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.  

Forgotten Book - Death and the Sky Above

This month the blog has, for the second month running, seen pageviews well in excess of one million. A big number, but I am conscious that AI surely accounts for a sizeable percentage, though how many, I can't say. So I remain very keen on diversifying with the content that I provide to readers, and I do hope that any of you who haven't done so will subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, The Life of Crime, which you can find here. The next issue is planned for 1 July.

There is also a paid version of the newsletter, currently running at two issues per month. This is The Life of Crime Premium and I'd like to give special thanks to all those who have subscribed to this so far. This has encouraged me to offer a widening range of material to those subscribers. In July, for instance, I'll be discussing a point Jim mentioned at Bodies from the Library - the suggestion that someone other than Leo Bruce wrote one of his Sergeant Beef novels. I'll share the evidence that demonstrates that was indeed the case.

My current plan is to retain Forgotten Books on the blog rather than moving them to the newsletter, but I'll keep this under review. 

Now for today's Forgotten Book... 

Death and the Sky Above is an early Andrew Garve title, dating from 1953. Nine years later, it was adapted by Roger Marshall (a terrific screenwriter, then right at the start of his career) into a short film. I can see why it was filmed, as Two Letter Alibi, because it's a visual and atmospheric story with no shortage of action sequences. Typical Andrew Garve, in fact.

In some ways, it's a combination of crime story and adventure story. There's a murder mystery which forms the catalyst for the action sequences, but the answer to the question of whodunit is hinted at very clearly in the first pages, and it most certainly isn't the main focus of the book. Garve was, in truth, usually much more interested in spinning an exciting yarn than in weaving a cunning mystery. There is, however, a neat plot device relating to an alibi connected with a Test cricket match at the Oval.

Charles Hilary is in love with an attractive and likeable TV presenter, Kathryn Forrester. The only snag is that Charles is married, to the once lovely but fast fading Louise. She's a difficult woman who takes pleasure in refusing him a divorce. They have an argument and he goes to the cricket to cool down. But whilst he's there, Louise is murdered. He's identified by a neighbour as having been present at the crucial time (though we know he wasn't) and he's duly convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

But a lucky chance enables him to escape from prison, and the meat of the story concerns his attempts, with Kathryn's selfless support, to make a new life for them both by sailing away from England. As so often, Garve's enthusiasm for and knowledge of small boat sailing is a key component of the story. The murder mystery, such as it is, is perfunctory in the extreme, but the action is very well described. 

The Family Next Door - 2025 TV serial - review

The Family Next Door is a six-part Australian TV series which originally aired last year and which I caught up with on ITV X. It's based on a 2018 novel by Australian author Sally Hepworth, whose work I'm unfamiliar with, and I'm not sure how close the TV drama is to the original source. I'd characterise it as a well-made blend of psychological suspense and soap opera, a formula that works very well for The White Lotus, the first two series of which I enjoyed watching.

I've not seen the actors appear in anything else, but they do a good job here, and they are led by Teresa Palmer, who gives a strong performance as Isabelle, a young woman who moves to an upmarket cul-de-sac in a coastal resort in Victoria. She is clearly troubled and trying to find something out about her new neighbours. But what exactly is the mystery that she appears to be trying to solve?

This is a pretty appealing premise, and it's well handled, especially in the early part of the series. Each of the six episodes is named for, and focuses primarily on, one of the lead female characters. So to begin with, 'Ange', episode one, deals with Isabelle's encounters with an estate agent who lives on the cul-de-sac and whose relationship with her husband is clearly coming under strain.

The children of the residents play an important part in each episode, and the child actors also do well. I think it's fair to say that some of the episodes seem a bit drawn-out, as is so often the case with six-part series when there is only enough plot for about four episodes (sometimes not as many!) And I felt the final episode was so-so. But overall, I enjoyed watching this one, even if it's not as good as The White Lotus. Crucially, the central idea that is the basis for the story is strong and interesting.