Five million pageviews

 

Yesterday was very enjoyable, mainly because I took part in a fun event at Warrington Central Library, but also because this blog passed five million pageviews whilst I was out. That's an awful lot of pageviews, and even if some of them are attributable to AI (which may be the case, hence the note on this blog making it clear that AI scraping of my writing is not something I agree to), there's no doubt from the number of messages and emails I get from people around the world that the 'genuine' figures are very much on the rise.

For this, I'm truly grateful. The support you give me by reading these posts, and reaching out to me directly from time to time, is really heartwarming. I've made so many good friends and pleasant acquaintances since the blog began nearly 18 years ago. Before long, I hope to pay tribute to one of those special people, whose death earlier this year was a grievous loss. But for now, let me just say - thank you.

I was delighted to be asked to take part in Warrington's 'crime week', supported by the Friends of Stockton Heath Library, who do a great job. I was also very pleased that yesterday's event gave me the chance to collaborate again with Sarah Ward, a fine writer and delightful company. I've read several of Sarah's novels over the years and she is an author of high calibre. The audience was very engaged, asking some excellent questions.

Rachel Ralston and Sandra Corfield did a great job of organising the event, and I was also pleased to provide a signed book for the winner of a quiz that I've devised, which has run alongside the exhibition about crime writing that I've provided for Warrington Libraries among others. The libraries in Warrington are facing various challenges due to budget cuts, but I shall always be very glad to support them, as they have for so long supported me.

 

Forgotten Book - A Death at the Bar

Kenneth Giles' crime writing career began in 1965 and ended with his death in 1974, when he was only 52. In that relatively short time, however, he managed to publish a couple of dozen detective novels, all of them appearing under Victor Gollancz's imprint. In addition to books published under his own name, he wrote as Edmund McGirr and Charles Drummond. I know very little about him, other than that he was at one time a journalist and that his early books were admired by such good judges as Anthony Boucher and Edmund Crispin (although Barzun and Taylor, who were impressed by his debut mystery, soon got fed up with him).

I'd never read him until I came across the fifth and final Charles Drummond novel, A Death at the Bar (1972). I managed to snaffle a copy with the splendid inscription: 'For Ted, the model of all my sinister characters, Luv from Ken'. I've no idea who Ted was, but this inscription does give the impression that Giles was a fun character, and there's no doubt that humour is the strength of this particular novel.

The story begins at a brisk clip, ten days into the New Year, with snow falling, when Drummond's protagonist Sergeant Reed is greeted by a barman from the Admiral Byng pub with the news that the landlord, Harry Alwyn, has been murdered - his head has been bashed in. On page two, we're introduced to the pub cleaning lady, who rejoices in the name Mrs Crippen. Already the tone is set.

There are some very funny lines in this book that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, the prose is cluttered and so is the plot. There are various improbable gangsters and some equally improbable police work. I get the impression that Giles/Drummond wrote quickly, and didn't bother much with editing. There's enough good stuff here for the ingredients to have been blended into a much more satisfactory book, but as it is, things do rather go downhill after that wonderful inscription.   

Forgotten Book - Inspector Rusby's Finale

Virgil Markham (1899-1973) was an American author who produced eight crime novels between 1928 and 1936, in other words at the height of the Golden Age, and then abandoned the genre. Why he gave up, I don't know, but given that Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, two giants of the Golden Age, also stopped writing detective novels at much the same time - in Berkeley's case, just three years later - perhaps one factor was a sense that intricate mysteries were beginning to fall out of favour.

I've blogged about two of Markham's novels in the past - Death in the Dusk and Shock! aka The Black Door and when John Norris blogged about Inspector Rusby's Finale (1933) five years ago, I very much liked the sound of the book. But I couldn't find a copy. Eventually, John began to sell his collection and I was able to buy his copy from him, complete with the inscription he mentions, in which Markham describes the book as 'an outstanding example of my splendid craftsmanship'. He's quoting from the blurb of the Albatross paperback edition! 

This is an unusual mystery novel, eccentric in some respects, but it does make enjoyable reading. The opening chapter, set in Rapallo, and featuring a conversation between a group of women, is faintly disconcerting to a mystery fan, but in fact it contains information relevant to the storyline. The mystery proper begins when Inspector Myles Rusby sets out to go to a country house party near Salisbury at the request of the enigmatic but lovely Mrs Cade-Jack. He arrives late, and is greeted by her. But when he awakes, the house is deserted - except for a dead body.

It's an intriguing situation and Markham throws the kitchen sink at the reader, loading the story with all kinds of Golden Age tropes, not least a rather pleasing amateur detective called Thriddle. It's a sort of riff on Trent's Last Case (the prototypical country house whodunit, in which the detective fell in love with the main suspect) but it's very different. It's also well-written, with some witty lines as well as entertaining characters such as a gardener with a passion for crossword puzzles. Good fun. 

The June 2025 newsletter

I've been delighted by reaction to my new free monthly newsletter. The June issue is just out, and you can sign up for it here: https://substack.com/@martinedwardsbooks/

To whet your appetite, apart from reports about my own doings, there are contributions from two very interesting writers, Sarah Rayne and Christina Hardyment, and news of a forthcoming in-depth interview with John Cornwell.

I'm always interested in suggestions for enhancing the newsletter or any other feedback.

The Gold - BBC TV - series 1 review

I've belatedly caught up with the first series of The Gold, which I missed first time around. And the first thing to say about this example of TV 'faction' is that it's extremely watchable. The acting is terrific - I don't think there's a less than excellent performance in the entire six episodes. The series was created and written by Neil Forsyth, and on the whole the script is excellent, despite some flaws.

The story is based on the Brink's Mat gold bullion heist of 1983 and it's made clear from the outset that although it's based on real events, some characters and 'element's have been created or changed for dramatic purposes. My general feeling about this approach to writing is that it's fair enough: the real question is how well the writer tells the story. I accept, however, that the result is often closer to fiction than what actually happened. For instance, the writer has to be very careful about how people in the story who are still alive are portrayed. You can bet that there will be a very proper anxiety about avoiding libel, although of course this can lead to some parts of the story being sanitised. There's definitely a danger that viewers will assume that the portrayal of people and incidents is closer to reality than is actually the case.

The Gold has, perhaps not surprisingly, been criticised in some quarters for soft-pedalling on its presentation of criminality. The two most interesting criminals in the story are Kenneth Noye and John 'Goldfinger' Palmer and both men are portrayed by exceptionally charismatic actors, Jack Lowden and Tom Cullen, so inevitably the characters on screen seem more appealing than I imagine their real life equivalents are or were. It's a casting choice that seems questionable to me, even though Lowden and Cullen are absolutely terrific. In contrast, Sean Harris as Gordon Parry exudes menace from start to finish, and his portrayal seems rather more likely to be close to the truth.

More debatable, though, is Neil Forsyth's decision to add a layer to his storytelling which involves portraying the villains, quite repetitively, as class warriors. Those who are still alive might like to rationalise their actions that way, but overall the effect of the many set-piece speeches comes across as inauthentic. An attempt at 'fine writing' that, for me, failed to work, despite Forsyth's obvious talents.

And those talents are considerable. He's very good at his portrayal of the cops. Hugh Bonneville is at his compelling and humane best as the lead detective, Boyce, while his sidekicks played by Emur Elliot and Charlotte Spencer are excellent. Spencer is especially impressive, one of the stand-outs in a cast of uniformly talented actors, although the character she plays is invented, and to some extent a 21st century idea of what an appealing female cop of the 80s might have been like.

The Gold is, I think, best regarded as an entertaining thriller loosely based on a real life crime, even though my guess is that Neil Forsyth had additional aspirations. The points the script makes about class and aspiration were made more cleverly in The Long Good Friday, which was not based on real life and perhaps all the better for it. But viewed primarily as entertainment, The Gold is very good indeed, and I shall definitely watch series 2. 

  

Bodies from the Library 2025

I've taken part in every Bodies from the Library since the event began ten years ago. Each time it's been highly enjoyable but I must say that this year the organisers - take a bow John, Mark, Susan, and Liz - excelled themselves. Attendance equalled the previous best ever figure and the mood from start to finish was extremely convivial. The crime writing and reading community is one I've always loved and this particular branch of it is delightful.

The previous evening I'd enjoyed a lovely dinner at St Pancras with two of my friends and fellow speakers, Christine Poulson and Moira Redmond, and the pleasurable mood continued throughout Saturday. Space doesn't permit me to mention all the people I enjoyed chatting to, but the programme offered plenty of variety and some very knowledgeable speakers. 

The morning kicked off with a conversation between me and Gary Wrigglesworth, who is in charge of marketing the British Library's Crime Classics, and we were followed by Victoria Dowd who talked about Gothic elements of Golden Age fiction. John Curran celebrated Bodies' tenth birthday by highlighting vintage mysteries with 'ten' or 'X' in the title, and Tony Medawar somehow managed to give a comprehensive account of Ngaio Marsh's long career in the space of thirty minutes and Jake Kerridge and Moira had a fascinating conversation about reference works dealing with Golden Age fiction. Ronaldo Fagarazzi took us through some clips from that great TV series Detective, while Len Tyler discussed the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Ronaldo, Kate Jackson, and Moira talked about blogging and then a group of us answered questions from the audience before a wine reception sponsored by HarperCollins

In addition, Christine and I had a conversation about Fiona Sinclair. This was special for me because the audience included a large group of Fiona's family members and family friends, who had arranged a reunion connected to the event (and republication of Scandalize My Name). It was poignant to meet some of them, including Fiona's daughter, and to appreciate how much the republication of Fiona's first novel has mean to them.

I enjoyed myself from start to finish. A truly memorable day.

Forgotten Book - Black Aura

Timing is everything in the world of writing, as so often it is in many walks of life. John Sladek's misfortune was to demonstrate a mastery of the locked room mystery at a time when that delightful form of detective fiction was deeply unfashionable. He was primarily a science fiction writer, but he published two books of this type before giving up on mysteries.

As Sladek said in an interview with David Langford in 1982, 'those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection. I enjoyed writing them, planning the absurd crimes and clues, but I found I was turning out a product the supermarket didn't need any more – stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap. One could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those. SF has much more glamour and glitter attached to it, in these high-tech days.' How lucky we fans of detective fiction are that the wheel has turned full circle, and locked room puzzles (genuine locked room puzzles, as well as the 'closed circle' mysteries that are similarly if erroneously badged) are all the rage. 

I first came across Sladek's witty and clever detective fiction many moons ago, and my enthusiasm for his work was revived recently when I was lucky enough to acquire inscribed copies of both Black Aura and Invisible Green from the writer Scott Bradfield, who got to know Sladek (who was American) when the latter was in London in the 1990s.

Black Aura was published by Jonathan Cape in 1974. Sladek had won the 1972 Cape/Times short crime story competition, which earned him a prize of £500 and an offer to publish a novel. The short story introduced an American living in London called Thackeray Phin, and in the novel he operates very much in the grand tradition of the Great Detective, solving baffling impossible crimes with aplomb.

The setting of the story is a commune presided over by a very dodgy medium called Viola Webb. Phin believes she is a fraud and moves in with a view to debunking her. The way that the ingenious puzzles in the book are counterpointed by witty vignettes of life in Seventies London makes this book a real treat. It's such a shame that Sladek abandoned the genre. I'm tempted to argue that this book and Invisible Green were the best locked room mysteries of the 1970s. 

Skibo Castle

Starting in my teens, I've had a good many enjoyable trips to Scotland, so when I say that last week was very special and the most memorable of all those experiences, you can be sure that it was quite something. We were lucky enough to spend six nights at Skibo Castle as guests of generous friends, Shelly and Steven, who are members of the Carnegie Club. The Club is based at the castle and takes its name from Andrew Carnegie, the great benefactor of libraries (amongst many other philanthropic projects) who bought and transformed the castle at the end of the nineteenth century. If I remember rightly, the first library event I ever took part in as a writer was in a Carnegie library in Merseyside, and I've been to plenty more since then. But nothing prepared me for Skibo. 

I'd anticipated that the weather might be iffy and took plenty of books, but as things turned out, there was barely a drop of rain from the moment our plane landed at Inverness, and I hardly read a word. Very lucky. The castle offers a wide range of outdoors activities and although most of these are not really my cup of tea, I did try my hand at axe-throwing and archery. Of course, I was hopeless at both, but at least I didn't injure anyone! The castle grounds are lovely, with many secluded walks. And the castle itself has fantastic facilities, as well as an archivist who gave us two very interesting tours. I thought the Queen Mary was luxurious, and it is, but Skibo is in a league of its own.

Because the sun shone, it seemed like a good plan to get out and about in the surrounding area, north of Inverness. So there were trips to Dornoch, with its beach, ancient cathedral, and pleasant local shops, the massive Dunrobin Castle (superbly situated by the Moray Firth) and a spur of the moment pilgrimage to find the former home of Anne Perry, who died a couple of years ago. I recalled Anne telling me many years ago about the charm of her secluded home on the outskirts of the seaside village of Portmahomack, and the place certainly lived up to what she told me about it.

There were two hosted dinners in the castle itself, while lunch and dinner was otherwise taken at the Clubhouse, situated beside the golf course. You don't need an alarm clock at Skibo, because every morning at 8 am, a bagpiper marches around the castle. At 9 am, an organist plays in the great hall to accompany your breakfast. Afternoon tea, served either in the castle or in the gardens from the old potting shed, is delightful. The library is first-rate (as is, it must be said, the whisky library, where we enjoyed an excellent tasting). There was a visiting falconer called David whose birds gave a fine display. Everything is luxurious without being flashy. And the resident pianists play Burt Bacharach on request - what more could anyone wish for? I met some interesting people and I did think the quality of the service provided by the staff was impeccable - quite a tribute to those in management, because achieving such high standards and maintaining them is no easy task. All in all, it was a unique experience and I'll never forget it. 

  

Alibis in the Archive 2025

I'm back home after a wonderful ten days which began with a Murder Squad event at Halifax Central Library and then the most enjoyable of all the many great trips I've had to Scotland over the years. And in between there was the Alibis in the Archives weekend at Gladstone's Library, always a highlight in my calendar. 

Alibis began for me with an enjoyable lunch with various friends, including Paul Charles, Shelly Dickson Carr (aka Michelle Karol) and her husband Steven Karol and then a walk in the sunshine to the gardens of nearby Hawarden Castle. Andrea Russell, warden of Gladstone's Library, greeted everyone at a drinks party and there was a chance to catch up with various pals including Martin and Martine Bailey, Liz Gilbey, and Jean Briggs. After dinner I assumed the role of quizmaster for the now traditional Alibis quiz. Because one of our speakers was John Lee, the estimable publisher at the British Library, the theme was the Crime Classics. In a splendid contest, a team including Matthew Booth and John Curran narrowly pipped a team featuring Jonathan Hopson, who volunteers at the Library and does a great job there.

Saturday's programme got off to a great start with a witty and interesting talk by Orlando Murrin about Culinary Crime. John Curran's expertise is such that his time was split into two sessions, so that we could hear him talk both about Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks and also about Collins Crime Club. Then John Lee and I conversed about the Crime Classics.

Jonathan and the Library archivist Alexandra had put together a lovely exhibition as a tribute to Peter Lovesey, who was a very popular speaker at Alibis a few years back. And the Diamond Dagger was on display, much admired by all. The afternoon began with Christina Koning discussing Cambridge Crime and she was followed by Shelly, who gave a personal insight into the achievements of her legendary grandfather, John Dickson Carr, king of the locked room mystery.

On Sunday we had Alex Pavesi, bestselling author of Eight Detectives, talking about G.K. Chesterton and Metaphysical Crime Fiction, and then I was in conversation with Paul who talked about his own writing briefly before discussing our mutual friend Colin Dexter. Last but by no means least came Caroline England (whose husband Jonathan was once a legal colleague of mine) discussing psychological thrillers.

When programming Alibis, I try to offer a wide range of subjects and also presentational styles, so that everyone attending has plenty of variety and lots of interesting insights to digest. It's also important to have agreeable people who enjoy mingling with fellow readers and writers and I was very pleased with the way everything went. Special thanks to Louisa Yates and everyone at the Library for all their hard work, as well as to the delightful speakers. And next year's Alibis dates for your diary - 5-7 June 2026.