Book Review – August 2023
Macabre fiction has been a particular strength of Welsh writers over the years, perhaps in part inspired by the alluring yet sometomes eerie quality of the landscape.
I have to admit I’m a big fan of so-called ‘tartan noir’ Scottish crime fiction; I enjoy the work of writers such as William McIlvanney, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Denise Mina. Welsh writers are yet to establish a cohesive equivalent genre for their own country, though their colleagues in television have been making enormous ‘Welsh noir’ strides in recent years with bilingual dramas like Y Gwyll, Craith and Un Bore Mercher.
British Library Publishing have a track record of unearthing classic British crime fiction and producing handsome short story collections featuring some well-known and other less well-known British crime writers from the twentieth century. Martin Edwards was commissioned to edit this latest collection featuring either writers from Wales, writers from elswhere who set some of their stories in Wales or, in some cases, writers who tick both boxes.
Crimes of Cymru is a collection of fourteen stories first published between 1909 and the 1980s. Among the better-known Welsh-born authors featured are Roald Dahl, Ethel Lina White and Arthur Machen. Other Welsh writers, less well-known but equally prolific, include Cledwyn Hughes and Jack Griffith. The rest of the collection is made up by writers from other parts of Britain who set some of their short stories in Wales. This includes Christianna Brand, Ianthe Jerrold and Michael Gilbert.
The short stories presented vary in style and length and, it has to be said, they are of variable quality too. But I think the whole point was to present a representative picture of Welsh crime fiction in the twentieth century, some of the work good and some necessarily not quite so good. In fulfilling this objective Martin Edwards has fully succeeded and has produced a very entertaining collection with an extremely helpful introduction and notes on each author.
Like other collections in the British Library Crime Classics series, Crimes of Cymru gives the reader an insight into a world that is now lost. I’m not so much thinking of the content of the stories and the past times they are set in, though that would be true in almost all cases. I’m referring to the circumstances in which these stories were first published. Most found their way to a readership through monthly magazines with titles such as Crime Mysteries, Pall Mall Magazine, The Strand Magazine and The London Mystery Magazine. Publications such as these may not have paid particurarly well, but they had a voracious appetite for short stories and provided a reliable route to publication for jobbing writers. This is a route, unfortunately that is no longer available to twenty-first century authors.
Crimes of Cymru does not feel particularly Welsh. But I guess that means it accurately reflects the times in which these stories were written, rather than than the more self-confident Welsh literary scene of today.
Martin Edwards
Martin Edwards was born at Knutsford, Cheshire and educated in Northwich and at Balliol College, Oxford. A member of the Murder Squad (collective of crime writers, Martin was the longest-serving Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association since its founder John Creasey. In 2015 he was elected eighth President of the Detection Club; his predecessors include G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. He is Archivist of the CWA and of the Detection Club and consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics.
