Latest news with #DetectionClub
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
AI Agatha Christie is a crime against fiction
I try to be positive, so in my frequent Luddite moments I call upon my inner Pollyanna and remind myself of the many blessings of technology. Yet the news that the BBC has added to Maestro, its educational streaming platform, a course of 11 short online videos in which a recreated Agatha Christie tells you how to write crime fiction made me feel appropriately murderous. Indeed, it's given me inspiration for another short story deriding and killing publishers. But I won't be asking AI for help. It's likely to be the nuclear weapon employed by Big Brother to destroy original thought. Yes, James Pritchard – who through Agatha Christie Ltd is the custodian of her legacy – has insisted that all writing advice given in 11 videos by his great-grandmother's recreated voice and face be drawn wholly from her own words. But after a lifetime of reading crime novels and more than four decades writing them, I think the whole idea of a disembodied voice mouthing the words selected by a team of academics is a horrid and dangerous way to go. Agatha – which as a fellow member of the Detection Club I feel entitled to call her even though she died 20 years before I was elected – was a genius. She became the world's bestselling author because of her innate gifts when it came to plotting and her rare, unsentimental understanding of human nature and good and evil. I read all her books in my youth, sneered at her writing in my pretentious years at university and during a bad bout of flu in my early 30s reread her and repented. I imbibed from her and others of her contemporaries like G K Chesterton and Edmund Crispin a love of the genre, especially when humour was added to the pot. And then, unexpectedly, I was invited to write a crime novel, joined the Crime Writers' Association and discovered a world of fun and friendship and very varied lives, for our members included cops and ex-convicts, doctors and nurses, musicians, bureaucrats and publicans. We would swap stories of how an episode in our lives had inspired us to have a go at telling a story from an improbable viewpoint. No subject was off-limits. I've had several occupations, including in academia, public service and journalism, and have never come across such a congenial and sociable bunch as crime writers and readers. There's a humility about them that I love and found rarely among academics and the literati. You couldn't get from an algorithm or from lectures what I've learnt from my lovely, irreverent, self-deprecating and sometimes mad companions in that world. You learn how to write primarily through reading. I don't believe it can be taught, though I admit some people benefit from good editing, and there's nothing wrong with handy hints. Indeed, I was a contributor to the highly entertaining Howdunit – published in honour of the 90th anniversary of the Detection Club – in which 90 of the living and some dead members muse on our trade. We collaborate on books occasionally, our planning meetings are hilarious and we donate the proceeds toward subsidising the next communal dinner. My passion is free speech, and my blood freezes at the thought of how AI will be used by Big Brother. I bet all the casual racism and other kinds of wrongthink expressed in throwaway lines in the work of Agatha and her generation will not survive the first algorithmic sanitising. 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,' Orwell taught us. AI can see off originality, courage, and truth in no time.
Washington Post
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
3 audiobooks to whisk you away to other times and places
Bessie Carter, best known in her role as 'Bridgerton's' waspish Prudence Dankworth née Featherington, here expands her repertoire marvelously. In Marie Benedict's engaging historical novel, Carter captures the personalities of the five most famous women detective novelists of the golden age of detective fiction. Each is distinctly herself in Carter's delivery: Agatha Christie, chastened by scandal; Margery Allingham, youthfully effervescent; Ngaio Marsh, no-nonsense New Zealander, with accent to prove it; Baroness Emma Orczy, lofty and commanding; and Dorothy L. Sayers, conveniently married to a Scottish reporter (his accent perfectly captured by Carter). It is 1930, and they have joined as members of London's recently formed Detection Club — whose male members frowned on accepting more than a couple of women. Undaunted, the five literary sleuths set about to prove their superior worth by solving an actual crime, the case of a murdered young nurse. What follows is an old-fashioned mystery, all events, clues and revelations adhering to the rules of fair play as set down by the club: No 'hocus pocus, trickeries, superstitions, epiphanies, acts of God, skulduggeries, or divine intervention.' (Macmillan, Unabridged, 10⅓ hours) Bessie Carter, best known in her role as 'Bridgerton's' waspish Prudence Dankworth née Featherington, here expands her repertoire marvelously. In Marie Benedict's engaging historical novel, Carter captures the personalities of the five most famous women detective novelists of the golden age of detective fiction. Each is distinctly herself in Carter's delivery: Agatha Christie, chastened by scandal; Margery Allingham, youthfully effervescent; Ngaio Marsh, no-nonsense New Zealander, with accent to prove it; Baroness Emma Orczy, lofty and commanding; and Dorothy L. Sayers, conveniently married to a Scottish reporter (his accent perfectly captured by Carter). It is 1930, and they have joined as members of London's recently formed Detection Club — whose male members frowned on accepting more than a couple of women. Undaunted, the five literary sleuths set about to prove their superior worth by solving an actual crime, the case of a murdered young nurse. What follows is an old-fashioned mystery, all events, clues and revelations adhering to the rules of fair play as set down by the club: No 'hocus pocus, trickeries, superstitions, epiphanies, acts of God, skulduggeries, or divine intervention.' (Macmillan, Unabridged, 10⅓ hours) Ex-Chicago police detective Carrie Starr, of mixed Native American descent, has just become U.S. marshal for a large but sparsely populated Oklahoma reservation. Shattered by the murder in Chicago of her daughter, she moves through her days numbed by whiskey and weed. She feels no interest in her job of looking into the cold cases of the many young women who have disappeared from the reservation. Confronted by a new case, she is less engaged at first than she is spooked by the occasional apparition of a ghostly woman with antlers. Yes, there is a supernatural element here, one connected, it emerges, to the appallingly frequent abuse and unsolved murders of Native American women. The plot grows infinitely complicated, drawing in oil companies, developers, a nearly extinct bug, yet another dead woman, an embezzling town official and whiskey in quantities that only fictional detectives can handle. Isabella Star Lablanc, herself of Native American ancestry, narrates the novel in a clear voice that alters slightly but convincingly to take in dialogue from different speakers. (Penguin, Unabridged, 9⅔ hours) Ex-Chicago police detective Carrie Starr, of mixed Native American descent, has just become U.S. marshal for a large but sparsely populated Oklahoma reservation. Shattered by the murder in Chicago of her daughter, she moves through her days numbed by whiskey and weed. She feels no interest in her job of looking into the cold cases of the many young women who have disappeared from the reservation. Confronted by a new case, she is less engaged at first than she is spooked by the occasional apparition of a ghostly woman with antlers. Yes, there is a supernatural element here, one connected, it emerges, to the appallingly frequent abuse and unsolved murders of Native American women. The plot grows infinitely complicated, drawing in oil companies, developers, a nearly extinct bug, yet another dead woman, an embezzling town official and whiskey in quantities that only fictional detectives can handle. Isabella Star Lablanc, herself of Native American ancestry, narrates the novel in a clear voice that alters slightly but convincingly to take in dialogue from different speakers. (Penguin, Unabridged, 9⅔ hours) Corren's memoir of his mother, Renay, is a peerless exercise in seedy realism, verbal pyrotechnics and savage wit. The author, youngest of Renay's six children, is a virtuoso of trash talk and a connoisseur of the sordid. He narrates the book in his own high-pitched, Carolina-accented voice, beginning in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1978, when he was 9, smitten with Donny Osmond but not yet realizing he was gay. He describes much of his life through influential literature: TV Guide, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Dick Dale's 'Mr. Fancy Panties,' James Baldwin and Lillian Hellman. Beyond that, his youth was marked by evictions, petty crime, besotted servitude to his mother's comfort and her utter neglect of domestic matters. Despite the extravagant comedy and occasional mawkishness, Corren brings a deeply felt, revved-up emotional truth to his feelings that is genuinely moving. Part elegy, part philippic, this is a phantasmagoric portrait of a much-loved woman, a star in one of America's red-lit, drugged-out, porno-saturated, fast-food-fueled circles of hell. (Grand Central Publishing, Unabridged, 10 hours) Corren's memoir of his mother, Renay, is a peerless exercise in seedy realism, verbal pyrotechnics and savage wit. The author, youngest of Renay's six children, is a virtuoso of trash talk and a connoisseur of the sordid. He narrates the book in his own high-pitched, Carolina-accented voice, beginning in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1978, when he was 9, smitten with Donny Osmond but not yet realizing he was gay. He describes much of his life through influential literature: TV Guide, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Dick Dale's 'Mr. Fancy Panties,' James Baldwin and Lillian Hellman. Beyond that, his youth was marked by evictions, petty crime, besotted servitude to his mother's comfort and her utter neglect of domestic matters. Despite the extravagant comedy and occasional mawkishness, Corren brings a deeply felt, revved-up emotional truth to his feelings that is genuinely moving. Part elegy, part philippic, this is a phantasmagoric portrait of a much-loved woman, a star in one of America's red-lit, drugged-out, porno-saturated, fast-food-fueled circles of hell. (Grand Central Publishing, Unabridged, 10 hours)
