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I think ex-coppers set up as private detectives. I know Graham Swift’s Light of Day uses that idea but it’s not crime novel really.

It’s good but I think what followed is even better.

I love that story. I heard him head it on a thing during lockdown. It was such a perfect lockdown moment. Wendy Erskine was doing a close reading of it. Just a perfect moment in a mad deranged time.

Sorry.

Just finally on Ackroyd…I was listening to this thing on Alan Garner and I was struck by how much had been stolen from him - the whole overlay of ancient and modern, the rituals of the past, the slippage and time travel between the two. It’s all there in the Owl Service and plenty of his stuff...

I think if Gawain is a detective then he’s very much in the mould of the set up detective where he becomes the fall guy. After all the quest he goes on ends with him avoiding sleeping with the femme fatale and then being made to kneel and wait literary for an execution which is called off right...

No you didn’t upset me. I am not invested either way in Albon and the Dee thing. Just thought I’d share that he did go ahead with it. I’m really interested in Higgs - he seems like someone who is quite happy not to write things just to be liked.

Hi did go ahead with a Dee opera

The one of his that I think is the most successful is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem where he seems to strike a balance between his love of the arcane/secret knowledge strand of his work and being a proper story telling writer. English Music is an early one I enjoyed but he kind of went off...

That’s very similar to how I felt after read the his last one - the sea will rise again or whatever it was called. It was very good but it was all about these aimless, washed up people, drifting, failing, slowly erasing themselves. He was very good at grubby rented rooms and tawdry caffs. I was...

Highsmith fits that description perfectly I think.

I don’t think the term literary fiction really existed before the eighties. Someone like Graham Greene was both serious and popular but the book trade seems to have forked with popular, bumpy cover books with gold titles, middlebrow sellers like William Boyd and then avowedly literary - ie not...

Possibly a rather sweeping generalisation but literary fiction could learn much from genre. I was struck by how good M John Harrison’s dialogue was, for example - really got that middle that most conversations have without making a big song and dance about it.

I do think that detective fiction - like other genre fiction- is treated very much as second class writing and for literary snobs to buy into it then it was sold as post modern/ironic etc but much in the same way as sci fi at its best is as good as anything else the detective genre has great...

Dr. Grimesby Roylott in Speckled Band - I have lost count of the number of times I have taught it and shown the Jeremy Brett version to Y9 classes.

I wouldn’t know what to do in a gym apart from the exercise bike. I love sport but was rubbish at all school sports and am hugely accident prone so it is amazing to my friends and family that not only can I ride a bike but that I’m actually properly competitive- albeit in a slightly odd...

These are Father Knox’s rules https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction

I think also detective fiction is satisfying - we get solutions/answers. The rules are strict (the 10 rules of Father Knox) it’s a genre that transcends cultures etc. allows for both highbrow and pulp versions. It’s a very accommodating genre and early on gave a space for female sleuths. Plus in...

T J Clark’s Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come - he’s one of my favourite art writers, here he takes five paintings which straddle depictions of the interaction between the heavenly and this world. It is all rooted in his determination to really dwell on what exceptionally close...

I really enjoyed it. It’s a big bugger but it moves along well. It has made me want to read the Anniversaries when I clear the decks a bit and I reckon he’s probably someone that quite a few on here would enjoy.