was so unpleasant that I struggled to figure out why any of them would bother with him. A map is supplied in the best Golden Age tradition.

A fairly obvious solution to the murder mystery is put forward, but then Brand supplies a clever and unexpected (at least by me) twist – although it depends on something so unlikely that I didn’t find it easy to suspend belief. There are various pleasing features in the book, not least the setting, but I’m afraid that Brand’s novels seem to me to suffer from a recurrent weakness. There is always a closed circle of suspects, which is fine, but those suspects always seem to succumb before long to “rising hysteria” and their highly-strung behaviour and chit-chat rather gets on my nerves. So it was here.

However, Brand’s skill with plot was formidable. She isn’t too far behind Christie and Berkeley in that respect and I also gather that in person she was truly charismatic. To my mind, her short stories tend to be more satisfying than her novels, because they are punchier and the characters in them don’t have time to grate on the reader. One of these days I will say more about her short stories, but for now I’ll rank Tour De Force as well-constructed, but a long way short of a masterpiece.  

Marrakech and Murder

I’m just back from a quick trip to – of all places – Africa. Morrocco, to be specific, and Marrakech to be even more precise. It was really an impulse decision to go off for a long week-end in search of a bit of sun before the run-in to Christmas, and very enjoyable it was too. I’ve never been to Africa before, but I was very taken with what I found.

I can’t recall ever reading a crime story set in Marrakech, though I’m sure there must be some; perhaps my memory is at fault. Any suggestions of titles? I’d really like to try a book set there. And there are surely bound to be plenty of thrillers set in Morocco. Certainly, it’s an atmospheric city; the souks are amazing, and I also saw my very first snake charmer. Not that I took a photo of the snakes, mind; you never know how they might react!

I read two contrasting books on the trip. I’ll be reviewing both The Players and the Game by Julian Symons and Tour De Force by Christianna Brand shortly. I’d read the Symons before but admired it all over again. Both books were highly ingenious – but Symons’ cleverness at plotting is sometimes overlooked by those who focus mainly on his criticisms of some classic detective novelists.

As for Brand – my feelings are mixed, in that I admire her work a good deal, yet find some of her writing rather frustrating. She and Symons were friends and contemporaries, but she was hurt when he gave one of her books a less than glowing review.  He described her approach as “hectic”, which isn’t the adjective I’d use, but there are, I think, reasons why she is much less well remembered today than her talents would have justified. More of this another day.   

Forgotten Book - The Poisoned Chocolates Case

P.G. Wodehouse wrote a number of stories with a crime element, and admired Agatha Christie. She liked his work, too, and it’s a pity the two of them never collaborated. Had they done so, they might have come up with a book as good as The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley.

This whodunit is a classic of the genre, which I first read many years ago. I decided to take another look at it, and found it was at least as good as I remembered - which is saying something. It’s clever and witty and quite unique.

Its genesis was a short story called ‘The Avenging Chance’. In the novel, written in 1929, Berkeley has the six members of the Crimes Circle (based, no doubt, on the then embryonic Detection Club) come up with different solutions to the puzzle of who killed Joan Bendix. Roger Sheringham’s solution derives from the short story – but here it isn’t the right answer to the puzzle. There are, in fact, two more twists in store.

In 1979 Christianna Brand came up with yet another solution. All this makes Berkeley’s point, that the solutions to a fictional mystery are potentially endless. I love the way he keeps shifting the kaleidoscope in this story. It deserves its status as a masterpiece of the Golden Age.

Should writers list their characters?

A very welcome arrival to the blogosphere is J.F. Norris, whose Pretty Sinister blog I’ve added to my blogroll. He covers some modern fiction – such as that very entertaining writer L.C.Tyler – but his main focus is on books from the past, and already he’s come up with some fascinating bits of information.

In commenting here, he also raised a very interesting question about lists of characters at the start of books, to help readers pick their way through. This used to be common in detective stories, but these days I’ve heard publishers argue that it is off-putting, and implies that the story is not clear enough to stand on its own merits.

I can understand this argument, and that some readers will draw an adverse inference if they see a character list at the front of the book. But I do tend to like them – for instance in the old books that Rue Morgue reprint. And some authors, like Christianna Brand, used to use them as part of the overall means of entertaining the reader.

I’ve been thinking about the other bits and pieces that can add to a reader’s pleasure in the last few days as I’ve been working with my American publishers on a map for The Hanging Wood. It’s fun to see my dubious draughtsmanship transformed into a rather nice piece of work by an artist. Maps seem to be coming back into vogue generally at present, not least in Scandinavian novels. A good thing!

So what will be the next device to be exhumed from the Golden Age? More family trees? Challenges to the readers? Clue-finders? None of them seem likely, I must admit. But you never know...

Michael Gilbert

I’ve mentioned Michael Gilbert a few times in this blog, and one of his titles is my ‘forgotten book’ this coming Friday. He’s a writer whom I came across in my teens. My parents liked his books and encouraged me to read him.

They had an ulterior motive, actually. The biographical note in the Gilbert books that Hodder published in those days explained that Gilbert combined a career as a solicitor with his crime writing. He achieved a good deal of success in both fields (he was Raymond Chandler’s solicitor in England, incidentally and a good friend of the great man). At this time my parents were unnerved by my stated ambition to become a crime writer, and naturally wanted me to have a ‘proper job’. When I proved resistant to this, they pointed to Michael Gilbert as an example of someone who wore both hats.

Duly persuaded, I studied law and ultimately became a solicitor. I remained a firm fan of Michael Gilbert’s books and during the 1980s, I persuaded a legal magazine to allow me to write an article about his work. This gave me the chance to interview a man who was something of a hero. I talked to him at length on the telephone and found him as urbane and likeable as his books. He was, too, remarkably and genuinely modest, a man who had spent most of his career in a world where solicitors were not allowed to advertise and in grave trouble if they did so surreptitiously.

After that, we spoke again on various occasions. He encouraged my own writing and was kind enough to provide an extremely positive quote for Eve of Destruction (something he seldom, if ever, did for other writers, and something of which I am rather proud). In later years he allowed me to reprint some of his classic short stories for CWA anthologies and shared with me his disappointment at the lack of critical attention given to The Queen against Karl Mullen, one of his last books, and quite splendid. The pity was that, by the time the novel came out, Michael Gilbert was no longer truly fashionable. Even Hodder, to whom he had long been faithful, dropped him. He had won much acclaim, including the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, but he is associated primarily with the post-war era, in which his most famous whodunit, Smallbone Deceased, is set. Yet he wrote with great accomplishment for half a century.

One other thing about Michael Gilbert. He had a great deal of insight into the crime genre in all its forms. As well as many novels and countless short stories, he wrote with success for both tv and stage, and Death in Captivity , Danger Within, was enjoyably filmed by Don Chaffey. He was a friend and admirer of Cyril Hare, and edited a posthumous collection of Hare’s best short stories. He wrote intelligently about the work of other writers, and thereby introduced me to such notable authors as Henry Wade and Christianna Brand.

Oh, and he and his wife found time to produce seven children, one of whom also became a successful writer. Quite a man.