Kitabı oku: «Howdunit»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Premise

Martin Edwards Introduction

Motives

G. K. Chesterton The Value of Detective Fiction

R. Austin Freeman The Art of the Detective Story

Ian Rankin Why Crime Fiction Is Good for You

James Runcie Why Do It?

Frances Fyfield The Moral Compass of the Crime Novel

Beginning

Peter James Motivation

Janet Laurence Getting Started

Freeman Wills Crofts Finding Ideas

Nicholas Blake Sources of Inspiration

Anthea Fraser Making Choices

Ann Granger Putting Murder on the Page

Natasha Cooper Intensity in Crime Writing

John Harvey Openings

Peter Robinson ‘Something Should Happen Now’: Narrative Hooks

People

Mark Billingham Character from Suspense

Bill James Cops and Criminals, Contrast and Comedy

Marjorie Eccles Making Characters Believable

June Thomson Characters, Relationships, and Settings

Places

P. D. James On the Suffolk Coast

Ann Cleeves Human Geography

Michael Ridpath Setting Stories in Unfamiliar Places

M.O.

Val McDermid Let the Story Be the Driver

Lindsey Davis Style

Kate Charles Choosing a Theme

Michael Jecks Pace

William Ryan Writing Scenes

Margery Allingham Dialogue, Rhythm, and Keeping to the Point

Patricia Moyes Listening and Dialogue

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Writing Dialogue

Perspectives

Aline Templeton Getting a Perspective

Liza Cody What on Earth Is It Like to Be You?

Plots

Agatha Christie Plots

J. J. Connington Logic and Working Backwards

Mary Kelly All Will Be Revealed

Kate Ellis Structuring a Plot

Eric Ambler Voyages of Discovery

Andrew Taylor How to Change Your Murderer

Detectives

Priscilla Masters Amateur Detective or Professional?

Susan Moody Believable Amateurs

Michael Z. Lewin Private Eyes

Research

Ngaio Marsh Getting It Right

Desmond Bagley Keeping Up to Date

John Malcolm Amateurs and Expertise

Detection

Edmund Crispin Detective Stories and Virtuosity

John Dickson Carr Rules and Prejudices

Christianna Brand Classic Ingredients

Michael Innes Clues

Catherine Aird Snakes and Ladders

Sophie Hannah Optimal Subterfuge

Suspense

Robert Goddard Suspense

Julian Symons The Face in the Mirror

Jessica Mann The Suspense Novel

Celia Fremlin The Hours Before Dawn

Action

Lionel Davidson Inspiration, Perspiration, Realization

Tom Harper Adventure Fiction

Felix Francis Writing Action Scenes

Michael Gilbert Filling the Gaps

Michael Hartland Constructing a Thriller

Mick Herron The Cold War, Then and Now

History

Michael Pearce A Laying On of Hands

Imogen Robertson The Christmas Tree Theory of Historical Research

L. C. Tyler Historical Dialogue

Humour

Alexander McCall Smith Humour and Human Nature

Robert Barnard Characters and Caricature

Ruth Dudley Edwards Humour and Satire

In Short

Roy Vickers Let’s Pretend

H. R. F Keating Switch-overs in Short Stories

Fiction and Fact

Peter Lovesey Fictionalizing Characters and Crimes from Real Life

Anthony Berkeley Trial and Error

Partners in Crime

Dorothy L. Sayers Collaborative Writing

Adapting

Alison Joseph Writing for Radio

Simon Brett Adaptability

Challenges

Martyn Waites Impostor Syndrome

Suzette A. Hill Writing: a Painful Pleasure

David Stuart Davies Writer’s Block

Stella Duffy Improvising

Ending

Laura Wilson The End of the Beginning

Joanna Hines In My End

Publishing

David Roberts The Changing Face of Publishing

Antonia Hodgson What Editors Want

Russell James Traditional versus Self-Publishing

Jill Paton Walsh One Thing Leads to Another

Writing Lives

Reginald Hill The Writing Process

Paula Gosling Keeping Track

Jonathan Gash Reading for Pleasure

Janet Neel Don’t Give Up the Day Job

Bertie Denham Writing to Relax

Elly Griffiths Social Media and the Death of Nancy

John Le Carré The Joy of Writing

Len Deighton Different Books; Different Problems; Different Solutions

The Contributors: Biographical Notes

The Detection Club: Presidents

The Detection Club: Members

Index of Authors

Subject Index

Copyright and Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Premise
Introduction

In Howdunit, no fewer than ninety leading crime novelists offer personal perspectives on their approach to their craft – and on the writing life. There are countless valuable insights for would-be writers, but our overriding aim is to entertain and inform anyone who enjoys crime fiction. And perhaps even some people who don’t regard themselves as crime fans – at least not yet – but who are fascinated by the way authors work.

Each contributor is a past or present member of the Detection Club, the world’s oldest social network of crime writers. Publication of Howdunit coincides with the Club’s ninetieth birthday, so there is one essay for each year of the Club’s life to date. Over the past nine decades, many of Britain’s preeminent authors in the genre have belonged to the Club. Their work includes spy, thriller, and adventure fiction, as well as traditional detective stories and novels of psychological suspense. It is high time that their collective wisdom appeared in a single volume. The emphasis is on present-day writing and writers, but our predecessors’ thoughts remain of interest. This is partly because they illustrate how much the writing life and literary fashions have changed, and partly because they show that quite a few challenges remain the same. Detection Club members take their work seriously – but we also take joy from it. That sense of pleasure ripples through the contributions, from Lindsey Davis’s thoughts on literary style to Simon Brett’s rueful reflections about the prospect of having one’s masterpiece adapted by other hands.

A century ago, the Club’s first President, G. K. Chesterton, wrote with pungent wit, ‘It is a well-known fact that people who have never succeeded in anything end by writing books about how to succeed; and I do not see why this principle should not be applied to success in the writing of detective stories as well as in lower and less glorious walks of life.’ But I like to think that Chesterton would have approved of this book, and would be delighted to see his own opinions appear alongside those of his contemporaries and successors.

From the Club’s formation in 1930, Detection Club members, with Anthony Berkeley Cox and Dorothy L. Sayers taking a vigorous lead, set about raising the literary standards of the genre. In those early days, bestselling thrillers tended to be shoddily written and jingoistic, so membership was confined to authors who had produced at least two detective novels of ‘acknowledged merit’, a standard occasionally applied in a rather haphazard manner. Thriller writers were excluded unless they also wrote detective stories in the classic vein. After the Second World War, when it became obvious even to the diehards that first-rate authors such as Eric Ambler were writing thrillers, the absurdity of continuing the exclusion was recognized and it was abandoned.

In its infancy, the Club was popularly associated with the idea of laying down ‘rules’ about how to write detective stories. The rules and their purpose have been shrouded in myths and misunderstandings. For a start, the rules were conceived by Ronald Knox, renowned as a satirist, before the Club was founded. And they were written tongue-in-cheek: an ordained priest, Knox presented them as a gentle skit on the Ten Commandments. Some of the ‘rules’, such as ‘The detective must not himself commit the crime’, were futile, taking the idea of ‘fair play’ towards the reader too far and for no good reason. He made one or two sensible points: for instance, when he says that twin brothers and doubles ‘must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them’, he was simply arguing against the use of inelegant trickery that might fool readers but only at the cost of exasperating them. Above all, he was arguing for common sense in the writing of mysteries, urging practitioners to shun the absurd plot contrivances and racial stereotypes that abounded in early twentieth-century crime writing.

Cox, who founded the Club, and wrote innovative and influential crime fiction as Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles, delighted in breaking the so-called ‘rules’ in his work, and so did many of his fellow members. But over the years, the joke got lost. One often-repeated canard is that Agatha Christie came close to being drummed out of the Club because The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was deemed to breach its rules. This is pure invention; the truth is that the novel was published four years before the Club came into existence, and it was much admired by Cox, Sayers, and Christie’s other colleagues.

It’s tempting to go to the other extreme, and suggest that the only rule for crime writers is that there are no rules. Writing is a process of trial and error, and each person has to work out what suits them best. Even so, the experiences of skilled practitioners, past and present, are instructive as well as intriguing. And who better, in Britain at least, to compile such a book than members of the Detection Club?

When I proposed, at the Club’s AGM in February 2019, that we collaborate on a book of this kind in order to boost our finances, I was unsure of the likely reaction. As it turned out, everyone was highly enthusiastic. The meeting also agreed to dedicate the book to Len Deighton, our longest-serving member, as a way of celebrating the golden anniversary of his election to the Club. As for the guiding concept of the book, Felix Francis summed it up as ‘How we dunit’. In other words, we’d talk about our own experiences, expressing personal views rather than laying down an earnest update of Knox’s jokey commandments. The Club’s publishers, HarperCollins, loved the idea, and in the months that followed, Howdunit took shape.

The result is not a textbook or manual; readers wishing to delve into the minutiae of police and courtroom procedure, forensic science, and the law of libel should look elsewhere. Instead the contributors offer a treasure trove of wit, wisdom, and anecdotes. You will find out here which author was the first novelist to use a word processor, who wrote what has been described as the first ‘electronic novel’, how a Booker Prize nomination led to a commission to revive a great detective of the Golden Age, and a good deal more. There is even a step-by-step case study in correspondence of the making of a collaborative crime classic, which illustrates that the creative process is an extraordinary mixture of pleasure and pain. And because there is no limit to the talents in the Detection Club, there are also several cartoons by ‘Clewsey’, whose name conceals a collaboration of three members, one of whom trained in graphic design …

I suggested broad topics that members might like to write about, and offered more detailed ideas to anyone who asked for them, but I didn’t try to impose conformity of approach or message or to eliminate contradictions. I wanted contributors to express themselves without feeling constrained by editorial diktats. When you are lucky enough to have the chance to work with such a gifted group of authors, it would be crazy not to give them free rein. The genre is a broad church, encompassing so many types of story, and it would be strange if all crime writers had same opinions or went about their task in the same way. As will become evident, they don’t. In these pages you can hear (just as you can if you attend a major literary festival) many different voices. The contributors have diverse opinions about everything from writer’s block to the crime novelist’s mission.

Some writers plot or outline in advance before writing the first word of a story, while others write from the seat of their pants, setting off on the journey of novel writing without having the faintest idea of where it will take them. Both approaches are explored in Howdunit, along with many other areas where there is room for divergent attitudes and approaches. To suggest that one view is invariably ‘right’ and another is ‘wrong’ is naive. Just as different criminals favour different m.o.s, so different crime novelists follow different paths when creating their mysteries. They also favour different types of crime fiction; this book aims to show the rich potential of the genre. The value of the personal views expressed by contributors lies in the way they illuminate the pros and cons, the choices that any writer needs to make. We don’t offer the false comfort of definitive answers where none exist, although there are also areas of widespread consensus – for instance, that writers with fertile imaginations can find ideas anywhere. The question for any individual is ultimately: what works for you?

I’m the eighth and current President of the Club, and my predecessors include such legendary figures as Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. The Club has a rich history, and I charted its early years in The Golden Age of Murder; suffice it to say here that the Club is simply a social association, a small dining club with membership by invitation. It’s very different from the Crime Writers’ Association, a much larger professional organization for anyone who has published a crime book, together with associates involved in the business of crime writing. The two organizations are not competitors and they enjoy a warm relationship; the four most recent presidents of the Club also chaired the CWA. Although the two organizations’ archives are distinct, together they comprise the British Crime Writing Archives, which for the past few years have been celebrated by an annual summer festival at Gladstone’s Library in north Wales.

In contrast to the position with the CWA, the number of members of the Club has always been limited, and as an organization that exists to have occasional dinners in London, its membership is predominantly British. There are no formal restrictions, and several Americans, including such contrasting authors as John Dickson Carr and Patricia Highsmith, have been members; so was the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh. The general principle is that membership is for life, and in fact Sayers had abandoned writing detective novels a decade before she became the Club’s third President. The enduring appeal of the Club has much to do with its small size, and with the spirit of collegiality between everyone who attends the dinners. From the Club’s inception, the list of eminent guest speakers at the main autumn dinner, currently held at the Ritz, has been impressive and eclectic.

Right from the start of the Club’s existence, it has subsidized its activities – well, the consumption of those splendid but rather pricey dinners – by producing crime stories. The first two joint ventures were collaborative cross-media mysteries broadcast by the infant BBC and published serially in The Listener, and on 23 July 1930 the Corporation also aired ‘Plotting a Detective Story’, a fifty-minute talk given by Berkeley and Sayers. The audience was reckoned to exceed twelve million people – a reach that, today, any prime-time British TV show or indeed publisher would kill for.

These groundbreaking initiatives were rapidly followed by the Club’s first novel, The Floating Admiral. This joint effort was concocted by no fewer twelve authors and boasted a preface by Chesterton. Almost ninety years on, it remains in print, and has recently been translated into several foreign languages. Further innovative books followed over the years, including stories in which Club members wrote about each other’s detectives, a collection of true-crime essays, and a set of stories about supposedly perfect crimes solved by a superintendent from Scotland Yard. The Club’s most recent publications are The Sinking Admiral, a twenty-first-century homage to its famous forerunner masterminded by Simon Brett, and a short story collection, Motives for Murder.

From the 1930s until the post-war era, these publications helped to keep the Club solvent and even enabled the hire of a couple of rooms in Soho, where the Club’s library was kept. But, as with most small membership organizations, the Club has never been flush with cash, and Sayers’ correspondence contains occasional outpourings of anguish about the parlous state of its finances. During the 1940s, and occasionally in succeeding decades, the Club’s very survival has been uncertain. The rented rooms are long gone, and so is the library. And the march of time prompts another question: in the twenty-first century, is there really any need for the Detection Club? How can it still have value and relevance in the era of social media and innumerable festivals, conventions and other opportunities for crime writers to get together with each other, as well as with fans?

My own, far from unbiased, opinion, is that the Club is such an agreeable institution, and so historically significant, that it deserves to be cherished. Quite apart from the convivial nature of the dinners, there is a growing interest in the heritage of crime fiction around the world, and the Club and its members have made a major contribution to that heritage. The Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan is a club modelled on ours, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting its President, while over the past three years alone, the Club’s history has been discussed and debated at events in countries as diverse as Estonia, the United States, Iceland, Canada, Dubai, Spain, and China. During the past twelve months it has also been celebrated by a BBC radio play and a French graphic novel. So if one looks beyond the superficial anachronisms, the Club is as ‘relevant’ as ever.

The real test is whether the small band of members considers that the Club remains worthwhile. If any doubt existed, this project has laid it to rest. Any editor will tell you that it’s one thing for seasoned authors to express interest in writing something and quite another to persuade them to produce it in a short space of time. My task was to approach busy authors with deadlines aplenty to plague their consciences, and also – because the project was a Club fundraiser in that fine tradition dating back to The Floating Admiral – to inveigle them into writing for free. All of us have a strong belief that writers should be properly valued and paid, now more than ever, with widespread research suggesting that literary incomes are in decline around the world (something that the aspiring author needs to keep in mind). But as the response to Howdunit shows, writers are also warm and generous people, and members of the Detection Club want it to continue to thrive.

Bestselling superstars showed themselves willing to put aside their current work-in-progress to contribute to this book. Even veteran members who hadn’t written a novel for years proved eager to participate. I found it thrilling to receive one manuscript after another and to marvel at the musings on so many different aspects of our craft. Members told me they were happy to contribute, first because of their enthusiasm for the Club, and secondly because they felt they had something worth saying about aspects of the writing process and the crime writer’s life.

The aim was not merely to produce a snapshot of the state of play in contemporary crime writing. Including historical material and illustrations, even cartoons, gives the book an added texture, highlighting changing fashions as well as truths about writing that are timeless. Families and estates of deceased contributors, aware of the strength of the members’ attachment to the Club, were remarkably supportive. The pieces by former members are usually shorter than those by current members, and I’ve written brief commentaries to link many of the contributions and to set certain pieces in context. Among other things, I hope readers will be tempted to read the books of contributors whose work they haven’t previously encountered.

Women writers have always played a central role in the Detection Club. Agatha Christie wasn’t by nature a ‘joiner’, but she became a member of the committee, and after Sayers’ death she held the Presidency for the rest of her life. In the early days, Secretaries of the Club included Lucy Malleson, who wrote as Anne Meredith and Anthony Gilbert, and Carol Rivett, alias E. C. R. Lorac; their more recent successors have included Mary Kelly and Jessica Mann. In the early years of the twenty-first century, distinguished writers such as P. D. James and Margaret Yorke continued to be prominent and loyal members who regularly attended the dinners, and the tradition continues to this day. So it seemed fitting for Liza Cody to contribute thoughts about the female perspective in crime fiction.

I aimed to edit the contributions as lightly as possible, despite inevitable overlaps and constraints of space. Of course, in terms of subject matter, we wanted to round up the usual suspects – plotting, people, and place – but also to do much more. So, to take two examples out of many, we have Mark Billingham reflecting on the nexus between stand-up comedy and suspenseful fiction, and Stella Duffy drawing on her experience in the theatre to suggest ways in which writers can learn from the art of improvisation.

Without a huge amount of goodwill on the part of many people and organizations, Howdunit could never have come into existence. I’m grateful to everyone who has helped me to put the book together, not least those who have tracked down or helped me to assemble potential contributions, including Nigel Moss, John Curran, Tony Medawar, James Hallgate, Lady Denham, Denis Kendal, the numerous literary agents who have assisted in my efforts to secure the rights and the material, not least Georgia Glover of David Higham, the Club’s own agent, and those who have contributed to the editorial process, including Mike Lewin, Dea Parkin and John Garth. David Brawn has proved (once again) to be a superb editor, and I greatly appreciate the support of David and his colleagues at HarperCollins who have worked on this book. Above all, my heartfelt thanks go to Len Deighton and my other friends and colleagues within the Detection Club for their kindness and generosity in making sure that the idea of this book became an exciting reality.

Martin Edwards

Motives

What is the value of crime fiction? Why bother to write it or read it? These old questions continue to be asked. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who became the first President of the Detection Club, provided some answers. ‘The Value of Detective Stories’, published in The Speaker on 21 June 1901, from which this extract is taken, was subsequently retitled ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ and is the first significant essay extolling the merits of the genre.

The Value of Detective Fiction
G. K. Chesterton

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the Iliad.

No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery.

Chesterton’s argument about the role of the lonely urban detective has often been echoed or refashioned, with the gumshoe going down the mean streets most famously compared – by Raymond Chandler in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ – to a knight errant.

Despite Chesterton’s eloquence, scepticism about the detective story persisted. In 1924, Richard Austin Freeman, pioneering creator of the scientific detective Dr John Thorndyke and later a founder member of the Detection Club (and an author Chandler described as ‘a wonderful performer’) wrote a long essay in The Nineteenth Century and After to defend his craft. Here is an extract.

The Art of the Detective Story
R. Austin Freeman

The status in the world of letters of that type of fiction which finds its principal motive in the unravelment of crimes or similar intricate mysteries presents certain anomalies. By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story – to adopt the unprepossessing name by which this class of fiction is now universally known – is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste.

That such works are produced by such writers for such readers is an undeniable truth; but in mere badness of quality the detective story holds no monopoly. By similar writers and for similar readers there are produced love stories, romances, and even historical tales of no better quality. But there is this difference: that, whereas the place in literature of the love story or the romance has been determined by the consideration of the masterpieces of each type, the detective story appears to have been judged by its failures. The status of the whole class has been fixed by an estimate formed from inferior samples.

What is the explanation of this discrepancy? Why is it that, whereas a bad love story or romance is condemned merely on its merits as a defective specimen of a respectable class, a detective story is apt to be condemned without trial in virtue of some sort of assumed original sin? The assumption as to the class of reader is manifestly untrue. There is no type of fiction that is more universally popular than the detective story …

This being the case, I again ask for an explanation of the contempt in which the whole genus of detective fiction is held by the professedly literary. Clearly, a form of literature which arouses the enthusiasm of men of intellect and culture can be affected by no inherently base quality. It cannot be foolish, and is unlikely to be immoral. As a matter of fact, it is neither. The explanation is probably to be found in the great proportion of failures; in the tendency of the tyro and the amateur perversely to adopt this difficult and intricate form for their ’prentice efforts; in the crude literary technique often associated with otherwise satisfactory productions; and perhaps in the falling off in quality of the work of regular novelists when they experiment in this department of fiction, to which they may be adapted neither by temperament nor by training.

An extract from Richard Austin Freeman’s notebook detailing ‘Clues & evidence’ in the novel he was planning, Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke.

Richard Austin Freeman was a capable amateur artist and kept a sketchbook, which includes several pages like these of inscriptions on ancient gravestones.

An illustration of this type appears in Dr Thorndyke Intervenes and adds interest to a mystery about inheritance and a missing body.

Despite the flood of high-calibre crime novels over the years, some people continue to express reservations about the genre, frequently confusing their personal reading preferences with objective arguments about literary merit.

John Bingham, a Detection Club author who was also a spy (said to have been used by his colleague John Le Carré as a model for George Smiley) wrote a full-page article for the TV Times in the summer of 1958 headed ‘A Thriller a Day Keeps Crime at Bay’. He highlighted what he saw as the sociological value of crime fiction, suggesting that it may deter criminals, by showing the consequences of law-breaking, and may help to recruit people to the police (although several of Bingham’s finest novels were notable for the ruthless interrogations of innocent suspects; so much so that in Murder Plan Six, he felt impelled to write a preface denying that he was ‘anti-police’).

H. R. F. Keating, sixth President of the Club, said in Writing Crime Fiction that the genre ‘puts its reader first, not the writer’ whilst contending that, quite apart from its value as entertainment, ‘the crime story can, to a small extent or to quite a large extent, do what the pure novel does. It can make a contemporary map for its readers out of the chaos of their surroundings.’

In modern times, Ian Rankin has been a powerful and persuasive advocate of the genre’s quality and importance. In 1999, he gave a lecture in Japan under the aegis of the British Council arguing that crime fiction has real value. Developing and updating those arguments in this essay, he makes a formidable case.

Why Crime Fiction Is Good for You
Ian Rankin

Why is crime fiction good for you? Well, it is about tragedy and our emotional responses to tragedy. It is also about moral choices and questions. It can be utterly serious in intent, yet still entertaining. It is still occasionally dismissed by the literary establishment as mere genre fiction – fine if you need something to pass the time, but not quite important enough to merit serious study. Yet ironically many literary novels (past and present) use the exact same tropes as crime fiction.

In the widest sense, of course, all fiction is good for you. It relaxes and entertains; it moves the reader from his or her own consciousness into that of other people in what can often be very different cultures and circumstances. In doing so it broadens our appreciation of human nature and the world around us. At some point in history, however, genre fiction became separated from literary or mainstream fiction, which are apparently more ‘serious’ in their approaches and ambitions. Yet it can be argued that early pulp fiction, such as that published in cheap popular magazines by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is the child of the serials and stories written by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and others; stories which in their day were exemplars of mass entertainment, even sensationalist, like modern-day TV soaps, but are now regarded as literature. Dickens in his own day was not regarded as a particularly worthy writer; rather, he was a forerunner of the modern airport bestseller. This gives me hope that many of today’s crime and thriller writers will in the future come to be regarded as powerful moralists and stylists as well as tellers of fascinating tales.

If we examine the canon of Western literature, especially the novel, we find that the main ingredients of crime fiction – violence, sudden reversals, mystery, deception, moral dilemmas and so on – can be found everywhere, from the Greek epics to contemporary Booker Prize winners. Ask yourself what keeps you reading a particular novel. It is the need to know what happens next. Novels need to pose questions and problems which will be resolved only if the reader keeps reading. If an author makes us curious, we will keep turning the pages. In a sense therefore all readers are detectives, and the crime novel merely codifies this essential aspect of the pleasure of reading.

The great crime writer and critic Julian Symons (one-time President of the Detection Club) once described the folk tale Little Red Riding Hood as an interesting case of disguise and attempted murder. Murder, suspense and betrayal can be found throughout folk literature and in the classic texts of most if not all civilizations – from The Odyssey through Hamlet and King Lear to the novels of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. The poet and detective novelist C. Day-Lewis thought of the whodunit specifically as a twentieth-century form of folk tale, while for his fellow poet W. H. Auden the classical detective story seemed an allegory of the ‘death’ of happiness. In real life, we seldom know what specifically killed off our happiness, whereas in the novel the seemingly random nature of existence is given an explanation – in crime fiction, death never happens without good reason and the causes of death never go unexplained (and are seldom unpunished).

Auden of course was talking of the ‘classical’ English detective story. Things have been changing more recently, the crime novel becoming ever more elastic. Consider the various terms by which it is known: the crime novel, detective novel, whodunit, suspense novel, roman noir, hard-boiled, pulp, police procedural, mystery novel, domestic noir, Scandi noir … even tartan noir. The reason for this proliferation may lie in confusion about the basic identity of the crime novel. This is a genre after all that would seek to include everything from the most basic puzzle-style story up to the likes of Dostoevsky. P. D. James tried to have it both ways when she described a successfully realized crime novel as combining ‘the old traditions of an exciting story and the satisfying exercise of rational deduction with the psychological subtleties and moral ambiguities of a good novel’. Certainly crime novels are intended to entertain. They are products of popular culture. As such they must turn a profit, for few institutions and publicly backed funders will subsidise them. Crime fiction may have literary aspirations, but its emphasis on entertainment ensures that these aspirations do not deter potential readers. Crime fiction is democratic in that it is accessible to all.

Before the Second World War, the crime novel in the UK reassured its readership that all would be well, that society might occasionally be shaken up (by some heinous crime such as murder) but that order would quickly be restored. A courteous and brilliant detective would bring elucidation and the guilty party or parties would be uncovered and sent for trial. The tight confines of this fictional universe, and the neat conclusions, provided pleasure to many but meant that the crime novel was considered as escapist literature, since real life seldom provided its own set of pat resolutions. In the United States, authors such as Raymond Chandler began to argue against such tidy (and mostly bloodless) confections. He wanted crime fiction to be a bit more cynical about human nature, creating a world of tarnished knights such as Philip Marlowe. Chandler sensed that what crime fiction really needed was a sense of the incomplete and of life’s messy complexity. The reader should go to crime fiction to be challenged by these realities. Practitioners in the UK began to realize this, too – gritty urban settings competed with rural idylls; good did not always triumph over evil; evil couldn’t always be explained away. In contemporary crime fiction the villains may escape justice altogether, or the reader may be invited to take sides with the criminal against the powers of law and order. There are even novels with no detectives and no mysteries, showing a world in which criminality, in the form of organized crime, operates openly and without apparent hindrance.

For many readers this came – and comes – as a refreshing change, because the crime novel has always been capable of so much more than simply telling a good story or playing an elaborate game with its audience. Crime writers throughout the world have known for years that the crime novel can be a perfect tool for the dissection of society. It’s something I learned very early on in my Inspector Rebus novels. I wanted to explore the city of Edinburgh from top to bottom, but also wanted to use Edinburgh as a microcosm for the wider world. I wanted to discuss politics and economics and moral questions and the problems we all face as a society. I realized that my police detective gave me a sort of all-areas pass. He could visit the various seats of power but also investigate the worlds of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. This has allowed me to explore themes of racism and human trafficking, the drug trade, various political upheavals, changing social attitudes, the rise of new technologies, our increasingly surveillance-driven society and so forth, without my novels reading as tracts or treatises. The adventure, the thrill of the chase, underpins the whole, but the story is no longer ‘just’ about that chase.

In spite of its exaggerations and heightened effects, the contemporary crime novel often tells us more about the world around us than do literary novels, many of which can seem introspective or focused on a narrow remit (an individual life; or the lives of a small interconnected group). Crime fiction tackles big issues, from corporate corruption to child abuse, inviting its readers to consider why these crimes continue to affect us, while also warning those same readers of new types of crime – as evidenced by the rise of the crime novel where the internet and social media are seen as a potential source of malevolence. The shadowy figure who steps out of a darkened alley in front of us has been replaced by an equally shadowy figure who threatens us via our home computer or mobile phone.

Writers such as Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Sarah Hilary, Eva Dolan, Mark Billingham and Adrian McKinty challenge their readers with stories that seem torn from the pages of this week’s newspapers and which make dramatic use of current technology, be it DNA analysis or CCTV. I’m not sure if they think of themselves as political writers, but there are certainly political elements to their themes and stories. These authors – and many others like them – see the roots of petty crime in abject poverty, in the current social problems of the UK. They also know how easily petty crime can escalate, and they often have a view to the larger (often invisible) crimes perpetrated by institutions and corporations. Their stories tend to be set in the urban here and now, allowing them to engage more readily with the world inhabited by their readers. Drug culture, youth problems and the alienation felt by many at the bottom of the pile are dealt with in their novels.

I chose Edinburgh as the setting for my books for similar reasons. It’s a city that visitors feel they can get to know fairly quickly, being compact and on the surface safe and civilized, with a wealth of historic streets and artefacts. In fact, it can seem a single homogenous entity with a castle at its core. Some of this conceit was exploded by Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting – and more especially by the hugely successful film that came shortly after. In my own first novel Knots and Crosses a serial killer is stalking the Edinburgh of the mid–1980s, and locals gather together to share their astonishment and outrage – it’s just not the sort of thing anyone associates with Edinburgh!

Except …

Well, the 25-year-old Ian Rankin who wrote that book had no grounding in the English whodunit. I had never read any Christie or Allingham or Sayers and had yet to discover Rendell and James. But I was doing a PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark, whose magnum opus, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, had taken me on an adventure into the world of the gothic, much of it Edinburgh-based and much of it grounded in reality. Miss Brodie tells us that she is descended from Deacon William Brodie, a noted gentleman. What she neglects to add is that William Brodie – a real-life historical figure – was a respected figure by day but a thief and rogue by night. He headed a gang which would break into homes, assaulting the unwary and stealing their valuables. Brodie was caught, tried and hanged – allegedly on a scaffold he had helped craft as Deacon of Wrights. Robert Louis Stevenson may have had Deacon Brodie’s story in mind when he wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his short but potent novel focused on the question at the heart of all crime fiction – why do we humans continue throughout history to inflict terrible damage on each other? Stevenson chose (for whatever reason) to set his tale in London, but it is every bit as Scottish in its themes and tone as Spark’s much later novel, and both books perhaps owe a debt to an earlier, lesser-known work, James Hogg’s Edinburgh-based slice of psychological Grand Guignol, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Just as Spark took me to Stevenson, so Stevenson led me to Hogg and his complex narrative concerning a young religious zealot who comes under the spell of a charismatic stranger; who convinces him that as a member of ‘the elect’ (and therefore bound for Heaven whatever he does on Earth) he should feel free to murder those he feels deserve it, including an elderly minister of the church and, eventually, his own brother.

We are never sure in Hogg’s tale whether the charismatic stranger is a psychopath, the Devil incarnate, or a fever-dream conjured up by a religious maniac. This ambiguity is central to much of the best Scottish literature, along with an interest in the doppelgänger. All three books suggest that human beings have within them warring natures. Sometimes we’re good, and sometimes bad. In my first Rebus novel I created an evil alter ego for the detective, in the shape of someone who had been almost like a brother but was now out to destroy him. I certainly had the battle between Jekyll and Hyde in mind as I planned the book. I even added clues that Rebus himself may be the serial killer terrorising Edinburgh. He suffers alcoholic blackouts and wakes in the morning unable to remember the night before, much as Jekyll does. In Rebus’s second adventure, Hide and Seek, I even play with the name Hyde in the title. (The book was originally going to be called Hyde and Seek.)

Many of the best contemporary Scottish crime writers learned from the same books I did, their work owing as much to Hogg as to Christie or Chandler. But several of us also proclaim a debt to William McIlvanney, a literary novelist, poet and essayist who, in the late 1970s, created Jack Laidlaw, a tough, streetwise Glasgow detective with a penchant for philosophy. Those books emerged just as the Scottish novel was having fresh life breathed into it by the likes of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, writers sustained by working-class city life and by the trials and vicissitudes of characters often not given a voice in literature. This is something I feel the Scottish crime novel has picked up on – giving a voice to the voiceless. Crime after all is more likely to strike those who have little or nothing than it is those who are protected by wealth and power.

The mechanics of the whodunit – its narrative conventions – do not really interest me as a writer. What interests me is the soul of the crime novel – what it tells us about ourselves and our society, what it is capable or uniquely qualified to discuss. My favourite crime novels tackle big issues, but always with reference to the effects of the investigation upon those doing the investigating and those affected by the crime, up to and including the initial victim. We are all inquisitive and curious animals, learning through questioning, and crime fiction touches this deep need both to ask the questions and (hopefully) to begin to touch on possible answers.

Crime fiction also enters dangerous territory – murder, rage, revenge – and so stirs up emotional responses we might not otherwise feel. Reading is not a passive experience in the way sitting through a film or TV show is. We watch violence on the screen, but seldom feel it in our heart. A well-executed narrative description can make us feel the pain of the sufferer, while also putting us inside the head of the inflicter. In a world made largely safe, crime fiction provides the sensation that we may be on the edge of danger. It heightens our basic survival instincts and gives us a primal reminder of the cave and the predator. And yet we read these books in our largely murder-free communities. There is little demand for crime fiction in a war zone. Once the conflict has died down, the crime fiction appears, to try to explain to us what just happened. You see this right now in Ireland, in the brilliant novels of Adrian McKinty, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway and many others. And in Africa, in everyone from Deon Meyer to Oyinkan Braithwaite. Just as the Scandinavian crime novel tells us so much about the social issues of that region, so writers in India such as Anita Nair are beginning to use the whodunit to explore issues such as child exploitation and sexual identity.

It seems to me there’s not much that is out of bounds to the crime novel, which is perhaps fitting, since the spirit of the crime novel is anarchic. We are absurdist writers, writing in the realms of satire and irony, from the ‘cosier’ end of the spectrum (owing much to Jane Austen, as realized by authors such as Reginald Hill, P. D. James and Val McDermid) to the harsher, derisive ironies and dark exaggerations of a Derek Raymond, Philip Kerr or David Peace. In satire, prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule, and the crime novel is the perfect vehicle for this, dealing as it does with larger-than-life characters whose weaknesses will soon be revealed, all set in a society largely ill at ease with itself. Of course, this also makes the crime novel ripe for satirizing, and plenty of authors have had fun deconstructing the likes of Hercule Poirot or the hard-boiled gumshoe. Michael Dibdin’s sublime The Dying of the Light comes to mind, as does Tom Stoppard’s clever stage comedy The Real Inspector Hound. More recently, Anthony Horowitz (The Magpie Murders; The Word Is Murder) and Steve Cavanagh (Twisted) have played with the crime novelist as anti-hero. Literary authors, too, have been attracted to the crime genre down the ages, either by plundering or paying homage. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a favourite – the monk/detective’s name is even William of Baskerville! Muriel Spark turns the conventions of crime fiction on their head in her short, shocking novel The Driver’s Seat, which was itself influenced by the nouveau roman, especially in the hands of Alain Robbe-Grillet, several of whose experimental novels were shaped as whodunits. More recent literary successes include Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries, which has a murder mystery as its narrative engine. Nor is children’s fiction immune. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are constructed as traditional whodunits, full of untrustworthy characters, reversals, mysteries, twists and revelations. Little surprise that Rowling, post-Potter, has gone on to fresh success as a writer of crime novels for adults.

The whodunit is, however, the broadest possible church, able to embrace the macho blood-and-guts nihilism of a James Ellroy and the gentle humanity of Alexander McCall Smith’s Ramotswe stories. In the stories of the past, however, there was a tendency for the irrruption of violence to lead to resolution (the unmasking of the culprit) and a return to the status quo. These days, it is harder to imagine everything settling back to ‘normal’ after an extreme act. Extremism has visited places we never imagined it would. Murderous acts seem to happen out of the blue – rare though they still are. The murder mystery these days seldom ignores this. As Muriel Spark herself once said, ‘We should know ourselves better by now than to be under the illusion that we are all essentially aspiring, affectionate and loving creatures. We do have these qualities, but we are aggressive too.’

In dealing with these aggressive qualities in the human animal, crime fiction provides both a salutary warning and the catharsis common to all good drama. The tight three-act structure of the crime novel (crime–investigation–resolution) pays tribute to the fact that we humans hunger for form and a sense of closure. Yet within those confines all human life plays out. We readers can explore cultures of the past, present and (very occasionally) future. We can visit countries and regions new to us and see the world through the consciousnesses of myriad others. We can have a multitude of adventures, experiencing the danger of chaos and coming face to face with the ugliest manifestations of evil and depravity as we dice with danger and the threat of imminent demise. And, in the end, haven’t we sentient creatures always been obsessed with death? It’s coming for all of us in some shape or form. Crime fiction gives us a way of exploring some of the implications, while still managing to have fun in the process.

So you see, crime fiction really is good for you.

From Ian Rankin’s belief in the soul of the crime novel, it’s a natural step to consider the moral energy and compass of the genre, subjects that have preoccupied members of the Detection Club from the days of Chesterton and Ronald Knox to the present. James Runcie, son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, has (like Chesterton) not merely created a hugely popular priest detective but also thought deeply about the implications of his writing.

Why Do It?
James Runcie

Since Aristotle there have been numerous attempts to provide a rulebook for crime writing. Most famously, Ronald Knox wrote his famous ‘Ten Commandments’, which recommended no twins, no undiscovered poisons, no supernatural agencies and no Chinamen. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a historical survey in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime published in 1928, outlining potential murders and possible plots: ‘Here is a brief selection of handy short cuts to the grave. Poisoned tooth stoppings; shaving brushes inoculated with dread diseases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison gas; a cat with poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle’ (that melts – I recently noted melting ice in the drama series Death in Paradise on BBC One); ‘electrocution by telephone; biting by plague-rats and typhoid carrying lice; boiling lead in the ears … air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic “Prince Rupert’s drop” (that’s molten glass dropped into cold water – a swimming pool might be ideal); frightening to death; hanging head downwards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns concealed in cameras; a thermometer which explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and so forth …’

Then, crucially, she adds, ‘There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. But it has probably many years to go yet, and in the meantime a new and less rigid formula will probably have developed, linking it more closely to the novel of manners and separating it more widely from the novel of adventure.’

Here, I think, she understands that what matters is not so much plot, but character. Crime fiction cannot work if we do not care about the people involved. The story has to be more than a puzzle. It can’t just be a conjuring trick with people’s lives, no matter how fictional they all are.

It’s my belief that we use crime writing to test the limits of our capacity for good and evil and to make sense of the world – and, as the writer of The Grantchester Mysteries, I think we turn to crime to contemplate our own mortality.

Here’s a thought …

One hundred years ago, in the United Kingdom, people used to recite the Book of Common Prayer at least twice a day, at morning and night.

Good Lord, deliver us from lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death.

Now, in a less Christian country, we think about death through crime writing. This has become the secular space in which we address our deepest fears and anxieties and, at the same time, we look for the consolation, justice and closure that is so often found wanting in real life.

As a result, I think crime writing has to be more than entertainment. It needs moral energy.

Think of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s killing of both the old landlady, Alyona, and then her sister, Lizaveta, provokes the questions: How much is it true that a murder can be justified? Can it ever be explained or excused by the argument that the murderer claims he was possessed by the devil? Can some individuals transcend cultural norms or contemporary ethics? Is it true that ‘without God everything is permitted’? Should confession and regret lead to a lighter sentence? Can a criminal ever truly repent of his crimes? Can a Christian?

For Christians the answer is ‘Yes’, but this forgiveness is dependent on the sincerity of penitence – and who, other than God, is to judge that?

The issues can prove so complex and disturbing that many writers bring the light of humour in to alleviate this moral darkness – even Dostoevsky does it. Think of the cynical giggling detective Porfiry Petrovich or Sonya’s dreadful old drunk father Marmeladov. They are the kind of figures you might find in Dickens; and it could be argued that Oliver Twist is a crime novel. Oliver is brought up ‘in care’ and is frequently kidnapped and kept in a place against his will. Fagin runs a criminal gang. Nancy is in an abusive relationship. Bill Sikes is a murderer. Monks dies in prison. Fagin is sent to the gallows. It’s a crime novel, a satire and a grim fairy tale all in one; but as with so much great fiction, the writer tests the characters by exposing them to crime, malpractice and misadventure.

Crime writing, if it is to be any good, is necessarily ethical. My own books are moral fables. You could even argue that they are sermons dressed up as fiction and social history. My hero, Canon Sidney Chambers, does not simply investigate. He considers the moral implications of crime and its effect on its victims. While keen to establish who dunnit, Sidney looks at the aftermath as much as the felony itself, regarding all those involved with compassion, bemusement and, sometimes, even comic detachment. His task is fiercely Christian. The whydunit. Hate the sin but love the sinner. There are traditional crime motifs in the stories, plot turns, twists, and heroes who turn out to be villains. There are several love interests. And while there are also jokes in these mysteries, there is also a teasing and tolerant humanity.

By the end of the series, I hope to have written a loving portrayal of a man who moves between the world of the spirit and the all-too-mortal world of the flesh, bicycling from Grantchester to Cambridge and back, attempting to love the unloveable, forgive the sinner, and lead a decent, good life.

I believe that detective fiction has to have this moral purpose and that, however lightly it is done, it should also enable people to think more deeply about the world and what matters within it. No crime is ever cosy. All good writing has to count. As Dorothy L. Sayers observed, ‘The only Christian work is good work, well done.’

We write, and we read, not just to be entertained, but in order to work out who we are and how we might live a better and more meaningful existence on this frail earth. And then, in confronting death imaginatively and unflinchingly, we learn to contemplate what we believe in, what we value and what we cherish.

It should make us all the more glad to be alive.

Frances Fyfield’s background is in the law rather than the church, and she has created two series characters, Helen West and Sarah Fortune, who are lawyers. Like her friend the late P. D. James, she is interested in detective fiction’s moral dimension, and the calibre of her books prompted Ian Rankin to say, ‘Her knowledge of the workings of the human mind – or more correctly the soul – is second to none.’

The Moral Compass of the Crime Novel
Frances Fyfield

Murder most foul! Read all about it! Distract yourself from daily boredom by reading of people whose lives are infinitely more dramatic and dangerous than your own.

The Victorians loved a good murder and the love of the reportage of same marks the beginning of this popular fiction. Read all about it, the more brutal the better. Revel in repugnance of dreadful deeds and personal tragedies and let the crime writers make money out of it. Is this really a high calling, or a base occupation? Is it exploitative, rather like being a salaried voyeur?

Once, when I was working in a legal office, a senior colleague came into my room and slammed one of my books down on the desk. ‘Filth!’ he roared. ‘Absolute filth!’ Fact is, some regard the fictionalization of murder as dirty work, while the majority of readers know better. Murder, that subject of universal fascination as being ranked the most abhorrent of crimes (I don’t always agree with that; think there could be worse) is the best subject you could ever get for a novel. The crime novel explores extreme emotions, the root causes and the effects of untimely death. It reflects its own society, and in the case of historical crime fiction, other societies. There is nothing wrong with murder as entertainment. P. D. James, writing about Dorothy L. Sayers, said of her, ‘She wrote to entertain and make money; neither is an ignoble aim.’

You may as well say, don’t write about war, or anything involving pain. When P. D. James (my role model in all things) wrote and talked about the morality of writing about murder as a subject, she was never ambivalent. You wrote the truth was all; you wrote a story in which moral dilemmas were paramount, so that the morality of the thing was implicit in the text. In other words, she wrote about characters who made a choice either to kill or to engineer the death of another. With her characters, there had to be a choice. Maybe the decision to do it seemed irreversible at the time, because of the imperatives of revenge, survival, reputation, jealousy; a whole range of motives that lead to eradication by homicide as the only solution for the perpetrator. When really, with her characters, there was always another choice, i.e. to refrain and … take the consequences, however dire they might be. The worst consequence of all was to go ahead, because as P. D. James said in so many words, in the act of taking life, the thinking murderer is changed. He or she remains damned, haunted, guilty, unloved, on the run and lonely. Murder is akin to suicide.

Unless the perpetrator happens to be psychopathic, with no emotions on the normal register, who likes pulling wings off things and killing for fun. His choices are limited: his capacity for regret no more than damage limitation and evasion. An all-too-convenient device in a crime novel, but not, to my mind, nearly as interesting as the examination of choice and regret.

The crime novel always has a moral compass. It cannot be self-indulgent: the rule is, tell the story, and above all, add more than a dash of pity.

P. D. James wrote about choice and consequences; about retribution, revenge and the enduring power of love. She said in her memoir, ‘The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart … every novelist writes what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.’

P. D. James again: ‘The crime novelist needs to deal with the atavistic fear of death, to exorcize the terror of violence and to restore at least fictional peace and tranquillity after the disruptive terror of murder, and to affirm the sanctity of human life, and the possibility of justice, even if it is only the fallible justice of men.’

Most writers do not make a conscious decision, moral or otherwise, to write about crime. The subject matter chooses them. If you are going to write, write about what fascinates you, a matter of taste and compulsion. P. D. James never considered writing any other kind of novel than the detective kind and this was not because her career in forensic science gave her a taste for death, but because she saw the detective/crime novel as the very best of all vehicles to write a good, strong novel about human passions. Of all writers, she is the most steeped in English Literature and the most rooted in Samuel Johnson, Austen, the Book of Common Prayer and more. And yet she wrote crime novels. She did not write romantic fiction, poetry, or novels of espionage, because murder chose her.

Murder chose me. I did not choose to write about crime, although I chose to write. During my day job which featured homicide on paper, I moonlighted with short stories of a romantic nature. In which boy and girl take a walk on the cliff path of an evening, hand in hand, happily contemplating the pretty sunset of their future. Only I could not let them do it; the pen failed. They argue; he pushes her over, and she falls, she falls, she falls.

I had sat through several trials of carefully prepared and honestly compiled evidence, only to conclude that facts alone don’t do it. At the end of it all a compilation of facts and witness statements will not tell you exactly what went on that fateful night. I wanted to bring order into chaos and fill in the gaps that evidence alone cannot fulfil. Only imagination and putting yourself in the shoes of another can do that. Also, I wanted to write about good people as well as bad. I think the crime novel has to acknowledge and celebrate goodness as well as badness, and always allow for the possibility of redemption. Because good people outnumber the bad by a long, long way. Only problem is, they have the inhibitions of decency, whereas evil has none. Says Raymond Chandler, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.’

There are no rules. The only moral compass is honesty, writing to the best of your ability.

A straight avenue to the heart.

Beginning

Deciding to write a crime story is one thing. To make a start and then keep going is quite another. Tackling the blank page demands drive and determination. How to banish the self-doubts and maintain confidence? Or, as Peter James puts it, to keep the dream?

Motivation
Peter James

One writer asks the other, ‘What are you up to these days?’

He replies, ‘I’m writing a novel.’

The first one says, ‘Neither am I.’

The easiest thing in the world for a writer to do is to not write. Most novelists I’ve ever talked to could procrastinate for England. I’m just as much a culprit – I could captain the British Olympic Procrastination Team. Our motto would be Anything but writing!

Social media has been a wonderful boon for all of us procrastinators. We can avoid getting those first words down by checking email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. When we’ve exhausted that, it’s time to let the dogs out again. Then make a cup of coffee. Next we remember something we need to order on Amazon. Then with a flash of guilt, we realize we forgot to call an old friend back two days ago. We know she’ll chat for ages, but get it out the way, and afterwards we’ll have a clear morning for writing. Or what’s left of the morning. Ooops, what’s that van pulling up outside? Aha, the plumber! Have to go down and let him in, make him a cuppa, find some biscuits …

But at the end of the day there is no escaping that if we want to make a living as authors, then we need to write. A mantra that always spurs me on is You cannot edit a blank page. It’s a sign that all of us should have on our desks. But that business of getting started in the morning is always hard. Graham Greene, one of my favourite authors, had a neat solution to this issue: he would always stop writing in the middle of a sentence. That way, his first task the next the morning was to finish the sentence – and it got him straight back into the flow.

It may not sound it, but I do actually love writing, although it took me years of perseverance before I could make a living from it, and during all that time I had to do a day job. My first three novels were never published (luckily, in retrospect!) My next three, not very good spy thrillers, were published but sold a negligible amount of copies – around 1,800 in hardback and 3,000 in paperback. But I kept going because I believed in myself. I changed direction, wrote two more novels, one a kidnap story and one a political assassination which were never published. Then, with my ninth novel Possession, a supernatural thriller, I struck lucky. Every major British publisher bid for the book and it was auctioned around the world, going into twenty-three languages. Finally, twenty-one years after I had sat down to type the first line of my first novel, I was able to actually make a living as an author.

Possession hit number two on the bestseller lists. But it was to be another fourteen novels and twenty years before I finally achieved my dream of hitting that coveted Sunday Times number one spot.

I’m seldom happier than when I’m hammering away at my keyboard and the story is flowing. I especially love the satisfaction of coming up with an inventive description for something, or a character I’m pleased with, or a plot twist that makes me punch the air with excitement. But it’s not been easy and writing never is. The hours are long and often lonely, and when I’ve finished I’m a bag of nerves waiting for my agent and my editor’s reactions – and then, much later, the reactions of my readers. Those nervous peeps at Amazon to see how the star ratings are going. Followed by an anxious wait for the first chart news … Plus the knowledge that I’m on a treadmill to turn out a new book every year – and my one golden rule is that with each new novel I want to raise the bar.

So, what is my motivation? Simple. First and foremost, it is the way I know best how to make a living. And that I want to do my best to try to please my loyal readers by making each book I write better than the last. I could list a dozen other factors, such as getting even with teachers at school who never thought I would amount to anything. Getting my revenge on the bullies who tormented me at school. A sense that I have something to say. A mission to try to understand human nature and why people do the things that they do. It is all of these and more. But at the end of the day my wife and I need food on our table and our animals need food in their bowls.

The late, odious film director Michael Winner was once asked by a precious actor, whom he had instructed to walk down a street, what exactly his motivation was in walking down the street. Displaying all his normal charm, Winner bellowed at him, ‘You’re walking down that street because I’m fucking paying you to walk down that street!’

Oscar Wilde, another writer whose work I love and admire, lamented on his deathbed, ‘I’ve lived beyond my means so I suppose I will have to die beyond my means.’ His drive to produce his great work was produced largely from his need to make money. He used his gruelling American lecture tours to help boost his sales there, and once famously said, ‘Of course, if one had the money to go to America, one would not go.’

Helping his nation to win the Second World War did little to help Sir Winston Churchill’s bank account. Having financially stretched himself buying his beloved country estate, Chartwell, much later he began writing the first of his six-volume opus, The Second World War, because he needed the money.

In 1974, scammed out of everything he had by a Ponzi scheme and left deeply in debt, Jeffery Archer penned Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less in a last-ditch attempt to stave off bankruptcy. It worked, launching a career that would make him one of the richest novelists on the planet.

It is pretty simple. If you are a professional author, money is going to be pretty high up your motivation list. Over the years I’ve met a number of people who told me they have writers’ block. But I cannot remember a single author who writes for a living ever telling me that. What other profession complains of block – other than perhaps plumbers? You don’t hear of solicitors complaining they have solicitors’ block, or taxi drivers saying they have cab drivers’ block, or accountants having accountants’ block.

I can’t imagine any professional author I know saying to his or her family, ‘Sorry everyone, I have writer’s block, I’m afraid there’s no food today.’

Sure, writing isn’t easy – if it was, everyone would be doing it. As it is, a great number of people do, mistakenly, think it’s a doddle. Margaret Atwood tells of the time she was at a cocktail party and had a what-do-you-do-what-do-you-do conversation with a rather pompous man. In response to her question he said, ‘I’m a brain surgeon. What do you do?’

When she replied that she was an author, he immediately responded, somewhat arrogantly, ‘Actually I’m planning to write a novel when I retire.’

‘How very interesting,’ Atwood retorted. ‘Because when I retire, I’m planning to be a brain surgeon.’

I often wonder, did he ever write that novel? And if he did, was it published? I’m doubtful of both, for one simple reason: lack of motivation. As a successful brain surgeon he was probably wealthy, living a nice lifestyle. In his mid-sixties, was he seriously going to lock himself away in his study for months and months of hard grind, trying to forge a whole new career, then go on the road and engage in social media? And then spend the next ten years writing more books to try to build his name? I doubt it, because I just don’t think he would have had that crucial motivation.

Thirty-five novels on, I still get a huge buzz out of the page proofs arriving. Out of seeing my publisher’s first cover ideas. It was a dream when I first began writing that one day I would see a copy of my book on an airport bookshelf. Now that dream comes true pretty much every time I enter an airport bookstore. I know I’ve been lucky, but I also I know how easy it is for an author’s sales to slide if they don’t keep up their standards. I guess my biggest motivation of all today is to keep that dream.

One question facing all writers is: how do I make a living? For anyone who isn’t independently wealthy, the challenge is to strike a balance between time spent writing, often with little or no immediate financial reward, and working to put bread on the table.

Many people dream of becoming full-time writers. Research undertaken in recent years, most notably by the Society of Authors, is discouraging: authors’ earnings seem, in broad general terms, to be low and in steady decline. And even if giving up the day job were feasible, would it be such a good idea?

Not according to Celia Fremlin, a Detection Club member who coped with demanding domestic commitments while pursuing a successful career as a writer. On her family website is a letter she sent in 1984, in which she said, ‘The first bit of advice I’d give to anyone aspiring to be a writer is to start by deciding what else he/she is going to be? It always saddens me to hear a talented young person saying: “The only thing I want to do is to write” – because this is virtually a guarantee that this is just the one thing they won’t do.

‘Writing (I’m talking here about fiction, of course – text-books and such are another matter) is, and must be, an off-shoot, an out-growth, of a full and interesting life, lived among all sorts of tiresome and uncongenial people, and beset by all the problems, difficulties, pressures and pre-occupations that real living involves. The best writing is, and always has been, squeezed out somehow from the turmoil of a demanding and absorbing life – happy or miserable, in sickness or in health, loved or hated – it doesn’t matter, so long as you are right there, in the thick of it.

‘Peace and quiet is fatal. Tuck yourself away in a country cottage, with a private income and freedom from all interruptions and distractions – and you’ve had it! Sorry, but you have!’

So how to get started? Janet Laurence is the author of, in addition to a variety of novels with contemporary and historical backgrounds, Writing Crime Fiction; in an introduction to the book, Val McDermid said it ‘will teach you to flex your writing muscles … and offers guidance on developing your own voice so that you can tell the stories that clamour in your heart and your head.’ Here are Janet’s thoughts about how to get started.

Getting Started
Janet Laurence

You may have an investigative character or a fiendishly clever way of disposing of someone buzzing around your brain. If this is the case, what are you waiting for?

Maybe you enjoy reading crime novels and feel that you could write one as good if not better than the ones you have come across. That is how Colin Dexter started during a wet holiday in Wales. His chosen setting was Oxford, a city he knew very well. The outcome was Last Bus to Woodstock, which introduced Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. The rest is history. All you need is the right idea.

Ideas are everywhere, you only need to open your mind to the possibilities. Read the newspapers, browse the library, listen to people talking, in the train, in the office, at social gatherings; there will be stories that can form the basis of a crime novel. Look for motives, methods, and how crimes are solved. Do beware, though, of opening yourself to being sued through not disguising the source of your plot and characters.

The best crime novels provide characters that grab the reader and drive the story. They need to have attractive qualities but also flaws. Think about your friends, what makes you like them enough to forgive their drawbacks? Who are the people you meet or read about in your daily life that you remember and why? We are not talking background or appearance here, but inbred qualities. You need characters who will behave in ways that will take your plot in interesting directions and that the reader will enjoy spending time with. The investigator you create, whether a member of the CID murder squad, a forensic pathologist, or someone unofficial, needs to be interested in the human psyche, someone who can explore questionable situations and puzzle out unexpected answers.

There must be suspects with a motive for murder, one of whom actually is the murderer and must occupy a reasonable space in the action. No bringing in the culprit just before the end. Finally you need the victim, or victims. Often there will need to be a second victim, or even a third. There may be one or two subplots which somehow link in with, or reflect in some way, the main plot.

The actual crime doesn’t have to be complicated: it can be a blow to the skull with a blunt instrument; a hit-and-run with a car; a push off a balcony or through a window. Less simple will be poison; a gangland kidnap and torture before death; a fire that makes identification of the victim difficult; and so on. Your imagination can provide any number of other examples.

Every crime has a motive. What has driven someone to kill? In your novel there should be several candidates who can have a motive for wishing the victim dead. They are the suspects. It is difficult to keep the reader guessing as to which one was responsible with fewer than four suspects, though Minette Walters has in one instance done an excellent job with only three. However, more than six suspects and the reader, sometimes even the writer, can get confused.

Alongside motivation your investigator has to consider the evidence surrounding the murder scene. These days the official investigation involves forensic teams minutely scanning both body and area and sending samples to a laboratory for analysis. Personally, I don’t feel equipped to enter this world and these days much prefer to set my crime novels in the past, with three novels featuring the Italian artist Canaletto and two more set in the Edwardian era with Ursula Grandison as the lead character. I like to make my investigator use eyes, ears and brain to assess what the scene offers as evidence, rather than looking to science. It is possible, though, for a modern unofficial investigator to manage without the forensic science aspect.

Crime novels rose to popularity in the Twenties. Most relied on the puzzle element in their story to keep the reader engrossed. Some were fiendishly clever. In the Thirties, what is known as the Golden Age of crime writing, female authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Josephine Tey wrote detective novels with strong and memorable characters. Their investigators Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Inspector Grant, have remained popular; new editions of their books are constantly being produced and their influence has continued into the present day.

Some element of puzzle, as superbly demonstrated by Agatha Christie, continues to have appeal. It is taken for granted that readers will look for clues to enable them to work out who ‘did it’ before the writer reveals the answer. There will be ‘red herrings’, clues that suggest the perpetrator is one of the other suspects, alongside subtle references that keep the reader in the dark until the denouement. There will usually be a number of ‘twists’, turning what has been suggested as the answer to the mystery on its head, maybe more than once, with a stunning ‘revelation’ providing the climax to the book. When I told P. D. James that I’d be hopeless at writing a crime novel as I could never sort out who ‘did it’ in any of the books I so enjoyed, she said, ‘It’s easier when you know who “did it”.’ This is true, though sometimes the writer will change their mind as to which suspect was the murderer. Ruth Rendell once said she had sometimes changed the perpetrator as she approached the end of a book: ‘If I can fool myself, then I’ll fool the reader as well.’

The setting and background to a crime novel can be anything that fires the writer’s imagination; it can look at a social problem such as knife killing or forms of dementia, reveal how a cruise ship is run or a television programme put together, or consider the need for food banks. Readers love to learn while enjoying a good read.

Most good crime novels will involve a theme, usually subtly suggested rather than shouted out. Writers such as Philip Pullman and Val McDermid say that they discover their theme while they are writing the book.

The denouement of a crime novel has to offer a resolution, one that will satisfy the reader. Many of today’s most successful crime novels work on a number of different levels but the ending has to bring the various strands together. Subplots should be settled before the final revelation. The main questions that have been raised need to be answered but there can be others left to the reader’s imagination, or that may provide hooks for another crime novel that includes a character or two from your initial one. Many authors find the kernel of their next plot emerging as they get towards the end of writing the current book.

To sum up, you need an interesting setting for your story, a strong plot, believable characters and a resolution that surprises whilst it makes sense of everything that has gone before. Writing a crime novel is hard work – Ian Rankin once said that being a crime writer was absolutely great, apart from the actual writing. There will be times, though, when the characters come alive, the plot explodes with new ideas, when that elusive ending is staring you in the face and you know that writing crime novels is the best thing in the world.

‘Ideas are everywhere’, Janet Laurence points out. Patricia Highsmith, who said in her fascinating book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that she was driven to creativity ‘out of boredom with reality’, recommended writers to keep a notebook. You can jot ideas down before they are forgotten. Highsmith also argued that emotions, both positive and negative, could be a fertile source of ideas. In her view, it is almost impossible to be out of ideas, and the usual reason why writers sometimes feel bereft of inspiration is that they are suffering from fatigue or external pressures.

One of the most successful writers during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the wars was Freeman Wills Crofts. His work suffered neglect for half a century following his death, but has recently enjoyed a revival. Reprints of his novels have brought him back into the public eye after a long absence from the shelves, and his work has even been optioned for television. Resolutely traditionalist in approach, he outlines five types of ideas for crime stories.

Finding Ideas
Freeman Wills Crofts

If we’re lucky we shall begin with a really good idea. This may be one of five kinds. Firstly, it may be an idea for the opening of our book: some dramatic situation or happening to excite and hold the reader’s interest. The standard way of finding a body in the first chapter, if hackneyed, is hard to beat.

Secondly, our idea may be for the closing or climax of our book. This must also be dramatic. As an example I suggest the well-known situation in which Tom, who thinks Jack is dead and has impersonated him, is unexpectedly confronted with Jack in a police office or court of law.

Our idea, thirdly, may be for a good way of committing a crime, probably a murder. It should be novel and ingenious – but not too ingenious – and if possible concerned with things with which the man in the street is familiar. This is probably the most usual way of starting work on a book. Every detective fan will think of dozens of examples.

A fourth kind of idea on which to build a book is that we shall write about some definite crime, such as smuggling, gun-running, coining, arson, or frauds in high finance.

Lastly, our idea may be simply to place the action in a definite setting, such as a mining setting, or a golf or fishing setting, or to lay our scenes in a certain place: a bus or an office, an opium den or Canterbury Cathedral.

We may of course build our book on some idea which does not fall under one of these heads. For instance, Dr Austin Freeman’s book, The Red Thumb Mark, was probably built on the idea that a fingerprint is not necessarily convincing evidence.

This then is the first stage in our work: getting the idea to start on. Our second stage is more difficult: we have to build up the plot on our idea.

We do this in a very simple, but very tedious way: we ask ourselves innumerable questions and think out the answers. One question invariably leads to another, and as we go on our plot gradually takes shape.

Nicholas Blake – the poet Cecil Day-Lewis – began writing ingenious Golden Age puzzles to earn some extra cash in the 1930s, but as time passed became increasingly ambitious as a detective novelist. Introducing an omnibus edition of his finest stories, he explained their diverse origins. Unluckily for him, one clever idea had already occurred to another crime writer, who later became a colleague in the Detection Club.

Sources of Inspiration
Nicholas Blake

Imagination at full stretch: emotional involvement … During the Thirties, I saw my little son narrowly missed by a road hog. Suppose he had been killed, and the police were unable to trace the hit-and-run driver? Such was the germ of The Beast Must Die. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a man – a widower whose only child had been killed like this: how would he find the culprit, and how might he set about destroying him? Revenge, incidentally, seems to be the motive in quite a few of my detection novels, though I am not an overly vindictive person. Perhaps, if I had lived in the early seventeenth century, I would have turned out revenge dramas after the Jacobean pattern. But the point is that, if The Beast Must Die has a sharper edge than most of my thrillers, it is because it sprang from that initial involvement of my emotions, and because I was enabled thus to take the hero’s plight at a more serious imaginative level. This book has the one first-rate plot I have ever invented – a plot, by the way, which was no great shakes till, halfway through the book, I suddenly saw how the hero could use his diary.

The plot of A Tangled Web, on the other hand, was given to me gratis – by ‘The Case of the Hooded Man’, as Sir Patrick Hastings called it in his Memoirs, the first case in which that celebrated KC led for the defence. At Eastbourne early this century a policeman was shot by a burglar – a clergyman’s son who bore the most remarkable resemblance, in temperament and actions, to Hornung’s ‘Raffles’. Sir Patrick was chiefly concerned, in his book, with the legal aspects of the case. So I could exercise all my imagination in reconstructing the character of this young burglar, of his beautiful and innocent mistress, and of the ‘friend’ who proved to be their downfall – a man who, even through Sir Patrick’s factual account, shines out luridly as the nearest thing to Iago I have ever heard about in real life. My emotions, even at the distance of 45 years, became thoroughly involved with the burglar’s girl as I interpreted her. After the book was finished, inquiries among retired policemen who had taken part in the case discovered that several things I had imagined about the Iago character, though not mentioned at the trial, were in fact true.

The germ of A Penknife in my Heart was also given me. A friend suggested a story in which two men, previously unknown to each other and both needing to get rid of certain human encumbrances, meet by chance and decide to swap victims. Neither my friend nor I had read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, or seen the film Hitchcock made of it. Later, I found that Miss Highsmith’s treatment was entirely different from mine; but its starting-point was identical – and, horror of horrors, I had given two of my characters the same Christian names as she had used for two of hers. The plot of A Penknife in my Heart is the most ‘fictional’ of the three presented here, and the most diagrammatic. To put flesh on it, I had to work myself into the minds of two very different men – a coarse brute and a weaker, more sensitive character, plunge as deep as I could into their weird relationship, and be each of them as he made his murder-attempt (upon a complete stranger), and live with them through the aftermath. It needed a pretty strenuous stretching of the invention.

Even before the plot is constructed in detail (or not constructed, in the case of authors like Eric Ambler, who regard writing a crime story as a voyage of discovery) there comes another question. Which type of crime fiction to choose? How to put it all together? Anthea Fraser and Ann Granger, two highly experienced novelists who both worked in other genres before specializing in crime fiction, describe their personal approaches.

Making Choices
Anthea Fraser

Crime writing is a broad church, offering a choice of police procedural, supernatural, hard-boiled, ‘noir’, psychological or romantic suspense, espionage, thrillers or whodunits, though sometimes the sub-genres can blur at the edges and overlap. I came to crime writing myself by way of paranormal books, which were enjoying a vogue at the time. When public interest started to wane, my agent asked if I’d like to change genre, and realizing there’d been a crime in each of the paranormals, I found I’d already made my choice.

It’s important to remember that although you’ll be writing over a period of months, the reader might take only a few days to read the entire book, so the same ‘tone of voice’ should be kept throughout. Sometimes I can tell where I’ve stopped for the day by a very slight but noticeable change of style, so I always begin by rereading (and heavily editing) what I wrote the previous day to ensure it flows without a break.

The main aim, of course, is to grab the reader’s attention from page one, and there are various devices to achieve this. You could start with a prologue covering an event that, unknown to the characters, has already happened. Or begin with an explosive incident that hasn’t yet happened, but which the reader is awaiting with trepidation until it occurs later in the book. Or you could have a catalytic event taking place in ‘real time’ which is the actual starting point of the story – such as the discovery of a dead body.

Conflict is, of course, a necessary component to a good story, whether between lovers, police colleagues or family members, and can pave the way to any number of situations, often resulting in murder. However the maxim ‘Write about what you know’ just isn’t possible when you’re dealing with murder, and anyway, what price imagination? I turn it round to ‘Know about what you write’, and try to make sure I check my facts – thoroughly – easy these days with the internet. When writing a police procedural, however, there really is no substitute for personal contact with a friendly officer who is prepared to answer any number of queries you might raise. What’s more, they seem to enjoy it, and I used to send my contact a copy of each book to thank him for ‘helping with my enquiries’!

If you’re lucky, you might find your characters already waiting in the wings, fully formed and ready to go, but failing that it’s useful to keep a ‘Faces and Places’ file containing photos torn out of magazines or newspapers of interesting faces (preferably not anyone well known) and the interiors of houses, or town or village streets along which you can imagine your characters walking. If any of these are applicable for the plot you have in mind, you can stick them up on a cork board in front of you. It’s helpful to look at them and think, ‘What would you do in this situation?’

Character names are extremely important and often people won’t come to life if you choose the wrong name. Sometimes, as the characters develop, it might be necessary to change one halfway through – no problem with the Replace All key. Since names go in and out of fashion, consideration must be given to the age and social status of the character. I also try to avoid any that are unisex or begin with the same letter, which might cause confusion.

The setting you choose is crucial; personally I’ve found it gives me more freedom to use imaginary locations. I do, however, picture them in a particular part of the country, and try to ensure the made-up place names fit in with those in the appropriate locality. Then I draw town plans, filling in shops, police station, church, etc., so that I know in which direction a character will turn when he comes out of his gate and – important in establishing an alibi – how long it will take to get from A to B. I also do plans of the main house in the story, again with the aim of being able to ‘see’ the action taking place. The reader should feel completely at home there, able to follow the characters as they move from room to room.

A series might require the invention of a complete county, in which case I draw a map of it, positioning towns and villages at random and working out the travelling distance between them in both mileage and time. I can then choose the one that best fits the plot, and if there doesn’t happen to be a town in a suitable place, I can always add a new one!

It can be quite a challenge to invent someone who’ll mature and develop and whose personal life will progress through an indefinite number of books – someone, in short, whom you could live with. Your characters will, of course, age and develop as you go along. Relationships will be formed or ended, family members might die, couples divorce and children be born.

One problem with a series can be timing – how much has elapsed between the end of one book and the beginning of the next. My DCI Webb series lasted for sixteen books and it became increasingly difficult to keep track of children’s ages and how long ago a certain event had taken place. So I invented my own time zone, in which the first book took place in year one and the second in the following year. The characters had met each other in year minus one or two. I could then check back in later books and life became easier.

After those sixteen books I wanted a rest from police procedure so wrote a stand-alone for the first time in years. And since I intended to limit police presence to the minimum, it had to involve a cold case that wouldn’t tread on their toes, a past murder in the family that had never been solved. Families fascinate me, the dynamics between the different members, the tensions and unsuspected jealousies.

After this book I wrote another stand-alone, but when I embarked on what was intended to be a third, I began to miss the comfortable familiarity of a series and decided to expand it into a new one, which became the first of the Rona Parish books. I didn’t want to return to police themes – in any case forensics had moved on in the past couple of years and I was out of date – but I wanted my protagonist to have a legitimate reason for repeatedly coming up against crime, so I made her a journalist and biographer. Both these seemingly harmless occupations led her, over the course of ten books, into considerable danger.

I have continued to slot stand-alones in between the series books. There’s a sense of freedom in being able to visit an entirely different location with totally new characters who will obligingly tidy up their problems within the covers of that one book.

A perennial question every writer faces is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ They can, of course, come from anywhere – a snippet in the newspaper, an overheard conversation – and don’t discount dreams! I dreamed the idea for one novel and several short stories, so I keep a notebook and pen by my bed and make a quick note of any that might be useful before they fade.

If the title comes to mind first, that’s a great advantage and points you in the right direction. There are various ways of choosing a suitable title. I occasionally use quotes – and was berated by no fewer than three fellow crime writers for choosing A Necessary End, when their own books, also under that title, were still at the proof stage.

The title of Whistler’s Lane, one of the paranormal novels, actually evolved from looking at the portrait of Whistler’s Mother, when I toyed with the fantasy that the whistler referred to was not a proper name. Ghostly figures in a dark countryside came to mind, and the plot developed from there. Another time I heard someone on the radio refer to a Macbeth prophecy, i.e. a self-fulfilling one, and filed it away for future use.

In terms of choosing titles, my easiest ride was with the Green Grow the Rushes series. The song itself has appeared in many forms in ancient and modern languages from Hebrew onwards, and the first time it was written down in English was in 1625. Whatever the original meaning of the verses – and they’ve become distorted over the years, like a game of Chinese Whispers – I’ve always thought they were most evocative. Who were the April Rainers, the Nine Bright Shiners, the Lily-White Boys?

I’d originally intended to use two at most, but as I wrote, more ideas offered, until I realized I’d have to use them all. They weren’t written in order, but as ideas presented themselves. It was pure chance that the final three were Ten, Eleven and Twelve, and I have to admit Eleven that Went Up to Heaven was quite a challenge! Short of killing off an entire cricket side, it took me some time to come up with a hopefully convincing mass murder.

I used to plan my books meticulously, knowing how far the plot would progress in every chapter, though obviously changes were made as I went along. (In one case an old lady was due to be murdered, but I became fond of her so I spared her and killed someone else!) Then the time came when I was in such a hurry to start writing that I couldn’t be bothered planning and jumped straight in, pushing the plot ahead of me chapter by chapter. It all worked out in the end, and that is basically the way I write now – a rough idea of what’s going to happen, but letting the details emerge as I go along. Unlike most of my fellow writers, I never do drafts. I prefer to stick to the original, though since I can’t read a page without making alterations, it will inevitably have changed considerably by the time I reach the end.

It has been said that writing is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration, and certainly it’s no good sitting back and waiting till you feel in the mood. If inspiration doesn’t come, I write anything, however unsatisfactory, like working in a new biro. Then, when the flow is re-established, I go back and polish it. And I always try to stop for the day at an interesting point, which will give me the impetus to get going the following day.