To Baltimore

I’m travelling to the US next week to attend Bouchercon, the world mystery convention. I first attended Bouchercon when it moved from the US to London for one year in 1990. Whenever the chance has arisen, which isn’t as often as I’d like, I’ve returned. Conventions are a great way to meet readers and fellow writers, and there’s a bonus when they are held in unfamiliar places. I’ve been to Bouchercons in such varied locations as Toronto, Las Vegas and Philadelphia – they are cities I might otherwise never have visited and I’m very glad I did. I’m optimistic the same will be true of Baltimore.

I’ve been sent details of the three panels on which I’ll be appearing. Two are scheduled for Thursday 9 October. In the afternoon, on ‘It’s Only Make Believe.’ my fellow panellists include that excellent writer Laurie R. King (whom I had the pleasure of meeting briefly at the Bristol Crimefest earlier this year) and fellow Brit Martyn Waites. I’m looking forward to it, and also to ‘Killing Floor’ earlier that day, when my colleagues will include Caroline Todd.

On the final slot of the convention, on Sunday 12 October, I’ll be joining a panel to be chaired by Ann Cleeves and including fellow Poisoned Pen Press author Carolyn Wall; the theme this time is ‘A Town Called Malice’.

An added bonus is that my American publishers, Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald, are guests of honour at the convention. Barbara and Rob recently visited Liverpool but other commitments denied me the opportunity to show them round. I haven’t seen them since I stayed with them at their fantastic home in Arizona just after a convention in Seattle nearly two years ago, and it will be good to catch up with them again.

I do hope that any of you who are attending Bouchercon will seek me out and say hello. It would be great to see you.

They can't all be wrong, surely!

I’m pleased - no, absolutely delighted is closer to the mark - to say that the cover of my next novel, Dancing for the Hangman, due to be published next month, will feature the following quotes from three gifted and highly successful authors for whom I have the utmost respect:

'An elegant, suspenseful, beautifully written reconstruction of Dr Crippen, revealing the man as never before, and also a thumping good novel.’
Frances Fyfield

‘An intriguing story told with intelligence, compassion and very great skill.’
Anne Perry

‘Martin Edwards dissects not only the facts but also the gaps and uncertainties in the historical record. This novel may bring us as close to the truth about Crippen as we are ever likely to get.’
Andrew Taylor

Paul Newman and Butch Cassidy

I'm sorry that Paul Newman has died. He starred in two of my favourite films that touch on the crime genre in different ways. The Verdict was a good legal thriller and The Sting even more enjoyable, with a clever crime caper strengthened by a nice score of Scott Joplin rags.

My number one Newman movie, though, is that all-time classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It's a film that benefits from a terrific script by William Goldman (who ventured into thriller territory in other movies), first-rate acting and a brilliant soundtrack, which earned two Oscars, one for the score itself and another for 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head', which featured in the legendary bicycle sequence.

'Raindrops' was the second single I ever bought, and I still think that its composition for this movie was brilliantly counter-intuitive. If you don't know the soundtrack, do check it out. 'South American Getaway' is a superb example of how to use voices as insturments, while 'The Sundance Kid' is wonderful - even though it was ultimately cut out of the version of the movie that finally reached the audiences...

Colonel Niven and Nina (and Frederick)

I’ve watched a second Ellery Queen show, ‘The Adventure of Colonel Niven’s Memoirs’. This wasn’t, to my mind, quite as clever or as gripping as the previous episode I’d seen, but nevertheless was okay, undemanding viewing.

A feature of the Ellery Queen series was the use of interesting guest stars, and in this story – about a very unpleasant writer and former spy – the big name was that of the blonde and elegant Nina Von Pallandt. Now I remember her from my childhood as part of a not very inspiring folk duo, Nina and Frederick. Her fame probably owed more to her good looks that her singing, but she did record a song, written by the formidable combination of John Barry and Hal David, for the soundtrack of the Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It rejoiced in the name of ‘Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?’ and it didn’t exactly race to the top of the charts, although another, much better song the composers wrote for the movie, ‘We Have All The Time in the World’, eventually did just that.

I did a quick check on Nina via the internet. Apparently she split up with Frederick, who was a Continental baron. After a colourful and mysterious life, he was murdered by river pirates. Blimey, I’d never have guessed that. Maybe someone ought to write a book about him.

At Clayton

Last Sunday saw another gathering of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association, this time at a brand new venue, the Dunkenhalgh Hotel at Clayton le Moors, which is not far from Accrington in Lancashire.

The event was organised by Roger Forsdyke and I shared a table with a number of old friends, including Roger and his wife Penny, Kate Ellis and her husband, and Meg and Percy Moss, as well as Diane Janes, whom I’d met for the second time at Windermere just three days earlier. The conversation ranged widely, as Roger – a very experienced senior police officer - discussed ‘cold cases’ (of special interest to me in view of the fact that DCE Hannah Scarlett heads a cold case review team of my invention) and ‘intelligence-led policing’ (also known as ‘gossip-led policing’.)

I asked Roger whether the transparent police bulletin boards that one often sees on programmes like Crimewatch UK are now standard issue. But he told me he’d never seen one actually used – they all appear to belong to the BBC’s Props Department - more traditional whiteboards are still the order of the day.

Roger is organising next year’s CWA conference, to be held at Lincoln. There will be plenty of guest speakers and I’m looking forward to it already. The photo of Roger, incidentally, was taken by Roger Cornwell. Roger and Jean are proprietors of Cornwell Internet, and amongst many other things they look after the CWA website, as well as the sites of many leading authors - and some publishers too. Anyone looking to engage web expertise might well benefit from hiring their services.

St George's Hall

St George’s Hall is one of the great buildings of Liverpool. More than that, it is one of the great buildings of Britain. It was admired by Queen Victoria, and by Dickens (who famously gave some of his readings there, attracting the sort of crowds we nowadays associate with film stars.)

The Hall was designed as a place where concerts and entertainments would take place, but it had a dual purpose, housing imposing panelled courtrooms, where cases were heard until 1984. If memory serves, Florence Maybrick was tried there, and found guilty of the murder of her husband James, whom some (but not me) believe was Jack the Ripper. In my early days as a solicitor, I appeared in the court myself a couple of times – a fascinating experience.

A little more recently, the Hall was the setting when I launched First Cut is the Deepest – a fairly glitzy event that I remember very fondly indeed. There is even some talk of launching my next book there, but I’m not sure whether it will come to fruition.

I mention the Hall now because I’ve had my first full tour of it, along with a group of Mensa members and visitors to Liverpool from all over the world. As so often happens with places on one’s own doorstep, I saw far more of it when I went into tourist mode than I’d ever seen before.

The Adelphi

The Britannia Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool is the city’s most famous hotel, and I featured it, in passing, in Waterloo Sunset. One of the key clues involves a photograph taken outside the hotel and mention is also made of one or two incidents from the hotel’s notable history.

The Adelphi was originally built in 1826, but was extensively rebuilt in 1912 to accommodate passengers from the cruise liners, whose home port was Liverpool. The most famous was the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, and indeed the Sefton Suite at the hotel is meant to be an exact replica of the Titanic’s smoking lounge.

Quite apart from its brief name-check in Waterloo Sunset, the Adelphi has an odd connection with a famous murder mystery – the ‘White Mischief’, aka Happy Valley case. Sir Jock Delves Broughton, a key suspect, committed suicide in the hotel during the Second World War.

Today it’s a tranquil place and I popped in at the weekend to take a look at the annual gathering of the members of Mensa – all the members I met seemed extremely pleasant and welcoming. If there are any Mensa members who read this blog, I’d be very interested to hear from you.

Coincidence

Coincidence plays a part in life, as well as in fiction. It’s a criticism of a novel if the events seem to depend too heavily upon coincidence – yet the fact is that coincidences are difficult to avoid, and they crop up quite unexpectedly sometimes.

I was reminded of this at the authors’ evening in Windermere last week, when Paul Flint, our host for the day, pointed out that my second Lake District Mystery, The Cipher Garden, involves a major character called Peter Flint who happens to be one of the suspects. Peter’s family hails from Penrith – and so does Paul’s…

I was quite startled by this revelation. I wrote the book before I ever met Paul (through work) and the Penrith connection was quite unknown to me. As it happens, I go to great lengths to avoid too great a likeness between my characters and reality, and the disclaimers seem to get lengthier with each book. But you can’t legislate against coincidence. And it’s always struck me as odd that, shortly after featuring first a football club and later a local hospital in my fiction, those two organisations should consult me for legal advice, without being aware of having featured in the stories (not in a negative way, I hasten to add.)

One of the topics for discussion during the evening was how different authors often come up with the same plot idea at around the same time. And sometimes, even apparently original concepts turn out not to have been quite so ground-breaking after all. So, for example, the twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was anticipated by Chekhov’s The Shooting Party. And yet the odds are that Christie wasn’t familiar with that interesting, but very obscure, story by the great Russian writer. Nor is she sure to have read an obscure American whodunit called The Invisible Host, which in some respects anticipates And Then There Were None.

The Creation of Place

P.D. James is famously inspired to conceive her novels by a particular locale. My imagination doesn’t work in the same way. I’m not really a visual thinker, and often I paint in the details of setting after working out the main plot.

So it is with the Lake District Mystery I’m writing at present. It’s not giving the game away to say that Hannah Scarlett and Marc Amos have bought a new house, near Ambleside. But so far, in the first draft, I haven’t described their home in much detail.

I’m hoping that will change now that I have stayed at Pinethwaite, the delightful home of Paul Flint, the bursar of Windermere St Annes School, and his family. The original house was built towards the end of the 19th century, but it has been much changed since then and is now absolutely full of atmosphere. As Geraint Lewis and I shared a glass of wine with Paul after our authors’ evening together, it struck me that the house would be a great place for Hannah to live (especially as Paul is a fan of Hannah’s!)

Next morning I woke to the stillness of a sunny day deep in the Cumbrian countryside. It really was delightful – and, for an author, inspirational too. You can expect to find a version of Pinethwaite, albeit much changed, somewhere in the next Lakes book.

Authors' evening

I enjoy collaborating with other authors – both in writing projects and at events for audiences. The Murder Squad ‘virtual collective’ has been hugely enjoyable since the seven of us got together back in 2000, but I also enjoy sharing a platform with a wide range of other writers – examples include Kate Ellis, Cilla Masters, Chris Simms, Stephen Booth and a number of other very good crime fiction practitioners.

Last Thursday’s event at Windermere St Annes School gave me the chance to work with two more writers for the very first time. I’d met Diane James once before, but this was my first encounter with Geraint Lewis. Diane shifts back and forth between fiction and true crime and I will post more about her work in the near future. Geraint has so far published one book, These Clouded Hills., a thriller set in Durham City (and I don’t know of any other crime novel set in that lovely place.)

Both Diane and Geraint are, like our host Paul Flint, members of the Arthur Ransome Society. In introducing us to our audience, Paul ingeniously made the link that my first Lake District Mystery includes a vital clue that is connected with a Ransome novel. This was Winter Holiday. I haven’t read much Ransome, but Winter Holiday was read to us by a teacher at junior school when I was eight or nine, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since.

You can never tell how an event will work out when you don’t really know the people you are appearing with. But I found Diane and Geraint were easy and charming companions and the mix seemed to suit the people who turned up for the evening. All in all, a very pleasant occasion.