Enter a Queen of Crime from New Zealand

 

How Ngaio Marsh first started writing crime stories

Ngaio Marsh in a picture thought to
have been taken in around 1935

Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh, a New Zealand writer and theatre director, wrote 32 detective novels featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective working for the Metropolitan Police in London.

She became known as one of the Queens of Crime, sharing the distinction with the English writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham.

Agatha Christie led the way with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. Then came Dorothy L Sayers with Whose Body? published in 1923, followed by Margery Allingham with The Crime at Black Dudley, published in 1929.

Ngaio Marsh was born and educated in Christchurch New Zealand and studied painting before joining a touring theatre company as an actress. She divided her time between New Zealand and the UK from 1928 onwards, when she started up an interior decorating business in Knightsbridge, London.

The idea for her first crime novel, A Man Lay Dead, came to her in 1931 when she was living in a basement flat off Sloane Square.

In the preface to my copy of an omnibus edition of her first three novels - A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer and The Nursing Home Murder - Ngaio Marsh writes about how she came up with the character of Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

It was a wet Saturday afternoon in 1931 and she had been reading a detective story borrowed from a library, although she couldn’t remember whether it was a Christie or a Sayers. By four o’clock, as the afternoon became darker and the rain was still coming down relentlessly, she had finished it. She wondered idly whether she had it in her to write something similar.

The Ngaio Marsh Collection,
Book 1, published by Harper

Then she braved going out in the rain to a stationer’s shop across the street where she bought six exercise books, a pencil and a pencil sharpener. And that is how the writing career of the fourth Queen of Crime from New Zealand began.

With many eccentric detectives already operating at the time, such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, Ngaio decided to opt for a professional policeman, with a background resembling that of some of the friends she had made in England.

Revealing her interest in the theatre, she chose the surname of an Elizabethan actor called Edward Alleyn, gave him the Christian name Roderick, inspired by a recent visit to Scotland, opened an exercise book, sharpened her pencil and began to write.

In A Man Lay Dead, Inspector Alleyn is asked to investigate the murder of a guest during a country house party. The host had suggested they play the Murder Game, which at the time was very popular with guests at weekend parties, but when the lights go up it is discovered that the victim is dead for real.

Alleyn arrives at Frantock ‘a delightful old brick house’, views the corpse, interviews the guests and gathers evidence with his team of police officers,

He enlists the help of one of the guests, a young journalist called Nigel Bathgate, as his ‘Watson’.

Bathgate later becomes a friend of the detective and appears in several of Ngaio’s 32 Inspector Alleyn novels.

The mystery centres round a valuable Russian dagger, which ends up in the back of the corpse, a disappearing Russian butler, a criminal gang of Russians in London and the victim’s unfortunate habit of philandering.

Alleyn picks up on the smallest of clues, such as a button from a glove and a trace of face powder on a man’s suit. He eventually tricks the murderer into giving himself away.

A Man Lay Dead was first published in 1934. It is now available in a variety of formats.

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Setting the Scene

Use your memories to help you write with assurance

Many crime writers believe the setting is one of the most important elements in a novel and that it almost becomes an additional character in the story.

The fishing village of Marina di Puolo gave me
the idea for my novel, The Shooting in Sorrento

Whether it is a country house in the case of Golden Age novels, a big city such as London or Edinburgh, or the island of Sicily, as in the novels of Andrea Camilleri, where the crime takes place has a big impact on the story and the investigation that follows.

A lot of writers become inspired by a particular place they have visited and their minds immediately start inventing a mystery to happen there.

When I interviewed the crime writer P D James in the 1990s she told me that her novels were almost always inspired by somewhere she had visited.

If you are a new writer you should try to set a story in a place you know well so that you can describe it convincingly and be accurate with the geography. Your murderer should be able to get from one place to another in a realistic amount of time, otherwise readers who also know the location will feel let down.

It is tempting to choose a glamorous setting for your book so that readers can become armchair travellers and enjoy visiting the sights along with your detective.

I was intrigued by the gated entrance to some
caves just outside Marina di Puolo

But many writers have picked abattoirs, factories, power stations and crime ridden inner city housing estates. As long as they have really known and understood their location, they have been able to use it effectively.

Wherever you decide to set your novel, you must visit it and get to know it well so that you can present it authentically.

There are exceptions, of course. I have read that H R F Keating wrote an entire series of books set in India, featuring his character, Inspector Ghote, an Indian police officer, and yet the writer himself had never been to the country, but had done all his research from maps and books.

But on the whole, it is better to know a setting well to be able to describe it accurately. After all, it is one of the perks of being an author to have a good excuse for frequent days out or holidays abroad.

For years, I enjoyed holidays in Sorrento in southern Italy, vaguely thinking it would make a beautiful setting for a detective novel or film and that no British crime writer had ever used it.

But it was only when I discovered some caves, while walking along the beach of a small fishing village just outside Sorrento, that I got the beginnings of an idea for a plot.

The caves were at sea level and would have been below what was once a Roman villa, providing the owners and their guests with access from the sea thousands of years ago.

The caves looked the perfect place
to hide a kidnap victim

There were some kayaks, paddles and some old fishing nets being stored in the caves now, behind locked metal gates, but it occurred to me that a body could also be hidden there, or a kidnap victim could be kept there. People could bring in contraband items by sea and hide them in there. Or, a character could be imprisoned there by someone who wanted to keep them out of circulation for a while.

When I visited Positano by boat I saw that the coastline of Sorrento had many such recesses at sea level that could be used in this way. They were places that were inaccessible by car and even difficult to get to on foot, but were perfectly accessible by boat if you knew the area well. That’s when the plot of The Shooting in Sorrento occurred to me.

The book, my second Butler and Bartorelli mystery, starts with a bridegroom being shot, seemingly at random by a sniper, while posing for pictures in Piazza Tasso with his bride after his wedding in Sorrento. 

It was a sight I had often seen over the years while on holiday in Sorrento, although, of course, I had never seen anyone actually shot.

Journalist Kate Butler and her partner, retired detective Steve Bartorelli, are staying at the same hotel as the wedding party and Kate feels she has to help the family, who speak no Italian and are traumatised by what has happened.

The years I had spent sightseeing and shopping in the historic centre of Sorrento  helped me enormously in devising my plot as I was able to easily recall how quickly you could get from one location, such as the Franciscan cloisters, to another, Chiesa del Carmine, a baroque church that overlooks the main square, Piazza Tasso.

The cover of my mystery novel,
The Shooting in Sorrento

With my family I had regularly visited the beach of Marina di Puolo, which is out of town on the Sorrentine peninsula, and I had great fun inventing an historic villa with a terrace that overlooked the seafront as the home of one of my characters.

Most people will have a favourite city or holiday resort in their memory bank that they can use as a location in a book and they will find it is a big help to be able to know instinctively whether a character has to turn left, or turn right, to reach a particular place. Also, they will know whether or not it is practical to allow a character to run up a steep hill quickly to reach a place in time for the murder.

If you don’t want to use a real town or village as a setting, you can imagine one of your favourite places that you already know well and move it to another part of the country, or to a different country, and give it another name, but you will still be able to rely on your memories of it to write about it with assurance.

Readers frequently say they will put up with a lot provided a novel has a strong sense of place, so the best settings to choose are the ones you know well and for which you have genuine feelings.

The Shooting in Sorrento is available as a paperback or Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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Whose Body?

Dorothy’s dazzling debut detective novel

Having read the first crime novel by Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, and the first by Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley, published in 1929, I thought it was only fair to turn my attention to the first novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the third Englishwoman who was dubbed a Queen of Crime.

Dorothy began writing her first crime novel, Whose Body? in 1920, at the beginning of what has been called the Golden Age of detective fiction, which lasted from 1920 until the start of World War II. 

A 2016 copy of the 1923 novel.

The book was published in 1923 and introduced her most famous character, the gifted amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

I am a big fan of Dorothy L Sayers and I have read and enjoyed most of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short stories. Or, at least I thought I had. But reading her novels purely for pleasure many years ago meant that I had not read them in any particular order and therefore I had somehow missed out on Whose Body?, her first novel.

Used to the Wimsey of the later novels, I found him a bit irritating to begin with, his dialogue making him sound more like Bertie Wooster than the highly intelligent and perceptive amateur sleuth he was to become. However, as the book progresses, he is gradually revealed to be a kind and sensitive person, who has developed an interest in criminal investigation as a hobby, but is still suffering from the trauma of his experiences during the First World War. He experiences flashbacks and hears the terrifying sound of the guns when he is placed under a lot of pressure.

It is his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, who presents him with his first case. Mr Thipps, the architect working on her local church, has just discovered the corpse of a man, completely naked apart from a pair of gold pince-nez, lying in the bath at his Battersea flat.

Wimsey gets round there before the corpse is taken away and, much to the irritation of the police officer in charge of the case, he manages to assess the crime scene for himself.

Thipps is completely shocked by the discovery and is then arrested for the murder of the man, so Wimsey sets out to try to find out who the naked corpse was and who put him in the bath of Mr Thipps, wearing only a handsome pair of gold pince-nez.

By the time I got to the end of the novel I was once again in awe of Dorothy’s writing, her brilliant plotting, her clever use of dialogue to present facts and the skilful way she shows Wimsey unravelling the mystery for the reader.

I was also struck by the differences between Dorothy’s debut novel and the first novels of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham.

Agatha used a country house setting for her murder, with a closed circle of suspects, and the clues involved alibis, overheard conversations and dressing up in disguise.

Dorothy L Sayers created
Lord Peter Wimsey

Margery also used a country house, but her first crime novel was less of a murder mystery with a crime to be solved, but more of a suspense novel, with a criminal gang taking over the country house after an old man is found dead, with the reader left wondering whether the good guys will triumph over the bad guys by the end of the book

Dorothy sets her story in London, with many of the scenes taking place in Wimsey’s Piccadilly flat.

Wimsey, helped by his manservant, Bunter, uses forensic techniques such as finger printing and examining minute pieces of evidence through a magnifying glass, before carefully arriving at his conclusions.

The novel does not involve a closed circle of suspects as the action takes place in various people’s homes, in a hospital, a workhouse, and also involves a trip to Salisbury. When Wimsey finally solves the puzzle he is overcome with revulsion about what will happen to the murderer, revealing another intriguing aspect of his character.

Whose Body? was acclaimed as a stunning first novel by reviewers and Dorothy was described as a new star in the firmament. The only criticism was that she made Lord Peter seem too fatuous, but she soon toned this down.

Sayers herself said of her creation of Wimsey: ‘At the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single, unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly… I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes.’

Whose Body? is available in a variety of formats from Amazon.

Crime fiction comforting during pandemic

Library ‘click and collect’ services are providing a lifeline for readers

Avid readers are braving the snow and the rain during the winter lockdown to go to the door of their local library and collect a bag full of books.

Although the library service is closed for browsing during lockdown, staff are operating a click and collect service, which is being much appreciated by their customers.

Death in the High City, The Shooting in Sorrento
 and The Body Parts in the Library on display
together in a library

Readers can either request books on line, or telephone with their order, and staff will issue the books and put them in a carrier bag for them to collect at the front door of the library.

Customers cannot ask for specific titles, in case the library does not have the book on the shelves, but they can ask for a particular genre, such as crime, or historical, and also mention their favourite authors.

The library staff can also look at their borrowing history to get an idea about what sort of books a customer might enjoy and can check that the customer has not already had a particular book out, before issuing it to the customer’s account and putting it in the bag ready for collection.

The service has been very well received by regular library users. Some have said it has been ‘a real treat’ to have books chosen for them. Others have said that the library staff have helped them discover new authors to enjoy, that they might not otherwise have tried. Many have said the books are a welcome distraction from the bad news about the pandemic, or the many television programmes that they don’t want to watch.

Libraries have large print versions and audiobooks of many of the popular tittles by well known authors to make them more accessible to customers.

The crime, or mystery genre, seems to be the most popular with library users. Maybe the drama and suspense of detective fiction is more palatable than the horrific events currently taking place in the real world. 

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Agatha Christie’s amazing legacy

Remembering Agatha’s work on the anniversary of her death

Agatha Christie, the best selling novelist of all time, died 45 years ago today at Winterbrook in Oxfordshire.

She left a legacy of 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, as well as numerous romances, plays and volumes of poetry, which together have sold more than two billion copies.

The Pocket Essential Agatha Christie gives
fascinating facts about her work

Agatha was 85 years old when she died and she had been a published author for 56 years. Her last novel, Sleeping Murder, featuring Miss Marple, was published in 1976, after her death.

She was such a popular and successful novelist that 45 years later her novels are still being purchased and borrowed from libraries and new film and television adaptations of the stories are constantly being made.

The Guinness World Records has listed Agatha as the best selling fiction writer of all time.

Her fictional detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, are familiar to people even if they have never read a detective novel.

But Agatha was unsuccessful to begin with and suffered six consecutive rejections. If she’d given up at that point the world wouldn’t have ever had the huge body of work that has entertained so many millions of people over the years.

The turning point came for Agatha when her novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, when she was 30 years of age, and she never looked back.

The lesson to be learned by other writers from Agatha’s life and career is that they should not give up. Success might come eventually, but only if you keep writing.

Just over a year before Agatha died she was asked by an interviewer what she wanted to be remembered for. She replied: ‘Well, I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.’ I think this has been said many times, so she would have been satisfied.

Curtain, Poirot’s last case, which she had written during the Second World War, was published in September 1975 just a few months before her death.

Agatha died on 12 January 1976 and was buried four days later after a service at St Mary’s Church in the village of Cholsey in Oxfordshire.

The inscription on her tombstone is a quotation from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen:

‘Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.’

The Pocket Essential Agatha Christie by Mark Campbell is packed with facts and information about Agatha Christie’s life and body of work that may help to inspire up and coming crime writers.

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The Crime at Black Dudley

Margery Allingham introduces her series detective Albert Campion

Fans of classic crime fiction still enjoy reading the work of authors from the Golden Age, who were writing between 1920 and the beginning of the Second World War.

A measure of the popularity of this genre is the amount of TV and film versions of the books that are still being made.

When people talk about the Queens of Crime from that era, the names Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers will immediately spring to mind, with the New Zealand author Ngaio Marsh not too far behind.

You can usually find books by these three talented ladies on the shelves in the crime sections of most public libraries.

Margery Allingham's first
crime novel

But you might struggle to find any of the novels of Margery Allingham, the English writer who was the fourth member of the elite Queens of Crime club.

Margery Allingham was born in 1904 in London and began writing at the age of eight when she had a story published in a magazine.

Her first novel was published when she was 19, but she did not make her breakthrough as a crime writer until her novel The Crime at Black Dudley was published in 1929. This introduced her series detective, the gentleman sleuth Albert Campion, even though he appeared only as a minor character in her first book.

He was at first thought to be a parody of Dorothy L Sayers’ hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, but Campion matured as the series of books progressed showing there was a lot more to him than you see at first glance and he became increasingly popular with readers.

Vintage Books, part of the Penguin Random House Group, have now republished all Margery’s novels featuring her series detective Albert Campion, making it likely that some of them will eventually be stocked by public libraries.

While Agatha wrote an amazing 66 detective novels, Ngaio comes in second with 32, and Margery is third with 18, finishing ahead of Dorothy, who wrote a total of 16 crime novels during her career.

I had never read any of Margery’s books and so, because I like to begin at the beginning, I started with The Crime at Black Dudley.

A group of young people have been invited to a country house party for the weekend, which is being held in a remote mansion in Suffolk. The story is told from the point of view of a young doctor, George Abbershaw, whose book on pathology had made him a minor celebrity. He is a friend of the host, a distinguished scholar named Wyatt Petrie.

Margery Allingham wrote 18
detective novels

When the host’s uncle is murdered, the young people find themselves being held hostage by a small number of armed men, who claim that an important item has been taken from the body of the victim and that the guests must remain at the house until it is found and handed in.

It is a novel full of suspense and there is violence, fighting and many shots are fired. My first thoughts were that it was unlike the Poirot and Miss Marple novels of Agatha Christie or the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L Sayers. The atmosphere of action and danger was more like that of the The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, which was published seven years earlier.

George Abbershaw eventually solves the crime with the help of the other guests, including a strange young man named Albert Campion, who no one seems to know anything about.

It is a satisfying conclusion, and although the society and way of life Margery describes might seem rather dated now, it has left me wanting to read more. Next on my list is Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham, first published in 1930.

Margery died at the age of 62 of breast cancer and her final novel, Cargo of Eagles, was finished by her husband Philip Youngman Carter and published in 1968, two years after her death.

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham is available in a variety of formats from Amazon.

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A Merry Christmas from the shed library

Did the book inspire the shed, or did the shed suggest the book?

Earlier this year I converted our old, wooden garden shed into a library to house the overflow of books from our house, and the many books we have been storing that had belonged to my parents and my husband’s parents.

Inside the Shed Library

Simultaneously, I was working on my third novel, The Body Parts in the Library, a cosy crime story about Sallie and Jo, a couple of women who have been made redundant from their jobs in a village library and replaced with a group of volunteers. 

When a silly prank is played on one of the volunteers, Sallie and Jo are suspected of being behind it and find themselves shunned by the rest of the village.

They set out to find who was responsible for the prank and the other bizarre events that happen subsequently, to try to prove their innocence.

But after a grim discovery is made in the library, they have to become amateur detectives, to try to identify the culprit so that village life can return to normal.

At the same time, they decide to open a library in Jo’s garden shed to raise money for charity and allow the villagers to borrow books from their own extensive collections..

The Body Parts in the Library was published in September this year and is now in stock at three Leicestershire libraries as well as being for sale on Amazon as either a Kindle e-book or paperback.

After putting up our Christmas decorations this year, we used up the left over tinsel to decorate the pictures on the walls of our shed library. And, after our Christmas Day walk, we took a bottle of wine and some nibbles down to the shed library to kick off our Christmas celebrations, because all the pubs in the village were closed because of Covid 19.

As I looked round at the shelves full of books, which had finally come out of the boxes we had been storing them in for so many years, I wondered if it was a case of art imitating life, or life imitating art.

Whatever the answer, I am pleased that I have managed to finish writing The Body Parts in the Library, after many years of working on it, and that I have finally been able to unpack all the books that have been hidden away in boxes for so long.

So as New Year’s Eve approaches, I can reflect on the two good things that have come out of 2020 for me.

It has been a horrific year for the whole world. So let’s hope for a better 2021 for everyone, everywhere. 

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The Secret Adversary

Agatha’s second novel keeps the reader in constant suspense

Considering Agatha Christie’s detective, Hercule Poirot, became so popular and that her first published crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was such a success, it is surprising her second novel didn’t feature the Belgian refugee again.

My 1981 paperback copy of
 The Secret Adversary

But Agatha must have decided she wanted to try something different with her next book, The Secret Adversary. Published in January 1922, it introduces the Young Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence.

I read The Secret Adversary many years ago and it hadn’t made much of an impression on me, but having decided to read all of Agatha’s crime novels in chronological order, I gave it a second chance.

The book starts with a prologue set in 1915 as the Lusitania is sinking after being struck by two torpedoes. A man entrusts a young American woman with an important package as she gets into a lifeboat, saying she should receive instructions about what to do with it when she is safely ashore, but if he goes down with the ship, she must take it straight to the American Embassy.

Then the action fast forwards to London, a few years later, as old friends Tommy and Tuppence encounter each other at the exit from a tube station near Piccadilly Circus.

The First World War is over and they are both back from the front, hard up and seeking work.

Tuppence suggests they join forces to become adventurers for hire, willing to do anything and go anywhere to earn money.

It is all light hearted fun as they make plans, enjoying tea, buns and buttered toast in Lyons, calling each other ‘old thing’ and ‘old bean’.

I was expecting the rest of the book to be fairly lightweight and to seem dated in comparison with contemporary thrillers and adventure novels.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Tommy and Tuppence are quickly hired to do a job that leads both of them into dangerous situations. It is written from both of their points of view, so that the reader is told everything.

There are carefully laid clues, twists and turns, and plenty of suspense. It is well written and difficult to put down, with Agatha keeping the reader guessing right to the end.

Reviews were generally positive about The Secret Adversary when it first came out, priced at seven shillings and sixpence.

On 26 January 1922 the Times Literary Supplement described The Secret Adversary as ‘a whirl of thrilling adventures’ and praised the fact that the identity of the arch-criminal, the elusive ‘Mr Brown’ is cleverly concealed to the very end.

Other reviewers agreed it was a success and called it ‘amazingly clever’ because Agatha managed to keep the identity of the master criminal a secret until the last few pages.

It was a clear departure for Agatha. Instead of writing a ‘whodunit’ she wrote a novel that keeps the reader in constant suspense, wondering if the good guys will triumph.

The Secret Adversary was made into a film in Germany in 1929 and was adapted for television in 1983 and again in 2014.

Nearly 100 years after it was published, Agatha’s second crime novel is still well worth reading.

Over the years, The Secret Adversary has been reprinted many times, with many different front covers.

There are plenty of new and second hand copies available on Amazon.

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Remembering crime writer P D James

How the ‘new Queen of Crime’ found the ideas for her novels

P D James was seen by some as
'the New Queen of Crime'

When crime writer P D James died on this day in 2014, it was a sad occasion for all who love the traditional, English detective story.

Baroness James, who began writing in the 1950s, was a link with the golden age of crime writing and has gone on record as saying one of her own favourite writers was Dorothy L Sayers.

And after the death of the acknowledged Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, in 1976, P D James was sometimes referred to by the media as ‘the New Queen of Crime’.

She will be remembered particularly for her 14 Adam Dalgliesh novels, many of which have been filmed for television.

Living until the age of 94 enabled Baroness James to enjoy her success and to go on set to watch the films of her books being made, meeting actor Roy Marsden, who was the first to play the part of Dalgliesh, on many occasions.

As a young journalist I was lucky enough to meet P D James at the Minsmere nature reserve in East Anglia during the filming of Unnatural Causes in 1992.

She was kind enough to give me some interview time and I was able to ask her some questions about her writing methods which gave me the basis for a newspaper feature.

I interviewed P D James in the caravan she had been allotted while out on location alongside two male journalists who both seemed far more confident than myself.

But the kindly mother and grandmother, who was 72 at the time, soon put me at ease. And when it became obvious that neither of my fellow hacks had actually read any of her books and were interested mainly in the filming, I plucked up the courage to ask her about her relationship with her main character, a widower who is a poet as a well as a policeman.

The beach at Dunwich, where an empty
boat sparked the idea for Unnatural Causes

She admitted that there was a lot of herself in the character of Dalgliesh as they shared a love of poetry, architecture, bird watching and the terrain of East Anglia.

She said: “I think if you are going to have a character who goes on for a series of books you do tend to give them the same interests as you have.”

Another characteristic she said they shared was taking pleasure in being alone. “I do need to be on my own when I’m writing. I need the house to be empty. It’s very strange.”

Although by then she had become a Baroness and was sitting in the House of Lords she said she made sure that when she was working on a book she did not let anything stop her writing every day.

“I very much enjoy writing detective fiction. I love the construction, the clue making, the characterisation. I love everything about it.”

I asked if she had decided to keep Dalgliesh single because it made him a more interesting character.  He had met and fallen for a young woman in her first novel Cover her Face (1962) but the relationship hit a stumbling block when he had to arrest her mother for murder.

Baroness James seemed amused but did not really answer the question. She referred to Dorothy L Sayers, who was often thought to be in love with her fictional creation Lord Peter Wimsey, but eventually married him off to a woman mystery writer, Harriet Vane.

“When she married him off it was as though she had done with him and she wrote very little about him afterwards,” P D James said.

She then revealed that she was intending to write a new Dalgliesh novel and in doing so, she gave me some valuable advice.

“I think I have the germ of an idea for another Dalgliesh book at the back of my mind now, inspired by a place. My books nearly always are inspired by a place or a setting.”

She said the opening scene of Unnatural Causes had been originally inspired by a particular part of East Anglia. “I was standing on the beach at Dunwich and I had this strong idea of a boat drifting ashore containing a corpse with the hands cut off at the wrist.”

She actually went on to write another six Adam Dalgliesh novels after my meeting with her, the last one being The Private Patient, published in 2008.

More than 20 years after our conversation, I finally started crime writing myself and took her advice by allowing a mysterious and magical setting, the upper town of Bergamo, a walled city in northern Italy, to be the inspiration for my first novel Death in the High City. 

Cover her Face and Unnatural Causes are both available from Amazon.

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On the shelf

The Body Parts in the Library arrives at a library!

Partners in crime

There are many significant milestones when you write a novel, such as completing the first draft, sending the revised final version out for publication and receiving a printed copy to hold in your hands for the first time.

But you can’t know the names of everyone who buys your book and find out what they think about it having read it. Once it’s out there you have lost control over it to some extent, a bit like when your child starts school for the first time. 

So it was a lovely moment for me today to see my latest novel, The Body Parts in the Library, on the shelf in a library for the first time. And it was particularly special for me because it was the library where I have a part-time job.

The Body Parts in the Library is a cosy crime novel about strange things happening in a village library being run by volunteers after the long-serving staff have been made redundant. Published in September this year, it introduces a new detective duo, the Library Ladies.

I have always been a big supporter of libraries and am now a champion of the role of the Library Assistant, which I hope comes across in the novel.

New in stock

I took a photograph of The Body Parts in the Library on the shelf next to another of my books, Death in the High City, which was published in 2014.

However, it didn’t stay on the shelf for long. We are operating a Click and Collect service at the moment and when we received a request for ten crime novels, we couldn’t resist popping it into the bag.

The Body Parts in the Library is now in stock at Shepshed, Loughborough and Ashby libraries in Leicestershire. It is also available for sale on Amazon as a Kindle e-book or a paperback.

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First novel published by Agatha Christie is 100 years old

The Mysterious Affair at Styles has now been entertaining readers for a century

My copy of The Mysterious Affair at 
Styles was published in 1954

After suffering six successive rejections, Agatha Christie’s luck finally turned when her detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in October 1920.

The story is set in England in the middle of the First World War and introduces what was to become Agatha’s series detective, the Belgian policeman, Hercule Poirot.

The novel was first published in the United States by John Lane and then in the UK in January 1921 by The Bodley Head, Lane’s British publishing company.

Poirot has come to England as a refugee and is living in a village in Essex, thanks to the kindness of a rich woman, Emily Inglethorp, who lives at the local manor house, Styles Court. The novel also introduces Poirot’s sidekick, Arthur Hastings, who has been invalided home from the Front and is invited by Mrs Inglethorp’s stepson, John Cavendish, to stay at Styles.

When Mrs Inglethorp is killed, Poirot says he owes her a debt of gratitude for helping him to have a new life in England and vows to use all his detective skills to solve the mystery of her death. Hastings has met him before and happily introduces him to the members of the family living at Styles.

As an Agatha Christie fan, I read The Mysterious Affair at Styles many years ago, along with some of her other novels, but I read them all in no particular order.

When I realised The Mysterious Affair at Styles had now celebrated its centenary I decided to re-read it because it was Agatha’s first published book and I wanted to see what I thought of it now.

The first thing that struck me was that she lets Hastings tell the story in the manner of Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. It works well and is a device that more authors might consider trying. It helps her mislead the reader because Hastings fails to understand the hints Poirot gives him and at times even draws the wrong conclusion from some of the things Poirot says to him.

Agatha Christie as a
young woman

My copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published by Pan Books Ltd in 1954 by arrangement with John Lane of The Bodley Head Ltd.

I was intrigued by the fact that a plan of the first floor at Styles is inserted into the middle of the text on page 26 and a diagram of Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom into the middle of page 38.

A rough drawing of a charred scrap of paper bearing the handwritten letters ‘ll and’  is inserted into the text of page 42 and a picture of words scrawled on a crumpled envelope into the text of page 53.

I noticed some repetitions in the book, for example Hastings twice observes that the maid Dorcas is a fine example of a good, old-fashioned servant, but then you have to remember it was Agatha’s first published novel.

Dorcas describes how the young people in the house enjoy having dressing-up evenings and putting on costumes from the dressing-up box in the attic and using techniques to darken their skin so they can dress up as ‘foreigners.’

Agatha shows how people thought about other nationalities at that time, in the middle of a terrible war, when Dorcas says of Poirot:

‘A very nice gentleman he is sir. And quite a different class from them two detectives from London, what goes prying about, and asking questions. I don’t hold with foreigners as a rule, but from what the newspapers says I make out as how these brave Belgies isn’t the ordinary run of foreigners and certainly he’s a most polite spoken gentleman.’

According to the blurb on the inside flap of the dust jacket of the first edition, The Mysterious Affair at Styles came about because of a bet Agatha had agreed with her sister, Madge, that ‘she could not compose a detective novel in which the reader would not be able to spot the murderer, although having access to the same clues as the detective.’

The text of the book included some 
helpful illustrations for readers

It was acknowledged at the time that Agatha won the bet and that the plot was clever and the clues well placed. It came down to a shattered coffee cup, an old envelope, a fragment of fabric and a splash of candle grease, but it was enough for Hercule Poirot to work out who was the murderer.

It launched Agatha’s writing career and she subsequently named her own house Styles. Hercule Poirot went on to become one of the most famous characters in detective fiction and featured in 47 of her novels and collections of short stories. When Agatha told the story of his final case in Curtain, she set the novel at Styles again.

At number six, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was one of the first ten books published by Penguin Books when it started up in 1935. The novel was later adapted for television, radio and the theatre.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles marked the start of a brilliant career for Agatha, who wrote 66 detective novels in total. She remains to this day the best-selling writer of all time.

While new writers can’t hope to surpass her achievement, or even equal it, her success can at least prove inspirational.

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