Writers – Is Your Work Autobiographical?

Tags

Agatha Christie, Eighteenth century, Henshaw Short Story Competition, Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, The Servant

• 

A good question. Clearly Agatha Christie was never accused of murdering anyone. Nor did Hilary Mantel have first-hand experience of the Tudor court. Yet both convey a convincing reality through a research and skillful storytelling.

In writing about the squalor and hardship of nineteenth-century London in The Servant, nobody would suggest I wrote from personal experience. I live in a broad-minded welfare state, where women have access to education, to reliable birth control, and take for granted that they deserve to be treated as equal to men. And yet. The glass ceiling still exists, the fear of university debt prevents many getting the education they might wish and powerful men can still get away with taking advantage of female employees. So it was not an impossible step to imagine how the women who went before us lived their lives.

And personal experience has a place.

I lived for twenty years in a house built in the middle of the English Civil War. Our cottage (above) was at one time called Speldhurst Farm and in earlier days was thought to have belonged to a yeoman farmer. How could I not make use of it as the home of dairy farmer Thomas Graham in my story? How not call on my knowledge of creaking elm plank floors, lime-washed walls, beams as thick as a man’s thigh, and sparking inglenook fireplaces?

In addition, my husband had a much-loved mare called Calypso, and though she was a grey rather than my farmer’s bay, when I wrote of a horse’s ‘warm breath on my stroking hand‘ I did, of course, write from personal experience.

• 

Two Christmases ago, a neighbour’s handsome English bull terrier came to visit and was swiftly inserted into my story as my hero’s dog. Woody (re-named Hector for plot purposes) could not, sadly, be described by his breed, since a quick spot of research discovered that the bull terrier, as such, did not exist until the following century, but I allowed myself poetic licence and merely avoided naming the breed. I am, after all, a storyteller rather than a historian.

• 

I’m convinced all writers draw on personal experience and feelings to some extent. Certainly I do.

However, I should make one final point on the subject. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to win a Henshaw Short Story Competition. The piece, Till Death Us Do Part, told of a cheating wife and how she killed off her husband. Let me reassure you that my own husband, the same one then as now, is still very much alive.

Anglican Women Novelists

Tags

Agatha Christie, Alison Shell, Barbara Pym, Book of Common Prayer, Capital punishment, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte M Yonge, Charlotte Maria Tucker, Church of England, Dorothy L Sayers, East Anglia, Elizabeth Goudge, Evelyn Underhill, Gaudy Night, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Judith Maltby, Lambeth Palace Library, Margaret Oliphant, Monica Furlong, Murder Must Advertise, Noel Streatfeild, P D James, Prayer Book Society, Rose Macaulay, Shirley, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death

There have been more Anglican women novelists than you might think. 13 of them feature in Anglican Women Novelists – from Charlotte Brontë to PD James, edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and published only this year. Two of the ninevoices were at its launch in the magnificent setting of Lambeth Palace Library in July.

The editors explain that to keep the book of manageable size they restricted it to writers who were British and deceased. But questions of selection are inevitable. Iris Murdoch is here? Yes, because although she lost her faith in Christ’s divinity, and was drawn towards Buddhism, her world was still infused by Anglicanism and she still attended Anglican services. The author of the Iris Murdoch essay (Peter S Hawkins) entitles it “Anglican Atheist”.

And why no Jane Austen, in whose novels the C of E features so much, when Charlotte Brontë gets in? Because between the two lie Catholic Emancipation and the repeals of the Test and Corporation Acts, meaning that other denominations could now take their place freely on the national stage: Anglicanism had lost its ‘default’ position as the nation’s faith and was becoming more of a denomination that you made a positive choice to join.

The essay on Charlotte Brontë (by Sara L Pearson) argues how much her life was rooted in the C of E and how much of her work does too. Shirley, we read, shows her “longing for the Church of England’s preservation and reformation”. In Jane Eyre the male representatives of the Church, Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers, are hardly role models, and their failings are compared with (and perhaps compensated for by) the qualities of female characters around them. Also, “the Book of Common Prayer haunts the pages of Jane Eyre … not only for its contents but also as a physical object”: it will have formed such an ever-present part of her childhood.

‘Dorothy L Sayers – God and the Detective’ is the title of Jessica Martin’s piece. She speaks of the role justice and punishment play in her detective novels. She makes the important point that Golden Age detective novels were written in the time when the hangman awaited the unmasked murderer: in that sense the stakes were higher, the ultimate retribution is always in the background.   Sayers had trouble with this, we read: she had “increasing unease with narrative arcs which must privilege orderly acts of justice over the wilder power of mercy”. She sees the limitations of this, and justice must come from elsewhere: “her plots have an invisible protagonist, and his name is Jehovah”. The essay then analyses Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death and Gaudy Night in this light.

The final essay is ‘PD James – “Lighten our Darkness”’ by Alison Shell.   She compares PD James to other Golden Age detective writers, principally Agatha Christie, concluding, “For all her own homage to Christie, her novels are far more violent and desolate than her predecessor’s; if Christie is the quintessential Golden Age detective novelist, James’ fallen world locates her within an Iron Age of crime fiction.” Evil is a reality: and the essay speculates on the degree to which PD James saw evil as a force in its own right. Her novels are steeped in the Anglican Church and its tradition. Churches (in a bleak East Anglia) provide the settings for many key events. PD James herself was a lover of the beauty of its traditional language and was a great supporter of the Prayer Book Society, set up to keep alive the glorious heritage of the Book of Common Prayer. Quotations from it recur in her work.

The other authors covered in the book are Charlotte Maria Tucker, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte M Yonge, Evelyn Underhill, Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Goudge, Noel Streatfeild and Monica Furlong.

Published by t&tclark, ISBN 978-0-567-68676-3 RRP £27-99

 

 

 

Authors & their detectives

Tags

Agatha Christie, Caroline Graham, Colin Dexter, Dashiell Hammett, Detectives, Dorothy L Sayers, Ellery Queen, G K Chesterton, Georges Simenon, Golden Age, Ian Rankin, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, PD James, Raymond Chandler, Ruth Rendell

A chance conversation in Waterstone’s the other day* showed me that my knowledge of Golden Age detectives wasn’t as good as I thought it was. Either that, or time’s wingèd chariot is taking its toll of my little grey cells …

So here’s a quiz so you can reassure yourself that your memory is fine. Just match the detectives with the authors, some from the Golden Age and a few beyond.

Detectives                                                                    Authors

Roderick Alleyn                                                             Margery Allingham

Tom Barnaby                                                                Raymond Chandler

Father Brown                                                                G K Chesterton

Albert Campion                                                             Agatha Christie

Adam Dalgliesh                                                             Colin Dexter

Alan Grant                                                                    Caroline Graham

Jules Maigret                                                                 Dashiell Hammett

Philip Marlowe                                                               P D James

Miss Marple                                                                   Ngaio Marsh

Inspector Morse                                                             Ellery Queen

Hercule Poirot                                                                Ian Rankin

Ellery Queen                                                                  Ruth Rendell

John Rebus                                                                    Dorothy L Sayers

Sam Spade                                                                    Georges Simenon

Tommy & Tuppence                                                        Josephine Tey

Chief Inspector Wexford

Lord Peter Wimsey

*             *

I’ll post the answers in a day or two.

*I couldn’t remember the name of Margery Allingham’s detective.  The kind man at the till very politely reminded me.  He’s in the list above (the detective, not the kind man in Waterstone’s).

What would you call your own detective?

A comma can cost millions

Tags

Agatha Christie, Blackberries, Caviare, Claudia Cardinale, Court cases, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, Jane Austen, John Creasey, Maine, New York Times, Oxford comma

At school, like many others I was told that when writing a list you did not put a comma after the penultimate item and before the ‘and’ or ‘or’ preceding the final item. So a grammatical shopping list (are there people who write grammatical shopping lists?) could read ‘apples, pears, blackberries and caviare’, or my favourite crime authors as a schoolboy might be ‘Erle Stanley Gardner, John Creasey, Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace’.   My dear wife, who learned English as a foreign language, was taught likewise.

It wasn’t till much later that I learned about the Oxford Comma. The comma that would come after ‘blackberries’ and ‘Agatha Christie’ in the previous paragraph. The last comma in ‘He went into Rymans to get notebooks, ink cartridges, paperclips, and inspiration.’

Its proponents say that it can avoid ambiguity: eg the sentence “I love my sisters, Claudia Cardinale and Jane Austen” could mean that Claudia and Jane are my sisters. Interesting as that would be, I doubt that many people would come to that conclusion: Claudia’s not the kind of name my parents would have chosen.

People can get exercised about this. But, you might think, it does not have any real consequences, other than whether you think your sentence does or doesn’t flow more smoothly without the comma.

You would be wrong. The Oxford comma (or rather the lack of it) is worth $5 million to the drivers who recently brought a court case against their employers, a dairy in Maine in the USA. The details of the case can be found in the New York Times article at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.html. In short, the case hinged on the meaning in a state law governing overtime of the following list of exceptions:

‘The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: 1. Agricultural produce …’

Was ‘packing for shipment’ separate from ‘distribution’, or was ‘distribution’ only involved insofar as ‘packing’ was concerned? The old ambiguity argument. The drivers won. The statute has now been reworded, and semi-colons replace commas in the list: and there’s what you might call an Oxford semi-colon after ‘shipment’, in case you were asking.

The NYT’s attitude to the Oxford comma debate may perhaps be inferred from its description of people interested in it as “punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs.”

Who’d have thought that a few drops of ink could be worth so much?

Christmas murder stories

Tags

Adam Dalgliesh, Agatha Christie, Camden Town, Christmas, country house murder, Hercule Poirot, P D James, Suffolk, whodunits

Each year I try to write a Christmas short story, usually with a murder in it. With varying success. I find I have contradictory emotions on just having finished The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by the great PD James. On the one hand I realise that what I produce comes nowhere near the quality of these stories. On the other, I’m spurred to greater effort.

These four stories aren’t festive tales.  And at the same time they are so atmospheric. PD teases us about what we’re reading: in one she says that the butler and his wife, the cook, are “indispensable small-part characters in any country-house murder”; and in another Adam Dalgliesh is flagged down on a country road on Christmas Eve, when “… his first thought was that he had somehow become involved in one of those Christmas short stories written to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers on an upmarket weekly magazine.”

The Mistletoe Murder (1995) is set in wartime, at a Christmas house-party in a practically empty country house. The period is well evoked, as is a pervading sadness. A gruesome killing takes place and there are very few suspects. The clues are there for us, but I didn’t manage to work it out. The ending was beautifully unexpected. A story told with real atmosphere.

A Very Commonplace Murder (1969) is a sordid story set in Camden Town, involving a voyeur who spies on lovers in a house opposite his place of work. The scene of adultery becomes a scene of murder.

The Boxdale Inheritance (1979) is an Adam Dalgliesh story.   He is asked by an elderly Canon (his godfather) to investigate a murder that happened in 1902. An inheritance depends on it. That ancient crime took place in another gloomy large house, with a family assembled for Christmas, a family riven (as is de rigueur in such a setting) by jealousy and greed. Unbreakable alibis abound. The principal clue to the solution is presented to the reader but in such a way that I sailed straight past it.

The Twelve Clues of Christmas (1996) also features Adam Dalgliesh. One Christmas Eve he finds himself at an unwelcoming Harkerville Hall, deep in Suffolk, faced with a bizarre apparent suicide. Again, members of a divided family are in attendance. Our hero solves the mystery by spotting the twelve clues of the title.

He concludes that story by observing, ”My dear Aunt Jane, I don’t think I’ll ever have another case like it. It was pure Agatha Christie.’” You’re too modest, Lady James.

Talking of Agatha Christie – one of the few whodunits I’ve read a second time is Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which I reread in order to see where the clues to the solution were. And yes, the main clue is there: as clear as day when you know its significance, but when read the first time it’s hidden in plain sight as just a piece of description. Similar to that in The Boxdale Inheritance.

So: if at this early stage you’re looking for a seasonal stocking-filler for a whodunit-lover, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories would fit the bill. And if you’re yourself a writer of Christmas short stories, here’s a standard to aim for!

‘And Then There Were None’

Tags

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, BBC TV, whodunits

I was in the happy position over Christmas, watching the amazing And Then There Were None on BBC TV, to be able to compare stage and TV versions of this classic Christie story. A group of ten strangers (each with a deadly and guilty secret in their past) find themselves cut off on an island, invited by the mysterious and apparently absent Mr U N Owen; they are then serially murdered, in the same sequence as in the nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys.

A group of us saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall in October, as part of their ten-months-long nationwide tour. (How well they must have known their words by the end!)   The cast included some names familiar to those of us of, er, more mature years: Paul Nicholas (star of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends), Mark Wynter (‘60s pop star, with hits such as Venus in Blue Jeans), and Deborah Grant (John Nettles’ ex-wife way back in Bergerac), to name but three.

The stage version gave us atmosphere and a storm, and the sense of being trapped. Unlike a film it couldn’t show us close-ups of bodies on jagged rocks, or transport us in momentary flashback to the Western Front or the drowning of a boy. But it did have the excitement of live theatre. Our group had a happy outing; I couldn’t remember whodunit, and the ending surprised me just as it had when I’d seen a film version years before. (This may have been the 1974 one with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer et al – this story does seem to appeal to all-star casts).

One of the motifs of the story is that there is on display in the house a group of ten toy soldiers. After each death the remaining characters discover that one of these has disappeared. That is easily effected in a film, but how did it happen on stage? In the interval I asked a fellow member of the audience, and he told me he’d seen one of the actors (one who was killed shortly afterwards) surreptitiously put one in his pocket. Maybe whichever cast member was nearest the toys at the time had the job of secreting one.

In our family we’re still enthusing about the TV version, shown on Boxing Day and the two successive nights in one-hour chunks. Wow! The atmosphere, the tension, the menace – and the absence of the semi-humorous tone you often get in Christie films – more, more! One by one the cast are killed, and they know it and can see it coming, and they fear each other. No supersleuth is there to explain the complexities of what is happening and to unmask the villain.  They just get killed, all ten …

I can see that some folk will have found too long the ominous pauses, but not us. To see Toby Stephens, Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and the rest put on their turns was just right for the dark evenings after Christmas when the festive supplies of food and drink need to be finished off.   I can’t see it myself, but the female half of our viewership were also much taken with Aidan Turner’s torso. Once displayed, why it then had to reappear quite so often I don’t know.   Yes, you guessed it – this was the role Oliver Reed played in the 1974 film: I can’t remember whether he kept showing us his chest.

Knowing who did it didn’t spoil my pleasure – indeed, it was fascinating to see the story unfold with that knowledge. What was difficult was not letting anything slip that would give the game away to my fellow viewers. Reader, I managed it.

The Twittersphere raved about the production – and the aforesaid torso was the detail most mentioned in that raving.

My favourite tweet was “They’ve really upped the stakes in the latest series of Big Brother.”

I don’t know why the BBC changed the skeleton in the policeman’s cupboard. In the play (and, I think, the original book) he has been bribed and has committed perjury, resulting in an innocent man being hanged. On TV he has instead kicked a young gay man to death in a police cell. One can only speculate why this change was made. 

Sometime I must read the novel to see how the Queen of Crime herself imagined the story. And to find out how it was that Mr U N Owen came to know all these terrible secrets.

I’ve heard it muttered somewhere that next year we may get Witness for the Prosecution (which I also saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at the Assembly Hall a few years ago). Bring it on!

 

‘The Monogram Murders’

Tags

Agatha Christie, pastiche, Poirot, Sophie Hannah

Followers of Hercule Poirot have had a long wait. Curtain appeared from the pen of the Queen of Crime back in 1975. Since then we’ve had to wait for new actors to play him – Peter Ustinov or Ian Holm, for example – or for the amazing David Suchet to work his way through the oeuvre.

Now (or since last year, when it was published by HarperCollins) we have a new novel, The Monogram Murders. This is a most entertaining pastiche by Sophie Hannah. The dustjacket carries an approving statement from its chairman, Agatha Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard, chairman of Agatha Christie Ltd.

For me it was a great read. An intriguing plot, with a splendidly complex solution. There are echoes of At Bertram’s Hotel meets St Mary Mead. (I know those are both Miss Marple, but it’s the venues that do the echoing …)

The narrator is Edward Catchpool, a 32-year-old Scotland Yard detective who is temporarily sharing lodgings with Poirot. He appears to be in awe of the great man and lets him have more or less complete control of the investigation. Poirot seems to have decided to train him.

The story starts in Pleasant’s Coffee House, a café somewhere away from central London which Poirot frequents because it serves uniquely good coffee. He is much taken with a young customer called Jennie who seems in fear of her life and who utters cryptic sentences, such as “It’s too late. I am already dead, you see, or I shall be soon”, and “Let no-one open their mouths!”

The scene shifts to the Bloxham Hotel, one of London’s finest. At the same time as Poirot is meeting Jennie three bodies are found: all poisoned, all laid out neatly, and all with cufflinks in their mouths bearing the monogram PJI. They are in rooms 121, 238 and 317. They are Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus, and they have all been seen alive at 7-15 pm when they were served tea together in room 238. A mysterious note is then left at reception, saying ‘May they never rest in peace. 121. 238. 317.’ This prompts the discovery of their bodies at 8-15 pm.

We also visit Great Holling, a village very much à la Christie, where you can almost smell the malice and the distrust. Catchpool goes there but the only person who will talk to him at all reasonably is Margaret Ernst, the widow of a former vicar, who is friendly with the doctor, Dr Ambrose Flowerday. We learn of a tragedy of years past.

To say more would give too much away. Suffice it to say that the traditional scene at the end where Poirot explains all, in the Bloxham Hotel’s dining room, has its surprises.

If I have one criticism it is that in the first half of the novel Poirot himself seems somehow static, and he did not come over to me as having quite the colour of the original. But that detracted little from my enjoyment of this meticulously plotted whodunit.

Well done Sophie Hannah.