Forgotten Book - She Died a Lady

Bob Adey was a huge fan of John Dickson Carr, and I'm delighted to have acquired a couple of his Carr books with inscriptions. One of these, She Died a Lady, was published under the name Carter Dickson in 1943; the copy is a slim war-time edition, which Carr has inscribed to a woman friend with the comment "more dirty work".

This is a Sir Henry Merrivale story, and it's a very good one. I was delighted with the way Carr pulled the wool over my eyes. With his impossible crime stories, I seldom work out the ingenious m.o. of the killer, which is often too technical for my impractical brain to grasp, but I tend to have better luck in figuring out whodunit. This time, I came up with a nice solution which proved to be hopelessly wrong. And as fellow detective fans know, there are few more satisfying reading experiences than being cleverly fooled by a cunning plot twist or two. And there several good twists in this story.

Other than an epilogue, this story is narrated by a village doctor. Sound familiar ? If not, Carr drops a hint by including a character with the same name as someone in Agatha Christie's  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But is this a clue or a red herring? Suffice to say that I thought Carr pulled off a neat narrative trick here, and although it's one of which Christie would have been proud, it is original as far as I know.

What we have here is a story of a married woman who falls for a young actor. Is her elderly husband blind to what is going on? When the lovers disappear, and seem to have taken part in a suicide pact, the husband is the obvious suspect. But Carr didn't deal in obvious solutions. I felt that he chose an unwisely small pool of potential murderers, but he outsmarted me. I enjoyed this one a lot, and I bet Bob did too.

The Craft of Writing: Originality

Originality is something to be prized in any form of writing, and certainly in crime fiction. The snag is that it is very, very difficult to be truly original. Even when you firmly believe you've come up with something absolutely fresh and new, all too often it turns out that you've been beaten to it, generally in a work that you weren't even aware of.

This sense that I needed to come up with something absolutely original held me back when, in my teens (yes, I started early) I thought about writing a detective novel. I didn't know how to create something that wasn't likely to be derivative. Inhibitions of this kind are not helpful, and I only got over them properly when I came up with the idea of writing a number of mysteries about a Liverpool lawyer. Something I knew for sure had never been done. Even then, one reviewer of my debut, All the Lonely People, thought she detected the influence of Raymond Chandler (which I wasn't conscious of, I must say, and I'm not sure she had read much Chandler or indeed much crime fiction).

I also imagined that I'd come up with a great idea for my first book that combined plot development with snappy social comment. A body would be discovered in a municipal waste heap, picked over by impoverished scavengers. Very good - except that, many years later, someone told me that G.D.H. and Margaret Cole also wrote a story about a body in a waste heap....Similarly, one of my early short stories about Harry Devlin included a plot device that I discovered, only very recently, to have been used by Gladys Mitchell.

These things can make you despair, believe me - but there's no sense in despairing. The stories by Cole and Mitchell are little known, but that's not really the point, either. The real issue is that I was trying to do something very different in those two Devlin stories than they were trying to do in their books. There have always been similarities between story ideas that appear in different books. There are said to be Russian and Swedish books that anticipate The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and one American mystery anticipated And Then There Were None. These were not, I'm sure, conscious borrowings, but rather ideas that were somehow in the air and which were developed by writers in different countries. Similarly, one of Dorothy L. Sayers' best plot ideas also occurred to Ronald Knox while she was working on her book. Another resembled an idea used (in a similar setting but in a different style of story) by Freeman Wills Crofts.

The same thing applies when there are overlaps between contemporary books. For instance, there was a vogue a few years back, after a drought in England, for crime novels in which bodies were discovered when the waters receded (very different from England 2014 - perhaps we are in for a spate of 'flood' stories...) I remember one Northern writer being rather cross that Reginald Hill had written a book about 'mystery plays' not long after she had done the same. But it was a mistake to be cross, in my opinion. The books were quite distinct, and I could give many other examples of overlaps which seem to me to be not in the least problematic. The real challenge for a writer is to come up with some element - be it voice, or character, or an aspect of setting - that is fresh. Trying to come up with at totally new storyline is wonderful when it happens - but it is rather uncommon, to say the least.

Agatha Christie, Poirot and The Labours of Hercules

The Labours of Hercules was perhaps an odd choice for the penultimate instalment of Agatha Christie's Poirot, a rather dark rendition of elements from the book of the same name,which in fact brings together a dozen collected short stories. The screenplay by Guy Andrews was well-crafted, especially given the challenge of the task facing him. The production was atmospheric and the cast (as ever) impressive, with Simon Callow really enjoying himself, though the story almost inevitably lacked the tight-woven texture of the best Poirot mysteries.

All the same, it's been quite a week for Christie fans. The CWA celebrated 60 glorious years on Guy Fawkes Night with an event at Foyles, announcing the results of its "Whowunnit" poll of members. And Christie was voted best ever crime novelist, and her The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was best detective novel. Best detective was Sherlock Holmes, and given that Poirot, in his early days, was rather derivative of Sherlock, this seems fair enough.

Unfortunately, due to pressure of work, I wasn't able to make it to London for this event, but I agree with the view expressed by Alison Joseph, chair of the CWA, that the result reflects the long and distinguished history of crime writing. There are those who argue that the likes of Jo Nesbo (good writer as he is) should be ranked with the all-time greats, but it's very difficult to make a sensible evaluation of the potential longevity of present day best-sellers. Some of the stars of previous generataions simply haven't lasted well (a great shame, in some cases.) Anyway, the best of Nesbo and other writers of today may still be to come. Christie and Conan Doyle have unarguably stood the test of time .So although all polls like this one have their limitations, because inevitably, one tends to be comparing apples and pears, the results seem to me to make sense.

Having said that, my own feeling is that the best classic whodunit of all wasn't even on the shortlist. My choice would be another Christie novel - And Then There Were None.

Forgotten Book – The Dangerfield Talisman

My choice for today's Forgotten Book is a novel published in 1926. That year saw the first appearance of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – suffice to say that The Dangerfield Talisman by J.J. Connington was rather less ground-breaking. All the same, it is readable example of an early Golden Age mystery by one of the first members of the Detection Club

The setting is a country house packed with the obligatory party of suspects. But this is a mystery story, rather than necessarily a murder mystery, although one character does disappear in strange circumstances. The eponymous Talisman is a family heirloom, valued at £50,000 "and the price of diamonds had gone up a good deal since then". Surprise, surprise – it goes missing.

We are provided at the outset with a chess problem that provides an enigmatic clue to the riddles surrounding the Dangerfield family, and the problem is ultimately solved in classic Golden Age fashion. The story is rather low-key, but offers agreeable entertainment in the game-playing tradition of its time.

J.J. Connington was an interesting writer, a prominent professor of chemistry who wrote a leading textbook on his subject, as well as a goodly number of nicely constructed mysteries. He went on to improve upon this early effort, and having enjoyed a few of his books, I'm certainly interested in reading more.

More about The Swedish Crime Story

I mentioned recently The Swedish Crime Story by Bo Lundin, which provides a concise but useful account of the genre’s highpoints up to 1980. It’s a short survey, and the book contains both the Swedish text and an English translation (which reads oddly in one or two small respects, but is otherwise okay.) Bo Lundin does not exactly have the critical or literary skills of Julian Symons, but all the same, I’ve found Lundin’s account very interesting.

Lundin highlights two distinctively Swedish elements of crime fiction. One is called ‘the Trenter Syndrome’, named after its foremost proponent. Stockholm’s Stieg Trenter wrote books in which the atmosphere of his home city was as central to the book as the mystery itself.

‘The Ulcer Syndrome’ (named after Inspector Martin Beck’s troublesome ulcer in the books by Sjowall and Wahloo describes books with a strong sociological, although sometimes far from socialist, element. Lundin says: ‘There is a typical Swedish disappointment to be found in these books, an injured idealism...the big disappointment has its basis in a dream which once seemed close to fulfilment.’ In these books, settings are not so much used for local colour as for casting light on the characters.

Lundin identifies the first real Swedish crime story as The Stockholm Detective, by Prins Pirre, published in 1893. I found it interesting that early Swedish crime writers studied Sherlock Holmes, Arsene Lupin, and Agatha Christie. Indeed, if Lundin is right, two books by Major Samuel August Duse anticipated The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. We already know that Anton Chekhov, no less, used an ‘acroidal’ plot in The Shooting Party. So perhaps The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was not quite as ground-breaking as everyone in the English-speaking world seemed to think at the time. Though I very much doubt that Christie knew the Pirre book, and probably not Chekhov's, either.

James on Christie

I’ve mentioned how much I enjoyed P.D. James’ new book, Talking About Detective Fiction. That does not mean, of course, that I agree with every view expressed in it. For example, I felt she was rather hard on Agatha Christie, even though she does express admiration for Christie’s mastery of her craft.

‘The last thing we get from a Christie novel is the disturbing presence of evil,’ James argues. I just don’t think that’s right, just as I’m rather surprised that James does not pay much attention to the fact that Christie’s settings were very varied indeed – she was far from being someone who specialised in village-based whodunits, even though many people associate her more or less exclusively with the Mayhem Parva type of mystery.

There has been an interesting discussion on the Golden Age Detection discussion forum about Christie and evil, and I’m with those who believe that Christie had a strong sense of evil, and let it show clearly in quite a number of her books. The closing paragraphs of Five Little Pigs and 4.50 from Paddington illustrate the point, and there are plenty of other examples.

I was also startled that James said of Christie: ‘She wasn’t an innovative writer and had no interest in exploring the possibilities of the genre.’ Blimey. What about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, Death Comes as the End, Murder on the Orient Express, Endless Night, and Curtain? I’m not sure how many detective story writers have been more innovative than Christie.

But there you go. Only a dull study of detective fiction would fail to spark debate, and this is a book without a dull paragraph. No doubt there are many people who agree with P.D. James on the subject of Christie. just as I agree with her when she concludes this fascinating book by predicting that: ‘in the twenty-first century, as in the past, many of us will continue to turn for relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge to these unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world.’