An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

I've had a copy of Iain Pears' most renowned novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost, for more years than I care to admit. Like all too many others, it's stared at me reproachfully from the shelf, but to be honest I was put off by its sheer length, and its reputation for density - even though it enjoys, overall, a very good reputation. But I knew it was set in 17th century Oxford, and my recent Atlantic crossing, to be followed by five days in Oxford, seemed like the ideal opportunity to have a read of it at last.

This is a sort of "casebook" novel, in the manner of The Moonstone, and I should probably have freshened up my understanding of the historical period before plunging in. Many of the characters are taken from real life, and there's a helpful Who's Who at the back, though I didn't realise that until I got to the end of the story.

Four characters tell their version of, effectively, the same sequence of events concerning the death of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College, of which a pretty but enigmatic young woman Sarah Blundy is accused. We start with an Italian visitor to Oxford, a man with medical skills, Marco da Cola. I found his account engaging, though there is a development towards the end of his account that was truly shocking. Then it's the turn of Jack Prescott, son of a supposed traitor; his story was in some ways the least satisfying of the four. After that comes John Wallis, a cryptographer and deeply unpleasant individual. Like Grove, but unlike Prescott, da Cola, and Sarah Blundy, he is taken from real life.

Finally we have the story of a young antiquary, again a real life figure, Anthony Wood. He's a more likeable fellow, though he has his moments of weakness. Towards the end of the book comes a remarkable plot twist that I simply wasn't prepared for - but it's very well done. At times I thought the book was heavy going, perhaps in part due to my ignorance of the historical detail; I suspect that it could have been cut by a hundred pages without any great loss. But despite this, I was impressed with Pears' writing. This is a fascinating novel, and I'm glad I finally made time to read it, even though it took me until the end of the Oxford trip to reach the climax. 

Paranoid, The Moonstone, and Dark Angel - crime on TV

Paranoid came to the end of its eight-week run on ITV last week, and I've just caught up with its final episode of. Bill Gallagher's conspiracy thriller. It felt like a guilty pleasure. Yes, there were massive plot holes, and the behaviour of the three lead detectives made it seem wildly unlikely that they'd ever hold the bad guys to account. But the rural Cheshire locations delighted me (quite a lot of the action took place in Dusseldorf, but never mind) and the pace of the story compensated, by and large, for the wackiness of some of the twists.

The idea was that a bunch of cops based in "the back of beyond" stumble across a terrible secret while investigating the bizarre shooting of a local doctor (filmed in Tatton Park). There was a dramatic cliffhanger scene set at night on Anderton Boat Lift, a fantastic choice of location, and even a scene set five minutes' walk away from my house, in the centre of Lymm. I loved all of this, even if Indira Varma, Robert Glenister and their German colleague, the mesmeric Christiane Paul, were all such mavericks as to make Morse look like Dixon of Dock Green. There was a great in-joke in the first episode, when the cops are promised back-up from the forces of Cuddington and Waverton - two tiny Cheshire villages. Will there be a second series? I rather doubt it. Another global conspiracy centred around places like Knutsford, Northwich, Lymm, and Frandley would be testing credibility even more than this story did. But we live in interesting times, so you never know....

The Moonstone, a five-part daytime BBC drama, also had counter-intuitive elements. I liked the idea of the black butler, Gabriel, a brave concept that worked well, though I felt his chumminess with his employers was less than realistic. Terenia Edwards (no relation) was a convincing Rachel Verinder, and though I felt that the story was rather stretched out to fit the five episodes, it was all in all a decent version of one of the great Victorian novels of sensation.

Dark Angel (not to be confused with various other stories with the same title) was a two-part ITV show about Victorian serial killer Mary Ann Cotton. Joanne Froggatt played her very well, and Alun Armstrong was good, as usual, as her step-father. Mary Ann had a penchant for putting arsenic in people's tea, and she did this so often that the attempt to stay true to her criminal career verged, unintentionally, on the comic. Again, though, I stayed with this to the end. Like the other two shows I've mentioned, for me it had quite an appeal, despite occasional flaws in the scripts.

Forgotten Book - The Documents in the Case

The Documents in the Case, first published in 1930, is in many ways an unusual book. It's the only novel that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in collaboration - with Robert Eustace. It's her only novel which does not feature Lord Peter Wimsey. And it's a novel that offers not only an interesting and unorthodox "howdunit" mystery, but also a fictionalised version of the Thompson-Bywaters case that fascinated a good many Golden Age novelists, not least Anthony Berkeley and E. M. Delafield.

Sayers is not by any stretch of the imagination a forgotten writer, but this is the one novel of hers that seems to me to have been generally under-valued. Perhaps it's the absence of Wimsey that accounts for the generally lukewarm critical reaction over the years (though I should add that a number of good judges have also praised the book.) Each time I read it, I find my appreciation of Sayers' skill increasing, even though, in the immediate aftermath of completing the book, she felt that she had failed to do justice to the clever idea at its heart.

In telling the story, she borrowed from Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Collins was a writer she greatly admired, and she was at the time she wrote the novel working on a biography of him that she never managed to complete. The events are seen from the point of view of characters in the story, and told in the form of letters. It's a very good device, when used well, and Sayers captures the different voices of the characters splendidly.

It's in the later part of the story, where the scientific material central to the plot is debated, that the narrative flags somewhat. Eustace contributed the scientific ingenuity here, as he did to stories by other writers such as L.T. Meade and Edgar Jepson, but Sayers did the writing. The method she chooses for conveying this material results in a rather abrupt ending, The problem with this section of the book is one of story structure, and I sense that she rushed those final pages, when with a slightly different approach she might have produced a book that would have been more widely acclaimed as an innovative masterpiece. Nevertheless, it's a novel of considerable interest and distinction, and if you aren't familiar with it, then it's definitely worth a read. There's a fascinating chapter about how the book was written, incidentally, in the late Barbara Reynolds' excellent biography of Sayers.

The Santa Klaus Murder

Ever heard of the crime writer Mavis Doriel Hay? Neither had I until I received a review copy of a book she published in 1936 and which has just been reprinted by the British Library, as part of its rather exciting programme to make available again some very rare crime stories from the Victorian era and also the Golden Age between the wars.

The Santa Klaus Murder is one of three novels she published, although she also wrote non-fiction on the subject of rural handicrafts. On the evidence of this novel, I'm guessing that she enjoyed the conventions of the Golden Age and in the post-war era did not feel tempted to return to the idea of game-playing mysteries. But I'm guessing, as I know very little about her.

So what of The Santa Klaus Murder? The first thing to say is that it's a nicely produced book, as you'd expect from the British Library. And it also ticks a number of Golden Age boxes - the setting is Flaxmere, a country house, a floor plan is provided, and a Chief Constable is heavily involved in the detective work in the way typical of the period (think J.J. Connington in particular) but would now seem rather extraordinary.

One very strong positive about the book is that the story is told from multiple points of view, almost like The Moonstone, though the Chief Constable's perspective predominates once murder is done. The victim is Sir Osmond Melbury, the wealthy patriarch. Agatha Christie had a similar victim in a Yuletide mystery that post-dates this one, Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Each member of the large cast of characters has a motive for murder, and my one reservation about the book is that there are too many people, so that focus blurs after the crime is committed, with too much space is devoted to the question of means and opportunity. But Hay could write, and her other two novels are to be published by the British Library next year.

Sir Osmond has proposed to change his will - a Golden Age stand-by - and of course this impacts on motive, and a fragment of a piece of paper about the legacies is again included, another element that you just don't find that often in modern books, but which is the sort of device that Christie used to love to play with. Overall, I found this an enjoyable novel, and the familiar ingredients are lifted out of the ordinary by a pleasing touch of humour. Mavis Doriel Hay may not have made a great name for herself in the genre, but this book shows that she does not deserve to be forgotten. A nice Christmas gift for a Golden Age fan.

Forgotten Book: Burglars in Bucks

The co-authors of today's Forgotten Book are those great political campaigners of the Golden Age, G.D.H. and Margaret Cole. I've been reading up about their life together and what strikes me above all is their unquenchable spirit. Time and again their crusades fell apart, yet each time they dusted themselves down, picked themselves up and started all over again. Rather like their number one sleuth, Superintendent Wilson, who resigned from the police force and became a private inquiry agent, only to resume his official career a few cases later.

I've not read any of the stories in which Wilson was not a policeman. In today's story, Burglars in Bucks, he is back in the police, but is rather on the edge of things, as here the Coles were experimenting. This is one of those stories told by gathering together bits and pieces of evidence - letters, press cuttings, telegrams, police reports and so on. It's a terrific concept, and I'd be glad to hear from readers of any similar Golden Age books they can recommend (other than, say, the Dennis Wheatley crime dossiers, which are not novels but, really, games.) The multiple viewpoint crime story has a hallowed tradition - think of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, or Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace's under-rated and noteworthy The Documents in the Case, published, like the Coles' book, in 1930.

One of the snags with this book is that there is no murder, just a burglary. And the reality  is that if you are going to write a full-length novel about a much lesser crime than murder, you have to write a truly gripping story. This is a book that is highly rated by a number of judges whose opinions I greatly respect, and I was looking forward very much to reading it. But I must say that it disappointed me. Which only goes to show how subjective an experience reading is.

Intriguingly, there is a seance scene, although it is less effective than the table-turning scene in a superior book published the following year, Christie's The Sittaford Mystery. I am sure there was no question of plagiarism. Probably the ideas common to the books of Christie, Sayers and the Coles were just "in the air" at the time - it often happens, and always will. Possibly conversations over dinner at the Detection Club played a part. Certainly, Christie and Sayers executed the ideas better than the Coles did.

And I was driven almost to scream by the laborious way information about the characters was dragged in, notably in the letters between one suspect and his wife. So we get lots of lines like "You surely can't have forgotten about the Pallants so soon...Don't you remember when the old grandfather died, in 1920, wasn't it?...what you've clearly forgotten is that the villain of the piece was the same Sir Hiram Watkins you're asking about..you'd better have the whole story for reference..." And so it goes on. Such clumsy writing defeats the whole purpose of the very interesting experiment that the book might have been. The Coles were very busy people and they often rushed their writing. Margaret Cole admitted this frankly in later life. They were, though, capable of better than this, and thankfully they bounced back yet again with stories like End of an Ancient Mariner..

Weirdly, for a story set, as the title suggests, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, the US edition was called The Berkshire Mystery.How can we explain this? Did the American publishers fall asleep before they read much of it? It wouldn't come as complete surprise...

Dorothy and Wilkie

Dorothy L Sayers had a huge admiration for her Victorian predecessor Wilkie Collins. I too am a Collins fan, and it's interesting to see the ways in which his work sometimesinfluenced hers. Perhaps the most notable example is to be found in theepistolary form that she adopted for her non-Wimsey novel The Documents in theCase.

For many years, Sayerstalked about writing a biography of Collins. She did start work on it, butnever managed to complete it – for reasons that are not entirely clear. She hadall the attributes, certainly including a gift for scholarship, that would haveequipped her ideally for the task.

I've often wonderedabout the incomplete biography, and recently John Curran told me that it hadbeen published, but was very difficult to obtain. Now, thanks to the kindnessof Christopher Dean, the chairman of the Dorothy L Sayers Society, I have beenable to borrow a copy, which I read with much interest.

There are one or twopassing observations to her fellow detective story writers, J.J. Connington andHenry Wade, but sadly, the manuscript finishes before Sayers reaches the pointin Collins' life when he wrote his masterpieces, The Moonstone and The Woman in White. What a pity that we do not have a really detailed study of those booksfrom Sayers in the context of Collins' life story. Perhaps she meant to returnto the book one day in the future. Her sudden and rather premature death meantthat she did not have the chance to do so – and we are the poorer for it, eventhough it is pleasing that the fragment remains in existence.

Vantage Point

The title of the 2008 action thriller Vantage Point suggests the nature of the story. The planned (or apparent) assassination of an American president is seen from various different perspectives. And each time we see the events leading up to the attack, we learn more about the complex plot.

Multiple viewpoint stories can work very effectively in the crime genre. Wilkie Collins proved this long ago with The Moonstone, and in a very different way, Vantage Point reminds us that, although a single viewpoint can give a narrative a great deal of emotional power, multi-viewpoints afford great potential for story development.

I liked this film a great deal. Dennis Quaid is very good as the secret service agent who is one of the few good guys, and William Hurt is, as usual, splendid as the President: nobody does bafflement as well as Hurt, I think. The very good cast also includes Sigourney Weaver.

It’s a film that is so fast-moving and convoluted that it will repay more than one viewing. Vantage Point is not an in-depth, character-driven film, but very strong on plot complication and drama. If that’s to your taste, I think you will probably enjoy it as much as I did.