A Database on European Crime Fiction, You Say?

Crime fiction is growing in popularity around the world, and the recent burst of Scandinavian crime fiction on the bestseller lists is yet another marker of that growth. So it only makes sense that the academic world is taking notice, spearheaded in Europe by the International Crime Fiction Group based at Queen’s University of Belfast. The group brings together scholars from disciplines such as literature, film studies and cultural history in a series of initiatives to study various aspect of the genre.

Recently, they sponsored a symposium at the British Library titled "Towards a Digital Atlas of European Crime Fiction?", investigating how to harvest the catalogs of the 48 European national libraries to analyze the transnational spread of crime fiction (including books, covers, authors, films, etc.)  with the help of maps and graphs. Hopefully, this will not only help the libraries involved create virtual as well as physical exhibitions based on their collections, including book covers and illustrations, it will benefit crime fiction authors, too, thanks to online resources coming soon.

There's already a strong scholarly crime fiction presence in Europe, including such institutions as the Library of Crime Literature (Bilipo) a Parisian public library exclusively concerned with crime-themed publications (which journalist Brad Spurgeon discusses in this blog post). And, if you happen to be in London early this summer, check out the London exhibition "Forensics: The anatomy of crime" at the Wellcome Collection through June 21.

Author R&R with Roger Herst

Roger Herst stops by In Reference to Murder today for some Author R&R. He's an ordained Reform Rabbi with a doctorate in Middle Eastern History who developed a passion for stories while delivering sermons from the pulpit. He's now written nine novels, including the latest, Nunavut: An Arctic Thriller, a David and Goliath story of the Inuit people’s fight to protect their native land and waterways from a Russian conspiracy to steal its resources and wealth for themselves.

Herst talks more about his approach to researching and writing the novel:

 

As a rabbi I have always been swimming in stories. Jewish tradition is largely about telling and retelling stories, first of our ancestors, then of our brethren and finally about ourselves. My first blush with writing stories was an attempt to flush out the narratives of Genesis, much like Thomas Mann and Leon Feutwanger. I thought I knew these mythological characters, but the Bible only provided skeletons. Yes, it was pure temerity (chutzpah) to tamper with the sacred text. But I was young and bold. When I started delivering these stories in place of normal sermons, the attention of my congregants grew. Some of these stories stuck to their bones for years! They let me know that people learn about themselves through stories about other people.

But I never wanted to be a Jewish novelist, so my first book published by Doubleday was about the crew of a nuclear submarine buried under the polar icepack. Since I had never been on a submarine I needed to rely upon my imagination, which during the creation of this work I learned to respect. Most of the data for the story was then classified by the Navy, thus I had imagine what might be true rather than what I knew to be so. Naval friends read the manuscript and kept me on track. Miraculously, it worked.

Yet my Jewish roots tugged upon me. It is often admonished to write about what you know. But I felt I knew too much about the Jewish community and didn’t want to wash dirty laundry in public. I avoided the subject until my scruples dissipated and I wrote “Rabbi Gabrielle’s Scandal,” about a young, vibrant, ambitious professional who defends a rapist in court and alienates her female friends and imperils her profession. I never started to write a series about Rabbi Gabrielle, but she grew into another story about the illicit gun trade in Washington DC. And that followed by another about an arson and then a robbery, a confrontation with the Vatican over a Dead Sea fragment and finally about launching a peace plan between the Palestinians and Israelis. Having her engaged in romances was tricky because I knew I never really wanted her to get married off, in a situation where the readers would know who she was sleeping with. Nor did I want her to be a goody-goody professional, always on the right side of every issue and always sacrificing her own interests for other. No, Gabrielle had to be a real full-blooded womanin the trenches, giving blows as well as receiving them.

After six such novels, it was time to return to non-Jewish books. “Destiny’s Children” told a tale of an immigrant Chinese laborer who arrives in California to build track for the intercontinental railroad. Far from his home and speaking no English he must make a new life in California and succeeds in a generational saga of two utterly different families who bond during the difficult years of the 1860s.

My soon to be published novel, “Nunavut, an Arctic Thriller,” reflects on the Inuit people who in 1999 were granted by the Canadian government the largest parcel of land and water ever bestowed upon an indigenous population. At the time, who understood the implications of Global Warming on the prospects of extracting Nunavut’s vast mineral resources?  The heroine is a female veterinarian who follows the mythic path of Sedna the Inuit goddess of the sea and ministers to sick creatures of the ocean. And in so doing she becomes involved in an international intrigue to challenge this young and inexperienced nation’s survival.

One tale seems to engender another.  A new character begs for more space, so my journey continues bringing this author much joy.

 

Read more about Roger Herst and his books on his website: http://rogerherst.com/. Nunvaut: An Artic Thriller is available now on Amazon.com.

The Golden Age of Murder

Regular readers of this blog may know Martin Edwards as a fellow contributor to the weekly Friday's Forgotten Books feature, but he's best known as an award-winning crime novelist whose Lake District Mysteries have been optioned by ITV.  Elected to the Detection Club in 2008, he became the first Archivist of the Club, and serves as Archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association. He's also the consulting editor for the vintage mystery reprints being published by the British Library.

Renowned as the leading expert on the history of Golden Age detective fiction, he won the Crimefest Mastermind Quiz three times, and possesses one of Britain’s finest collections of Golden Age novels, including unique inscribed books and manuscripts. So it's not surprising his new book is The Golden Age of Murder, which investigates how Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and fellow colleagues in a mysterious literary group called the Detection Club transformed crime fiction, writing books that cast new light on unsolved murders while hiding clues to their authors’ darkest secrets.

As part of his blog tour celebrating the publication of the book, he's stopping by the blog today to talk about how he got interested in books that delve into the backstory of crime fiction:

 

I first became fascinated by books that fall, more or less, within the term “crime reference” when I was still a teenager. This was when I came across the recently published first edition of Bloody Murder by Julian Symons. His history of the crime fiction genre fascinated me, and it’s still one of my favourite, and most-read, books.

Symons was a crime novelist of distinction – if you don’t know his work, it really is worth checking out, especially The Man Who Killed Himself, The Man Whose Dreams Came True, and Sweet Adelaide – and this gave him a real understanding into the nature of writing detective fiction. His arguments were cogent, and he highlighted many interesting books that I enjoyed immensely once I’d tracked them down.

That isn’t to say that I agreed with everything he wrote. I was even cheeky enough to write him a fan letter which told him how much I liked his book, but questioned something he’d said. Oh, the impudence of youth! He responded with a very interesting and generous letter, something for which I’ll always be grateful.

Symons admired, as I do, Agatha Christie and Anthony Berkeley, but I feel he was rather harsh about Dorothy L. Sayers, and too dismissive of Henry Wade. He also under-estimated the range of Golden Age detective fiction, in my opinion, perhaps because he was more interested in novels of psychological suspense. His book has – rightly – been highly influential, but perhaps it has contributed to a feeling that Golden Age mysteries were, for the most part, lacking in quality.

Well, I’m also a contemporary crime novelist, but I think it’s a mistake to under-estimate the writers of the past, and I’ve tried to make that case in The Golden Age of Murder. The book is the product of decades of reading, and years of planning and research (not to mention endless re-writing...) In fact, the more I’ve investigated the people who wrote Golden Age fiction, the more I’ve become intrigued. They really were a remarkable bunch of people.

My book is very different from Bloody Murder. For a start, it covers a much shorter time span – the emphasis is on the authors and books of the Thirties, although I’ve managed to sneak in plenty of material from before and after that remarkable decade in the world’s history. But one thing’s for sure. If readers enjoy my book half as much as I’ve loved reading and re-reading Bloody Murder, I’ll be very well satisfied.

 

The Golden Age of Murder is available via in both print and digital formats via all the major brick-and-mortar and online retailers. To get you started, here are the Indiebound and Amazon Kindle global links, so you can grab your copy today!