Yesterday's Papers (26 page)

‘When I arrived back from Luke's house, there was a message from him on my voicemail. He asked me to present his apologies to the meeting tonight. He spoke in a jerky way, as if his nerves were in pieces. I called his mobile this time and managed to catch him. Though I guessed that he regretted answering as soon as he heard it was me on the line. It was as if he'd been hoping to hear from someone else.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said he needn't try to bluff me. I knew him too well not to realise he was sick with worry. I asked him to talk to me, to trust me with the problem, whatever it was. He didn't bother to deny the truth of what I was saying, but he said there was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. He was desperate to get off the line. Finally he said a quick goodbye and put down the phone before I could utter another word.' She groaned, put her head in her hands. ‘This must all sound ridiculous to you. Am I being silly?'

‘You're bound to be anxious. And confused.' Harry paused. He thought about telling her of his own last conversation with Luke Dessaur, but something held him back. ‘What's the explanation for the overnight case? Is there anyone he might be visiting? What about his godson?'

‘You know Ashley Whitaker?'

‘Yes, I often buy books from him. I first met Luke through Ashley, as it happens - years before Crusoe and Devlin started to act for the Kavanaugh Trust.'

‘Luke can't be staying with him. Ashley and his wife are attending a book fair in Canada. I remember Luke mentioning it that night at the theatre.'

‘Any other lines of inquiry?'

‘You sound like a policeman,' she said. ‘I know you have been involved in a number of - unusual cases, but I would hate to think...'

Harry loosened his tie. The room was warmed by twin radiators and poorly ventilated. Perhaps that, and the watchful presence of Uncle Joe, explained why he felt so uncomfortable. ‘Luke's behaviour is a mystery.'

‘Yes, but it's not...'

Again, she allowed her voice to trail away. Harry could guess the reason. She had meant to say:
it's not a
murder
mystery
. He said gently, ‘Anyone else who might be worth contacting?'

She pushed a hand through her thick black hair. ‘He's a good man, as you well know, but I wouldn't say that he has many friends. He and Gwendoline lived for each other. Since she died, I think he has led a solitary life. But I would have expected him to let me know if anything was amiss.'

Harry caught the eye of the shrunken head and quickly glanced away again. How could Frances concentrate on her work with that face staring down at her? ‘Has he seemed out of sorts before?'

‘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 delighted 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)