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Source ISBN: 9780008380137

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008380144

Version: 2020-07-31

Dedication

Dedicated to Len Deighton, elected to membership of the Detection Club in 1969

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Premise

Martin Edwards

Introduction

Motives

G. K. Chesterton

The Value of Detective Fiction

R. Austin Freeman

The Art of the Detective Story

Ian Rankin

Why Crime Fiction Is Good for You

James Runcie

Why Do It?

Frances Fyfield

The Moral Compass of the Crime Novel

Beginning

Peter James

Motivation

Janet Laurence

Getting Started

Freeman Wills Crofts

Finding Ideas

Nicholas Blake

Sources of Inspiration

Anthea Fraser

Making Choices

Ann Granger

Putting Murder on the Page

Natasha Cooper

Intensity in Crime Writing

John Harvey

Openings

Peter Robinson

‘Something Should Happen Now’: Narrative Hooks

People

Mark Billingham

Character from Suspense

Bill James

Cops and Criminals, Contrast and Comedy

Marjorie Eccles

Making Characters Believable

June Thomson

Characters, Relationships, and Settings

Places

P. D. James

On the Suffolk Coast

Ann Cleeves

Human Geography

Michael Ridpath

Setting Stories in Unfamiliar Places

M.O.

Val McDermid

Let the Story Be the Driver

Lindsey Davis

Style

Kate Charles

Choosing a Theme

Michael Jecks

Pace

William Ryan

Writing Scenes

Margery Allingham

Dialogue, Rhythm, and Keeping to the Point

Patricia Moyes

Listening and Dialogue

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Writing Dialogue

Perspectives

Aline Templeton

Getting a Perspective

Liza Cody

What on Earth Is It Like to Be You?

Plots

Agatha Christie

Plots

J. J. Connington

Logic and Working Backwards

Mary Kelly

All Will Be Revealed

Kate Ellis

Structuring a Plot

Eric Ambler

Voyages of Discovery

Andrew Taylor

How to Change Your Murderer

Detectives

Priscilla Masters

Amateur Detective or Professional?

Susan Moody

Believable Amateurs

Michael Z. Lewin

Private Eyes

Research

Ngaio Marsh

Getting It Right

Desmond Bagley

Keeping Up to Date

John Malcolm

Amateurs and Expertise

Detection

Edmund Crispin

Detective Stories and Virtuosity

John Dickson Carr

Rules and Prejudices

Christianna Brand

Classic Ingredients

Michael Innes

Clues

Catherine Aird

Snakes and Ladders

Sophie Hannah

Optimal Subterfuge

Suspense

Robert Goddard

Suspense

Julian Symons

The Face in the Mirror

Jessica Mann

The Suspense Novel

Celia Fremlin

The Hours Before Dawn

Action

Lionel Davidson

Inspiration, Perspiration, Realization

Tom Harper

Adventure Fiction

Felix Francis

Writing Action Scenes

Michael Gilbert

Filling the Gaps

Michael Hartland

Constructing a Thriller

Mick Herron

The Cold War, Then and Now

History

Michael Pearce

A Laying On of Hands

Imogen Robertson

The Christmas Tree Theory of Historical Research

L. C. Tyler

Historical Dialogue

Humour

Alexander McCall Smith

Humour and Human Nature

Robert Barnard

Characters and Caricature

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Humour and Satire

In Short

Roy Vickers

Let’s Pretend

H. R. F Keating

Switch-overs in Short Stories

Fiction and Fact

Peter Lovesey

Fictionalizing Characters and Crimes from Real Life

Anthony Berkeley

Trial and Error

Partners in Crime

Dorothy L. Sayers

Collaborative Writing

Adapting

Alison Joseph

Writing for Radio

Simon Brett

Adaptability

Challenges

Martyn Waites

Impostor Syndrome

Suzette A. Hill

Writing: a Painful Pleasure

David Stuart Davies

Writer’s Block

Stella Duffy

Improvising

Ending

Laura Wilson

The End of the Beginning

Joanna Hines

In My End

Publishing

David Roberts

The Changing Face of Publishing

Antonia Hodgson

What Editors Want

Russell James

Traditional versus Self-Publishing

Jill Paton Walsh

One Thing Leads to Another

Writing Lives

Reginald Hill

The Writing Process

Paula Gosling

Keeping Track

Jonathan Gash

Reading for Pleasure

Janet Neel

Don’t Give Up the Day Job

Bertie Denham

Writing to Relax

Elly Griffiths

Social Media and the Death of Nancy

John Le Carré

The Joy of Writing

Len Deighton

Different Books; Different Problems; Different Solutions

The Contributors: Biographical Notes

The Detection Club: Presidents

The Detection Club: Members

Index of Authors

Subject Index

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Premise

Introduction

Howdunit

, no fewer than ninety leading crime novelists offer personal perspectives on their approach to their craft – and on the writing life. There are countless valuable insights for would-be writers, but our overriding aim is to entertain and inform

anyone

who enjoys crime fiction. And perhaps even some people who don’t regard themselves as crime fans – at least not yet – but who are fascinated by the way authors work.

Each contributor is a past or present member of the Detection Club, the world’s oldest social network of crime writers. Publication of

Howdunit

coincides with the Club’s ninetieth birthday, so there is one essay for each year of the Club’s life to date. Over the past nine decades, many of Britain’s preeminent authors in the genre have belonged to the Club. Their work includes spy, thriller, and adventure fiction, as well as traditional detective stories and novels of psychological suspense. It is high time that their collective wisdom appeared in a single volume. The emphasis is on present-day writing and writers, but our predecessors’ thoughts remain of interest. This is partly because they illustrate how much the writing life and literary fashions have changed, and partly because they show that quite a few challenges remain the same. Detection Club members take their work seriously – but we also take joy from it. That sense of pleasure ripples through the contributions, from Lindsey Davis’s thoughts on literary style to Simon Brett’s rueful reflections about the prospect of having one’s masterpiece adapted by other hands.

A century ago, the Club’s first President, G. K. Chesterton, wrote with pungent wit, ‘It is a well-known fact that people who have never succeeded in anything end by writing books about how to succeed; and I do not see why this principle should not be applied to success in the writing of detective stories as well as in lower and less glorious walks of life.’ But I like to think that Chesterton would have approved of this book, and would be delighted to see his own opinions appear alongside those of his contemporaries and successors.

From the Club’s formation in 1930, Detection Club members, with Anthony Berkeley Cox and Dorothy L. Sayers taking a vigorous lead, set about raising the literary standards of the genre. In those early days, bestselling thrillers tended to be shoddily written and jingoistic, so membership was confined to authors who had produced at least two detective novels of ‘acknowledged merit’, a standard occasionally applied in a rather haphazard manner. Thriller writers were excluded unless they also wrote detective stories in the classic vein. After the Second World War, when it became obvious even to the diehards that first-rate authors such as Eric Ambler were writing thrillers, the absurdity of continuing the exclusion was recognized and it was abandoned.

In its infancy, the Club was popularly associated with the idea of laying down ‘rules’ about how to write detective stories. The rules and their purpose have been shrouded in myths and misunderstandings. For a start, the rules were conceived by Ronald Knox, renowned as a satirist, before the Club was founded. And they were written tongue-in-cheek: an ordained priest, Knox presented them as a gentle skit on the Ten Commandments. Some of the ‘rules’, such as ‘The detective must not himself commit the crime’, were futile, taking the idea of ‘fair play’ towards the reader too far and for no good reason. He made one or two sensible points: for instance, when he says that twin brothers and doubles ‘must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them’, he was simply arguing against the use of inelegant trickery that might fool readers but only at the cost of exasperating them. Above all, he was arguing for common sense in the writing of mysteries, urging practitioners to shun the absurd plot contrivances and racial stereotypes that abounded in early twentieth-century crime writing.

Cox, who founded the Club, and wrote innovative and influential crime fiction as Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles, delighted in breaking the so-called ‘rules’ in his work, and so did many of his fellow members. But over the years, the joke got lost. One often-repeated canard is that Agatha Christie came close to being drummed out of the Club because

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

was deemed to breach its rules. This is pure invention; the truth is that the novel was published four years before the Club came into existence, and it was much admired by Cox, Sayers, and Christie’s other colleagues.

It’s tempting to go to the other extreme, and suggest that the only rule for crime writers is that there are no rules. Writing is a process of trial and error, and each person has to work out what suits them best. Even so, the experiences of skilled practitioners, past and present, are instructive as well as intriguing. And who better, in Britain at least, to compile such a book than members of the Detection Club?

When I proposed, at the Club’s AGM in February 2019, that we collaborate on a book of this kind in order to boost our finances, I was unsure of the likely reaction. As it turned out, everyone was highly enthusiastic. The meeting also agreed to dedicate the book to Len Deighton, our longest-serving member, as a way of celebrating the golden anniversary of his election to the Club. As for the guiding concept of the book, Felix Francis summed it up as ‘How

dunit’. In other words, we’d talk about our own experiences, expressing personal views rather than laying down an earnest update of Knox’s jokey commandments. The Club’s publishers, HarperCollins, loved the idea, and in the months that followed,

Howdunit

took shape.

The result is not a textbook or manual; readers wishing to delve into the minutiae of police and courtroom procedure, forensic science, and the law of libel should look elsewhere. Instead the contributors offer a treasure trove of wit, wisdom, and anecdotes. You will find out here which author was the first novelist to use a word processor, who wrote what has been described as the first ‘electronic novel’, how a Booker Prize nomination led to a commission to revive a great detective of the Golden Age, and a good deal more. There is even a step-by-step case study in correspondence of the making of a collaborative crime classic, which illustrates that the creative process is an extraordinary mixture of pleasure and pain. And because there is no limit to the talents in the Detection Club, there are also several cartoons by ‘Clewsey’, whose name conceals a collaboration of three members, one of whom trained in graphic design …

I suggested broad topics that members might like to write about, and offered more detailed ideas to anyone who asked for them, but I didn’t try to impose conformity of approach or message or to eliminate contradictions. I wanted contributors to express themselves without feeling constrained by editorial diktats. When you are lucky enough to have the chance to work with such a gifted group of authors, it would be crazy not to give them free rein. The genre is a broad church, encompassing so many types of story, and it would be strange if all crime writers had same opinions or went about their task in the same way. As will become evident, they don’t. In these pages you can hear (just as you can if you attend a major literary festival) many different voices. The contributors have diverse opinions about everything from writer’s block to the crime novelist’s mission.

Some writers plot or outline in advance before writing the first word of a story, while others write from the seat of their pants, setting off on the journey of novel writing without having the faintest idea of where it will take them. Both approaches are explored in

Howdunit

, along with many other areas where there is room for divergent attitudes and approaches. To suggest that one view is invariably ‘right’ and another is ‘wrong’ is naive. Just as different criminals favour different m.o.s, so different crime novelists follow different paths when creating their mysteries. They also favour different types of crime fiction; this book aims to show the rich potential of the genre. The value of the

personal

views expressed by contributors lies in the way they illuminate the pros and cons, the choices that any writer needs to make. We don’t offer the false comfort of definitive answers where none exist, although there are also areas of widespread consensus – for instance, that writers with fertile imaginations can find ideas anywhere. The question for any individual is ultimately: what works for you?

I’m the eighth and current President of the Club, and my predecessors include such legendary figures as Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. The Club has a rich history, and I charted its early years in

The Golden Age of Murder

; suffice it to say here that the Club is simply a social association, a small dining club with membership by invitation. It’s very different from the Crime Writers’ Association, a much larger professional organization for anyone who has published a crime book, together with associates involved in the business of crime writing. The two organizations are not competitors and they enjoy a warm relationship; the four most recent presidents of the Club also chaired the CWA. Although the two organizations’ archives are distinct, together they comprise the British Crime Writing Archives, which for the past few years have been celebrated by an annual summer festival at Gladstone’s Library in north Wales.

In contrast to the position with the CWA, the number of members of the Club has always been limited, and as an organization that exists to have occasional dinners in London, its membership is predominantly British. There are no formal restrictions, and several Americans, including such contrasting authors as John Dickson Carr and Patricia Highsmith, have been members; so was the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh. The general principle is that membership is for life, and in fact Sayers had abandoned writing detective novels a decade before she became the Club’s third President. The enduring appeal of the Club has much to do with its small size, and with the spirit of collegiality between everyone who attends the dinners. From the Club’s inception, the list of eminent guest speakers at the main autumn dinner, currently held at the Ritz, has been impressive and eclectic.

Right from the start of the Club’s existence, it has subsidized its activities – well, the consumption of those splendid but rather pricey dinners – by producing crime stories. The first two joint ventures were collaborative cross-media mysteries broadcast by the infant BBC and published serially in

The Listener

, and on 23 July 1930 the Corporation also aired ‘Plotting a Detective Story’, a fifty-minute talk given by Berkeley and Sayers. The audience was reckoned to exceed twelve million people – a reach that, today, any prime-time British TV show or indeed publisher would kill for.

These groundbreaking initiatives were rapidly followed by the Club’s first novel,

The Floating Admiral

. This joint effort was concocted by no fewer twelve authors and boasted a preface by Chesterton. Almost ninety years on, it remains in print, and has recently been translated into several foreign languages. Further innovative books followed over the years, including stories in which Club members wrote about each other’s detectives, a collection of true-crime essays, and a set of stories about supposedly perfect crimes solved by a superintendent from Scotland Yard. The Club’s most recent publications are

The Sinking Admiral

, a twenty-first-century homage to its famous forerunner masterminded by Simon Brett, and a short story collection,

Motives for Murder

From the 1930s until the post-war era, these publications helped to keep the Club solvent and even enabled the hire of a couple of rooms in Soho, where the Club’s library was kept. But, as with most small membership organizations, the Club has never been flush with cash, and Sayers’ correspondence contains occasional outpourings of anguish about the parlous state of its finances. During the 1940s, and occasionally in succeeding decades, the Club’s very survival has been uncertain. The rented rooms are long gone, and so is the library. And the march of time prompts another question: in the twenty-first century, is there really any need for the Detection Club? How can it still have value and relevance in the era of social media and innumerable festivals, conventions and other opportunities for crime writers to get together with each other, as well as with fans?

My own, far from unbiased, opinion, is that the Club is such an agreeable institution, and so historically significant, that it deserves to be cherished. Quite apart from the convivial nature of the dinners, there is a growing interest in the heritage of crime fiction around the world, and the Club and its members have made a major contribution to that heritage. The Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan is a club modelled on ours, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting its President, while over the past three years alone, the Club’s history has been discussed and debated at events in countries as diverse as Estonia, the United States, Iceland, Canada, Dubai, Spain, and China. During the past twelve months it has also been celebrated by a BBC radio play and a French graphic novel. So if one looks beyond the superficial anachronisms, the Club is as ‘relevant’ as ever.

The real test is whether the small band of members considers that the Club remains worthwhile. If any doubt existed, this project has laid it to rest. Any editor will tell you that it’s one thing for seasoned authors to express interest in writing something and quite another to persuade them to produce it in a short space of time. My task was to approach busy authors with deadlines aplenty to plague their consciences, and also – because the project was a Club fundraiser in that fine tradition dating back to

The Floating Admiral

– to inveigle them into writing for free. All of us have a strong belief that writers should be properly valued and paid, now more than ever, with widespread research suggesting that literary incomes are in decline around the world (something that the aspiring author needs to keep in mind). But as the response to

Howdunit

shows, writers are also warm and generous people, and members of the Detection Club want it to continue to thrive.

Bestselling superstars showed themselves willing to put aside their current work-in-progress to contribute to this book. Even veteran members who hadn’t written a novel for years proved eager to participate. I found it thrilling to receive one manuscript after another and to marvel at the musings on so many different aspects of our craft. Members told me they were happy to contribute, first because of their enthusiasm for the Club, and secondly because they felt they had something worth saying about aspects of the writing process and the crime writer’s life.

The aim was not merely to produce a snapshot of the state of play in contemporary crime writing. Including historical material and illustrations, even cartoons, gives the book an added texture, highlighting changing fashions as well as truths about writing that are timeless. Families and estates of deceased contributors, aware of the strength of the members’ attachment to the Club, were remarkably supportive. The pieces by former members are usually shorter than those by current members, and I’ve written brief commentaries to link many of the contributions and to set certain pieces in context. Among other things, I hope readers will be tempted to read the books of contributors whose work they haven’t previously encountered.

Women writers have always played a central role in the Detection Club. Agatha Christie wasn’t by nature a ‘joiner’, but she became a member of the committee, and after Sayers’ death she held the Presidency for the rest of her life. In the early days, Secretaries of the Club included Lucy Malleson, who wrote as Anne Meredith and Anthony Gilbert, and Carol Rivett, alias E. C. R. Lorac; their more recent successors have included Mary Kelly and Jessica Mann. In the early years of the twenty-first century, distinguished writers suc

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