Yesterday's Papers

by Martin Edwards

  ‘As you might expect, this business with Vera Blackhurst has appalled him. He is very suspicious of her. He’s even said that the Trust’s survival might depend on the outcome of her claim. The Trust means a great deal to him - and we are desperate for money. But I can’t believe there is any reason for him simply to... well, to act as though he is personally under threat.’

  ‘Have you discussed this with the other trustees?’

  ‘Only with Matthew Cullinan and even with him I was rather circumspect. He oozed charm as usual, but he obviously thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Perhaps I am. Even so, I wanted to have a word with you before tonight’s meeting. I was sure that you would listen to me patiently. As you have. Sorry to come crying on your shoulder.’

  She smiled ruefully and Harry found himself having to fight the urge to give her hand a comforting squeeze.

  She wasn’t his type, but he had a lot of time for Frances Silverwood.

  ‘I’m sure Luke will be fine,’ he said. But he wasn’t sure that he really believed it.

  She stood up. ‘Thank you for hearing me out, Harry. I expect this will probably all blow over and I’ll have made a complete fool of myself in Matthew Cullinan’s eyes. Worrying over nothing.’

  Harry stood up and took a last glance at the shrunken head. It stared back, as if to say: You know it’s right to fear the worst.

  The Making of Yesterday’s Papers

  Writing Yesterday’s Papers was a hugely enjoyable experience. It was my fourth book, and – proud though I was of the first three – my aim was to step up to the next rung of the ladder as a crime novelist. One of the pleasures of writing a series of books over a number of years is that you have the chance to soak yourself in the recurring characters and their world. I felt that by now I was really getting to know Harry Devlin. In the early days, inevitably, his life had been dominated by the murder of his estranged wife Liz. Her death would continue to haunt him, but he was also moving on.

  Since I was working in Liverpool, and since, like me, Harry had fond memories of the Merseybeat era, I thought it would be fun to write a book drawing on Liverpool’s pop music heritage from the days of the Swinging Sixties. This idea led me naturally to a plot involving a “cold case” – long before I wrote The Coffin Trail, the first of the Lake District Mysteries which introduced, in Hannah Scarlett, a detective who leads a team specialising in unsolved crimes from the past.

  The popular music of the 1960s holds a special place in my affections; so much of it was fresh and unforgettable that it is hard to surpass. And Liverpool, for several years, seemed to be at the heart of the world of pop culture. It was an exciting time in the city. The Beatles soon claimed iconic status, and the Cavern Club was legendary. I vividly remember the one and only time I saw the Beatles live – at the age of seven. They were not performing on stage, but rather opening a carnival in Northwich, the Cheshire town where I lived – presumably fulfilling a contractual obligation taken on before their breakthrough. My memory is of a colossal crowd in a modest town park that had never seen anything like it – and of the four stars in their purple suits, at constant risk of being engulfed by their adoring fans.

  As well as the Beatles, countless other groups and solo singers from Merseyside had recording contracts, and a good many of them featured in the Top 20. But even more disappeared before long without trace. While driving into work in Liverpool one day, as I was planning the book in my head, I stopped at traffic lights in Aigburth. I was listening to a favourite song that I’d heard a hundred times before, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” It was written by Bacharach and David, the only songwriters to match Lennon and McCartney for both dominance and brilliance in the era of the Mersey Sound, when many of their hits were covered by artistes from Liverpool. There is a line in the lyric about “all the stars that never were”, and as I sat in the queuing traffic, those words sparked an idea which became central to the plot.

  The storyline required Harry to dig into the past, and from an early point I decided that the archives of Crusoe and Devlin would play a significant part in the events of the book. By way of research, I decided to explore my own firm’s archives. Solicitors have a cautious habit of keeping their files and deeds for many years, and although in recent times many archives have been digitised, this was uncommon at the time I was writing the book. Thousands of files take up a huge amount of space, and as we did not have enough secure rooms in our offices to keep them, we rented not one, but two storage areas elsewhere in Liverpool. I had never had cause to visit these premises previously, but when I was taken on a guided tour by our archivist, I was fascinated.

  The fictitious archive in the book is an amalgam of its two real-life counterparts, with a few invented extras thrown in. One of our archives was indeed underground and close to the waterfront – an extraordinary and atmospheric labyrinth. The other was located closer to the city centre, and I was told that part of the building had once been a ballroom. Both places fired my imagination. There is something emotionally, as well as physically, chilling about dank subterranean places that makes them very appealing as settings for scenes in a crime novel. So much so that I later varied the theme, and had Harry venture into Williamson’s Tunnels in First Cut Is the Deepest and a disused railway tunnel in Waterloo Sunset.

  Harry, like me, is interested in classic true crimes (including the extraordinary Liverpool cases of James Maybrick and William Herbert Wallace), as well as in detective mysteries. So I felt he could not possibly resist the approach made to him by Ernest Miller at the start of the story, despite Miller’s unattractive personality. For the subplot featuring Miller, I was influenced by a narrative device used ingeniously by the superb Canadian writer Margaret Millar in one of her best novels, A Stranger in My Grave, which I decided to give a fresh twist. Playing a game with the structure of the story was something new for me as a writer, one of those risks that doesn’t always work out – but in this case, I was very happy with the result, and the fact that I was able to deliver a twist in the very last line of the book.

  A word about chronology in crime fiction. A couple of issues tend to arise. First, when characters in the present investigate a case of the past, the writer has to handle the story with care, to make sure that the gap in time does not create insuperable problems. Yesterday’s Papers concerned a murder in 1964, 30 years before I started work on the book. If I were writing the story today, the material would need to be treated very differently, because so much more time has elapsed, and the people who were around in 1964 are correspondingly older, even if they’re still alive. Second, there is the question of how a detective ages over the course of a series. It is a problem that Agatha Christie encountered (but ignored) with the length of Hercule Poirot’s career, and that, in common with many others, Ruth Rendell has had to face with Reg Wexford. I was 32 when I first started writing about Harry; suffice to say, he has aged much less rapidly than me! At the time of Harry’s last outing, in Waterloo Sunset, I acknowledged the passage of years, while compressing the interval between that book and his early cases. It is fiction, after all…

  Few writers feel total satisfaction with their books; there is always something that you think you could have done better. This is certainly true of me, but all the same, I was very happy with Yesterday’s Papers. I had wanted to create a complex, multi-layered mystery, and the reviews were extremely gratifying. The Sunday Times was among the newspapers that praised it lavishly, later choosing the book as one of the few mysteries to feature in its collection of “Paperbacks of the Year”.

  Briefly, if naïvely, I hoped that these accolades would signal a boost in sales. Instead, my paperback publishers (who did not publish me in hardback) decided to concentrate on their own stable of authors, and Yesterday’s Papers soon disappeared from the shelves. Happily, when I moved to Hodder and Stoughton, the book enjoyed a fresh incarnation in paperback form. And I’m delighte
d that a mystery that will always be one of my favourites amongst my own works is now enjoying, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, a new life in a brand-new form.

  Meet Martin Edwards

  Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer whose fifth and most recent Lake District Mystery, featuring DCI Hannah Scarlett and Daniel Kind, is The Hanging Wood, published in 2011. Earlier books in the series are The Coffin Trail (short-listed for the Theakston’s prize for best British crime novel of 2006), The Cipher Garden, The Arsenic Labyrinth (short-listed for the Lakeland Book of the Year award in 2008) and The Serpent Pool.

  Martin has written eight novels about lawyer Harry Devlin, the first of which, All the Lonely People, was short-listed for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for the best first crime novel of the year. In addition he has published a stand-alone novel of psychological suspense, Take My Breath Away, and a much acclaimed novel featuring Dr Crippen, Dancing for the Hangman. The latest Devlin novel, Waterloo Sunset, appeared in 2008.

  Martin completed Bill Knox’s last book, The Lazarus Widow, and has published a collection of short stories, Where Do You Find Your Ideas? and other stories; ‘Test Drive’ was short-listed for the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2006, while ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’ won the same Dagger in 2008.

  A well-known commentator on crime fiction, he has edited 20 anthologies and published eight non-fiction books, including a study of homicide investigation, Urge to Kill .In 2008 he was elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club. He was subsequently appointed Archivist to the Detection Club, and is also Archivist to the Crime Writers’ Association. He received the Red Herring Award for services to the CWA in 2011.

  In his spare time Martin is a partner in a national law firm, Weightmans LLP. His website is www.martinedwardsbooks.com and his blog www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/

  Bibliography

  Harry Devlin Series

  All the Lonely People (1991)

  Suspicious Minds (1992)

  I Remember You (1993)

  Yesterday’s Papers (1994)

  Eve of Destruction (1996)

  The Devil in Disguise (1998)

  First Cut Is the Deepest (1999)

  Waterloo Sunset (2008).

  Lake District Mysteries

  The Coffin Trail (2004)

  The Cipher Garden (2005)

  The Arsenic Labyrinth (2007).

  The Serpent Pool (2010)

  The Hanging Wood (2011)

  Other Novels

  The Lazarus Widow (with Bill Knox) (1999)

  Take My Breath Away (2002)

  Dancing for the Hangman (2008)

  Collected Short stories

  Where Do You Find Your Ideas? and Other Stories (2001)

  Anthologies edited

  Northern Blood (1992)

  Northern Blood 2 (1995)

  Anglian Blood (with Robert Church) (1995)

  Perfectly Criminal (1996)

  Whydunit? (1997)

  Past Crimes (1998)

  Northern Blood 3 (1998)

  Missing Persons (1999)

  Scenes of Crime (2000)

  Murder Squad (2001)

  Green for Danger (2003)

  Mysterious Pleasures (2003)

  Crime in the City (2004)

  Crime on the Move (2005)

  I.D.: crimes of identity (2006)

  The Trinity Cat and other mysteries (with Sue Feder) (2006)

  M.O.: crimes of practice (2008)

  Original Sins (2010)

  Best Eaten Cold (2011)

  Guilty Consciences (2011)

  Non-fiction

  Understanding Computer Contracts (1983)

  Understanding Dismissal Law (two editions)

  Managing Redundancies (1986)

  Executive Survival (two editions)

  Careers in the Law (six editions)

  Know-How for Employment Lawyers (with others) (1995)

  Urge to Kill (2002)

  Tolley’s Equal Opportunities Handbook (four editions)

  Martin Edwards: an Appreciation

  by Michael Jecks

  Both as a crime writer and as a keen exponent of the genre, Martin Edwards has long been sought out by his peers, and is now becoming recognised as a contemporary crime author at the top of his form.

  Born in Knutsford, Cheshire, Martin went to school in Northwich before taking a first class honours degree in law at Balliol College, Oxford. From there he went on to join a law firm and is now a highly respected lawyer specializing in employment law. He is the author of Tottel’s Equal Opportunities Handbook, 4th edition, 2007.

  Early in his career, he began writing professional articles and completed his first book at 27, covering the purchase of business computers. His non-fiction work continues with over 1000 articles in newspapers and magazines, and seven books dedicated to the law (two of which were co-authored).

  His life of crime began a little later with the Harry Devlin series, set in Liverpool. The first of his series, All The Lonely People (1991), was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for the first work of crime fiction by a new writer. With the advent of his second novel, Martin Edwards was becoming recognised as a writer of imagination and flair. This and subsequent books also referenced song titles from his youth.

  The Harry Devlin books demonstrate a great sympathy for Liverpool, past and present, with gritty, realistic stories. ‘Liverpool is a city with a tremendous resilience of spirit and character,’ he says in Scene of the Crime, (2002). Although his protagonist is a self-effacing Scousers with a dry wit, Edwards is not a writer for the faint-hearted. ‘His gifts are of the more classical variety - there are points in his novels when I think I’m reading Graham Greene,’ wrote Ed Gorman, while Crime Time magazine said ‘The novels successfully combine the style of the traditional English detective story with a darker noir sensibility.’

  More recently Martin Edwards has moved into the Lake District with mystery stories featuring an historian, Daniel Kind, and DCI Hannah Scarlett. The first of these, The Coffin Trail, was short listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the year 2006.

  In this book Martin Edwards made good use of his legal knowledge. DCI Hannah Scarlett is in charge of a cold case review unit, attempting to solve old crimes, and when Daniel Kind moves into a new house, seeking a fresh start in the idyllic setting of the Lake District, he and she are drawn together by the murder of a young woman. The killer, who died before he could be convicted, used to live in Kind’s new cottage.

  Not only does Edwards manage to demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the law (which he is careful never to force upon the reader), with the Lake District mysteries he has managed to bring the locations to vivid life. He has a skill for acute description which is rare - especially amongst those who are more commonly used to writing about city life.

  More recently Edwards has published Take My Breath Away, a stand-alone psychological suspense novel, which offers a satiric portrait of an upmarket London law firm eerily reminiscent of Tony Blair’s New Labour government.

  Utilising his legal experience, he has written articles about actual crimes. Catching Killers was an illustrated book describing how police officers work on a homicide case all the way from the crime scene itself to presenting evidence in court.

  When the writer Bill Knox died, Edwards was asked by his publisher to help complete his final manuscript, on which Knox had been working until days before his death. Bill Knox’s method of writing was to hone each separate section of his books before moving on to the next, so Martin was left with the main thrust of the story, together with some jotted notes and newspaper clippings. From these he managed to complete The Lazarus Widow in an unusal departure for
him.

  More conventionally, Martin Edwards is a prolific writer of short stories. He has published the anthology Where Do You Find Your Ideas? which offers a mix of Harry Devlin tales mingled with historical and psychological short stories. His Test Drive was short listed for the CWA Short Story Dagger.

  Edwards edits the regular CWA anthologies of short stories. These works have included Green for Danger, and I.D. Crimes of Identity, which included his own unusual and notable story InDex. In 2003 he also edited the CWA’s Mysterious Pleasures anthology, which was a collection of the Golden Dagger winners’ short stories to celebrate the CWA’s Golden Jubilee.

  A founder member of the performance and writing group, Murder Squad, Martin Edwards has found the time to edit their two anthologies.

  When not writing and editing, Edwards is an enthusiastic reader and collector of crime fiction. He reviews for magazines, books and websites, and his essays have appeared in many collections.

  He is the chairman of the CWA’s nominations sub-committee for the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, the world’s most prestigious award for crime writing.

  Martin Edwards is one of those rare creatures, a crime-writer’s crime-writer. His plotting is as subtle as any, his writing deft and fluid, his characterisation precise, and his descriptions of the locations give the reader the impression that they could almost walk along the land blindfolded. He brings them all to life.

  (An earlier version of this article appeared in British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia, edited by Barry Forshaw)

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