The English love affair with the murder mystery

By Guy Stagg

The English are a morbid bunch. They see more ghosts per person than any other nation. Perhaps it is due to our relatively stable history, meaning that families and buildings stay around long enough to become haunted. Christmas always used to be a time for ghost stories, but recently they have been replaced by our other grisly fascination: murder mysteries.

This Christmas has been an especially good one for fans of the murder mystery. David Suchet was in fine form as he enters the final lap of his Poirot run, while P. D. James’s most recent novel Death Comes to Pemberley was a delightful, if brutal, sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Meanwhile 2012 brings the latest series of Sherlock and a new TV adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood – the Dickens whodunit, left tantalisingly unfinished at the author’s death.

The English have always been fans of crime fiction, and murder mysteries in particular. But it’s not as if we have higher murder rate than any other country. So why do we enjoy reading about it so much?

England did not invent the murder mystery. However, we did perfect the genre. The Golden Age of detective fiction was between the wars, where writers like Dorothy L Sayers and GK Chesterton became household names, while Agatha Christie went on to sell more novels than any author in history.

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“The Amateur Detective Just Won’t Do”: Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction

a tough critic

By Curtis Evans

In a three-part essay, I explore crime writer Raymond Chandler’s attitude toward the classical British detective novel.  Though Chandler, one of the major figures in the American hard-boiled mystery movement, commonly is portrayed as deeply hostile to classical British detection, the truth, I argue, is a rather more complex matter.

Reading Englishman Nicholas Blake’s mystery novel The Beast Must Die (1938) for the first time in 1950, the great American hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler was moved to comment (in a letter to future mystery critic James Sandoe) on his disappointment with the tale.  Chandler wrote that he initially had found the story “damn good and extremely well written.”  He went on to lament, however, the “devastating effect” on the tale “of the entrance of the detective, Nigel Strangeways, an amateur with wife tagging along.”

Chandler conceded that the “private eye”– the type of detective associated most prominently with his own work (and that of his contemporary Dashiell Hammett)–”admittedly is an exaggeration—a fantasy.”  Nevertheless, he asserted of the private eye that “at least he’s an exaggeration of the possible.”  Contrarily, Chandler declared, the “amateur gentleman who outthinks Scotland Yard is just plain silly.”  In fictional mystery, Chandler concluded peremptorily, “the amateur detective just won’t do.”

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‘Death of the Mantis’ is an African thriller with Minnesota roots

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By Euan Kerr

“Death of the Mantis,” the third book in the internationally successful Detective Kubu mystery series, arrives in bookstores this week.

Like the other Michael Stanley novels it’s set in Botswana. This time the detective tries to solve a series of murders on the edge of the Kalihari desert. While the books are distinctively African, there is an important Minnesota connection.

Michael Stanley introduces himself.

“Michael Stanley is two of us actually,” said one of the two men sitting at the table. “I’m Stan Trollip and I write with my friend Michael Sears.”

Trollip and Sears combined their first names to create a nome de plume after writing their first novel “A Carrion Death.”

They are both South African, and both have had long careers as university professors. Sears lives in Johannesburg, but Trollip taught at the University of Minnesota, UND, and at Capella University. He still lives here part of the year.

Sears traces their writing career together back to an incident decades ago when they were traveling in Botswana.

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Murder, he wrote …

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By Diane de Beer

His earlier work in magic realism didn’t do well in this country, that is why Mike Nicol turned to crime.

In writing, of course, not reality.

He was fascinated by how well local author Deon Meyer was doing, but had always thought himself too superior for crime writing. Once he started delving deeper, he discovered there was far more to the genre than met his jaundiced eye.

And as Meyer sits across the table from now good friend Nicol, the then novice to crime writing tips a hat at the more seasoned author. In the meantime, Nicol has finished his first crime trilogy and might just have kept going with this particular gang if his partner hadn’t advised him to move on to something and someone else.

But he’s going to miss his two crime heroes (Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso) who scratched around in the underbelly of Cape Town as crime often sought them rather than they it.

When still researching the route he should go, Nicol was surprised to discover how many crime authors deal in social issues. But he also had to look at his style of writing.

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For George Pelecanos, D.C. makes ‘The Cut’

By Carol Memmott

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– George Pelecanos, gearhead, movie buff and crime novelist, is rolling through Silver Spring, Md., in his 2008 Bullitt-replica Mustang.

The Highland Green fastback, one of only 7,700 built by Ford, was snagged by guys who love the iconic 1968 film starring Steve McQueen. In his role as police Lt. Frank Bullitt, the Mustang-driving “King of Cool” pursues a Tuxedo Black Dodge Charger through San Francisco in one of the greatest car-chase sequences in movie history.

“It’s kind of corny, but I bought my own Bullitt Mustang,” says Pelecanos, 54, who says the McQueen movie was one of his favorites growing up. “I sort of had to have it.” He points out, with obvious delight, that his was No. 28 off the line.

“I have a great love of films,” he says. “I went from being a movie freak to being a novelist, and it was very influential in my work.”

The author of 17 crime novels set in the gritty, “other” Washington and a writer/producer for HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Wire and now Treme steers the Mustang over the D.C. line toward his destination: a church parking lot that he says “is a good place to kill a guy.”

Pelecanos has been here several times before, either on his Trek bike or on foot. It’s how he scouts locations for scenes in his books. The Cut adds a new protagonist — a young Iraq War vet turned P.I. named Spero Lucas — to the stable of detectives, cops, criminals and honest everyday folk of all colors who people his novels. The Cut went on sale today.

While he drives, Pelecanos points out a house where he imagines Lucas lives and the local Safeway where one of his characters buys his morning coffee. “I’m always out on my bike,” says Pelecanos, who lives in Silver Spring, not far from the nation’s capital. “I found Lucas’ house. I found the house he breaks into. I did the walk from his house to the church one night. I wanted to see what it feels like to be walking at night in these places where there are not many people. I wanted to make sure you could kill a guy a half-block from the 4th District police station.”

This coplike knowledge of the streets gives his novels authenticity. They are, he says, “a combination of just being out there, being engaged with the city, because I’m not a person who has a huge imagination. I can’t sit in an office and make my stories up or dream up my characters — I have to go out there and find them. I’m just a firm believer in breathing the air and feeling the dirt between your fingers.”

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