Slaughter in Southwold - and Suffolk

I've just returned from my first proper visit to Suffolk - a county I've only passed through briefly in the past, en route to somewhere else. What a lovely place I've missed... Suffolk was beloved of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, and features in some of their books, as well as in plenty of other good crime novels. Rendell even published a glossy illustrated guide to the county. Suffice to say that when I was invited to take part in the Slaughter in Southwold Crime Fiction Festival, I accepted very quickly indeed.

And what a successful festival it was - a huge credit to Charlotte Clark and her willing team, and to Suffolk Libraries, for whom Charlotte works as an executive library manager. She told me that the festival originally began in conjunction with the CWA, a great example of collaboration. Everything was very well-organised, and I bumped into old friends such as Val McDermid, Kate Ellis, Felix Francis, and Mick Herron, as well as having the pleasure of meeting Nicci French (that is, the husband and wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) for the first time. The attendance was excellent and Beccles Books also did a grand job of selling Gallows Court among other titles.

Southwold is a very long way from where I live - roughly a 500 mile return trip that involves some of the most depressingly clogged motorway routes in Europe, so I was determined to make the most of my trip. Suffolk boasts some delightful market towns, several of them with second hand bookshops, and on the way down I stopped off at Bungay, and wandered round the old castle ruins (above) as well as just about resisting the temptation to add to my book collection.

I really enjoyed my first visit to Southwold, a very upmarket little resort, with an inland lighthouse and pretty little beach huts - you can buy one too, if you have £75,000 to spare! I travelled to the equally smart Aldeburgh (above photos of Moot Hall, Martello Tower and marina), just down the coast. Both towns are home to lovely, high calibre independent bookshops which I enjoyed visiting very much. I also made a point of going to Dunwich (above photos of boat on beach and priory gateway), site of a once great port, now lost to the waves; a ruined priory still remains inland. The notion of a lost village, let alone a lost port, has always fascinated me. There was also a chance to take a look at Leiston Abbey (above, lower photos), a very impressive ruin.

Making my way up the coast, I spent one night at a hotel on the edge of Oulton Broad - I hadn't realised that the Norfolk Broads actually extend into Suffolk. As I was very lucky with the weather, I couldn't resist the lure of a boat trip along the broad, Oulton Dyke, and the River Waveney - a truly delightful experience. I also continued to explore the towns and villages of the area - the likes of Thorpeness (rather close to the nuclear reactor at Sizewell, but very attractive), Burgh St Peter, and Beccles, where I finally succumbed to temptation, having managed to find a couple of inscribed crime novels at yet another second hand bookshop.

And then it was on to Sutton Hoo, legendary as the site of Anglo-Saxon burials, and pleasantly situated above the River Deben. After that, on to Bury St Edmunds, a cathedral city as charming as Wells which I visited the other week, and dinner with Kate and her husband Roger, who were also doing the tourist thing, having had a similarly long journey.

 On my last day in Suffolk, I explored the lovely village of Long Melford and then the gorgeous town of Lavenham. They say that Lavenham is England's best-preserved medieval town, and I don't doubt it. The Guildhall in the market place is a National Trust property, well worth visiting. And I decided to fit in one more National Trust visit before returning home. This was to Ickworth, a hugely impressive property. To my astonishment, as I was looking round the rooms, one of the guides addressed me by name. It turned out she's read all my Lake District and Liverpool novels. Believe me, that's not an everyday occurrence! It's hard for me to put into word how gratifying such encounters are. What a marvellous time I had. I'm so grateful to those who helped to make it possible, and to make it so special.

The CWA Dagger in the Library

I've written many times on this blog, and elsewhere, about my lifelong love of libraries. I vividly remember being, at the age of ten, allowed to become the smallest member of the adult section of Northwich Library, in order to feed my addiction to Agatha Christie, and then to many other crime writers. And in recent years, in recent weeks even, I've enjoyed doing a range of library events up and down the country, as well as hosting Alibis in the Archives at Gladstone's Library.

So you can imagine that I'm as pleased as Punch to find my name on the shortlist for the CWA Dagger in the Library, along with such luminaries as Nicci French, Peter May, Simon Kernick, Rebecca Tope, and Keith Miles (aka Edward Marston). This is an award where the nominees are selected by librarians throughout Britain, and I'm duly honoured.

There are some truly wonderful libraries in this country. It's been a privilege for me, over the past few years, to become quite closely associated with the British Library, and that relationship, in particular with Rob Davies and his team in the publications department, has brought me enormous pleasure. The same goes for Louisa Yates and her colleagues at Gladstone's, a very different place, an independent library run as a charity, and rich in history, atmosphere and charm.

And then there are the public libraries which mean so much to the communities of which they form part. I've enjoyed working, for instance, with local and area librarians, and also a Friends Group in Stockton Heath which aims to support the professional staff in a variety of ways.

Hard to believe, but it's almost two years since I wrote about the threat posed to Lymm Library, a short walk away from my home. Like other local people, I was deeply worried about its future, but I'm thrilled to be able to report that it's just been announced that the library is not only to be saved, the empty space in the building is to be utilised for the benefit of the community: the detail is here.

So there is a great deal of room for optimism about libraries, despite the undoubted financial pressures they face, if all of us who believe in libraries pull together. I look forward very much to trying to play a part, in the coming months and years, to trying to play a small part in helping their almost limitless potential to be realised for the benefit of communities not just in my neck of the woods, but further afield as well.

Before We Met - Lucie Whitehouse - review

Before We Met is a widely acclaimed psychological suspense novel by Lucie Whitehouse that was published not long ago. In the wake of all the publicity about the films of Gone Girl and Before I Go to Sleep., I decided to try another book in broadly the same field. Unlike Gone Girl, however, but like Louise Millar's Accidents Happen, Before We Met is set in England (apart from a few flashback scenes in the US).

I'm a fan of psychological suspense, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who is sorry that Minette Walters has not been very productive of late. Her The Sculptress is one of my all-time favourites in this genre. I also very much enjoyed A Likeness in Stone by Julia  Wallis Martin, another excellent novelist who has sadly been absent from the scene for quite a while. Nicci French, too, has moved away from superb stand-alones to the greater orthodoxy of a series. There's no shortage of other writers working in the same field, and achieving similar success. Sophie Hannah, to name but one - even though, interestingly, she has just digressed into the very different world of Hercule Poirot.

In Lucie Whitehouse's book, Hannah is a young woman who seems to have it all. She's recently married Mark,a wealthy businessman, who is devoted to her, and although she's not found a new job since marriage brought her back home from the States, that is surely only a question of time. But one day she goes to meet Mark at the airport - and he doesn't show up. What has happened, and is her lovely marriage all it seemed? No prizes, I'm afraid, for guessing the answer to the second question.

I was interested that Whitehouse chose to tell her story in the third rather than the first person. This risks some loss of immediacy, but I found the first half of the book gripping. Once one particular secret was revealed, I felt the story became relatively conventional, and certainly more orthodox than the best-sellers by Gillian Flynn and S. J. Watson, but it's still a decent read from start to finish. .

#Youdunnit - tweeting about murder, and other crime stories with a gimmick

#Youdunnit is a slim and interesting volume published as a giveaway by Penguin, and it's a very good example of the inventive way in which crime stories can be written. As the hashtag suggests, this is mystery in the age of Twitter, and is the first, as far as I know, "crowdsourced" crime story - or rather, three stories, for the book contains longish short stories by Nicci French, Tim Weaver, and Alastair Gunn.

A prefatory note explains that this book was a collaboration between Penguin and Specsavers (who have lent much support to the genre in recent years). Crime fans in the Twitter community were invited to come up with plot ideas, and 1000 tweets and nearly 700 plot suggestions later, the three authors got to work. It's a very interesting concept, and not entirely a surprise that, despite the common starting point, the writers came up with three very different stories.

Of these, I enjoyed "The Following" in particular. This came from Nicci French,  a husband and wife writing duo whose psychological novels of suspense I've admired for some years. Recently, they have turned to writing a series, which I haven't yet tried, and I'm not sure why they made the change, though I suspect they have made it with aplomb. This story is told in the first person by a woman, in classic French fashion, and is very nicely done. Weaver's story gives a cameo role to David Raker and is set in South Africa, while Gunn focuses on the bicycle plot element provided by crowdsourcing.

All in all, this little book is an enjoyable experiment, and it's worth recalling that it's just the latest in a long line of games played by crime writers. The "challenge to the reader" was a popular feature of many Golden Age novels, while I've always had a soft spot for "clue-finders" at the end of whodunits.Combining crime novels with jig-saws enjoyed a brief vogue in the Thirties. I like playing these games myself, and my first published short story, "Are You Sitting Comfortably?" was a sort of trick story. "An InDex" played with the idea of indexes and mystery, while "Acknowledgments" was a bit of fun aimed at those worthy but sometimes ludicrous pages of acknowledgments that take up an increasing number of pages in so many books these days. I'm always keen to hear of other examples of games played with the genre - please let me know of any games or gimmicks that strike you as especially interesting, either in concept or execution.

Accidents Happen by Louise Millar

I've been meaning to read and review Louise Millar's Accidents Happen for a while now. Although the title doesn't necessarily suggest a crime novel, and nor does the paperback cover, showing a windswept woman, it's a book that has been well received elsewhere, and finally I got the chance to catch up with it. And I found the story highly readable and refreshingly different.

If you wanted to pigeon-hole the type of story, you might compare it to early Nicci French. We're talking psychological suspense from a female perspective .Books of this kind usually feature strong women, but in the early pages, the protagonist Kate Parker seems irritatingly nervous about pretty much everything. This disturbs the people she is close to, even though her obsession with statistics about accidents and other risks is explained by reference to the tragic bereavements she has suffered, including the death of her husband Hugo.

As the book proceeded, however, I found myself warming to Kate, and I think many other readers will respond similarly and root for her as the story twists and turns, even though at one point she behaves hurtfully towards two harmless women she doesn't know, unattractive and impulsive behaviour she quickly regrets. We forgive her accordingly. An example of subtle characterisation, I thought.

There is a terrific plot twist in this story, although I must say that one solitary clue (concerning a name) enabled me to figure it out at a fairly early stage. But that didn't lessen my enjoyment. I found the story of Kate's struggle against a real or imagined menace very appealing, and the background is nicely done; a mixture of everyday Oxford life, and an intriguing foray into London one night for a "bat-watch."

I was especially interested in Louise Millar's craftsmanship, and I'll try to make a few points about her storytelling technique without "spoilers". She chose to tell the story from several viewpoints, those of Kate, her young son Jack, her sister-in-law, a weird next door neighbour, and a mysterious child. This was a good way of building suspense and complicating the narrative. Especially neat, to my mind, was the fact that both Kate and Jack were placed in jeopardy separately. I also thought that the slow build-up of Kate's interest in a man who might just have the solution to her psychological problems was well done, even if some of the tests that he set her were a little odd, and rather protracted.

Millar clearly took the decision to build the stakes as high as possible. I did wonder whether the explanation for what was going on, which was rooted in the past, was a bit excessive. A less melodramatic and frankly unlikely motivation and plan might have served equally well, and enhanced credibility (I wasn't convinced by what had evidently happened in Shropshire, for instance.) I also felt that the finale wasn't foreshadowed quite as much as it might have been (then again, more clues might give too much away; it's a real dilemma when writing a book of this kind.) But the name of the game in modern commercial fiction is High Stakes, and Louise Millar certainly delivered. She is a really talented entertainer, and I look forward to reading more of her books.

Before I Go To Sleep

Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson, is a first novel that has achieved stunning success, winning awards and earning massive sales. My paperback edition is festooned with superlative-laden comments from reviews and other authors. Tess Gerritsen even goes so far as to say it is the best debut novel she has ever read – a large claim, to put it mildly.

Yet there is a minority view that the book is over-rated. Maxine Clarke, aka Petrona, wrote this critical but typically thoughtful and considered review, and others have also expressed serious doubts about the plausibility of the plot-line.

When I took this book away with me on holiday, I was aware of both the hype and the criticisms, but I wanted to read it with an open mind. It’s a novel of psychological suspense, written by a man but told from the point of view of a woman, and it sits very much in the territory marked out by the likes of Nicci French and Sophie Hannah – essentially a modern update of the “woman in jeopardy” thriller. The subject is amnesia, and the related issue of the fallibility of memory – familiar themes in crime fiction. So the basic elements are perhaps unoriginal, but I thought that Watson’s treatment of them seemed fresh and full of energy.

I was gripped by this book from start to finish. There is no doubt that there are plot flaws, many of which Maxine has pointed out, and I understand and sympathise with her reservations – which are, again characteristically, expressed in a very fair way. What is more, I think it’s absolutely reasonable to judge such a successful book by the toughest standards – tougher than those applied to less celebrated efforts, for sure.

That said, most crime novels contain elements that are, to say the least, improbable. Ultimately, a key subjective question for judgment is whether an author succeeds in overcoming the inherent unlikelihood of the material and exciting the reader. Well, I was excited, and I did want to know what was going to happen to poor old Christine and her enigmatic husband Ben. You need to suspend your disbelief when reading, but I was happy to do so.

Ethel Lina White

The writer I mentioned yesterday as having been born in Abergavenny was Ethel Lina White. It’s fairly safe to say that Ethel’s is not a household name – yet perhaps it should be. For she was the author of the books that sourced two extremely successful films. Some Must Watch became the movie The Spiral Staircase, while The Wheel Spins became one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, The Lady Vanishes.

White was born in the Welsh town in 1876. Apparently, her early work was mainly in the short form, and she wrote three non-crime novels, before moving into the genre at the age of 55. She gave up her job in the Ministry of Pensions to write full-time, and the gamble ultimately paid.off.

Her work is (roughly) in the tradition of the American Mary Roberts Rinehart, sometimes unflatteringly known as the Had-I-But-Known school. Her main focus is on women in jeopardy, and in that respect at least, you might say that she was a literary forerunner of fine modern writers such as Nicci French and Sophie Hannah.

Despite the success of some of her novels, others remain obscure, and I’m quite interested in hunting them down. Even though it is very different from Hitchcock’s great film, The Wheel Spins is a very good story. White, who died in 1944, was skilled at building suspense, and although her work is, perhaps inevitably, rather dated, I think she deserves to be better known. She is one of the most successful Welsh crime writers of all time.

Complicit: review

My first encounter with the fiction of Nicci French was the superb Killing Me Softly, and I’ve read a number of the other French novels (‘Nicci French’ is, in fact, a husband and wife duo, Sean French and Nicci Gerrard). Their latest novel of psychological suspense, Complicit, has just been published, and I found it an excellent read.

The book is divided into past and present narratives, each told by a young music teacher, Bonnie Graham. The story set in the present recounts the bizarre sequence of events that unfolds once Bonnie finds the dead body of a man to whom she was very close (who is not identified to the reader for quite some time.) The ‘past’ narrative explains the events of a chaotic summer which led up to the man’s murder.

Bonnie is asked by a friend to play at her wedding, and so she forms a band that includes past, future, and would-be lovers. Her choice of fellow musicians is unwise in the extreme, as it turns out, and there were times when Bonnie’s folly irritated me intensely. Some of the events of the story are unlikely in the extreme, but the skill of Nicci French is to ensure that you suspend your disbelief because you do want to find out what has been going on, and how matters will be resolved.

At first, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this story, but it soon had me hooked. The split story-line is handled adroitly, and you can never be quite sure what will happen next (although my rule of thumb was that Bonnie would mess up in some way, and she consistently lived up to these expectations!) If you like pacy suspense novels, I am sure you will find Complicit gripping. It's not a short book, but I devoured it ravenously.

Sleep With Me review

Sleep With Me was an intriguing choice for ITV 1’s New Year’s Eve drama production. Billed as an erotic thriller, it had a very good pedigree – adapted by the legendary Andrew Davies from a novel by Joanna Briscoe – and a good cast, headed by the reliable Adrian Lester. And it was the type of psychological suspense story that writers such as Nicci French do so well.

The basic premise is that Richard, a journalist and would-be novelist, and Lelia have a seemingly perfect relationship, but their lives are invaded by an apparently mousy (yet at the same time smouldering and intense!) French woman, Sylvie, who has literary ambitions of her own. She seduces Richard, rather improbably I thought, but her real target turns out to be Lelia. And then it emerges that she and Lelia have a shared past, which includes a tragic secret.

I found Sleep With Me to be watchable, and I didn’t regret following it to the end, even though the final plot developments didn’t seem especially credible or satisfying. A harsher view might be that it was neither erotic nor thrilling. The real problem, I think, was that the motivation of Sylvie was ambiguous, and unsatisfactorily conveyed. Maybe the ambiguity was intentional, but maybe it resulted from an uncertainty about characterisation. This impression of uncertainty meant that Sleep with Me was an okay drama, rather than attaining the levels of excellence so often associated with Andrew Davies.

So that’s my reading and viewing for 2009 done. Much more is to come in 2010 – in the meantime, my very best wishes go to all readers and writers of crime fiction for the year ahead, and especially to those who are kind enough to spare some of their time to take a look at this blog.

Collaboration

It’s trite to say that writing is a solitary occupation, but it’s usually true. However, there is more scope for collaborative writing than is often appreciated, and I must say that I very much enjoy writing in collaboration, and I've written several books (including one novel, The Lazarus Widow) with one or more other writers. After all, if it worked for Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney and Bacharach and David, why can’t it work with novels?

In the crime genre, there have been quite a few notable writing teams over the years. Two cousins working together made the name of Ellery Queen famous, while in Britain, the names Manning Coles and Francis Beeding concealed pairs of writers. In the 60s and 70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo wrote the Martin Beck series, while in the States, two female writers combined to produced the finance-based Emma Lathen mysteries. Behind the pseudonyms of Patrick Quentin, Jonathan Stagge and Q. Patrick hid Hugh Wheeler – better known later for his work on musicals – and a variety of associates. Dick Francis collaborated with his wife Mary on his racing thrillers, although her name did not appear on the books – it’s different now that he is writing with his son.

Nowadays there are plenty of examples of writing teams. Nicci French is a notable husband and wife pairing, while Charles Todd writes with his mother Caroline. There are even crime writing twins – the Mulgray Twins.

‘Round-robin’ novels involve an especially elaborate form of collaboration, where a story is told by a succession of different authors. The Detection Club’s The Floating Admiral is a very famous example, but there are plenty of others, including a 19th century curiosity, The Fate of Fenella, whose contributors include Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker. Intriguingly enough, I was asked a while back to contribute to a round-robin novel. Whether it will see the light of day, I’m not sure – but it’s an appealing idea.

Patrick Hamilton

There are three interesting biographies of Patrick Hamilton – few writers who work in the crime genre are so blessed, although maybe this is because Hamilton is not always described as a ‘crime writer’ (though he would be if he were working today, I think.) One of the books is Through a Glass Darkly, by Nigel Jones, a sound piece of work that is well worth reading.

Jones is in possession of many private papers relating to Hamilton, and was generous enough to make these available to Sean French, who wrote another biography not long afterwards. Sean French is now better known as one half of the best-selling crime-writing duo Nicci French, but his Patrick Hamilton: a life shows him to be a very accomplished biographer as well.

Rather spookily, French describes the sociopathic Ralph Ernest Gorse as an ‘oblique self-portrait’ of Hamilton. Like Jones, he doesn’t try to place Hamilton in the context of crime writing history generally (a missed opportunity, I feel) but he describes with some poignancy the bitter life of a man who knew great success, but also tragedy – he was disabled and disfigured when a motor car ran into him while he was crossing the road, his sex life was often depressing, he suffered mental problems, and his addiction to alcohol ultimately cost him his life. His judgment, it has to be said, was hopeless – a Marxist who never joined the Communist Party, he was a big fan of Stalin, and was bemused when the truth about his hero came out.

The third biography is The Light Went Out, by Patrick’s elder brother, Bruce Hamilton. There was a close and curious relationship between the two men. Bruce was also a writer, and much of his work unquestionably falls within the crime genre. His frustrated devotion to Patrick shines through the pages, even though, according to Sean French, the longer and unpublished version of the memoir casts a rather different light – he seems to have been jealous of Patrick’s greater literary talents.

Because Patrick was a fine writer, Bruce’s own literary achievements tend to be under-estimated, even by Sean French. I’ve read several of Bruce’s books, and they are interestingly different from the run of the mill whodunits of the time, though one or two of them show the same weird adoration of Stalin and Soviet Russia. But there’s no doubt that Patrick is, and will remain, better remembered, and these three books, taken together, provide copious fascinating nformation about a life of soured brilliance.

Another thing about Bruce, by the way (sorry, I just can’t resist trivia.) His godfather was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Adventures of Margery Allingham

Some years ago, I read a very good biography of the accomplished Golden Age writer Margery Allingham, written by Julia Thorogood. The Adventures of Margery Allingham, which I’ve just acquired, turns out to be an updated version of that book, appearing under the author’s current name of Julia Jones. The publisher, originally Heinemann, is now Golden Duck, which I imagine is in effect a private venture run by the author, or someone based in her (and Allingham’s) neck of the woods in Essex.

The first edition appeared in 1991, and the 2009 version boasts an introduction by the best-selling novelist Nicci Gerrard (who also forms half of the ultra-successful writing partnership Nicci French). There is also an afterword, which tells the amazing story of how Allingham’s husband Pip (Philip Youngman Carter, a notable illustrator and occasional writer) was the father of a child borne by Nancy Spain, herself a detective novelist and tv personality of the 1950s, and something of a lesbian icon in the days when lesbianism was not as widely discussed and celebrated as it is today.

The book is so good, and the material so worthwhile, that I think it is a real pity that Julia Jones did not engage in a proper re-writing of the book for its second incarnation. The afterword is short and has an unsatisfactory ‘tacked-on’ feeling – it would have been better to have integrated the latest revelations into the Allingham story as a whole. I wasn’t really convinced that the money I spent on the book was worth it. But if you haven’t read the first edition, and you’re interested in Allingham and her work, the investment would certainly be justified, for Julia Jones is a good writer who definitely knows her stuff.

On a separate note, I send my thanks to that marvellous blogger Dorte H, for her ‘Grasshopper Award’. I don’t know how inspirational this blog really is, but I very much appreciate the comments and input of Dorte, and her own blog is a consistently delightful read.