Olney Review of Books - guest post by Simon Lee

As the years pass, I find it interesting to look back on school and student days, and in recent years I've had the pleasure of renewing a number of friendships from long ago. Someone I've enjoyed getting to know better is Simon Lee, who is not only Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, Queen’s University Belfast, a former vice-chancellor, chair of the Everton Library Trust, chair of the William Temple Foundation, but also and the founder of the Olney Review of Books. The latter strikes me as an admirable initiative and I'm grateful to Simon for taking the trouble to respond to my request for a guest blog post about it. Here's what he has to say:

 
'Fifty years ago, when I went up to university, I was delighted to discover that the Balliol College law library was open 24 hours a day. It would make a great setting for a murder mystery. One student in his final year would be my chief suspect because he seemed to be in the library all the time. He went on to be a successful solicitor and crime fiction writer. He is also the consultant editor of the wonderful British Library Classic Crime series. Work hard in a law library and perhaps you too could be a Martin Edwards...
 
That, at least, is what I have told my law students over the decades and in diverse institutions - for instance in this blog at the Open University half a dozen years ago
https://university.open.ac.uk/open-justice/blog/christmas-its-mystery
 
Not every law student goes into legal practice or becomes a crime fiction writer. I went on to postgraduate study at Yale where Professor Arthur Leff said, ‘Whatever you can do, I can do meta.’ That is the lot of those of us stay to work in universities, reflecting on law in fact and fiction by teaching, researching and reviewing.

 
My latest project in that spirit is the Olney Review of Books (ORB), a free, on-line quarterly. All thirteen articles in the inaugural issue are available to those who sign up for the free newsletter while three sample articles are on the website which takes you to that opportunity: https://olneyreviewofbooks.co.uk/
 
Martin Edwards kindly contributed to the launch issue which was always planned for this month to celebrate twin 250^th anniversaries. Everyone knows that the 4^th of July 1776 was the date of the American Declaration of Independence. You might even know that on 1^st January 1773, the most famous hymn in the world was written in Olney, Buckinghamshire, by the local Anglican curate, Revd John Newton. We know it as Amazing Grace although he called it Faith’s Review and Expectation.
 
Very few people, however, seem to have turned the page to see that the next hymn in the collection of Olney Hymns (a 1779 publication) is titled On the Eclipse of the Moon 30 July 1776. This hymn, based on John Newton’s observation of the Moon from Olney, has been eclipsed by its illustrious predecessor for 250 years, until now. ORB’s first article has an analysis of the hymn by a distinguished theologian, Revd Professor Kenneth Newport, who is also a student of astro-physics.
 
More generally, the idea of ORB is to challenge the assumption that it takes a big metropolitan city with millions of people, such as New York or London, to have a literary culture including a Review of Books. Olney is a small market town in Buckinghamshire with only 7,000 residents. This does not make us parochial. We are interested in the genius of small communities everywhere, including the way conversations such as those between John Newton and his Olney neighbour, the poet William Cowper, can stimulate creativity.
 
Those of us who have been reviewing for decades will have nurtured our own dream of writing a murder mystery ourselves. Mine is set at a charity cricket match and features a hat-trick of puns in its title, The Bowler’s End (how the bowler died, at which end of the pitch, and what the bowler was up to – ‘End’ as the method, the location and the purpose).
 
While I search for a publisher, what I love about crime fiction is the community it has generated and the values readers and writers share, such as appreciating tradition without being afraid to challenge it. In their own way, 250 years ago, Newton and Cowper’s conversations about hymns, faith, words and social justice (seeking to abolish slavery and to ameliorate the conditions of lace-working women and girls in Olney) created the same dynamic. 

Fifty years ago, conversations in that college law library were a sharing of culture and craft. Now, ORB is encouraging exchanges of views about books in the round, in their whole life-cycle or, as we like to say, how books go into orbit. Talking of small communities, our next issue leads on the 300^th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. We will take Gulliver into space but we will also be celebrating little community libraries.'     
 

 

The White Lotus - season 2 review

It's in the nature of television, especially today, that if a series becomes a big success, there will be follow-ups, even if the storyline was originally conceived as a one-off. I don't know what Mike White, the director and writer of The White Lotus had in mind originally, but he came up with a story concept that is flexible enough to be highly adaptable.

Having enjoyed season 1 of The White Lotus, I wondered if I'd find season 2 a let-down. I needn't have worried: it's at least as good, and benefits not only from a good ensemble cast but also the presence of such notable actors as F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hollander (who is as good here, as the rather sinister gay man Quentin, as he was in the first season of The Night Manager).

This time the setting is the White Lotus resort and spa in Sicily. There are plenty of scenes in and around Taormina, a gorgeous town I've been lucky enough to visit twice. Again the storyline is built around a teasing 'whowasdunin' puzzle. A body is found floating in the water, but we don't know who is dead. And then we flashback to a week earlier. This season is seven, rather than six episodes long, which allows for plenty of exploration of the guests, staff and their relationships. What I didn't expect was that two interesting characters who featured in season 1 also show up here - although their lives have moved on.

If anything, I thought season 2 was better than season 1. Experienced as I am in anticipating plot twists, I did not see the final development coming, forseeing neither the identity of the body in the water, or the reason for their death. And this is only one example of Mike White's clever writing. There's quite a lot of wit here, but also a number of genuinely poignant moments. It's far superior to a typical soap opera, for instance, because not only are the characters drawn in depth, the situations are intriguing and often unpredictable. 

  

The Pleasures of Research

I'm back from a lovely trip to west Wales, where fantastic weather made the research for a forthcoming story most pleasurable, even if the heat did slow me down a bit! I've had the idea for this particular story for some time - it's destined for an anthology - but I'd struggled to find a way to make the plot come alive. Then it struck me that what I really needed was a great setting. In just such a way, my idea for a story set in Bletchley Park during the Second World War needed a second key setting - which I found by sheer chance while taking part in a festival on Jersey, of all places, and the result was 'The Sound of Secrecy'.

For a number of reasons, I thought Wales would work well, provided it was a part of the country that I wasn't too familiar with - because I wanted the sense of  'a stranger in town' (or at least in the countryside) in the narrative. So I settled on the Llyn Peninsula, which for some reason or another I've never explored on my many trips to Wales over the years. Criccieth seemed an obvious base, and it proved to be ideal.

Criccieth is a small, pleasant town with a thirteenth century castle and a charming bay, and I realised on my first night there that it would make an ideal home for my protagonist. The 'stranger' would be a man she meets, and they'd go around the area together as their relationship develops. There were lots of options, and I explored as many as I could in the time available, naturally including one or two potential murder scenes, though I didn't manage to make the boat trip to Bardsey Island (you sail from the tiny cove of Porth Meudwy, in the photo below).

However, there was a lot to see - not just glitzy Abersoch, where a beach hut can set you back £200,000, but places like Aberdaron (with a gorgeous old church where R.S.Thomas - once nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature) used to preach, and Nefyn, had considerable charm  There's a very good National Trust property and garden at Rhiw, and I also fitted in a trip to Anglesey to visit Plas Newydd, which somehow I've never got round to seeing before. The house overlooks the Menai Straits - a great location.

And one thing leads to another. Whilst in Pwllheli (which I used to associate with holiday camps but which has a very pleasant nature reserve), I was contacted about a possible short story for a women's magazine, and an idea for the storyline sprang to me as I strolled around the waterfront. I didn't write anything other than copious notes when I was away, but such trips are not only fun but also tend to help your mind to figure out how to solve storytelling challenges. Even the gull which perched outside my bedroom window was clearly impressed by the view. Truly inspiring.

Forgotten Book - The Riddle of Samson

Islands make great settings for detective novels, a truth that I hope readers will find reinforced when my own Fever Island appears in September. The Scilly Isles have featured in several crime novels, books by W.J. Burley and Kate Rhodes among others, and they also supply the setting for The Riddle of Samson by Andrew Garve - in fact, Samson is one of the smaller islands in the group. Happily, a map of the main novel is provided at the start of the novel, which dates from 1954. Maps really do help with books like this, and I can think of some other Garve novels which would have benefited from including a map - because setting does play an important part in his work.

The opening line is unorthodox and memorable: 'The day I crossed to Sicily the islanders had just learned that for the first time their history they were going to have to pay income tax.' This was a bit of social history that came as a real surprise to me, but it turns out to be accurate, and more importantly it does contribute to the plot. Because the unwelcome tax regime has become a news story which has attracted a bunch of journalists. And, as ever with Garve books, the journos are depicted in a very believable way.

The storyteller is John Lavery, a young archaeologist who is doing some preparatory work prior to the arrival of a colleague called George. He comes across the newspapermen, and an attractive woman in their company who turns out to be married to the biggest loudmouth of them all, a seasoned journalist called Ronnie. 

The woman, an enigmatic individual whose name is Olivia, accompanies John on a little exploration of Samson and when she misses her boat back, they end up spending the night together - in a very innocent way, it must be said. But Olivia fears her husband finding out that the pair of them have been together, and when Ronnie does indeed turn up on Samson, the plot thickens very nicely.

This is an enjoyable story, with pleasing elements of mystery and more than a touch of the outdoors adventure in which Garve excelled. His forte wasn't 'fair play' detection, but more the unravelling of crafty criminal plots, and the more books of his that I read, the more I admire his range. 

Dear England - BBC TV review

Dear England is a television adaptation of a successful play about football (and I don't think there have been many works for the stage that fit that description) written by James Graham. James Graham is one of our leading playwrights and I almost got to meet him when his Hull University team reached the final of Christmas University Challenge four years ago, but he had to rush off to London after the semi-final to attend an opening in the West End. A pity from my perspective, because I'm sure he is a very interesting chap. And his writing is undeniably ambitious.

Dear England is an example of this ambition. It's a story about the career of Gareth Southgate as England football manager. Southgate famously missed a decisive penalty in 1996 and had minimal success during his brief career as a club manager, but his involvement with the FA led to his being appointed - in effect as a safe pair of hands, following the brief and unfortunate reign of Sam Allardyce, a very experienced club manager who lasted only one match before becoming embroiled in a scandal.

Joseph Fiennes plays Southgate and I think his performance is uncanny, as it seems to capture the man's appearance and behaviour extraordinarily well (I think this is true, even though I've never met Southgate). Jodie Whittaker plays a sports psychologist, Pippa Grange. In real life, I gather that Pippa Grange was only directly involved with the England team for a couple of years and I suppose her role was expanded because there are virtually no other women in the cast (so, for instance, apart from one tiny scene at the end, we see nothing of the way the job impacted on Southgate's home life).

The story of how an evidently decent man achieved great progress in leading the national team, while ultimately falling short of winning anything is, to a football fan like me, interesting. James Graham builds in lots of 'state of the nation' references, although I think it's open to debate as to how well some of the comparisons work. There are some common factors to leadership whatever organisation is being led. But there are also differences. The skills you need to lead a nation are in some respects fundamentally different from those of leading a team in a competition which has the simple (if hard to achieve) objective of winning a competition.

But the real problem with the show is that it's too long - four episodes expands the material beyond its natural length, so there is a quite a bit of padding. Even so, I stuck the course to the inevitably anti-climactic conclusion. Any chance of a play or fictional TV series about Pep Guardiola?  

The White Lotus - HBO/Sky Atlantic TV - season 1 review

The White Lotus first hit our TV screens five years ago. It was a big success, and seemed to be very trendy, but I didn't pay much attention to it until recently, when I thought I might take a look. If I'm honest, I wasn't expecting great things. Just something superficial and glossy and no doubt very expensively made, a sort of high-calibre soap opera.

I never expected to enjoy the show as much as I did, and in a short space of time I've watched all three seasons. I'm now very much looking forward to season four. Mike White, the writer and director, has done a quite superb job of creating a series that has genuine depth. The sex scenes have attracted quite a lot of comment, but I think the whole show is very well done - writing, acting, photography, the whole bundle. The music is unusual but brilliantly effective, too.

The White Lotus is a chain of luxury hotel resorts in glamorous locations around the world, patronised by the rich and privileged. Season 1 is set in Maui, an island I loved staying in myself (but in a rather less exotic and expensive, although perfectly pleasant hotel) and runs to six episodes. The story opens at an airport. A older couple talk to a young man who has been staying at the White Lotus on his honeymoon. It emerges that a tragedy has occurred there, and someone died. The older people realise the young man is on his own...next thing we know, we flashback to ten days earlier, as the honeymooning couple and others are greeted on arrival by the manager and staff of the White Lotus.

So yes, this is a whowasdunin. Who has died, and why? Is it the new bride, or someone else? The mystery is cleverly contrived, but it's only one ingredient of a complex storyline, full of interesting (if not necessarily likeable) characters. Vast wealth doesn't bring happiness might be the moral of the story. Except that, in one or two cases, it seems to do so. For instance, Tanya, a very mixed-up billionaire, befriends Belinda, a wellness consultant, and wants to help her, but complications in her own personal life begin to get in the way.

There are oddities about the storyline every now and then, choices made about which situations to explore and which to glide past, but overwhelmingly my reaction was positive. And I can imagine academics discussing the show in some depth in years to come (for all I know, they are already at it), simply because it's rich in discussion points, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes satiric, consistently interesting.

     

Forgotten Book - Rustling End

Douglas G. Browne (1884-1963) was a capable crime writer who also enjoyed success with non-fiction - books about true crime cases and a biography of Bernard Spilsbury. Towards the end of his career, he was elected to membership of the Detection Club, but today many of his books are hard to find. That's true of Rustling End, which was first published in 1948. I count myself as fortunate to have a copy that Browne inscribed to someone who inspired his creation of Stephanie, the young woman in the story.

The first chapter is curious. A young solicitor, John Fordyce, drops into an Essex pub and witnesses a strange confrontation between the landlord, a man called Detmold, and a customer. The men stare at each other intently. Something is amiss between them - yet they don't seem to know each other. Subsequently, Fordyce learns that Detmold has been arrested on a murder charge, and he's ultimately convicted on compelling evidence.

Fordyce then attends a dinner party hosted by Harvey Tuke and his wife Yvette. Among the guests is Stephanie, over from New Zealand. She wants to get in touch with her aunt, but the lady has married unexpectedly and rather mysteriously, and Stephanie receives a letter from her husband, a man called Prowse, who lives at Rustling End in Essex, basically fobbing her off.

Fordyce shares Stephanie's curiosity and their investigations soon uncover some worrying developments - but not the aunt. This is a novel inspired by the Moat Farm case, but it has some distinctive plot features which mean that although the basic situation is straightforward, there's more to the whole business than meets the eye. I enjoyed this novel, an interesting piece of work by an under-estimated author.

Deadly Remains by Kate Ellis

Deadly Remains is the latest Wesley Peterson novel by Kate Ellis, published last year. This lengthy series benefits from a pleasant setting on and around the south Devon coast, with Tradmouth (which stands in for Dartmouth, as Morbay and Neston stand in for Torquay and Totnes in the series) as the focal point, and the base for Wesley and his friend and boss, the Scouser Gerry Heffernan.

Kate's books invariably showcase intricate plotting, something which has drawn me to them since I first got to know her late in the 90s. Like me, she was a big fan of Glenn Chandler's scripts for the early series of Taggart and her storytelling shares with Glenn's a knack for taking disparate plot ingredients and blending them together into a satisfyingly mysterious meal. There is often - though not in this particular storyline - an element of the macabre that adds a tasty seasoning of the weird and unorthodox

The Wesley books follow a tried and tested pattern. They always combine a mystery set in the past, usually told through a diary or recovered documentation of some kind, frequently unearthed by archaeologist Neil Watson, and a puzzle of the present. In Deadly Remains, the body count is high; however, this is not in any way a gruesome novel (or even, in any meaningful sense, a police procedural), but rather a well-crafted traditional detective story.

Here the death of a writer and researcher with plenty of ghostwritten books on his CV is investigated by Wesley, while bones are unearthed in a dig by Neil's team, which is supplemented in this case by young Michael Peterson, whose role in the story is especially well-handled. The mystery in the past involves a plane crash during the Second World War. 

This aspect of the story reminded me of Fetch Out No Shroud by Stephen Murray (the pen-name of Stephen Hayes), a friend of mine who published some good traditional mysteries with the Collins Crime Club in the 80s and 90s (that book appeared in 1990) and who was already well-established when I first got published. He appeared to me to be destined for crime writing stardom. Alas, Stephen hasn't published a novel for upwards of thirty years, but his novel - which involves a body found on an airfield and the death of a war historian investigating dark secrets of the past - is one I enjoyed. I don't recall the details of the plot, but even though I found a rather brutal online review of it from Publishers' Weekly, I still think it would be worth seeking out. Stephen is one of many writers whose talent, I felt, deserved greater success and a longer career than he was able to achieve. 

   

The Lake District Cold Case Mysteries - a box set

Joffe Books are a dynamic publishing company and since they licensed the UK ebook rights to my Lake District series (now known as The Lake District Cold Case Mysteries) the books have been going great guns. It's also been a great pleasure for me to be reunited with Kate Lyall Grant, who was my editor at Hodder in the late 1990s when I was writing the Harry Devlin series.

Joffe Books specialise mainly in discounted ebooks, which they market very effectively. Their latest coup has been to put the eight Lake District Cold Case Mysteries into a box set, which they are selling very cheaply on Amazon UK, and this has resulted in the set achieving #1 bestseller status. An absolute bargain, I'd say, but then I would, wouldn't I? If you're tempted, here is a link to paste into your browser: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LAKE-DISTRICT-COLD-CASE-MYSTERIES-ebook/dp/B0H63C9YZJ/ref=sr_1_2?crid=9RMWZVWM47G5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.APR4VfiNbufrcqt79vNRXSx0jLK71kWxIpDV0nJdTEHNLdkLdRjGR_rOE4Kb8whTppXA0P7v13PejkPXARdgol1lf95SaLlF_NzaEW4ZVs2jxdpdLeWz1Xwr6w-Lroq4JjTfC291OUShz-1fo7bzJfKcpqnFlWj5wlDkSgjcC_OryrjVp7ki3P7u9e8aF_Flr1KkzCY30f6lpCn7x4qfC3FGSL7pIsnT9p5Yc6ymkL8.dXwZr_aJqTR47afcw8ltiGt36XnrZi3TOzuh9JGm6rA&dib_tag=se&keywords=martin+edwards+lake+district&qid=1782752538&s=books&sprefix=%2Cstripbooks%2C137&sr=1-2#averageCustomerReviewsAnchor

Agatha Christie Day at Bolton Library

It's all about Agatha at the moment. Last Monday I was doing a bit of filming, for a video trailer for the forthcoming Marple Mysteries festival in Marple (where else?) next April; this sounds like a great event, and will also celebrate the opening of the town's impressive-sounding new library. At a time when libraries are under threat in some areas (including, regrettably, my own), I'm glad to do anything I sensibly can to support them. 

Saturday saw me travelling to Bolton Library, which I last visited for a talk upwards of twenty years ago, and I recall a grand building in the heart of the town's cultural quarter. Since then, the library has been modernised, very impressively, and there's also a museum and aquarium. I didn't have time for an extended look round, but it definitely looked worth a further visit.

I was invited to Bolton by Caroline Hall from the Library because she was organising an Agatha Christie Day. It's never any hardship to talk about Agatha and her work, so I had no hesitation in accepting, and I was impressed by the turnout on another very hot day. The first speaker, Lauren Field, a curator from the natural history section of the museum, talked interestingly about dogs and poisons in Agatha's work. And there were some poisonous herbs on display - nobody was unwise enough to touch them, but I think we were all rather intrigued.

Caroline interviewed me, and there were some excellent questions from an audience that seemed very engaged, followed by a very good book-signing session. A pleasant visit, and also a chance to reflect, once again, on the vital role that libraries play in our communities. Initiatives like this are definitely worth supporting.