I woke to a detective story. Maybe I had left the radio on, in our pebbledashed family home in Cheam, the storm black and loud outside; I must have fallen asleep while Capital Radio jukeboxed tunes at my bedside. When I woke it was to a particular line, and I’ll never forget it. “She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.” The voice was nasal, a little like Bob Dylan. There was a rasping guitar. I was 11. I didn’t even know what filing nails was.
There was no rewind on the radio, so the haunting words drifted away like smoke rings from a cigarette as I fell back to sleep. I would have to listen out to hear them again, find out whose voice that was and whose guitar. It turned out to be my introduction to Elvis Costello. The song, Watching the Detectives, was not only his first real hit – I like to think it was my first murder mystery. I’m still not sure what’s happening in it, except that somehow a murder on the TV is communicating danger to the woman watching the screen with her lover: “She looks so good that he gets down and begs.”
If Elvis was my King, Agatha became Queen. Soon after I heard the detective song, my mum said ‘You might enjoy this’ and handed me my first whodunnit. The book was Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, published in 1938.
Mum was giving it to me nearly 40 years after publication, and here we are, nearly 50 years on from that mother-son exchange, and I still remember its shocking setup. An old man with lots of money, Simeon Lee, calls his family together to announce he is revising his will. He seems to be deliberately annoying them, and he goes too far. Before he gets to change the will, they hear a crashing sound. He has died in a locked room. The only clue is a piece of rubber on the floor. I’ll take you no further into the story, in case you are reading it now.
The thing that jumped out at me was not the murder but the dedication on the very first page. “My dear James,” wrote Agatha to her brother-in-law. “You complained that my murders were getting too refined. Anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a ‘good violent murder with lots of blood’. A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder! So this is your special story written for you. I hope it may please. Agatha.”
No sooner had I read the last page of my first Agatha Christie than the author herself was dead. I saw the headline on a cold January morning at a newsagent: MOUSETRAP THEATRE LIGHTS DIMMED TO HONOUR QUEEN OF CRIME.
It is a strange thing to say, but it felt like my first bereavement. I had lost no one until Agatha. She lived to 86, bless her; it still amazes me that my life has overlapped the lives of people born in the 1800s. Even now, I remember my teenage years through Agatha Christies: Sad Cypress on a beach in Cornwall. And Then There Were None (with the unprintable original title) interrupting French homework. Dead Man’s Folly on a weekend trip to my grandmother’s. My teenage years were a parade of Agathas. By then I was fully into Elvis too.
Count them — 66 Christies, 27 Costellos. That’s how many Elvis concerts I have been to in the last 40 years. The great writer doesn’t always make it easy for his fans, but I think I understand why. No artist wants to become his own tribute act. Like Bowie, he released an extraordinary sequence of almost-perfect albums. Bowie went from Hunky Dory to Let’s Dance without a single duff move. Elvis went from My Aim Is True to King of America. For them both, a dozen on the trot.
No distraction on Twitter, no trolls, no one telling Bowie: “You look like a prat in that outfit.” Would we ever see it today, an artist on that kind of run? By 18 I had read all the Agathas and, I reckoned, knew every word of every Elvis song: “The salty lips of the socialite sisters with their/Continental fingers which have/Never seen working blisters…”
Who else writes like that? Van Morrison? Leonard Cohen? Bear in mind, the charts were full of the Smurfs and Joe Dolce. Top of the Pops was Legs Eleven and the monster Savile. Rejecting the pap of Radio One felt essential. Joy Division meant the world to me. In my miserable, angst-ridden teens, I worshipped a singer – Ian Curtis – who took his life before I even discovered him.
If Agatha/Elvis were my Queen and King, I never got a chance to show my love until recently. A weird thing happened that I must share with you. I am patron of the Appledore Book Festival in Devon. I fell in love with the town, and the village, on my first visit in 2012. I had a memoir out about my 25 years in the BBC and visited Devon to talk about it. Appledore is gorgeous. For years afterwards, I took my family on holiday there. I remain committed to the book festival.
In 2020, Covid hit. The festival organisers, being of strong Devon stock, decided they weren’t going to let some measly global pandemic put them off their stride. The festival would go ahead, with safety measures. We would do it as a drive-in. “Are you okay to interview someone with a new crime book out?” they asked me. “Sure,” I said. “Who is it?”
Had they not told me it was Richard Osman I would have known the second I saw his giant frame silhouetted against the ribbon of orange sunset the coast provided for his arrival. He is unmistakably… Osman. I loved his book. We did the social distancing thing, arriving onstage six feet apart. By now the sun was down.
I had not been given the instruction that “people shouldn’t blow their horns, because the farmer in the next field is quite angry about all this”, so I asked everyone to blow their horn if they agreed with what was being said, or wanted to ask a question. The session became noisy. Our own racket was punctuated by loud activity in the next field. The farmer had been so angered by the horns he had got in his tractor and started driving it in circles. We apologised.
Richard captivated the audience. At that point, his Thursday Murder Club was just another new book. It was out that month. No one saw the absolute sensation it would become. Credit to Richard for his vision – his success reopened the market in what came to be called ‘cosy crime’. The TV had been full of Father Brown and Midsomer Murders, but Agatha Christie’s style seemed dated in the book world.
No longer. I like to think that strange drive-in conversation with Richard was the last moment before we fell back in love with the whodunnit. And now here we are. It took me a while to realise what had happened. Suddenly there was a real hunger for the kind of books I had loved as a teenager.
Agatha invented the phrase ‘crime scene’ and pioneered the living room denouement. She even – and this is incredible – wrote the first whodunnit where the narrator is the murderer. There is now so much ‘unreliable narrator’ fiction there’s probably a U.N. award at the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate!
So here I am. With Elvis Costello in my ears and Agatha in my heart, I have my own whodunnit for you. I may be turning 60 this year, but I’m hoping it’s worth the wait.
Content Source: www.express.co.uk