The Theatre by the Lake

A highlight of my trip to the Lake District was a backstage tour of a truly fascinating place, the Theatre by the Lake at Keswick. There can be few theatres anywhere in the world that enjoy a lovelier setting, overlooking Derwent Water, and the building – opened eleven years ago - has been very sympathetically integrated into the landscape.

One of the many pleasant things that has happened to me as a result of writing this blog is that, after I mentioned the Theatre following my last visit to Keswick, in the autumn, I got into contact with David Ward, literary consultant to the Theatre, and a Cheshire based former journalist. David has written a history of the Theatre which I found really interesting. It’s a story of a collective and community effort to create something truly worthwhile, in the face of many obstacles. It’s great that the story had a happy ending. Audiences and reviews have been exceptional, consistently. I would love to watch a production there, and when time permits, I plan to do so.

I am interested in featuring the Theatre in either my current work in progress or a future book, or perhaps both. It’s such an intriguing place, and one whose existence deserves to be very widely known. I’ve been encouraged by David’s reaction to the suggestion, and he was kind enough to arrange for a colleague, Rachel Swift, to organise an enthralling tour. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to look behind the scenes at many remarkable places, including Wembley, Harrods, Chester Zoo and Liverpool's Conservation Centre, and this was another memorable outing

Because the Theatre is such a modern place, it’s not at all like something out of Phantom of the Opera. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the props room (which among many other artefacts boasted a fake skeleton) was compelling. Could it be a scene for an incident in a mystery novel? Very possibly....

Forgotten Book - Shadows Before

It's almost eighteen months since I featured Dorothy Bowers in Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten Books, so I thought she was more than due for another mention. She only wrote five novels in a career of great promise that was, sadly, cut short by TB. But they are books of distinct merit, which earned her election to the Detection Club not long before she died.

Shadows Before is an ambitious and elaborately plotted mystery. First published in 1939, it marked a welcome return for Chief Inspector Pardoe and his doughty sidekick Sergeant Salt. Again, the pair are called in when a local force, confronted by the fatal poisoning of a rich woman, needs the help of Scotland Yard. The sensitivity of the case is increased by the fact that the victim’s husband, Matthew Weir, was acquitted two years earlier of poisoning her sister. Weir is a mild-mannered academic who attracts the fervent support of those who know and like him – but is he a skilful double-murderer? And if not, what, if anything, is the connection between the two deaths?

The complications of the story are increased by the way in which Bowers shifts between the viewpoints of different characters – and in one instance, perhaps, she plays a little less than fair. The major flaw in the book is, however, simply that the cast of characters is too extensive, with the result that interest is diffused. This is a pity, because Bowers sketches her people with skilful economy and a less congested narrative would have been highly effective. It is a mark of her limited experience at the time, perhaps, that she overdid the complexities. Nevertheless, the quality of the writing has stood the test of time and makes this book a pleasure to read.

At one time, Bowers' novels weren't easy to find, and that may account for their having slipped out of sight. But Rue Morgue Press have done a great job in reprinting all five titles, and researching the all-too-short life of this accomplished writer.

Stone Circles

There is something fascinating about ancient stone circles. One has a sense of timelessness, of sharing with people long gone and forgotten. And yesterday I visited, for the first time in more than twenty years, a stone circle in a quite lovely setting. This was Castlerigg, on the outskirts of Keswick.

I decided to celebrate my birthday by having a day’s holiday from work – and where better to spend it than in the Lakes? After the recent fine weather, the day began with drizzle, but – untypically, it has to be said – the weather improved the closer we came to the Lake District. The first stop was Windermere, a town I’ve always liked, and the second was Castlerigg.

The stone circle at Castlerigg isn’t exactly Stonehenge, but it’s quite notable and well visited. It dates back 4,500 years, which is quite a thought. I find it impossible to resist imagining what it was like all that time ago, and what mysterious rites took place in the circle, and around the gathering of stones known as the Sanctuary. The landscape of the Lakes has no doubt changed a lot in the interim – human beings have had a massive impact on it, an impact that isn’t always obvious. But I’m sure it was gorgeous 4,500 years ago, as it is today.

I’m not sure if I’m going to feature Castlerigg in either my work in progress or a future novel. I’m conscious that Stephen Booth, in his Peak District series, had a novel that featured a stone circle, Dancing with the Virgins, and I think both he and I are keen to avoid utilising similar material, though of course so much depends on how that material is presented. P.D. James featured a stone circle, for instance, in The Private Patient. One thing is for sure, a stone circle makes for a very evocative setting, and does have the potential to provide a great scene in a mystery, as well as for a stop on a day trip.

Reginald Hill

In discussing Peter Robinson yesterday, I mentioned that he and I first met at a CWA Northern Chapter meeting. At it was at the inaugural lunch of the Chapter, in Borougbridge, back in 1987, that I first met one of the finest crime writers of the last forty years. Reginald Hill has, since then, been something of an inspiration to me.

I’d read some of Reg’s books before that first meeting, and I enjoyed the way he combined intricate plotting with witty characterisation. He was, and will no doubt remain, best known for his books about Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, but his other books should definitely not be overlooked. For example, a thriller that originally appeared under the pen-name of Patrick Ruell, The Only Game, is a terrific piece of work that I certainly recommend.

As a writer, he has gone from strength to strength. Bones and Silence was a magnificent piece of work, but arguably he topped it with On Beulah Height. And then, some might say (and I would agree) that Dialogues of the Dead is even better. He is extraordinarily prolific, yet he remains committed to quality of story. His short fiction is superb, and I’ll write about this on another occasion.

Reg and his wife Pat are invariably good company, and I suffered with them as the original Yorkshire TV series of Dalziel and Pascoe, starring the comedians Hale and Pace, proved to be distinctly underwhelming. Happily, the BBC made a much better fist of it, and I had the happy experience of attending the preview at the RSA in London of the very first episode, ‘A Clubbable Woman’.

I’ve been reading Reg’s latest novel over the last couple of weeks, and a review will appear here shortly. The book is called The Woodcutter, and it doesn’t feature Dalziel and Pascoe. But the central character does have some of Fat Andy’s charisma, as well as one or two dark secrets.

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is now one of the leading crime writers, but he certainly paid his dues. He wrote a good many novels about his series detective, Inspector Alan Banks, as well as an excellent stand-alone, Caedmon’s Song, before his talents were widely recognised. When a publisher finally got behind him, and gave his work the marketing push that had previously been lacking, his sales soared.

I started reading Peter’s books shortly after he was published for the first time. They appealed to me a good deal, because they were to some extent in the vein of the kind of story I fancied writing. Before long, I met Peter at a meeting of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association, probably getting on for twenty years ago. Although he was living in Canada at the time, he was born in Yorkshire, and his stories are mainly set in that county. Banks is based in Eastvale, which is a fictional place in the north of Yorkshire, with elements reminiscent of one or two real-life towns.

In addition to his novels, Peter is a prolific writer of short stories of high calibre. I’ve been listening to an audio version of his short story collection The Price of Love, and I’ll post about this before long. With his short fiction, he ranges widely in his settings and plots, and I suspect that, like many of us, he finds the ‘break’ offered by writing a short story or two helps to keep him fresh in between novels.

I last bumped into Peter a couple of years ago at the Harrogate Festival, at a party to celebrate 21 years of Alan Banks mysteries. It was a lively and well-attended event, and a good illustration of how a writer who keeps working hard may, after a number of years, finally hit the jackpot. Like Ian Rankin, Andrew Taylor and Ann Cleeves, he was by no means an overnight success. But like them, he richly deserves the success he has achieved on the back of a long run of soundly written and entertaining mysteries.

The Cipher Garden and Amazon

I’ve received glad tidings from Allison & Busby, namely that The Cipher Garden is to be reprinted shortly, with new cover artwork in the same style as that for The Serpent Pool and the recent reprint of The Coffin Trail. An early version is illustrated above, although there may be a few changes before it is finalised.

This is pleasing news, because one of the unfortunate aspects of life as a published writer – if you are lucky enough to hang around for a few years, and produce a number of books – is that it’s all too easy for your work to slip out of print. This can be frustrating for several reasons. In my own case, I do find that people attending talks I give are sometimes keen to buy the early Harry Devlin books, and I don’t have that many of my own stockpile of copies left!

Yet the truth is that I was relatively lucky. The Devlin series did have a second life – after the books first came out, Hodder reprinted the early titles in the late 90s, as well as publishing the sixth and seventh entries in the series – but even that came to an end. As a result, when I wrote Waterloo Sunset, I was quite careful to make sure that someone could read it without any previous knowledge of the Devlin saga. And at least Waterloo Sunset – a book I enjoyed writing enormously - remains readily obtainable.

As for The Cipher Garden, I wonder if the fact that it’s been quite extensively (and positively, thank goodness!) reviewed on Amazon is a factor in its continuing sales and longevity. I guess that it may be. Whatever people may think about Amazon reviews, they do influence buyers, with five-star reviews clearly pretty important, and I’m certainly very grateful to those who have reviewed this and others of my books kindly on Amazon. One quite prominent writer recently told me of his dismay about negative reviews on Amazon of his latest book, and this rather sad story illustrates, I think, the impact of Amazon reviews on writer morale as well as on sales.

1000 Not Out

I squeezed in a couple of blog posts yesterday, which took my overall tally of posts since I started ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ to one thousand. Suffice to say that, when I began the project, I never dreamed I would get this far, let alone so (relatively) soon.

It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me and, all being well, I don’t plan to stop in the forseeable future. I do want to say how very much I appreciate the responses that I receive. Your comments often provoke much thought as far as I’m concerned, and I do hope you will keep them coming, along with the many fascinating snippets of information that you provide.

And it has been an absolute delight to meet in person a number of fellow bloggers and blog readers over the past two and a half years. There are many others of you that I guess, unfortunately, I’m unlikely ever to meet, but who knows?

Recently I was startled to discover that this blog was listed number 5 in the ‘top 10 UK literature blogs’ by Cision. Quite gratifying, but much more gratifying is the sense of being in touch with people all over the world who are united by a shared love of the crime genre

Talking about Crippen

Public speaking is something I’ve done often over the years, yet I’m far from being a ‘natural’. I spend my youth dreading and therefore avoiding it, and when I became a solicitor, I coped with advocacy (in less formal employment tribunals rather than conventional courts) by treating each case as a battle to be won. I started lecturing on legal topics in my 20s, but found this hard going, and I still try to dodge it when I can.

When my first novel was published, I found my first ever radio interview to be quite an ordeal. But over the years, I gained a lot of practice in talking about my writing, and I became more confident. I also found it easier to talk about crime fiction than, say, legal issues, because crime fiction is what I love. Attending crime conventions and participating in panels also helped to build my confidence.

Since publishing Dancing for the Hangman, I’ve given my talk about Dr Crippen several times. Each time it’s a little different, because I talk without notes and consequently change it a bit every time, varying the parts of the story on which I focus. Last night was different again, because I gave the talk as part of the Lymm Festival, and members of the audience included quite a number of people who know me as a neighbour rather than a writer. And, of course, you don’t want to make a fool of yourself in front of people you might bump into any day.

Fortunately, there was a good audience, with lots of questions, and the atmosphere was very positive, with plenty of books sold at the end of the evening. I really enjoyed sharing my enthusiasm for a story which really is stranger than fiction. The Crippen mystery is endlessly fascinating, and the Lymm Festival-goers seemed to think so too.

Poisons and Poisoning

One of the unexpected pleasures of the CWA conference at Abergavenny was a talk by a writer I hadn’t heard of before, called Celia Kellett. Her subject was Poison and Poisoning, which just happens to be the title of a book she published recently on the subject.

Maybe it’s my fondness for Christie, maybe it’s my interest in the Crippen case, but I have a weakness for mysteries featuring poisons, and I did find Celia Kellett’s talk fascinating. Unfortunately, she didn’t have many copies of her book for sale, and they’d all been snapped up by the time I reached the end of the queue. But I’ve now bought a copy for myself, and it’s certainly a book packed with information (published, by the way, by an enterprising Welsh firm, Accent Press.)

We tend to think of mystery stories featuring poisoning as slightly old-fashioned, perhaps because of all those cases of demure-seeming Victorian ladies doing away with their husbands with different kinds of poison. As I’ve said before, the Liverpool case of the Maybricks is one of my favourite true crime stories, and of course it features here.

But Kellett also makes it clear that there is plenty of potential in the modern world for murder by poison. As she says: ‘poisons are everywhere’, and ‘prisons worldwide still hold many murderers who used poison as their deadly weapon.’ This is a very useful reference book, and I expect to dip into it often in the future. And, who knows, it may tempt me into writing a poisoning mystery of my own one of these fine days....

Seaside Crime

Last Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, and I was due to travel from Middlesbrough to Boroughbridge for the CWA lunch. It seemed a shame to waste such glorious weather. So I decided to take a quick look at a seaside resort I’ve never visited before. This was Saltburn by the Sea, some miles north of Whitby (a resort I know quite well) and lacking Whitby’s Dracula connection, but nevertheless, as I found, a place of real charm.

Saltburn has a pleasant-looking beach, a historic furnicular cliff railway, a pier, and a lovely glen. I took plenty of photos, but although Blogger has today permitted me to upload one, that seems to be the limit! I enjoyed wandering around for an hour or so before it was time to leave. There’s something about seaside resorts that I find quite entrancing. In summer, that is. I’ve visited them often in winter, and of course they can sometimes have a melancholic atmosphere.

Seaside settings do, I think, work very well in crime fiction. Examples of books with a seaside backdrop that I’ve enjoyed are the very different Sunspot by Desmond Lowden, and Light Reading by Aliya Whiteley. Both are entertaining and deserve to be better known. And there are many others that one might name. I’d be interested to know of any particular favourites of readers of this blog.

I’ve never had a seaside setting in my novels (apart from one scene in Take My Breath Away, with a fictional place based on North Yorkshire’s forgotten village, Ravenscar) but the seaside has cropped up in one or two of my short stories. I was especially happy with one called ‘Diminished Responsibility’, which did not attract a great deal of attention at the time – but it’s a story that will, I hope, find a fresh life in some future anthology.