Collecting Crime

The Map for What Beckoning Ghost?
Maps add interest and information to many detective novels, and this is an example of a book with a map decorating its endpapers – a feature of murder mysteries that was more common during the Golden Age than it is today. This book, What Beckoning Ghost?, was the personal copy of the author, Douglas G. Browne, as can be seen from the signature and address.
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Nancy Spain – and Norman
Nancy Spain (1917-1964) was a celebrity broadcaster and journalist who was killed, along with magazine editor Joan Werner Laurie in a plane crash when on her way to commentate on the Grand National race at Aintree, Liverpool. Her varied CV included authorship of ten light-hearted crime novels.
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Rediscovering Crime Classics
Readers who enjoy fiction from “the Golden Age of Murder” between the world wars used to be thought of as an endangered species. Other than Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and a few others, authors of traditional whodunits had largely faded from view, their books out of print and often almost impossible to find. Digital publishing has helped to change things, by making many old titles available gain, while the extraordinary success of the British Library’s Crime Classics has shown that there is a much larger readership for Golden Age fiction than many had realised.
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O England!
Under his own name, Anthony Berkeley Cox published O England! in 1934. This was a polemical non-fiction book in which Cox, with characteristic self-confidence, put forward his manifesto for the transformation of English society. Some of his proposals were outlandish to the point of absurdity, but others seem, with hindsight, to have been far-sighted.
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Crime writers as correspondents
In the age of email and social media, the art of letter writing is fast disappearing. This is a pity for several reasons, not least because there is a real fascination in reading (some) old letters, and there are certainly a number of crime writers of the past who were fascinating correspondents. Dorothy L. Sayers was a prime example, and a selection of her letters has been gathered together in a series of five chunky volumes. Raymond Chandler’s letters also provide many intriguing insights into his craft, and his opinions on countless subjects; again, a selection has been published. The correspondence of most writers of the past is, however, difficult to track down, which means I am all the more grateful for the kindness of Howard Lakin of Lakin and Marley Rare Books (www.lakinandmarley.com) for providing me with this scan of a letter sent by Ngaio Marsh to James Keddie.
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The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
“Association copies” which connect a book to the author or another person of note are often collectible, and just occasionally much sought after and very expensive when found. This first edition of Dorothy L.Sayers’ Wimsey novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a case in point. It was the copy that Sayers gave and inscribed to her mother – who died not long afterwards – and therefore has a particular resonance for Sayers devotees.
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Death of Jezebel
Christianna Brand (1907-1988) was not only a notable writer of detective fiction in the classic vein but also an exuberant personality. She certainly liked signing copies of her books – there are plenty of examples around, often with long, chatty inscriptions. This copy of Death of Jezebel is unusual even by her standards, though – because she signed it twice, for two different recipients, one of whom was the legendary crime fiction bibliographer Allen Hubin.
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The Rasp
This was the book that introduced Philip Macdonald’s regular detective, Anthony Gethryn, and served to establish his reputation as a writer of ingenious mysteries. Macdonald was born in 1900, and yet this book, published in 1924, when he was only 23, was not his first – he had previously co-authored two novels with his father, Ronald Macdonald. This particular edition was inscribed by Macdonald on 23 October in the year of publication – the dust jacket, alas, is a facsimile.
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The Floating Admiral
I was prompted by my election to the Detection Club to seek out their publications – details of which I am compiling for the Detection Club page on this site. The Floating Admiral is a famous ‘round-robin’ novel by various hands, and because of its scarcity, a first edition in wrapper would normally be out of reach for me. But not long after I learned of my election, I won the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger for ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’ and by a happy chance, the prize money was equal to the cost of this copy of the book.
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Hannibal Rising
Do book-signings and launch parties really help to raise an author’s public profile? Opinions vary. Many publishers, for instance, are sceptical as to the value of signing sessions. Often they work best if set up in a manner distinctive enough to capture the imagination of potential readers – and, ideally, the media. One of the most striking examples in the crime fiction field over the past few years was the bizarre celebration of the UK publication of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising on 5 December 2006. Harris is almost as famous for being shy of personal publicity as he is for creating legendary serial killer Hannibal Lecter. But when Heinemann launched the book at Waterstone’s in Oxford Street, London, they made the most of the occasion. In fact, they made a meal of it….
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The Man in the Brown Suit
The Man in the Brown Suit was Agatha Christie’s fourth published novel, a light thriller first appearing in 1924. As a crime writer, she was at that time still finding her feet, but the book nevertheless remains an enjoyable read to this day. It is also interesting to note that the key twist in the book anticipates the much more famous trick solution to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926.
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The Sad Variety
Nicholas Blake was the name under which the poet (and eventual Poet Laureate) Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972) wrote detective novels. He enjoyed much success in his day, creating a notable amateur sleuth in Nigel Strangeways, who was in part based on W.H. Auden and who appears in perhaps the best Blake book, The Beast Must Die, which was filmed by Chabrol. Blake’s debut, A Question of Proof, appeared in 1935 and made an immediate impact.
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Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery – long galley proofs corrected by Christie and her agent
Gordon Ramsey, an American academic, was assisted by his friendship with Phelps Pratt, president of Agatha Christie’s American publishers, Dodd, Mead, in persuading the notoriously reclusive author to co-operate with this, the first full-length evaluation of her work, published in the US in 1967. Janet Morgan’s 1984 life of Christie records that Ramsey had to agree to various constraints on his work: the book contained little biographical material and respected her wish that he should not mention the then unpublished final novels featuring Poirot and Miss Marple, although they had been written many years earlier.
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Black and Blue by Ian Rankin – first edition
I first met Ian Rankin in 1995, at the Nottingham Bouchercon, but by that time I had read and enjoyed several of his novels. In those days, he was living in France and his work was relatively little known. I remember picking up a first edition of his debut short story collection, A Good Hanging, in a gathering of remaindered hardbacks. A couple of quid then, perhaps one hundred now – if you can lay your hands on a copy. When I was asked to take over the editorship of the Crime Writers Association’s annual anthology, Ian was one of the first potential contributors I approached. He promptly obliged with the excellent ‘Herbert in Motion’ – written in a single day and I still recall with appreciation the enthusiastic encouragement he gave me after reading my fourth Harry Devlin novel, Yesterday’s Papers.
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Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine – the first issue
From the start of my crime writing career, I have been lucky enough to be associated with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the longest running specialist crime fiction magazine of all time. The very first crime story that I had accepted for publication was a short story called ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ It won first prize in a competition judged by the senior fiction editor of Bella Magazine, who agreed to publish it. By a lucky chance, the crime writer Robert Barnard was present at the award ceremony and he recommended the story to Eleanor Sullivan, the then editor of EQMM. So the story appeared on both sides of the Atlantic a few months before publication of my debut novel, ‘All the Lonely People’. After Eleanor’s death, her successor Janet Hutchings, who has always been a huge supporter of British crime fiction, offered me much encouragement. On my first visit to the US, one of the highlights was a visit to Janet at EQMM’s offices in New York and over the years, many of my short stories have first seen the light in the pages of the magazine.
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