The Unbreakable Alibi

I’ve watched another in the 1982 TV series of Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime, starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This story was The Unbreakable Alibi, and really it is a skit on the work of Freeman Wills Crofts, the alibi king, whose patient cop Inspector French tirelessly unravelled the most complex alibis. You tend to wonder why criminals in the French era bothered with such elaborate plans when the great man had his train timetable ready to consult at every opportunity.

The story was light but agreeable, with a bit more substance in terms of plot than some of the others I’ve seen in this series. As ever, Annis’ vivacious performance keeps it all going pretty well.

It did make me wonder about the emphasis that crime writers place on alibis. The high water mark was surely in the Golden Age, when Crofts was at his peak, in the 20s and 30s. Writers did rather depend on the trains running to time. After J.J. Connington wrote The Two Tickets Puzzle, Dorothy L. Sayers doffed her cap to him and his book when elaborating upon his idea a year or so later in Five Red Herrings.

Today, alibis still play a part in a good many books - although the same tends not to be true of train timetables! Alibis crop up occasionally in my own work, but I haven’t tended to devote a lot of space to them, preferring to concentrate on other ‘techniques of misdirection’ when putting together a whodunit-style plot. But one of these days, perhaps, I’ll try to create an ‘unbreakable’ alibi for one of my own culprits....

Travelling and Dorothy L. Sayers

I’ll be travelling for a few days, but I’ve scheduled blog posts for each day of my absence, so there will be plenty of varied reading matter for regular visitors to ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ However, it may be difficult for me to access a pc while I’m away, so please forgive me if I take longer than usual to post or reply to any comments.

It’s been a year since I’ve had a real holiday and I have to say that I’m looking forward to this one, even though no doubt – as usual – it will prove all too brief! Today would have been my mother’s birthday; for many years, she came along for the summer holiday, so that we could celebrate with her in style. This is the first time she hasn’t been around, but I’ll be thinking of her. And thinking, also, of the mystery novels in which she and I shared enjoyment for many years.

She was a great Dorothy L. Sayers fan, and so I became one too. Her favourite was Gaudy Night, but mine is a near-tie between The Nine Tailors and Murder Must Advertise. I would also put in a word for The Documents in the Case, a very interesting experiment in mystery writing, if not a complete success. Neither of us cared for Five Red Herrings, a rather plodding mystery, but at least the Galloway setting is well evoked. And I'm honoured to say that I've just been invited to give the 19th Dorothy L. Sayers Lecture next year, as part of the Essex Book Festival, by the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. Not sure what to speak about yet, but plenty of time to prepare!

Gaudy Night

I made a mistake with Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night. Having devoured, and enjoyed hugely, most of her output, I read it in 1970 at the age of 14. At this point, I'd never once visited Oxford (and certainly I'd never dreamed that one day I’d be a student at Lord Peter's old college, or be invited to tea at Somerville, Sayers' college, on which the fictional Shrewsbury College was based.)

The result was that I was horribly disappointed – the youthful Martin Edwards really didn’t fit the profile of the sort of reader who would get something out of a long story, set in an all-women’s college, that doesn’t even include a decent murder mystery. Even after I fell in love with Oxford, and even though I remain a fairly ardent Sayers fan, I never broached Gaudy Night again.

I felt it was time to give it another chance, but I decided to wimp out by watching the 1987 tv adaptation by Philip Broadley (a prolific and talented writer of mystery screenplays, who sadly died a few weeks ago.) It was part of the series featuring Edward Petherbridge as Wimsey and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane – casting choices made in Heaven, I think.

I enjoyed the adaptation much more than the book, and appreciated the thinking behind the story in a way I failed to do as a teenager. But I remain to be convinced that Gaudy Night is a masterpiece of detective fiction (a view that a number of good judges hold.) Along with Five Red Herrings and Busman’s Honeymoon, it ranks as the type of Sayers ‘mystery’ that simply doesn’t excite my interest because the good stuff is buried with too much long-winded material that isn’t necessary for the story.

It wasn’t the fault of the excellent cast, or of Broadley, who did his best to jazz things up, but still couldn’t avoid the need to pad the story out. My own feeling is that, if anyone tries to adapt Gaudy Night in future, the best plan would be to make fairly radical changes to the action of the plot, while trying to remain faithful to some of the underlying themes – and to make it short and sharp.