Crime Thrillers - Our Favourite Fiction
‘Crime thrillers are the most borrowed books from British libraries.’ That item of news was reported by the national press in 2012 and was repeated after another survey in 2016. Here we are now in 2021 and if you have been visiting your local library or looking in your local bookshop window you surely won’t need an eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes to tell you that crime thrillers still enjoy mass popularity with the book-buying and book-borrowing public.
Back in 2012 and 2016 the American author James Patterson was the top ranking author in the crime and thriller genre. Close behind was Lee Child – born in England but by then a USA resident. Ian Rankin from Edinburgh was the only British-born author in the top ten. As of today in 2021 well I don’t know about you but in the front shop window or shelf there seems always to be a proliferation of Peter James, Peter May, Cathy Reichs ... oh and a certain Robert Galbraith a.k.a. J.K. Rowling.
Photo: British Library, Euston Road, London, 2013.
‘Crime thrillers are the most borrowed books from British libraries.’ That item of news was reported by the national press in 2012 and was repeated after another survey in 2016. Here we are now in 2021 and if you have been visiting your local library or looking in your local bookshop window you surely won’t need an eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes to tell you that crime thrillers still enjoy mass popularity with the book-buying and book-borrowing public.
Back in 2012 and 2016 the American author James Patterson was the top ranking author in the crime and thriller genre. Close behind was Lee Child – born in England but by then a USA resident. Ian Rankin from Edinburgh was the only British-born author in the top ten. As of today in 2021 well I don’t know about you but in the front shop window or shelf there seems always to be a proliferation of Peter James, Peter May, Cathy Reichs ... oh and a certain Robert Galbraith a.k.a. J.K. Rowling.
Photo: British Library, Euston Road, London, 2013.
Back in 2017 when St Paul’s Cray library featured crime and thriller books they chose a wide variety of authors in their imaginative Watching the Detectives display. Fashions come and fashions go: the late P.D. James and Ruth Rendell were popular big sellers in their day whereas the likes of Jo Nesbo represent a much more recent vogue for Scandinavian crime noir. Mark Billingham, Peter James and Ian Rankin are leading lights amongst a strong cavalcade of British-born contemporary crime writers. There are many more.
Let's move on now to a notable centenary in 2021 marking one hundred years since the debut of a very famous detective invented by the celebrated 'Queen of Mystery' -the unequalled Agatha Christie.
Photo: St Paul's Cray Library, 2017
Let's move on now to a notable centenary in 2021 marking one hundred years since the debut of a very famous detective invented by the celebrated 'Queen of Mystery' -the unequalled Agatha Christie.
Photo: St Paul's Cray Library, 2017
A Celebrated Centenary: 1921 to 2021 marks the one hundredth anniversary of Agatha Christie's groundbreaking classic debut crime fiction story The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
During the week of 18th to 22nd January 2021 the BBC marked a very special crime thriller centenary. They aired again on Radio Four Extra a classic recording from 2005 of Agatha Christie’s first-ever murder mystery story The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The book was published exactly one hundred years ago in 1921. It was a groundbreaking and enduring classic. It marked the debut of Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. She wrote it in her early twenties after her sister had challenged her to try her hand at crime fiction.
It is critically important to emphasise that Agatha Christie, in this book, invented many of the conventions of the classic crime country house locked room murder mystery. The Mysterious Affair at Styles created a template that she and many other authors would use enduringly afterwards.
Here are some of the conventions:
-The amateur detective will outsmart the police and will unveil the murderer and explain ‘whodunit’ while the police still are baffled.
-The suspects will be confined to the small number of residents of the country house and any visitors staying there at the time of the murder. The list can also include other people in the village that live close by. However, it is a strict convention that the murderer must not be one of the servants.
-The corpse is usually to be found shot, stabbed or poisoned inside a room whose door is locked on the inside. The room has no other feasible means of ingress e.g. no one could have got in through a window or down a chimney.
-At the end of the story all the suspects will be gathered in the drawing room and there the amateur detective will unveil the murderer.
We can also note, surely, that the popular murder mystery board game Cluedo replicates the original Agatha Christie formula.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles is set in wartime 1916. Captain Hastings comes to stay at Styles in a sleepy East Anglian village while on leave from the front. The old lady Mrs Inglethorp, the owner, dies – apparently poisoned. Captain Hastings learns that his old friend Hercule Poirot the retired Belgian police officer is staying nearby in a resort home for Belgian refugees. He suggests that Poirot tries to solve The Mysterious Affair at Styles! Incidentally in the BBC Radio Four recording the character of Poirot is played by the legendary John Moffatt who for Agatha Christie fans of a certain age will always be THE one and only Poirot, with apologies to the great David Suchet who of course is the face and voice of Poirot for a whole generation of a subsequent television audience. John Moffatt (1922 – 2012) starred as Poirot in twenty-five radio productions. It is interesting to note [see above] how Poirot was depicted on the front cover of one of the very earliest published editions of his debut story The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
During the week of 18th to 22nd January 2021 the BBC marked a very special crime thriller centenary. They aired again on Radio Four Extra a classic recording from 2005 of Agatha Christie’s first-ever murder mystery story The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The book was published exactly one hundred years ago in 1921. It was a groundbreaking and enduring classic. It marked the debut of Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. She wrote it in her early twenties after her sister had challenged her to try her hand at crime fiction.
It is critically important to emphasise that Agatha Christie, in this book, invented many of the conventions of the classic crime country house locked room murder mystery. The Mysterious Affair at Styles created a template that she and many other authors would use enduringly afterwards.
Here are some of the conventions:
-The amateur detective will outsmart the police and will unveil the murderer and explain ‘whodunit’ while the police still are baffled.
-The suspects will be confined to the small number of residents of the country house and any visitors staying there at the time of the murder. The list can also include other people in the village that live close by. However, it is a strict convention that the murderer must not be one of the servants.
-The corpse is usually to be found shot, stabbed or poisoned inside a room whose door is locked on the inside. The room has no other feasible means of ingress e.g. no one could have got in through a window or down a chimney.
-At the end of the story all the suspects will be gathered in the drawing room and there the amateur detective will unveil the murderer.
We can also note, surely, that the popular murder mystery board game Cluedo replicates the original Agatha Christie formula.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles is set in wartime 1916. Captain Hastings comes to stay at Styles in a sleepy East Anglian village while on leave from the front. The old lady Mrs Inglethorp, the owner, dies – apparently poisoned. Captain Hastings learns that his old friend Hercule Poirot the retired Belgian police officer is staying nearby in a resort home for Belgian refugees. He suggests that Poirot tries to solve The Mysterious Affair at Styles! Incidentally in the BBC Radio Four recording the character of Poirot is played by the legendary John Moffatt who for Agatha Christie fans of a certain age will always be THE one and only Poirot, with apologies to the great David Suchet who of course is the face and voice of Poirot for a whole generation of a subsequent television audience. John Moffatt (1922 – 2012) starred as Poirot in twenty-five radio productions. It is interesting to note [see above] how Poirot was depicted on the front cover of one of the very earliest published editions of his debut story The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
A Crime Thriller in St Mary Cray!
Introducing: Carruthers of the Crays
... the 1960s and the Cold War
Are there any crime fiction stories set in St Mary Cray and the Crays? Many leading detectives are associated with specific and recognizable real places. Jim Bergerac in Jersey … Roy Grace in Brighton … Vera Stanhope in Newcastle … and not forgetting Pearl Nolan whose cosy crime capers are set in Whitstable, Kent via the pen of Julie Wassmer. But what of Carruthers of the Crays? He has a readership-in-waiting and via the pages of Cray 150 please let me warmly commend him to all who may never have heard of him, until now …
James Carruthers alias Teddy Towler alias Alf Arber:
It is only today that classified War Office files have been opened, revealing the dramatic story of secret agent James Carruthers alias Teddy Towler alias Alf Arber.
Carruthers single-handedly and bravely went undercover in the Crays in the 1960s trailing a Communist spy cell that was known to be operating in the district. Radio-boffins at the British Ministry had intercepted and decoded messages that they knew Moscow was receiving from a transmitter situated at high level somewhere in the Cray Valley. Was it operating from a factory rooftop, perhaps? – or from a top-floor flat in a high-rise residential tower block?
Carruthers swapped his pinstripe suit for a set of oily overalls, flat cap and packet of Woodbine cigarettes, and reinvented himself as Teddy Towler, newly resident in the Crays area and son of a Bermondsey docker. He worked first as a lathe operator at Morphy-Richards, but then took a job at Tip Top Bakeries, working the night shift. That freed up the daylight hours for him to patrol the streets of St Mary Cray and St Paul’s Cray keeping his eyes skinned for anything suspicious.
Carruthers had a brainwave: if any Russians were living in the area, where were they buying their vodka? He made enquiries at the local off-licences. A visit to one in Cotmandene Crescent gave Carruthers a vital clue that he was on to something. The proprietor informed him that “A furriner bloke was in ‘ere last week. ‘E wanted a brand of vodka I’d never ‘erd of. It was called Vladi Nora. I told ‘im: I don’t stock it, mate.”
Carruthers duly kept watch on the premises for the next few days, hoping that the mysterious foreigner might return and purchase some vodka. But on the morning of the fifth day, a shock was waiting for Carruthers: during the night, the off-licence had been fire-bombed.
Carruthers knew that his cover had been blown. Teddy Towler must disappear immediately. And so Carruthers adopted a new disguise. Borrowing a bicycle, donning a Gannex raincoat and a pair of spectacles with thick jam-jar lenses, Carruthers became Alf Arber the collector of the weekly Cray Wanderers FC tote fund. By this ruse, wheeling his bike round the district and knocking on multiple doors of houses and flats, Carruthers eventually located the secret radio, and used a hammer to smash it to pieces.
Details of this heroic operation by Carruthers were put under fifty-year seal as required by the Official Secrets Act. What became of Carruthers? A further mystery surrounds this. In 1993 at a flat in Moscow, undertakers investigated the papers of the late Alexi Androvski who had died, leaving a widow by the name of Olga Legova. When searching the contents of a bedroom drawer they made a startling discovery: tucked between the pages of an England v Germany World Cup Final programme of 1966 was the original birth certificate of James Carruthers.
Had Carruthers been brainwashed to become a Communist, whereupon he had defected to the USSR? Had he been honey-trapped by the delectable Madame Legova? Or was he only posing as a defector, while engaged in further espionage for the West? There may never be a solution to this remarkable and hitherto unpublicised mystery. Some people doubt that James Carruthers ever existed at all, and they suspect that I have made all this up …
Short Story (or do we mean Tall Story?) by Jerry Dowlen
Introducing: Carruthers of the Crays
... the 1960s and the Cold War
Are there any crime fiction stories set in St Mary Cray and the Crays? Many leading detectives are associated with specific and recognizable real places. Jim Bergerac in Jersey … Roy Grace in Brighton … Vera Stanhope in Newcastle … and not forgetting Pearl Nolan whose cosy crime capers are set in Whitstable, Kent via the pen of Julie Wassmer. But what of Carruthers of the Crays? He has a readership-in-waiting and via the pages of Cray 150 please let me warmly commend him to all who may never have heard of him, until now …
James Carruthers alias Teddy Towler alias Alf Arber:
It is only today that classified War Office files have been opened, revealing the dramatic story of secret agent James Carruthers alias Teddy Towler alias Alf Arber.
Carruthers single-handedly and bravely went undercover in the Crays in the 1960s trailing a Communist spy cell that was known to be operating in the district. Radio-boffins at the British Ministry had intercepted and decoded messages that they knew Moscow was receiving from a transmitter situated at high level somewhere in the Cray Valley. Was it operating from a factory rooftop, perhaps? – or from a top-floor flat in a high-rise residential tower block?
Carruthers swapped his pinstripe suit for a set of oily overalls, flat cap and packet of Woodbine cigarettes, and reinvented himself as Teddy Towler, newly resident in the Crays area and son of a Bermondsey docker. He worked first as a lathe operator at Morphy-Richards, but then took a job at Tip Top Bakeries, working the night shift. That freed up the daylight hours for him to patrol the streets of St Mary Cray and St Paul’s Cray keeping his eyes skinned for anything suspicious.
Carruthers had a brainwave: if any Russians were living in the area, where were they buying their vodka? He made enquiries at the local off-licences. A visit to one in Cotmandene Crescent gave Carruthers a vital clue that he was on to something. The proprietor informed him that “A furriner bloke was in ‘ere last week. ‘E wanted a brand of vodka I’d never ‘erd of. It was called Vladi Nora. I told ‘im: I don’t stock it, mate.”
Carruthers duly kept watch on the premises for the next few days, hoping that the mysterious foreigner might return and purchase some vodka. But on the morning of the fifth day, a shock was waiting for Carruthers: during the night, the off-licence had been fire-bombed.
Carruthers knew that his cover had been blown. Teddy Towler must disappear immediately. And so Carruthers adopted a new disguise. Borrowing a bicycle, donning a Gannex raincoat and a pair of spectacles with thick jam-jar lenses, Carruthers became Alf Arber the collector of the weekly Cray Wanderers FC tote fund. By this ruse, wheeling his bike round the district and knocking on multiple doors of houses and flats, Carruthers eventually located the secret radio, and used a hammer to smash it to pieces.
Details of this heroic operation by Carruthers were put under fifty-year seal as required by the Official Secrets Act. What became of Carruthers? A further mystery surrounds this. In 1993 at a flat in Moscow, undertakers investigated the papers of the late Alexi Androvski who had died, leaving a widow by the name of Olga Legova. When searching the contents of a bedroom drawer they made a startling discovery: tucked between the pages of an England v Germany World Cup Final programme of 1966 was the original birth certificate of James Carruthers.
Had Carruthers been brainwashed to become a Communist, whereupon he had defected to the USSR? Had he been honey-trapped by the delectable Madame Legova? Or was he only posing as a defector, while engaged in further espionage for the West? There may never be a solution to this remarkable and hitherto unpublicised mystery. Some people doubt that James Carruthers ever existed at all, and they suspect that I have made all this up …
Short Story (or do we mean Tall Story?) by Jerry Dowlen