Hi, I'm A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window. This is a psychological
thriller, a sort of Hitchcock's Rear Window for the 21st century. Our
agoraphobic narrator, once a respected child psychologist, is now house-bound
and so she spends her days spying on her neighbors. One night she believes she
witnesses is a crime in the house across the park but can't set foot outside to
investigate, nor can she persuade anyone including the police to believe her. But
is the danger real or imagined? That's what you have to find out. So I'm here at
the Waterstones on Tottenham Court Road and I'd like to talk to you about a few
of my favorite books starting with this one, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. One
of the things I love so much about crime fiction is that sometimes, not always, not
often, but sometimes you can experience and enjoy a crime novel on two levels.
You can savor the twists and turns of the story, scratch the surface though and
you're exposed to something more resonant, something deeper. And no one
pulls us off quite like Kate Atkinson who got her start as a so-called
literary novelist, winning what was then the Whitbread, but then turned her hand
to detective fiction. This is a dazzlingly well plotted mystery, but more
than that, it's packed with characters who are textured, who are three-dimensional,
I still think about them, what, ten, twelve years having read this book so I
couldn't recommend this one more highly and it's actually been quite formative
for me as a writer. So my next selection is Howards End by E. M. Forster. This is
one of the most humane novels I've ever read by one of the most humane novelists
who ever wrote. It's very English in certain senses and yet it's so
accessible that even I as an American can appreciate its nuances and its
comments on caste and class in Edwardian England. It's also very funny but, above
all, as I mentioned earlier it is humane. It is a compassionate novel and its
credo which has been immortalized ever since is 'only connect.'
Forster is urging his readers to reach out to and feel sympathy for those who
are different from them. I love this book; it makes me laugh, it makes me cry, as
stereotypical as that sounds. So I spoke earlier about how Kate Atkinson can
bridge the gap between literary fiction and suspense. Another author who does
this beautifully, brilliantly even, is Tana French. This is the first novel in
her series featuring the Dublin Murder Squad. And what's novel
about this series is that each book is narrated by a different character. She
rotates her narrator so you get a sort of 360 degree view of this unit. The
prose is absolutely dazzling, you've never read sentences so sculpted and so
pyrotechnic in a crime novel before. This book is somewhat controversial, this is
the first in her series, in that it ends - I won't say how it ends but it ends on a
note that some people find dissatisfying. I think it is perfect, I think
it is the only ending for this book. In order to discover what it is you need to
read it and then you'll want to read all of her books. So I came over to the UK
quite a few years ago for my PhD at Oxford and the subject of my PhD thesis
was this lady, Patricia Highsmith, who's first Ripley novel, adapted very
famously in 1999 as The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, is one of the
greatest crime novels ever written it's followed by four sequels of varying
quality (one of them is pretty bad, the last one, skip it). This one though is
marvellous. It evokes '50s Italy, it evokes the jazz scene but most of all it speaks
poignantly to the difficulty that someone without a conscience has in
relating to others. What's so persuasive about this novel, what's so disturbing
about it, is how Highsmith gets us to root for a serial killer which is what
Tom Ripley is. Traditionally crime fiction has been about moral education.
When we start a Sherlock Holmes story we know that by the end the guilty will be
punished, the virtuous rewarded or redeemed and order and justice upheld
and restored. Not so in Highsmith and that's what makes her work so addictive
and so, again, disturbing. So this is one of the stranger novels I've read. I don't
know whether to call it a psychological thriller or a period piece or a drama or
even a fantasy. It's Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay which was adapted
very famously by Peter Weir, the Australian filmmaker, in the '70s and I
think there's a recent TV remake as well. It's the story of a group of schoolgirls
who at some point in the early 20th century in Australia go for a picnic at Hanging Rock.
Three of them don't return. Neither does one of their teachers and the way
this plays out, the ripple effect it has on their community, is wholly absorbing,
more than a little disturbing and altogether addictive. This is a fever
dream of a novel ,it's like a mirage, it absolutely shimmers. You just have to
read it, lazy as that sounds, I don't know how else to pitch it. You'll never forget, and it's short!
So my desert island volume, not just in terms of value for
money, although that's a consideration, is this the complete Sherlock Holmes by
Arthur Conan Doyle. In one of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels the obnoxious
little detective says that he finds a lot of Sherlock Holmes plots to be utter
rot but the writing, he acknowledges, is exquisite. I don't think that's entirely
fair, there's a reason that Sherlock Holmes is the foundation stone, as
critics say, upon which crime fiction has been built and has been ever since his
creation in the late 19th century. But even though the plots are sometimes
silly they're almost always memorable and again that writing is just glittering.