36 APRIL 2020 http://www.writers-online.co.ukA
dam Macqueen is a journalist and author who has
contributed to Private Eye magazine since 1997 and wrote
the history of the magazine to celebrate its 50th anniversary
in 2011. Between 1999-2002 he was deputy editor of The
Big Issue. As an author his books have the most intriguing titles –
The Prime Minister’s Ironing Board, The Lies of the Land: A Brief
History of Political Dishonesty and The King of Sunlight. His first
novel, Beneath the Streets, is a political thriller and published by
Lightening Books in March 2020.The journalist and now novelist shares
his top fi ve reads with Judith SpelmanShelf life
‘Judging by the shelves in my
local library, mysteries account
for an enormous proportion of
the nation’s reading but I wonder
how many people actually read
them with their own detective
hats on. I’m not sure I’ve ever
worked out a murderer ahead
of the final chapter, or even
really tried to. I think the key
to mysteries’ ubiquity is that
they provide a ready-made
framework on which to hang characters and explore
more interesting issues. Dorothy Sayers has two of the
most fascinating of the former in Lord Peter Wimsey and
Harriet Vane (the latter only a background presence in
this instalment): Wimsey’s deliberately-curated image as a
foppish dilettante disguises both his intelligence and the
lingering effects of shell shock in the First World War.
This is at the heart of his relationship with his batman-
turned-valet Bunter, just one of the supporting characters
Sayers uses to interrogate and satirise Britain’s class
system between the wars: Wimsey’s snobbish sister-in-law
the Duchess of Denver, his sister Mary, married down to
a Scotland Yard man, and in this book the employees of
the Pym’s Publicity advertising agency into which m’Lord
goes undercover as a 9-to-5 man (a deception boldly
not revealed to the reader until five chapters in, though
regulars will guess from the first line).’MURDER MUST ADVERTISE
by Dorothy L Sayers, 1933‘I’ve picked this because it’s a
rollicking read, full of intrigue,
adventure and excitement,
and it introduces perhaps the
greatest role-model in children’s
literature, Dido Twite. But it has
a particular significance for me
now because it’s the first book
that made me realise – decades ahead of Gordon Burn’s Alma
Cogan and Robert Harris’s Fatherland – that you don’t have to
stick to the rules: you can take the bits of history you want and
reshape the rest into your own story, as I’ve done with Beneath
The Streets. Aiken’s whole series takes place in an alternative
England where James III is on the throne and dastardly
Hanoverians are plotting against him, and where wolves roam
the countryside, having entered the country through a channel
tunnel completed a couple of hundred years ahead of schedule.BLACK HEARTS IN
BATTERSEA
by Joan Aiken, 1964‘I’ve picked this because it’s a
rollicking read, full of intrigue,
adventure and excitement,
and it introduces perhaps the
greatest role-model in children’s
literature, Dido Twite. But it hasBLACK HEARTS IN
BATTERSEA
by Joan Aiken, 1964ADAM
MACQUEEN
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Beneath the
Streets