Original crime

Detective fiction is not dead. Two recent crime novels have been bestsellers. And both deserve to be

In a week or two, God willing, about 500 books will arrive on my doorstep. They’re mine; I last saw them in New York over a year ago. They arrived in England last August but I have had nowhere to put them, so they’ve been sitting in a Pickfords facility somewhere in Suffolk. I shall soon summon them to my new home. That’s if the vendors and I complete as planned in a few days’ time.

Still, I’ve had books to hand. I have read, among other things, two very enjoyable vintage crime stories; I posted about these some weeks ago (Crime on the Side, May 19). Now I’ve read two more recent bestsellers. Both have been highly praised and I was afraid I’d be disappointed. I wasn’t.

First, The Thursday Murder Club.

So who’s the sleuth?
In any good crime story, there is a detective or amateur sleuth the reader can accompany on the journey of detection. The stronger their identity, the stranger their quirks, the more likely it is we’ll be back to keep them company in the next story as well. Agatha Christie of course had Poirot; Dorothy Sayers had the sometimes-annoying Lord Peter Wimsey. C. Day Lewis had his eccentric amateur, Nigel Strangeways. A writer can buck that convention. But they’d better know what they are doing.

Richard Osman does. Instead of a detective as such, his very successful The Thursday Murder Club (2020) was the first of (so far) three books to feature an ill-assorted group of four friends, all in their 70s and 80s, living in a retirement village and trying to solve cold cases. It’s a hobby. Then a dodgy local builder is dispatched in his kitchen with a heavy blow to the head. Suddenly it isn’t a hobby any more. And although there are two police detectives, they’re there mainly for human interest and as a foil for the sleuthing seniors. Meanwhile, there’s another death – and then a third and a fourth, both long ago, come to light. Are they connected, or are they muddying the waters?

As a detective novel, The Thursday Murder Club does have some flaws. Now and then it’s hard to suspend disbelief; the fearsome four are sometimes just a bit too lucky, and the two “real” detectives a little too complicit in their activities (and a police investigation of a murder like this would be a lot more professional). The plot is quite complicated, and I think most crime fans would want to have more clues that would help them join in with the investigation in their heads, and let them build their own theories. At the end, when we do find out who did dispatch the dodgy builder, it’s a surprise. It should be, of course; but I’d have liked more clues that would have made me kick myself for not spotting them.  

And yet it all sort of works, because – like some of the best crime stories – this book has features that transcend its qualities purely as detective fiction. For a start, it’s also got a strong sense of time and place. There’s the retirement community itself, and its setting. It’s been built around a former convent, with a clinic, and a chapel that has not been deconsecrated; and it’s set on a verdant hillside that seems to be near Robertsbridge in Kent – a beautiful part of the country. (The nearest shopping centre is called Fairhaven but seems to be Hastings in disguise.) The residents are not just nice old dears; some of them did a lot with their lives and are still people to be reckoned with.

There is also a frankness about dementia and ageing. Osman understands that older people actually confront this more than the young realise. They baldly accept the brutal fact that they don’t know how long they’ll be around, or how long they’ll be compos mentis. Amongst Osman’s characters, for instance, there is Elizabeth; every day she opens her diary at a date two weeks hence and writes a question, the answer to which she knows today – but will she then? If she doesn’t, it’ll be a warning that her grasp is weakening.  Her husband Stephen has already crossed the threshold and she does not want to lose him to full-time care, but knows she soon must.

There’s a fair bit of social commentary. A ghastly get-rich-quick builder has a house of almost comic vulgarity, and attitudes (especially to women) to match. A police officer drops by to talk to the residents on crime prevention; she’s a woman (and, we learn much later, black). She says she is happy to be addressed by her first name, but not as “love”. Elderly resident Joyce has a go-getter daughter who works in finance. Joyce herself was once a nurse, and remembers how horrible some consultants were. Moreover Osman’s turn of phrase makes the narrative more vivid. Elizabeth, looking for signs of dementia in herself, thinks with dread of the time when you “become ‘Poor Rosemary’ or ‘Poor Frank’, catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they really were.” The old convent has “a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing.” The murder victim is clubbed in his kitchen and his “fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.” This book might have limitations if seen solely as detective fiction. But it is much more than that, and is compulsively readable.

Author Richard Osman turned to writing books only recently; The Thursday Murder Club, published in 2020, was his first book (though he’s since written three more – a productive use of lockdown perhaps). But he has been involved in creative ventures of one kind or another (including scriptwriting) for a very long time, and has been producer or presenter of some of the best-known shows on British TV, working or appearing on The One Show, Have I Got News for You, The Dragon’s Den and Whose Line Is It Anyway. He was also for many years presenter of a BBC quiz show, Pointless. He dropped the latter last year to concentrate more on his writing after the huge success of his crime novels. As I was writing this, he tweeted: “This week marks 150 weeks in the bestseller list for The Thursday Murder Club. I couldn't have dreamt of this three years ago, so heartfelt thanks to everyone who has read the books.”

But her emails…
So to the second of these two bestsellers; it’s just as good – and just as original. It’s Janice Hallett’s The Appeal.  

Like Osman, Hallett had never published a book before this one – and walked off with an instant bestseller. But she too had been a journalist and screenwriter. (She co-wrote the 2011 film Retreat, a rather bleak and grisly thriller set on a remote island during a pandemic – about which, she now says, the script was very prescient.)

The Appeal is a whodunnit with a daring structure. It does not start with a crime; you don’t learn of it until quite close to the end of the book. Instead it starts with a note from Roderick Tanner QC to two of his juniors. He is clearly vexed by a case and wants them to unravel it from a huge pile of emails sent and received, over many months, by the various characters. We realise that one of them may be in trouble and may be in jail; we also guess that they are mounting an appeal and that Tanner is their brief. But even these facts we are not told; we infer them. And for the moment we learn nothing else. Instead we are given all the emails, in chronological order – which is how Charlotte and Femi, the juniors, are reading them. We don’t get much comment from either of the juniors. Mostly, we just get the emails.

They revolve around a production by an amateur dramatics group, the Fairway Players (it’s Arthur Miller’s All My Sons). The members of the group are jockeying for parts in the play; the auditions begin. The production is led by Martin, a wealthy local businessman and owner of an hotel/conference centre. Then, not far in, he announced that his infant granddaughter Poppy has brain cancer and needs an experimental treatment from the States. He mounts an appeal to pay for it. From then on the stories of the play, the appeal for Poppy, and the crime to come are intertwined.

The emails structure lets us see each character’s personality for ourselves, without description, from the way they relate to each other – a powerful piece of show-don’t-tell that works very well. It’s a large cast, but they include Isabel, the twittery, verbose, rather nervous nurse who seems to irritate everyone. There’s Martin himself, the local middle-class alpha male, and the members of his family. There is Sarah-Jane, professional appeals organiser, curt with Isabel but emollient with others. And there is Samantha, also a nurse, who has recently returned from some very dodgy parts of Africa, where she has been working with Médecins Sans Frontières. There is something unclear about her and we learn of her mainly from the emails of others. Bit by bit, we sense that all is not as it appears with the fundraiser for Poppy, or with the doctor treating her, or with Samantha’s time in Africa. Bit by bit these themes combine until we are finally confronted with the crime itself.

I thought this book a real tour de force – an unusual crime story told in a highly original way. I wrote once that Dorothy Sayers’s Wimsey novels work so well because she puts you inside his head and unscrolls the story much as he sees it, so that you share the process of detection with him. Something even better happens here; you keep Femi and Charlotte company as they wade through a mass of emails through which threads emerge but are seen through a glass, darkly. The emails also reveal a great deal about each individual with splendid clarity. In 2021, Guardian interviewer Kate Kellaway asked The Appeal author Janice Hallett how much an email could say about someone’s character. “More than you might think,” she replied. “Even the one-line emails people think give nothing away can be revealing.” She is not joking. All of us will have had friends or colleagues whose emails gush like Isabel’s or are curt like Sarah-Jane’s.

Amateur dramatics, 1930s-style

Moreover, like The Thursday Murder Club, this book is a sly snapshot of modern Britain. There is the too-busy health service, the wary HR departments, and the class structure that is never discussed but is always just below the surface, and is baked into our DNA. Here as in real life it defines so much of people’s behaviour – our acceptance of our place in any process, our deference to people who do not deserve it, and our failure to question their motives. I’d guess that this realistic setting is, indirectly, part of the reason for both books’ success. This is not because people want social commentary in their leisure reading; I’m not sure they do. It’s more because they recognise the settings and characters and identify with them. It’s something the Golden Age crime novel didn’t always do quite so well. Neither Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers appeared socially aware, at least in their books; indeed Sayers was (it’s said) a snob. And at times the standard plot of the day seemed to be death at a country-house weekend, not something most of their middle-class readers would have experienced.

The Appeal did have a flaw: the characters, though well-drawn, were mostly just not very attractive. A few were unpleasant and the rest left me mostly cold. Do you need someone to root for in a book? I do. In this respect, Osman’s characters worked better for me and were part of why I liked the book. I enjoyed The Appeal anyway because it was so original and well-written. But I should have liked to have someone who made me care more about the outcome. Still, I think this matters more to some readers than others.

The good news is that both writers have decided to keep writing. Hallett has produced four more crime novels since; Osman, two. Both manage to entertain while reflecting a fast-changing world. I think they’ll be with us a while.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

 

Crime on the side

Crime writing is fun, but don’t give up the day job... A look at two vintage detective stories by men who didn’t

When I was a child my parents used to like a good thriller or crime story on TV, especially on a winter’s night. “See what’s on tonight?” my mother would say, as my father dutifully opened The Times at the telly page; and then she would almost always, say, “I do hope there’s a good murder.” Back then, that meant a series such as The Saint, adapted from the stories of Leslie Charteris and starring Roger Moore, then in his 30s. Or, a little later, The Expert, in which Marius Goring played a forensic pathologist. There were many more, including the odd American import.

Like my mum, I do enjoy a good murder. Committing one oneself means lots of messy paperwork and there are ethical questions, so I prefer to read a good crime novel. A year or so ago I wrote a piece about the Golden Age of Crime, focused on the four famous Queens of Crime – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. But I mentioned that there were a host of others, often now forgotten – some with good reason, but others still well worth the read. A recent rummage round a Norwich bookshop (The City Bookshop, since you ask; others are available) turned up a selection. Some had been ‘rediscovered’ and put out under a modern imprint, but one of those was very disappointing; I could not read more than 20 pages. However, there were also some original Penguins in their green-and-white covers, very old, very pre-loved and in one case stuck together with Sellotape. These proved rewarding.

First, A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake.

*

 A Question of Proof is a classic Golden Age of Crime story. If you like Agatha Christie & Co., you may well enjoy this.

Written in 1935, it is set in an English prep school. It’s summer and the school’s Sports Day has rolled around. Sometime between lunch and tea, one of the pupils, a ghastly little tick called Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss, meets with a most unfortunate end. Suspicion rests on the members of the staff common-room. Was it Evans, who is carrying on with the headmaster’s wife, and may have been blackmailed by the boy? Wrench, who is doing likewise with one of the maids? Either could be ruined if rumbled (this is the 1930s). Or was it Gadsby, the prodigious drinker? Or Sims, who cannot keep order? Evans’s eccentric friend Nigel Strangeways is brought in to find out.

It’s the first of many outings for Strangeways, who was to feature in most of Nicholas Blake’s detective novels, of which there were 20 in all. As many people will know, “Nicholas Blake” was a pseudonym for C. Day Lewis; the future poet laureate was himself an impoverished prep-school schoolmaster at the time and wanted to earn some money from detective fiction without risking his reputation as a poet. He proved quite successful; the books were never quite as popular as (say) Agatha Christie’s, but they did do well and are still read.

It’s easy to see why. A Question of Proof seems a bit old-fashioned now, but it’s well-written and well-paced and the characters very well-drawn. And having gone to a prep school myself, I think he catches the atmosphere. No-one mourns the dead pupil; for the other boys, his sudden death is the occasion not for sadness but for excitement and speculation, and Day Lewis catches this callousness rather well. The chaos in Sims’s classroom is realistic; there were always teachers like that who could not control their pupils. There’s also a surprising whiff of radical politics, though it’s very subtle – Day Lewis was on the left most of his life and at the time this was written was actually a member of the Communist Party. One wonders how he really felt about teaching in a place like this.

C. Day Lewis in 1936 (Howard Coster/
National Portrait Gallery)

I am not sure how I feel about Strangeways. He is somewhat contrived, with his carefully crafted eccentricities such as an addiction to tea, in huge quantities, throughout the day – though some people do have that in real life (the late Tony Benn was an example). Still, most writers of detective fiction have such a lead character, a cipher through which the reader follows the crime being solved. They are often given an odd backstory or a pattern of eccentric behaviour, and this is consistent from one book to another. That consistency means readers know what to expect, and will buy the book. Christie of course had Poirot; Sayers had Lord Peter Wimsey; P.D. James had Adam Dalgleish. But the writer must ensure that their investigator acts true to character, and that – especially in later books – their eccentricities do not become so hackneyed that they become a caricature of themselves.

A number of “Nicholas Blake’s” detective novels are still in print, including at least three or four for Kindle. A Question of Proof, the first, was published in 1935 and the last, The Private Wound, as late as 1968. By then Lewis was Poet Laureate, having been appointed at the start of the year. It is one of four “Nicholas Blake” novels that doesn’t feature Nigel Strangeways. The other 16 do.

Detective fiction does seem an odd departure for an intellectual like Lewis. At the time A Question of Proof came out he was 31 and had published his first collection of poetry 10 years earlier; he was an associate of W. H. Auden and was strongly influenced by him as a poet. (Nigel Strangeways is said to have initially been modelled on Auden, though he acquired a more distinct character in later books.) Patrick Maume, writing in the Irish Dictionary of National Biography, says that Day Lewis had reviewed numerous detective stories for the Spectator and thought he might as well have a go himself. It is also said Day Lewis needed the money. Whatever his motives, the identity of “Nicholas Blake” soon became known; the board of Cheltenham College, where he was teaching, were concerned and he had to assure them A Question of Proof was in no way autobiographical. (The board were already displeased by his membership of the Communist Party.) 

As to the Blake novels themselves, it may seem that they were meant purely as entertainments but this was not entirely so. “Day Lewis always made it clear that he did not regard the Nicholas Blake novels as serious works of art, but that they should not be dismissed as purely commercial,” says Maume, adding that Day Lewis used the books to explore certain morbid psychological states. There are also political overtones; The Smiler With the Knife (1939) revolves around a fascist conspiracy, very topical at the time. Maume says the film rights were optioned by Orson Welles. Moreover crime fiction might have been a sideline for Day Lewis, but it was a jolly successful one. One of the novels, The Beast Must Die (1938), sold some 430,000 copies, according to Maume. It was filmed in 1969 by Claude Chabrol, and is still in print. 

*

During the war Day Lewis was in a long and troubled affair with the writer Rosamond Lehmann. He was thus a frequent visitor to her cottage at Aldworth, on the Berkshire Downs west of Reading. There he will have become acquainted with the journalist Anne Scott-James – then women’s editor of Picture Post – who owned the cottage next door. He will thus also have known Scott-James’s then husband, Macdonald Hastings, who also worked for Picture Post, in his case as a war correspondent. After the war he too decided to try his hand at crime fiction. Cork and the Serpent (1955) was one of several detective novels he produced between 1951 and 1966.

The books have an original premise; instead of a detective or private investigator, they feature one Montague Cork, the head of a large London-based insurance company. Now and then, should a claim seem doubtful or fraud possible, he will investigate personally. He has thus become something of a sleuth. One evening he is walking down Mayfair’s Cork Street when he is accosted by a lady of business. She is taken aback by Cork’s response, which is to examine the brooch she is wearing; how did she come by it? He has realised that it fits the description of a valuable jewel that has been reported to his company as lost.

However, it turns out that not one but two clients have reported it as such. So whose was it? One of the two is clearly lying. The eccentric playboy Maharaja of Lumphur? Or the Berkshire racehorse owner and peer Lord Pangbourne? Before Cork can dig further, something most regrettable happens to the Maharaja. Cork decides to speak to Pangbourne and glides off down the Great West Road in his Bentley. The action takes place mainly on the Berkshire chalk downs that to this day are an important centre for the horse-racing industry. The world of horse racing is an important backdrop to the story, as are the rural locations.

It all sounds a bit genteel. It isn’t; the folks in this book do some quite unpleasant things to each other, there are well-drawn, colourful characters and, as in all the best detective yarns, you do become invested in the story and want to guess who the villain is before Cork does. There is also a surprising final scene involving a Royal garden party. Now and then the plot does get contorted, and it was never quite clear to me exactly how the streetwalker, Carmel, came by the brooch. But it’s all good fun. Moreover Hastings’s depiction of Carmel and of the Indian characters seems old-fashioned today but was probably liberal for its time (although Macdonald Hastings himself was not; he held very conservative views).

The rural and racing themes are not surprising, as author Hastings was a great lover of country life and of country sports. According to his son, the journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings, he spent a great deal more than he could afford on the latter, keeping a collection of superb shotguns. He had been quite a distinguished war correspondent; his more dangerous assignments included trips on motor torpedo boats and a bombing raid over Germany in a Short Stirling, the crew of which were killed the following night. His son wrote in a family memoir (Did You Really Shoot the Television?, published in 2010) that he was probably quite reckless. After the war he edited the prestigious Strand Magazine, and when that folded in 1950 he started a magazine on the countryside and country pursuits, Country Fair (this too lost money).  It was about the same time that he started writing detective novels. His character, Montague Cork, was based on a real insurance magnate who Hastings knew, Claude Wilson, head of the Cornhill Insurance Company. History seems to record little of Wilson, and Hastings himself once said that nothing so exciting had happened to Wilson in real life.

There were five Montague Cork novels. In Sir Max’s view, Cork and the Serpent is actually the weakest of them; it draws on Hastings’s knowledge of racing, which was not as great as he supposed it to be, according to Sir Max. Neither, he adds, was his father really familiar with the aristocracy, and this also shows. Critic Daniel P. King, writing in Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers (1980), calls it a “slow moving tale with much muddling about”. He also states that the Cork novels “range from the trite to the noble”. This might be sweeping. To be sure, Macdonald Hastings was not Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Detective novels, for him, were a sideline in a busy life. Still, the Cork books sold well; and I thought Cork and the Serpent much better than King judged it to be. If it is the weakest, then the others might be well worth reading.

In Did You Really Shoot the Television?, Sir Max is often highly critical of his father, who was bad with money, had very right-wing views and was monumentally tactless. But he had a varied and successful career in journalism, and later in broadcasting.  And Montague Cork, says Sir Max, was a “delightfully original fictional creation”; he praises, too, the countryside descriptions in the books, especially in Cork on the Water and Cork in Bottle. I would like to read the rest.

Not all vintage crime fiction is worth reading. Although some books are unjustly neglected, others are neglected all too justly. But Nigel Strangeways and Montague Cork do deserve our time. As it happens, both were written by men who had remarkable lives of which crime fiction was but one part. So if, as crime writers, both are still worth reading, maybe that is not a coincidence.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.