Thanks to Bill Doherty for the following account of the Society's March meeting:
Scene setting is vital in
detective fiction and as the Lit. Soc. membership milled round the Court Hall,
wine glass in hand and bon mot à la bouche, a black-clad figure slid through
the throng and deposited a large suitcase in the corner of the room. Before
anyone could scream “Not now, Cato!”, Tony Moore had clicked the lock and the
sinister figure was introduced as Laura Wilson, prolific author of
internationally acclaimed detective fiction who sat poised to induct us into
our very own “locked room” mystery, revealing the secrets of her trade.
Background checks came up
with a childhood love of books and an ambition to be a librarian, albeit one
who dressed as a “bunny girl”. Beatrix Potter’s” Fierce Bad Rabbit” was her
gateway drug to the world of Agatha Christie and the arid desert of English
Lit. was memorably enlivened by Chaucer’s bod- meets- bawd “Miller’s Tale”. She
arrived at Somerville College Oxford in time to surf the Post-Modernist
wave and admitted to wearing a black
polo-neck and wandering round with a volume of Derrida under her arm.
Initially, writing for a living was a prosaic affair – scripting catalogue
captions with a word limit of 19. Stage 2 of forging a rigorous literary
discipline came with writing 250 word pieces
for children’s history books which taught her to master the narrative arc. In
her spare time she wrestled with “A Little Death”, a structurally ambitious
crisscrossing of 3 first person narratives.
Death intrigued her and
she describes helping her doctor mother lay Granny out and Mum explain that a
woman’s role was to be present at the beginning and the end of life. This drew
a silent tear from the Scottish History
Nicodemite in the audience, paraphrasing as it does Mary Queen of Scots’
valediction “En ma fin gît mon commencement – in my end lies my beginning.” Few
murder victims were so unwise as to throw themselves on those all- too-
ethereal tender Tudor mercies. Quentin Crisp’s unsolicited testimonial that murder shows real commitment helped her
focus on a specific kind of death. After discussion with her publisher, she
opted for crime fiction as it was a smaller pool, a stronger genre and the sleuth satisfyingly
sets the world to rights. When a series
was proposed, she created D.I. Stratton – male, happily married, an allotment
and no destructive vices. She set him down in the Second World War and its
aftermath explaining how this facilitated plotting by removing complications
like mobile phones and allowing characters to be conveniently eliminated by
random "Doodlebugs”.
A much-remarked feature
of Wilson’s work is the wealth of accurate period detail which contributes to
the atmosphere she successfully summons and is the product of hours of research
at Sussex University’s Mass Observation Unit. Her muse thrives on real–life
crime but she avoids well-trodden paths like the Kray and Richardson gangs. Her
most recent work has drawn on the Madeleine McCann case, age-progressed photos and the contemporary
cult of celebrity. Earlier novels used the Rillington Place murders and the
1958 Notting Hill riots. Laura’s mastery of her field has been acknowledged in
her appointment as Crime Fiction Editor of
“The Guardian”, winning the Prix du Polar Européen and an Ellis Peter
Award and being officially designated a Killer Woman.
The evening closed with
our speaker patiently fielding a range of audience questions and all relieved
to find the suitcase contained a selection of Laura’s books rather than the mortal
remains of D.I. Stratton as apparently authors come to hate their most popular
characters; Conan Doyle hated Holmes and Christie Poirot.