Why I love…

#45: The Kings of Crime – I: John Dickson Carr, the King of Hearts

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King Carr

Bookends: It Walks by Night (1930)/The Hungry Goblin (1971)

Books published 1920-59: 64

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: In a career spanning 41 years John Dickson Carr published seventy-six novels and collections of short stories, wrote a raft of mysteries for radio (many of which can be found here), penned the official biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a non-fiction account of the mysterious murder of magistrate Edmund Godfrey, wrote a column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and was made a member of the Detection Club as well as a Grand-Master of the Mystery Writers Of America.  He created two long-running and dearly-loved sleuths, and in his later career branched out into exquisitely-researched and detailed historical mysteries that weren’t afraid to veer into the nonsensical – the time travel element of Fire, Burn! (1957) – or the fantastical – invoking a deal with the Lucifer himself in The Devil in Velvet (1951) – if they served his purposes.

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#16: Why I love… being able to give up on a book

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Quitting

Unless you’re an English Literature student or a Holocaust denier, you probably read for enjoyment.  If you’re a book blogger, you probably do that in order to spread the joy of those books you read; well, or you’re trying to find someone who shares your interest given that most of your time is spent inside with people who don’t exist and you’ve forgotten how to make real friends (hey, that’s my excuse…).  However you look at it, books are a source of release or relief to you, a fount of fascination and excitement that can and should be shared with others that they might spread that love and you can somehow become wealthy, or at least get some free review copies, on the back of it.

Noble aims, aims I both celebrate and promote, but let’s not overlook the fact that some books are shite.  It comes down to personal tastes, obviously – for whatever reason, a stone-cold classic fails to fan the flames of your heart, or Matthew Reilly’s full bore insanity doesn’t quite tickle your fancy in the manner intended – but it remains an inevitability: someone who claims  to enjoy everything they read is either a) lying or b) illiterate.  To take a recent example, John Williams’ Stoner has enjoyed an unprecedented resurgence in interest, and at the time of writing has 660 five-star reviews on Amazon; I tried to read it this summer and cannot believe that ink was wasted on reprinting that which would have been far better utilised by those hateful weekly celebrity ‘gossip’ atrocities in pointing out that a woman in her fifties has cellulite or an older rich man has a younger partner, and I say that as someone who considers those magazines a threat to the toilet paper industry.

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#5: Why I love… classic crime fiction

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I am not the most practical of men.  Put me in the garden and ask me to dig you a hole of any size, I’ll do so happily.  Give me an unlimited supply of timber and ask me to build a rabbit hutch, however, and you’re going to be waiting a very long time indeed.  I’d theorise the hell out of it – internal height = average rabbit height + 3 standard deviations + largest recorded vertical rabbit hop from rest – but the application of saw to wood is going to go very wrong.

I remember reading an interview with Lee Child in which he likened writing mystery novels to designing a house; if you decide you want an extra window in a room then that’s going to involve moving the sockets you’ve got on the wall, possibly moving the door and so the light-switch, etc.  If when writing the final chapter of your novel and suddenly decide someone else should be the killer but you change nothing in the preceding pages…well, catastrophe.  My love of theory married to this appreciation of plot construction is what drew me to crime novels in the first place, and the more I read the more I liked it.  I began to recognise that, the further back you went, the more of a factor the plotting became and that for sheer joyous planning you really couldn’t beat the classics.  There’s a moment in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun where a bottle being thrown out a window is surprisingly significant – remove that one simple action and a lot of stuff elsewhere doesn’t make sense.  Honestly, I think that’s awesome.

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