Caroline Crampton's Reading List

"This was published slightly after the ‘Golden Age’ period of detective fiction that I normally stick to—between the two World Wars. But John Bude started out during that period and carried on in that style, even though this was published in the 1950s. What I like about this book is that it’s a holiday mystery in the sense that a lot of it is set on the French Riviera, a popular holiday destination for well-off people, and it’s also a sort of holiday for the detectives involved, because they have been sent from Scotland Yard to pick up a suspect associated with a case that’s going on in London. They are on a bit of a jolly to the south of France, they’ve got a holiday spirit about them as well. The crime they are there to investigate is also very much of its time, and the British Library edition does a good job of explaining it. Basically, it’s a currency racket: post-Second World War, there were all these currency protections put in place in Europe and Britain, to protect economies from massive fluctuations in the market. A counterfeiting operation, overseas, is extremely illegal on several counts. That’s what they are there to investigate. Yes, there are more than 100 of them now. A lot of these were books that were out of print or very, very difficult to get hold of, and mostly from that Golden Age period between the two World Wars. This series has brought back into easy accessibility lots and lots of writers who otherwise weren’t getting read. And they’ve had some interesting surprise bestsellers! What’s good about the collection is that the books have been chosen for their quality, so if one appears in the series, you can be fairly sure it’ll be a good one. If a writer has published 30 books, and they’ve picked five, they’ve picked those ones for a reason. They all come with an introduction that offers some context about the writer and some key social history of the period as well—stuff like the currency racket in Death on the Riviera has all been explained nicely before you actually plunge into the mystery and get confused."

"This is one of her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane stories, which is a sub-series within her work. All of Sayers’ mysteries feature Wimsey, but starting with 1930’s Strong Poison , she wrote books featuring Harriet Vane, who acts as his sparring partner and—spoiler—eventual wife. In Strong Poison, Harriet is a detective novelist on trial for murder. She has been researching methods of murder for a book she’s writing, and ends up accused of the murder of her ex-lover. Wimsey investigates and eventually extricates her from that situation. In this book, she’s trying to get away from it all after having been at the centre of that terrible media maelstrom and the court case. She’s taken herself off on a solo walking tour of the south coast of England. She wants to get away from murder, death, the press, everything. She stops to have her lunch on a beach one day when she’s walking, and she sees a rock out in the low tide zone, and is a bit confused by what she sees. She goes to investigate, and finds a man lying dead on the rock with his throat cut. It is a locked room or impossible crime mystery in as much as she was sitting there the whole time, she could see the whole beach, and no one approached either by sea or by land. Yet here is this man lying there, still warm, blood still flowing. It’s impossible. How can it happen? “The classic ingredient—a closed circle of suspects—can be easier to create in a holiday setting” It all unfolds from there, really. She walks to the nearest town to tell the police. And because she is eminently practical, she realises this is going to be a huge story: detective novelist just cleared of murder discovers newly-murdered man. She calls the papers herself and sells the story—she can at least profit from it. Then Lord Peter Wimsey turns up to help investigate what has happened. The title, in true Dorothy L. Sayers fashion, is an obscure reference to the writ of habeas corpus , which says that you can only hold an inquest for a body if the body is present. If there’s no body there, you can’t proceed with the prosecution of a crime. The tide has come in and gone out again, taking the body with it. If Harriet hadn’t been there to take notes and photographs—because she had her little camera with her for her holiday—the police probably wouldn’t even have believed anything had happened. Most of the novel takes place in this interim period, where they can’t find a body but know that a murder has been committed. Not really, compared with the likes of Agatha Christie , or Ngaio Marsh . I think she wrote 15 books in total, starting in the early 1920s and finishing, I think, in 1937. Then she completely pivoted away from detective fiction, and had two subsequent careers. She got very involved with religious writing during the war—she was an ardent Anglican—and she did a lot of broadcasting for the BBC on the subject. Then, after the war, she got very involved in translation. She started and nearly completed what was, for most of the 20th century, a very highly thought of translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy . She remained a fan of detective fiction and a critic, but didn’t publish any of her own novels after the late 1930s. She died in 1957."

"Agatha Christie has a couple of really famous overseas mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot— Death on the Nile being one, and the other being Murder on the Orient Express , which isn’t set in summer but it’s still a holiday mystery. I’ve never been able to understand why Appointment with Death isn’t up there with those two, because it also features Hercule Poirot, and he’s on holiday—this time in Petra in Jordan, where he has gone on a sightseeing tour to the famous monuments with a party of other tourists. He doesn’t know them. It’s a perfect closed circle, because the archaeological site is sort of inaccessible, unless you come with guides. Once you’re there, it’s hard to leave—I think it’s just in the desert, so you couldn’t just walk off on your own. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A very unpleasant woman, a matriarch of a family, is there with several of her children and her spouses. They all have to kowtow to her. She’s very cantankerous. Later, she’s found dead, and there are only a handful of people in the valley who could have done it. Hercule Poirot happens to be there, he investigates, and so on. It’s a great set-up for a mystery that draws directly from Christie’s own experience of travelling in the Middle East . She was very familiar with that area, so the setting is very precise and well described, you really feel like you are there. And there’s this undercurrent of evil; she’s exploring the idea of how a disturbed and disturbing personality in a family can trickle down the generations. This woman who’s been murdered is truly horrible. She’s really done a number on her children. All together, this makes for a great mystery and it deserves to be more widely known. You do get that sometimes. I think, as the genre developed, people began experimenting and playing with it. The idea that the corpse should be discovered in the very first chapter, then the detective should enter, and the solution is delivered at the end—they started pulling that apart and playing with it. For instance, there’s a later Agatha Christie, also a Hercule Poirot novel, called Cat Among the Pigeons , in which Poirot is not even mentioned until at least three-quarters of the way through the book. It’s a novel featuring entirely original characters until that point, and again, I think that’s Christie playing with the form, having a bit of fun. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Also, later on in her career, she was a bit tired of writing Poirot novels, but the publisher still wanted and needed her to keep doing that. She started finding interesting ways to meet that requirement whilst also doing what she wanted to do. I think, in Appointment with Death , the reason the death comes later is because you need lots of chapters with the woman alive to understand the effect that she’s had on people, and to build up the possible motives. And it sets up the ethical question of the book as well, which is: is it truly a sin to have killed someone who has done so much harm?"

"Christianna Brand is probably better known these days as the author of the Nurse Matilda books, the template for Nanny McPhee. But Brand was an established crime writer, and an early member of the Crime Writers Association, who wrote a whole series of novels featuring Inspector Cockrill. I have to say, Cockrill is a blank slate as a detective, he doesn’t have the character or eccentricities of Poirot or Miss Marple, but he’s perfectly pleasant to read about. Her books are more interesting for the actual plot mechanism, and sometimes the setting, than for the character. In this one, he’s on holiday, on an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy . It’s left deliberately vague which one. In classic summer holiday mystery fashion, a murder is committed among the resort group that he’s in, and the interesting twist is that he’s initially the suspect when the local police start investigating the crime. He’s right there, he has the means and the motive—so part of the reason that he jacks in his holiday and starts investigating is because he needs to prove that he didn’t do it. Then, of course, it becomes an interesting investigation in its own right. He’s also a very reluctant holidaymaker. He didn’t want to go in the first place, so that all adds to the drama: he didn’t want to go, then he ends up being involved in a murder investigation, potentially being framed as the suspect. You are supposed to feel for him. Nothing has quite gone to plan."

"This is a classic ‘country house at Christmas’ short story, first published in 1931. Sayers’s regular sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey is spending the festive period at a house party hosted by a rich and genial old man who loves to have his guests play classic parlour games like Hunt the Slipper and Sardines. During a game of Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? he notices that his daughter’s priceless pearl necklace has disappeared from the side table where she had put it for safety. A search quickly reveals that none of the guests have pocketed it and it’s not anywhere in the house, yet nobody has left the property nor been alone for more than a few seconds. It’s up to Wimsey to track it down, and while I don’t want to spoil what is really a very clever ending, suffice to say that it’s a very appropriately seasonal solution."

"Tied Up In Tinsel is actually one of Marsh’s later novels. She published her first in 1934 during the golden age but she then lived into the 1980s and kept writing in a similar style throughout her life. This one is from 1972 and sees her regular Scotland Yard sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, drawn into a country house murder mystery after someone disappears from the house party. Just to add extra spice to the case, many of the servants at this house are convicted murderers who have served their time and been released — altruism or cunning scheme? The reader must decide! Marsh was a huge theatre enthusiast and a celebrated director of amateur and university Shakespeare productions in her native New Zealand. She brought some of this dramatic expertise into her detective fiction, with plenty of her novels featuring actors or plays in some way, and I think she did some of her best writing about this setting. My particular favourites are Enter a Murderer , in which an actor is shot dead on stage during a performance by what was supposed to be a dummy gun, and Overture to Death , which is about an extraordinary murder among the actors in a parish play in rural Dorset."

"This is a novel that was originally published in 1938 and has recently been brought back into print by the British Library’s Crime Classics imprint, becoming an unexpected bestseller when it was rereleased in 2014. I love it because of the opening setup: a collection of strangers are travelling home in the same train carriage on Christmas Eve when the train gets stuck in a snowdrift. They are forced to pool their resources and trek out into the snow to seek shelter for the night. The group finds a nearby house with the door ajar where a fire is burning, tea has been laid on the table as if guests are expected, but there’s nobody to be found. A quite creepy mystery unfolds from there!"

"This is another one set at a country house over Christmas, a scenario beloved of mystery writers, because it provides a conveniently limited circle of suspects and a nicely festive atmosphere. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter However, this one was published in 1951 and tackles the ways in which British society has been changed by the Second World War . Hare takes on aristocratic antisemitism and the post war economic slump as well as delivering an entertaining murder mystery ."

"This is a true classic of the golden age, first published in 1941, with the usual country house setting and a festive house party suddenly turned tragic by a murder. Heyer is better known today for her historical and romantic novels, but starting in 1932 she published twelve detective novels that really deserve to be more widely read. It’s also been republished under the title A Christmas Party in case the “envious Casca” quotation from Shakespeare ’s Julius Caesar is off-putting to the contemporary reader. Lots of reasons! Christmas is a convenient and plausible reason for a novelist to gather characters together in one place, including those who don’t like each other very much but feel some kind of duty to be present for the celebrations. The festive season can also escalate existing tensions, or cause hidden secrets to be revealed, which can result in a tragedy. A house party, especially in a rural area, isolates and confines suspects in one place and helpfully limits the scope of a detective’s investigation (a book where theoretically anybody in the world can have done the crime is no fun). Snow, too, is very useful for capturing or concealing footprints; I once made a whole podcast episode about this. The contrast between the “comfort and joy” of the Christmas season and the darkness of a sudden murder is a good impetus for a plot, too. Finally, I think there’s something in the idea that midwinter is a time for gathering around the fire and listening to scary stories — and what could be more scary than realising that there’s a murderer on your Christmas guestlist?"

"Molière struggled with his health for several years before he wrote this play — he had a terrible cough and difficulty breathing, especially in the damp, smoky Parisian winters. In this play, he wrote the central role of Argan, the ‘imaginary invalid’ of the title, for himself. Argan is frustrating and cantankerous, always trying different doctors and treatments and then abandoning them when they don’t bring him relief. This was obviously something Molière had personal experience of, and he had written plays satirising the medical profession before: 1665’s L’Amour médecin , for instance, features five doctors who were based on real-life Parisian physicians, each with their own idiosyncrasy mercilessly satirised by the playwright. Le malade imaginaire is meant to be a comedy, so there’s plenty of bodily humour and farcical action as Argan’s frivolous second wife tries to secure her inheritance. There’s also a romantic sub-plot, as Argan tries to marry his daughter off to a doctor so that he will always have a free medical attendant in the family. The play ends in the kind of musical dance interlude that was traditional in late 17th century drama, with Argan getting himself “certified” as a doctor because there is no one more qualified to practice medicine than a hypochondriac and no disease will dare kill off a doctor. “A few hours before Molière died, he had convinced an entire theatre that he was perfectly fine” Although a comedy, this play has come to have a tragic resonance for me, because it was Molière’s last play. During the fourth ever performance, Molière was taken ill while acting onstage as Argan, racked with terrible coughs. He managed to pass it off as part of the character, but after the play was over he collapsed and had to be carried in a litter to a colleague’s lodgings nearby. He died there a few hours later, choking on his own blood. Just a few hours before, he had convinced an entire theatre’s worth of people that he was perfectly fine, just a hypochondriac. I think this is an extreme example of how a lot of people with health anxiety feel all the time: it’s just hypochondria until something serious shows itself, by which time it’s too late."

"Sanditon was begun in early 1817 and left unfinished when she died in July of that year. She completed eleven chapters, though, which give us a fair idea of the book’s plot and themes. A carriage accident at the start introduces the protagonist Charlotte Heywood to a Mr and Mrs Parker, who are from a seaside town called Sanditon. Until recently, this place was a small fishing village, but with the investment of Mr Parker and others, it is quickly being transformed into a fashionable watering place, full of invalids and hypochondriacs who have come to stay there for the ‘cure’ offered by the fresh sea air and various local quacks. Once the Parkers are recovered, they invite Charlotte to return home with them to experience Sanditon for herself, where she finds a community of quarrelling, selfish people obsessed with their own health. It’s much more bitingly satirical than Austen’s previous fiction, I think, and it’s truly a shame that we will never know how she intended to develop the ideas further. It’s also fascinating to think about how the book’s subject matter intersects with her own life. Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was well-known in the family as a hypochondriac, so the author was writing Sanditon from personal experience. And at the time when she started writing it, Jane herself was already unwell with the illness that would, six months later, take her life. As Austen biographer Claire Tomalin puts it: “What other fatally ill writer has embarked on a savage attack on hypochondria?” It’s a remarkable piece of fiction for a dying woman to write. Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813, which is right at the point when lots of competing theories about how the mind and the body interact are being debated by the scientific community. William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood had inspired other ideas about what might be flowing around the human body, and thoughts ranged from a kind of ‘vapour’ that moved around inside us, to mysterious ‘animals spirits,’ to fibres or ‘nerves’ that delivered information to the brain. “Mrs Bennet’s nerves represent much more than just the emotional disregulation of a silly woman” Hypochondria was also right the point here of transitioning from being considered wholly a condition of the body—the ‘hypochondrium’ was a term for an area of the upper abdomen and ‘hypochondria’ was disease experienced there—into being a problem felt in the mind, as we know it today. Less than a decade after Austen’s novel appeared, the French doctor Jean-Pierre Falret published a pivotal book that declared hypochondria to be an entirely mental condition. “Moral and intellectual causes are, without contradiction, the most usual causes of hypochondria,” he wrote. All of which is to say, Mrs Bennet’s nerves represent much more than just the emotional disregulation of a silly woman. The palpitations and flutterings and faintness she experiences in moments of great emotion or distress are actually a major point of medical debate at the time, as well as being crucial to a greater understanding of how the human body works."

"Hot Milk is about Rose, who has confusing and debilitating health problems, and her daughter Sofia, who finds her mother exasperating but seems perpetually tied to her, and even sometimes experiences apparent sympathy pains for her. The novel sees them travel to a peculiar clinic in Spain, where Rose is supposedly going to be cured of the cause-less paralysis that has confined her to a wheelchair by a strange man named Gómez. The novel is a dense, literary exploration of Sofia’s interior life, but it also provides some fascinating and tragic insights into the plight of the hypochondriac. For instance: Rose has remortgaged her house in order to be able to pay the 25,000 euro fee to attend the clinic. Given that she has no diagnosis, this seems exceptionally steep, but it is representative of the desperate lengths people will go to get relief when no other answers are forthcoming. I do think that hypochondria can be part of, or even mask, other psychological or mental issues. Something the comedian Marc Maron says in his standup comes to mind: “My father was a doctor, which means I was a hypochondriac. How else are you going to get their attention?” For him, his hypochondria was connected to his issues in his relationship with his father and it was part of how he asserted himself. Jane Austen’s mother seems to have used her fluctuating health problems to keep her family constantly surrounding her, fussing over her and moulding their lives to fit hers. It can be a means of exerting control, which I think is what the character of Rose wants from it. It can even be compared to factitious disorder imposed on another , what was previously called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a caregiver will deliberately neglect their charge or make them sick so as to be able to seek medical assistance and receive attention. But in its simplest form, I think hypochondria is a very internal and individual condition, not necessarily defined by its reception by others. And every hypochondriac I have ever spoken to has expressed the desire never to think these thoughts again. For myself, if I could flick a switch and never worry about my health again, I would."

"Before his illness and incarceration in various mental institutions, Schreber trained as a lawyer and worked as a judge. The clarity and specificity of his descriptions in this book are remarkable: one modern reviewer called it “a textbook of psychiatry from the viewpoint of the patient,” and I think that sums it up well. Both Freud and Jung were compelled by Schreber’s case and analysed it extensively, and the new NYRB edition has only brought more interested people to the text. I think what I take from it, above all, is that the patient’s voice matters: we still read this book in part because of how unusual it is to hear from the person actually experiencing the delusions rather than those trying to treat them."

"Alice James was the younger sister of both the novelist Henry James and the psychologist William James . She experienced ill health for most of her life, mostly dismissed as hysteria, before dying at the age of 43 from breast cancer. She began keeping a diary in 1889, when she was already in her 40s and existing in a state of near-constant invalidism. Like Schreber’s Memoirs , her writing is valuable both because it comes from the patient’s perspective, and because it was written in real-time rather than with hindsight. Alice shows us how frustratingly non-linear her condition is; periods of chronic but manageable weakness are punctuated by seemingly random acute attacks that render her bed-bound and, at times, unable to walk. Always, she has to contend with the shadow of insanity or ‘mental feebleness’ that hangs over her—because doctors are unable to fix a physical diagnosis for her many symptoms, there is always this lingering possibility that it was all a result of her malfunctioning mind. This is very frustrating for Alice, and for the reader, who finds themself in the peculiar position of actually rooting for her to be diagnosed with a serious illness just so everyone will stop assuming that she is crazy. Two things come to mind. The first is: don’t try and talk them out of it. Bracing injunctions that “you probably imagined it” have always just made me feel worse, because I don’t feel believed. The second is: focus on distraction and misdirection. Without denying that the anxiety is there, try and pull the hypochondriac into other enjoyable activities that will keep their mind occupied. Once they are fully engaged, they may well forgot all about the disease that was killing them just a few hours ago."

"I think this is my favourite novel from the 1940s. It’s not a wartime mystery written from the comfort of the 1960s, looking back; the author was writing as the war was still going on, and she didn’t know what was going to happen—what the outcome was going to be. I find that really interesting to think about. As you say, it’s set in the blackout. A group of friends are gathered in an artist’s studio one evening. They’re all doing different things: the artist has finally persuaded an actor friend to come and pose for a portrait, the artist’s sister is in the kitchen making dinner, and a couple of others are playing a chess game. That’s where the ‘checkmate’ of the title comes from. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s one of those classic murder mystery situations where technically all of those people could vouch for the other: on paper, they’re all within sight of each other. But once you start to unravel it, questions arise: Can the portrait painter really see the chess players? Was his sister in the kitchen the whole time? That kind of thing. The studio is in the garden of this very rundown house in North London. The whole street has been condemned for redevelopment, but there’s this one old man who has clung on in this house, he will not sell. So the whole street is abandoned, apart from that one house. This old man lives alone, in one room. He’s in bed, most of the time. And he gets shot dead on this evening. There’s no one around, seemingly, apart from this group out in the studio in the garden. That’s the setup. There’s one other detail about it that I find really interesting, which is that the murder is discovered by a special constable. A special constable was a kind of volunteer policeman who joined up to help with the shortage of police during the war, after men were recruited into the armed forces. They were often, I think, retired police officers, or people who’d worked in policing overseas. They had this odd status where the only thing they were really allowed to do is police the blackout. They’re not really supposed to solve crimes. So when the real Scotland Yard detectives turn up, there’s this odd professional tension between them, which is very peculiar to wartime. I’ve never really seen that in a detective novel anywhere else. The characters in the studio don’t like the special constable at all either, because he’s very officious and seems inclined to accuse people, which is interesting. Yes. The British Library has this imprint called ‘Crime Classics’ , edited by Martin Edwards. A lot of the books that they republish were previously unavailable—out of print, or very hard to get hold of. They’ve brought them back in a nice paperback range. If you’re looking for a classic murder mystery that isn’t by Agatha Christie , then that’s a good place to go."

"Yes. This was her first wartime mystery of two. She wrote it in late 1939, or early 1940. It features her regular detective Albert Campion, who she’d been writing about since the late 1920s. He’s in, I think, at least ten books through the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning, she’s writing him as almost a parody of an aristocratic amateur sleuth. He’s very silly. That slowly morphs into him becoming a more serious, rounded character. His silliness becomes a facade that he puts on when he doesn’t want people to realize that he’s actually very astute. What’s so interesting about this book is that she completely formally deconstructs the detective novel as people have known it to date. It begins with Campion waking up in hospital with total amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is, or where he is, or why he’s there. He’s had an accident, he’s suffered a head injury, and he has no idea what’s going on. But he just has this overwhelming feeling that there’s something he’s supposed to be doing — something really important. He doesn’t know what it is. He has to piece together his own identity, and the case that he must be working on, from what he overhears other people saying and from contextual clues, and from who comes to see him in hospital. He’s solving the mystery of himself at the same time as trying to solve a wartime mystery. “The classic whodunnit had been domestic. But wartime enforced a much more communal way of living” In it, there’s a gang of counterfeit currency conspirators trying to flood Britain with fake money in order to destabilize the economy, and make Britain more likely to be defeated in the war. Interestingly, lots of the reviews for this book at the time were really good, but the one thing that comes up a lot is people saying that it’s all very far-fetched. Obviously, people at the time thought, there couldn’t be secret Nazi collaborators making fake coins or dropping fake banknotes. But then about 15 years later, Allingham was sent a press cutting from a German fan saying ‘no, actually you were right. This really was happening.’ It was called Operation Bernhard. It was absolutely real. She’d imagined something that was actually going on. I think so. Yes. I think J.K. Rowling has also cited Allingham as her favourite of all the Golden Age crime writers. Allingham wasn’t content to just churn out books in the same old classic mould. She was always trying to do something a bit different each time. Actually her publishers really hated this about her. She was supposed to be on the crime list, but a couple of times they said: ‘We can’t put this out as a crime novel—people will feel really shortchanged.’ They would move her to the general literature list. She was always a bit awkward in that sense."

"In a way. Christie was incredibly prolific during the Second World War. She always maintained at least a book a year over her whole career, but during the late 1930s, early 1940s, she was writing two and sometimes three. She wrote what she intended to be the last Poirot and the last Marple mysteries in the early 1940s, and then they were put away in a bank vault, as an insurance policy ‘in case of my death.’ She signed over the copyright—the Poirot to her husband and the Marple to her daughter. The idea was that if she were to be killed, their posthumous publication would make a lot of money and that would see that her loved ones would be okay. So in addition to the books that she actually published, she was writing extra ones, in case of emergency. As it happened, she lived into the 1970s, and the books weren’t published until then. But, yes, N or M? is the only book she wrote during the war that’s actually about the war. She completely ignores it in all of her other ones. She comes back to it, from the later 1940s, but not at the time. N or M? is a Tommy and Tuppence novel, who are recurring characters for her but far less well known than Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter They’re a married couple, and they’re interesting because they actually age through the books. Poirot never ages. But the first time we meet Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary in 1922, they are young, they’re not married, they come to fall in love over the course of the case that they solve. And then the next time, in Partners in Crime , they’re married, they’re about to have a child. It then jumps forward, and in N or M? that child is much older, and they’re feeling quite bored. They used to be involved in espionage, and now there’s a war and no one seems to want them. Then they are recruited, or rather, Tommy is recruited to help find a mole in the British intelligence services. And Tuppence decides that she’s not being left behind, so she gets dressed up incognito, goes to join him, and they pursue this case together. It is all about finding fifth columnists. It was the one time that Christie tried to write about the war while it was happening, and she does it in a more lighthearted tone. All the Tommy and Tuppence books are that way. One interesting thing about this book is that there’s a character in it called Major Bletchley, who freaked out the British intelligence service . They wondered whether she somehow knew what was going on at Bletchley Park, since she was very good friends with someone who was actually working there, a Cambridge mathematician called Dilly Knox, who was one of the leading codebreakers. They thought he must have said something, but when she was asked why she’d named this character in her book Major Bletchley, she said, ‘Well, I was once on a train from Oxford to London and broke down and I was stuck in Bletchley station. It was such an inconvenience, it was awful, I hated it. So I gave this really boring character the name Bletchley.” She had no idea. It was a coincidence, but it evidently bothered them very much. That’s definitely true. I think a question that lots of these writers were trying to solve was that, up to this point, the classic whodunnit had been domestic, albeit sometimes in the aristocratic, country house sense. But wartime enforced a much more communal way of living. Everyone had to do the blackout, or else it wasn’t going to work, that kind of thing. It was a bit harder to send a load of characters off to a remote country house and just keep them there. There was a sense that you had to be part of the world."

"This is based very directly on Michael Gilbert’s own experience of being a prisoner of war during the Second World War. He served in the armed forces, was captured in Italy, and was in a prisoner of war camp. While he was there, he had the realisation that in the work of the detective novelists of the 1920s and 1930s, the most difficult thing was to draw a plausible circle around your suspects. You have to do that in order for such a book to be good: it has to be one of only, say, these eight people, and there’s no way that a random homicidal maniac walked in off the street, did it, and left, because that’s not interesting. Exactly. So he realised that a really good and unusual example of the closed circle is the prisoner of war camp. Entry and exit is very tightly controlled. The whole point is that no one gets in or out, so that’s what he decided to work with. He wrote it later, but it reflects his own wartime experiences.. And it’s a really good mystery, but with the added context of being set in an unusual place, and based on his unusual experiences during the war. It’s a nice little record of something you don’t necessarily get to read firsthand all the time. No. And I was particularly drawn to it because my grandfather was in an Italian prisoner of war camp. So that’s why I initially picked it off the shelf. He was a very long way from home: he was from Johannesburg and enlisted there. His unit was brought to Europe, where he was captured, and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. He then escaped, and tried to walk down the length of Italy to meet the Allies, who were coming north, but he didn’t make it, he got captured again. That time he got taken to Munich, and he spent the rest of the war in a camp in Munich. Having heard those stories from him, I was interested to read a whodunnit based on such similar experiences."

"Yes, two writers, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Gordon Neil Stewart. She was a British poet and novelist, and he was a journalist, originally from Australia. They got married in 1936, and they lived in West London. They were both, I think, quite active in civil defence and volunteering. They both signed up to be ARP wardens as soon as the war started. It was that experience, or particularly Pamela’s experiences, that gave them the scenario for this. They wrote two detective novels together as Nap Lombard. The first one was called Tidy Death , which is basically impossible to get. For whatever reason, the British Library decided to republish the second one first, and that’s Murder’s a Swine . This has, again, a brilliant, and very accurate contemporary feeling. The detectives are a married couple, and you can imagine that Pamela and Neil are giving some of their own relationship to Andrew and Agnes in the book. “Agatha Christie, as the most prominent and best-selling crime writer of the time, was under a lot of pressure not to write about the war” They live in a block of London flats, where they don’t know many of their neighbours. Everything is very transient; people are there when they’re on leave. Who is anyone, really? As the book opens, Agnes locks herself out. And as she’s waiting for the landlord of the building to come and let her in, she decides to go and wait in the air raid shelter out of the rain. She meets a warden who’s also hanging out down there, and together they find that someone has shoved a body in among the sandbags. The mystery unravels from there. It becomes clear early on that the murderer is somebody on a twisted revenge vendetta. Every time something awful happens, there’s some kind of pig connection. At one point, someone’s being terrorized by a pig head that keeps appearing at the window of their flat in the night. It’s got some scarier moments, but overall it’s quite a light hearted book. I think so. I’ve heard that Christie, as the most prominent and best-selling crime writer of the time, was under a lot of pressure not to write about the war. Though, as you can see, other writers were not bothered; E.C.R. Lorac wrote several books about the war, and most of her books of the time mention it at some point. I think Christie, in particular, had been scared off early on, because in 1939 she had a contract to write a series of 12 short stories for The Strand magazine. You can buy them now as a collection called The Labours of Hercules; each one is a Poirot story in which he solves a case that mimics the classical myth of the labours of Hercules. The twelfth story she wrote for that serialisation is about Hitler, or a Hitler-like figure who is the leader of a fascist organisation in a central European country, and The Strand refused to publish it. Her agent made sure she still got paid, but only 11 stories ever appeared. And for the subsequent anthology, she wrote a new twelfth story in its place. The Hitler story has since been republished in the academic John Curran’s edited edition of her notebooks . But I think she and her agent were wary after that—that things would be rejected for serialisation, or that readers would not want to read them, if they were too directly about the realities of the war at that moment. Other writers perhaps didn’t have that cautionary experience. But I do think they thought about it a lot, particularly among those writing detective fiction . They knew they were there to entertain and to comfort, and were aware that people read their books for recreation. So giving them serious dollops of wartime content was maybe not what they were for. But at the same time, Allingham in particular didn’t seem able to think about anything else—quite understandably. Probably for her, the choice was to give detective fiction a rest until after the war, or include the war in her mysteries. And she really needed the money, so she kept them coming. I do find it interesting, though, that in a genre where you are essentially making light of death anyway, to a greater or lesser extent, that this was something that troubled people."