Guilty Secrets with Martin Edwards

 Martin Edwards is an award-wining novelist and short-story writer. He is also a well-known editor of numerous anthologies. He is a former Chair of the Crime Writers Association and current President of the Detection Club. Aside for awards for his books, in 2011 he was awarded the CWA Red Herring Award in recognition of his services to the Association. In 2018 he was awarded the Dagger in the Library and in 2020 he was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger. The most recent anthology he edited is the CWA Guilty Secrets.

Ayo:- Congratulations on editing Guilty Secrets which is of course the latest CWA Anthology. How many anthologies have you now edited and does it get any easier?

Martin:- I just counted, and this one is my sixtieth anthology. As with most things, experience does help, in that you get a better sense of which stories work together to form an appealing mix, and you feel a bit more confident about your selection judgments. 

Ayo:- Guilty Secrets is about folklore and mythology with the emphasis on the Supernatural, science and speculative fiction along with the mysterious. How did you decide on the theme?

Martin:- I like to devise anthologies of stories with fairly broad themes that can be interpreted creatively and perhaps in unexpected ways. My general approach as an editor is to have a fairly light touch on the tiller, so that the contributors have the freedom to exercise the full range of their talents. I chose this particular theme because it seemed to me to offer lots of interesting possibilities.

Ayo:- You clearly like writing short stories as you have written so many, what made you want to write short stories?

Martin:- I love reading short stories and I love writing them. When I was about thirteen, I was given a CWA anthology as a Christmas present, and it fascinated me. At that point I’d never heard of the CWA, but I already knew I wanted to be a crime writer and I felt I’d love to join an organisation full of people who did what I yearned to do. Of course, I never dreamed that I’d become Chair of the CWA, or win CWA awards, or edit the CWA anthology for thirty years. So I’ve been very lucky. And a constant element during all that time has been my enthusiasm for writing short stories, partly inspired by that first CWA book. And there’s no doubt that some ideas work better in short stories than in novels. Also, you can take risks in a short story, and experiment in ways that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, in a full-length novel. Which I find very exciting. 

Ayo:- Can you remember the very first short story that you wrote and your feelings about it once you had written it

Martin:- Definitely. It was a story called ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ and it won first prize in a Southport Writers’ Seminar competition. It felt absolutely thrilling, an unforgettable joy! The judge was the fiction editor of Bella and she published the story in the magazine. At that time, I hadn’t had a novel accepted, so it really was a breakthrough moment. What’s more, Robert Barnard was in the audience, and he recommended the story to the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine¸ with which I’ve had a long and happy association. This was a wonderful start to my career as a published author of crime fiction and despite my extreme inexperience at the time, I still feel that it was a good story and ‘different’ from the norm. And I still like to try to be inventive and not follow a predictable path with my writing. This approach possibly has its downsides in commercial terms, but I believe it has kept me fresh as a writer, and perhaps it is why I can honestly say that I take at least as much pleasure in my writing now as I have ever done.

Ayo:- Is there a theme you would like to put together for an anthology.

Martin:- For years, I’ve had the idea of editing a book of mysteries inspired by the music of Burt Bacharach, who for me is pop music’s equivalent to Agatha Christie (i.e. ground-breaking and subtly sophisticated, under-estimated by some, but loved by many more). And I’m pleased to say that What the World Needs Now will soon be published, and that proceeds will go to autism charities in the UK and US. A worthy project, in my opinion, and it’s a book I’m extremely proud of, with great stories by the likes of Mark Billingham, Charles Todd, Sarah Hilary, and Ragnar Jonasson. And a foreword by Rupert Holmes, ace crime writer and composer of ‘The Pina Colada Song’!

Ayo:- Since short stories are compact, every element must work hard to build a specific world do you find this difficult?

Martin:- Not really. Writing short stories seems to come fairly naturally to me. I love writing novels as well, but I find them harder work, simply because the scale is much larger.

Ayo:- Short stories force you to omit more than you include. Have you ever written a short story that you would like to expand to a novel.

Martin:- Not exactly, but when I created the character of Rachel Savernake, and had the idea of writing a very different kind of novel about her, I was conscious that she was a very unorthodox individual, not really like anyone else in the crime genre. So I wrote a short story about her, just to see how much I enjoyed writing the character. I never tried to get that story published, but I proved to my own satisfaction, at least, that she was a strong character who would sustain an intricate novel. This gave me the confidence to write Gallows Court and the next five (so far) Rachel Savernake novels. And I still love writing about her. 

Ayo:- Short stories often end on a lingering note rather than a neat resolution. How do you know when a story is truly finished? 

Martin:- I sometimes wonder if any good piece of writing is ever truly finished. You can always try to improve what you’ve written (or what someone else has written - I did have the temerity to write a new ending for Anthony Berkeley’s brilliant classic mystery The Poisoned Chocolates Case!). I am very, very committed to revision and making my work better. But realistically, you have to draw a line somewhere, with both novels and short stories, or you’d never publish anything. I must admit, though, that five minutes after I submit something to a publisher, I have an idea about how I could have improved what I’ve written! And it’s this quest for constant improvement that helps to keep me energised and enthused as a writer.

Ayo:- With all the short stories that you have written, do you have a favourite?

Martin:- There are quite a lot that I’m very fond of, including some that never attracted a great deal of attention, perhaps because the books they appeared in didn’t get much publicity. The stories that have won or been shortlisted for prizes, such as ‘Murder and its Motives’, ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’, are all stories I’m proud of, but there are others, such as ‘Squeaky’, ‘InDex’, ‘The Woman Who Never Was’, and perhaps especially ‘The Outsider’, that I think are just as good. And I’m pleased with my two recent reverse chronology stories, ‘Don’t Look Back’ and ‘The Scares’; the former just got a great review in Publisher’s Weekly and the latter is in Guilty Secrets.

Ayo:- Writing short stories is incredibly difficult would you rather write a short story or a novel?

Martin:- I love writing both, but of course short stories take less time, which is a point in their favour! I enjoy subverting readers’ expectations, and a good short story can do that – so can a good novel, of course. I suppose writing a novel that works really well is especially satisfying – in my case, books like The Crooked Shore or Hemlock Bay would, at least in my opinion, fall into that category, as would the novel I’m doing edits on right now, Fever Island.

Ayo:- What would you say to someone who is considering writing a short story but is hesitant.

Martin:- As with so many things in life, I think that one should ask oneself what one really wants to do, and be clear about that, before wondering how to go about doing it. If you really want to write a short story, then I’d say: definitely go for it, and the chances are, you’ll find the experience very rewarding, in artistic if not necessarily financial terms. If you’re not sure you really want to do it, perhaps find something else you feel really enthused about instead. For me, commitment is a very important thing for a writer. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with being committed to writing a story that sells, either. But I think being committed to writing a story that has that precious element of difference and is not like lots of other stories is even more appealing.

Ayo:- When can we expect to read your next short story.

Martin:- What the World Needs Now is due out soon, and it includes my story ‘Who Gets The Guy?’, inspired by a rather lovely if little-known song by the great Dionne Warwick. It’s a tale about the music business in the 60s and I really enjoyed writing it.

Guilty Secrets: From the Crime Writers Association - Beyond and Within (Flame Tree Publishing) Out Now

Editor Martin Edwards has commissioned an entertaining range of stories from the membership of the world's most celebrated group of crime and mystery writers, the Crime Writers' Association (CWA). Founded over 70 years ago by John Creasey, the Crime Writers’ Association supports, promotes and celebrates this most durable, adaptable and successful of genres, while supporting writers of every kind of crime fiction and non-fiction. In this new collection, enjoy 23 original, thrilling mysteries packed full of enthralling characters, drama and intrigue, by the following authors: Martine Bailey, Christine Poulson, Dea Parkin, Martin Edwards, C.J. Carver, Kate Ellis, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Phil Lecomber, L.C. Tyler, Glenda Young, Antony Johnston, Simon Dinsdale, Renita D’Silva, Paul Gitsham, Yvonne Eve Walus, Brian Price, Pam Plumb, Nick Guthrie, Margaret Holbrook, Andy Sykes, Cath Staincliffe, Roland Moore and Rachel Amphlett.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative.

Short Stories: a personal perspective - Martin Edwards

My first published fiction was a short story. ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ won a competition at a seminar organised by a writers’ circle, and was duly published in a national magazine, and then in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the US. After that, there was no stopping me. Although my next published work was my debut novel, All the Lonely People, I’ve kept writing short stories, as well as editing anthologies of short crime fiction. I don’t keep count, but the tally at the moment is about seventy stories and forty collections, so you could certainly say that I’m as committed to the short form as I am to the novel.

Where did this love of the short story come from? It goes back a long way, that’s for sure. I can remember asking for, and being given as a Christmas present, a Crime Writers’ Association anthology when I was about thirteen. That book contained stories by great names of the genre such as John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin, and it fired my imagination. So did an anthology of ‘tales of terror’ edited by Crispin, which includes one of my all-time favourite short stories, the wonderfully haunting and enigmatic ‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Later, as I began to write fiction for publication, I found the short story liberating. You can do almost anything with it. ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ was an unorthodox type of mystery, and from time to time I’ve tried further experiments with the form. So ‘An Index’ is a crime story which takes the form of a short extract from an index to a book. ‘Acknowledgments’, which won the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham Prize, is a skit on those sections in books where the author acknowledges help received. For an American anthology with a Sherlock Holmes theme, I wrote ‘The Observance of Trifles’, a story in the form of a blog post, and accompanying comments.

Even if you’re not in the mood to push the boundaries in structural terms, the short form offers endless possibilities of subject, theme, and mood. There are ideas which, to my mind, suit a short story but not a novel. One day I went for a test drive in a car. The chatter of the showroom salesman gave me the idea for a story, but it was clear from the outset that it would only make a short piece, rather than a novel. The result was ‘Test Drive’, which was shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger. Occasionally, I read novels which seem to me to be just expanded short stories; an example I came across the other day is Miles Tripp’s A Man Without Friends, published in 1970, which contains a brilliant central idea connected with the vagaries of justice, but not quite enough (in my opinion, anyway) for a truly satisfactory full-length book. 

A particular setting often inspires me to write a short story. Typically, a trip on holiday or to a festival (in pre-pandemic days, of course!) might introduce me to an interesting location that I’d like to write about. Not knowing the place in depth, I wouldn’t want to produce a novel with that setting. Maintaining authenticity for, say, five thousand words is much easier than in a book of ninety thousand words. So I’ve written stories set in places as varied as Hartlepool (‘Lucky Liam’) and Hawaii (‘Catch of the Day’). Wandering the darkened streets of Venice one night, I lingered in front of a shop window and a rather macabre thought sprang to mind. The upshot was a story called ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’, which won the CWA Short Story Dagger, and represented a real breakthrough in my crime writing career. And when I was hired to give a series of lectures about crime fiction to passengers on the Queen Mary 2, I read about the history of the ship while on board. This gave me the idea of writing a story set on the original Queen Mary: the eventual result was ‘The Locked Cabin’. 

‘The Locked Cabin’ wasn’t an easy story to write. I began with the idea of a crime taking place on the ship, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I left it for a while, and then started thinking about the possibility of writing a short ‘locked room mystery’. The two ideas coalesced, and I was able to start work on it in earnest.

Something of the same kind happened after I visited Bletchley Park. I had an idea for a story about war-time code breakers, but somehow it didn’t come to life, so again I left it to simmer. Months later, I visited Jersey to give some talks about writing. Whilst on the island, I visited Gorey on a lovely sunny day, and thought that I’d like to use the resort as a setting. I came up with a way of combining this backdrop with the code breaking story. The result was ‘The Sound of Secrecy’.

There’s something else you can do with a short story. You can treat it as a professional exercise. When I first dreamed up the idea for the novel that became Gallows Court, I was very taken with it. The concept involved an extremely ruthless and fabulously rich young woman called Rachel Savernake, who arrives in London in 1930, and becomes involved in a series of bizarre murder mysteries. My thinking was that I’d try something fresh as a novelist, writing a book very different from my other work: an attempt to ‘break out’, so to speak. It was bound to be a gamble, especially given that I didn’t know how the novel would develop. So I decided to write a short story featuring Rachel, to see if I enjoyed writing about her and if I felt I could ‘soak’ myself in this rather unusual character for a year or two. I wrote the story, and found that I loved writing about Rachel. This encouraged me to crack on with the novel. One thing led to another, and the Rachel books have become my most successful novels. I never tried to publish the short story – it was simple a trial run, a way of acclimatising myself to a new type of crime writing. But I have recently written a story which features Jacob Flint, another key character in the series, although Rachel does not appear.

As a reader, I love a short story that has something special about it. Preferably an ingredient that would be difficult or impossible to replicate in a novel. So my favourite short story is Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. In the crime genre, you can’t go far wrong with the likes of the Jackson’s fellow American Fredric Brown or, in Britain, three authors who contributed to several of my anthologies: Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, and Peter Lovesey. Among contemporary writers, the American Art Taylor has won many awards and is a master of the form.

These days, we’re also frequently told that we live in an age of shortening attention spans. If that is true, then it’s one more good reason to relish short stories. They may not take long to read, but the best examples give lasting pleasure. 

And Then There Were More Edited by Martin Edwards (Flame Tree Publishing) Out 23 August 2025

A CWA anthology celebrating members' fiction from over the years, Then There Were More is a delightful compilation of stories from some of the best crime writers of the last century. The first CWA anthology, Butcher’s Dozen, appeared in 1956, and was co-edited by Julian Symons, Michael Gilbert, and Josephine Bell. The anthology has been edited by Martin Edwards since 1996, and has yielded many award-winning and nominated stories in the UK and overseas. Founded over 70 years ago by John Creasey, the Crime Writers’ Association supports, promotes and celebrates this most durable, adaptable and successful of genres, while supporting writers of every kind of crime fiction and non-fiction.  The full list of featured authors in this book is: Anne Perry, Christine Poulson, Andrew Taylor, Amy Myers, Judith Cutler, Gillian Linscott, Martin Edwards, Bernie Crosthwaite, Catherine Aird, Simon Brett, Yvonne Eve Walus, John Harvey, Kate Ellis, Zoe Sharp, Bill Knox, Cath Staincliffe, Liza Cody, Ann Cleeves, and Peter Lovesey.

More information about Martin Edwards can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook, at X @medwardsbooks and on Instagram @medwardsbooks. You can also sign up to his newsletter on his website. Information about the CWA can be found here and the Crime Readers can be found here.