And to come, companion works I enjoyed reading as I edited mine.

The Holmes short stories… (and I suppose the novels)

‘The game’s afoot, Watson!’ My gateway drug to mysteries was Sherlock Holmes. At ten I was mesmerised by the rattling cab on cobbles, gaslight struggling to be seen through fog, and dastardly deeds to be foiled. Conan Doyle was sloppy and inconsistent with his money-making nemesis. He quietly admitted that Holmes pronounced things as certainties which could only be probabilities. I grew tired of the idea of pure masculine intellect as humanity’s greatest achievement, shunning romantic attachment, and punishing the body.

Mrs Ashton is warm, emotional, longwinded, dishonest, and in a long term sapphic relationship. She is an anti-Holmes. Mrs Ashton has an astute eye for the guilty look or the stained sleeve, but she can also find a clue through her ‘gift’.

Her genesis was the idea of a detective who sometimes, actually could pluck a solution as if from the air.

The Moonstone.

Wilkie Collins did not invent the detective story but The Moonstone runs through the genre’s DNA. Told as a series of personal accounts by well-crafted characters, it is misdirection all the way. A cursed, looted diamond is sought by three Brahmins who wish to return it to its rightful place on a holy statue. A young lady inherits it on her 21st birthday, there’s a shocking theft, and suspicion falls on everyone. Very much a novel about character, as well as a darn good read, I’ve twice given it away and then bought a new copy within a year. It’s not just about the puzzle.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.

Her brilliantly told debut shows three phases in the life of her Victorian heroine – becoming a male impersonator in the theatre, then a kept woman, and a Dickensian fall into poverty and redemption through social action. This is a vividly imagined, exuberant, sapphic Victorian world and in part showing what suffering and wickedness Victorian greatness concealed. Waters is not pious or prudish, she is absolutely unashamed by carnality, and she has no fear to invent where history is silent. An immersive joy in a believable world, as I want all my books to be.

Love the cover!

Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel.

This is a funny and horrible book, both assured and deeply disturbing. It took twenty years before I could dare read it again. In the present era, it tells of a sad, suburban medium, Alison, who tours the towns of the southeast with others of her kind. We think she and her companions are frauds, but Alison is in fact genuine, and her constant communion with the dead is an unspeakable burden. Plagued by her personal ghosts, the story slowly brings her horrific childhood to light. Her true gift is a curse. Yet the ending offers hope. I wanted to write a book which took suffering seriously but let the light in too. And which never made the mistake of mocking the grieving.

The Flashman Papers.

You can admit an influence while admitting its flaws. These are fantastic gung-ho books which show precise research without dullness. Flashman, the bully in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, grows up to be a great military hero and each book is part of his cynical, unexpurgated memoirs. Actually, he’s a coward, a cad, a womaniser, and a cheat. George MacDonald Fraser fills the books with sparkling historical detail, placing Flashman in an improbable number of perilous situations where he suffers the agonies of cowardice. Flashman treats women extremely badly, there’s a sexual assault in the first book and in another, he sells a woman he’s tired of into slavery. Although his wife has the money and cuckolds him too. Through these flawed eyes we see the great and the good of Victorian society. My desire to write a complicated crook like Mrs Ashton nods to the glorious and far more despicable Flashman.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

I’ve read every Christie, Sayers and Tey (detective-wise). My favourite single “Golden Age” story is our introduction to Harriet Vane. There’s a stunning opening – a woman is on trial, accused of poisoning her rakish lover, the world thinks she did it, but a single juror refuses to convict. That gives Lord Peter Whimsy a chance to save the novelist Vane and he cracks on to do so. Although I like Lord Peter less as I reread him, and I sometimes contemplate a book where a woman poisons the man who got her off a murder charge and then stalks her. Who wouldn’t be Lord Peter at all. Lord Peter has an agency of women of a certain age who can be usefully deployed to snoop – his Baker Street Irregulars. And now I recall, in this novel, one such ally of Wimsey uses spiritualist fraud to solve a murder… Sayers – gifted translator and scholar – defended the detective story from accusations of triviality, and so do I.

And Christie? Poirot just irritates. I most like Miss Marple in the Thirteen Problems, who solves twelve crimes in an armchair without dropping a stich in her knitting. The smart folk underestimate her, but she understands them.

A diversion across the Atlantic.

I’m intrigued to notice that if you ask me about SF, fantasy, horror, legal-courtroom thrillers, historical, satire, or contemporary fiction, American writers will be among those that leap to mind. When it comes to sleuth stories, they don’t. I’ve read the noirs and Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen, etc, and for some reason they don’t impress me.

A note on the covers. I tend where possible to use the cover of the book as I first read it, for absolutely no rational reason at all.