Author Tony Medawar talks to us about his latest novel Ghosts From the Library and shares his favourite stories from the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Tony Medawar is a detective fiction expert and researcher who has tracked down many rare stories from the Golden Age of Crime fiction and made them available to a wider audience. He is the Editor of the popular Bodies from the Library series which will be familiar to many Suffolk readers.
Tony's latest collection is Ghosts From the Library: Lost Tales of Terror and the Supernatural which includes stories from Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Arthur Conan Doyle and others. Ghosts From the Library was published by Collins Crime Club on 29 September and you can find it and Tony's other work on our catalogue.
Heroes is a very broad concept. Literary heroes would definitely include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, R. Austin Freeman and of course Agatha Christie. Other heroes would include Clint Eastwood, The Who, Morecambe and Wise and the greatest comedy writers of all time, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton.
I was introduced to crime fiction by my mother who had many of Christie’s novels in the Fontana paperback edition. The first I read was A Caribbean Mystery and I can still remember Tom Adams’ intriguing and terrifying cover. I read all of her books and many others by such luminaries of the Golden Age as John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh, EC Bentley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Philip Macdonald, Josephine Tey and Freeman Wills Crofts.
My quest to find uncollected and unpublished stories was born out of a simple desire to read more by my favourite writers!
In 1990, I attended the very first Festival and was lucky enough to meet Agatha Christie’s daughter as well as David Suchet and Joan Hickson, the definitive Poirot and Miss Marple. Nearly thirty years later, I was appointed as the Festival’s producer. I produced the 2020 online Festival and the 2021 Festival, and this year I was responsible for developing the programme.
Many authors have written stories that were not published in any of the collections of their work, sometimes, because they were too short or too long or for other reasons; and I have also been lucky enough to find and publish some stories that were previously unknown. I do indeed come across stories and think that they would be perfect for one or other of the series I edit.
As a matter of principle, I think it can be helpful to warn readers to whom it might not be obvious that stories written in the first half of the twentieth century sometimes feature characters that sometimes use offensive language or otherwise are described or behave in ways that reflect the prejudices and insensitivities of the period. I do not believe such references should be edited as it gives modern readers a false impression: racism, sexism, antisemitism and the like existed in the past and, in the words of Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is what is at risk if books are edited or banned in light of prevailing views.
As well as writing crime and detective stories, many of the authors active in the Golden Age also wrote in the supernatural genre, many of which never found their way into a collection. This new anthology brings together thirteen such stories, including Daphne Du Maurier’s first short story, Terror, which hasn’t been reprinted since its original appearance nearly a century ago, as well as a previously unpublished ghost story by Anthony Berkeley, a previously unpublished radio play by Agatha Christie and uncollected stories by the likes of Josephine Tey, Christianna Brand and Margery Allingham, together with some very special extras.
I am working on three new single author collections for the fabulous American publisher Crippen & Landru, two more anthologies for HarperCollins and something rather exciting for another American publisher, Rowman & Littlefield.
There are three: The Locked Room, Dorothy L Sayers’ final story featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, which was published for the first time in Bodies from the Library 2 (2019); Child’s Play, a previously unpublished short story by Edmund Crispin which appeared in Bodies from the Library 4 (2021); and Agatha Christie’s previously unknown early short story, The Wife of the Kenite, which nearly a century after its first appearance in an obscure magazine was reprinted for the first time in Bodies from the Library 1 (2018).
I have just read A Book of Murder, the fourth in Victoria Dowd’s hugely entertaining ‘Smart Women’ series. I am currently reading DL Marshall’s Anthrax Island, the first in his series about John Tyler. And next I’ll be re-reading Curtain, Agatha Christie’s final novel about Hercule Poirot, the self-styled “greatest detective in the world”.
Three writers stand out for me. The first is Martin Edwards, the president of the Detection Club and winner of the 2019 Diamond Dagger, awarded by members of the Crim Writers’ Association for his lifetime contribution to crime writing in the English language. As well as being the doyen of crime fiction scholarship - with non-fiction studies like The Golden Age of Murder and The Life of Crime under his belt – he has written many superb detective stories of his own including the three titles featuring Rachel Savernake and Jacob Flint, which include the absolutely superb Blackstone Fell; I’m really looking forward to the next in the series, Sepulchre Street.
The second writer who seems to me to conjure the spirit of the Golden Age is Robert Thorogood, who created the delightful television Golden Age mystery series Death in Paradise and its forthcoming spin-off Beyond Paradise (2023); Robert has also written several Death in Paradise novels and a new series about the Marlow Murder Club, including Death Comes to Marlow.
The third writer of Golden Age type mysteries is Kate Ellis, particularly for her absolutely fantastic series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Wesley Petersen. Kate received the CWA’s Dagger in the Library in 2019 and her books feature a historical mystery alongside a contemporary case; the latest in the series is the brilliant Serpent’s Point.
I wrote around 20 of the cases in 221B Baker Street!, the Sherlock Holmes board game from Gibsons Games.
