Motives for Murder

On Thursday evening I had the pleasure of presiding over an unforgettable evening at the Dorchester Hotel. It was the Detection Club's November dinner, which proved to be a sell-out, with a speech from distinguished former crime fiction editor Hilary Hale and the induction of two new members - James Runcie and Mick Herron. Guests included visitors from the US and members of the family of Ronald Knox, one of the Club's founders.

We also celebrated the recent 80th birthday of that wonderful writer Peter Lovesey, who has been a member of the Club for over 40 years. I admired Peter's books long before I met him, more than a quarter of a century ago, and when I suggested to Club members that we celebrate him in a practical way by producing a book in his honour, the response was overwhelmingly positive. And the result has just been published - a book called Motives for Murder.

The UK edition, published by Sphere (front cover above), was presented to Peter by David Shelley, once my own editor (and now J K Rowling's!) and the man who first commissioned my Lake District series. The US edition, published by Crippen and Landru (front cover below), was presented to Peter by Doug Greene whose own contribution to the genre includes a splendid biography of John Dickson Carr.

Len Deighton has written a foreword to the book, and Peter himself has supplied a fascinating afterword, detailing his memories of his early years in the Detection Club. Ann Cleeves, Len Tyler, Kate Charles, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Susan Moody, Andrew Taylor and Liza Cody are among the galaxy of talented writers who have written brand new stories for the book - while Simon Brett contributed a sonnet. An added twist is that the stories (and the sonnet) are connected to Peter's life and work in one way or another. The result is one of the most satisfying anthologies I've been concerned with, and a fitting tribute to one of life's good guys (who treated us on Thursday night to a wonderful rendition of his witty poem about autopsies...) It was a truly memorable occasion.

Top Ten Favourite Books About Crime Fiction

Prompted by a question posed by Lisa Shevin on the very informative Golden Age Detection Facebook forum, I've put together a list of my favourite books about the crime genre. Of course, such lists should never be taken too seriously, especially when I'm responsible for them, since I'm perfectly capable of changing my mind in a matter of hours, or forgetting titles that really should be unforgettable.

I've limited myself in three ways. First, by including only one book per author. Second, by excluding any book to which I've contributed, which rules out quite a few that I'm very fond of. Third, by excluding books about Sherlock Holmes - so many exist that they deserve a list of their own. Even so, there are many excellent books that I have enjoyed and learned from, including quite a number by good friends, that aren't on the list. So, with all those caveats (but then, I am a lawyer...), here goes:

10. The Letters of Dorothy L Sayers, vol. one. Edited by the estimable Barbara Reynolds, and the first of five remarkable collections of Sayers' correspondence,this book provides great insight into the mind and life of an extraordinary writer.

9. Whodunit? ed. H.R.F. Keating. This is a likeable book, a mixture of author bios, essays by various hands, and much more besides. I referred to it constantly in the 80s and 90s and it introduced me to some terrific novels.

8. Murder for Pleasure by Howard Haycraft. An early study of the genre, which contains bags of information, but presents it in an extremely readable form (something that can't always be said of othewise excellent books.)

7. John Dickson Carr: the man who explained miracles, by Douglas G. Greene. I was first urged to read this many years ago by Peter Lovesey, and his recommendation was spot on. Excellent about Carr, and also about the Detection Club; Doug's research was most helpful when I was working on The Golden Age of Murder.

6. A Catalogue of Crime by Barzun and Taylor. This book contains pithy paragraphs about countless otherwise obscure novels, short stories and anthologies, and more besides. The opinions are sometimes maddening,and I still marvel that they thought Knutsford (more famous as the setting for Cranford than as the town of my birth) is in Ireland. But then, all books about the genre contain mistakes - a recent example is the "academic" book that describes Ronald Knox as an American. The real test of merit is whether the book enthuses the reader, and I love this one, for all its faults.

5. Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks by John Curran. John's detective work in deciphering the notebooks and putting them into context is quite riveting. No book gives a more revealing insight into the creation of classic detective novels (though there's a brilliant chapter in Barbara Reynolds' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers that is also gripping.).

4. The Collector's Guide to Detective Fiction by John Cooper and Barry Pike. This contains lots of information about (mostly) Golden Age writers, and is a real treasure trove, with fantastic illustrations of old jackets that I find irresistible. The authors are two British doyens of writing about the Golden Age whose insights I've long admired, and learned from..

3. Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. John Reilly. The first two voluminous editions of this book again taught me a great deal about many writers I'd never heard of before. There is some fascinating stuff here, and I devoured it in my younger days. Two later editions, with different editors, did include essays by me, but Reilly's version was in many ways definitive.

2. Locked Room Murders by Robert Adey. This is sheer fun - an account of pretty much every locked room/impossible crime story -with solutions in a separate section. I sometimes read extracts during library talks, and the audiences really enjoy the snippets. Masterly research, superbly and economically presented.

1. Bloody Murder by Julian Symons. This has to be my number one. As will be seen when The Golden Age of Murder is published, I challenge quite a few of Julian's opinions, and he is apt to be criticised by some Golden Age fans. Part of this is due to his trenchancy, more of it is due to the fact that he was covering a vast amount of material in a short span - you simply can't cover every base in a book that purports to cover even a fraction of the history of crime fiction, let alone the whole of it. But it is supremely readable and well-written, and I know many people, otherwise not really interested in books about the genre, who love it. Symons was writing for the 'typical' reader rather than the specialist (and that, to be truly successful, demands a higher level of accessibility and readability than writing for specialists) but he manages to cover a vast amount of ground with aplomb.

Mysteries Unlocked

This year, I've been pleased to contribute essays to three widely diverging books, and each of them was a different writing and publishing experience. The first essay was a study of the short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, for Morphologies. Another is a discussion of Gilbert Adair and detective fiction for a forthcoming Adair festschrift. And the third is also a contribution to a festschrift, this time Mysteries Unlocked, which is sub-titled Essays in Honour of Douglas G. Greene.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Doug and I go back quite a long way. So long, in fact, that I can't quite recall when and where we first met. I've been a long-time subscriber to the wonderful books he publishes under the Crippen & Landru imprint, and edited one of them, a collection of Ellis Peters' "lost classics." He has helped me a great deal with my researches into the Golden Age, with that generosity that seems to me to typify the overwhelming majority of people in the crime fiction community. He is the author of a wonderful biography of John Dickson Carr, which I strongly recommend, as well as editor of a number of extremely interesting short story collections. In person he's very good company, and we've dined together a couple of times this year, most recently at Malice Domestic. So I'm very glad that Curtis Evans proposed celebrating Doug's 70th birthday with a book that includes essays, almost all of them brand new, about different aspects of crime fiction. The book is introduced by Steve Steinbock, who was at that same rather memorable dinner in Bethesda last May. Yep, it's a small world.

My contribution discusses Anthony Berkeley's short stories, and I'm currently enjoying reading the others, ranging from a lovely piece by Peter Lovesey about Eric the Skull of the Detection Club to a fascinating article by Mauro Boncampagni about the Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge/Patrick Quentin writing collective. I've never met Mauro, but I have the pleasure of corresponding with him, and I'm indebted not just to him but also to his wife, who has been translating The Coffin Trail into Italian - as a result, Mondadori will be publishing the first Lake District Mystery later this year, I'm thrilled to say.

Barry Pike and Julia Jones, leading lights of the Margery Allingham Society, are the authors of a pair of excellent studies. Barry's deals with Allingham's commercial fiction and Julia's tackles The China Governess. Julia's article is both interesting and wise; she explains how her view of the book has changed over the years, and I think this typifies the best scholarship. I admire critics who are willing to revisit their opinions, Both Dorothy L. Sayers and Julian Symons were admirable in this regard; it seems to me to be a sign of strength. Julia casts fascinating new light on the novel. To find out how she does this, you'll have to read the book!

John Curran, supremely knowledgeable about Agatha Christie, tackles her attempts at "locked room mysteries" with his customary authority. Mike Ashley (whom I've never met, but for whose anthologies I've written numerous stories) discusses Max Rittenberg. I'd never heard of Rittenberg, but Mike makes me want to read him. Roger Ellis writes interestingly about J.S. Fletcher, and Steve Steinbock about one of Carr's rivals in the impossible crime field, the under-rated Hake Talbot.

And there is more, much more. A wealth of other material of high quality, in fact, contributed by commentators including Jon L. Breen and Marv Lachman (against whom I once competed in a game of Mastermind, at the Nottingham Bouchercon) who combine to make this a truly wide-ranging reference book. I love devouring essay collections about the genre, and this is one of the best to have appeared in years. Editor Evans, himself the author of two of the essays, is to be congratulated on having come up with a great idea, and then on having done the spadework of turning it into a reality.

Forgotten Book - Night at the Mocking Widow

John Dickson Carr used the name Carter Dickson for the books he wrote about Sir Henry Merrivale, a detective whom some fans prefer to Dr Gideon Fell. Today's Forgotten Book, Night at the Mocking Widow, was published at the start of the Fifties but is set in an English village - with the excellent name Stoke Druid - in 1938. It's an English village mystery, and has a touch of nostalgia about it, as well as displaying Carr's love of England very clearly.

Stoke Druid is plagued by poison pen letters, and when one of those accused by the letters dies in tragic circumstances, the letters stop,only to start up again. The Mocking Widow (another great name) is a dominant stone in an ancient circle, and there is an "impossible situation" which does not actually involve a murder, with murder only taking place towards the end of the book. Stone circles have often featured in crime novels, and no wonder -they are so often spookily atmospheric.

I can't better the summary of this book to be found in Douglas Greene's biography of Carr, a book I regard as one of the best biographies of a detective novelist ever written. He is largely positive, though he recognises that the novel does not have the power and grip of Carr's best pre-war work. I thought that the ingredients were impressive and appealing, although I find the comedy associated with Merrivale much less appealing than do his biggest fans - for me, the Fell stories are on the whole markedly better.

I didn't guess the culprit in this one, but I felt this was in part due to the fact that the motivation is very thin. Carr made strenuous attempts, especially in the comic scenes, to compensate for the lack of a murder investigation from the outset, but by this time his powers were just beginning to fade. Perhaps the classic example of a village poison pen letter campaign is Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger. Even though that too is not one of her masterpieces, which perhaps explains why I've not mentioned it on this blog before, it is a smoothly accomplished whodunit and, to my way of thinking, clearly superior to Carr's effort. Overall verdict on this one- not bad, but unfortunately anti-climactic.