My choice this week for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is N for Not Safe After Dark by Peter Robinson.
This is a collection of twenty short crime stories, including three Inspector Banks stories and an Inspector Banks novella (90+ pages). The title story Not Safe after Dark is just six pages long and yet those six pages are full of tension and suspense as an unnamed man enters a park after dark, even though he knows that such big city parks are dangerous places.
Peter Robinson’s introduction is interesting for me in that he explains how he writes and compares writing a novel to writing short stories. He’s used to thinking in terms of the novel, with it’s ‘broad canvas’ and finds it hard to ‘work in miniature’. Short stories don’t come easily to him.
I carry a novel around in my head for a long time – at least a year, waking and sleeping – and this gives me time to get under the skin of the characters and the story. Also, plotting is probably the most difficult part of writing for me, and being asked to write a short story, which so often depends on a plot twist, a clever diversion or a surprising revelation, guarantees that I’ll get the laundry done and probably the ironing too.
In short stories there is no space to develop the characters or the plot, nor to give different points of view as in a novel. But, as far as I’m concerned, with the stories I’ve read so far in this book Robinson has succeeded in creating convincing stories with believable characters in real settings.
Often reading short stories I’m left wanting more, which is what happened to Robinson with one of these stories. Innocence is a haunting tale of a man accused of murduring a teenage girl. After writing Innocence, which won the Crime Writer of Canada’s Best Short Story Award in 1991, he couldn’t let the story go and went on to write a whole novel expanding on the events of the story. This eventually became Innocent Graves, featuring Inspector Banks (who is not in the short story).
The other stories include a private-eye story set in Florida, a romantic Parisian mystery, a historical story inspired by Robinson’s interest in Thomas Hardy and the place where he was born, and stories about such varied topics as American Football and Shakespeare.
Note: Peter Robinson’s website is here.
And there is a fair amount of violence in this dark book, starting with the discovery of a brutally tortured body in Mary King’s Close, an ancient Edinburgh street now buried beneath the High Street. It’s August in Edinburgh during the Festival.
J is for 
She is employed by the Coverdales as their housekeeper and in the interests of having their house kept clean and tidy they tried to make her comfortable. But part of the problem was that they looked on her as little more than a machine, not as a person. They meant well, wanting to make other people happy, but they were interferers and things went from bad to worse. Then Eunice met Joan, who was completely unstable, in fact she was insane. Joan is a religious fanatic, a sinner who delights in telling people of her past sins and wanting them to seek God’s forgiveness. Their friendship ends in tragedy.
is for 
books I’ve read recently. Poirot investigates the death of Simeon Lee, the head of the Lee family. None of his family like him, in fact most of them hate him and there are plenty of suspects for his murder. He is found dead with his throat cut in a locked room – locked from the inside.
BooksPlease 