The Jigsaw Murders - Jeremy Craddock

Over the years, I've written quite a bit about true crime and I once published a book (known by various titles, including Catching Killers) which focused on crime investigation and forensics as well as some famous cases. I've often thought about writing a book devoted to a single case, but I've never got round to it. I did, however, once draw up a pitch for a non-fiction study about the Crippen case (which also featured in my novel Dancing for the Hangman) and made some notes for a slightly less well-known case which has also fascinated me for ages, the Buck Ruxton case. One of the attractions of the latter case (my book was going to be called The Cyclops Eye, but I didn't get much further than the title!) was that nobody else had studied it in depth in modern times.

Well, now the gap has been filled, not by me but by Jeremy Craddock in The Jigsaw Murders, published by The History Press (an excellent indie publisher by the way; they once published a Murder Squad anthology and were good to work with). Jeremy is a journalist who comes from the Lake District and now lives in Cheshire, so I have a considerable fellow feeling for him. Regardless of that, I'm very pleased that he's produced such a well-rounded study of a major murder investigation.

Ruxton was a doctor working in Lancaster, a fascinating and historic town which rather strangely used to have a pub named after him. He was a strange man who murdered both his wife and his children's nanny before dismembering their bodies. The remains were ultimately found in the Scottish border country. An extraordinary forensic investigation was required; there's a very good book co-written by the pathologist John Glaister which details the medico-legal background. Jeremy Craddock goes into detail about Ruxton's background and some of this information was quite new to me. 

The sub-title of the book is 'The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics' and the murders were shocking and extraordinary. The investigation was undoubtedly an important landmark, whether or not you identify it as the 'birth' of modern forensics. I'd say that this extensively researched study is a candidate for the various non-fiction awards.

  

Forgotten Book - The Great British Torso Mystery

Today, for once, my forgotten book is a work of non-fiction. I first came across the name of Richard Whittington-Egan about forty years ago, when I started work in Liverpool. A local man, he'd published a number of books about his native city, and I later discovered that he was also an expert in true crime. I never met him, but we were in touch in the later years of his life, when he was living in the south west with his wife and literary collaborator Molly. He kindly read and commented on the manuscript of my novel Dancing for the Hangman and he told me about a book he'd written called The Great British Torso Mystery, which I duly acquired. Richard died in 2016 but I've recently reread the book, which is the only full-length study of a case that was, in its day, very high profile.

An unidentified and mutilated human trunk was discovered on the banks of the River Severn, not too far from Cheltenham, in 1938. The incident, and the mystery surrounding it, became a sensation. It was dubbed, rather wonderfully if not quite accurately, 'The Case of the Thousand Clues'. The legendary pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was consulted, but the torso was never definitively identified. It seems very likely, however, that it belonged to an individual called Captain William Butt.

A related discovery was made even before the torso was examined. A gigolo called Brian Sullivan was found to have gassed himself. He was an associate of Captain Butt, who had engaged the services of Sullivan's mother, Nurse Sullivan, to look after his mentally troubled wife. Butt, like Sullivan, was an unscrupulous fellow, and the nurse was also a strange character; her role in the story is important, but open to interpretation.

Did Barry Sullivan kill Butt and try to disguise the crime by mutilating the body? If so, why? If not, what really happened? A detective novelist of the day, Andrew Soutar, investigated on behalf of the Daily Mail, and although his reporting prompted a libel suit from Nurse Sullivan, perhaps his veiled hints that she was involved in the death of Butt were not too far off the mark. 

It's a case that I find intriguing in various ways and Richard's treatment of it is interesting. The book was published by a small press, and I do feel that it would have benefited from stricter editing. All the same, it's an interesting piece of research and the case is so extraordinary that I'm surprised that it isn't better-known.

Forgotten Book - Dreadful Summit

Stanley Ellin was one of those admirable writers who was always trying something different. He wasn't especially prolific, publishing fourteen novels in just shy of forty years, although he did write a good many short stories of high calibre. Today, he is best remembered for those short stories - "The Question" is one of my all-time favourites - but his novels definitely should not be overlooked. Those I've read are of a very high standard.

This is true even of his debut, Dreadful Summit (the title comes from Hamlet), which was published in 1948, the same year as his famous short story, "The Specialty of the House". It's a remarkable book, and was filmed in 1951 by Joseph Losey as The Big Night; I've not seen the movie, but reviews of it seem to be mixed. As far as I can tell, the novel has been out of print for years, though it was a green Penguin paperback in the 60s.

In some ways, the novel anticipates The Catcher in the Rye. It's a first person narrative, and all the action is crammed into 24 hours, as the narrator, George LaMain, turns sixteen. It's also the day his life changes forever. George's mother died when he was very young and he's been brought up by his father Andy, who runs a bar and grill in New York City. When a well-known columnist called Al Judge assaults Andy in front of George's eyes, the boy vows revenge.

At first, one's instinct is to sympathise with George. But it soon becomes apparent that he'd not really the nice young kid he might seem to be. He records disturbing incidents and behaviour in a way that makes the reader realise that he's deeply troubled. What will become of him? The tension mounts, and this is a good example of a book that benefits greatly from brevity. I'm always intrigued by narratives which disclose a gap between the narrator's perception of the world and objective reality - my own Dancing for the Hangman explored that very theme, though is otherwise utterly different from Ellin's book - and this is a striking, and dark novel. Recommended.

Writing and Wellbeing

From my early years, I've been fascinated by stories - hearing or reading them as well as telling them. Stories always seemed to me to represent a way of escaping from the real world and into my imagination, and growing up, I found that extremely appealing. I still do. Even when something from real life influences my fiction (for instance, the Crippen case which inspired Dancing for the Hangman), my main focus is on the imaginative aspects of the story. And stories also offer us ways of trying to understand the world (and the people in it) a little better. That's surely one of the key reasons why perfectly law-abiding people love stories about crime and criminals.

Writing and wellbeing seem to me to have clear and close connections, and these have interested me for a very long time. At Malice Domestic, Catriona McPherson made a telling point when she reminded us that, in many ways, writers' lives are privileged: she drew a comparison with the work of psychiatric nurses, for instance. Having once worked for six months as the world's most incompetent factory labourer, I know she's right; I'd much rather be a writer than anything else. Equally, it's the case that, for many writers, the privileges are offset by the downsides - emotional and financial insecurity and rejection being among them.

Writing can, apart from anything else, act as a very positive form of therapy, even for those who don't seek to publish what they write. I know that when I was at my lowest ebb, eight years ago, when everything that could go wrong in a hitherto blessed life seemed to be going wrong, writing was a lifeline. And this blog, and the kindness of its readers, played a valuable part in helping me to get through an extremely difficult time.

The Society of Authors recently took wellbeing as a theme for an issue of its quarterly magazine, and this prompted me to start an initiative on behalf of the Crime Writers' Association. I wanted to encourage the sharing of experiences so that members who were encountering setbacks would realise they are not alone, and that some of the taboos would start to break down. Simon Brett, a friend and a man I've long admired, has written movingly about his own struggles with depression, and at my suggestion he contributed an article to the CWA members' private newsletter, Red Herrings.

This has in turn prompted further articles and also thoughtful online discussion, just as I'd hoped. And only today, C.J. Sansom wrote a moving article in The Sunday Times about his own experience of depression, which stems back to his childhood and unhappy time at school. Each person's experience is different, but understanding more about what individuals have gone through (and, where they've been able to overcome difficulties, how they've gone about it) is important in so many ways.

Progress has been made in recent years in terms of reducing the stigmas that surround mental health problems, but fresh challenges for writers have emerged, and the public nature of social media (wonderful though it can be) exacerbates the problems. So I believe that talking about these things (which is very different from over-sharing), rather than hiding away from them, is a Good Thing, and I'm glad to find that others take the same view. None of us want to dwell too long on gloom and doom; there's enough of that in the world already. But recognising that life has its downs as well as its ups equips us better - in the long run - to value and make the most of those ups.

Notable British Trials is Back!

More than sixty years have passed since the last entry appeared in the renowned series of Notable British Trials, published by William Hodge and Co. Now, I'm pleased to have had the chance to read a brand new entry in the series - number 84, no less. It's the Trial of Israel Lipski, edited by true crime writer M.W. Oldridge, and published by Mango Books under licence from William Hodge.

Pleasingly, this volume includes a lengthy foreword which provides a history of how Notable British Trials came into being. It's a fascinating story, and some of Oldridge's predecessors were legends of true crime writing - the likes of William Roughead and Frin Tennyson Jesse. Classic cases covered include those of Adelaide Bartlett, Florence Maybrick, Alfred Monson, and Buck Ruxton,

The famous trials are interesting in themselves. They also provide a vast amount of information for writers, not just true crime writers, but also novelists. When I was working on Dancing for the Hangman, I studied Filson Young's book about the trial of Dr Crippen very carefully. I was trying to write a novel which respected the facts that were known (while using fictional skills to explain the apparently inexplicable parts of the story), and the trial transcript gave me a great deal of help.

In line with the tradition of these books, Oldridge contributes a detailed introduction which sets the case in context. Lipski's murder of Miram Angel in 1887 attracted a good deal of attention at at the time, and the case does have intriguing features, although I find it less mysterious than, say the Bartlett or Maybrick cases. There are illustrations, and all in all I think Mango have done true crime fans a real service in bringing this famous publishing brand back to life.

The Return of Notable British Trials

Regular readers of this blog will know of my enthusiasm for true crime cases, and books about them. It's this interest that fuelled my novel Dancing for the Hangman, my non-fiction book Urge to Kill, and my CWA anthology Truly Criminal. And I've enjoyed many fascinating conversations with criminologists - only the other day I had a very pleasant lunch with someone who did ground-breaking research on the legendary Wallace case, and who turns out to live just a few miles away.

Given all that, I was naturally delighted to learn from Kate Clarke that the Notable British Trials series of books is to enjoy a new lease of life, after a hiatus lasting more than half a century. This is, I imagine, another spin-off of changes within the publishing industry, and the economics of publishing, and very welcome it is. The new publishers, taking a licence from the rights owners, are Mango Books, evidently a young and forward- looking company.

Adam Wood, who runs Mango, told me: "One of the intriguing parts of identifying cases which should be added to the NBT series is whether a transcript of the trial is available. We prepared a list of cases which were obvious omissions in the original series, but on further investigation realised that none existed in the obvious places and that's probably why William Hodge didn't include them. Thankfully, with the British Newspaper Archives now available online, we are able to access contemporary newspaper reports of trials, many of which are very detailed. This means we're able to piece together a trial without a formal transcript, or at least a complete one. It's been a lot of fun walking in the footsteps of the likes of William Roughead and W. Teignmouth Shore."

The first title in the series will be The Trial of Israel Lipski, to be edited by experienced true crime writer M.W. Oldridge. Two more forthcoming titles will feature a pair of railway-related mysteries - more "blood on the tracks"! I've read a number of the original books in the series, and found them very helpful with a range of projects, as well as fascinating in their own right. So I'm certainly awaiting the publication of the new titles with eager anticipation. 

Travelling Around the Blogosphere

In the past few days, I've been lucky enough to feature, along with my writing on several of the best crime blogs around. Here's a round-up, starting with my visit to Fiction Fan's blog to talk about ten of the best Golden Age detectives. A fun post to write!

I've often said that Dancing for the Hangman, published eight years ago and written a while before that, is a personal favourite of mine, even though it's a history-mystery, very different from all my other novels. I've usually added that, in terms of sales, it is my least successful book; perhaps this is because it was published here and in the US by two small presses. The reviews were terrific, and I was delighted to see that Puzzle Doctor, responsible for a very interesting blog with a leaning towards classic crime, has given the novel a boost with a terrific review today. I'm really pleased about this, because I still believe in Dancing for the Hangman, and I hope to give it fresh life one of these days, not least with an ebook version.

One of my latest short stories, "Consuming Passion", has appeared in the July issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, a memorable issue which contains loads of good things, including reflections on the magazine's history of publishing first stories by writers who have gone on to make a name for themselves. I was delighted to read about Keenan Powell's enthusiasm for my story in her Mysteristas blog. Like the review on In Search of the Classic Mystery, this sort of thing is very good for morale (especially as I'm battling with a rather tricky story right  now...)

And finally, Puzzle Doctor hosted an interview with me in connection with the Cluff books published by the British Library. I'm grateful to him, to Fiction Fan, and to Keenan for giving me this attention.

Forgotten Book - Henbane

Henbane, by Catherine Meadows, published in the US as Doctor Moon, is a long-forgotten book dating from 1934, which I have wanted to track down for ages. There were two reasons for my curiosity. First, it's a fictionalisation of the Crippen case, which has fascinated me for decades. Having been responsible for my own take on Crippen in Dancing for the Hangman, I'm always keen to see what other writers make of the story. Second, Dorothy L. Sayers lavished praise on the book in one of her reviews for the Sunday Times, and she was no mean judge.

I wasn't disappointed. This is a very readable and capably written novel, and it's all the more surprising that Meadows, so far as I know, published only one other novel. That was Friday Market,another book inspired by a real life crime, namely the Armstrong case. I do wonder if Meadows was a pen-name for someone else,but I've  not found any evidence of this. If anyone knows the answer,or has more information about the mysterious Ms Meadows, I'd be glad to learn it.

Meadows sticks fairly closely to the established facts of the Crippen case,but makes some amendments - more, I think, than Sayers realised. Caspar Moon, who stands in for Crippen, is very sympathetically presented, and so too is his secretary and lover, based on Ethel Le Neve. It follows that his wife Cora (called Flora in the novel) is presented vividly but negatively, as a man-chasing and utterly selfish domestic tyrant. Sayers said: "the book is not merely a costume-piece, still less a study in morbid psychology; it is a fine novel of human passion and suffering."

I haven't kept a statistical record, but it's my very strong impression that the Crippen case is referenced more frequently in Golden Age fiction than any other real life case - including such notable cases as Maybrick and Wallace. The story was sensational in its day, and remains absolutely full of interest - so much so that I enjoyed writing Dancing for the Hangman as much as any other novel I've ever written. As with Maybrick and Wallace, there 's room to debate what actually happened. I don't go along with the theory advanced a few years ago,based on claims relating to DNA, that Crippen's wife survived, and I think it very likely (as, I believe, did Agatha Christie) that Ethel was not quite the dewy-eyed innocent portrayed by Meadows. But Meadows' story, though told at a pace that is very leisurely by today's standards, remains enjoyable, and it's baffling that a writer of such accomplishment should have vanished seemingly without trace. .  

Reprinting The Golden Age of Murder

I'm delighted to say that the hardback edition of The Golden Age of Murder has been reprinted. A few times in the past I've had a hardback novel reprinted after the original print run sold out, but in those cases the print run was considerably smaller. What accounts for this happy development? The quality and quantity of reviews are a big factor, I guess. And I'm also extremely grateful for the word-of-mouth recommendations that have helped the book to do so well.

These things do make a huge difference. Over the years I've written some books of which I was really proud which made only a limited impact in sales terms- Dancing for the Hangman in particular springs to mind, despite the great reviews it received. This time, I've received many more emails and even traditional letters from readers than for any other book. Even though The Golden Age of Murder isn't a novel, it's still a real thrill to find a large number of people responding to it so positively.

When the book was being prepared for publication, I must have driven the publishers crazy by making continual changes. I kept finding out new information, and dreaming up fresh things to say. You have to draw a line somewhere, but happily, my editor was very tolerant, and I like to think that the reaction to the book has justified my belief that it was worth doing everything I could do keep improving it.

But that process is potentially endless. The reprint has enabled me to include some additional items (three extra author photos, and also some new trivia for the end notes) and also to correct some printing and other errors that crept in - no doubt in part due to my constant tinkering. I don't think it's practicable with a book of such scale to eliminate every conceivable error, but I do feel very happy about the latest set of changes.

Will there be any more changes for the paperback edition, due out next May? Well, I continue to be enormously grateful to people who contact me with fresh snippets of info (and occasionally to point out typos) and please do keep them coming. The quest for perfection may be doomed to failure, but the true writer, I think, always wants to keep improving.

P.S. Since I posted this a few hours ago, I've been contacted by an expert on GA fiction from the US telling me about a fascinating snippet of Detection Club history from the 30s. Such is the power of cyberspace, and the generosity of fellow crime fans.

Reaction to The Golden Age of Murder

When you publish a book, it's usually far from easy to predict how it will be received. You've done your best with it, your agent and editor are happy with it (bad news if they aren't!), but you can never quite be sure how others will react. Authors are often said not to be the best judges of their own work. My most commercially successful novel is The Coffin Trail, and in sales terms, my least commercially successful, is Dancing for the Hangman. Yet my own feeling is that the latter book is possibly, in literary terms, my best. Who knows? All these judgments are subjective, like all reviews.

So I was unsure about how people would respond to The Golden Age of Murder. It's 25 years (even I find this hard to believe) since I pitched the idea of an Oxford Companion about the crime genre to the late Michael Cox, then a senior editor at Oxford University Press, and later a successful novelist, so people can see how long it's taken me to reach this point. When you've worked long and hard on a project, you hope the results will justify the effort. But there are no guarantees; life isn't like that.

I realised over time that I wanted to write a book that was ambitious, wide-ranging, very personal, and... different. Rash of me, really. I don't even know for sure if it is, as some have said, a reference book. A quarter of a century ago, I did want to write a reference book, but my priorities have evolved as I've developed as a novelist. Above all, I wanted to tell a story, and the more I researched it, the more I felt that the story of the early years of the Detection Club deserved to be told. And it was important to me to tell the story with a degree of empathy with the writers, and also with humour .

To say that I've been thrilled by readers' reaction to this book to date is true, but it hardly conveys the excitement I feel about the number of people who have "got" what I was trying to do. It's a long book, with a tight structure that is not very obvious, although each chapter does have a distinct theme. So I thought that the readers most likely to appreciate it might be those who read it more than once, and then found they enjoyed going back to it. And since I was aiming to interest Golden Age fans but also to intrigue and entertain those who  had little or no real interest in GA books, I was expecting quite a lot of scepticism. That may still come, of course. But the reviews so far have been fantastic, beyond my wildest dreams..I've been lucky throughout my career to have been reviewed in national newspapers as well as specialist magazines and more recently blogs, but I've never had so many great reviews in such a short space of time

One or two extremely interesting projects have already been mooted as a result of the book's appearance, and if anything comes of them, that will certainly be a bonus. In my own mind, I am primarily a novelist and short story writer, rather than a writer of non-fiction, but I care about, and take care over, all my books, and I certainly care very much about the story told in The Golden Age of Murder. I'm so pleased that plenty of other people seem to care too.





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Forgotten Book - My Own Murderer

Richard Hull is a writer who has long fascinated me, and I've chosen another of his titles as today's Forgotten Book. This is My Own Murderer, published in 1940, but probably written just before the outbreak of war. I found a very battered old paperback edition in an Amsterdam bookshop many years ago, and I'm glad I did, as I've never seen a copy since. An obscure book, then, one that cries out for a new life as an ebook.

The story is narrated by a solicitor, but not one with whom I was quick to empathise. His name is Richard Henry Sampson, and it's worth noting that this was Richard Hull's real name. Yet we can be sure this wasn't any sort of wish fulfilment, as Sampson is not a heroic figure. Far from it. The choice of name springs from Hull's love of irony.

Sampson's affable but very dodgy client, Alan Renwick, calls on him one evening, and we know from the start that Renwick has killed someone - a valet called Baynes, who was blackmailing him. Yet Sampson's instinct is not to encourage Renwick to go to the police, but rather to help him in concealing his involvement in the crime. The plot thickens pleasingly from there.

This is one of Hull's best books. One of the things I like about it is the way he presents Sampson as a rascal, but very much a loser. He constantly persuades himself that he's ahead of the game, fooling the police and everyone else, when in reality he is getting deeper and deeper into trouble. This kind of self-deception is something that really interests me, as anyone who has read Dancing for the Hangman will understand. And Hull develops the story very nicely, all the way up to a rather chilling finale. I can recommend this novel highly to anyone lucky enough to find a copy.

Yesterday's Papers

Is it  reasonable for writers to have favourites among their own books, or should one love them all equally? Well, my view is that books are not like children, and I certainly do have favourites. They include, for instance, my relatively little-known novel about Dr Crippen, Dancing for the Hangman. As for the Harry Devlin series, I've always had a very soft spot for Yesteday's Papers.

I've been very pleased to see this book, which dates back to the mid-90s, give a  fresh lease of life by digital publishing.The ebook version has a very nice intro from the great Peter Lovesey. And, as is the case with the other Devlin ebooks published by Andrews UK, print versions are also available. But I must admit that I'm still thrilled that a new mass market paperback edition is to be published later this year.

The book is going to feature in the Arcturus Crime Classic series, which already includes All the Lonely People, as well as some wonderful books that date back much further, written by the likes of Francis Durbridge, Erle Stanley Gardner, Anthony Berkeley and many more. It's gratifying to be in such company, especially as few other living writers are on the Arcturus list.

The first paperback edition of Yesterday's Papers was published by Bantam, and subsequently Hodder produced an edition. So the Arcturus book will be the third mass market paperback, not counting the Andrews UK edition. I'm very glad about this, because the story was great fun to write. It dwells heavily on Liverpool's Beatles era, and there are some plot twists I really enjoyed concocting. In some ways, it might just be my most complex mystery from a plot perspective, with three different strands to the storyline. The Lake District Mysteries are, deliberately, less heavily plotted, and one of the benefits of having different series is the chance to tackle the crime novel in various different ways. So much more satisfying than constantly repeating oneself. 

CWA Northern Chapter - Silver Jubilee Week-end

I had a memorable week-end attending the Silver Jubilee celebration of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association in Pickering, North Yorkshire. Our convenor, recently retired former DI Roger Forsdyke, didn't allow a torn achilles tendon to interrupt his arrangements for what began as a celebratory lunch and turned into a rather longer and thoroughly enjoyable celebration that was blessed with excellent weather.

I attended the first meeting of the Northern Chapter back in 1987 - along with my then fiancee, now my long-suffering wife. That meeting was set up by our first convenor, another ex-cop, Peter Walker, who is most famous as author of the books on which the enormously successful TV series Heartbeat was based. And it was great to see Peter, along with his wife Rhoda, this week-end. The idea that partners of writers should be made welcome was Peter's original concept, and a very good one too. It has helped to enhance the social aspect of the Chapter, and has generated many long-lasting friendships.

Peter and Margaret Lewis, two authors and also publishers, were also at that first meeting and not only did they become great friends, a few years ago they actually published one of my books - Dancing for the Hangman. Meg Elizabeth Atkins and her husband Percy Moss were also founder members of the chapter, and it was lovely to see Peter, Margaret, Meg and Percy once again. Sadly, Robert and Louise Barnard, whom again I met that first time 25 years ago were unable to attend due to Bob's poor health, but Bob did write to Roger.to wish all his friends well - sentiments that were very warmly reciprocated. We also remembered the great Reginald Hill, who with his wife Pat was another founder member.

A highlight of the week-end (in addition to the excellent hospitality of the White Swan Inn) was a superb talk about an extraordinary double murder case by Detective Superintendent Steve Smith from North Yorkshire Police, who is pictured at the top of this post along with Roger. Special thanks to Roger and his wife Penny, as well as their son Toby, another police officer, for arranging such a tremendously enjoyable event. Amongst many others, it was great to catch up with Stuart Pawson, Lesley Horton and Sherlock expert David Stuart Davies. We look forward to the next 25 years!

Book Launches

Book launches are great fun for an author, but are they really worth doing? I've heard varying opinions on the issue - just as views differ as to the value of book signings. I've been to plenty of launches by other authors, as well as having a few of my own, and I've enjoyed them. Maybe the key question, though, is: what do you expect to get out of them?

For writers like me who do not sell in vast quantities, realistically, part of the rationale for a book launch is simply to have a good time in the company of like-minded people. Selling books is a bonus, not the main purpose. For bestsellers, of course, it's different, mainly a commercial enterprise. But a launch which focuses just on selling isn't terribly attractive in my opinion.

An unexpected benefit of my last launch, of The Serpent Pool, at Gladstone's Library, was that the setting gave me an idea for part of my next book. So it's very fitting that The Hanging Wood will again be launched at Gladstone's Library, on 28 July. I'm really looking forward to it.

Having a distinctive venue for a launch seems to me to be part of the fun of it all. I've been lucky in this respect. In the past, my launches have taken place at such terrific locations as Manchester Central Library (M.O., the CWA anthology), The Hard Day's Night in Liverpool (Waterloo Sunset) and St George's Hall in the city (Dancing for the Hangman.) Nights to remember and I'm optimistic that 28 July will be equally memorable.

Take My Breath Away

I'm very pleased to confirm that Take My Breath Away, a stand-alone novel of psychological suspense set in London, will be published in the US by Five Star in June. This is a book I'm proud of having written, though its publication in the UK a few years back didn't attract as much attention as I had perhaps naively hoped. Some of those who read it loved it, and there ware no negative reviews, just not very many in all! But Priscilla Masters did feature it in one of her own novels, which really did gratify me.

Here is the cover of the ARC, which has just been sent out to reviewers. I will be fascinated to see the reaction to the book in the States. Five Star published my novel about Crippen, Dancing for the Hangman, a couple of years ago, and the response was very pleasing. They have also published the first two Harry Devlins.

I owe a debt of thanks here to Ed Gorman, whose support for the book helped me to achieve my ambition of an American edition. Ed is a great friend to many crime writers, not least myself, and I'm truly grateful to him.

Slaughter on a Snowy Morn

The Father of Forensics, the biography of Sir Bernard Spilsbury that I covered in this blog recently, has a new true crime book out, again published by Icon. Slaughter on a Snowy Morn deals with a much less familiar subject, an American case that I had never heard of before this book arrived on my doorstep.

The set-up of the story is rather intriguing. This is taken from the back cover of the book:
‘Sing Sing Prison, New York, July 1916. Charles Frederick Stielow, a 37 year old farmhand with the mind of an infant, is just minutes away from the electric chair for a double murder he didn’t commit. With a vengeful legal system baying for blood, his situation looks hopeless. Eight blocks away, Stielow’s wife sobs helplessly in her hotel room, certain she will never see her husband alive again...’

Evans, who clearly has a great passion for forensic science, concludes that the Stielow case sounded ‘a warning bell about the dangers of junk science’. It also represented a milestone in American jurisprudence: ‘for the first time, scientific testimony helped to overturn a murder conviction’. The story is, for Evans, a conspicuous example of the power of human outrage in the face of injustice.

If you are a true crime fan, then I think you will find Evan’s work interesting. This book didn’t appeal to me quite as much as The Father of Forensics, perhaps mainly because of my great interest in Spilsbury and his important role in the Crippen case, which I retold in Dancing for the Hangman. But it’s good to know something about a case of which I was previously unaware.

Talking about Crippen

Public speaking is something I’ve done often over the years, yet I’m far from being a ‘natural’. I spend my youth dreading and therefore avoiding it, and when I became a solicitor, I coped with advocacy (in less formal employment tribunals rather than conventional courts) by treating each case as a battle to be won. I started lecturing on legal topics in my 20s, but found this hard going, and I still try to dodge it when I can.

When my first novel was published, I found my first ever radio interview to be quite an ordeal. But over the years, I gained a lot of practice in talking about my writing, and I became more confident. I also found it easier to talk about crime fiction than, say, legal issues, because crime fiction is what I love. Attending crime conventions and participating in panels also helped to build my confidence.

Since publishing Dancing for the Hangman, I’ve given my talk about Dr Crippen several times. Each time it’s a little different, because I talk without notes and consequently change it a bit every time, varying the parts of the story on which I focus. Last night was different again, because I gave the talk as part of the Lymm Festival, and members of the audience included quite a number of people who know me as a neighbour rather than a writer. And, of course, you don’t want to make a fool of yourself in front of people you might bump into any day.

Fortunately, there was a good audience, with lots of questions, and the atmosphere was very positive, with plenty of books sold at the end of the evening. I really enjoyed sharing my enthusiasm for a story which really is stranger than fiction. The Crippen mystery is endlessly fascinating, and the Lymm Festival-goers seemed to think so too.

Margot on short stories versus novels

Margot Kinberg needs no introduction to readers of her insightful blog, ‘Confessions of a Mystery Novelist’ or her two novels, Publish or Perish (great title!) and B-Very Flat. Her blog posts are not merely regular but detailed and very skilfully conceived, leaving the rest of us in awe at her industry as well as her depth of knowledge. She also manages to find time to be an associate professor in San Diego.

I greatly appreciate her comments on this blog, and I’m delighted she has agreed to contributed a guest post today, as part of her current blog tour, on the pros and cons of short stories as compared to novels. Over to Margot...

‘First, thank you, Martin, for your kind invitation to guest blog. I am truly honored. One of the appealing aspects of crime fiction is that it can take any number of forms. Many crime fiction authors focus on one of those forms or subgenres (e.g. police procedurals, psychological thrillers, historical crime fiction, and so on). Mastering even one of those subgenres or forms takes talent. There are some authors, though, who’ve mastered more than one form of crime fiction. That requires even more talent and hard work, since crime fiction is not the same across the genre. For example, let’s consider crime fiction short stories versus crime fiction novels.

In novel form, a well-written crime fiction story usually involves solidly-developed characters, a strong plot that keeps the reader guessing, and the buildup of tension and suspense as the story goes on. Crime fiction short stories, though, are quite different in some ways. For one thing, there’s little opportunity to develop characters, so the author has to let the reader know as much as possible about the character in a very efficient way. Also, there’s little opportunity for the buildup of tension and suspense. The author has to convey the suspense with far fewer words. There are other differences, too, of course. The linear approach to telling a story that can work well for a short story can be quite unsatisfying in a novel. The slow buildup of tension that can make a novel unforgettable is too slow for the short story. Given these differences, most authors choose one or another of these forms of crime fiction. Some, though, master both.

Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps best known for his short stories, especially the fifty-six short stories in which his sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, features. However, Conan Doyle also wrote four Holmes novels. In fact, Holmes first appears, not in a short story, but in the novel A Study in Scarlet. In that novel, Holmes and his new room-mate, Dr. Watson, discover the murderer of Enoch Drebber and his friend, Joseph Stangerson, who’ve been staying in the same rooming-house. At first, Drebber’s murder is blamed on his landlady’s son, since Drebber had been making advances on the boy’s sister. But then, it looks as though Stangerson may be guilty. When Stangerson, too, is murdered, Holmes looks into both men’s histories, and the clues that connect the deaths. He finds that Drebber’s murder and that of Stangerson are connected with their past lives. Conan Doyle wrote three other Holmes novels, as well as other novels of historical fiction and numerous other novels and stories.

Agatha Christie is usually remembered for her novels, in particular those featuring her sleuths Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. However, she also wrote several short story collections. Some of them, such as The Labors of Hercules, Partners in Crime and The Thirteen Problems feature her famous sleuths. Other collections of her stories, though, have featured other characters. One of the most memorable of Christie’s short stories is The Witness for the Prosecution, which appears in The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. In that story, Leonard Vole is tried for the murder of wealthy Emily French, who befriended him without knowing that Vole was married. Vole’s attorney wants to enlist Vole’s wife, Romaine, as a defense witness, but in one of the story’s many twists, she plans to appear as a witness for the prosecution. Romaine Vole’s reasons for appearing for the prosecution (and, of course, the outcome of the trial) make for compelling reading.

The writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, better known as Ellery Queen, wrote dozens of Ellery Queen novels from 1929’s The Roman Hat Mystery through 1971’s A Fine and Private Place. While a few of those novels didn’t feature Ellery Queen himself, the vast majority of them did. The prolific “Queen team” also wrote several short story collections featuring Queen. One of their more famous short stories is The Adventure of the One Penny Black, in which Queen solves a baffling series of thefts. Several copies of the same book have been stolen from the owners. At the same time, there’s been a robbery of a very valuable stamp from the collection of the Ulm brothers, a pair of stamp collectors. In an interesting twist, Queen finds out how these events are all tied together.

Ross McDonald, who created the famous private investigator Lew Archer, was also talented both at novels and short stories. In the course of his career, McDonald wrote nearly twenty novels featuring his empathetic but world-weary private detective. Many consider Lew Archer to be one of the groundbreaking characters in the genre. McDonald was also the author of several Lew Archer short stories, including The Singing Pigeon. In that story, Archer’s on his way back to Los Angeles from Mexico when he decides to stop for the night at the small, family-owned Siesta Motel. All is not as peaceful as it looks at the hotel, as Archer finds out when he discovers that there’s been a murder there. He also discovers that the murder is connected to the disappearance of a young woman he met at the hotel. McDonald wrote other short stories, too, that don’t feature Archer.

And then there’s Ed McBain, the author of the very popular 87th Precinct series featuring Detective Steve Carella. He, too, is well-known for his novels, but he’s also written several short stories. One of them is One Down, the story of Ben, a traveling sales representative who finds a unique way to deal with his domestic complications. This and McBain’s other stories are an interesting departure from his 87th Precinct series, but they still have his distinctive style.

Ruth Rendell has also carved a literary niche for herself as a novelist and as a short story writer. She is, of course, the author of the popular Inspector Reg Wexford series of novels. She’s also written several standalone novels, both as Ruth Rendell and as Barbara Vine. Novels such as From Doon With Death (Rendell) and A Dark Adapted Eye (Vine) have established Rendell’s reputation as a novelist. She’s also, though, written several collections of short stories. Her stories have the same intensity that her novels do and she’s been able to create memorable scenes and characters with them. For instance, in Catamount, which appears in Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories, we meet Nora and Gordon, who visit their friends, Carrie and Chuck, who live in the Rocky Mountains. Over the course of several visits, Nora finds that she has a certain fear of how big and even un-tamed everything is. It turns out that her fears are justified when a severe storm strikes the area where she’s staying on the same night that Chuck falls ill and desperately needs medical assistance. As we follow Nora’s attempt to help her friends, we see how Rendell explores the psychology of fear.

I would be more than remiss not to mention the contributions my talented blog host has made both to the world of crime fiction novels and the world of crime fiction short stories. Martin Edwards’ Harry Devlin novels and Lake District novels have justly received commendation. They feature strong characters, engaging plots and unexpected twists and turns. His recent novel, Dancing For the Hangman is a fascinating fictional look at a real-life murder case, the Crippen case, from the point of view of Crippen himself. He’s written other novels and non-fiction as well. But Edwards is also an award-winning short-story writer. Some of his stories feature his sleuth, attorney Harry Devlin. Others don’t. For instance, in 24 Hours from Tulsa, we meet Lomas, a sales and marketing director for whom the world is changing so fast that he’s struggling to survive in it. His children have grown up so fast that they’re nearly strangers to him. He’s found out his wife’s been unfaithful. His company is putting more and more pressure on him and his colleagues to keep increasing sales in a world where people are purchasing online. Even the traffic patterns are no longer what they used to be. Lomas’ stress at having to deal with this new world is causing some people, including his boss, to think he’s “losing it,” and that only adds to Lomas’ anger, resentment and, in a sense, bewilderment at what’s happening around him. We feel Lomas’ increasing rage and fear as, desperate to retain some control over his life, he takes a drastic step.

Writing crime fiction stories in any form can be challenging. Writing different forms of crime fiction takes particular flexibility and talent, and I salute those who accomplish this successfully. Which are your favorite authors who write both novels and short stories?

Thanks once again, Martin, for your hospitality.’

Plot, Pace and Information

Every now and then in this blog, I touch on an issue concerning the writing of crime fiction, and I’ve been interested to see how many comments some of these posts have prompted. One example was when I asked about the gruesomeness of some modern crime fiction. And another came last Monday, with my post ‘Too Much Information?’

These are topics that intrigue me, though I don’t think there are simple answers to the questions I have posed, and I’m glad that you seem to have found them interesting too. Many readers, it seems, are fascinated by the craft of writing, and give it a lot of thought.

A number of comments on ‘Too Much Information?’ made the point that the key issue is that of balance, and I agree. If background information slows down the development of the story, that’s a drawback. But background information conveyed subtly can add a layer of interest to the book, and can also, sometimes, reflect some of the key themes.

If I were to choose an example from my own work, it might be The Serpent Pool. There’s quite a bit of stuff in there about Thomas De Quincey, which (I like to think) is interesting in its own right. But it’s also intended to cast some light on the plot, both in relation to the role that Daniel Kind plays in unravelling the central mystery, and in conveying ideas about motivation to murder.

Books that have a historical setting tend, by definition, to include a good deal of information about past times. Ellis Peters’ books about Brother Cadfael provide a classic example. And when I wrote Dancing for the Hangman, I tried to integrate historical background with the depiction of Crippen as a credible, if by no means wholly likeable, character. The pace of modern life is one of the reasons why a novel set today can seldom afford to become bogged down with an excess of background detail. But provided that detail is relevant and interesting, it can certainly add to reader enjoyment.

Dancing and The Coffin Trail

I’ve received my copies of the audio book version of Dancing for the Hangman. It’s unabridged and published by Soundings. Until a couple of years ago, the audio versions of my novels were on cassette tapes. Now they are in CD format – a sign of changing listener preferences.

Many of my audio books have been read by the excellent Gordon Griffin. This time, because the story is told in the voice of Crippen, an American, the reader is Jeff Harding, who has a number of notable audio books to his credit.

The reprinted UK paperback edition of The Coffin Trail is at last available and I’m really pleased with the look of it. The new cover design that Allison & Busby have come up with really appeals to me. One change which I hadn’t anticipated was the switch in size – this version is larger than its predecessors.

My previous paperbacks have been in ‘A format’, and until a couple of years ago this tended to be the format used by publishers for crime novels. There has, however, been a move towards the larger ‘B format’, which was in the past more typically associated with mainstream ‘literary’ novels, and the publishing director at Allison & Busby, Susie Dunlop, felt that it would be good for the design and style of my books to move in that direction. I’m very pleased about this, and pleased in particular that those readers who were keen to get hold of a fresh copy of the first book in the Lake District series will again be able to do so.