Recommends: Detective Weekend

First published in Prospect (Issue 193) 

Sleuths! The English Riviera Festival of Crime and Thriller Writing
Various venues in Torbay, 18th-21st April, Tel: 01803 665 800

Although most fictional detectives are eccentric loners, crime fans are an ever-expanding mass. Witness the cult following of Danish TV thriller The Killing or the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which has spawned a film franchise and inspired a clothing line by H&M. But the Queen of Crime is still Agatha Christie, whose books have been translated into over 100 languages (a world record) and whose play The Mousetrap is the longest running (from 1952 to the present) in the West End.

The fourth annual Sleuths! crime-writing festival takes place over a long weekend in Christie’s hometown, Torbay. On the Sunday her grandson Mathew Prichard will present a talk about the letters she wrote while on a round-the-world trip in 1922.

This year’s headline act, however, is Colin Dexter, who created one of the best-known sleuths of his generation: Inspector Morse. Having killed off Morse in 2000, Dexter recently revisited the inspector’s youth in the prequel Endeavour, and he will talk about the crime-ridden Oxford of his books at the festival. Alongside the talks, there will be writing workshops, a mystery trail and a psychological thriller play performed by the Bijou Theatre Company.

Review: Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

Dingy flats and rented rooms are Leontia Flynn's territory in Profit and Loss. Anyone who has spent the first decades of their adult life (Flynn points out: "these days we're classed as youth / till 44") in academe or poorly paid work will recognize the succession of neglected digs she describes with a comic sense of bravery. Several of the poems in the first third of the book use the same opening gambit: "I once lived in a house ...". The effect is sometimes curious ("I once lived in a house with rusted locks"), sometimes macabre ("I once lived in the house of an infamous death"), and, cumulatively, deadpan. There is a trace of the stand-up comedian's patter in the movement of Flynn's best verse. Her most surprising opening lines are understated, with a faintly amused delivery, and she is not averse to a bawdy punchline in poems whose titles, at least, give some warning: "The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail" and "The Vibrator". The ease with which she moves between registers is most impressive in the book's centrepiece, "Letter to Friends", a long conversational poem modelled on Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron". Her manner is airy, though rarely arch like Byron's or Auden's in his "Letter" - she has a knack for working clever rhymes into the ode stanza without sounding self-satisfied, often invoking brand names in pairs such as "artefacts" / "Filofax" and "Apple" / "grapple".

Despite the collection's grim settings and even grimmer context - "a scary month for news" from the banking crisis to "the Church of Rome, / its awful crimes" - Flynn often strikes an optimistic note, and that note rings true in some of her more inventive conceits. Flynn's line in "The Girl Upstairs" celebrates the fact that "the rising wind / rumbles the bins and makes the drinkers shout" and neatly absolves the loud culprits, even as she tells us she is the girl crying in the poem. Meanwhile her description of a "mid-price, brick mid-terrace" in "The Dream House" would be flatly sarcastic if its "loving grubby marks" were not transformed by her vision of "some mythic beast in a distant land" beginning its "trek towards their life".