The International Agatha Christie Festival

I've just returned home from the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay. This was the third time I've taken part in the festival, which seems to be growing all the time. I was asked to take part in 'Roger Ackroyd Day', namely 17 September, and to give a presentation about Agatha and the Detection Club. Family commitments meant the overall trip was shorter than originally planned, but I still managed quite a lot of sightseeing on the long journey to and from the south west and I'll highlight some of my experiences on another occasion.

All festivals require a good deal of hard work on the part of a considerable number of people - not just the festival director, Matt Newbury, and administrator Jo Barlow, but a range of others working hard in the background. It all seemed to go very smoothly, and that's no mean achievement, as the logistics for an event of this kind can be quite challenging to manage. 

It was interesting to return to the Grand Hotel, where I first stayed during the Agatha Christie Centenary celebrations in 1990 - before I was a published crime novelist! Equally interesting to reflect on everything that has happened since then; many wonderful things that I never foresaw, that's for certain. One of the great pleasures of a festival is the chance to catch up with old friends and to meet other people for the first time. It was good to see Tina Hodgkinson again, and she kindly introduced me to fashion expert and TV presenter Amber Butchart. Now I'm nobody's idea of a fashionista, but Amber proved to be very charming and told a great story about her experience as a winner of Celebrity Mastermind.

I was pleased to chat with David Brawn, always good company, as well as Agatha guru John Curran, her great-grandson James Prichard, Robert Thorogood (whose conversation with Ben Miller was excellent), true crime expert Angela Buckley, and many more. Thanks to David, I also came away with an inscribed copy of Lucy Foley's new novel featuring Jane Marple, which I look forward to reading. It was a great trip. 

Forgotten Book - A Corpse for Charybdis

A Corpse for Charybdis was the fourth novel published by Susan Gilruth, and the first to appear under the imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. This marked a step-up for her after being published by Robert Hale. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to Hale, who did a good job for many, many years, producing books for library readers. Many of their titles were very enjoyable. But print runs were small, and I suspect the editing was minimal. 

For many authors coming towards the latter stages of their career, Hale provided a decent enough home (perhaps the major British detective writer they published in his later years was the great Michael Gilbert), but for a younger and ambitious writer, the opportunity to move on to a major firm like Hodder must have been welcome, as well as (relatively) more remunerative.

The novel appeared in 1956 and there was no paperback edition, nor (as far as I know) any overseas edition, although the story was adapted for BBC Radio. So, like most of Gilruth's seven novels, it's quite a rare book - I've never seen a physical copy, only a pdf. I decided to read it while on a cruise, because it is set on a cruise, and one of the fascinating elements of the story is the light it casts on cruising in the post-war era - suffice to say that it was a very, very different experience.

Another historical point of interest is that the story is set during the Cold War, and the ship in question is a Yugoslav cargo ship, which is only carrying a handful of passengers. These include Liane Crauford, who again narrates, and her husband (I'm tempted to say, her long-suffering husband, but to be honest he is a bit dull, if pleasant enough) Bill. Gilruth's interest in true crime is reflected in her reference to the James Camb 'porthole murder' case from real life, while her knowledge of detective fiction is evidenced by a pleasing 'red herring' about the m.o. in Sayers' Murder Must Advertise. There's also a plot device slightly similar to that in another holiday whodunit, Christie's A Caribbean Mystery.

One of the merits of a cruise mystery - and quite a lot of them have been written over the years- is that the setting provides a 'closed circle' of suspects. Helpfully, there is a plan of the passenger deck and Gilruth also includes a cast of characters at the start of the book. This reveals that Liane's chum Hugh Gordon of Scotland Yard will make an appearance at some point. I don't think this is a spoiler of any meaningful sort, though I did wonder how Gilruth would work him into the story. Suffice to say that she does so in a more or less plausible way. This is a teasing mystery, and although Gilruth didn't focus on 'fair play' in the Golden Age manner, there's an undeniable charm about her writing. 

Rogue Agent - 2022 film review

What a terrific actor James Norton is. I first came across him in the first series of Happy Valley, in which he was superb as a villain, and I've followed his career since then with interest as well as admiration. When I saw that he had the lead role in Rogue Agent, a Netflix film inspired by a true story of crime, I was keen to watch it, and I certainly wasn't disappointed.

Norton plays Robert Freegard, a seemingly likeable and definitely plausible individual. When we first meet him, he's posing as an MI5 agent and conning three naive young people into abandoning their old lives. Years later, he's selling posh cars and when an attractive lawyer, Alice (Gemma Arterton) passes by, he chats her up. Before long, they are living together. 

Alice checks into Robert's background and learns from a private detective that the man she has fallen for seems not to exist. When she confronts Robert, he tells her that he works for MI5, and she believes him. He also persuades her to start up a business venture with him. When he drains the account, she doesn't seem to realise the legal implications of a joint account until a policeman explains them to her, which I thought was rather odd for a supposedly hot-shot lawyer. The scenes in her office I didn't find convincing, but overall, the script is strong and the story really interesting, in this particular case all the more so because of its real life origin. 

I didn't know much about Robert Freegard until I watched this film. As a general rule, I'm wary about films that dramatise recent events involving living people, because they can embellish the facts in a way that seems deeply unfair. But as far as I can tell, even though significant elements of the storyline are invented, there's actually nothing unfair about Rogue Agent. If anything, it flatters Freegard, a cruel conman, by having such a charismatic actor portray him.   

The Names by Florence Knapp - and Italy

I planned September this year as a month mainly devoted to holidays, and celebrating various publications, before things were disrupted, but a trip to Italy in the company of Kate Ellis and her husband Roger Bullock proved very relaxing, a chance to unwind away from home. And for once I decided that for my holiday reading I'd focus on a novel that isn't a work of crime fiction. There are certainly crimes committed in Florence Knapp's much-acclaimed debut The Names but they are incidental to the main story - or, I should I say, stories.

The premise appealed to me greatly (even if I don't think it's actually true): the idea that one's path through life is affected by the name one is given at birth. Florence Knapp traces a boy's development in seven-year stages, according to whether he is called Gordon (after his bullying father, a doctor), Julian (a name favoured by his mother Cora, as a sort of compromise), or Bear (a name chosen by his sister Maia). I did wonder if the cover quote saying that the novel is 'life-affirming' was a euphemism for 'twee', but it proved to be anything but. 

I really enjoyed this book. The writing is excellent from start to finish and I'm fascinated by the structural premise, one that has always appealed to me - there's a Sliding Doors moment at the start of the book, when Cora is going with Maia to register the birth, and the ways in which Florence Knapp takes the stories from there is consistently engaging. She really is a fine writer and the only question now is: how does she top this achievement?

As for my own writing, my British Library anthology Eat, Drink and Be Murdered was published while I was away, and the previous anthology in the series, Puzzles of the Parish received a wonderful review in Barry Turner's final column on classic crime in the Daily Mail: 'Edwards makes an excellent start with G. K. Chesterton’s sharp-witted Father Brown exposing a religious charlatan who is also a murderer.
The challenge for Edwards is to maintain the standard for the rest of the book. This he achieves magnificently with a rich assortment of astute priests including an amateur detective who recovers a church treasure and a rector who, having disposed of a blackmailer, takes advantage of an open grave made ready for another funeral. While the masters of crime fiction such as Michael Gilbert and Edmund Crispin are well represented, there are rarer names of the genre here. And very good they are, too.'

The Italy trip started in Lucca, a wonderful old walled city that appealed to me greatly; a climb up a tower was rewarded with fantatstic views. There was a trip to Pisa; I've been there twice before, but this was the most enjoyable visit of the three. Moving from Lucca to Genoa involved a stop in Porto Venere; we managed to fit in a climb to the church before having lunch during a prolonged and truly spectacular thunderstorm. 

My daughter Catherine had told me that Genoa was well worth a visit and she was proved right. I liked it a lot and felt that, despite getting around the city a good deal, there was still more to explore. A trip to upmarket Portofino, by boat from Rapallo, was very enjoyable, as was the climb to the church, museum, and lighthouse. Weather conditions prevented a boat trip to Cinque Terra, despite the fact that the sea was quite calm, but we visited Monterosso and Vernazza by train; charming places. I'd like to go back there another time, should the opportunity arise.  

Dream Lover - 1993 film review

Dream Lover is a thriller written and directed by Nicholas Kazan (son of the legendary director Elia Kazan, and himself an Academy Award nominee). I assumed the famous Bobby Darin song 'Dream Lover' would feature, but it was not to be, and this is certainly a film that confounded my expectations in quite a number of ways. 

It's a strange film in some respects, and over the years it has attracted both admiration (from the eminent critic Roger Ebert, for instance) and scorn. I can see both points of view and I find myself rather undecided on whether its strengths outweigh its flaws. I don't want to say too much about the flaws, because that would entail spoilers, but suffice to say that the sudden and melodramatic ending of the film seemed to me to be very unsatisfactory as well as unexpected (and I admit that I didn't expect it). I'm all in favour of twist endings, but this was one I didn't care for.

I was completely unfamiliar with the cast of the film, but James Spader, who plays a wealthy and charming young architect has evidently had a successful career. His character is called Ray Reardon, which added to the strangeness, since that's a name I associate with the famous snooker player. At the start of the film, Ray is getting divorced from his wife; although he struck her in a moment of anger, she still seems devoted to him. 

Soon Ray develops an obsession with a beautiful and enigmatic young woman, Lena Mathers (Madchen Amick). Their passionate relationship leads to marriage and children, but Lena is a mysterious character and Ray becomes increasingly puzzled about her, and for good reason. There were one or two elements of the film that reminded me of the brilliant Body Heat, in which another naive professional man becomes besotted with a gorgeous woman, but there's no doubt that Body Heat has stood the test of time much better. 

Forgotten Book - Who Killed Robert Prentice?

The first Crime Dossier created by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links was Murder off Miami (in the US, File on Bolitho Blane) and it proved to be a huge success, bringing together Golden Age elements such as the 'challenge to the reader' in a dossier format, like a three-dimensional version of books such as The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace. 

A follow-up was inevitable, and it came in the form of Who Killed Robert Prentice? which boasts some intriguing clues as part of the package. Unfortunately, since the clues include a particular perfume on certain correspondence, they don't always stand the test of time. When copies turn up on the second hand market, items are often missing - my first edition lacks an important newspaper cutting as well as some face powder (!) but one curiosity is still present and correct. This is a little wallet of pieces of a torn-up photograph - which turn out to display a topless woman in the company of a man: in other words, it's a compromising picture used for the purposes of blackmail. Racy for 1937, that's for sure.

The British police are baffled by the death - by strychnine poisoning - of the wealthy Prentice. His widow contacts a visiting American detective called Schwab and asks him to look into the case. He soon finds that there are several plausible suspects, including the deceased's step-son and his mistress. 

After some intricate stuff concerning alibis, it eventually becomes clear that the crime turns on a plot device which is by no means original (I associate it with another strychnine poisoning mystery, which in other respects is very different) but which still works pretty well in this context. This was actually the first Crime Dossier I ever read, and rereading it thirty years later was equally pleasurable. 

Cellar Door - 2024 film review

Cellar Door is a fairly recent American film which takes a situation with a number of rather familiar ingredients and and manages to make something quite interesting and entertaining out of them. As a result, I found it more watchable than I might have expected, given that the script does have a number of flaws. In a way, it's a Faustian pact story with a difference. 

A young couple, Sera and John (Jordana Brewster and Scott Speedman) who have recently suffered a miscarriage decide to make a new start by looking for a house in the country. An estate agent introduces them to a slightly mysterious chap called Emmett (Laurence Fishburne) who makes them an offer that they find it impossible to refuse.

Emmett lives in a gorgeous mansion which has seen some kind of unspecified tragedy in the past. He offers the couple the chance to acquire the house for nothing, subject to one condition only - they must never open the cellar door. Of course, they say yes, but soon John is itching with curiosity, desperate to find his way past that pesky cellar door.

The plot thickens when a work colleague of John's turns up at the housewarming party and subsequently accuses him of sexual harassment. There's a pleasing twist near the end of the film, and it becomes clear that the primary significance of the cellar door is metaphorical rather than actual. I'm not sure everything in the story made complete sense, but there were just about enough interesting developments to keep me engaged to the rather ambivalent ending.   

War of the Worlds - 2005 film review

I vividly remember reading H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, aged about 12 or 13, after borrowing the book from my school library. I was so impressed that I was tempted to buy a paperback copy of The Time Machine for myself, and I also read quite a few of his short stories. I even tried his 'social realism' fiction, but at that age, I certainly didn't find it gripping, and I think it's fair to say that today he is much better remembered as a writer of sci-fi than for his non-genre fiction.   

About seven years ago, I enjoyed a BBC TV version of the story - some key scenes of which were shot in Great Budworth, a lovely Cheshire village well-known to me - but I've only just caught up with Steven Spielberg's 2005 film version, set in the United States. This begins and ends clunkily, in my opinion, with a solemn and rather banal explanatory voiceover by Morgan Freeman, but the action in between is very good.

The cast is led by Tom Cruise, whose performances in action films generally strike me as excellent. I know that some people don't like his portrayal of Jack Reacher, partly because of his lack of height, but I thought he did a pretty good job. And under Spielberg's direction, he is on top form here, as Ray Ferrier, a dock worker whose marriage is over and whose ex-wife Mary Ann (now pregnant by her new bloke) has custody of their children, moody adolescent Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and young Rachel (Dakota Fanning). At the start of the film, Ray is late to collect his children for a few days, and his lack of attention to punctuality sums up the unreliability that has ended his marriage.

There are news reports of electrical storms in Ukraine, and soon strange clouds form overhead. Before you know it, alien tripods are causing havoc - and their first appearance is quite memorable. The story focuses on Ray and his children, and is well handled, with several moments of very high tension. You can interpret Wells' storyline in a variety of ways, but what matters most is that it really is a very good story, a landmark title in science fiction that has stood the test of time. 

Andrew Shanks R.I.P.

No 'Friday Forgotten Book' today, because I want to pay a personal tribute to my brother-in-law Andrew Shanks, who died on Tuesday. This tragic news came as a great shock, and it will be a considerable time before we come properly to terms with his loss. Andrew was a writer and translator of distinction, although his field was far removed from crime writing; he did, however, provide me with advice several times. He's mentioned in the acknowledgements to Blackstone Fell, having given me a good deal of help with my research for a pivotal chapter in that book, set around a church service. He was a priest (at different times he had rural and inner city parishes and he also served as Canon Theologian at Manchester Cathedral for a decade) and also a philosopher. In a message to Andrew's widow Dian Leppington, his friend Rowan Williams has already expressed his admiration for Andrew's personal qualities with great eloquence and poignancy.

Andrew was the eldest of the four children of Michael and Juliet Shanks: he's on the left in the above photo, with Chris, Roland, and Helena. Michael was a distinguished economist (whose influence continues to the present; his ideas were referenced last week in his column by the economics editor of the Sunday Times) and author. Andrew read History at Balliol, his father's old college, and he and I overlapped there, although he enjoyed Balliol less than I did and we didn't meet until after I'd got to know his sister, whom I first met at the same college. I've often said that Andrew is the cleverest person I know, but even more important than his formidable intellectual gifts were his personal qualities, his compassion, warmth, and playful sense of humour. 

Andrew played an important part in my life, more important than perhaps he realised. Not only did he officiate at our wedding, he guided me through after the death of my mother at the darkest time of my life and delivered a tribute at the memorial service when I simply couldn't manage it. And there was much more: he and Dian frequently hosted us, and my crime writing friend Eileen Dewhurst at their home in Leeds when we stayed en route for northern CWA events in Yorkshire. On one occasion he and Dian looked after our children at short notice while we were away and I'd messed up the arrangements. At different times, when they had homes in Hornby (E.C.R. Lorac country!) and Grassington, we stayed there for holidays. There was a memorable family gathering in Liverpool two years ago when we all spent a January weekend together to celebrate his 70th birthday, visiting the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight in Wirral, among other things (the below photo). And there was much else besides.

I very much enjoyed our conversations over the years, at family get-togethers or sometimes when we  played chess or watched Match of the Day together. He was never less than fascinating to talk to and it's safe to say that I learned a lot more from him than he did from me. I think we had many shared values, though it's fair to say that our ideas about how society could best implement those values were often very different. On his extremely interesting website Andrew describes himself as a 'neo-Hegelian...politically however (more and more) a sort of anarcho-pacifist.' In the last really lengthy discussion we had, he explained to me his ideas about reforming the House of Lords. These are set out on a page of his website and I think they deserve serious consideration by serious people (even if Andrew's confidence in the charitable sector is greater than mine). In any event, the point is not really whether you agree 100% with his argument: what matters is the quality of the thinking behind it.

Andrew suffered from serious ill-health of various kinds for many years, but it was a tribute to his courage and indomitable spirit that he bounced back so many times, and was able to devote himself to his writing and his happy and fulfilling personal life with Dian right to the end. I cannot deny that books such as his first, Hegel's Political Theology, were too difficult for me, but he achieved something special in recent times with his impressive translation of the poetry of the German Nelly Sachs. She was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I confess I'd never heard of her until Andrew explained what an extraordinary individual she was. His translations seem to me to be highly successful and he won two prizes for them. As I've mentioned, his father's legacy endures. So too, I have no doubt, will Andrew's. I shall remember him with gratitude and huge affection.    

 

   

The Scottish Isles

 

I'm just back from a lovely trip to the Scottish Isles, which although overshadowed by other things, provided a scenic reminder of just what a gorgeous part of the world is to be found up the coast from Liverpool, from where the ship did a round trip. First stop was Shetland - not as warm as on my last visit, to Shetland Noir, but still charming.

It was nice to see Lerwick again (and to see a copy of The Life of Crime in the excellent Shetland bookshop!) but the highlight was a guided walk across the sand tombolo to St Ninian's Isle, a look at the ruined chapel, and the rugged scenery. There were also some Shetland ponies.

Next stop was Kirkwall on Mainland, Orkney, an island I've never visited. As with Shetland, Orcadian tourism has definitely benefited from the popularity of Ann Cleeves' books about Jimmy Perez!

The ancient settlement of Skara Brae was an absolute must-see, and the nearby Skail House was also very interesting. A trip into 'downtown Kirkwall', as someone described it, was notable in particular for the chance to look around St Magnus Cathedral - truly impressive.

Next came Lewis, an island which features in Peter May's very successful novels. The Black Houses were fascinating, as were the standing stones at Calanais. A look around Stornoway afforded the opportunity to explore the grounds of Lews Castle. All in all, most enjoyable.

The final sea day afforded vistas of the Dutchman's Cap and Fingal's Cave as well as various other islands, and indeed Ireland. A wonderful place to explore - and no shortage of crime writing associations!