Mark McCrum, a crime writer based in Tintern has released his third murder mystery. He spoke to NICHOLAS THOMAS about his work, the secrets of writing a good whodunnit, and the influence of his heroine Agatha Christie

MURDER Your Darlings is the latest puzzler to star Francis Meadowes, a crime writer forced to once again turn sleuth when he finds himself, unwittingly, at the centre of a murder mystery.

Set at a writers’ retreat in Italy, the book follows Meadowes’ investigations as he uses his experiences of writing crime fiction to try and solve a far more real case.

This is the third time Meadowes has taken up the role of detective. In Mr McCrum’s previous whodunnits, The Festival Murders and Cruising to Murder, the author-turned-detective has to solve murder mysteries at a literary festival and on a luxurious voyage, respectively.

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Mr McCrum, who writes at his woodland home near Tintern, wasn’t always an author of fiction. As a travel writer, he spent time visiting far-flung parts of the world, and it was one of those trips, to western Africa, that eventually provided the inspiration for Cruising to Murder.

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Mark McCrum, author of the Francis Meadowes murder mysteries, lives in the Wye Valley near Tintern.

“I got onto this boat in Ghana, and I thought ‘this is Agatha Christie’ – wealthy Americans, people from all over Europe, they all looked like they’d walked out of an Agatha Christie book,” he said. “I though it was the perfect setting, they’re all trapped on a boat in a way.”

In her novels, Agatha Christie sent Hercule Poirot on exotic trips with Europe’s upper classes.

The Belgian detective visited Egypt (Death on the Nile), Iraq (Murder in Mesopotamia), and France (The Mystery of the Blue Train); and was returning to London from Turkey when he was tasked with solving his most famous mystery (The Murder on the Orient Express).

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Agatha Christie, photographed in 1950. Picture: PA ARCHIVE

Like his heroine, Mr McCrum likes a grand setting for his whodunnits, and the three Francis Meadowes novels each includes a cast of quirky figures, all with their own lives of scandal and intrigue, that were characteristic of Christie’s books.

Mr McCrum too has experience of rubbing shoulders with celebrities, spending several years ghost-writing books for rich and famous people who didn’t have the time to pen their own autobiographies.

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Murder Your Darlings, the third and most recent Francis Meadowes whodunnit by author Mark McCrum.

“The thing about being a ghost is that you’re invisible,” he said. “Although I’ve had five top-10 bestsellers that I’ve written, there’s only one of those that is public, because all the others [are ghost written].

“So you have a strange sensation when you go into a bookshop at Christmas and you see that the book you’ve written is number one, but you can’t say it – it’s quite an odd feeling.”

The author also wrote the book to accompany the BBC’s Castaway 2000, a reality show which followed the efforts of 36 members of the public to build a community from scratch on Taransay, a remote island in the Outer Hebrides.

The show is perhaps best remembered for its participant Ben Fogle, who has gone on to forge a successful career as a TV presenter.

In 2001, Mr McCrum covered pop star Robbie Williams’ European tour for an official book.

“We went all around Europe – Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France,” Mr McCrum said. “I was on the inner circle – I had the AAA lanyard which meant I could go into his dressing room, which not many people can do. And that was at the time when he was at the height of his fame, so it was very interesting insight into that world.”

Another regular appointment in Mr McCrum’s career as a writer is to attend literary festivals, and a fictionalised version of one of these events would accidentally become the setting of the first Francis Meadowes mystery, The Festival Murders.

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The cover of The Festival Murders, the first Francis Meadowes whodunnit by author Mark McCrum.

“I didn’t mean to start a series – I just wanted to write about a literary festival, and then I started writing it and thought that from the point of view of a story, a literary festival without anything happening is not that exciting,” Mr McCrum said. “So I thought, well why not have a murder?”

The Festival Murders is set in the fictional Moldon Wold Literary Festival (a nod to Hay-on-Wye in Powys). Meadowes, a fairly ordinary crime writer, is one of many authors in attendance at the event when he, Mr McCrum said, gets “sucked into the investigation” surrounding the murder of a controversial critic in the adjacent hotel room.

“The one person who would be quite unpopular [there] is a critic,” Mr McCrum said. “He’s also got a very dodgy personal life, he’s playing fast and loose. He’s a bad man and deserves his end.

“It enabled me to write about the rivalries and the things that go on behind the scenes at literary festivals, there’s always slight jostling for position among writers, and a kind of one-upmanship.”

The three Francis Meadowes books have each borrowed from some of Mr McCrum’s real-life experiences – the most recent, Murder Your Darlings, set in the same kind of writers’ retreat as the one at which the author has taught for several years.

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Crime writer Mark McCrum at his writing desk in his Tintern home.

But despite moving from London to Tintern two years ago, Mr McCrum said he was reluctant to pen a whodunnit set in the village he now calls home.

“You have to be careful where you live, I don’t think I’d want to put a lot of people from the village into a murder mystery – they might stop talking to me,” he said.

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Mr McCrum is currently working on the outline for the fourth Francis Meadowes mystery, and later this month he will hold a ‘How to Write a Whodunnit’ event at Rossiter Books in Monmouth, where he will share with crime fiction fans the rules and tricks of creating a good detective story.

“I love the puzzle – I think if you can write a good whodunnit, it’s where the clues are clearly out there for everyone to see, and yet they’re concealed, so hopefully when you get to the end you are surprised by the murderer,” he said. “That’s what Agatha Christie did brilliantly – the plots were always brilliant. It’s difficult to do, kind of like making an intricate clock.”

Murder Your Darlings is on sale in hardback now. The first two Francis Meadowes novels, The Festival Murders and Cruising to Murder, are on sale in paperback.

How to Write a Whodunnit, with Mark McCrum, will take place at Rossiter Books, Monmouth, on Thursday, January 23, 7pm. Tickets cost £5 and are available online at rossiterbooks.co.uk