New Life in New Brighton

In the 1980s, I lived for eight years on the Wirral peninsula, not far from the seaside resort of New Brighton, which faces Liverpool across the River Mersey. Now it has to be said that New Brighton’s heyday as a tourist haven was about a hundred years ago, and in the 80s, it had a rather decayed feel. I tried to capture that in the opening chapter of my second Harry Devlin book, Suspicious Minds, but when the novel was at proof stage, I took the precaution of making a return visit to find that the place was being spruced up, and so I hastily modified what I had said about it.

Fast forward seventeen years, and I have just given a talk on Dr Crippen at the brand new Floral Pavilion. The idea was to have a couple of crime fiction events (by Margaret Murphy and me) to coincide with a week-long performance in the theatre of Agatha Christie’s play Spider’s Web, which has played to large and appreciative audiences.(The list of forthcoming attractions also impressed me – ambitious and interesting.)

I must say I was enormously impressed by the Floral Pavilion and by the ongoing regeneration of New Brighton. Of course, I was seeing them on a beautiful day, but even so it was great to see people on the beach at Fort Perch Rock a hundred yards or so from the Pavilion. I’m not saying New Brighton will ever replace Majorca as a sun-seeker’s paradise, but the past-it atmosphere that struck me twenty-odd years ago is now itself clearly out of date.

Incidentally, Crippen had a connection with New Brighton. Apparently he gave a lecture there in 1907 about one of his supposed medical cures. Maybe they ought to put up a plaque to record the historic association. But on second thoughts…..

Life in the Dock

Six months ago, I had the pleasure of awarding first prize in the Liverpool, Capital of Culture Year, short story competition to Cathy Roberts. We had entries from a wide range of countries, but as luck would have it, the winner lived on the doorstep – actually, in a tugboat, MV France-Hayhurst, currently moored in the Albert Dock.

Circumstances have conspired to prevent Cathy and me from meeting again until now, when I had the chance to visit the boat for coffee and an all too brief chat. Cathy continues to write (her brilliant winning story is being adapted into a play) and is engaged on a wide variety of activities, and she has a marvellous fund of stories about life in the dock world.

Quite apart from the fascination of maritime history and travel around the world under sail, there’s obviously something special about the camaraderie between people who live and sail on boats. Their lifestyles are intriguing. For instance, Cathy introduced me to one neighbour who divides his time between Liverpool in the summer and Egypt in the winter.

The society centred around the boats moored at Albert Dock is a classic ‘closed community’, and even on a sunny day when Liverpool and Albert Dock looked terrific, with many interesting contrasts between the old buildings and the brand new (the still unfinished new museum is in the next-to-bottom photo) I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a fantastic setting for murder, mystery and a classic form detective story…

Inspector McLevy

The BBC Radio series of Victorian detective stories featuring Inspector James McLevy were completely unknown to me until I discovered, in my Crimefest delegate bag, a promotional CD of one of the episodes, For Unto Us. I’ve now listened to it and done a bit of research about McLevy.

The radio series was conceived and written by David Ashton, and features Brian Cox, a formidable actor, in the title role. The setting is Victorian Edinburgh and McLevy is a ‘thief-taker’ feared by the city’s villains and his subordinates in equal measure. His prime adversary is Jean Brash, as intelligent and sexy as she is criminally inclined, and her personal relationship with McLevy is pleasingly equivocal. She’s a sort of Irene Adler, if you like, but developed more fully than Conan Doyle’s adventuress.

The strength of the episode I heard was definitely in the interplay of the characters. The ‘mystery’ element was distinctly underwhelming; neither the main story nor the sub-plot held my interest, unlike the gibes traded between the cops and the robbers, which were pretty entertaining.

It turns out that there was a real James McLevy, who wrote about his cases, and was quite a star in his day. David Ashton has also written novels about his hero, and it may be that the novel form gives him rather more scope to develop the plots of the stories. Overall verdict on the CD: decent easy listening to while away a tedious commute by car.

Themes and Laurie Johnson

Music is an important element in many crime films and television series. A great theme can add an extra dimension to any story. Sometimes the music lingers longer in the memory than the film or tv show itself (an example is the score for the 1967 version of Casino Royale), but when all the elements come together perfectly, the result is superb.

In the movie world, I think of Roy Budd’s theme for Get Carter and John Barry’s haunting score for Body Heat as quite unbeatable. The mood of each film is set by the opening moments, in which the main theme creates a sense of unresolved tension and menace – on Jack Carter’s train ride to Newcastle in Get Carter, and the sinuous credits that precede our introduction to Ned Racine in Body Heat.

In the tv world, one of the best themes ever written was composed by Laurie Johnson, who wrote the music for The Avengers. It’s a great tune, which I loved as a boy and still much admire. Now a box set of Johnson’s work, including his masterpiece, and many other pieces of music written for the series (including ‘Return of the Cybernauts’ – not the easiest story to set to music) has been made available. Three CDs for under a fiver on Amazon can’t be bad.

Of course, as with so many box sets, some items are included which will not feature in anyone’s list of favourites. Johnson is a professional who has turned out a lot of good material in the course of a long career (other well-remembered crime themes of his include The Professionals) but I think most people will regard The Avengers as his greatest achievement.

Deception

Accountants don’t often find themselves taking heroic roles in thriller films, for some unfathomable reason, but Jonathan McQuarry manages it in Deception, a film which came out about a year ago. The fact that the nerdy McQuarry is played by charismatic Ewan McGregor certainly helps. We first meet him when he is feeling lonely during an audit visit to a corporate client. He is befriended by slick lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman) and soon he is discovering that there is more to life than balance sheets.

An accidental (or is it?) exchange of mobile phones plunges our hero into involvement with a mysterious sex club. Strange – but invariably glamorous - women start ringing him up to ask if he is free this evening. They meet at hotels, and after a quick bedroom romp, but no conversation, they disappear out of his life again. One of the ladies thus briefly encountered, amazingly, is the legendary Charlotte Rampliing. Suffice to say, she is still stunningly attractive after all these years. I kept expecting her to reappear later in the film, only to be disappointed. Then McQuarry meets through the game a very pretty blonde girl (Michelle Williams) he has already taken a shine to, and the plot begins to thicken.

Jackman, McGregor and Williams are all excellent in this movie, but although there are plenty of plot twists, some of them are rather predictable, while there is at least one gaping hole in the plot. As is often the case with films of this kind, the first part of the movie, when characters and events are being set up was rather more convincing than the later stages, when disbelief has to be suspended time and again.

All the same, I enjoyed Deception. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s well made, and the actors do a good job with the material. Worth watching.

The Influence of Hitchcock

The Bank Holiday weather was excellent, so I spent a good part of it outdoors, but I still managed to catch the Sky documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, introducing a season of his films. In half an hour, the programme provided a good summary of some of the reasons why the portly film director was one of the most influential movie-makers of the twentieth century.

Film pros such as Stephen Frears waxed lyrical about the way in which Hitchcock’s visual imagination, coupled with his artistic and technical skills, enabled him to create so many suspenseful scenes. The point was made that Hitchcock didn’t bother much with dialogue, but rather focused on set pieces – the crop-dusting sequence in North by North West and the shower scene in Psycho are classic examples. This is something which perhaps differentiates the thriller from the conventional mystery, where dialogue is often highly important (yes, it’s a generalisation, but I think it’s broadly true.)

Another key point was that humour played an important part in many Hitchcock films. Thrillers which are unrelentingly bleak can be wearisome, and I'd guess that the wit of the films is one of the reasons why they have lasted so well.

It isn’t just movie-makers who can learn from the Master of Suspense. Novelists keen to fathom the craft of building tension (and I’m one of them) can hardly fail to benefit from studying Hitchcock’s techniques. Even in his supposedly weaker films, such as Frenzy and Family Plot, there are many clever touches. I’m planning to record one of the Hitchcocks I’ve managed to miss over the years, Notorious, and another that I haven’t seen for a very long time, To Catch a Thief. Something to look forward to.

Gently Through the Mill

The latest episode of Inspector George Gently was set in Durham at the time of the 1964 general election. Gently Through the Mill opens with the death by hanging of a former owner of a flour mill, who has recently sold the business to the Labour Party election candidate. It appears to be a case of suicide, but Gently and his infuriating sidekick Bacchus find that lately there has been a great deal of trouble at the mill. And before long there is a second death.

I haven’t read the Alan Hunter book on which the show was based, but I’d like to bet that most, if not all, of the political stuff wasn’t in the original. The same may or may not have been true of the scenes involving freemasonry. It seems that the novels have just been used as a starting point for the scriptwriters, but although the stories have one or two jarring anachronisms, nevertheless I thought this episode, like the others that I’ve seen, had something that lifted them out of the ordinary and made them worth watching.

The more I’ve seen Martin Shaw as Gently, the more I’ve been impressed by the quiet authority of his performance, and the less his previous incarnations as Adam Dalgleish and Judge John Deed have got in the way of my appreciation of the humanity he brings to Gently. But I still wish that, having transplanted the stories to the North East, the programme makers had filmed them there, rather than in Ireland.

In the Chair

As a postscript to Crimefest, a few people have asked me how it felt to compete in the Mastermind quiz, in that leather chair made famous by the TV programme, with lights dimmed, except for one very bright one, shone right into the contestant’s face. The short answer is that it is a bit like doing an exam, with the added frisson of making a fool of yourself in front of various friends and readers. The consolation was that Simon Brett, Meg Gardiner and David Stuart Davies were in the same boat, and very good-natured fellow sufferers they were.

The setting was certainly intimidating, as with the TV show. The Crimefest organisers did a good job of replicating the menacing atmosphere, and Maxim Jakubowski is a seasoned - and both authoritative and fair-minded - interrogator. In fact, the very first time I met him was as long ago as 1990, when he organised a similar event for the London Bouchercon, in which I participated (and thereby met some fascinating people, including Geoff Bradley, editor of that great fanzine CADS.) Maxim repeated the quiz at the 1995 Bouchercon in Nottingham, with panellists including the late Edward D. Hoch and US crime expert Marv Lachman, and me.

So I did have some past experience of what it feels like to expose my ignorance, as well as my fund of criminal trivia, to a crowd of curious onlookers. As one friend said to me: ‘How could you possibly have forgotten the first name of Marcus Didius Falco’s beloved? It’s the same as your wife’s….’

Conventions - for and against

Various bloggers have been reflecting on the pros and cons of crime conventions in the wake of Crimefest, and this debate mirrors many of the conversations that go on in the book rooms and bars wherever conventions are held. Two of the main reservations from the perspective of writers and readers are these. For authors, arguably, conventions sell very few books for the panellists attending (other than the star names.) For readers, once you have heard a writer a couple of times, and attended a panel of theirs on a certain topic (‘the importance of setting’ is an example), future panels on such themes can turn out to be samey.

There is truth in both these points, but there are also strong reasons why I really enjoy conventions, long after my first visit to the 1990 Bouchercon in London (when I wasn’t even a published writer.) As a mid-list novelist, attending a convention may not work out on a strict cost-benefit analysis, but I think there are hidden benefits in terms of profile-building – all the more important at a time when market conditions are so dire. From a fan’s point of view – and I’m still very much a fan, as I hope this blog illustrates – there is much fun to be had from attending panels, even on familiar topics. Though I think it makes sense to be selective. Back in 1990, I attended every panel I could. Now, short as a convention is, I tend to take breaks. This does mean I miss some treats – for instance, at Crimefest 2009, I made a mistake by missing the translators’ panel, which everyone seemed to like. However, I did enjoy, among others, the Hakan Nesser interview, and the panel chaired by Maxim featuring the likes of Paul Johnston (a terrific writer, who deserves to be better known) and the witty Declan Burke.

I’ve mentioned before the pleasure of meeting old friends, and of getting to know others for the first time. In the breaks I take, very often away from the melee of the convention hotel, I enjoy having the chance to get to know one or two people better. For instance, from last year’s Crimefest, I recall a thoroughly agreeable lunch with Natasha Cooper. This year, I had a long chat with Chris Ewan, a fellow lawyer and highly promising author, and also got together with Russell James, who wasn’t involved in the convention, but lives close to Bristol and had travelled in for the day. Russell is an interesting writer, whose fiction is very dark, and who has recently diversified into non-fiction with much success – Great British Fictional Detectives is his latest title, and it’s packed with tons of information. I’ve known Russell for years, but we’ve never talked at such length before, and I found him fascinating and informative on the life of a full-time writer after years as a self-employed business consultant.

So are conventions worth it? In my experience, the answer is an unequivocal yes. I’ve never been to one, either here or in the US, that that didn’t teach me a good deal and wasn’t great fun.

Forgotten Book - Trial and Error

Following up the ‘Forgotten Authors’ panel at Crimefest, my entry for Patti Abbot’s series of Forgotten Books is the novel which I said, in answer to a question from the floor, I would most like to see reprinted. In fact there are lots of them, but this is definitely a good one. It is Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley.

The set-up is brilliant. Little Mr Todhunter is terminally ill. So he decides to make one final gesture, committing an ‘altruistic murder’ by killing the most obnoxious person he can find. He shoots Jean Norwood, ‘famous actress manager’, and believes he has committed the perfect crime. The snag is that an innocent person is charged by the police with Jean’s murder, and the police seem to have an ‘iron-clad’ case. So Mr Todhunter has to turn detective to prove himself guilty of murder and save an innocent life.

This is Berkeley’s finest books, widely regarded as a Golden Age classic – yet at Crimefest, very few people seemed to be familiar with it. This is sad, because Berkeley’s cleverness and cynical wit make Trial and Error a unique piece of work. On publication, the book aroused much debate because of a legal point – and in my edition, a green Penguin, Berkeley justifies his interpretation of English law in a way that seems to me to be pretty convincing (mind you, I have never practised criminal law…)

Berkeley dedicated the book to P.G. Wodehouse, and his earlier fiction reflects Wodehouse’s influence, but by the time this novel was published in 1937, his writing was truly distinctive. It is sad, and astonishing, that within a mere two more years, his career as a crime novelist was at an end.