Spooky Mysteries

Apart from an afternoon having coffee and book-hunting in Didsbury, I spent most of yesterday reading and mulling things over.

It was a whole day thinking about spooky mysteries. Breakfast in the garden with the cats, reading Bret M Herholz's graphic short, 'The Adventures of Polly and Handgraves', which had arrived that morning in the post. It's a lovely gloomy murder mystery, saturated by black nineteenth century misdeeds and fiercely cross-hatched rain. I was also tangled up in Joan Aiken's spooky animal stories for a while, and then the beginning of Michelle's Lovric's 'The Undrowned Child.' Now, I've read all three of her historical novels set in Venice, and this is her first for kids and it's gorgeous with ambience. It's pickled with suspense and I'm loving it.

Then a trot round Didsbury - my favourite bookshop, which is quite like the one in my teen novel, 'Exchange', as it turns out. Behind the cafe the rooms seem dimensionally transcendental somehow, seasoned with dust and that Penguiny smell. I was straight into the Wodehouses and the Ed McBain's. I'd never read any of the 87th Precinct procedurals and I wanted to sort that out. 'Cop Hater' is marvellous, it turns out. All those 1950s stinky hot August streets and nasty, graphic homicides. Clipped, slangy dialogue set out like skinny stanzas. Dames in nylon underwear at the end of their tether as their uniformed boyfriends pound the city streets. I wa sitting in the window of Saints and Scholars with a mocha in one of those funny tall glasses. They had the top twenty from the same week of August in 1984 playing. Why didn't I think the top twenty then was brilliant as it seemed yesterday? Laura Brannigan, Howard Jones, Tina Turner.

In the evening I was away with the purring, twitchy Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in one of his very late Granada episodes. I'm eking them out to make them last. And then Matthew Sweet's documentary on Film Noir. One of the commentators - I forget who - said something *brilliant* about interior monologue being an easy but fantastic way to tell a tale. It's like feeding the audience the info 'intravenously'. But it's not nourishing, he went on to say. They don't have to work at the drama. Wonderful!

So my head's spinning with mysteries and sultry atmospheres. Just this morning I've listened to 'The Scarifyers' for the first time. A proper rollicking Boy's Own radio show, this - with an elderly cop, and an M.R Jamesian scholar-writer getting involved in supernatural shenanigans. I don't know how I've missed out so far on these. Fruity and chewy as wine gums.

For years when people asked me, what genre do you write in? I was a bit hapless, which is no good with the marketplace these days. I'd say it was literary magic realism... um, adventures, um, something. It's a blend of genres, etc... um... bit of fantasy, but more real that that... on council estates and stuff...

Anyway - I realised that what I've always written have been mysteries, of one sort or another. Even in my earliest novels. There was always someone vanishing - Nesta does a runner in 'Does it Show?' and the whole estate has to go out looking for her. Someone snatches the baby in 'Marked for Life' and there's an investigation by a whole family of amateur sleuths. And there has always been something spooky going on. Some hint of the supernatural. So - okay - Spooky Mystery. That'll do as a genre description. It's what I'm steeped in.