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The. Many of your friends, Phyllis,

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were delighted to know that another book from you is on the publisher's shelves and it's called Talking About Detective Fiction.

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How did it all come about? Well, it began as long ago as 2006,

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when I had a letter from the then librarian of the Bodleian after a request to the publishing department to write a book in aid of the library.

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And I decided that it would be a great pleasure to do it,

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not only because of my huge admiration for the library, but I wasn't ready to start another novel.

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And you know how it is. We writers are never happy unless they're either plotting, planning or writing.

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The royalties on talking about detective fiction or going to the body.

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And I wonder why you must have some affection for the dear old place.

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Is that right? Anyone who has any contact with Oxford knows about the Bodleian.

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It has one of the greatest libraries of the world.

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And of course, it's not only for scholars, it's for everyone who is interested in books and wants information.

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Some people have heard of Cambridge, haven't they, as well as Oxford?

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Some people. And I just wonder. There are far more crime writers that we associate with Oxford,

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who you shouldn't be surprised about this because you have made Oxford the most murderous city in the whole of the United Kingdom.

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How many body bags of you produced? Well, I think most claim to fame, Ferris is that single handedly I have made Oxford, as you said, the crime,

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the murder capital of the United Kingdom, and the present count, where that final count for most was 91 corpses.

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I didn't count them myself, but somebody sent me 71 corpses and I kept a little card by the television set, plus three or plus two.

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Adam DAVIES can't possibly compete with that.

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The central theme of this book, Phyllis, I think, is the development of what we always used to call and how you use detective stories.

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And these days we drifted towards a sort of a different nomenclature with the crime novel.

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Can you explain a little more, more fully then than that?

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Well, if we go back to the so-called Golden Age, the plot was absolutely dominant.

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The story was dominant. It had to be a puzzle and it had to be an ingenious puzzle.

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And people had to be killed in very clever, ingenious ways.

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And things have changed in another way, really to remember, they were so keen on having maps and charts and the sort of plan of the manor,

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a matchstick figure on the stairs with a corpse, and the characters had to serve the plot.

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The characters tended to be stereotypes, really.

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They particularly are really and are Agatha Christie when you get the same sort of characters over and over again.

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But now I think the detective story has moved much closer to the mainstream novel and I think is a very important development that the story,

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of course, is still vitally important. The mystery is important.

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So it has to be credible in the old days.

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Very often, I mean, with Agatha Christie, you love the book and at the end you realise it could never possibly happen like that.

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Part of the attraction of mayhem, the mysteries, is that they are not only entertaining, but they take people into an entirely different world.

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Very often with a modern crime novel, you're taken into the same old violent world that you read about in the newspaper and see on the television.

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Whereas if we go back into this comfortable village where Miss Marple lives, for example, it's peaceful, you know,

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as the vicar might find a body on the study floor, but it doesn't much interfere with the Sunday sermon.

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And it's all solved by Euros, Grace Owls or Miss Marple with her knitting.

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And then the little village is absolutely transformed peacefully again until the next murder happens.

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And that is rather reassuring to read. Order is restored at the end.

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Yes, yes, I agree. So the detective story is immensely satisfying to write because it's so difficult to do well.

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The ones I've written that are not strictly detective stories would be much easier to write.

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And somebody said, You've got to produce a novel in a month or else terrible things will happen to you.

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Or I could produce a novel and so could you. But it wouldn't be a detective story.

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Couldn't do it in a month. Have you got any routine and discipline about why you write, how you write, and what room you write?

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Well, I do. I don't much care what room I write in as long as I have a comfortable chair, a large table.

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To hold all my research material and the good old thesaurus and dictionary and so on and the good light.

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And is Father Pleasant? If I can make coffee very close to the kitchen is rather a good place.

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Really. For years I've had exactly the same method of writing a book.

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I like writing by hand. Some of my friends, I think Ruth Rendell, really?

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Ruth actually writes on her computer.

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But you do feel perhaps that that this direct contact between pen and paper rather helps and hinders you?

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Is that is that right? Oh, absolutely. I like to I like to somehow feel the words coming down my arm on to the page.

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I like that feeling. And I think what one has to do in a crime is to hold a creative tension,

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to integrate the different parts of the book, the setting, the characterisation, the plot and the scene.

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All of those have to join together and really produce a wonderful whole.

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In general, you seem to be able to convey this sense of understanding,

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both from the point of view of the victim and from the point of view of the murderer.

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Well, I think it's helped by the fact that I write by changing the viewpoint.

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So when I'm seeing things from the point of view of Dalgliesh or one of his subordinates or suspect or even the murderer, that's more difficult.

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I'm entering into that person's mind. I am that person.

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When I'm writing about that person, I'm feeling as that person feels.

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And of course, this leads people to say, I'm surprised you believe this stuff.

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And the other don't you find with your writing, they muddle up the writer with the character.

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But the whole thing about being a writer is that you're able to sympathise with all these views and convey them.

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Without that, I think you become a cruel writer or a writer without humanity.

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And writers, in fact, can be brilliant, technically, and write brilliantly.

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And sometimes at the end, one feels this book has no humanity in it.

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The horror genre seems to be extraordinarily fascinating to the vast majority of people.

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I think it probably is the most popular form of popular writing.

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And whenever one goes into bookshops bookshop where it is crime or detective writing shelves of childhood shelves.

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I think, first of all, people do love a story and with a detective story, you get a story, you get a plot, you get a beginning, a middle and an end.

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Something happens and it's usually something pretty exciting.

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Then I think there's the puzzle. People love a puzzle.

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I don't think this is the most important aspect really, Colin, because if it were, we would never reread that detective story.

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And I love rereading my favourites, although I know whodunit.

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But they do love a puzzle and it has to be a fair puzzle.

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But of course,

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I think it's it is a book which is reassuring psychologically and excellent to go into all these deep Freudian ideas that people put forward.

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But it is reassuring. It is a very moral point of view because it says that even the most unpopular person,

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even an evil person, has a right to live his or her life to the last natural moment.

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That murder is never justified. That murder is the unique crime and that when it happens in any civilised society,

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the whole of the resources of the police force will be directed to try to discover who did it.

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So that is comforting. I think I'm always a bit disappointed when it's not a murder that they're doing.

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I mean, if somebody steals a tin of salmon from the supermarket, it's difficult to sustain interest for 450 pages, isn't it?

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But it's exactly so. And I say in the book that people are much more interested, you know,

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in who killed and brutally killed and Augusta than who who stole her diamond necklace when she was on holiday Bournemouth.

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And it's all together there. Is that the fact that it is murder and murder is fascinating because from time immemorial,

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I mean, when we look at old literature going back, of course, the oldest literature is drama.

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Drama is much older than the novel.

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But going back to old drama and as far as writing is concerned, the Bible beyond murder has always fascinated human beings.

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The reason why people should step over that invisible line which separates the murderer from the rest of us,

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I mean, it remains perennially interesting,

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I think, but it certainly is the it's a form of popular writing, which is particularly successful and particularly popular in difficult times.

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Times of unrest, times of war, times of depression.

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When it is possible for people to feel that no matter how much money you part of the problem, how many social workers you part of the problem.

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Something like a bright young people's crime in inner cities seems beyond our ability to solve.

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So here you have a form of writing where there is a problem of the heart, and by the end of the book, that problem is going to be solved.

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Not by good luck, not by human intervention, but by a human being, by human intelligence and human perseverance and human courage.

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And that's very that's very satisfying. And I think that's probably at the root of it is quite extraordinary.

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How many very, very clever and emotive people love detective fiction.

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It surprises me, really, that they do and they continue to.

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And I think, you know, that if we were sort of left stranded in some foreign city because three flights have been cancelled and

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we have to wait next day for a flight and then we're in this strange hotel and life is very boring.

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And if we found in on the bedside table two books, one, the winner of a prestigious prize and the other of Agatha Christie.

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I think I know which one most travellers would reach out for.

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We've been talking fresh about mostly UK writers in every everywhere.

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We mustn't forget that other countries have an enormous amount of literature, especially,

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I think recently we've seen it in some of the Scandinavian countries, haven't we?

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Well, I think it's interesting that there are nearly always Protestant countries.

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People have made this point, which is interesting.

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And of course I have a whole chapter on the detective writer in America, the sort of so-called hard boiled school.

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Someone said that some Roman Catholic countries have a confession and the reading, the crime writer.

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Crime fiction is a way of getting rid of guilt, and they can go to confession and get rid of it.

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If we have to read crime fiction, it's perhaps a little sort of far fetched, but it is curious.

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Romans used to say Khomeini's, quote, send ten times as many men as there are opinions about why you do things.

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Your classes. No doubt that's what it means.

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I've not mentioned the wonderful cartoons which feature I think in every chapter in this book.

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I think Particularly Marvellous is the one about The Hound of the Baskervilles.

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I think that is the funniest every best wish to talking about the detective both to you fellows and also, of course, to the Bodleian.

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Thank you.