Meeting 15 March 2019: Murder for Fun and Profit by Laura Wilson

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.