I'm back home after a flying visit to the British Library on Saturday, when I took part in Deadly, the Library's first festival dedicated to women crime writers, and organised by Bee Rowlatt. Why, you may ask, was I taking part? Well, it's a good question, but I was very glad to be invited and only sorry that other commitments meant that I couldn't be there for longer.
The event was great fun. I was asked to captain 'Team Marple', comprising myself, Victoria Dowd, and Library curator Lucy Rowland, and our opponents were 'Team Vera', comprising Henry Sutton, Nicola Upson, and Sam Blake. The quiz mistress was the top TV screenwriter Sarah Phelps, whom I'd never met before, but who proved to be very entertaining and extremely interesting to chat to.
Somehow or other, we managed to win the quiz. I'm not indulging in false modesty when I say this was down to the excellence of Lucy and Victoria, whose knowledge of tiny details of the Christie canon was deeply impressive. My main contribution was pretending to look as though I knew most of the answers.
Despite the relative lack of time (because I've just started a new Rachel Savernake novel and that is demanding a lot of attention at the moment) I was glad to have the chance of conversations not only with my fellow quizzers, but also the likes of Sophie Hannah, Ann Cleeves, and Abir Mukherjee, as well as members of the audience such as Ayo Onatade, the podcaster Joyanna, and Tina Hodgkinson (who took the above photo, which appears on her Bluesky account). Deadly was a sell-out and congratulations to Bee and everyone else who made it such a success.
2 comments:
That sounded like it was a lot of fun, and I wish I could attend, but flights from Hershey to London are prohibitively costly.
Fair enough, Bill! And yes, it was great fun.
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