I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was ten years old. Telling stories came naturally to me. A lonely, not terribly clever boy in a destructive private school, I slept in a dormitory with six or seven boys on army beds, all of us missing our parents and home life. I told stories and cheered the others up. That was how I made friends and discovered my calling.
By sixteen, I knew that I would be not just a writer but a crime writer. That insight came from a Christmas present I received from my father: the complete short stories and novels of Sherlock Holmes in two volumes. I have them to this day.
What I loved about Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant creation was not the crimes themselves. In fact there are surprisingly few murders among the sixty investigations, and many of the stories are fantastical to say the least. No. What grabbed me was the idea that mystery and crime had tentacles that could reach out across the entire world, that a story beginning with a treasure stolen in Agra or a forced marriage in Utah could find its conclusion in Croydon or the Brixton Road. If you know London, you’ll know that these are not the most exciting holiday destinations, and as a teenager being brought up in Stanmore, which I thought of as an equally uninteresting place, the attraction was irresistible.
And so—Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Magpie Murders, the Hawthorne novels: my biog says that I have committed more fictional murders than any living writer, which may only be the dream of an overimaginative publisher’s PR department but does broadly describe my work of the last thirty years.
I love crime fiction. I love reading it and writing it. I devoured pretty much all the works of Agatha Christie when I was traveling the world in a year off before I went to college. I’d pick up and drop off paperbacks as I progressed through youth hostels and actually read Death on the Nile on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia in Mesopotamia, and Murder on the Orient Express in Istanbul (I couldn’t afford the train tickets). At college, I devoured Golden Age crime fiction and adored Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen—all the usual suspects and more. I’m a fan of at least a dozen modern crime writers I could name. Japanese crime fiction in particular appeals to me and I love almost anything published by Pushkin Vertigo (and, of course, The Mysterious Press).
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become troubled. Why do I love crime fiction? Why does anyone?
I remember working on Agatha Christie’s Poirot, writing scripts for Sir David Suchet who, for me, has never been bettered in the title role. I would often find myself wrangling with the producer until three o’clock in the morning. How did the fingerprint get on the glass? Could the killer arrive at the house in such a short time? What were the sight lines? Were we making everything clear enough? And as the clock ticked on and bed became an ever more unlikely prospect, a devilish voice would whisper in my ear …
Who cares? Does it really matter? It’s only a murder mystery. Who will notice?
I had the same dark thought when I was writing Midsomer Murders. Each script took me about three months to create. It demanded two hours of a viewer’s attention on a Sunday evening. And all of this simply to discover that the butler did it?
What was I doing with my life?
And yet for all my growing doubts, crime fiction has become more popular than ever. You must forgive me if I explore this with reference to my own country, England, but let’s start with the pandemic, when, not surprisingly, book buying soared. According to the press at the time, book sales rose by an astonishing 21 percent, with sales of around 3.8 million copies a week. And what was the most successful genre? It wasn’t humor or romance or even science fiction, which might have held up a mirror to what we were living through. It was crime. While people huddled behind closed doors, a staggering sixty thousand murders were delivered in a single week.
What is it about murder stories that makes them so popular? The first thing to say (and I’ve said it often enough) is that it’s not the murders themselves. Contrary to what many people seem to think, particularly with the high mortality rate in Midsomer Murders, I don’t enjoy killing people and as a corollary, it always strikes me how gentle and collegial most of the crime writers I’ve met have been. The point of murder is simply to introduce character. There is no faster way to open the door into people’s lives. A wife kills her husband. But they seemed so happy together! What was the truth of their relationship? What was going on behind those net curtains?
Nor is the detective necessarily the main reason why we pick up a mystery. Of course Rebus, Morse, Reacher, Harry Hole, the Lincoln Lawyer, and all the rest of them have their loyal fan bases, but that doesn’t account for the thousands of other successful and even bestselling books with less well-known investigators or single adventures that have never continued into the world of the series. Agatha Christie’s most brilliant (and most copied) novel, And Then There Were None, doesn’t have a detective at all!
It’s my belief that crime novels have come to offer something that is sorely missing in real life and that, as human beings, we fundamentally need. And that something is justice, closure, truth.
Consider the template of a thousand whodunits. A community is in trouble, rife with suspicion and fear. It’s no coincidence that so many Golden Age crime stories are set in English villages where everyone knows everyone … or thinks they do. Somebody has been killed. The detective usually arrives as an outsider, unless of course the village happens to be St Mary Mead. He or she is rather like the Byronic hero (“that man of loneliness and mystery”) and finds a modern counterpart in one of those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns where the lone rider suddenly turns up in town, settles every score, and then disappears like a desert mirage. One thing is certain. By the time the hero leaves, the truth will be known with every i dotted and t crossed. The community will be healed.
When you start reading a murder mystery, there can be no doubt that there will be a satisfying conclusion. I’m sure somebody at some time will have written a whodunit without an ending. Josephine Tey springs to mind with The Daughter of Time. But a book without that last chapter, all the suspects gathered in the library or wherever and the killer unmasked, would be an act of self-harm, a literary chocolate teapot. And whether you’ve guessed it or not, that last reveal is what makes it all worthwhile.
Sadly, life in the UK is not like that at all.
You may have heard of the sub-postmasters, more than nine hundred men and women who ran small post offices all over the country and who were wrongly accused of theft when a faulty computer system called Horizon was installed in their businesses. Ironically, it was a brilliant TV drama—Mr Bates vs The Post Office—that brought to light what is now being called the greatest miscarriage of justice in UK history. Some sort of compensation may be on the way as politicians, journalists, PO executives, and Fujitsu bosses (who created the technology and lied about its reliability) rush to apologize, effectively covering their asses. But fifty-nine innocent people died with the shame of a criminal record. Four of them tragically committed suicide. And though lawyers made millions from the ensuing court cases, lives have been ruined and the process of justice has been grindingly slow.
And then there is a woman called Michelle Mone who, if the allegations against her are true, could have stepped straight out of the pages of a Chandler novel as a blond glamor queen with a shifty-looking husband, both of them accused of profiteering from COVID-19. These two charmers were given a £120 million contract to supply personal protective equipment to our health service, none of which turned out to be fit for purpose but which earned them profits of £65 million. The National Crime Agency is circling but Mone is still a baroness, elevated to the House of Lords. Her husband, Doug, has just taken possession of a £50 million yacht. It is hard to describe the sense of anger and disgust these two inspire. At least 223,396 people died of COVID in the UK.
I could go on. Brexit, our departure from Europe, is widely seen as a social and financial disaster, yet the politicians who sold it to us have never been held to account and continue to earn huge chunks of money on the speaker circuit around the world. Liz Truss, who was prime minister for just forty-five disastrous days and who cost the country an estimated £30 billion, has cheerfully accepted a yearly allowance of £115,000 for life.
Injustice upon injustice. And as for the sense of truth, even that is being held back from us. Social media provides multiple interpretations of the same events. As in the United States, conspiracy theories abound and we now live in an age of post-truth where what you believe cannot be contradicted because, quite simply, it is your belief. I’ve mentioned COVID a couple of times in this introduction. Is it not incredible that we still haven’t been told the cause of an event that derailed the entire world? Was it a dead pangolin sold in a wet market in Wuhan, an accident in a nearby laboratory, an experiment that went wrong? We don’t know—and wherever we look these days, we live in a state of constant uncertainty and I don’t think it’s good for us.
So it’s hardly surprising that crime fiction, with its insistence upon one inarguable ending and a landscape in which the guilty are punished and the innocent freed to continue with their lives, should be so valued now. Just look at the stories in this collection: little nuggets of life that just make you smile and make some sort of sense of the chaos all around.
I was quite wrong to think the genre lightweight or irrelevant. What it offers is kindness, decency, justice, and truth in a world that increasingly seems to have none and at a time when it has never mattered more.
Anthony Horowitz
January 2024