Literary Society News 1 May 2017

Recent Programme:


Last Meeting 21 April 2017
GUY FRASER-SAMPSON

On April 21^st the Literary Society enjoyed a talk on British Crime Fiction by Winchelsea resident and writer Guy Fraser-Sampson. Guy has published books on finance and investment, and is a consultant and lecturer at the Cass Business School. He has also written a book on cricketing history. In recent years he has turned to fiction, first with three books which continue the Mapp and Lucia saga chronicled by EF Benson, and these have been optioned by BBC Television. More recently he has been writing crime fiction, with a series of detective novels under the general heading The Hampstead Murders, reflecting their location. The first of these, Death in Profile, was published in March 2016. Guy is a member of the Crime Writers Association and has spoken about his books at literary festivals around the country and on Radio 4.

Guy identified two extremes of current British crime fiction: the ‘Scandi-noir’- type books, which feature increasingly violent death in bleak landscapes, and the ‘cosy’ stories, set in implausibly quaint English villages. His aim is to develop a middle ground, with police procedural novels which are quirky and unusual. Rather than using the formulaic plot structures and damaged central characters of much modern crime fiction, he offers readers a team of likeable police officers whose careers and personal lives evolve from one book to the next. Guy said that said he did not plan the structure of a book in advance, chapter by chapter, fitting the characters into the plot, as advocated by some creative writing teachers. Instead he prefers to establish characters first and then let the plot evolve around them. Some characters prove to be so forceful that they take over from others as a story progresses.

Much of Guy’s talk was about the crime writers who have inspired him, especially those from the inter-war ‘golden age’ of crime fiction; in particular, Freeman Wills Croft, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers, John Creasey, Derek Raymond and Christopher Fowler. We heard amusing anecdotes on long-forgotten writers like Marie Corelli, who wrote bodice-rippers where half-clad damsels were roughly treated by men in tight white trousers. He had reservations about Agatha Christie, who he felt had excellent plotting skills but failed to develop characters. Although English, Raymond Chandler set his fiction in California, and aimed to write stories about real people, rather than fanciful characters. He fell outside the scope of Guy’s talk, but held some interesting views on detective writing, expressed in a famous essay The Simple Art of Murder.  

Guy offered copies of ‘Death in Profile’ to anyone who could answer three questions: 1. Who wrote the book on which the film The Lady Vanishes was based? (A: Ethel Lina White - The Wheel Spins) 2. Who wrote the book on which the film Suspicion was based? (A: Francis Iles aka Anthony Berkeley - Before the Fact) 3. Who introduced the phrase ‘elementary, my dear Watson’, and which writer subsequently adopted it? (A: P.G. Wodehouse -  Psmith in the City, and Agatha Christie - the Tommy and Tuppence stories). Only part 1 of question three was correctly answered.

The talk provoked a good number of questions and answers, and Guy promised that a list of the writers and stories he had mentioned would be available to us all, via the Lit Soc blog, as indeed it now is. (See below)

Peter Southgate

Forthcoming activities:

Next Meeting: Friday 19 May

Members' evening: Bring along a reading ( 5 minutes maximum), to share with the rest of the society on the theme "Perchance to Dream"