 Yn ymgyrchan, wrth gwrs, rwy'n gweithio gyda'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell Cymru. Mae ymgyrch yn Catherine Johnson. Yn y cyrraethau am y cyfnod eich Llyfrgell ymddianol. Mae'r llyfr yn y Llyfrgell yn 80Z yn y Llyfrgell Cymru. mae yma'r cwm yw'r hyn yn ei wneud, yw'r cyfnod eich llyfrgell, yn ei wneud, mae'n cyrcasio eich llyfrgell eich llyfrgell i'r llyfrgell. Ond yw ymdiffin. Mae gennych o'r bonus. Mae gennych o'r ingen puzzle. Mae gennych o'r teimlo i chi'n mynd i fel. Mae yw'n ardych chi'n fawr i'r gwahag. Mae gennych am shepherd. Mae gennych ei ymdifonio buseni'r hwn arall, ac mae gennych y prifocl iddyn nhw. Mae gennych eich bod yna bachwedd ac yn bachweithio ffwrdd. Ac mae gennych eich bod ynенu i'r ysgrifennu i'w ddechrau'r bobl. Fy gynnydd i chi'n gwneud i chi'n gwneud o'r grom yma three o'r clwc on Friday, so we didn't waffle over which item to choose for which letter. We ended up sitting there until 7.30 until security threw us out and we argued like cats. And it would have been sample conversations like, I'm not having that woman's book in this exhibition over my dead body and words to that effect. So we have a sample of the huge mass of crime fiction. Our competing alphabets were turned into wonderful visual feast by our designer. It was originally meant to look rather more like a bookcase, I'm sorry it doesn't, but the colours are rather different. It's been a huge hit with school parties who we desperately have to steer away from the somewhat more lurid crime novels because they can match the colours in the graphics to the colours in the novels. And if you'd like to go back again you can do that as well. I'm afraid there isn't a prize for somebody who gets them all. But let me turn to introducing our panel and our chairman tonight. Our chairman is Mark Lawson, he's a leading cultural broadcaster, author and journalist. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. He recently wrote and presented that wonderful BBC Radio 4 series, Foreign Bodies, a history of modern Europe through literary detectives. He's introduced late reviews since 1994. He is the main steerer of front row on BBC also Radio 4 and he's been a Guardian columnist since 1995. He's going to introduce our guests, Jason Webster, Henry Sutton and PD James. I hope you enjoy the evening. Thank you very much indeed. Good evening. I had to absolutely promise before tonight's event that I would not call, refer to one of the guests as Baroness James of Holland Park. So instead I'm going to call him Henry Sutton. Henry's books include Get Me Out Of Here and My Criminal World, his new book which he'll give a little reading from later on. He also co-wrote the first posthumous sequel to R.D. Wingfield's Frost novels, First Frost. Phyllis James or PD James, she has asked us. So don't think we're being rude or cheeky. She has asked us to call her Phyllis tonight so we will. One of the most remarkable figures in literature in this country and also in public life in general having been a governor of the BBC in the days when director-general's often used to last for several years at a stretch. You will not need me to tell you, but he's written a huge number of novels from the first cover he faced to the private patient about Commander as he was by the end, Adam Dalglish. Most recently Death comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice with a Crime Twist. Jason Webster, who is here from Spain, but may he just reveal, be moving back to Britain at some point, but he spent a lot of time in Spain and has begun a series of crime novels there including Death in Valencia. I was just telling him, when I interviewed him for radio and introduced one of his books, I said the title as, Or The Bull Kills You. My producer shouted at me that I put the stress at the end of the sentence, which you're not supposed to do in radio, but in that case it is the correct phrase. I've just checked that. Kill the Bull or the Bull kills you. My producer wanted, or the Bull kills you, which as we said, as opposed to kissing you or taking you out for dinner or anything like that. So we're going to talk about a few things tonight and then we'll open it up to you. We'll bring the lights up and take questions. The two semi, but it's all very relaxed, the two semi-formal rounds we've got, one in which the three guests will pick out some of their favourite, one or two of their favourite crime novels and perhaps in some cases may read from them and then there will be a little reading from one of their own books. What I wanted to start with was the first thing we see when we go into the exhibition, which was a very striking quote, but a new one to me Phyllis from Raymond Chandler. A crime novel is a tragedy with a happy ending. Do you think that's true? Is there any truth in that? Oh, I think it's very true. It's interesting, isn't it, that we read crime generally for relaxation, for fun, just to take us out of our problems, our unusual world, and it's very reassuring. And yet it does have murder, ghastly murder at the very heart of it. So there is really a curiosity there. But on the whole I think it's an intensely reassuring medium. And that's why I think it's very popular with people who have a great deal of responsibility in their lives. You won't find that what they like to read is a detective story. And that's largely, I think, because however difficult life is in a detective story, there is a solution. There is always a solution. You may not get complete justice. You don't get divine justice. You get really the fallible justice of men. But you do, the crime is solved. If it were not solved, it would be a detective story. And I think that's what people like. So it is a happy ending to that extent. To that extent, although in the best crime novels and indeed in yours, we should have a strong sense that someone has died that there has. And that can never go away. No, I agree absolutely. But that I think is comparatively modern. If we go better out of a Christian. Sometimes I wonder if she knows how the corpse became a corpse. There is really no horror there. There's no disgust. There's no pity really. But that is happening now because I think detective, well we'll be talking about that, no doubt. The detective story is increasingly becoming a good novel. Henry, a tragedy with a happy ending. As Phyllis was suggesting there, it's a historical, which is why they've got it at the start of the exhibition, it's a huge change now. You do now have crime novels in which the crime is not solved or they get the wrong person. I mean, I got turned on to the genre I think because I discovered books that actually didn't have happy ending. That didn't resolve any great crime that didn't have a sense of redemption actually. In a way issues of what's now known as noir fiction if we go back, which actually was around back in the 1920s and 30s and a bit later, particularly with novelists like Jim Thompson who wrote the novel, of course, Killer Inside Me. Now that is a classic noir novel that actually for those who have read it and those who are perhaps more unfortunate of seeing the film, it ends in an absolutely brutal, nihilistic fashion. And classic noir fiction does that. There are no happy endings. The term is often misappropriated actually. I noticed at the exhibition here, they're talking about Nordic noir. Now most what we know as the Scandinavian crime novelists actually aren't what I'd call noir novelists. But nevertheless, the genesis of the crime that I like, the psychological, the more psychological crime novels certainly don't have happy endings generally. They can do, but most definitely not necessarily. And it's more to do with actually exploring aspects of warped psychology for one of a better word if not really psychopaths because that in a way is too much of a contrivance. But nevertheless, it's that slippage from being a figure who is on the edge perhaps of what they're doing and then spiralling out of control. And I think crime handles those or the genre in oddly enough an entertaining way very, very pertently and perceptively. Jason, if whether the bull kills you or the bull kills you, somebody's going to die in the book. So to what extent can they be have happy endings? Well, I suppose I just think that comment of Charlie. I mean, I think it's the solution thing. I'm assuming that that's what was the forefront of his mind when he came up with that because it's, you know, there's this idea that, yes, there's a problem and then it can be solved. So yes, so you have to create the problem and then to solve it. But I think there's something, there's an echo, I think, of the religious experience in this. If you look at the New Testament story of New Testament, it's sort of the ultimate tragedy with the happy ending and the resurrection of Christ at the end. So I think it's interesting that for the first, whatever, 50 years of crime writing, you have got that solution because in a way it's coming in, I think. I think there's an interesting parallel between the way that society is losing, the way that the church and religious authorities is losing its control over society just as the crime novel is coming to the fore. So the 1860s, it's immediately after the publication of the Origin of Species and what have you. So I think at the beginning in those first few years, the crime novel in some ways is playing a role as a substitute for the religious solutions and religious certainties of the past. If you can then move away from that, like you were saying, with the noir novels, it's a later development perhaps, that you don't have to have a solution in the crime novel because maybe the crime novel is moving away from being a substitute for certain religious certainties in society. I think that's very interesting because it's been said that it is a kind of a substitute for confession and that accounts for the fact that it's really most popular and it began in Protestant countries and that's still largely true. Well I think it's interesting because I live in Spain and obviously it's a country I'm observing and we spoke a little bit about this when we did the radio programme. The crime novel in Spain really comes to the fore in the 1970s so just as the Franco regime and with it the church is losing its authority. So there's an interesting parallel there between Britain in the 1860s and Spain in the 1970s. So it does be interesting to look at other countries. I don't know other countries in the history of their crime genre enough but is there a parallel there with other countries that religion is sort of losing its grip and people are turning to the crime resolver, let's say, the detective as a substitute for the priest. It's interesting that Chesterton comes up with exactly a priest. Father Brown as his detective. Anyway, so to come back to your point, I think maybe at the beginning, yes, it's harking back to the original tragedy with a happy ending. Maybe you draw away from that the further you are from religious grip. The religious thing I think is very interesting. When I was making that radio series, Val McDermid said something which really shocked me and actually in some ways appalled me. She said that it's a Protestant form. She said, she actually said, Catholics cannot write good crime fiction, which I thought was a bit, I mean, probably, I am. I was totally afraid of, she's pretty good. But she's absolutely right. It begins, I mean, it's strongest even now in Scandinavia of a Protestant country, far more than, I mean, it isn't in Italy, but not to anything like the same extent, for example, or knowing as it is in South America where Catholic countries don't. But this may be wearing away, but it is an interesting point, I think. We're talking about it. The other thing that struck me in that chapter, unquote, is that in literary terms, because certain of Shakespeare's plays, if you freeze-frame them or indeed stop them at the interval, they appear to be tragedies. I mean, much to do about nothing. If you stop it after the Kill Claudio line, it seems to be a tragedy, and yet it's resolved as a comedy. The winter's tale, I suppose, is the same. It's the fundamental need, isn't it? Out of misery comes happiness. Out of death comes life. It seems to be a small version of that, really. I mean, I find, as I said originally, crime fiction, dating from the late 19th century and obviously the early 20th century, and this issue of it really, certainly in this country, the Golden Age, being surrounded by the whole momentum of it to do with puzzle-solving, to do with actually resolving crimes with very much good versus evil, and the good invariably being the detective of one form or another. That whole premise, as you say, I can see conceivably religious connotations to that and so on, but I wonder also how much it's to do, the popularity to do with actually pure entertainment and escapism. I mean, Charlie used to talk about this issue that all men need, he used the word men, I'm afraid, at the time, because obviously that was the terminology, but all men need to escape the deadly rhythm of their own mind at some point, and actually by engaging in any form of reading literature, it allowed you to have an imagination of fantasy life and so on, and a lot of crime fiction initially anyway, and certainly now, being a popular genre, was to do with not just escapism, but actually entertainment, and the thing that interests me is the boundaries between entertainment and actually what a lot of crime fiction is about and has certainly become about, violence and all sorts of really grim social and also psychological issues, yet somehow it's still perceived to be an entertainment, a form of entertainment, and all key best-selling novelists particularly view themselves as writers of entertainment rather than really anything else. Graham Greene, even using the actual term entertainment to distinguish, we'll talk about those distinctions, literary distinctions later, so we've got some more general topics later, but so the first of our sort of formal rounds where we've asked the panellists to choose some favourites, so Phil is first for you. Well, I must say the Moonstone, I think that's a marvellous novel, it's the best kind of Victorian writing, it's totally engrossing, it's a long, long, long flame, flame flag, there you are, it takes it into itself, but it did nearly all my favourites have taught me something and this teaches me something about viewpoint because I think it's one of the first decisions to be made when you're writing a detective story through whose eyes, through whose ears, through whose brain are we going to see this happening and I find that I like to change the viewpoint so that the one chapter will be in the mind of Dalglish, and maybe in the mind of a suspect we could get onto a problem, a very great problem, of ever doing it in the mind of a murderer because you're not supposed to know who the murderer is till the end and Dorothy Elsayers said that was why you could never write great literature, but that's another question. This is done magnificently, it's a very long novel and he moves from one character to the other and we are in their minds, so I learnt that. Then there's Dorothy Elsayers which is actually here on the display at the nine tailors and I think this has taught me the importance of setting. It's a wonderful story and the most important part of it is not really the crime although the crime is interesting and I'm not sure it's all together. I'm not sure the reasoning is all together. I don't think it could be done in quite the way she says but what is brilliant about it is that we are back in the fen villages before the first world war and a totally different way of life from our own and it's gone forever and the way in which she describes the church and the village and the villages and then the great flood at the end when all the villagers have to go up the hill and take refuge in the church because all the dykes have burst and there's the flood. Very good writing indeed and a hugely enjoyable one. Funnily enough I forget which American was who disliked crime novels and he was shown this in an effort to convert him into a life book in all his life all about bell ringing which didn't and of course the bell ringing is part of the fun of it and then I have the franchise affair Josephine Tay very elegantly told fairly simple plot but not only engrossing the whole way but he is very good at the two women one very elderly and one middle aged and not particularly attractive but very intelligent and a great character and they come alive and it's so good to have a hero who's not 21 and beautiful for a change and it is a very good story and I think I love that then what have I got here oh yes, Cyril Haire tragedy at law Cyril Haire is an example of somebody who's very successful in another field he is a high court judge who writes very good detective stories this is much the best he's really one of those writers who writes one excellent one and the others are all very interesting but never quite achieved it and here we have a judge going on circuit and what's fascinating about this book is it takes you back into the world in England at the very beginning of the last war when judges used to go round with great pomp and ceremony with a whole household with them and there was in every sort of town they visited there was the judges lodging it all started with a great sort of procession and a service in the largest local church and then the poor people who've been waiting for the judge who were in prison brought up and tried at this size and every town he visits and attempt is made on his life and in the end he is murdered it's a very good detective story but the attraction for me is the writing it's very elegantly written beautifully written and what it tells me about life in those days and about the law which has always rather fascinated me so I've got those then I've got CJ Sampson the Tudor mysteries I love this this is the one writing now long books and I'm afraid you're rather getting too long maybe but we're back he is a Tudor historian we're back there he has a sort of lunchback lawyer Shadwick and it's really the one in which the king Henry VIII makes his passage we hardly call it a visit it's a great promenade up to York to receive the apologies of the substance of it because of their rebellion the whole court the whole lawyers everybody moving that they managed to do it I don't know for me who loves history that's absolutely fascinating so I think I've almost got them have I? I've got the moonstone yes I think the Tudor mysteries and then the one in the Fens the Nine Tailors those are my favourite I also like her Gordi Knight actually I do like Gordi Knight many people don't like it but I think it's very clever because what that does for the first time she used detective story to say something that was very important to her about the almost sort of sanctity of a job of work and the position of women in colleges and academic life at that time but I like it and it is a very good detective story so that's my choice really I think I've got them all here some of them that's the go something it's sovereign that one is it it's not my area it is it's the one called sovereign Jason I suppose I thought about this I think that the two writers who have most influenced me are Siminole and Michael Dibdon Siminole because I think he understands that there's something essentially poetic about crime writing because Chesterton talks about this as well he says something about how the crime novel I think he says that the crime novel expresses the poetry of modern life and I feel that with with Siminole as well I mean he always talks about how his books would start with the atmosphere what he called the poetic line that was always his starting point for any for any novel and I think often when I read his books the plots themselves that doesn't stay with me what stays with me is the sense of the book or the feeling of the book may great can spend a whole novel just kind of trailing somebody in the rain in Paris and I just think it's amazing that he can do that that sometimes very little can happen but it's just that sense of very very well in his books so that was a big influence on me but also I think then particularly Michael Dibbden I first heard about Michael Dibbden on a radio programme years and years ago and I'd lived in Italy for a while beforehand and I just thought this sounded really interesting so I just went and bought some of his books and was immediately taken by it and I like the fact that he's a police procedural and detective fiction so that's a who'd done it style but also the fact that he's able to use this to talk about a country that he obviously knew very well and wanted to express all kinds of things about Italy and Italian society and Italian culture so after I'd lived in Spain for quite a while it's sort of so to seed reading Dibbden's book so to seed very much so that after I'd lived in Spain I could do this and Dibbden was sort of the first person I reached out for just to give me some sense of structure and where to start so yes very very big influence on me and interestingly both writers who were writing outside their own culture this Simonon being Belgian but moving to France and then writing about France which is relatively rare isn't it because most crime writers write about their own their own country maybe it's that outsider thing and obviously with Dibbden I felt that if he could do it I could do it as well as an outsider I mean I think he was never particularly I mean I think in Italy I'm not sure if his books were very successful I remember an interview with him once where he said I think at the time Italian within Italian society crime fiction was still to look down upon it was the yellow books and it was just sort of like pulp fiction I think I don't know if that's changed since but yeah it sort of gave me the courage in a sense that this guy he'd done it and he'd done it very very well and I thought if I can aspire to those heights that would you know that was something to say just something to reach out for Henry I was asked to design a I teach creative writing at University of East Anglia and I was asked to design a master's module on crime fiction writing for crime fiction and I spent about a year deciding what text I would have on that list for that course and I made a decision quite early on that I wanted to really concentrate on the genesis of the modern crime thriller as I came to call it and the ten novels that are on that list I guess in a way one way or another they are my favourites or at least are representative of particular subgenres or at least began with the beginnings of those subgenres and I'll just go through the list very quickly and then there's one novel in there particularly I think that impacted on me or has impacted influenced me more than most in particular when it comes to my own writing and the course is a ten week course the first novel on there is Chandler's The Big Sleep which of course is though Dashel Hammett effectively is credited with really being the originator if you like of the hard boiled style Chandler in my mind took it to another level the next novel is as I mentioned earlier one of my a very disturbing novel the classic noir novel Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and if at all the students I taught this year none of them had read it before and they were really quite shocked with that novel it is quite brutal and to think that it came out in over 60 years ago again is also really quite shocking I think and surprising the next novel after we did boiled maybe we did noir and then we did psychological the psychological thriller or at least the beginning of it which to me I really take that to be Patricia Highsmith the talented Mr Ripley which I think is an extraordinary novel that manages to to create a character Tom Ripley who really is not just a murderer obviously but actually has an appeal you can not quite sympathise but you can empathise with this guy and it is an extraordinary thing that I think that Highsmith did and it is an extraordinary thing I think she did with actually the genre by creating this character and to me getting into the head the mindset of a criminal was really quite revelatory and I found that a really interesting premise after that we had John McCarray's The Spy Who Came from Cold which of course is the greatest spy thriller ever written and also one of the great British novels of the 20th century following about the only one novel in translation I wanted on the list was Morrissey World and Pair Willow's Rosanna the first in the series of the Martin Beck series which I think is again the beginning of the modern police procedural and the way that those two authors writing together in a seamless fashion managed to create a sense of place a sense of time and what it really was like to investigate some really brutal crimes was extraordinary and it said awful lot about the welfare state of Sweden at that particular time so they managed to do a number of very interesting things and after all that rather sort of heavy dark stuff that one of the novels that I particularly wanted to get in there was Elmore Leonard to get shorty because I think humour is one thing that crime manages strangely enough to do very well but there are very few crime writers I think who actually do it very well but Elmore Leonard I think is an absolute master at it and that novel particularly is utterly hilarious but it's not just that the characterisation is superb the dialogue of course is absolutely fantastic and the plotting too he manages to do all that is quite extraordinary and then following from that we had Val McDermott's The Mermaid Singing which again was the first novel really to look into issues of the psychological the criminal profiler Tony Hill there and it's a novel that addresses issues of not just I guess the serial killer, the psychopath but also actually gender and she was very much at the forefront I think at the time of trying to get across these more sort of feminist issues which came in there without actually sort of ramming it down your neck and I think that was a clever novel and then the one novel we had under the bracket the literary crime novel was Martin Amos's Night Train which I think is an extraordinary novella actually that in part is actually a sort of hard boiled or a homage to the genre and particularly writer's Light Charms and also Elmore Leonard actually but it moves into a different terrain towards the end of that novel and it actually addresses has a crime even existed here and what is a crime actually and so I think that's a wonderful novel and then I think that the best global best-selling thriller writer on the planet at the moment is one of our own Lee Child who was formerly of course Jim Grant born in Coventry and I think he has managed to create something in his character Jack Weach in an extraordinary series and he can really write that guy and I think he does things that we did know we did the affair actually because it was the one novel that came out last year and it sorry a year before actually it's out of the paper back now and it's really about the beginning of how Weachup became what he is so that worked and then the last novel in the series because it was a particular recent favourite of mine was Denise Mina's The End of the Wasp Season which I think she's a great writer who manages to bring in aspects not just of police procedural but actually again she's very very keen at exploring the psychological issues of crime and both the perpetrators and the victims and that's something that's very important to me and indeed Catholic Confession is very important in that novel although written by Protestant but yeah it's so we'll talk about a couple more general things and I mean I take some questions we might do the readings from your own work towards the end I think we might try that the question of the investigator because the other side of that we had a tragedy with a happy ending his other his much more famous comment is down these main streets a man must go who is not himself mean but the character is one of the reasons it seems to be crime fiction is tragic is that the investigators tend to be fairly tragic figures I mean Zen in Michael Diblin is extremely tragic we're now going to have a very polite argument Dalglish to me is quite a tragic figure well he's a toaster's wife and baby and I think that's a yes I'm not sure he's tragic apart from that actually I think in the golden age with the women writers and we're thinking of Agatha Christie, Garthiel Sayers Nile Marsh, Marjoram I don't think their detectives were particularly tragic but they were all slightly romantic and they were all sort of gentlemen weren't they they were all somehow I'm not sure we felt that they were really real policemen in the way we do today they were not the worst for that but obviously if you take Dalglish Al Sayers Lord Peter Wimsy well she was quite frank about why she had a aristocratic detective she was rather poor at the time and she wanted to write about somebody who had limitless money and she said that when she got fed up with her miserable little flat she gave him a wonderful apartment when her carpets were showing more unusual wear she made him buy an obus on carpets and when her car had broken down for the first time then she gave him a damler and occasionally when she felt generous she let him drive it and I can see that this world was probably much more attractive she felt it would be to her readers than having a sort of sergeant plot on the job and then the others were exactly the same in fact when we get to who is an Elbert Campion Marjoram she told more or less he's connected with Marjoram he's so grand we're not allowed to know who he is and then we have from Niall Marsh and she has Roger Collaine and I'm afraid she was rather snobbish they all seem to me a bit snobbish I have to accept that I think with Dalglish Al Sayers it was an academic snobbery but with the others it tended to be social and with Niall Marsh it certainly was she spent her life with some dear friends who were aristocrats and I think she felt that was the kind of life she preferred and Roger Collaine trouble about Roger Collaine he has either Inspector Fox I think he must be has his sort of legman and he will call him Foxy to show how matey they are but I must say I don't know why I'm rude about him because these books have given me immense pleasure they are extremely well written especially Dalglish Al Sayers and one returns to them with what we were saying earlier that sense of being remote from the problems of everyday life back in a gentler England before the war with a story that never really loses its power and consorting with these very agreeable people so what is to worry about? Jason I was very struck in the exhibition by the quote suggesting that Agatha Christie disliked Poirot she refers to him as an egotistical creep and we're told that she wouldn't have him on the cover of the novels but I think this is more to do with the acting interpretations by the late John Moffit as we have to sadly say now and David Cichet has badly the last one I think there's a tragic quality to Poirot there clearly isn't there that he's a loner something has happened in the in the war It's so pleased with life isn't it so pleased with himself it's difficult to think of him as a tragic figure but I think she did fear why on earth did I invent him you know with his nostosias and his patient shoes and his oiled hair and he speaks very sort of fractured English to begin with but he's just bitter and bitter as he goes on and in the end he's hardly got an accent at all Now I prefer Miss Marple I think most people prefer Miss Marple I think Miss Marple is a much more human person but I suppose she's chiefly remembered for Poirot but she did really regret what she ever invented him Dorothy Alsay has learnt a bit from that you know you do keep him at least fairly normal about he's going to end up grotesque and Poirot is a bit of grotesque his little cells He is but I think David Cichet has made him a fascinating character in those adaptations though he does it brilliantly Jason maybe damaged the investigator we have a sense of damage in particularly now don't we these are people who have seen too much I mean that's I think it's something to do with being an outsider there's something to do with the picaresque style isn't there I think in crime writing and there's that influence the picaresque hero is always he's always outside mainstream society so I think if he is going to be somebody who's capable of seeing stuff that other people don't he has to be coming from an outside perspective so if you want to create an outsider one of the things that you can do as a writer is give him a traumatic backstory because trauma often or trauma much overused word but problems in life they're what shape us often or how we deal with them so that's going to give you your particular character your particular investigator the perspective that he will have in order to investigate so I think it's easier to write about damaged people I mean it's harder as a writer I think to write about somebody who's just happy and getting on with life I mean it's a sort of a writer trick it can get in the way of the plot can't it I get off the board of the baggage of some of these people and I also think that I call it this sort of curry jazz in real ale brigade I mean all rankings detectives you know John Harvey's detectives there was a sort of period of British writers creating characters who all drank ale who all went to the nearest curry house or had a take out and all listened to jazz and I think actually the tables are turning a bit and I think that the baggage is going actually and I think for a good thing because it does tend to actually get in the way of the plot frankly and if you're not really interested in jazz or real ale it's actually you're losing quite a lot of the plot aren't you you're losing a lot of the story and I think Charlie it is interesting though isn't it the way in which the amateur has more or less died and now nearly everyone is starting will have a professional detective and I suppose partly that's because they must have the background techniques people want to know about all these wonderful things that the piece can do from the forensic science laboratory here and you need it but in the old days they were really all virtual amethyst not all but most of them were I think that's a crucial point but police may explain to me once that it's to do with the law now isn't it if you discover a crime and don't report it you will go to jail you're supposed to tell the police rather than just tootle around and solve it yourself but technology has created another problem because a lot of policing now either as a writer it's so technical unless you spend an awful lot of time researching you're just going to not understand it and then also most you talk to most detectives etc and they go on and on about how boring their job is so I guess hence why the baggage came in but then you can then shift the story I think into actually which is why police you were saying don't bring in the voice the thinking of the perpetrator the criminal but actually it's in a lot of novels now it's often in italics you get at the beginning they all talk in italics it's their warped minds and the novel with these passages interspersed of whatever torture they're exacting or whatever they're planning to do and obviously we don't know who it is or even what sex the perpetrator is for that matter too because that's another twist that quite often comes into the frame you think oh here's yet another male psychopath but it's actually a female but technology is a good point I think isn't it you see in a number of novels now just the desperation to get the characters to somewhere where they don't have mobile phone reception or CCTV cameras and of course DNA most of the old ones you can read the books if they had DNA they wouldn't get further than Chapter 1 but it's often very difficult for the writer because I can remember many times because I've got this time structure and then I'll sort of say when I'm in the lab how long would Douglas have to wait before you've got these results from the stomach contents well when we're busy he might wait ten days or four or nine and say I wanted to know next day so all his cases are marked high urgency you know but still it is quite difficult and sometimes they won't tell you because it's something they don't want to tell you I mean I think they can pinpoint now when anybody telephones they really can pinpoint almost what room they're in when they're telephones but they won't tell you how close it is so I sort of have to say well roughly you know one wants to know all this absolutely of course and not all of it can be told I wouldn't think in many ways it has much less to do actually I think when Chandler came up the idea that actually it was the scene, the writing that was the most important thing and he was used to to say that you know if people got to the end of his novels and missed the final scene well it really didn't matter because that wasn't actually actually the point of them it was really the writing and the momentum that was built through characterisation description and so on and I do think that there seem to be two camps of writers in a way in the last 100 years those who actually focus more on the writing and by that I mean I guess in classic sort of literary terms characterisation dialogue, setting description and those who concentrate more on plot and sometimes writers manage to meet those two big and very important components in the middle and sometimes they don't and sometimes writers obviously emphasise one and other writers emphasise the other there are no necessarily right or wrong ways of doing it but I think there are two camps I think that technology is a problem I mean when I started writing my I did start thinking well surely with all technology they've got you could solve anything almost within a week but when I started doing the research and talking to Spanish policemen it was a great relief to me to find out that there's so many budget cuts that all this technology doesn't work so it's like I always have this great excuse now that's why the case goes on for so long I haven't used that thank you very much there's going to be a lot of budget cuts budget cuts but it's also why we see so much cold case fiction now isn't it that you can go back into the days when crimes were harder to solve and that's so they almost apparently in an unsolved murder they keep all the exhibits that's so remarkable keep for 30 or 40 years and it's never really dead a case but also psychologically that you have these I mean it happens in real life that you have these people who think they've got away with it for 40-50 years and have married had families and then they're caught I mean that's an extraordinary subject psychologically isn't it? it is there's a plot there there's a plot there we're all working away we'll work away before we open it up to the audience the other issue which Jason and I have discussed in a radio interview is the expectation of justice that in the in the classic English detective novel people did the readers they not only want justice to be restored but they expected to they trusted the police and when you get into other cultures where the police are not trusted that becomes a big issue I think Jason certainly in Spain because we were talking with Antonio Hill about that and he said that comment about how in Mexico was it that he told some friends in Mexico that he was writing crime novels and they said why are you doing this you know the police are the bad guys yeah no they actually said to me why would you have a cop as a hero they couldn't understand that I don't think the genre can work at all unless the police are honest it couldn't work you're quite right how could it work you've got to know the people investigating are telling the truth otherwise there's no real problem the whole thing is a nonsense isn't it well you have your single honest man like Zen for example a single good man in this corrupt although they're bad they can be quite corrupt can't they now Zen, Rebus they're essentially bad guys who do the right thing in the end often these when I wrote the first draft of the first crime novel and this came from a policeman who told me this he included it into my character he'd actually taken some money he went there was a drugs raid there was a dead man on the floor and there was like 50,000 euros just spread over the floor and he just took like a few hundred and put it in his back pocket and in Spain that's just kind of okay I thought this was very realistic I'll put this into it I've got this from the horse's mouth so I gave this to my character he'd done this in the past and my publishers came back and said it's so sympathetic to this sort of thing so I did change it but I think there's a certain degree of law breaking but it has to be some sort of moral overview surely that he is working to some greater moral good even if he can break the rules along the way Oh but it was Highsmith of course who said that art has nothing to do with moral or moralising or convention and I think that actually is an interesting point of view and it brings into play inherent corruption and sort of instability that an awful lot of people seem to encounter if not suffer themselves Well when you go to Dexter in which the detective is a serial killer I mean that's the extreme the extreme end of the spectrum but an extraordinary well functioning serial killer which is why actually the contrivance there is sort of absurd if we could bring the the lights up I think we can do that and then we can take yes thank you excellent we'll take questions from the audience for a while and then we might move towards some yeah we'll do our readings probably more towards the end who would like yes sir have we got microphones we have so we'll get a microphone down to that gentleman with the scarf if you put your hand up and then we'll see how we go from there thank you very much I was interested in the description of the waxing and waning of religious faith and Protestantism particularly in connection with the mid 19th century but I'd rather thought that at that time with the creation of the Metropolitan Police CID who started I think as plain clothes wouldn't that also have engendered a great interest in detection and that would have given rise to what we see repeatedly now the first detective story which was all around the time of the 1850s to 1860s when detection became a career really and an interest and something that really motivated an interest in people I'll just repeat that in fact well you worked on a historical crime story as well the significance of the mid 19th century and the rise of a professional police force the significance of that to the genre well I think it was very significant in fact I forget who it was but a very well known detective writer has said he didn't think you could have a proper detective story until there was the detective force in the Metropolitan Police and certainly when we look at crime novels which are in the past then we have to be trying to be accurate about what was happening at that time and this was a huge change for the police before then really it was total muddle river police and those poor unfortunate watchmen you know who were usually over 80 and couldn't wait to get back into their cozy little corner actually investigating crime and it's certainly with my last book Death Comes to Family that's not so long before that was an official police force and then it was left locally the magistrates and the local constables and they appointed the local constables and the magistrates and the constables investigated and the general view was it always leave everything to local people they know what's going on don't bring it up to London and we've always had this strong feeling haven't we that we mustn't have a national police force we never have and maybe we shall end by having it but the general feeling was no if you have that they get too strong and there will be some bad eggs and there's no result will happen keep it local and people will keep an eye on them so it has made a huge difference I think to crime writing and of course mainly to police investigation although every government suggests it don't they a British FBI it's the first thing they will say now I think this is because crime has become so international and the big criminals are very very wealthy men dealing in drugs or dealing in our coffins and they go right across boundaries obviously therefore it does seem silly to have your police force just one police force dealing with your country they've got to and of course there is our interpol but sometimes the feeling that we need more organisation we need more cooperation we need more technology use to get these people Also you worked at the Home Office famously in your time but isn't it is the case isn't it that some serial killers were not spotted in Britain for quite a long time because they killed people in different counties and therefore they didn't put together the killings I can't say I know any particular thing but I think it could well be but of course what we had in those days was calling in the yard and nowadays of course the yard is not curled in so often because every police force has this forensic science service every police force has all the necessary technical resources it needs and the yard you know I don't think they're ever called in they were called into the Yorkshire River but don't need to look and see what was happening and generally approve it but otherwise there is the local police really are responsible for everything that happens within their boundaries and that may change I suppose And in a Spanish context you have that in the relationship between the different police forces that's one of the fascination of your books just for people who haven't yet read it it's quite dizzying isn't it? Yeah so you've got a national police force called La Poletia Nacional and they deal with towns and cities with a population of more than 50,000 people I think anywhere else the countryside and villages what have you there looked after by the Guardia Civil the Civil Guard who were the main that was what Franco used mainly as his tool of repression and then you've got local police as well so a town like a big city might have its own municipal police and then you've got you've got the regional police as well it just goes on and on and on and actually I talked to the police and I said there must be lots of rival reason what have you and there are there are some really big rivalries but surprisingly not so much between the national police and the Civil Guard who are also on a national level the guys who are the national police really don't like the municipal police because they get paid more than they do and they have a really easy job so the national police get all the hard work and then they actually get paid less so you can use that quite a lot it's good material for the books I suppose really terrorism must have made a huge difference really hasn't it I mean there's a close cooperation between the police fighting codes and MI6 or MI5 whatever the secret service this is an entirely different kind of policing isn't it in a way I think you've got this idea that you shouldn't have too much power with one police force so in Italy and France you've got the same thing dividing it up but in Spain obviously there was the whole business in the 1980s when the police actually turned terrorists against the terrorists and created the GAL this sort of illegal organisation that went around kidnapping and killing suspected ETA members so yes things went really topsy turvy all power creates corruption so the more powerful a police force is or a security service for that matter the more prone to being corrupt I mean Scotland Yard now what are they doing there in the pocket to use international I don't have, I'm afraid I'm very skeptical and rather cynical about the effectiveness actually of a lot of what the police are meant to be doing and things, certainly things like you know white collar crime financial crime they're way behind the curve on that but the question of it provokes a lot but the question of jurisdiction though which you get that in Northern Irish crime fiction now which is beginning to come out it's the range, it's like Spain there the novels being written now about the troubles in Northern Ireland you have the British Army you have the RUC you have then there's the other one which I don't get the initials right there was the and then you have the Republic of Ireland police but also you have that in your novels that trying to get a crime off onto someone else from Ireland if bodies were found in the river or the sea there would be arguments over where the person actually died in order to who took the case aren't they more likely to be crime novels on detective stories yeah I think they are just talk to us about that distinction well I think to be detective you have to have the mystery at the middle you have to have a closed circle of suspects you can't have numerous suspects which of course when you're talking about international terrorism there's no limit to the suspects you might have you have a detective who comes in to solve the crime and by the end of the book you should be able to reach the right decision yourself by logical deduction inserted in the book with deceptive cunning but essential fairness that put very very brutally is what a detective story is there must be a mystery there must be a logical reasonable solution you don't have to go into justice and whether you went to prison or didn't go to prison there has to be a solution but when you're talking of a crime novel it's entirely different it's absolutely different and I suppose Brighton Rock is an example of a crime novel we know from the beginning that hell is going to be murdered we know that Pinkie is rotten and the interest in the book is what is going to happen to these people including Pinkie's unfortunate girl wife but there's no mystery there we know and the excitement is quite otherwise than solving a mystery so which genre do you to think you're writing in? Henry ah good question in fact we you know I spent an awful lot of time talking to colleagues and students about the genre even calling my course the writing of crime forward slash thriller fiction and I'm thinking of dropping the forward slash for the next academic year I'm not even quite sure why and then I'm thinking thriller is always fictional anyways you can't have thriller fiction is nonsensical but you couldn't so I guess crime I write crime novel in the broader sense but they incorporate bits of psychological crime and also to a certain degree in my most recent novel in my aspects of procedural Jason I think I'm writing police procedurals I'm still working it out but there's no element of the who done it there as well so I'm sort of blending genre you can also write the procedural thriller now so I saw the other thing yes this side anyone like to start for this side with a question yes yes madam can we get microphone down there we were talking earlier about escapism and entertainment but now there's quite a lot of the crime novels are seen as social documents I just wanted to how you felt about that that was about the crime novel we talked about as entertainment but they're seen as often as social documents now a lot of what I was making the series for 804 a lot of the younger writers they talk about using it to make a statement or a point they are and I think part of this is writing more realistic novels because I like to set mine unambiguously in the present age and as I've got a girl detective and she is one of the books she had a very sick granny who bought her up it was natural in that book that the police would expect her or at least the social services expected her to give up her time and get leave to look after granny in a way they would never have expected anybody else to so you don't set out to write a feminist novel but you just have to be aware of these issues because they're now part of society and if you're trying to write a realistic novel and it's interesting with my friend Ruth Rendell but increasingly she is using the crime novel to say something about matters that are important to her whether it's race or whatever it is and I think that is happening and the point is you need to do it very subtly because you're really not wanting to be a didactic writer or doctrine to want to reform people you're telling a story and creating a mystery but there must always be this knowledge of the society in which it is set and your society you know is a very different society from the one in a village in England Well I finish you had one of the great feminist titles still often used in headlines about various issues an unsuitable job for a woman I mean you see that very often it's quite a provocative title that isn't it? Well it was and of course that was set some time ago and then indeed she was taking over she was working for a small detective agency a very unsuccessful one and the detective killed himself and left her the agency and she took it over and the general feeling there of course well it's a very unsuitable job she'll never make a go of it but she did make a go of it I love that book I thought it was rather gross Do you think of yourself as a feminist writer? No I think of myself as a writer I think I am a feminist in that I love my sex in a sense and I feel that there is a lot that needs doing and making fair it is not fair huge advantages that happened in my long lifetime I mean I've lived for 92 years and believe me when I was a child you would never have thought that a woman could be a minister or a chief constable or actually be in charge of an aircraft or one I met the other day who was captain of a ship of war you know it's just incredible what women have achieved and will continue to achieve but there are still all sorts of rather nasty I think differences and I think that I particularly dislike the sort of atmosphere I think you can get in some offices which is just anti-female and anti-woman but I don't think it helps anybody to keep stressing that we are making things better I think all the time and women are achieving and we must never forget that women who want to stay at home and bring up children are doing an incredibly important job and they should have the choice of doing that if they want it we ought to have the choice and largely we have the choice and that must be reflected in our novels Do you fancy being Prime Minister? You'd be very good Not at the present You've got a book I'm not thinking of doing away with Dave although it might be quite an advantage We've talked about this before and because Death Comes to Pemberley is a sequel to Jane Austen In the English novel to make that distinction both the traditional novel and the crime novel has always been dominated by women haven't they? That's one of the historically interesting Jane Austen, George Eliot, the crime novel famously Absolutely Absolutely and women are very good at it women are very good writers The largest proportion of readers of crime fiction of all fiction but crime fiction I think that the gender divide is something like 75% to 25% I think we will find the detective story particularly agreeable because it provides the structure and within that structure you can deal with really violent emotions and violent deeds and murder deeply because of the disturbing things which a woman might really rather hesitate to put in a straight novel I think it is very supported Yes, we'll come over Gentleman at the front if we could bring the microphone Anyone on this side would like to have the microphone ready for you Yes There's a lady down here at the front if we could get that microphone down to her and we'll take this gentleman first and I was very interested in G.K. Chesterton's story where he confronts Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes I think it's the case of Mr Glass and the BBC did a wonderful broadcast where the crime is really Sherlock Holmes condemning someone who's innocent because of his method so my question is in terms of that story you have the priest who's got holistic and non-reductionist who empathises with the victim to solve the crime and then you have the rationalist scientist who actually destroys well through his solution he creates his own crime in a way I mean I'm fascinated by how detective and crime novels look at the way we seek truth and portray that within their stories That comes back to almost the question over here about realism too doesn't it and social the sort of social aspect of working out or interpreting and indeed exploring reality now and where we live and how we live and so on I think it's very hard to I mean to actually go out and think this novel which is meant to be entertainment one way or another and obviously the novel that's conventions is full of various contrivances and so on that actually make it completely truthful in that sense but obviously I think the aim of the writer anyway is to try and achieve some form of truth or try and get to that question at least and I guess the more the more boundaries parameters you have on a particular form a particular genre the harder it is in a way to actually exercise the aspects of truth if you are bound up very much with a plot that revolves around a set of precedents what sort of truth are you actually achieving there in the more historical sense of crime fiction which is why I think the question over here is crime writing now actually more realist is it more truthful than the right word I'm not sure but it's certainly become more realist the importance of truth I think it's crucial to the genre itself and how a particular detective goes about trying to uncover that truth one of the reasons I'm attracted to Simonon is because I think he's the psychology he understands the psychology of the perpetrator or a situation so that's he's reaching his conclusions it's not just the scientist or reductionist approach but that makes him attractive to me as a him being I think so how your detective goes about solving the crimes it's sort of like how maybe it reflects in some way you as a writer or not if you're choosing not to have your detective as a sort of an alter ego but it's sort of how you're approaching life itself and how you what's your take on just the mystery of existence I think although one of the reasons the spy novel Henry Manch's spy novel is so fascinating I think is that one of the reasons he's an astonishing writer is the relativism that there is no truth to be and the shifting identities too but in a way lecari's main aim was actually his aim of fire was to like were corrupt institution and that was his thing and what he was championing in a way was the individual was a sense of individual freedom rather than actually a institutional freedom and I think in a way that's the truth he was looking for you've always got the movement towards truth haven't you even if you don't find it at the end or it's relative or it's uncertain the move towards truth is crucial to the genre to begin with I won't say which one in case you haven't read it but the famous exchange at the end of one of the lecari's George Smiley you won George and he says famously I suppose I did he doesn't think he did that's an amazing moment yes the lady in blue I heard Ian Rankin recently express the view that men can't write good women detectives I just wondered if the pan I've been struggling since then to think of an example to disprove that but I haven't succeeded I wonder if the panel have got any ideas I'll just repeat that Henry for Phyllis yes Ian Rankin said recently that men cannot create convincing women detectives he gave that as a reason for why he didn't make chivalry in the central character after Rebus left do you think that's true that men can't create successful women detectives but unfortunately we haven't done enough examples have we they haven't really created them in any large numbers certainly I can't at the moment just think of one whether successful or not successful the man has created and they usually when they are created in a sort of subordinate role you don't usually find a man responsible to a woman and of course in many police forces that is how it is because the woman is chief constable but that has not sort of got into fiction yet and I wonder whether it will I think it would be difficult I think it's much easier for women to create men than it is for men to create women I think to an awful lot of men we are still one huge secret society that they can never quite understand it can never quite understand although one of my great campaign is I think Lindola Plant has not been given enough credit part of it is on television but Jane Tennyson is one of our Jane Tennyson is one of the crucial characters in crime fiction but then you see a woman well that's what I mean no I'm giving her that credit but she introduced there was nothing before that of anything I'm trying to think a novel I've read in fact the child's most recent novel The Wanted Man has two strong female characters who are the CIA and one CIA one's FBI so they're not the lead characters but they are key characters and he surprisingly perhaps always creates very strong female characters who might be a local police chief or someone quite high up in the FBI for instance or the army for that matter also it also ties into the ladies question about reflecting society because Lindola Plant says when she wanted to research it and she rang up and asked to speak to a woman DCI they said well there are only two of them so you have to speak to one or the other so it's um I mean I think any novelist you know if you can't create characters that are of not of your gender then you perhaps shouldn't be in the game and I think you have to be able to create male and female characters as easily as one or the other Although it's a very common view that male writers are not as good at women as women are at men this view is put forward by women critics and novelists very largely but do you agree with it? No Jason Sorry I'm just going to say when it comes to Tennyson she's not exactly happy is she? That's the point she's tremendously successful but as a woman she's not a happy woman in any of her relationships I think that happens really with almost all fiction when you get a really strong woman you don't usually come that she's got a very happy man three or four gorgeous kids don't see it work like that No that's what I was saying I think there are almost no happy detectives in fiction Mae Grey is perhaps happy isn't he Mae Grey is happy He's contentive he's faithful to his wife unlike his creator famously Yes we'll come back to this side anyone here who would like to close with reading last chance to raise a hand on that side don't go home regretting anyone on that side who would like to ask a yes I can see a hand there at the back yes at the beginning of a detective story do you always know who the perpetrator is going to be at the beginning of a story do you always know who the perpetrator is I do because that's how I work really I plot in great detail very great detail and I have the structure in all sets in black and white in notebooks and so on before I begin but what is interesting is the book always changes when you actually write it so you'll never get the book you thought you were going to get not completely but certainly I know who did it, why he or she did it who the suspects are, what their motors were how the truth will be discovered all that is clear in my mind before I start writing and just between friends is there a book on the way at the moment well there's a plot in my mind and I'm well excited by it but quite frankly at 93 in August and I'm not entirely fit and I would hate to leave something unfinished that's really rather a horror used to be when I did overseas tours and I was flying a lot I always took the book I was working on but I thought that's the worst thing if this pain goes down in the ocean a book aren't finished and somebody will tamper with it so who knows if I have the energy I'd love to do one more just one more we hope so do you know? no, not normally sometimes when I start a novel I think I know and then I change a call all the way through I sort of think if you know as a writer then somehow the reader will know right at the beginning because every sort of sentence is somehow leading towards that reveal so no, I don't like to plot that closely I don't know whether it was Ruth but I think somebody may have been Ruth Randall who completely changes in the last chapter and think that'll fool them I plot very carefully yes, before I start writing because I think then I can when I'm writing I can concentrate on writing and I'm not having to think about plotting so that would my brain isn't quite big enough to do the two things that it wants so I try to limit what I need to actually do when I'm actually doing the writing but with you I find that things can change they do change suddenly your character leads you in a different direction but essentially the core is there from the beginning and do you have those moments when suddenly something is solved it's a tricky thing you just feel it never happened like this there's this feeling I've got something this is wrong, it all hangs together but there's something wrong about it and then in the morning you suddenly think that's where he went that's wonderful usually when you're just waking up it comes it's a marvellous feeling we haven't got that much time so we have a short little reading from each of our writers so are you ready you want me to go first could you go first please if you can but with the eye on brevity I'm just going to get comfortable now this is the very beginning of my new novel which will be out in April and it's about a crime writer struggling with his new novel this is here we go as ever I'm probably staring out of the window at flowers, at foliage anyway a few straggly roses, clematis possibly ferns perhaps a vine maybe and plenty of other stuff weeds notably or I'm looking at the sky through the long slim slightly grimy panes above the French windows watching clouds build and threaten while urging my mind to race off elsewhere or I'm just looking at my screen my chap chubby hands hovering lamely over the keyboard perhaps I'm glancing at the books and paperwork stacked up on my desk the mounds of receipts and bills invoices and remittance slips contracts and invitations the old bit of fan mail too having arrived the old fashioned way via my publishers and through the letterbox I like to hang on to these cards some I guess have been sitting there for a while so in many ways while trying to avoid these things I never get properly dealt with or filed and trying to concentrate trying to think about what I do best while panicking a little because a deadline is looming more bills have to be paid and my brand enhanced and image appears as if from nowhere thank God not of course that I believe in one in my game this then is how I'm going to begin it first light Christmas morning a thin freezing fog was drifting in from the sea across the tide line the frosted dunes and curling around the decrepit hotels and guest houses the long since shut and boarded arcades and amusements a fun fair from another era lost further up the golden mile he crossed the road his dog trotting obediently by his side out of habit he looked behind him in front again scanned every which way not that he could see far but far enough to tell he was the only fool about at this time and in this place why he liked it his grey Hugo boss puffer was zip tight his orange beanie pulled low yet still the air was getting straight to his bones once on the sand bass his black and tan boxer immediately bounded out of view increasing his pace not because he was worried about the dog but to try to generate some warmth he headed straight towards the sea on a faint path they always went the same way across this area of outstanding natural beauty how it had been designated as such was a mystery bass he shouted at last where the hell are you thank you very much and um Jason this is the shortest extract I could find my detective and he's with his colleague and they're eating lunch they spend a lot of time eating lunch I think there's a basic sensuality to Mediterranean crime writing which I try to get across so my detective Max Cameron is with his colleague Torres and they're having paella they're eating paella together instead of chasing the bad guys there's a kind of rating system for rice dishes, Torres said all part of the mystery of paella you're not going to get mystical of me are you paella is not just food for a Valencian it's a way of life Torres took a swig because he read drink and pursed his lips you know all this already or at least you should do you've been here long enough all right camera held up his hand no disrespect so what's this rating system then bo re bo and mel Torres flicked out his fingers as he listed the words it's like giving marks to a paella depending on how good it is camera chuckled serious stuff Torres stared at him a family can spend the whole meal time arguing over paella all right so what do they mean Torres gave him a look bo as you should know by now is a Valencian for good re bo means very good and mel, mel means honey that's the top mark Torres frowned kind of well is it or isn't it there's another one above that but it's hardly ever used perhaps never it belongs to the perfect archetypal paella like some kind of platonic ideal one that's been made over an open fire wood from an orange tree and using Valencian water of course it's impossible to make paella from water from anything else doesn't come out the same and this top mark is de categoria Torres said his Valencian accent thickening slightly will open vowels like a yelling cat you think Plato had paella in mind when he was coming up with his theory of forms there's a form for everything Torres hit back even the hairs in your nose well at least that's what my mate Joaquin told me at school I never did understand much in philosophy classes camera lifted lifted up a spoon of rice and meat so what category is this one then I reckon it's pretty mel get out of here you don't know what you're talking about this he pointed at his plate and frowned in concentration bo you can't give it more than that camera put the spoonful in his mouth it tated alright to him perhaps a little heavy on the oil now that he thought about it so what's below bo then what happens if it's a bad paella Torres scald no such thing what's the name of that book my dear a death in Valencian death in Valencian and I'm sure Jason will give you one afterwards if you'd like a copy no I don't believe it again I'll buy one and PD James yes well I won't go and read a short bit so putting it in thing this is in Pemberley Elizabeth has been married to Darcy for six years there are two babies upstairs in the nursery she's had a wonderful evening with her sister there the bingles are there they've been having music Georgian has been playing everything has been civilised and peaceful and then Darcy looks out of the window just when they're going to bed and there is this chase coming at huge speed towards the house out of a part of the estate which is called the wild wood because it really is very wild and here they are it's coming at immense pace the coach was still coming at speed rocking round the corner of the end of the woodland road to approach the house Elizabeth thought that he was surely rattled past the door but now she could hear the shouts of the coachman and see him struggling with the reins the horses were pulled to a halt and stood there rootless in name immediately and before he could dismount the coach door was opened and in the shaft of light from Pemberley they saw a woman almost falling out and shrieking into the wind with her hat hanging by its ribbons round her neck and her loose hair blowing about her face she seemed like some wild creature of the night or a mad woman escaped from captivity for a moment Elizabeth stood rooted incapable of action or thought and then she recognised that this wild shrieking apparition was Lydia and ran forward to help but Lydia pushed her aside and still screaming thrust herself into Jane's arms nearly toppling her Bingley stepped forward to assist his wife and together they half carried Lydia to the door she was still howling and struggling as if unaware who was supporting her but once inside protected from the wind they could hear her harsh broken words Wickham's dead Denny has shot him why don't you find him they're up there in the woodland why don't you do something he's dead and then the salves became moans and she slumped into Jane's and Bingley's arms as together they urged her gently towards the nearest chair thank you very much there'll now be the authors will sign their books thank you to our audience thank you to Henry Sutton and to Jason Webster I'm sure they weren't objective I say that it's a particular privilege to be with PD James who I am now going to call Baroness James of Holland Park thank you very much thank you