Stephen Spotswood - Fortune Favours the Dead - The Inspiration

 

It started with my grandmother’s bookshelf. This was the grandmother I got along with, which was convenient since I spent as much time at her house as at home. It was a modest bookshelf--two dozen ceramic knick-knacks taking pride of place at eye level with the floor-level shelves left for my grandmother’s small collection of aging paperbacks. I imagine things were arranged that way for my benefit. Keeping the breakables safe from the curious toddler.

The curious toddler grew up, but remained curious. Eventually I started pulling out those old paperbacks. The covers caught me first: colourful, sinister, many featuring gun-wielding women showing enough skin that made me think these weren’t for children.

So of course I read them.

I don’t remember if I liked them much. I was very young and was still working on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But they stuck with me. Those hardboiled heroes from half a century before.

Fast forward a few decades. I was going through my own bookshelves--less modest than my grandmother’s since I didn’t have to make room for curios, though I probably have some of the same titles she had. Maybe even the same editions, since my fondness for lurid covers remains.

I was shelving a Rex Stout novel and thought, “I think I’d like to read that again.” One thing led to another and I ended up spending a season doing a reread and sometimes first read of all of Stout’s Nero Wolfe books in chronological order. It wasn’t a hard task since I have a great fondness for Stout, who married the traditional English murder mystery with the hardboiled American voice.

Somewhere in there I began wondering what kind of story I would tell if I decided to play in that particular sandbox. I’d spent the last two decades as a playwright writing almost exclusively female protagonists, many of them queer. And most of my plays deal with characters learning to thrive in a world that, for one reason or other, is set against them.

Very quickly, Lillian Pentecost and Will Parker emerged. The reserved genius thriving in spite of (or to spite) her multiple sclerosis and her circus-trained protege who is learning to be a working detective one hard-won lesson at a time.

As for why I put them in 1945, it’s because life shouldn’t be easy for a hardboiled hero. That time was a pivot point in American culture. Coming off the high of the war and turning inward--to infrastructure and suburbia and family-building, but also to paranoia and fear, the McCarthy hearings and the Lavender Scare. The next decade won’t be kind to Will, a bisexual woman with a chip on her shoulder, and her boss, a woman who’s more interested in doing what’s right than what’s legal. And unlike Stout’s novels, I plan to have these two detectives grow and change as the world around them becomes a particularly difficult place to live if you’re different.

Hopefully I’ll find a collection of readers who will love Lillian and Will as much as I do. And hopefully they’ll tuck them away on the bottom shelf. All the better for a new generation of curious children.

Fortune Favours The Dead by Stephen Spotswood. (published in hardback on 12th November 2020 by Wildfire)

New York, 1946. Lillian Pentecost is the most successful private detective in the city, but her health is failing. She hires an assistant to help with the investigative legwork. Willowjean Parker is a circus runaway. Quick-witted and street-smart, she’s a jack-of-all-trades with a unique skill-set. She can pick locks blindfolded, wrestle men twice her size, and throw knives with deadly precision - all of which come in handy working for Ms P. When wealthy young widow Abigail Collins is murdered and the police are making no progress, Pentecost and Parker are hired by the family to track down the culprit. On Halloween night, there was a costume party at the Collins’ mansion, where a fortune teller performed a séance which greatly disturbed Abigail. Several hours later her body was discovered bludgeoned to death in her late husband’s office. Problem is, the door to the office was locked from the inside. There was no-one else in the room, and the murder weapon was beside the victim; the fortune teller’s crystal ball. It looks like an impossible crime, but Pentecost and Parker know there is no such thing...

The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin

The Long Shadow is certainly a Christmas story with a difference. It is a genuinely chilling psychological thriller that will have you shivering as you read it and not because it is set around Christmas. 

 

When Imogen is awoken by and answers the ringing telephone in a dark and empty house she does not expect to be accused of murdering her husband by a man she met at a party who is on the other end of the phone.  But she is and as she tries to cope with guests arriving in her home for the Christmas festivities strange things are taking place. Who put the half bottle of whiskey beside Ivor’s favourite chair and why does it appear that someone has been going through his papers as well.?  More importantly why is this man continuing to phone and insist that Imogen is guilty of killing her husband? As Imogen grapples with her house being filled with her husband’s relatives over the festive period she is also finds herself questioning not only her own sanity but her relationship with her husband.  Did she really know him?

 

Faber & Faber are as part of their Faber Classic Crime for 2018 re-issuing Celia Fremlin’s The Long Shadow which was originally published in 1975. It is a shame that she is not as well-known as she should be as she certainly knows how to write chilling story that leaves you with an incredibly creepy feeling and The Long Shadow is certainly a Christmas mystery with a twist.  It is a fascinating and intense story with a plot that that leaves you with the feeling that a lot has been hidden by many the characters. There is also a sense of claustrophobia that that surrounds everyone and everything.  It is also an insightful study of human behaviour, sorrow, avarice, reprisal and narcissism by all.

 

I admit that reading it now does on the one hand show how dated it is but, this does not take away from the fact that The Long Shadow is domestic noir at its finest and Celia Fremlin certainly knows how to show a reader the darker side of an ordinary domestic setting. As psychological thrillers go The Long Shadow is incredibly atmospheric a riveting read and just as relevant today as when it was first published.   One does not have to wait until Christmas to read this stylishly written thriller.

The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books – Only a Hundred?

We all like lists, partly because we like a good argument. Any attempt to pick the “hundred best” books, whether in the crime genre or anywhere else, is bound to prompt controversy. But this hasn’t deterred critics over the years - Julian Symons and Harry Keating, both doyens of crime reviewing in the second half of the last century, both had a go. With my new genre study for the British Library, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, however, I wasn’t trying to list “the best” books; I set out to do something rather different.

Actually, this book isn’t focused on a list – it’s about telling a story, of how crime fiction developed between the end of the Victorian era and 1950. I’ve picked titles that help to illustrate a variety of themes as that story unfolds. Of course, there are plenty of predictable choices, ranging from The Hound of the Baskervilles to Strangers on a Train. But I like to think that there are plenty of choices that will come as a surprise, perhaps in the same way that a pleasing plot twist in a mystery may catch even an alert reader unawares. I’ve included plenty of personal favourites, such as Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank, but again, this isn’t an attempt simply to list my own top hundred most-loved crime novels. I wanted to focus more on a diverse and appealing range of entries.

In the book’s introduction, I say that some of my choices are unashamedly idiosyncratic, and having the chance to come up with some unlikely titles was an important part of the appeal for me of writing the book. It serves, as the title suggests, as a companion to the British Library’s popular Crime Classics series, but again I’ve tried to defy expectations by selecting only a limited number of the books that have appeared so far in the series. I didn’t want simply to repeat what I’d said about books and authors in my introductions to books in the series. Nor did I want to rehash all that I said in my last book about the genre, The Golden Age of Murder. I wanted to offer readers value by trying to give them something fresh.

But, as with The Golden Age of Murder, if to a lesser extent, I used the techniques of a novelist in telling the story of classic crime, and that meant that – as writers do when they tell a story long enough to fill a book – I kept revising my ideas as I worked on the manuscript. One hundred books written over a time span of half a century isn’t really as large a number as it may seem! Some of the choices that featured in my original synopsis had to give way to other books that seemed, as time went on, better to reflect different aspects of the story. As a rough estimate, I’d say I changed about a quarter of the selections over the time (rather more than twelve months) that I was writing the book.

So some of the titles you’d expect to see in a “best of” list are probably conspicuous by their absence. Some, I hope and expect, you may never have heard of, even if you’re a real aficionado. For me, that’s a good thing, because I believe that part of the pleasure of reading a book like this lies in making fresh discoveries. (Just as I did long ago, after reading Symons’ wonderful history of the genre,) Of course, one hundred titles isn’t nearly enough – so in all, I finished up by mentioning another six hundred in addition to those discussed in depth. If this book tempts you to search out some obscure but fascinating books (and given the number of titles to choose from, there are lots of possibilities!), I’ll be delighted. Happy hunting!

The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books is published in the UK on 7 July by the British Library, and in the US on 1 August by Poisoned Pen Press.  

More information about the author can be found on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @medwardbooks

John Creasey and Dennis Wheatley

As part of its celebration of the life and work of classic crime writers I spent a number of hours on Saturday 20 February 2016 re-acquainting myself with the works of John Creasey and Dennis Wheatley courtesy of Peters Fraser Dunlop’s Crime Classic team at their bloggers event.  The event was held at the Groucho Club, Soho, London in the presence of Richard Creasey (the son of John Creasey) Dominic Wheatley (Dennis Wheatley’s grandson) and Charles Beck who is an authority on Dennis Wheatley.

 

Charles Beck & Richard Creasey

The event started with Charles Beck talking about Dennis Wheatley and his work and him explaining that there was much more about Dennis Wheatley than his horror novels which is best known for.  He shared further interesting insights on Dennis Wheatley one of them being that he enjoyed working with Christopher Lee and that the actor really wished that he had been able to act in more films that had been made of Dennis Wheatley’s books.

Richard Creasey

John Creasey's son Richard told several amusing stories about his father including the fact that he started writing under a pseudonym because he was writing so quickly and his publisher could not publish his prodigious output under the same name. When asked about his father (who founded the CWA) on what he would have thought about the CWA now, he explained that he founded the CWA because there was no where for crime writers to gather and talk together and that he thought that his father would have been incredibly pleased with the way in which it had turned out.  He also went on to say that his father would have been really delighted to learn that the CWA New Blood Dagger was named after him.  

It was a fascinating afternoon with clips from various films made of Dennis Wheatley’s books and those of John Creasey being played in the background.

Thanks to Peters Fraser Dunlop’s Crime Classic team for arranging the event.  It was certainly an enlightening event and thanks to @PFDAgents for organising it.

Ayo Onatade & Richard Creasey

Tales on the Off-Beat - Collected short stories by Youngman Carter

Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter was married to Margery Allingham, one of the Queens of the Golden Age of English crime writing, for almost forty years. He collaborated on his wife’s early crime novels, completed Cargo of Eagles, the book she left unfinished on her death in 1966, and then wrote two continuation novels featuring her famous detective Albert Campion.

He was an artist, a designer of book jackets (more than 2,000), a soldier, a journalist, a magazine editor, a travel writer and a wine writer. He was also the author of around fifty short stories, most of which were published in magazines and newspapers in the late 1950s.

Shortly before the death of Margery Allingham in 1966, Youngman Carter began work compiling an anthology of his stories, including some written whilst on active service in the Western Desert during WWII, but the collection did not appear in his lifetime.

Now, thanks to extensive work by the Margery Allingham Society and editor Mike Ripley, Youngman Carter’s Tales on the Off-Beat finally appears in print, 46 years after the death of the author, containing 25 of the author’s stories of crimes, con-men, assassins, treasure-hunters and the downright supernatural.

The anthology, with an introduction by Barry Pike (chairman of the Margery Allingham Society), contains Youngman Carter’s famously uneasy tales The Evil Eye of Brother Polidor, Kane’s Doll and Grand Seigneur which all appeared in the cult magazine Argosy (UK) and several chosen from the legendary American publication Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The majority of the stories have not been seen for almost sixty years but reveal a writer with a knowing and assured journalistic eye for outrageous characters, a sly sense of humour and a genuine gift for creating atmospheric settings, particularly in Peter the Blind, set mostly in wartime London. Reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, Youngman Carter’s stories were genuinely “on the off-beat” – a description, and a title he himself suggested.

Said editor Mike Ripley: “Youngman Carter’s stories, sometimes sardonic and always willing to deflate the pompous, still have the power to amuse and surprise. They fall roughly into three categories: crime stories, war stories and tales with a supernatural twist and feature a motley collection of crooks, con-men, soldiers, spies, journalists, artists and dodgy art-dealers. (He was particularly good on dodgy art-dealers!). In his Introduction, Barry Pike describes them as ‘intelligent, erudite, fanciful and exuberant’ and I have no doubt they would have appealed to Margery Allingham’s most famous creation, Albert Campion.”

Tales on the Off-Beat is published in hardback, paperback and as an eBook by Ostara (www.ostarapublishing.co.uk) on 15^th October 2015.

For further information contact Mike Ripley on: mikeripley@virginmedia.com.

VINTAGE BRING GOLDEN AGE CRIME WRITER MARGERY ALLINGHAM BACK INTO PRINT

EXCLUSIVE WATERSTONES EDITION OF FIRST

MR CAMPION NOVEL BEGINS 2 YEAR

PUBLISHING PROGRAMME

Vintage is delighted to announce it is bringing back into print golden age crime writer Margery Allingham’s complete series of Mr Campion books, beginning this December with an exclusive Waterstones edition of the first in the series, The Crime at Black Dudley.

Joseph Knobbs, Crime Buyer at Waterstones, says: 'We are thrilled to have Allingham's first Mr Campion mystery back in print, exclusively for Christmas.  Our customers love a good mystery - and it's always a treat to find something from crime fiction's golden age that we can bring to a new generation.'

A queen of the golden age of crime writing, Agatha Christie called Margery Allingham ‘a shining light’ of the genre, and in an event at the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival this year J.K. Rowling declared that Allingham was her favourite golden age crime writer, and Mr Campion novel Tiger in the Smoke her particular favourite.  Vintage will publish a new edition of The Tiger in the Smoke in May 2015 with an introduction by bestselling crime writer Susan Hill, and over the next two years will publish twenty Mr Campion books in a bold new series look.

Alongside Margery Allingham, the Vintage Murder Mysteries list is proud to publish a host of classic crime writers including Gladys Mitchell, Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin. 

Notes for editors

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham exclusive Waterstones edition is available now, published by Vintage price £8.99.

Publication dates for the new Margery Allingham titles are as follows:

DECEMBER 2014

The Crime At Black  Dudley (exclusive to Waterstones)

MAY 2015:

The Tiger In The Smoke (with a new introduction by Susan Hill)

The Crime at Black Dudley (general edition)

Dancers in Mourning

Death of A Ghost

Look To The Lady

SEPTEMBER 2105

Mystery Mile

Police at the Funeral

Sweet Danger

DECEMBER 2015:

Flowers For The Judge

The Case Of The Late Pig

Mr Campion & Others

FEBRUARY 2016:

Coroner’s Pidgin

The Fashion in Shrouds

The Traitor’s Purse

MAY 2016:

Hide My Eye

The Beckoning Lady

More Work for the Undertaker

AUGUST 2016:

Cargo of Eagles

The China Governess

The Mind Readers

The Vintage Murder Mysteries logo, featuring on all titles, is the distinctive emblem of the Death’s Head Hawkmoth which has for centuries been a bringer of doom and an omen of death. The perfect companion then, for the Vintage Murder Mysteries sleuths, for whom sinister occurrences are never far away and murder is always just around the corner.

For further information please contact Bethan Jones on 0207 840 8543 or bjones@randomhouse.co.uk

Bethan Jones

Publicity Director, Harvill Secker and Yellow Jersey Press

Penguin Random House

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

0207 840 8543 / 07500120270

bjones@randomhouse.co.uk

@BethanKJones

www.vintage-books.co.uk