Shrewsbury and the CWA conference

I've just returned from Shrewsbury after an exhilarating weekend. It was the CWA's annual conference, an event I've rarely missed over the past thirty years. The setting was lovely - the ancient town is crammed with history and interest, and the Lion Hotel, whose previous guests have included Darwin, de Quincey and Paganini, was a splendidly historic venue.

The speakers included the legendary investigative psychologist David Canter, author of the Gold Dagger-winning Criminal Shadows, who shared many insights about the pros and cons of offender profiling. A psychiatrist explored the way that her discipline can contribute to cutting edge fiction. A forensic expert cleverly updated us on latest forensic techniques, and how they might be used in solving The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. There were talks about Ellis Peters, and about marketing books in the modern age. A leading scientific advisor to government was the after dinner speaker. And there was much more besides...

Quite a bit of alcohol was quaffed, and we also had a visit to Tanners' ancient wine cellars, again fascinating and historic. A ghost tour around the town was followed by a trip to the castle and the amazing public library, where an extremely old building which once housed Shrewsbury School has been cleverly integrated into a modern facility. I've never seen a library like it. There was also a book-signing at Waterstones.

It was great fun to catch up with old friends and also to meet many of the CWA's newer members, such as playwright Derek Webb, novelists Stephen Norman and Jo Summers, and human rights campaigner Stephen Jakobi. Great credit goes to Cilla Masters for organising things with such verve, and to Dea Parkin for all her support work. As for the CWA's AGM, it was a well-attended forum for lively debate and some very good exchanges of ideas for the future. And the upshot is that I've been re-elected as Chair of the CWA for a further (and definitely, definitely final) twelve-month term. It's a great honour to lead such a thriving and fun organisation. 

The Spaniard's Curse - 1958 film review

I sat down to watch The Spaniard's Curse without high hopes, to be honest. The title didn't inspire much confidence, but the Talking Pictures TV channel has dug up are some hidden gems, and I was taken by surprise when the opening credits revealed that Kenneth Hyde's screenplay was based on a story by Edith Pargeter. And that, of course, was the real name of an author I've long admired - Ellis Peters.

The original story is, in fact, a novella, "The Assize of the Dying"; I hadn't even realised that it had been turned into a film. It's a reminder that she was doing very good work long before the era of Brother Cadfael. And the story is certainly a good one, a cut above many of the other short black and white British movies of the 50s.

We begin with a jury worrying over its verdict in a murder trial. Stevenson, the accused (Basil Dignam, in relatively early and untypical role) is ultimately found guilty, and when asked if he has anything to say, he uses the formula of an ancient Spanish curse on the judge (Michael Hordern), prosecuting counsel, and jury foreman. Hence the melodramatic title, although I feel it is  much inferior to The Assize of the Dying, which strikes me as genuinely evocative.

Soon both Stevenson and the jury foreman die, and attention focuses on the judge and his domestic circle, comprising his dashing journalist son (Tony Wright, who played Jack Havoc in the film version of The Tiger in the Smoke), his ward (Susan Beaumont, an attractive young woman whose screen career was bafflingly brief) and her new boyfriend (Canadian actor Lee Patterson). Hordern gives an excellent performance in quite a challenging role.

The set-up of the story is full of promise, and there's a very pleasing red herring which fooled me completely for a while. After that, it faltered a little, and personally I felt that had something to do with Patterson's lack of charisma. The ending also felt a bit rushed. On the whole, though, I found this an entertaining film, a little different from the run-of-the-mill, and it's worth a look if you get the chance.




 

Ellis Peters and Wellington Literary Festival

This year sees the centenary of the birth of Edith Pargeter, better known to crime lovers as Ellis Peters, the creator of Brother Cadfael. Although she often travelled abroad, set many books overseas, and was a noted translator of works written in Czech, she was first and foremost a woman of Shropshire, the county where she was born and spent nearly all her life, and which featured in many of her best books. Pleasingly, Wellington Town Council in Shropshire decided to celebrate her at its Literary Festival this year and I was honoured to be asked to be the guest speaker, discussing her life and work.

I imagine the invitation stemmed in part from the fact that I edited a collection of obscure Peters stories for a book published by Crippen and Landru some years ago, The Trinity Cat, and in part from the fact that I've written about her work on a few occasions, for instance in Following the Detectives, edited by Maxim Jakubowski. So I was glad to accept, although as I journeyed down the M6 to Wellington through ghastly traffic, I reflected that travel hasn't improved as much as it should since Cadfael journeyed around in the twelfth century.

One thing that impressed me enormously was the venue for the Festival. This is a large and recently built leisure centre which includes a public library, and much else besides. The very pleasant town councillor who introduced my talk was clearly proud of the centre, and quite right too. This is exactly the sort of project that provides tremendous benefits to a community, and my impression was that the facilities are well used and much appreciated.

Putting a library together with other leisure resources may sometimes be complicated and far from cheap, but the social dividends can be hugely rewarding if it is done well (in a more modest way, it's been done in my home village,Lymm, and again the results have been admirable.) In the 21st century, when maintaining social cohesion is, in many ways, as important as ever it has been, a high calibre venue such as this brings people together and ensures that events like the Literary Festival are not only possible but likely to be successful and greatly valued.

The festival committee had certainly done a good job in getting an eclectic list of speakers: it's not often that Germaine Greer and I are metaphorically rubbing shoulders in the same programme. Although I've visited nearby Ironbridge before, I 'd never stopped in Wellington previously, but I was really struck by what the local people, and their authority, have created. And I'm sure Edith Pargeter would have been impressed as well.

Festivals

Festivals come in all shapes and sizes, and I have enjoyed attending a wide variety over the years. One of the most upmarket was the Cheltenham Literary Festival, where the Murder Squad was invited some years ago - in fact, it was one of the relatively few occasions when all seven of us took part in the same event - a performance written specially for the occasion which took place in an old courthouse. An enjoyable and memorable occasion.

There have also been a good many smaller scale events, ranging from literary festivals at nearby Knutsford to the distinctly unorthodox Kidwelly ebook festival last year, which created a great deal of controversy, but at least gave me a fun week-end in a pretty part of south Wales on a sunny week-end.

This year I'm looking forward very much to Gladfest, scheduled to take place in August in the wonderful setting of Gladstone's Library in north Wales. I'll be hosting a Victorian murder mystery event on the Saturday evening, and among the others who are appearing is Stella Duffy, a writer of distinction, about whom I hope to write more another day. I'll also be talking about the late Ellis Peters, creator of Brother Cadfael, at the Wellington Festival in Shropshire in October.

But today has seen the finale of an annual "must" for me, the local Lymm Festival, which combines cultural events with a wide range of other activities. It's been running for a decade now, and goes from strength to strength. Today we've had a number of guests, including Kate Ellis and her husband, wandering round local gardens which have had an open day. I'm fascinated by the marvellous gardens that lie,often quite unexpectedly, behind all kinds of houses and this annual event, like the brilliant National Garden Scheme open days, of which I'm a big fan, is a lot of fun. And something more. It's given me an idea for my next book....

Following the Detectives

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve contributed a couple of essays, on Ellis Peters’ Shropshire and Inspector Morse’s Oxford, to a forthcoming book edited by Maxim Jakubowski, dealing with real life scenes of fictional crime. Two subjects I found very agreeable to research as well as write about. Marvellous, contrasting, yet each very English.

The book is due to come out on 25 September, published by New Holland Press, and I’m looking forward to reading the other contributions. All the more so as the authors are a distinguished list – I feel as though I’m in the best company.

This comes as no real surprise though, as Maxim has a knack of compiling very good books. I’ve had the pleasure of contributing to a number of them, and on another day I’ll write about a long ago volume called 100 Great Detectives for which I wrote an essay.

Here’s what the blurb has to say about the new book: ‘Whether it be the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Ystad of the Swedish Wallander, Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco or Donna Leon's Venice, the settings chosen by crime fiction authors have helped those writers to bring their fictional investigators to life and to infuse their writing with a sense of danger and mystery. "Following the Detectives" follows the trail of over 20 of crime fiction's greatest investigators, discovering the cities and countries in which they live and work. Edited by one of the leading voices in crime fiction, Maxim Jakubowski, each entry is written by a crime writer, journalist or critic with a particular expertise in that detective and the fictional crimes that have taken place in each city's dark streets and hidden places. The book includes beautifully designed maps with all the major locations that have featured in a book or series of books - buildings, streets, bars, restaurants and locations of crimes and discoveries - allowing the reader to follow Inspector Morse's footsteps through the college squares of Oxford or while away hours in a smoky Parisian cafe frequented by Inspector Maigret, for example.'

Ellis Peters memories

I mentioned Crippen & Landru the other day in connection with their new book by Philip Wylie. A few years back, I co-edited one of their books, a Lost Classic, featuring obscure stories by Edith Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters - The Trinity Cat and Other Mysteries.

My co-editor was Sue Feder. She was someone I never met, but she was a great fan of, and expert in, the work of Ellis Peters. Doug Greene introduced us via email and we corresponded about the various unpublished (in volume form) stories that Peters had written and which might be suitable for the collection. Sue’s enthusiasm was infections, and it was a sad blow when, some time before the book was published, she died after a long fight against serious illness.

I’ve been involved in various literary collaborations over the years, and I think of the Peters venture with considerable affection. The stories in The Trinity Cat, by and large, are set in fictionalised versions of her beloved Shropshire Many of them were written in the 50s, but they retain their charm, I think. She was a capable writer, though I’d describe her plotting as workmanlike rather than brilliant. Agatha Christie she was not –but she was much better than the great Agatha at evoking place.

I like to think Sue Feder would have been proud of ‘our book’. It was a pleasure to collaborate with her, albeit at a distance. It’s an odd thing, by the way, but three of the books I’ve produced over the years have been co-written with people whom, for one reason or another, I never actually got to meet.

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.

Following the Detectives in Shropshire

Maxim Jakubowski’s book Following the Detectives should appear later this year, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve contributed a couple of essays to it. By coincidence, over the past two week-ends, I’ve revisited the scenes of crime fiction that I’ve discussed in Maxim’s book.

On the way down to the CWA conference in Abergavenny, we drove through Shropshire, one of the greenest and pleasantest of counties. Ellis Peters, a native Salopian, was passionate about Shropshire, and that passion accounts for a good deal of the success of her books, both those featuring Brother Cadfael, and the others, mainly featuring various members of the Felse family.

A writer of note who has lived in Shropshire for a number of years is Priscilla Masters, and she too has sometimes set her work in the county. Like Peters, Cilla Masters has an empathy with the English countryside that shines through in her writing.

The photos were taken in Bridgnorth, one of Shropshire’s attractive and historic towns. I was fascinated to learn that the wall of Bridgnorth’s ruined castle leans at n even more dizzying angle than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Cadfael Country

I’ve been asked to contribute a couple of essays to a book about locations associated with crime fiction, and by a lucky chance, I’ve managed to visit them both in the last week. One was Oxford, the other Shropshire.

Now, Shropshire is a green and pleasant county, but its tranquillity was regularly disturbed for fictional purposes in the books of the late Ellis Peters. Peters (whose real name was Edith Pargeter) was an author of considerable distinction for many years, but it was only with the success of the Brother Cadfael series, the first of which she published (expecting it to be a one-off) at the age of 64 that she became an international best-seller.

Peters was born in the little village of Horsehay, close to Ironbridge Gorge, and she retained a lifelong devotion to her native county, which was where she lived for most of her life. It’s worth noting that not only in the Cadfael Chronicles, but also in her Felse series, which have a contemporary setting, she makes use of the Shropshire landscape, though she tends to disguise it.

Shropshire is an attractive place to visit. There are many lovely rural walks, I am sure, but last week I concentrated on the old and charming towns. Ludlow and Shrewsbury are terrific, but there are other appealing places, such as Bridgnorth and Church Stretton. As Peters said:

‘I have used this landscape, native and familiar to me, in all my books; sometimes in its veritable shape and by its own names, sometimes with its edges diffused into a topography between reality and dream, but just as recognisable, for those who know it as I do, as if it had been mapped with the precision of an Ordnance Survey sheet. I did not set out deliberately to make use of my origins. Shropshire is simply in my blood, and in the course of creation the blood gets into the ink, and sets in motion a heartbeat and a circulation that brings the land to life

Cadfael's Home Town

On my trip to Ludlow, I stopped off at Shrewsbury, to look around a town I like a great deal. The last time I went there was for a legal case, and it’s been a few years since I’ve had the chance to wander round the old streets at leisure. It was good to be back.

I visited somewhere I hadn’t, oddly enough, gone to before. This was Shrewsbury Abbey, an ancient place made famous to crime fans by Ellis Peters’ books about Brother Cadfael. Needless to say, the books were on sale inside, but it’s also right to say that there’s a lot more to the Abbey than just the literary connection. It has a fascinating history, which Peters chronicled faithfully in her best-sellers about the twelfth century sleuth.

Cadfael was, of course, a herbalist, and I couldn’t resist taking a shot of a shop window advert for one of his modern day successors. I also wandered down the Abbey Foregate, which is now by-passed by most of the traffic, and which is thus rather more tranquil than the bustling place described in the books.

There was also time for a quick look at the Castle and its very attractive gardens. But because of the need to press on towards Ludlow, I couldn’t stay long, and I’m hoping to make a return visit to Shrewsbury before too long.

Mystery Islands

I love islands – especially small ones. They seem to me to be tranquil places, yet full of mystery. The best Golden Age detective story (in my opinion) is set on a small island – Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. And the enduring appeal of the island setting is highlighted by the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

For years, my favourite island has been Herm, in the English Channel, a marvellous little place, but now it has been displaced at the top of my list by Holy Island, aka Lindisfarne (not to be confused with the 1970s folk/rock group of the same name), off the coast of Northumberland, not far from the Scottish border.

Staying overnight in the Old Manor House, right next to the ancient priory, was a great experience. The weather was glorious and that meant plenty of opportunity to explore the main sights, even though time ran out before it was possible to roam to some of the less visited parts of the island.

Holy Island is a place of pilgrimage, and no wonder. I found it utterly fascinating. I am not aware that it has featured in any mystery novels, though perhaps Ellis Peters or Peter Tremayne may have set medieval stories there. But it would be a perfect setting for a modern day mystery in the classic mould.