A leading critic stated that Gwendoline Butler is the only woman crime writer equal to the Four Great Founding Mothers: Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh. Remarkable just how many Highest Common Denominators they share. They are all well-educated: Butler read History at Oxford, and lectured there. All prolific writers: not for them fame based on a dozen titles and some TV adaptations (Butler has written seventy books, with three in the Millennium Year). They have all written on other than detective fiction. Four have had supportive husbands: three in particular, including Gwendoline's, distinguished in their own right.
Gwendoline Butler is probably the most elegant crime writer, lives in an attractive nineteenth century house in Runnymede, and has always moved in top academic circles. Her late husband, Dr Lionel Butler, the historian, was a Fellow of All Souls, Principal of Royal Holloway College when he died tragically in 1982, and her younger twin brothers are also authors, one an ex-MP, the other a Professor at Cambridge. How can she conjure up such macabre delights as a family of three found dead at their table, a collection of malformed infant skulls in a building site, a painted corpse with the thymus gland neatly cut out, or a body in a Guy Fawkes cart? Plus she holds the accolade of being one of the six originators of the genre - level with Poe, Doyle, Berkeley, Webb and Freeman - for she invented the woman's police procedural.
How did you immerse yourself so completely in crime?
I'd always enjoyed reading crime. Apart from Pickwick Papers and Jane Austen, I read nothing but crime from the age of eight, using my Mother's and my Grandmother's library tickets, pretending I was taking books out for them. My Aunt had the Collected Short Stories of Sherlock
Holmes and Dr Thorndyke. One day in my Grandmother's cupboard I found a battered yellow copy of The Mystery of the Yellow Room,by Gaston Leroux, and, to her amazement, I read the entire book by the light of the fire in two hours. But I also read the classics, Trollope, Gaskell, Jane Austen: her and Doyle's literary style have influenced mine.
You didn't start by writing crime?
I'd always intended to write, to earn money. As a historian I wrote a history book for children, but nobody wanted it. Not only did I read detective stories, but I knew people who read one a day, so I wrote one whilst at home in Oxford when my husband was doing research in Malta for three months. I went to classes to learn to type, just as later I went to classes to learn to use a word-processor, to be professional and make more money. A publisher I had known at Oxford praised it - but rejected it. At that time Lionel was Literary Executor for the wealthy Edward Meyerstein, the novelist and poet. Also involved was the young George Greenfield, later one of the most famous agents. So Receipt for Murder was published. It was based on some friends of mine, but had no series detective.
Your first books were based on the area, fashionable Blackheath, where you were born, and soon your series detective did appear, John Coffin.
I wanted a Londoner and I thought Coffin was a good selling name - I took it from a family of friends in New England, where it is quite common. When my brother Alan was Warden of the Toynbee Settlement he invited you and me, John, to hear Dr (later Lord) Owen, a local resident, give the Annual Lecture. Owen put up the idea of London being divided into two cities, so I put John Coffin up for Chief Commissioner, and he got the job.
You followed Michael Innes and Francis Gerard in that Coffin moves up the ranks to become Chief Commissioner as did their Commissioners Sir John Appleby and Sir John Meredith.
Yes, he's ambitious, unlike Inspector French. He married twice, his first wife died, his second is a famous (and good) actress. I love the theatre and I based the St Luke's Theatre and their flat, a converted church, on a similar building in Runnymede and on a theatre in a former church in North London.
Apart from the Coffin books, Gwendoline has written Victorian detective novels, romances and Gothics, and has won various awards, such as the CWA Silver Dagger and the Romantic Novelist's Association Silver Rose Bowl. This increased her following in the States. I first met her in 1984 to interview her for Jeff Meyerson's now vanished magazine Poisoned Pen, and had the privilege of helping her start writing again.
How did you become Jennie Melville, with your woman detective Charmian Daniels, thus inventing the woman's police procedural?
When we were in St Andrews, where my husband was Vice-Principal and Professor of Medieval History, I had a lot of creative energy and found I could write two books at once, a thousand words on one in the morning, a thousand on the other in the evening. I wanted a change from Coffin. I wrote about women, criminals, and the police, and George Greenfield sold it in a fortnight. He met the team of Michael Joseph at a party, just after Mary Fitt had killed herself. They wanted a new writer. I chose the masculine anonymity of initials, like P D James or C V Wedgwood, but they insisted on a woman writer, so I took my Grandmother's name of Jennie Melville. Soon after, when walking the dog, I saw a young, red-haired policewoman undergoing training, so I started with Charmian Daniels.
An interesting genetic point arises here. Gwendoline has younger twin brothers, and was herself a twin, but her sister died soon after birth. She wondered if this was why she wrote as two women. Recent research has shown that when one twin dies at birth, the survivor works as hard as two people - Leonardo Da Vinci, John Lennon, Elvis Presley and David Jason for example.
When you were Chairman of the Gold Dagger Awards Judging Panel; to which you had me appointed, what were your criteria then, and now, as a Crime Time reviewer and a judge in the Ellis Peters Competition?
Originality, development and good basis of plot - sensible, not silly or arbitrary - and written properly.
Crime Time has just published The King Cried Murder, based on sixteenth century Windsor, its Theatre Royal and George III, which introduces new sleuths: two spycatchers for Mr Pitt and Fanny Burney's clever young maidservant. This first of a new series is already selling in the States. So what are the other two new books?
The new Charmian Daniels novel Dead Again (Macmillan) is now out, and HarperCollins' latest Coffin, Coffin's Ghost, has also just appeared. And I'm working on the next Coffin!
Your sense of originality, of the macabre and the unusual even seems to be increasing. How come?
I can only say the blank screen makes me start to write, and when I start I must know the end, so the plot develops and grows organically.
As a historian Gwendoline insists on complete accuracy, when she was writing Let There Be Love, a romance published by Severn House, she wanted to get the 1919 Paris details perfect. In 1992 we went to Paris together, armed with my Father's 1920 Baedeker, found a building where an important dinner party could be held, then paced out the heroine's walk back to her apartment in the Place des Vosges with her admirer, just released from hospital. On the hottest day for years, our stroll along the Rue de Rivoli took ninety minutes. Leaning on the Pont Neuf she decided an American Colonel, with petrol, gave them a lift thus far. A murder attempt was to take place during a Heads of State Dinner at Versailles. We paced around, found it rather sombre, so I suggested the Army using searchlights as a form of floodlighting.
Additionally, she has contributed to various English and American reference books, is a very competent public speaker and broadcaster, as I know personally from some fifty events we have shared. Her house in Runnymede contains a huge library of crime and detective fiction. Her knowledge and acute receptivity should ensure a continuing list of unusual crimes and solutions to delight her readers in many lands.
And Ken Ferris looks at a new Gwendoline Butler novel…
The King Cried Murder! by Gwendoline Butler, CT Publishing, £16.99
The first pons asinorum historical crime writers must cross is knowing your period comprehensively and intimately, not just quoting chunks from textbooks on water closets or town planning. We wince at the American author who thought London's Strand and Embankment made a sort of beach. Gwendoline Butler is one of the rare writers who is a professional historian, read history at Oxford and lectured there. Next you have to be able to recreate the ambience so perfectly that your readers can see, hear, smell and almost touch the atmosphere in your chosen venue. Finally, the third bridge to cross is being able to combine real life characters with your imagined cast, whichever your sleuth, to use a medieval term, is to be. Mrs Butler cleverly uses eighteenth century Windsor as the place and time: she lives in the shadow of Windsor Castle herself and one of her detectives, Charmian Daniels, with whom she invented the woman's police procedural, is based there. In this book the sleuths are Major Mearns and Sergeant Denny, who made their debut in Crime Time 2.1 in the short story A Bad Winter's Day in Windsor, aided and abetted by a clever and attractive young woman, Charlotte Minden, serving maid to Fanny Burney, one of the Queen's waiting women. This makes a total of six detectives created by Mrs Butler: all the most popular crime writers have more than one detective to their name - Agatha Christie had eight, John Creasey a dozen, and John Dickson Carr four.
Her stage is set in the Castle itself and in the original Theatre Royal, where she cuts the action skilfully and always with a compelling sense of atmosphere. Young women are being found slashed to death in town and Castle - or are they all young women? The King in the frenetic stages of his illness is escaping his guards through secret passages and roaming the dark streets. A clever and sinister doctor, concentrating on mental illness and with a modern power complex, attacks Burney, who is quite sure she will be safe roaming the streets and visiting the theatre haunted by the killer. The book is full of terrifying incidents, mysterious warnings in blood, and men who are not what they seem. The denouement is sharp, unexpected, bleak but credible. This is one of the best historical crime novels I have read, and the very best for truth, terror and atmosphere. I am delighted to know this is a new series. A final word of praise for the jacket - like the Adam covers for Christie, it is in the right key and gives a subtle clue.
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