City Life

A varied couple of days for me. I spent Sunday afternoon at Anfield, where a stadium packed to capacity watched the big match between Liverpool and Chelsea. A fascinating experience, though one of the coldest sporting occasions I can remember. It’s always fun to go to Anfield – and in my early days as a crime writer, I used the football setting as the backdrop for a short story featuring Harry Devlin, called ‘Never Walk Alone.’

The snow duly arrived yesterday, making commuting even less appealing than usual. However, I had an added incentive to venture through the blizzard that descended on the city in the afternoon, as I was due to be interviewed on City Talk, the Merseyside radio talk show, by Dean Sullivan during his regular show – the topic for discussion being Dancing for the Hangman.

I was looking forward to meeting Dean, a good actor who is best known for his long-term role as Jimmy on ‘Brookside’, since a few years ago he was mooted as a possible Harry Devlin in a televised version of my Liverpool mysteries. That never happened, unfortunately, and neither did my interview with him. Dean was unwell and the interview was conducted by an affable deputy, called in at short notice.

As I walked back to the office from the Liverpool Beacon which is home to City Talk, my mind wandered to those crime novels with a snowy setting. There are several good ones. A favourite of mine is Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery, an under-rated detective story with a pleasing (if not extensively clued) solution. If you saw the recent, very unsatisfactory, televised version, but haven’t read the book, I can promise that the book is much better.