Cosy slice of crime set on Seine cruise would make a compelling TV series
Crime fiction can, in very reductive terms and with many obvious exceptions, be divided into two broad categories: hard-boiled and cosy mysteries. The former is defined by your fast-talking PI or tortured cop, beautiful femmes fatales, sex, violence, treachery, conspiracy, bad language, usually a large urban setting.
The latter is more your Agatha Christie/Midsommer Murders type affair, where killing is almost a genteel pursuit, the detectives are inquisitive amateurs, the mystery is a clever puzzle to be solved, the setting is quaint and/or beautiful, and the real-life consequences of death – anguish, misery, destruction – are nowhere to be seen, barring the major's housekeeper discreetly giving an unhappy gasp on finding his bloodied corpse in the billiards room.
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Irish Independent
a day ago
- Irish Independent
Cosy slice of crime set on Seine cruise would make a compelling TV series
The mystery and intrigue behind Laura Lippman's 'Murder Takes a Vacation' is reminiscent of Agatha Christie Crime fiction can, in very reductive terms and with many obvious exceptions, be divided into two broad categories: hard-boiled and cosy mysteries. The former is defined by your fast-talking PI or tortured cop, beautiful femmes fatales, sex, violence, treachery, conspiracy, bad language, usually a large urban setting. The latter is more your Agatha Christie/Midsommer Murders type affair, where killing is almost a genteel pursuit, the detectives are inquisitive amateurs, the mystery is a clever puzzle to be solved, the setting is quaint and/or beautiful, and the real-life consequences of death – anguish, misery, destruction – are nowhere to be seen, barring the major's housekeeper discreetly giving an unhappy gasp on finding his bloodied corpse in the billiards room.
Irish Times
09-08-2025
- Irish Times
Zealous book bans and brilliant writers forged strong Irish Penguin links from the start
'When my first novel appeared in Penguin,' said the writer Malcolm Bradbury, 'I regarded it as a step towards canonisation'. He was surely not alone. For most of us, Penguin books have always been there, from the classroom to the bedside table. But as the publisher celebrates its 90th anniversary this month, it's easy to forget that before its arrival, it was almost impossible to read a good paperback. Paperback novels existed, of course, but they were mostly pulp fiction, penny dreadfuls, as disposable as they were garish. 'Real books' – literature – were largely preserved in hardback, the durability of the format matching the contents. Then in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane was returning from a visit to see his author Agatha Christie. At Exeter train station, he wanted something to read on the journey home but couldn't find anything that was both affordable and worthwhile. [ Books better than screens for students, study finds Opens in new window ] The idea hit him in a coup de foudre. Quality literature in paperback – a good book for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Lane's secretary came up with the name Penguin: a 'dignified but flippant' symbol. A conservative publishing industry was sceptical that the idea would work. But – allowing for the benefit of hindsight – of course it was going to work. This was a culture before TV, before hand-held devices, when the people's choice for portable entertainment was a book. Many people had one on the go at all times, borrowed from lending libraries in Woolworths: so paperback books were a way for publishers to get – literally – into every pocket. The first set of 12 Penguin books appeared in July 1935, including novels by Ernest Hemingway , Dorothy L Sayers and (the indirect inspiration for the series, so it was only fair) Agatha Christie. The series was indeed a huge hit, shifting three million copies in the first year. From the start, Penguin drew on Irish writers for its list. The 17th Penguin title, published in October 1935, was Liam O'Flaherty's Civil War drama The Informer, though not all its Irish titles were so durable. (Does anyone now read St John Ervine's The Wayward Man, published by Penguin in 1936?) [ What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tighe, Nuala O'Connor, Claire Hennessy and more give recommendations Opens in new window ] Soon, Penguin was not just republishing older books but taking on original titles. The publisher showed that books could be mass-market material without aiming for the lowest common denominator. It created a democratisation of reading. Liam O'Flaherty: Penguin published his novel The Informer in 1935 They showed too that books could be timely as well as timeless, with the rapid turnaround of the Penguin Specials series. In 1937, the title Germany Puts the Clock Back sold 50,000 copies in four days, to a public hungry for detailed information on the Nazi threat. But it also showed that they could not just follow trends, but lead them and initiate the public conversation. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), about the dangers of pesticides and the industry's cover-up, was a clarion call for the environmental movement. [ From the archive: Fifty years on, Silent Spring still matters, by Eamon Ryan Opens in new window ] Most famously, Penguin became part of a campaign itself with the publication of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Penguin published the book in 1960 to test the new Obscene Publications Act , which allowed so-called obscene work to be published if it had 'literary merit'. The publisher invited prosecution and the authorities were happy to oblige. At the trial numerous authors and academics spoke up for the book (though Enid Blyton turned down the opportunity to do so), and the prosecution bombed. Penguin's marketing genius – an important part of its success – came into play: it had 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover ready to distribute (using a different printer, as the usual one refused to handle the book) and managed to get some copies on sale the same day as the acquittal. One month later, the novel had sold two million copies. Ireland's own zealous book bans could also create a market that Penguin was keen to satisfy. In 1950 it published a translation of Apuleius's second-century raunchy Latin satire The Golden Ass, which had been banned in this country. And Ireland's once unloved son, James Joyce, has a strong history with Penguin. Allen Lane, who had been the first publisher to produce a UK edition of Ulysses in 1936 (when Penguin was still a sideline for him), reissued the novel as Penguin title number 3,000 in 1969. James Joyce: Penguin reissued Ulysses in 1969. Photograph: Lipnitzki/He had paid £75,000 for the paperback rights, a record at the time. Within 18 months, it had sold almost half a million copies – an extraordinary figure for a novel as dense, allusive, ambitious and delightful as Joyce's masterpiece. More widely, Penguin has a good track record of recognising Ireland as a country that punches well above its weight in literary brilliance. In 1946, to celebrate George Bernard Shaw's 90th birthday, it published one million books in one day: 100,000 copies each of 10 of his titles. They sold out in six weeks. Shaw had been a Penguin stalwart since the early days. Its imprint of non-fiction work, Pelican Books, was launched with Shaw's two-volume The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism; the author modestly claimed that these new cheap editions 'would be the saviour of mankind'. Now Penguin continues to publish many of Ireland's most successful writers, from Marian Keyes and Colm Tóibín to Donal Ryan and Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, and has its own imprint for Irish writing, Sandycove. Marian Keyes. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw But what first comes to mind when many of us think of Penguin books are the classics series: the slightly forbidding black classics, or the edgier, cooler modern classics. The Penguin Classics series was launched in 1946: its launch title, a new translation of The Odyssey, set out its stall clearly. This was a range to be both high-minded and accessible, to bring the greatest writers in history within reach of the ordinary book buyer. The Modern Classics followed in 1961, for books that weren't quite old enough to be classics, but demanded some recognition – or at least some marketing. They were given stylish covers, in line with its aim to be – as former series editor Simon Winder put it – 'a series to be enjoyed, rather than something that is good for you'. But the Classics and Modern Classics ranges have a tricky line to tread: these books not only reflect the literary canon, but they also help to shape it. It took a long time for Penguin to break out of the traditional modern classics mode of white men: Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Fitzgerald. The current publishing director of Penguin Classics, Jessica Harrison, acknowledges this. When reviewing the list for the 90th anniversary celebrations, she told me, she could see that 'in the 80s they brought in a lot more women writers' and later 'there must have been an editor who was really interested in Japan and Chinese [literature].' Now, the list looks wider, though even now there are only a handful of Penguin Modern Classics writers from China, and one from North Africa. But Penguin's success is not just down to the quality of the books. From the start – see the Penguincubator, a Penguin books vending machine launched in 1937 – the publisher has been a ruthless exploiter of its own intellectual property, with special editions and rejacketed reissues a regular feature of its catalogue. (It currently keeps no fewer than seven editions of Orwell's Animal Farm in print.) This approach itself leads to unexpected successes. In 2018, it launched a dirt-cheap (80p in the UK) series of Little Black Classics, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' most famous work – which meant you could buy The Communist Manifesto at the till point in Tesco. As a result, it made the Sunday Times bestseller list. More recently, Fyodor Dosotevsky has been having a moment, thanks to handsome reissues of his novella White Nights, which became Penguin's bestselling classic title of 2024, outstripping hardy perennials like Jane Austen. This ruthless reuse of its titles has its latest manifestation in the Penguin Archive series, a set of 90 short books published this year to celebrate the anniversary, with handsome covers reflecting the various styles of Penguin books over the decades. Dracula author Bram Stoker The bestselling title of the series when it was launched? Not Austen or Orwell or Fitzgerald, but an Irishman: Bram Stoker, whose short story collection The Burial of the Rats outsold the other 89 titles. It's impossible, of course, to cover the full range of Penguin's history even in a generous spread of 90 titles. But nonetheless, there do seem to be one or two curious omissions. Are there, I asked Jessica Harrison, any authors she regrets not including in the Archive? 'It did feel odd,' she said after a long pause, 'to be without [James] Joyce.' Not half.
Irish Times
26-05-2025
- Irish Times
Death Valley review: Timothy Spall effortlessly commands the screen but this BBC drama struggles
When did we decide we preferred our television detectives sunny-side up rather than served in the traditional hard-boiled fashion? At whatever point it happened, we nowadays live, beyond all hope of escape, in a cosy crime purgatory, where murder is a green light for jolly japes, and the only good cop is a whimsical one. Cosy crime isn't new. It extends back to Agatha Christie in the 1920s and even to Wilkie Collins in the 19th century. But goodness, is it having a moment now – whether manifesting as cosy crime in the sun (Death in Paradise), cosy crime marinated in the cheesy values of 1980s US television (Poker Face) or cosy crime in upper-west-side Manhattan (Only Murders in the Building). Alas, like a killer driven to ever more desperate extremes in the hope of attracting attention, the genre has lately arrived at the 'trying-too-hard' stage of its cycle, as evidenced by the distractingly offbeat Death Valley ( BBC One, Sunday) – a capricious caper that cannot make up its mind whether to celebrate the tropes of the milieu or poke fun at them. [ The Last of Us finale review: A nerve-shredding, bloody conclusion that leaves us wanting more, and soon Opens in new window ] The setting of small-town Wales is in the classic British tradition of dramedies taking place off the beaten track (see also: Shetland, Vera, Midsommar Murder or, in ancient times, Wicklow-set Ballykissangel). It stars veteran Timothy Spall as a reclusive actor once famous for playing a television detective (one gathers his character was a cross between Taggart and Bergerac). He's content in his solitude, with only his cat for the company – until a local bigwig seemingly shoots himself, and the police are called in. READ MORE Timothy Spall (left) plays John Chapel, with Gwyneth Keyworth as Janie Mallowan in Death Valley. Photograph: BBC/BBC Studios/Simon Ridgway Spall earned his reputation with gritty character parts in unsentimental State of the Nation films such as Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh (who would go on to cast him as the painter JMW Turner in a 2014 biopic). However, it is whimsy all the way in Death Valley, where his character, John Chapel, quickly joins forces with local police officer Janie Mallowan (Gwyneth Keyworth). They're an odd pairing though you wonder how much of this is on purpose and how much has to do with the baffling decision to make Janie a devoted dispenser of gags. She's forever firing off pithy observations and commenting on life around her, whether or not anyone else has asked her to upend the contents of her brain all over their conversation. Her backstory contains its share of loss, and her outré personality is presumably a coping mechanism – unfortunately, Death Valley doesn't make any of this feel plausible. For instance, in an early scene where she and John meet in a coffee shop to compare notes, she explains that she's reading an online piece about 'washed-up celebs and what they look like today'. She reveals that John is mentioned. But when he inquires further, she says she's only joking. Well, that's going to bring him around to her side, isn't it? The actual mystery is solid. The dead businessman, Carwyn Rees, did not, in fact, take his own life. He was done in by people close to him amid murky dealings in his building development company and an illicit affair (or three) on the side. Here, Death Valley holds up – in so far as you can understand the motives of the perpetrators and the means by which the ghastly deed was carried out. That sets it apart from popular rivals such as Death in Paradise, where the big reveal about that week's murder invariably raises more questions than it answers. The problem is ultimately one of tone. Death Valley wants to be flighty as anything and also have the crunchy qualities of a solid sleuth fest. It is well-intentioned and thoughtfully plotted while Spall effortlessly commands the screen as a fading luvvy who just so happens to be a top-rank crime buster in real life. But some things simply don't go well together. Now we know that this category includes off-beam humour and dark deeds in small-town Wales. The six-part series is on BBC One on Sundays from 8.15pm
