Jessica Mann R.I.P.

 

I'm truly sorry to report the death, on Wednesday, of Jessica Mann, a crime writer and reviewer of distinction. It's only a month ago that she played a full part in the Alibis in the Archives weekend, talking with her customary fluency and passion about female crime writing, and then joining a panel of authors for a wide-ranging discussion about the genre. A fortnight ago, she was - as so often - a convivial guest at a Detection Club dinner. And only last week I received a parcel of books from her. It was, therefore, with great shock and much sadness that I heard the news from her daughter Lavinia yesterday. 

Jessica lived a full life of high accomplishment, and I’ll remember her with huge affection not just as a talented author but as someone who was always ready, willing, and able to give younger colleagues, myself included, a great deal of help and encouragement. I first met her in the late 1980s, some years after I first read her books, but it's really been in the past ten years that she and I became friends. She followed this blog and emailed me regularly to urge me to keep busy, travelling and writing. We'd even talked recently about collaborating on a book together. She was a great believer in making the most of life, a philosophy that stood her in good stead.

Jessica Mann was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied archaeology, and Leicester University, where she took a degree in law; she became a barrister, but did not practise, although she later served as an employment tribunal member. Over the years, she served as a planning inspector as well as serving on numerous committees – including the CWA committee – and as Secretary of the Detection Club. A week after she completed her finals at Cambridge, she married the distinguished archaeologist and historian Charles Thomas; they had two sons and two daughters. Jessica and Charles lived in Cornwall for many years, but after his death two years ago she came back to London, the city of her birth.

Jessica’s first crime novel, A Charitable End, appeared in 1971; her penultimate book, Dead Woman Walking took her career full circle, as it reintroduced one of the characters from her debut, as well as the psychiatrist Dr Fidelis Berlin, who appeared in a handful of earlier novels, perhaps most memorably the superb A Private Enquiry, which was shortlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger. Her final novel, The Stroke of Death, saw the reappearance of perhaps her most popular character, the archaeologist Tamara Hoyland, after an absence, regretted by many readers, of a quarter of a century. 

Jessica’s non-fiction included Deadlier than the Male, an excellent study of female crime writing, and she was in much demand as a journalist and broadcaster from the time she first appeared on Radio 4’s Any Questions in the 1970s; she also featured on Question Time, Start the Week, Stop the Week, and the Round Britain Quiz . For many years, she reviewed crime for the Literary Review. For about fifteen years, she’d coped with Parkinson’s, which must have been very difficult, but her spirit was indomitable. Her life advice to me, regularly repeated and much appreciated, was very simple: “Do it now!”  Jessica was, you see, a wise woman as well as a good friend and a fine writer. She will be much missed.

The Running Heroine - guest blog by Jessica Mann

The competing merits of stand-alone and series crime novels is a topic of perennial interest, and I'm delighted to say that Jessica Mann is today contributing a guest blog on this very topic.

"Off the top of your head how many crime writers can you think of whose books are all stand alone? In fact, can you think of any? Because even those who started with one-offs usually move on to re-using the same characters, as HRF Keating, did when the first Inspector Ghote followed five stand-alones. Authors can be bored by their running heroes, as Christie seemed to become with Poirot.  Lindsey Davis and Val McDermid  both gave themselves breaks recently , each writing a one-off novels, but then returned to their series characters, in, almost by definition, “series places”.

Other writers feature not so much series as recurring places and people. One is Michael Gilbert, of whom Martin Edwards wrote , “It is a feature of this author’s work that he regularly created fresh and engaging characters who would pop up in various novels and short stories, without any one achieving dominance.” Characters, and  places: having adopted Thomas Hardy’s cathedral city of Melchester in his first book, Close Quarters, he  revived that scene of crime thirty years later  in The Black Seraphim.   

I enjoy these surprise encounters even  more than meeting reliable old favorites. It was fun when Margery Allingham’s Amanda Fitton,  introduced  in  one of the  early, more light-hearted crime novels,  reappeared half a dozen books later in The Fashion In Shrouds,  after which she’s a fixture. Agatha Christie’s return to Hercule Poirot in her last book, Curtain, is in  a different category, as she wrote the book many years earlier and put it aside for later publication.

Minor characters reappear in my own books; and some  are connected by   series heroines.   Professor Thea Crawford,  reluctant detective in The Only Security and Captive Audience, plays a small part  in subsequent novels featuring her former  pupil,  the archaeologist Tamara Hoyland. Both of them know   Dr Fidelis Berlin, introduced  in A Private Inquiry, and taking  a minor role in Under A Dark Sun and a major one in The Voice From The Grave.

The  heroes and heroines of crime fiction  often grow up (as Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion did)  even reach retirement age, like Ian Rankin’s Rebus, but they usually remain vigorous and influential, as did Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn. Very few  detective heroes  grow realistically old, though Ruth Rendell’s Wexford,  Peter Dickinson’s Pibble and Hercule Poirot do.

And I hope the septuagenarian Fidelis is credible  in my new book, Dead Woman Walking. One of its minor  characters, a young Isabel Drummond,  is revived forty years after her first appearance in  A Charitable End. It was my first novel – so perhaps it no longer counts as a stand-alone."