Catriona McPherson misses Margery Allingham

Enjoyable article from Hollywood paper about Catriona McPherson. Says she started writing her own detective novels because MA & co were all dead. I was helping Francis plough through the CWA boxes and boxes of dagger submissions when her first novel came out. Both of us thought how deft and delightful it was - and quite rightly it won the Ellis Peters award that year.

Clearly Catriona's going from strength to strength and I'll be looking out for the next in her series.

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Cadavers in the Times

Just as I was leaving for the Bouchercon, Francis thrust a copy of the Times into my hand.  'Read the third leader,' he insisted.

What a piece of serendipity. Under the title 'Murder Most Mystifying' Oliver Kamm had written a short piece in praise of the detective novel form.  He'd been reading P.D. James's short book Talking About Detective Fiction (Bodleian 2009)

'The wonder is,' Kamm commented, 'That so rigid a structure should provide so rich a vehicle for the literary imagination ... at its best the detective novel is a window on its time and on the darkness of the human condition.

'Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes belongs to a fog bound Victorian London where opulence lies alongside a criminal underworld. Margery Allingham's greatest story of Albert Campion, The Tiger in the Smoke, evokes the same familiar but threatening place in another time. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown solves crimes through an understanding of the ineradicability of sin. And Lady James's peerless, ageless poet-detective is a shrewd observor of mores as well as murder. They are cultural treasures. Long may cadavers litter the literary landscape.' (The Times Tuesday October 15th 2009)