Bodies From the Library

 21st June 2025.
Report by Carol Westron

Bodies From the Library was held in the
Conference Centre of the British Library.

It celebrated its tenth year by having the largest number of attendees it had ever welcomed.

Attendees were greeted by the offer of hot drinks and a goody bag,

and a stall selling British Library Crime Classics and books by the speakers, did a lively trade throughout the day. 

The first talk was by Martin Edwards and Gary Wigglesworth (part of the staff of the British library), who discussed the very successful British Library Crime Classics. The first question that Gary asked Martin was what had made the last few years a suitable time for republishing Golden Age crime fiction, much of which had been forgotten by the majority of people, and why did he think it had proved so popular. Martin replied that new technology, such as Print on Demand, had made republishing books more financially viable. He also thought that many readers found the Golden Age a good place to find ‘comfort reads’, especially during the Pandemic and its aftermath, and compared this to the 1920s and 1930s, when readers felt a similar need for the safety and comfort of a story that took them away from their own worries.

Martin and Gary then discussed how the books for Crime Classics were selected, and Martin said that the initial proposals came from him, sometimes after they had been suggested by friends, and then the British Library staff had to research who held the copyright and whether it could be acquired for a reasonable price. Martin said that the aim was to provide a range of books that appealed to a wide and varied range of readers. The British Library publishes twelve Crime Classics a year, two of which are anthologies of short stories.

The second talk was by Victoria Dowd, who gave a fascinating overview of The Gothic in the Golden Age. She described how the Gothic tropes that appear in the Golden Age had developed from Victorian fiction and referred to the psychological landscapes that mirrored the mood of the characters, and the monsters who looked ordinary, until their real evil was revealed. She spoke of the fear of incarceration; locked room mysteries; and closed circle situations, such as Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery, with its added dimension of the supernatural when the snowbound party indulge in table turning. Victoria also pointed out that the house features in the Gothic links to the Golden Age as a repository of memories, and as a place that should be safe, but which becomes a trap. She mentioned books that are not usually considered crime fiction, but undeniably are based around a crime, such as Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which she cited as an example of the haunted individual. In the Golden Age, the detective is considered the restorer of order, but this is not always the case: in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr Quinn, Harley Quinn is a magical detective, however he is balanced by the very human Mr Satterthwaite. Other detectives can be less benign, and represent the infiltration of safe spaces by the scary creatures hidden beneath the guise of those we trust; or in novels such as Christie’s And Then there Were None, where there is no detective to restore order, and chaos and terror can reign unchecked.3. Nine and Death Makes Ten by Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr).

John Curran gave his talk the title And Ten There Were None. In tribute to ten years of Bodies from the Library, he listed and briefly talked about ten Golden Age books with the word ten in their titles.

1. John’s first book choice was naturally And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, the original title of which was based on an old nursery rhyme, and was called Ten Little...

2: The Ten Tea Cups by Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr).

3. Nine and Death Makes Ten by Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr).

4: Ten Days Wonder by Ellery Queen

Because John could not find enough titles with ten in them, he had to resort to the Roman numeral X.

 5: The Tragedy of X by Ellery Queen.

6: X versus Rex by Martin Porlock (aka Philip Macdonald)

7: Warrant for X by Philip Macdonald.

8: Ten Star Clues by E.R. Punshon.

9: Let X Be the Murderer by Clifford Whiting.

10. Ten Minute Alibi by Anthony Armstrong & Herbert Shaw.

John also threw in the pre-Golden Age 1909 murder mystery The Man in Lower Ten by the American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Tony Medaware took us on a whistle-stop tour of Ngaio Marsh: Artist in Crime, in which he told us about Marsh’s early fascination with performing on the stage, which equalled and probably excelled her love of writing. He made various suggestions of people in Marsh’s theatrical life whom she used as a model for characters in her novels, such as the actor-manager Allan Wilkie who provided the character of Sir Henry Ancred in Final Curtain, and her friend Nelly Rhodes who, with her family, provided the basis for the Lamphrey family in the book Surfeit of Lamphreys.

Jake Kerridge and Moira Redmond provided us with A Golden Age Reference Shelf.

Amongst the books they recommended are:

Taking Detective Stories Seriously: crime reviews by Dorothy L. Sayers, edited by Martin Edwards.

Murder for Pleasure by Howard Haycraft: the first book length study of crime fiction.

Snobbery With Violence by Colin Watson, which studied social attitudes in the Golden Age.

The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards.

Guilty but Insane by Samantha Walton: case studies of the psychology of crime in Golden Age books.

Deadlier Than the Male by Jessica Mann.

The Hooded Gunman by John Curran: The Illustrated History of the Collins Crime Club.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James.

Murder Inc. by Dilys Winn.

Murderess Inc. by Dilys Winn.

A Catalogue of Crime by Jacques Barzan & Wendell Hertig Taylor.

Bloody Murder by Julian Symons.

The Bedside Companion to Crime by H.R.F. Keating.

Ronaldo Fargarazzi introduced us to several excerpts from the 1960s television series Detective, which illustrated how far television detective drama has come in the last sixty years. There were excerpts from early dramatisations of:

Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh

The Body in the Loch by Michael Innes

The German Song by H.C. Bailey

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

Dover and the Poison Pen by Joyce Parker

Martin Edwards and Chrissie Poulson introduced us to the work of Fiona Sinclair, an actress, poet and novelist whose novel Scandalize My Name has just been republished by British Library Crime Classics. The book was first published in 1960, but sadly Sinclair died in 1961, so the rest of her novels were published posthumously.

Len (L.C.) Tyler called his talk More Baffling Than Any Detective story. In it Len examined a real life murder during the reign of Charles II. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was an English magistrate who was murdered in an extremely violent way: he was discovered beaten and strangled, after which he had been stabbed with his own sword. Len gave us a brief outline of the original story, with its political and religious background, and explained how the story of Godfrey’s brutal murder has formed the basis of two detective novels:

Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey by John Dickson Carr, and Len’s own The Three Deaths of Justice Godfrey, which is part of his series featuring John Grey.  

In the penultimate session three bloggers discussed The Pleasures and Pressures of Golden Age Blogging. Ronaldo Faragazzi, Kate Jackson and Moira Redmond talked about how often they blogged, the usual lengths of their blogs, and what specialist subjects they blogged about.  

The final session brought all the speakers back to the stage to answer audience questions, which had been previously submitted during the day.  

This was followed by a wine party, where speakers and audience could mingle and chat.