Author Archives: markrgreen1815

Also at the conference: The Barbican Library

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We were delighted to welcome as part of the conference our friends at the Barbican Library with a stand for delegates to browse through samples from their amazing Golden Age Crime Collection. 

The collection was acquired in the mid-1980s, largely through the efforts of the then Director of City of London Libraries, Melvyn Barnes. Melvyn has never held truck with the snobbery about detective fiction in certain circles and is the author of Murder in Print: A Guide to Two Centuries of Crime Fiction.

I was delighted to find when I checked their catalogue that one of the speakers’ recommended list books, of which I hadn’t been able to get a copy, was there. 

I was even more delighted to discover that if I turned up with proof of address at the Barbican Library, I could become a member and immediately take out the rare book in question on loan for 3 weeks. 

How good is that? Don’t you just love our fantastic library services?

Some reminders of the day

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Jake Kerridge and Martin Edwards discuss What and When Was The Golden Age?


B A Pike discusses Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham

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Simon Brett and Martin Edwards discuss The Detection Club and its Collaborative Novels

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Meanwhile in the foyer…The Barbican Library stand with examples from their Crime Classics collection and the British Library Pop Up Shop.

Richard Reynolds discusses The Oxbridge Murders
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Rob Davies (the British Library), Dr John Curran, and David Brawn (Harper Collins) discuss Publishing the Golden Age


Tony Medawar explains Howdunnit? Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes


Dolores Gordon-Smith discusses Tracking Down The Murderer: Freeman Wills Crofts


Dr John Curran discusses Agatha Christie’s Influences

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L C Tyler discusses Taking The Golden Age into the 21st Century

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Ripe For A Reprint panel explaining their selections.

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Bodies From The Library team: Liz Cooper and Susan Cooper

Big thank you to our partners: the British Library and Harper Collins

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Every delegate at the conference received a goody bag which contained the British Library Crime Classics edition of Death of an Airman by Christopher St John Sprigg ( a name that sounds like it was a pseudonym of the type favoured by many Golden Age authors but it isn’t).

The British Library also gave delegates exclusive opportunity to buy the new British Library Crime Classics book Quick Curtain by Alan Nelville at their pop up bookstore at the conference before it goes on general sale on 1st July.


Harper Collins very generously included in the goody bags one of three new Collins Crime Club editions of classic Edmund Crispin mysteries featuring his Oxford don detective Gervase Fen.

Harper Collins also provided in each goody bag one of three historic Golden Age novels in new hardback Detective Story Club/Collins Crime Club editions with introductions by our own Dr John Curran, Martin Edwards and David Brawn.

We hope delegates enjoy reading whichever of the books they got in their own goody bag.

Huge thanks to delegates at the conference

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We were delighted to see you all. 

If we didn’t get opportunity to speak to all of you we just wanted you to know that we were thrilled so many people came and we hope you had a great day. 

We will be sending you feedback forms so you can tell us what you liked, what we could do better, and, most importantly, what you would like to see at future Bodies From The Library conferences. 

See you all again!

Trollope pops up for The Bodies From The Library Conference

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You might be forgiven for thinking that there can be little in common between one of the great Victorian authors and golden age detective fiction other than his prolific output which bears comparison with Agatha Christie (47 novels from Trollope against 66 for Christie with 6 more as Mary Westmacott).

Indeed Trollope thought nothing of reassuring his readers almost from the outset of a novel that the hero and heroine will get together in the end whatever trials and tribulations they might go through during the course of the novel, whereas the detective fiction genre by its very nature seeks to conceal and misdirect the readers about the ending. However, closer reading reveals some interesting points in common.

There is a prevailing sense that there is a rightness and orderliness to which life should conform. Trollope was by nature conservative and liked the social order to be maintained. He may show internal struggles between high and low church camps in the Church of England but does not like to see this struggle spill over into the public domain disturbing the population of Barchester at large. The same desire for order to be restored after it has been disturbed by the events related in the crime novel is a core part of the appeal of golden age detective stories – the killer is caught and justice is done (though not always through the formal judicial system).

There is an understanding of money as a key motivator in human events. Whether it is the agonising of Mark Robarts over the debts he has brought upon himself in Framley Parsonage or in the colossal swindling of Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, Trollope shows how money, the greed for more of it, and the painful exigencies to which the lack of it drives people is behind so many of our actions. Often there is dependence of one generation on the prospective inheritance from the previous generation that drives people to act as they do.

So what type of detective fiction might Trollope write. Some might suggest he would be into “cozies”. Few would consider him “hard-boiled” or “noir”. And though his plots might not be as tightly wrought as “golden age” authors, his psychological insights, especially into women, would place him alongside the finest writers of the genre such as Ruth Rendell or P D James. 

“Discuss!” As they used to say on exam papers. 

Last Few Days Before The Conference

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I have been away for a few days and after I finished packing my bag, I downloaded four novels from the speakers’ recommended lists: The May Week Murders by Douglas Brown, Death’s Bright Dart by V C Clinton-Baddeley, The Case With Nine Solutions by J J Connington and Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts. 

I think it is just marvellous that I can buy these books in seconds and pack them for holiday reading without taking up any space in my bag. 

It is also fantastic to see so much Golden Age detective fiction available again through e-publication after years of obscurity and being out of print. 

Looking forward to discussing these and other related topics at the British Library on Saturday. 

A Three Pipe Problem

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This week I have read The Norwich Victims by Francis Beeding, Fire Burn! by John Dickson Carr (which I picked up for just £1 the previous week at the Book Barn – what a bargain) and The Greene Murder Case by S S Van Dine. I found the historic setting of Fire Burn! gave it a very different feel. I am not sure I go for the bang on the head/time travel book-ending of the story but then it worked for the TV series Life on Mars though that only went back to the 1970’s rather than 1829 as Dickson Carr chose to do.

One of the peculiarities of manner which emerged about the pre-Victorians was their prudish reaction to the excesses of the earlier Regency era.  So along with keeping one’s hat on indoors, and always wearing gloves (useful for those of a criminal disposition), there was the treatment of smoking which is not a million miles from the modern almost blanket ban anywhere civilised. A female charcter notes to a male character that she can tell he has been smoking but doesn’t mind even though she ought to do so.

This makes such a change from the usual Golden Age novel set 100 years later. Then everybody smokes, the only question is what? Of course, pipes are favoured by some of the cerebral detectives (following Holmes we see Wimsey and Campion both indulging in pipes at one time or another). Others go for cigars (Gervase Fen, Roger Sheringham  et al – as well as Wimsey and Campion when social occasions require it). Cigarettes are more the preserve of the police detectives (Inspector Martin) or Americans (Philo Vance – though, to confuse the issue, he speaks with an effete, laconic drawl in the finest Wimsey or Campion tradition).

Women tend to smoke less, however, and this can be a pointer to their moral and hence criminal tendencies – I won’t give examples to avoid spoilers but you have been warned! Note to self – must check if Harriet Vane smoked in Strong Poison – now that would have been a red herring though it could be a marker laid down by Dorothy Sayers that Vane is in the feminist vanguard.