Thanks to all of you dear friends and family who sent text messages and emails pointing and laughing after my brief TV appearance last Friday. Yes, the hairdresser did get to finish the cut. And no, Ayo Onatade and I didn't confer in advance on what to wear …
Me and my partners in crime Ayo, Adrian Muller and Lizzie Hayes were called in to help comedian and writer Sandi Toksvig discover just why the British are so infatuated with crime fiction. Critic Barry Forshaw and writer Andrew Taylor were also there to add their expertise.
Filming took place in the grand setting of Addington Palace in Surrey which had drawing rooms aplenty in which to skulk and to bump off unsuspecting passers-by – and to gawp at men in scary lemon-coloured shorts (which really were a crime) playing golf.
The segment on BBC1's The One Show obviously only encapsulated a brief extract of what we talked about – we'd probably still be yakking now if we hadn't have been packed off home mid-afternoon. I got to pontificate on whether solving the mystery was important – and people are still asking me why I said I was more interested in the plot and the characterisation than working out whodunit.
One interesting thread that didn't make the cut was which book we'd recommend to someone new to the genre. I cheated a tad and dithered between two – Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley and Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The others all went for classic novels.
I know what got me started reading crime fiction – Dorothy L Sayers' The Nine Tailors. We read as part of the syllabus for English Literature O Level at the age of 16. I don't remember much about the GK Chesterton we also read, and I've always enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories (and particularly the Jeremy Brett TV version). But for some reason the Sayers really stuck in my mind.
About ten years later, when I went back to crime fiction in a big way, it was writers like Sara Paretsky and Val McDermid who got me hooked. I've read and enjoyed many of the classics, but never get the urge to re-read them, whereas I reckon I've read each of the books in Highsmith's series at least four times, and I intend to go back to the Larsson after the final part of the trilogy is released.
I can't remember exactly what I said on the BBC recording, but if you want a sound-bite rationale for each choice, Highsmith is a masterful writer whose cool, measured prose pulls you into the life of the amoral Tom Ripley, while Larsson's awesome debut novel presents a truly original and flawed heroine.
So what book would you use to entice a crime fiction virgin into the genre?
