This Deadly Isle

I'm delighted to announce the publication on April 18 of my new Golden Age mystery map of Britain, This Deadly Isle. Yes, it's a bit of a departure from my usual  line of work (and it won't be the last such departure this year) and putting the material together really was a great deal of fun. A winter project that I much enjoyed.

This Deadly Isle is published by Herb Lester Associates, who have produced a number of interesting and very attractively designed mystery-related maps, for instance a nice Agatha Christie map by Caroline Crampton, who hosts the excellent Shedunnit podcast. I've covered several of these maps on this blog previously and it was a great pleasure to be asked to prepare one myself.

Golden Age fans tend to like maps. I certainly do and I'm always pleased to find an old novel with a map of the area where the events unfold. In creating This Deadly Isle, my aim was to offer a wide variety of locations across the country and to feature an equally wide range of stories and authors. So the usual suspects are present and correct, but there are also plenty of titles that many people will be unfamiliar with. If you fancy a copy, ordering details can be found here.

I've never created anything like this before and naturally one wonders what the artist will make of the raw material. I'm very impressed by the images I've seen so far and I am really looking forward to receiving my own map... 

Agatha Christie's England - mapped by Caroline Crampton

Rising interest in podcasts has been noticeable for some time now and the crime fiction enthusiast is very well served by those which are available. Over the past year or so, I've enjoyed taking part in discussions with quite a number of them. Some are relatively specialist, such as Jim Noy's The Invisible Event podcast, some more general, such as the Slightly Foxed podcast (which led me to discover the excellent literary quarterly journal, Slightly Foxed, which is full of good things). Another which I rate very highly is Shedunnit, which is written, hosted, and produced by Caroline Crampton.

Caroline has now diversified with a fun project - a map of Agatha Christie's England. This is published by Herb Lester Associates, and it turns out that they are responsible for a number of comparable maps connected with the world of crime and espionage. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a weakness for maps in detective fiction and I've enjoyed poring over this one.

In a recent blog post, Kate Jackson discussed the map and also interviewed Caroline. I imagine that one of the trickiest aspects of the project was that Christie was born and always lived in the south of England, and inevitably the settings for her stories are skewed towards places she knew, especially in Devon and London. But Caroline has done a good job of including locations from the north, not only the obvious ones such as Abney Hall and Harrogate, but also those which don't immediately spring to mind as Christie-related, such as Edale in Derbyshire and the Pier Head in Liverpool.

The map comes with a couple of pretty postcards in the art deco style that is often associated with Christie, mainly as a result of TV productions, and all in all, I'd say that it makes a nice gift for the Christie fan in your life.