Crime Fiction in the Portico Collection
In June 2022, the Portico invited Jean Briggs and Matthew Booth, two crime fiction authors and members of the Crime Writing Association, to help choose some books from our collection for a recommendations wall as part of National Crime Reading Month. This article records that conversation, and marks our inaugural Palmer Crime Writing Lecture, given by Martin Edwards on his book The Life of Crime on 15 June 2022. The lecture covered the history of crime writing in Britain from the late eighteenth century, whereas in our conversation – and this article – the focus was crime writing in the Portico’s North West Fiction section. Arguably, crime writing in the North West begins with Manchester-born Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, which has heavily influenced murder mysteries from the early nineteenth century until the current day.
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Charles Dickens and Crime Fiction
Under the name J. C. Briggs, Jean writes the Charles Dickens Investigations series and has donated Murder in Ghostlight (2019), the third in the series, to the Portico because the book takes the Victorian author to Manchester, performing with his theatre group, and features Mancunian writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Geraldine Jewsbury. When a man is shot on stage, Dickens becomes a suspect. In his own work, Dickens is well-known for incorporating crime and the Victorian underworld into his novels, whether in Oliver Twist (Fagin, Bill Sykes, Nancy) or Great Expectations (transportation and Magwitch). He was fascinated by detectives and the work of the relatively new police force. The Portico Library has a first edition of Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), which is shelved in our North West Fiction section as it is set in Preston. The sub-plots feature a bank robbery, a missing person and suspected murder against the backdrop of mills and factories.
It wasn’t just Dickens. Crime was an important part of plots in a lot of nineteenth-century fiction. Mrs Gaskell made a murder the main plot in Mary Barton (1848), which was based in Manchester between 1839 and 1842. The writer Wilkie Collins, a good friend and collaborator of Dickens, is perhaps best known for mystery novels like The Moonstone (1868), which is considered by some to be the first detective novel. Collins’ most famous work, Woman in White (1859), is based in Highgate, London and Cumberland and is an archetypal gothic crime novel featuring asylums, changed identity and Italian political espionage. According to our 1875 catalogue, the Portico Library did have the original three volumes in 1860 but no longer does. Perhaps a crime mystery of our own…
Recreating Victorian Crime
Like Jean, many recent crime fiction writers have often turned to the Victorian period for a historical setting for murder mysteries – or to recreate the popular 19th Century genre of the ‘sensation novel,’ which focussed on criminal biographies. Edward Marston’s ‘railway series’ is set in the 1850s at the height of the new railway boom in Victorian Britain. Marston’s The Railway Viaduct (2006) sets the Sankey Viaduct, a Grade 1 listed feat of railway engineering by George Stephenson that connects Manchester to Liverpool, as the scene of a crime. The dead body of a man is hurled from a train hurtling across the viaduct into the canal below. Similarly, Andrew Martin writes a series of crime fiction novels about railwayman Jim Stringer set at the turn of the 1900s, including The Blackpool Highflyer (2005), which is based around the setting of driving millworkers to their vacations in the seaside resort of Blackpool in the hot summer of 1905.
John Buxton Hilton wrote a series of novels set in 1870s and the dramatic countryside of the High Peak district based around police detective Thomas Brunt. The case of a missing girl in Game Keepers Gallows (1976) wove together legend, folklore, rustic customs and secret community loyalties making it as much about eerie customs as crime. Hilton wrote a number of more recent books, also set in and around Buxton, featuring Superintendent Simon Kenworthy. In Some Run Crooked (1978) Inspector Kenworthy finds himself investigating three murders spread over two hundred years, delving into the occult and bizarre.
The Missing Golden Age
It is striking that the Portico Library does not have any books by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and others from the ‘golden age’ of crime fiction in the 1920s to 1950s. This is possibly due to the library hitting a period of financial difficulty at this point. There has been a reappraisal of some of the lesser-known writers from this period, partly due to their republication in the British Library Crime Classics series. For example, J. Jefferson Farjeon’s 1930s Christmas whodunnit Mystery in White outsold the thrillers Gone Girl and The Goldfinch on its re-release in 2014. Arguably, the popularity of this book, and the series more generally, has influenced recent TV adaptations of Agatha Christie novels, particularly those by Sarah Phelps, and the film Knives Out.
Martin Edwards has edited much of this British Library series and also written Gallows Courts and Mortmain Hall, detective fiction set in the Golden Age of crime fiction, as well as a more contemporary series set in the Lake District. Matthew Booth hosted the event with Martin at the Portico Library and his own book A Talent for Murder is a locked room mystery set in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction with a new detective, Everett Carr.
Contemporary Crime Writing
The Portico Library is rich in more contemporary crime fiction set in the North West, particularly on the mean streets of Manchester. Gangs, people trafficking, pimps, loan sharks and the drugs trade feature in novels such as Tom Benn’s The Doll Princess (2013), set a month after the IRA bomb in 1996. These themes are a world away from the typical country house setting of a golden age crime novel, but, as Jean and Matthew point out, they are shared with Victorian mystery writing. For example, Oliver Twist (1838) alludes to prostitution and features gangs of trafficked children run by criminals. Bill Rogers’ The Tigers Cave (2010) depicts the brutal consequences of human smuggling, and the DI Spicer novels by Chris Simms, set in Manchester in the 2000s, depict a seedy urban landscape in decay. These novels hold up a mirror to problems in society, much as Dickens did in Hard Times.
A fascination with the contemporary business of detecting and police procedures, such as that held by Dickens and Collins, can be seen in the crime writing of Cath Staincliffe and Val McDermid. In addition, Staincliffe and McDermid put strong female protagonists centre stage. Staincliffe’s Private Investigator Sal Kilkenny works in Manchester, as do her police detective duo Rachel Bailey and Janet Scott (televised on ITV as Scott and Bailey). In addition to dealing with crimes, these women also face being undermined solely because they are women. Val McDermid won the Portico Prize for The Grave Tattoo in 2006, which is set in the Lake District and, though the main events take place in the current day, it revolves around a 200-year-old homicide involving Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
Many of McDermid’s books are set around the North West such as A Place of Execution (1998), which is set in Scarsdale Derbyshire with the horrific murder of children by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady as a key component in the psychological tragedy that unfolds. In another novel published the same year, Star Struck sees McDermid’s Private Investigator Kate Brannigan in Manchester working as a bodyguard to a soapstar on the set of The Northerners.
The ‘Golden Age’ may be absent and a mystery hovers over what happened to the Portico’s Woman in White, but there is still much to investigate in our collection of crime fiction set admidst the peaks, lakes and urban grime of the North West of England.
Debbie Challis, 2022
Matthew Booth is the author of several books and short stories about Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a number of scripts for a Holmes radio series produced by Jim French Productions in Seattle, as well as creating his own series about a disgraced former barrister investigating crimes for the same production company. He is the creator of Everett Carr, an amateur sleuth in the traditional mould, who appears in his debut investigation in the book, A Talent for Murder, a traditional whodunit, which offers a contemporary twist on the format. The novel is the first in a series published by Level Best Books. Matthew is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and is the editor of its monthly magazine, Red Herrings.
Jean Briggs taught English in schools in Cheshire, Lancashire, and Hong Kong. She now lives in Cumbria and writes murder mysteries, featuring Charles Dickens as an amateur detective. There are nine novels in the series, published by Sapere Books. The latest, ‘Summons to Murder’ was published in December 2021 and number 10 will come out later this year. She is currently Vice Chair of The Crime Writers’ Association, and also a member of The Society of Authors, a member of The Dickens Fellowship, and a trustee of Sedbergh Book Town.