The Red House Mystery

A.A. Milne is remembered today as the creator of that amiable character Winnie-the Pooh, but he was also fascinated by the detective story. More than that, he ventured into the genre on several occasions, with short stories (including one I think is quite splendid), one or two plays and a novel that many regard as a light-hearted classic of the Golden Age – The Red House Mystery.

The book was first published in 1922, just after Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers first came on to the scene. Thirty year old Antony Gillingham is the amateur sleuth in this enjoyable tale, which I was commissioned to review by Tangled Web UK (one of my favourite online crime fiction resources, by the way) to mark the appearance of a reprint by Vintage Books.

The Vintage edition is pleasingly packaged and includes a short and cheerful introduction by Milne, who takes the opportunity to chat about some of his ideas about the genre – including his preference for an amateur sleuth, definitely not quite so fashionable these days. Milne, incidentally, was an early member of the Detection Club.

I’m delighted by this reprint. Vintage are to be congratulated. I do hope they can be tempted to reissue more hidden gems of the detective genre.

Open Book etc.

Barry Forshaw rang to tip me off that he’d talked about my work on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Open Book’ yesterday, while warning me that there was always the chance that any mention of my name might be edited out of the final interview! The theme of that part of the programme was lawyers who write crime fiction and the starting point was Mariella Frostrup’s interview of P.D.James about Cyril Hare. I’ve talked about my admiration for Hare on this blog, and James is clearly a huge fan, especially of Tragedy at Law.

Barry was then interviewed by Mariella (lucky chap) about lawyers who write crime and gave me a name check, along with Frances Fyfield, when talking about British lawyer-writers. The Americans, he mentioned were Scott Turow, John Grisham and Mark Gimenez, so I felt I was in very select company.

By coincidence, Steve Steinbock has just blogged about my very first novel, All the Lonely People, which introduced the Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin, on Criminal Brief. Steve recently gave my latest novel with a legal background, Waterloo Sunset, a terrific review in The Strand Magazine, and this time I am quite unable to resist linking to his generous remarks.


Finally, three more entries on the blogroll: Bookwitch, Paul Brazill, and Deighton Dossier. Do also check out Rob Mallows’ impressive website about Len Deighton.

The Two Mrs Carrolls

I rather enjoyed The Two Mrs Carrolls, a movie that is often described as a film noir (though I think you need to define film noir quite loosely to accommodate it.) Really, it is as much a classic woman in jeopardy story as the very different Back to the Coast which I discussed the other day.

Unexpectedly, the woman in jeopardy is Barbara Stanwyck, often a femme fatale, but here a rather syrupy character who makes the mistake of falling for psychopathic artist Humphrey Bogart. Bogart too is cast against type – he’s not really ideal for the role of angst-ridden creative genius, and the headaches which represent his troubled mental state are portrayed (to be blunt) in an overplayed manner of which any ham actor would be proud. Yet somehow, despite the flaws of the film – it’s based on a stage play, and the theatrical origins of the story become increasingly apparent as the story progresses – it is still pretty entertaining to watch.

Bogart falls for Stanwyck while still married to the first Mrs Carroll. He paints his wife as the Angel of Death, and then, as his creative juices begin to dry up, decides to murder her. For a time, he is happy with Stanwyck, but then the problem returns and he allows himself to be seduced by Alexis Smith (rather less attractive than Stanywyck, but there’s no accounting for tastes.) He embarks on another murder plot, but his schemes are complicated by a blackmailing chemist and his own precocious daughter. Very watchable.

Before the Frost

Swedish television adapted Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books for the small screen before the BBC got there with the recent series starring Kenneth Branagh. Thanks to Roger Cornwell of Cornwell Internet, I’ve just watched one of the shows, Before The Frost.

I haven’t read the book which sourced the tv programme, but I did find it enjoyable viewing. The actor who plays Wallander, Krister Henriksson, is less obviously charismatic than Branagh, but I liked his rather shambolic interpretation. The story features the cop’s daughter, Linda, who joins her father’s police force only to become personally involved in a bizarre mystery with origins in a horrific real-life event.

Like a number of other Mankells, this one opens with a vivid, horrific and baffling scene – an attack on swans. This is witnessed by an elderly woman who is out mapping abandoned pathways through the woodland. She suffers an accident and is incapacitated, making her easy prey for the villain of the piece. When her daughter reports her missing, Wallander comes on to the scene.

It’s a dark story, but compelling, and as usual insight is offered into a particular aspect of society of which Mankell disapproves – to say more would be giving too much away. I’m glad to have seen it – thanks, Roger.

Forgotten Book - Close Up

It seems heretical to suggest that a book by Len Deighton might be 'forgotten' so as to qualify for inclusion in Patti Abbott's series. But I think Close Up does qualify, and given that Deighton has just celebrated his 80th birthday, it seems timely to remember this foray into the movie world. I covered the book as my contribution to an extensive Deighton appreciation for Shots, that excellent online magazine, and I thought I'd include in a blog post a few of my thoughts about it.

Inevitably, Deighton will always be associated with the spy novel. I have long been a fan of books like Bilion Dollar Brain and Horse Under Water. There was one nice little trick connected in a way with the concealment of identity in Billion Dollar Brain which I was cheeky enough to adapt and then utilise in a very different book of my own - I Remember You.The Ipcress File made an especially good film, benefiting from a soundtrack by the brilliant John Barry that includes the spooky main theme, often heard today as background for all kinds of television programmes.

But there is much more to Deighton than Harry Palmer (the name given to his central character when the books were filmed). To my mind, some of other work is equally appealing. I’m definitely not qualified to judge his cookery books, or his travel guides, but I enjoyed Only When I Larf, which is quirky and unusual. Close-Up is even better.

Close-Up was published in 1972, and I read it a couple of years later. I haven't read it from cover to cover since then, but still it sticks in the memory. It’s set in the film world and presents the story of a fading star called Marshall Stone. Deighton spent some time working in the movie business, and he put his experience of the business to good use.

What impressed me most was the way in which Deighton focused on the gap between image and reality. The material offers tremendous scope for Deighton’s sardonic humour. A typical example comes right at the end when the mogul Koolman says: ‘Close-Up. I’d never buy a title like that. It’ll mean nothing on a marquee in Omaha.’

I met Len Deighton once, about fifteen years ago, when he was over in Britain (he spends most of his time in the States.) He struck me as modest and unassuming. It was one of those conversations that lasts only a few minutes, and which one wishes had gone on much longer. Had it done so, I would have mentioned how much I enjoyed not only his celebrated novels, but also Close Up.

Stephen Booth and others

I recently added a number of blogs to the blogroll. They include Dorte’s excellent blog – if you haven’t read her post on the rules of feminist detective fiction, which she mentioned here in recent comments, you may be interested to check them out. Another blog well worth a look is the much-visited blog run by Kate Sutherland. I came across it by chance, via a link from John Baker’s blog. This is one of the things I like about the blogosphere – all the unexpected connections. Wandering from link to link, I sometimes feel like a child entering a vast, sometimes unfamiliar and daunting, yet nevertheless utterly entrancing world.

A third blog that I’ve only recently encountered is that of the East Midlands crime novelist Stephen Booth. Over the years, I’ve done one or two events with Stephen, and the highlight was when we were both in the short-list of six for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Prize for best crime novel of the year, at Harrogate in 2006 (The Coffin Trail was the book of mine that got me there.) Also on the short-list were Susan Hill, Lindsey Ashford, Ian Rankin and the eventual winner, Val McDermid. The last time I saw Stephen was one evening in autumn when we had a drink together in the bar of the Bouchercon hotel in Baltimore. He’s a journalist whose sales success enabled him to become a full-time novelist.

I first came across Stephen through his well regarded debut novel Black Dog and I’ve read several since then. My favourite is The Dead Place, a really excellent mystery that handles the death motif very well. I once told him that, after that book, I felt I couldn’t go ahead with a planned Lake District novel I had in mind, called The Dead Shop (after the old morgue in Appleby). And at that point, he told me he’d once contemplated a book involving a coffin trail…..

Finally, I want to mention my sadness at the passing of a notable member of the crime community, Barbara Franchi. I had the pleasure of meeting her, though all too briefly. She reviewed one or two of my books very positively, and since she was by no means a bland reviewer, I was definitely in her debt. Many others who knew her much better than me have paid warm tributes to her on the internet and elsewhere, making it clear that she will be much missed.

Before and After

Peter Antony’s short, snappy story in The London Mystery Magazine, 'Before and After', which I mentioned recently, is (as far as I know) the only short mystery to appear under that name, featuring the notable amateur sleuth Mr Verity.

This is a rare case where the author is more interesting than the story (though the story is a lot of fun.) For the pseudonym of Peter Antony concealed the identities of two brothers, Peter and Anthony Shaffer. They were twins, born in Liverpool in 1926 and they wrote three detective novels together in the 1950s which are firmly in the Golden Age tradition. How Doth the Little Crocodile?, The Woman in the Wardrobe, and Withered Murder are all very enjoyable. They all feature the same brilliant sleuth (though in the third book, which they brought out under their real names, they changed his name to Mr Fathom – all rather odd.)

The short story in LMM, is an impossible crime tale, a neat little snippet, and I am glad to have discovered it after much searching. Anthony went on to write the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Frenzy, as well as Sleuth, the rather less successful Murderer, and that horror classic The Wicker Man. He died in 2001, shortly after publishing his memoirs. Peter wrote a number of outstanding stage plays, perhaps most famously Equus and Amadeus. He was eventually knighted and survives his twin. I wonder if he ever looks back fondly on his early excursions into detective fiction. I hope so.

Back to the Coast

Saskia Noort is an interesting Dutch writer, described by her UK publishers Bitter Lemon Press as ‘a bestselling author of literary thrillers’. I rather liked the first Noort book they published, The Dinner Club, and so I fell upon her new book, Back to the Coast, with considerable enthusiasm.

In fact, as is the confusing way with the publishing of books from overseas, Back to the Coast was Noort’s debut novel, originally appearing in Holland in 2003. The English translation is by Laura Vroonem. I’m never quite sure why the work is so often published out of sequence – it’s even more puzzling in the case of a mystery series. At least the two Noort books are stand-alones.

The story is told by Maria, a singer with two children and a history of unsatisfactory relationships. At the start of the book, she has an abortion, and soon someone starts to persecute her because of it. Threatening messages are followed by an arson attack on her house. The police are lackadaisical, and soon an increasingly paranoid Maria flees to the coast, to stay with her sister Ans. But there is no hiding place for her. Soon her unhappy past starts to catch up with her.

Strip it down, and this novel fits within the tradition of the woman-in-jeopardy novel. Noort is a trendy writer, but I’m not sure I’d call her books ‘literary thrillers’ – really, she is updating the work of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ethel Lina White and Mary Higgins Clark. But this is not a criticism. I find her books quirky and intriguing. Here, I guessed the identity of Maria’s persecutor, and the motive, early on. But strangely, this did not spoil my pleasure in a story told in an off-beat way by an appealing and vulnerable narrator. Yet another good book from Bitter Lemon.

Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock

The British comedian Paul Merton isn’t exactly renowned as a film critic, but I found his BBC 4 documentary about the films that Alfred Hitchcock made in the UK to be eminently watchable. I’m a long-time admirer of the Master of Suspense, and I wasn’t sure about how Merton would tackle the subject, but a love of humour unites the two men and Merton’s analysis was amiable and interesting in its focus on some of Hitch’s less celebrated films (many of which I must admit I’ve never seen.)

Hitch was seen explaining that he only ever filmed one ‘whodunit’, because he didn’t find it satisfactory to have his audiences concentratiing on the solution to a puzzle, rather than on emotional engagement with the characters. I think he had in mind some of the highly cerebral detective stories of the Golden Age (step forward Ronald Knox?) but I’d take issue with the suggestion that all whodunits of the past, let alone the present, lack an emotional pull.

However, there’s no doubt that the key to Hitchcock’s genius is his ability to involve viewer in the build-up of suspense. So often we know something that the protagonist does not. I was interested by his statement that he erred in Sabotage (one of the movies I haven’t seen) by having the bomb actually go off and kill someone, rather than being discovered in the nick of time. Among the other films mentioned was Young and Innocent – I own an omnibus DVD which includes this one, but have never got round to watching it, perhaps because the title put me off. I ought to give it a chance.

Hitch’s use of dramatic settings for climatic scenes was emphasised, as was his range of camera tricks and techniques. I learned that many of his early ‘talkies’ were based on stage plays, until his career took a leap forward with the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Among the movies that this programme has encouraged me to seek out is his first ‘talkie’, Blackmail. And the witty script made it good viewing for its own sake.

Ronald Knox and the Rules of Detection

Ronald Knox, about whom I posted the other day, was a keen Sherlockian, and an intellectual student of the genre. He was involved with the Detection Club right from the outset, and was among the contributors to Club publications such as Behind the Screen and The Floating Admiral.

He is, however, probably best remembered by mystery fans today for his ‘Decalogue of Detective Fiction’, which began life as a lecture and later formed the preface for a volume of short mystery stories which he edited in 1928. He argued that the detective story is a tale told back to front, with the body appearing early in the story and the detective trying to establish the facts which led to the murder. He argues that the formality of the true detective story (as opposed to the thriller, which depends for effect on shock value) required a set of governing rules and he set out his own idea of the ten commandments of the genre.

The first commandment, for instance, is that the ‘criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow’. Even today, this concept seems to me to have some merit in relation to the whodunit, but like all rules it can be broken to great effect by writers of talent. Some of the other commandments (‘not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’) are a touch facetious while ‘the detective himself must not commit the crime’ is a rule which, if rigidly enforced, would have deprived us of a number of classic crime novels.

So Knox’s commandments are fun, and a historic curiosity, but not much more than that. However, I can’t help wondering - do readers of this blog have any commandments of their own for modern day writers? If so, let me know!