Audio books and Gallows Court

This week, Sheila Mitchell has been recording the full-length audio book version of Gallows Court. I was thrilled when she proposed this to my publishers, and so were they. Over the years, I've been lucky in the actors who have recorded my books for audio. Gordon Griffin in particular has done sterling work, and last month I had the pleasure of meeting Julia Franklin, who recorded The Cipher Garden some years back. But this is the first time Sheila has been involved with any of my books.

Sheila has been (as was her late husband Harry Keating, formerly a distinguished President of the Detection Club) a friend for many years. I've learned a great deal from her about such things as voice projection - not that I'm much good at it, even now, though she's done her best to train me! Harry, I gather, recorded one of his own novels, before concluding it was best left to the professionals. I very much agree, and I can't see myself ever wanting to record a novel of my own, even though I did once record a short story, "No Flowers", for an Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast.

Done well (as it needs to be), audio recording is a demanding job. Sheila has recorded countless audio books over the years, and her preparation continues to be absolutely meticulous. During recent conversations, I was interested to find out how she goes about it, and it's become clear to me that an in-depth understanding of the characters and incidents, as well as oddities of pronunciation, is invaluable for someone about to embark on a marathon of reading aloud.

I was greatly impressed by the list of questions she fired at me after her second reading of the text; thankfully, I managed to figure out the answers. Her incisive analysis of the tricky bits will, I feel sure, be a real benefit. She spent the first three days of this week full-time (about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) in the studio, recording Gallows Court. That she's been willing to do this is something I regard as an honour and I very much look forward to listening to the result.

Invisible Ink by Christopher Fowler

I'm very keen on "books about books" and have just finished reading one that is an absolute gem. It's early days, but if I read a more entertaining book about books in the whole of 2013, I'll count myself extremely fortunate. I'm talking about a little volume called Invisible Ink: How 100  Great Authors Disappeared. The publisher - not previously known to me - is Strange Attractor Press, and the author is Christopher Fowler.

Chris Fowler is someone I've only met very briefly in person, though we do share an agent, but I've been delighted to receive a couple of brilliant short stories from him for CWA anthologies, featuring his series characters Bryant and May. His writing is distinguished by a combination of intelligence and wit that is very much to my taste, and these qualities are constantly in evidence throughout this little book.

The title really is self-explanatory. It's based on a long series of articles Chris Fowler wrote for  The Independent, and at times the pieces show their journalistic origins. There are a few errors of fact, of the kind that crop up in all books like this. For instance, Harry Keating did not produce "the definitive biography of Agatha Christie", but rather edited a book of essays about her. It is also a pity that not only does the book lack an index, there isn't even a list of contents. But at least this meant that it was a pleasant surprise to keep reading and find such great choices of author and so many fascinating and unexpected anecdotes.

There are far too many good lines for me to quote them all, but I really loved the description of Ronald Firbank as "a sort of polar opposite to Andy McNab." Quite a lot of interesting crime writers are featured (but is Harry, who died less than two years ago, really forgotten? it's a grim thought), including the likes of Gladys Mitchell, John Dickson Carr and Austin Freeman. However, there are some people I confess I've never even heard of and some of their personal stories were gripping. Fowler's gift is to make you want to read what his chosen hundred (or at least, most of them) have written, even though each of his pieces is short as well as snappy. All I want now is for him to find another hundred equally fascinating authors to tell us about. In the meantime, I am sure many readers of this blog will enjoy this book as much as I did.

CADS 56

I mentioned the latest issue of that terrific magazine CADS the other day and I’ve been dipping into it, as usual, with great pleasure. The range of articles is as wide as ever. Examples include an excellent piece by Dick Stewart on Little Dorrit, a book which I have to own up to never having read. There’s a history of the spy story, an examination of the crime novels of Macdonald Hastings by the indefatigable Philip Scowcroft, and an account of the first Dennis Wheatley Convention. I’m not really a fan of Wheatley, but his Murder Dossiers were a fascinating idea, and there is an article about them on my website.

A number of current crime novelists read and contribute to CADS. Among them is Harry Keating, who has written an entertaining piece about the return of Inspector Ghote, his most popular character, in A Small Case for Inspector Ghote? Marvin Lachman continues his features about mystery series characters who have made the transition from printed page to television, and includes a long list of recent genre-related obituaries. There’s an intriguing article by John Herrington called ‘The Case of the Novel that Never Was’, about a banned detective story of the 30s, and a range of short reviews by the phenomenally knowledgeable Bob Adey.

Bob Cornwell contributes an assessment of reviews of crime novels published in 2008, and does an extremely interesting Q&A with Len Deighton, but the emphasis of the magazine is on books and short stories of the past. There’s a continuation of Nick Kimber’s article about S.S. Van Dine and Philo Vance, while an academic with a great interest in crime fiction, B.J. Rahn, writes about ‘The Mystery of Ernest Bramah’.

Bramah, by the way, created the blind detective Max Carrados – but his first book was English Farming and Why I Turned It Up. Later, he published A Guide to the Varieties and Rarity of English Royal Copper Coins. Who says crime writers can’t be versatile?