Crime Fiction Round-up

I've decided to have an occasional round-up of crime fiction that I've enjoyed and I'm featuring three novels today.
I came across a review of The Mangle Street Murders by M. R. C. Kasasian on one of my favourite blogs - http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-mangle-street-murders-by-mrc - and thought it sounded worth a look. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is set in the late nineteenth century. Sidney Grice, a 'personal detective' as he styles himself, is a kind of anti-Sherlock Holmes. Whereas I imagine Holmes to be rather attractive in a saturnine way, Grice has a glass eye which he keeps taking out and a repellently supercilious manner. However March Middleton, the young woman who goes to live with him as his ward and becomes his assistant, is more than a match for him and the play of wits between the two is great fun. The story moves along at a cracking pace. There are plenty of jokes (Conan Doyle makes an appearance at one point) and although I guessed some of the solution to the mystery, it really didn't matter.
My second novel is Asa Larrson's The Second Deadly Sin. She is maybe my favourite Scandanavian writer and I wasn't disappointed. She is so good at really gripping openings. A bear attacks a dog outside a farm house and is shot and wounded by the farmer. The bear is hunted down and killed: in its stomach is a human hand. Meanwhile in a nearby town a woman is murdered and District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson and Police Officer Anna-Maria Meller get to work on the case. They are both attractive characters. The story is a complex one with its roots in the past and if there was a weakness it was in the flashbacks to a hundred years before. I wasn't quite convinced by them and found myself wanting to get back to the main story. But still, a very good read leading to a tense climax.

Kate Ellis in The Cadaver Game (great title!) also makes use of connections between the present and the past, and does so very skilfully, using journal entries from a couple of centries earlier. This too has an arresting opening. Two young people run naked through woods at night, paid to take part in a game which turns out to be anything but. It is some time before their bodies are found and meanwhile the police, alerted by an anonymous phone call, find the body of a woman in a cottage. This is the sixteenth outing in a very successful series featuring DI Wesley Peterson. A complex plot is well handled, the ending was clever, and I loved the enticing Devon setting.
So three novels I can happily recommend if you are looking for some holiday reading. Kate's new novel, The Shroud Maker, is just out in paperback and I have asked her to be my guest on the blog soon, so something to look forward to.
Incidentally I'd love suggestions for my own holiday reading. Something with a French flavour would be particularly welcome.

The Pram in the Hall

'There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.' There is some truth in this famous statement by Cyril Connolly. I guess that Connolly was thinking more of male writers and the necessity to support a family and the need to write for money. Still it is worth noting that many of our greatest women writers - Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes - have been childless. 

There is no doubt that when you have children, hugely rewarding though it is, time, energy and the mental space that writers need are in very short supply. On the other hand, being a parent does supply you with some great material. Here's an example: years ago I delivered my daughter to a children's party. The child in question had just joined my daughter's school so I barely knew her parents and they barely knew me. There was a great scrum of parents and kids when I arrived. I can't remember now if I left my mobile phone number, but I do remember that as I drove away I realised that the parents of the party girl didn't even know where I lived. What would they do if some reason I didn't return to collect my daughter?

I jotted it down as an idea for a story and when, last year, the theme of 'Guilty Parties' was announced for a CWA anthology, I thought of it right away. The anthology is out now and 'What's the Time, Mr Wolf' is in it. It's lovely to find myself there along with old friends, like Martin Edwards, Kate Ellis, Peter Lovesey and many others that I have met at conferences, and yes, parties (guilty or otherwise) over the years. The hardback is a bit pricey, but no doubt it will be out as a paperback and an ebook in due course, and you could always order it from the library. It's a great way to sample the work of writers you might not have read before.

What I Did on My Holidays

Or, rather, what I read on my holidays. I really enjoyed Kate Ellis's PLAYING WITH BONES, one of her Joe Plantagenet series, let in a lightly fictionalised York. There is an element of the supernatural in these and it was satisfyingly creepy! And as we were in northern France I took with me Adrian Magson's DEATH ON THE MARAIS, set in Picardy, which turned out to be a thoroughly good read.
We visited Tunbridge Wells first and I picked up a copy of Richard Cobb's STILL LIFE in Hall's, one of my favourite second-hand book-shops. Richard Cobb is best known as a historian of modern France, but this is an account of his childhood in Tunbridge Wells between the wars and is a fascinating piece of social history. I read it when it first came out twenty years ago and enjoyed it all over again.
The other books I've been revisiting are Molly Hughes's four autobiographical books, beginning with A LONDON CHILD OF THE 1870S and ending with A LONDON FAMILY BETWEEN THE WARS. They are hugely enjoyable, a window on a world very different from today, and though I really wouldn't want to have been a woman then, I couldn't help feeling a bit envious - mostly perhaps of the writer's optimism and high spirits.
Oh, and I mustn't forget CRANFORD, and the Father Brown stories, re-readings both. Chesterton's stories are certainly ingenious puzzles, but at their best they are much more than that. 'The Queer Feet' and 'The Strange Crime of John Boulnois' are among my favourites.

A Coda: I got home to find an email from Ra Page at Comma Press telling me that LITMUS (the short story collection that I blogged about a while ago) had got a rave review from THE INDEPENDENT ('Works brilliantly... ingenious... unfailingly interesting') and had been chosen as a BOOK OF THE WEEK. The NEW SCIENTIST liked it too: 'Exquisite... delectable.' Wow!

A rose by any other name?

Titles are very much on my mind at present as I mull over the options for my recently completed novel. Of course whatever my agent and I settle on, it won't necessarily be the title the book ends up with, but still . . . you want something that'll get you off to a good start and attract the eye of an editor. And this is by no means easy. A good title should pique the reader's curiosity, it should tell the reader something about the book, but it shouldn't tell them too much. Some of best titles, I think, are allusive rather than descriptive, they come at the novel from a slant. SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS, MISS SMILLA'S FEELING FOR SNOW are recent titles that I find memorable and evocative. The title should fit the novel so well that you can't imagine it with any other name. LORD OF THE FLIES. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. GONE WITH THE WIND. CATCH TWENTY-TWO. Great titles, all of them, It comes as something of a surprise to discover that Margeret's Mitchell's original title for GONE WITH THE WIND was TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY: nothing like as good. And CATCH TWENTY-TWO wasn't Joseph Heller's first idea either.
Im my experience a title is either obvious from the start or it gives you endless trouble. One way round this is to begin with the title. That's more or less what I did with my short story, 'Don't You Hate Having Two Heads?' I happened to see this, the title of a surrealist painting, in an article in THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, and it stuck in my memory. And when sometime later on holiday in Venice I visited the Guggenheim museum and saw Max Ernst's sinister painting, THE ROBING OF THE BRIDE, in which the bride does indeed have two heads, well, the story almost wrote itself. My friend the crime writer Kate Ellis who has some great titles, often uses them as a jumping off point: that's what she did with her latest book, THE FLESH TAILOR, an archaic name for a surgeon. Similarly with my novel FOOTFALL I had the title in mind some time before the novel began to form round it.
In the end there is something mysterious about a good title. It's not necessarily something you can decide on just by thinking about it. Like an idea for a novel, it can arrive out of the blue and you know it when you see it.