DEBORAH CROMBIE: Every so often on Jungle Red we get to have fan girl moments and today is one of mine. I have devoured Elly Griffiths' books from the very first Ruth Galloway, and although I came a bit late to The Stranger Diaries, I loved that, too, and the subsequent novel featuring DS Harbinder Kaur. So how had I somehow missed The Brighton Mysteries?
I can only plead "too many books in the to-read pile." But a couple of months ago I discovered the first Brighton book, The Zig Zag Girl, in my Audible library, and once I started it, I was absolutely hooked. Of course the good thing about starting a series behind is that you can binge on the available books, and binge I did! I listened to the first five books (the narrator, James Langton, is wonderful) one right after the other and I felt bereft when I finished the fifth book. I love these characters, I love the Brighton in the fifties (and then the sixties) setting, and I love the glimpse into the world of magic and Variety.
But what, I wondered, drew Elly from Ruth the contemporary archeologist and Harbinder the contemporary detective to post-war theater? The answer is as fascinating as the books, and here is Elly to explain.
ELLY GRIFFITHS: My grandfather, Frederick Goodwin, was born in 1897 in Hastings, England. Along with his two best friends, all three called Freddie, he lied about his age to join up in the First World War. They thought the war would be over by Christmas but, by December 1914, the other two Freddies were dead. Grandad fought on, first in the trenches and then in the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps. He ended the war, aged only twenty-two, as an Acting Major in the RFC. Like a lot of veterans Grandad didn’t talk about his service, but the one thing he did say has stayed in my mind. ‘After everything I saw in the war, there was only one job I could do. Become a comedian.’
So Frederick Goodwin became Dennis Lawes. Grandad said it was because the shorter name looked bigger on the playbills but I wonder if he just wanted to leave his old life behind him.
Grandad was a Variety entertainer, sometimes called Vaudeville in the US. He travelled around the country, performing in a different town every week. Sunday was changeover day and, at certain train junctions, like the tea rooms on Crewe station, the performers would meet and swap stories. I have described this world in the opening pages of The Midnight Hour.
Somehow, during this peripatetic life, Grandad met and married his first wife, my Grandmother. She died when I was young but I will never forget her name: Ellen (Elly) Griffiths. Ellen and Dennis had one child, my mother Sheila. For reasons of her own, Ellen left her husband and baby when Sheila was only two. Grandad then brought up his daughter on his own, taking her with him from show to show, staying in theatrical digs. My mum had lots of memories of this time: tap dancing on the empty stage, Grandad trying to darn her socks, friendly landladies and scary ventriloquists. She also remembered quite a few chorus girl ‘aunties’. I should say that Grandad married three times and all his wives were dancers.
When mum was ten, Grandad sent her to boarding school. It’s hard to know what else he could have done but Mum found the adjustment hard. She’d never been to school before and her companions were acrobats and sword-swallowers, not children her own age. But she made good friends at Heath House and her memories of that time became my children’s series, A Girl Called Justice.
In the holidays, Mum would join her father wherever he was performing. She would get on a train and travel, on her own, from Surrey to Blackpool, Glasgow or Scarborough. ‘When you got there, how did you know where the theatre was?’ I asked once. ‘In any town,’ said Mum, ‘I could always find the theatre.’
I was very close to my Grandad. He died when I was fifteen and left me his playbills in his will. I didn’t really appreciate this at the time but, about ten years ago, my sister had some of them framed for me. I began to be obsessed with the names. Stephen Lang: not quite himself. Roy Dexter: novelty comedian. Dorothy Gray and Brother (why doesn’t he even get a name? maybe she had lots of brothers and rotated them in the act?). The Two Konyots (?). And, especially, Lou Lenny and Her Unrideable Mule. Was it a real animal or two people inside a mule costume? In either case, it’s easy to see why it was unrideable.
Grandad was also on the bill with Jasper Maskelyne, the magician who famously put together the Second World War espionage group, The Magic Gang. They created dummy tanks and fake soldiers. They were meant to have made the Suez Canal disappear, through deployment of ‘dazzle lights’. I began to think of a story about a magician called Max Mephisto. He would have been involved in a similar group along with his friend, Edgar Stephens, who later became a police officer. That idea became The Zig Zag Girl, the first of the Brighton Mysteries.
The Midnight Hour is the sixth in the series. It’s set in 1965 and the world of entertainment is changing. But I still haven’t worked out the secret of the unrideable mule.
DEBS: Elly's grandfather Dennis Lawes looks just how I imagine her magician character, the dashing Max Mephisto.
Here's more about The Midnight Hour.
September 1965
When theatrical impresario Bert Billington is found dead in his retirement home in Rottingdean, an idyllic village outside Brighton, at first no-one thinks it’s suspicious. But when he is found to have been poisoned, suspicion falls on his wife, ex Variety star Verity Malone. But it’s 1965 and Verity has been reading Betty Friedan. She insists on being interviewed by a woman police officer and employs private detectives Emma Holmes and Sam Collins to clear her name.
WPC Meg Connolly finds herself caught between the PIs (one of whom is her boss’s wife) and her sometimes offensive colleagues. The resulting chase takes them to Whitby – where Max Mephisto is playing Dracula’s father – and into the Bert Billington’s dark past in the early days of Music Hall. It becomes clear that the murderer is someone who knows him very well indeed.
Elly Griffiths wrote four novels under her own name (Domenica de Rosa) before turning to crime with The Crossing Places, the first novel featuring forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway. The Crossing Places won the Mary Higgins Clark award and three novels in the series have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. The Night Hawks (Ruth #13, published in February 2021) was number two in the Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers list. Elly also writes the Brighton Mysteries, set in the theatrical world of the 1950s. In 2016 Elly was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library for her body of work. Her first standalone mystery, The Stranger Diaries, won the 2020 Edgar award for Best Crime Novel. The second, The Postscript Murders, has recently been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Elly also writes A Girl Called Justice, a mystery series for children.
DEBS: Needless to say I have The Midnight Hour pre-ordered and cannot wait to find out what is happening in Brighton!
REDS and readers, do you follow authors from series to series, or standalone to standalone, even though the setting and even the time period may be quite different? Who are some of your favorite series-shifting authors?
