The Books That Led Me to Crime.

[Adam Colclough]

One of my earliest memories is of discovering the box of well thumbed paperbacks stored under my parent’s bed. They belonged to my late maternal grandmother, who, like me, had been an avid if reader with determinedly eclectic tastes.

My favourite game involved stacking them up like so many building blocks, all the time I played it the thing that really caught my attention was the brightly coloured covers.

Two types in particular stick in my mind. The first were soft and pastel coloured with the illustrations done in the fuzzy style of a cinema camera with Vaseline smeared over the lens, the titles, once I’d mastered the words necessary to read them concerned the adventures of a busy lady called Angelique in ‘Love’, ‘Revolution’, or some other exciting situation.

My favourites though belonged to the other type, these were about a dozen or so Agatha Christie novels with the sort of lurid covers favoured by her publishers in the late sixties and early seventies.

Actually the covers weren’t lurid, they were downright gruesome and I loved every one of them. Not least because the dominant imagery more often than not involved guns, nooses and, in my favourite of the whole bunch, a blood stained knife reflected in a series of mirrors.

Later I got around to reading the books to see if the content matched the promise held out by the covers, it didn’t really, but what I did find was enough to foster an ongoing fondness for the peculiarities of the traditional British crime novel. A literary genre that, in its best moments, can be far more sinister than it is usually given credit for being.

I can’t help wondering what Angelique is getting up to these days; perhaps she’s staying in a country house with Colonel Mustard and his friends. Now there’s a plot with possibilities.