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From The Sunday Times

August 17, 2008

Looking for leads

Joan Smith

Many contemporary readers love the big names of golden-age detective fiction. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Josephine Tey sit alongside those of PD James, Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. But Cyril Hare? These days, few people remember Faber’s star author from the 1940s and 1950s, whose best-known titles — Death Is No Sportsman and He Should Have Died Hereafter — belong in another world.

PD James, however, has not forgotten. In her new novel, she mentions a Hare plot device, freezing a body to disguise the time of death. Her intense awareness of Hare is unsurprising — his final book was published in 1958, only four years before Faber took on her debut, Cover Her Face — but the golden age is endlessly fascinating to younger writers, too. Earlier this year, the first-time novelist Nicola Upson used Josephine Tey, author of classics such as The Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair — as her main character in An Expert in Murder.

Many novelists are attracted by the challenge of writing about a bygone age, when manners and class were different. Gilbert Adair has had great fun with a trio of Agatha Christie pastiches, starring the monstrously delightful Evadne Mount as his Miss Marple. Michael Dibdin also wrote a Christie pastiche, The Dying of the Light, a classic drawing-room mystery that gradually turns into something much darker.

Dibdin began his literary career with The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, in which the great detective is unmasked as Jack the Ripper. Julian Barnes’s recent novel Arthur & George, more serious in intent, is based on the real-life relationship between Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and an Anglo-Indian solicitor wrongfully accused of killing farm animals. Barnes’s use of the detective-story format to explore themes of class and racism is striking, but it’s clear many writers welcome the opportunity to be playful in a genre dominated (thanks largely to the humourless Patricia Cornwell) by gruesome serial killers. Gyles Brandreth has even written a series of novels in which the playwright and wit Oscar Wilde features as a detective.

In some cases, of course, a reference to another writer’s work is no more nor less than a tribute to an admired contemporary or predecessor. Italy’s greatest living crime novelist, Andrea Camilleri, named his grumpy Sicilian detective inspector after the Catalan writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban, whose novels are currently being republished in English by Serpent’s Tail. Inspector Montalbano inherited his anti-Establishment politics and passion for good food from Montalban’s private eye, Pepe Carvalho, and lovingly described meals are a feature of both series of novels.

Montalban died five years ago, making Camilleri’s recurring tribute to him all the more touching. At the age of 88, PD James has dedicated her new novel to Faber, which has published her for almost 50 years. The dedication and her homage to the all but forgotten Cyril Hare show that she is aware of her literary debts — and that, like all serious writers, she knows the value of occasionally teasing her readers.