Howdunit. Группа авторов
was highly enthusiastic. The meeting also agreed to dedicate the book to Len Deighton, our longest-serving member, as a way of celebrating the golden anniversary of his election to the Club. As for the guiding concept of the book, Felix Francis summed it up as ‘How we dunit’. In other words, we’d talk about our own experiences, expressing personal views rather than laying down an earnest update of Knox’s jokey commandments. The Club’s publishers, HarperCollins, loved the idea, and in the months that followed, Howdunit took shape.
The result is not a textbook or manual; readers wishing to delve into the minutiae of police and courtroom procedure, forensic science, and the law of libel should look elsewhere. Instead the contributors offer a treasure trove of wit, wisdom, and anecdotes. You will find out here which author was the first novelist to use a word processor, who wrote what has been described as the first ‘electronic novel’, how a Booker Prize nomination led to a commission to revive a great detective of the Golden Age, and a good deal more. There is even a step-by-step case study in correspondence of the making of a collaborative crime classic, which illustrates that the creative process is an extraordinary mixture of pleasure and pain. And because there is no limit to the talents in the Detection Club, there are also several cartoons by ‘Clewsey’, whose name conceals a collaboration of three members, one of whom trained in graphic design …
I suggested broad topics that members might like to write about, and offered more detailed ideas to anyone who asked for them, but I didn’t try to impose conformity of approach or message or to eliminate contradictions. I wanted contributors to express themselves without feeling constrained by editorial diktats. When you are lucky enough to have the chance to work with such a gifted group of authors, it would be crazy not to give them free rein. The genre is a broad church, encompassing so many types of story, and it would be strange if all crime writers had same opinions or went about their task in the same way. As will become evident, they don’t. In these pages you can hear (just as you can if you attend a major literary festival) many different voices. The contributors have diverse opinions about everything from writer’s block to the crime novelist’s mission.
Some writers plot or outline in advance before writing the first word of a story, while others write from the seat of their pants, setting off on the journey of novel writing without having the faintest idea of where it will take them. Both approaches are explored in Howdunit, along with many other areas where there is room for divergent attitudes and approaches. To suggest that one view is invariably ‘right’ and another is ‘wrong’ is naive. Just as different criminals favour different m.o.s, so different crime novelists follow different paths when creating their mysteries. They also favour different types of crime fiction; this book aims to show the rich potential of the genre. The value of the personal views expressed by contributors lies in the way they illuminate the pros and cons, the choices that any writer needs to make. We don’t offer the false comfort of definitive answers where none exist, although there are also areas of widespread consensus – for instance, that writers with fertile imaginations can find ideas anywhere. The question for any individual is ultimately: what works for you?
I’m the eighth and current President of the Club, and my predecessors include such legendary figures as Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. The Club has a rich history, and I charted its early years in The Golden Age of Murder; suffice it to say here that the Club is simply a social association, a small dining club with membership by invitation. It’s very different from the Crime Writers’ Association, a much larger professional organization for anyone who has published a crime book, together with associates involved in the business of crime writing. The two organizations are not competitors and they enjoy a warm relationship; the four most recent presidents of the Club also chaired the CWA. Although the two organizations’ archives are distinct, together they comprise the British Crime Writing Archives, which for the past few years have been celebrated by an annual summer festival at Gladstone’s Library in north Wales.
In contrast to the position with the CWA, the number of members of the Club has always been limited, and as an organization that exists to have occasional dinners in London, its membership is predominantly British. There are no formal restrictions, and several Americans, including such contrasting authors as John Dickson Carr and Patricia Highsmith, have been members; so was the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh. The general principle is that membership is for life, and in fact Sayers had abandoned writing detective novels a decade before she became the Club’s third President. The enduring appeal of the Club has much to do with its small size, and with the spirit of collegiality between everyone who attends the dinners. From the Club’s inception, the list of eminent guest speakers at the main autumn dinner, currently held at the Ritz, has been impressive and eclectic.
Right from the start of the Club’s existence, it has subsidized its activities – well, the consumption of those splendid but rather pricey dinners – by producing crime stories. The first two joint ventures were collaborative cross-media mysteries broadcast by the infant BBC and published serially in The Listener, and on 23 July 1930 the Corporation also aired ‘Plotting a Detective Story’, a fifty-minute talk given by Berkeley and Sayers. The audience was reckoned to exceed twelve million people – a reach that, today, any prime-time British TV show or indeed publisher would kill for.
These groundbreaking initiatives were rapidly followed by the Club’s first novel, The Floating Admiral. This joint effort was concocted by no fewer twelve authors and boasted a preface by Chesterton. Almost ninety years on, it remains in print, and has recently been translated into several foreign languages. Further innovative books followed over the years, including stories in which Club members wrote about each other’s detectives, a collection of true-crime essays, and a set of stories about supposedly perfect crimes solved by a superintendent from Scotland Yard. The Club’s most recent publications are The Sinking Admiral, a twenty-first-century homage to its famous forerunner masterminded by Simon Brett, and a short story collection, Motives for Murder.
From the 1930s until the post-war era, these publications helped to keep the Club solvent and even enabled the hire of a couple of rooms in Soho, where the Club’s library was kept. But, as with most small membership organizations, the Club has never been flush with cash, and Sayers’ correspondence contains occasional outpourings of anguish about the parlous state of its finances. During the 1940s, and occasionally in succeeding decades, the Club’s very survival has been uncertain. The rented rooms are long gone, and so is the library. And the march of time prompts another question: in the twenty-first century, is there really any need for the Detection Club? How can it still have value and relevance in the era of social media and innumerable festivals, conventions and other opportunities for crime writers to get together with each other, as well as with fans?
My own, far from unbiased, opinion, is that the Club is such an agreeable institution, and so historically significant, that it deserves to be cherished. Quite apart from the convivial nature of the dinners, there is a growing interest in the heritage of crime fiction around the world, and the Club and its members have made a major contribution to that heritage. The Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan is a club modelled on ours, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting its President, while over the past three years alone, the Club’s history has been discussed and debated at events in countries as diverse as Estonia, the United States, Iceland, Canada, Dubai, Spain, and China. During the past twelve months it has also been celebrated by a BBC radio play and a French graphic novel. So if one looks beyond the superficial anachronisms, the Club is as ‘relevant’ as ever.
The real test is whether the small band of members considers that the Club remains worthwhile. If any doubt existed, this project has laid it to rest. Any editor will tell you that it’s one thing for seasoned authors to express interest in writing something and quite another to persuade them to produce it in a short space of time. My task was to approach busy authors with deadlines aplenty to plague their consciences, and also – because the project was a Club fundraiser in that fine tradition dating back to The Floating Admiral – to inveigle them into writing for free. All of us have a strong belief that writers should be properly valued and paid, now more than ever, with widespread research suggesting that literary incomes are in decline around the world (something that the aspiring author needs to keep in mind). But as the response to Howdunit shows, writers are