The. Many of your friends, Phyllis,
were delighted to know that another book from you is on the publisher's shelves and it's called Talking About Detective Fiction.
How did it all come about? Well, it began as long ago as 2006,
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.
And I decided that it would be a great pleasure to do it,
not only because of my huge admiration for the library, but I wasn't ready to start another novel.
And you know how it is. We writers are never happy unless they're either plotting, planning or writing.
The royalties on talking about detective fiction or going to the body.
And I wonder why you must have some affection for the dear old place.
Is that right? Anyone who has any contact with Oxford knows about the Bodleian.
It has one of the greatest libraries of the world.
And of course, it's not only for scholars, it's for everyone who is interested in books and wants information.
Some people have heard of Cambridge, haven't they, as well as Oxford?
Some people. And I just wonder. There are far more crime writers that we associate with Oxford,
who you shouldn't be surprised about this because you have made Oxford the most murderous city in the whole of the United Kingdom.
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,
the murder capital of the United Kingdom, and the present count, where that final count for most was 91 corpses.
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.
Adam DAVIES can't possibly compete with that.
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.
And these days we drifted towards a sort of a different nomenclature with the crime novel.
Can you explain a little more, more fully then than that?
Well, if we go back to the so-called Golden Age, the plot was absolutely dominant.
The story was dominant. It had to be a puzzle and it had to be an ingenious puzzle.
And people had to be killed in very clever, ingenious ways.
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,
a matchstick figure on the stairs with a corpse, and the characters had to serve the plot.
The characters tended to be stereotypes, really.
They particularly are really and are Agatha Christie when you get the same sort of characters over and over again.
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,
of course, is still vitally important. The mystery is important.
So it has to be credible in the old days.
Very often, I mean, with Agatha Christie, you love the book and at the end you realise it could never possibly happen like that.
Part of the attraction of mayhem, the mysteries, is that they are not only entertaining, but they take people into an entirely different world.
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.
Whereas if we go back into this comfortable village where Miss Marple lives, for example, it's peaceful, you know,
as the vicar might find a body on the study floor, but it doesn't much interfere with the Sunday sermon.
And it's all solved by Euros, Grace Owls or Miss Marple with her knitting.
And then the little village is absolutely transformed peacefully again until the next murder happens.
And that is rather reassuring to read. Order is restored at the end.
Yes, yes, I agree. So the detective story is immensely satisfying to write because it's so difficult to do well.
The ones I've written that are not strictly detective stories would be much easier to write.
And somebody said, You've got to produce a novel in a month or else terrible things will happen to you.
Or I could produce a novel and so could you. But it wouldn't be a detective story.
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?
Well, I do. I don't much care what room I write in as long as I have a comfortable chair, a large table.
To hold all my research material and the good old thesaurus and dictionary and so on and the good light.
And is Father Pleasant? If I can make coffee very close to the kitchen is rather a good place.
Really. For years I've had exactly the same method of writing a book.
I like writing by hand. Some of my friends, I think Ruth Rendell, really?
Ruth actually writes on her computer.
But you do feel perhaps that that this direct contact between pen and paper rather helps and hinders you?
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.
I like that feeling. And I think what one has to do in a crime is to hold a creative tension,
to integrate the different parts of the book, the setting, the characterisation, the plot and the scene.
All of those have to join together and really produce a wonderful whole.
In general, you seem to be able to convey this sense of understanding,
both from the point of view of the victim and from the point of view of the murderer.
Well, I think it's helped by the fact that I write by changing the viewpoint.
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.
I'm entering into that person's mind. I am that person.
When I'm writing about that person, I'm feeling as that person feels.
And of course, this leads people to say, I'm surprised you believe this stuff.
And the other don't you find with your writing, they muddle up the writer with the character.
But the whole thing about being a writer is that you're able to sympathise with all these views and convey them.
Without that, I think you become a cruel writer or a writer without humanity.
And writers, in fact, can be brilliant, technically, and write brilliantly.
And sometimes at the end, one feels this book has no humanity in it.
The horror genre seems to be extraordinarily fascinating to the vast majority of people.
I think it probably is the most popular form of popular writing.
And whenever one goes into bookshops bookshop where it is crime or detective writing shelves of childhood shelves.
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.
Something happens and it's usually something pretty exciting.
Then I think there's the puzzle. People love a puzzle.
I don't think this is the most important aspect really, Colin, because if it were, we would never reread that detective story.
And I love rereading my favourites, although I know whodunit.
But they do love a puzzle and it has to be a fair puzzle.
But of course,
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.
But it is reassuring. It is a very moral point of view because it says that even the most unpopular person,
even an evil person, has a right to live his or her life to the last natural moment.
That murder is never justified. That murder is the unique crime and that when it happens in any civilised society,
the whole of the resources of the police force will be directed to try to discover who did it.
So that is comforting. I think I'm always a bit disappointed when it's not a murder that they're doing.
I mean, if somebody steals a tin of salmon from the supermarket, it's difficult to sustain interest for 450 pages, isn't it?
But it's exactly so. And I say in the book that people are much more interested, you know,
in who killed and brutally killed and Augusta than who who stole her diamond necklace when she was on holiday Bournemouth.
And it's all together there. Is that the fact that it is murder and murder is fascinating because from time immemorial,
I mean, when we look at old literature going back, of course, the oldest literature is drama.
Drama is much older than the novel.
But going back to old drama and as far as writing is concerned, the Bible beyond murder has always fascinated human beings.
The reason why people should step over that invisible line which separates the murderer from the rest of us,
I mean, it remains perennially interesting,
I think, but it certainly is the it's a form of popular writing, which is particularly successful and particularly popular in difficult times.
Times of unrest, times of war, times of depression.
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.
Something like a bright young people's crime in inner cities seems beyond our ability to solve.
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.
Not by good luck, not by human intervention, but by a human being, by human intelligence and human perseverance and human courage.
And that's very that's very satisfying. And I think that's probably at the root of it is quite extraordinary.
How many very, very clever and emotive people love detective fiction.
It surprises me, really, that they do and they continue to.
And I think, you know, that if we were sort of left stranded in some foreign city because three flights have been cancelled and
we have to wait next day for a flight and then we're in this strange hotel and life is very boring.
And if we found in on the bedside table two books, one, the winner of a prestigious prize and the other of Agatha Christie.
I think I know which one most travellers would reach out for.
We've been talking fresh about mostly UK writers in every everywhere.
We mustn't forget that other countries have an enormous amount of literature, especially,
I think recently we've seen it in some of the Scandinavian countries, haven't we?
Well, I think it's interesting that there are nearly always Protestant countries.
People have made this point, which is interesting.
And of course I have a whole chapter on the detective writer in America, the sort of so-called hard boiled school.
Someone said that some Roman Catholic countries have a confession and the reading, the crime writer.
Crime fiction is a way of getting rid of guilt, and they can go to confession and get rid of it.
If we have to read crime fiction, it's perhaps a little sort of far fetched, but it is curious.
Romans used to say Khomeini's, quote, send ten times as many men as there are opinions about why you do things.
Your classes. No doubt that's what it means.
I've not mentioned the wonderful cartoons which feature I think in every chapter in this book.
I think Particularly Marvellous is the one about The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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.
Thank you.