Not Wanted on Voyage

One of the lecture topics I chose for my recent talks on board Queen Mary 2 was "cruise mysteries". And the more I researched the subject, the more examples I found of such novels. Quite a few of them will feature as Forgotten Books over the coming months. There are plenty of enjoyable titles from the past where writers have made excellent use of cruise ships as a background for murder mysteries. The "closed community" on board ship makes for an atmospheric setting.

Then again, and perhaps inevitably, I did encounter a few disappointments. On this blog, I like to focus on books I've enjoyed, rather than the misfires, but if anyone thinks I am besotted with all classic mysteries, regardless, perhaps this post will alter that view! There were four books which didn't really do it for me, alas. Each of them had some redeeming features, but not enough for me to want to devote a whole "Forgotten Book" post to them. So here's a round-up - and of course, feel free to disagree...

One of the disappointments was The Blind Barber by John Dickson Carr. It's a Gideon Fell mystery, first published in 1934, and featuring an Atlantic crossing from New York to Southampton. I was really looking forward to reading this one, which had previously eluded me. But I have to say that, despite my enthusiasm for both Carr and Fell, this book disappointed me. It's really an armchair detective story, with Fell told about misadventures on board ship by his friend, the mystery writer Henry Morgan. The story is, really, a farce, and the humour hasn't worn particularly well.

I was also optimistic about Robin Forsythe's The Pleasure Cruise Mystery. Once very obscure, it's an example of Dean Street Press's admirable commitment to reprinting forgotten mysteries. The story features Algernon Vereker, and it's quite well and amusingly written, especially in the early stages. But the plot simply didn't capture my interest. I shall definitely give Forstyhe another go, but this was a rather discouraging introduction to his work.

K.K. Beck was a prolific writer of cozy-type mysteries in the later years of the twentieth century. I read her Death in a Deck Chair, set in the Golden Age, and it's a competent piece of  light (very light) entertainment, but the involvement in the storyline of one of those Ruritanian-style countries so beloved of minor GA writers put me off.

Finally, Nancy Spain's Not Wanted on Voyage. There's a nice plan of the cruise ship at the start of my copy, but the story didn't appeal to me. In real life, Nancy was a fascinating character, as her biography and autobiography make clear, but her speciality as a detective novelist was humour, and I found the facetiousness of this one simply too much. I'm afraid the title is all too accurate; I still haven't finished it..

Murder at the Manor - and other classic mysteries

I've just received my author copy of Murder at the Manor, another anthology that I've compiled for the British Library. It will be available in early February. Compiling this book has given me the opportunity to bring together another selection of vintage mysteries. I've adopted the same general approach as for Resorting to Murder, Capital Crimes, and Silent Nights. The theme this time is the country house mystery. There are a few (relatively) familiar authors and stories, and a number of less obvious choices, including a little known, but in my view excellent story by Anthony Berkeley.

Over the Christmas break, The Times published a detailed article about the British Library series, after interviewing John Bude's daughter and me, and listed the top ten bestsellers in the series. Even then, a few weeks after its publication, Silent Nights had reached number seven in the list, and the other two anthologies have also sold many more copies than any of the other twenty-odd story collections I've edited. We're very encouraged by this, and several more anthologies are in the works.

The success of the British Library series is being emulated, and sometimes quoted in the publicity material of, other publishers who are, understandably, keen to take part in the current revival of interest in Golden Age fiction. I'm sure there are many people like me who feel that having so many of these old, and previously hard-to-find, books available again at affordable prices, is very good news.

A particular shout-out for Harper Collins, who - even before the BL series took off - have been doing great work in terms of bringing back books like The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman. They have more recently been reprinting Francis Durbridge's Paul Temple books, and have launched the very attractively presented Detective Story Club reprints. I hope to cover one of their titles, The Mystery at Stowe by Vernon Loder, before long. Loder is a writer I've heard good things about for years, not least from my friend Nigel Moss, who has written the introduction. Yet I've never come across one of Loder's books, so I was delighted to read it; the book will be on the shelves in the shops in March. Another book in the series, Freeman Wills Crofts' The Ponson Case, with an intro by crime novelist Dolores Gordon-Smith, will also feature here before too long.

Among the estimable smaller presses active in this field are Dean Street Press, whom I've mentioned several times before on this blog. In the coming months, I'll be talking about quite a few of their titles in more detail, The authors they are publishing include Ianthe Jerrold and E.R. Punshon, and I've just received a copy of a book by the highly obscure Robin Forsythe. It's called "Missing or Murdered".