Why I Fell in Love with Murder Mysteries…
By Benedict Brown
I’ve been writing whodunits for two and a half years now, but I fell in love with them a long time ago. I come from a family of readers and my childhood home in London is full of books. In our lounge still to this day is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase which is covered from wall to wall with books of every genre, but especially crime fiction. Even that wasn’t enough to contain our ever-expanding library and, over the years, new deposits have built up around the house so that most rooms now have a bookcase or two. My mum was a teacher, my dad worked in magistrate courts. They were both avid readers and encouraged my brothers and me to be the same.
From an early age, I fished out Agatha Christie books from that enormous shelf and quickly got caught up in the magic of her mysteries. Even as a child, I loved the clear-cut right vs wrong moral code of Poirot and Miss Marple and their imperceptibly twisting plots. When I became a teenager, my tastes expanded to take in modern authors like P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and Colin Dexter. At university, I even studied a module in detective fiction. After a master’s in creative writing, I spent ten years writing kids’ books, but I always knew that I’d get round to crafting my own mystery series for adults one day. My first, “The Izzy Palmer Mysteries”, is set in the modern day, but it was no surprise to my family when I jumped back in time to the 1920s for my second series. I hope that my “Lord Edgington Investigates…” books emulate the queen of crime fiction herself and all those wonderful writers who kicked things off in the golden age of murder mysteries.
