I'm thrilled to introduce readers to today's guest, Len Tyler. Len has written no fewer than seventeen humorous crime novels including the award-winning Herring series. And there are others in various stages of production in the pipeline.
Alex: Tell us a bit about yourself, Len.
Len: I was born and brought up in Southend, which may be why marshy coastal locations crop up so often in my books. I was always keen on English as a subject at school, but I never seemed to get the hang of the ‘how does Shakespeare invoke a sense of terror and foreboding in the first witches’ scene?' stuff. Nor did my frequent submissions to the school magazine find much favour. I therefore effectively retired from literature in the fifth form, and ended up reading geography at Oxford. From there I joined first the Civil Service and then the British Council, being posted to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Sudan and Denmark. Afterwards I was Chief Executive of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. For some years, that kept me busy enough. It was just before the Copenhagen posting that I had my first literary success, winning an Ian St James Award for my short story Richard Remembered, which was published (along with Kate Atkinson’s first short story, amongst others) in a HarperColins anthology entitled Flying High. But it was not until, some years later, I hit on crime as a subject for my writing - and wrote The Herring Seller’s Apprentice - that I finally succeeded in getting a contract for a full-length novel. I’ve now published seventeen, with others in various stages of production. Most of the books are part of one of two series - the Herring series is contemporary crime; the John Grey series is historical, set during the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II.
Alex: Tell us a bit about yourself, Len.
Len: I was born and brought up in Southend, which may be why marshy coastal locations crop up so often in my books. I was always keen on English as a subject at school, but I never seemed to get the hang of the ‘how does Shakespeare invoke a sense of terror and foreboding in the first witches’ scene?' stuff. Nor did my frequent submissions to the school magazine find much favour. I therefore effectively retired from literature in the fifth form, and ended up reading geography at Oxford. From there I joined first the Civil Service and then the British Council, being posted to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Sudan and Denmark. Afterwards I was Chief Executive of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. For some years, that kept me busy enough. It was just before the Copenhagen posting that I had my first literary success, winning an Ian St James Award for my short story Richard Remembered, which was published (along with Kate Atkinson’s first short story, amongst others) in a HarperColins anthology entitled Flying High. But it was not until, some years later, I hit on crime as a subject for my writing - and wrote The Herring Seller’s Apprentice - that I finally succeeded in getting a contract for a full-length novel. I’ve now published seventeen, with others in various stages of production. Most of the books are part of one of two series - the Herring series is contemporary crime; the John Grey series is historical, set during the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II.
Alex: How would you describe your writing, and are there particular themes that you like to explore?
Len: I think most of it comes under the heading of ‘humorous crime’ - probably more humour than crime, really. There’s an annual award for comic crime called The Last Laugh Award and I’m proud to say that all of the books in the Herring series have been short-listed for it, and I’ve won it twice - a record of some sort, but also evidence that that’s what other people think I write too. The Herring series has developed into something of a tribute to the writers of the Golden Age of crime fiction (the 1920s and 30s basically). I wouldn’t describe what I do either as parody or pastiche though. The books are set in the present day - it’s just that my narrator, Ethelred, would be much happier if it was still the 1950s, with Peter May batting elegantly against the Australians at Lords and Tony Hancock on the wireless. His sidekick, Elsie, also has nostalgia for the same decade, but for her it’s more about bright red lipstick, rock and roll, full circle skirts and sunglasses. I reference Christie and Allingham and Chandler mainly through the fairly traditional plot structures, references to their books and my own book titles - the last four have been Cat Among the Herrings, Herring in the Smoke, The Maltese Herring and Farewell my Herring. Strangely, it is via the historical series that I tend to address contemporary issues using seventeenth century parallels. When I wrote The Plague Road, about people fleeing the plague in London, there were migrants streaming across Europe. When I wrote about seventeenth century witch hunts, it was difficult not to draw comparisons with social media witch hunts today. Another book featured corruption in government contracts. The latest one, Too Much of Water, is about an election, with some coastal erosion thrown in. That may make it sound as if I’m preaching in some way. I’m most definitely not. My aim is to entertain. The only point I wish to make, over and above that, is that there is very little that is completely new and unprecedented and that the study of history, even through the medium of fiction, puts some of it into perspective.
Len: I think most of it comes under the heading of ‘humorous crime’ - probably more humour than crime, really. There’s an annual award for comic crime called The Last Laugh Award and I’m proud to say that all of the books in the Herring series have been short-listed for it, and I’ve won it twice - a record of some sort, but also evidence that that’s what other people think I write too. The Herring series has developed into something of a tribute to the writers of the Golden Age of crime fiction (the 1920s and 30s basically). I wouldn’t describe what I do either as parody or pastiche though. The books are set in the present day - it’s just that my narrator, Ethelred, would be much happier if it was still the 1950s, with Peter May batting elegantly against the Australians at Lords and Tony Hancock on the wireless. His sidekick, Elsie, also has nostalgia for the same decade, but for her it’s more about bright red lipstick, rock and roll, full circle skirts and sunglasses. I reference Christie and Allingham and Chandler mainly through the fairly traditional plot structures, references to their books and my own book titles - the last four have been Cat Among the Herrings, Herring in the Smoke, The Maltese Herring and Farewell my Herring. Strangely, it is via the historical series that I tend to address contemporary issues using seventeenth century parallels. When I wrote The Plague Road, about people fleeing the plague in London, there were migrants streaming across Europe. When I wrote about seventeenth century witch hunts, it was difficult not to draw comparisons with social media witch hunts today. Another book featured corruption in government contracts. The latest one, Too Much of Water, is about an election, with some coastal erosion thrown in. That may make it sound as if I’m preaching in some way. I’m most definitely not. My aim is to entertain. The only point I wish to make, over and above that, is that there is very little that is completely new and unprecedented and that the study of history, even through the medium of fiction, puts some of it into perspective.
Alex: Are you a writer that plans a detailed synopsis or do you set out with a vague idea and let the story unfold as you write?
Len: Both! I tend to start with an idea - maybe no more than ‘a group of people try to flee the plague and have problems on the way’. Then I start writing to see where it takes me. But almost invariably, and usually about a quarter of the way in, I think, no, I’m going to need to plan this. And so I spend a day or so sketching out the rest of the book. But it’s much easier to do that then, when I have a better idea what I want to write, than it is sitting down at the start of the book and trying to second guess where it will all take me. Later, I’ll realise that the first plan no longer works, and I plan it all again. I tend to do a lot of redrafting - both during the writing of the first draft and once the first draft is finished. Of course, no book is ever finished as such - you just see the deadline approaching, give the thing a final tidy and hand it in.
Alex: Tell us about your latest novel.
Len: At any given moment I’ve usually got at least three ‘latest novels’ - the last one actually published, the one that’s edited and proofread and waiting to be published and the one I ought to be working on at this moment! The latest in the John Grey series is Too Much of Water, which I’ve referred to briefly above. The most recent in the Herring series is Farewell My Herring. It takes place on a creative writing course somewhere in the north of England. To get a decent Golden Age plot these days, you need to send your characters somewhere where there is no phone signal and your little group can be genuinely cut off as the bodies pile up. So I had to study a map of mobile reception and find a suitably remote location for my fictional study centre. Thus Ethelred and Elsie have signed up to teach on a crime writing course at the bleak Fell Hall. But no sooner have the other tutors and participants begun to arrive than a snowstorm isolates them completely from the outside world. Claire, an inoffensive, rather mousy would-be writer is found strangled before the first lecture has even begun. Why on earth would any of the participants want to kill her? And which one was it? Unable to call the police, Elsie and Ethelred try to apply their theoretical skills to a real murder. Then another member of the party vanishes ...
Alex: What was the first book you read?
Len: I have a vague idea it was a book called Larry the Lorry, but I can no longer remember anything except the title. I don’t think it had any serial killers in it. Later I read some of the classics like The Treasure Seekers and The Little Wooden Horse. And Emile and the Detectives, which was certainly my first crime novel. I devoured all the Jennings books, and would now have had a fine collection of first editions if my parents hadn’t kindly donated them to a jumble sale while I was working overseas. My first proper grown up book was definitely Three Men in a Boat, which I discovered on the shelves of my primary school and from which I progressed to PG Wodehouse. I was in my teens before I read Agatha Christie after which, you might say, I never looked back.
Alex: How much research do you do and what does it usually entail?
Len: For the Herring series, not so much, though I’ll often visit locations where the action takes place - the best was having to do a trip to Egypt for Herring on the Nile. And I do have to check mobile phone coverage, of course. For the John Grey historical mysteries, I do lots. Before I started the first book in that series I found myself researching every aspect of life in the seventeenth century - language, politics, law, technology, food, drink, clothes, architecture, beliefs, money, prices, social customs, music, literature, plays. A great deal of the research involved sitting in the British Library for days on end, reading standard text books and PhD theses - though occasionally you would thrillingly be entrusted with some leather-bound seventeenth century book, that had actually been handled by just the sort of people you were writing about. In one such law book I found, between the pages, an arrest warrant, apparently still unserved three hundred and fifty years later - and when you looked at the crimes that the people named had committed, I’d have been a bit nervous about serving it on them too. I also visited historic houses and museums - I’ve used a lot of that material when describing places that John Grey has gone and what it feels like to be in a room with an open fire in the middle of the floor and no chimney. Then, for each individual book, I’ve had to research in detail the Sealed Knot or the death of Oliver Cromwell or the Great Plague or the Great Fire of London or shipbuilding or elections. You get to know a lot about a very short period of history! Interestingly perhaps, when I wrote Too Much of Water, I based the rapidly vanishing town of Eastwold on Dunwich in Suffolk - a great port in the Middle Ages but now reduced by coastal erosion to a few houses. I’d intended to visit Dunwich for obvious reasons, but the COVID pandemic stopped me travelling there until the book was more or less complete and it would have been pointless - I’d already formed my ideas about the fictional Eastwold. I found, in the end, it made surprisingly little difference and reminded me that I always end up using only a tiny fraction of the facts that I assemble. Most research is purely defensive - avoiding saying something that is clearly untrue. The reader doesn’t want to see page after page of erudite historical analysis. They are usually much less interested in (say) the exact process for the sequestration of royalist estates in the 1650s than you are as the author. It's all about what you leave out of the final work!
Alex: Do you ever base your characters on people you have encountered in real life?
Len: I think all of my characters begin as composites of various people I’ve met or seen on television. And, like most writers, I probably put a bit of myself into almost every character I write. All of that is however usually only a starting point. The characters grow, mysteriously, as the book progresses and the final version is often very different from what you started with. Characters also develop as a series progresses - the John Grey of the later books is very different from the youthful and rather naive law graduate of the first one.
Alex: Which was the last book you read that blew you away?
Len: I was very impressed by Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I do wish I’d written that.
Alex: How do you market your books?
Len: I enjoy writing. I don’t enjoy marketing. Not at all. That’s why I would never self-publish. But you can’t get out of marketing completely - so, I do Twitter and Instagram and maintain a website. It’s also why I attend conferences and visit book groups (though they can both be fun) and it’s why I do interviews like this one …
Alex: What are your interests aside from writing? And what do you do to unwind?
Len: I’m lucky to live on the coast and to be able to do a lot of walking and a bit of inexpert bird watching. I do the garden (I ought to be mowing the lawn right now). I listen to music. And I read - of course.
Alex: Which authors do you particularly admire and why?
Len: I admire Agatha Christie as somebody who, if she did not actually invent the crime genre, transformed our expectations of it. She was the first to come up with so many of the classic plots - the narrator did it, nobody did it, everybody did it, the one you thought had been murdered in chapter one did it. But as a stylist, I don’t think you can beat Raymond Chandler, at least in the crime field. Nobody else does dialogue the way he does it. His plots can be a bit careless, but it isn’t about the plots - it’s about attitude. Outside crime, I admire Hemingway for his ability to strip a story back to the bare essentials. PG Wodehouse is greatly underrated as a story-teller - again, there is scarcely a wasted word in any of his writing and his planning was meticulous. If you’ve pigeon-holed him as a bit of a lightweight, then you’re so wrong. And Evelyn Waugh combines complete cynicism with being very, very funny - but I doubt if I would have liked him as a person or that he would have liked me very much.
Alex: Thank you so much for sharing this, Len. It's been fascinating to hear how you go about this strange business of writing. I'm with you on Chandler and Wodehouse. I think Wodehouse is the one name that has popped up more in these interviews than any other - and deservedly so. So thank you again and good luck with your latest books.
Len: Thank you, Alex for inviting me to take part.
Len: Both! I tend to start with an idea - maybe no more than ‘a group of people try to flee the plague and have problems on the way’. Then I start writing to see where it takes me. But almost invariably, and usually about a quarter of the way in, I think, no, I’m going to need to plan this. And so I spend a day or so sketching out the rest of the book. But it’s much easier to do that then, when I have a better idea what I want to write, than it is sitting down at the start of the book and trying to second guess where it will all take me. Later, I’ll realise that the first plan no longer works, and I plan it all again. I tend to do a lot of redrafting - both during the writing of the first draft and once the first draft is finished. Of course, no book is ever finished as such - you just see the deadline approaching, give the thing a final tidy and hand it in.
Alex: Tell us about your latest novel.
Len: At any given moment I’ve usually got at least three ‘latest novels’ - the last one actually published, the one that’s edited and proofread and waiting to be published and the one I ought to be working on at this moment! The latest in the John Grey series is Too Much of Water, which I’ve referred to briefly above. The most recent in the Herring series is Farewell My Herring. It takes place on a creative writing course somewhere in the north of England. To get a decent Golden Age plot these days, you need to send your characters somewhere where there is no phone signal and your little group can be genuinely cut off as the bodies pile up. So I had to study a map of mobile reception and find a suitably remote location for my fictional study centre. Thus Ethelred and Elsie have signed up to teach on a crime writing course at the bleak Fell Hall. But no sooner have the other tutors and participants begun to arrive than a snowstorm isolates them completely from the outside world. Claire, an inoffensive, rather mousy would-be writer is found strangled before the first lecture has even begun. Why on earth would any of the participants want to kill her? And which one was it? Unable to call the police, Elsie and Ethelred try to apply their theoretical skills to a real murder. Then another member of the party vanishes ...
Alex: What was the first book you read?
Len: I have a vague idea it was a book called Larry the Lorry, but I can no longer remember anything except the title. I don’t think it had any serial killers in it. Later I read some of the classics like The Treasure Seekers and The Little Wooden Horse. And Emile and the Detectives, which was certainly my first crime novel. I devoured all the Jennings books, and would now have had a fine collection of first editions if my parents hadn’t kindly donated them to a jumble sale while I was working overseas. My first proper grown up book was definitely Three Men in a Boat, which I discovered on the shelves of my primary school and from which I progressed to PG Wodehouse. I was in my teens before I read Agatha Christie after which, you might say, I never looked back.
Alex: How much research do you do and what does it usually entail?
Len: For the Herring series, not so much, though I’ll often visit locations where the action takes place - the best was having to do a trip to Egypt for Herring on the Nile. And I do have to check mobile phone coverage, of course. For the John Grey historical mysteries, I do lots. Before I started the first book in that series I found myself researching every aspect of life in the seventeenth century - language, politics, law, technology, food, drink, clothes, architecture, beliefs, money, prices, social customs, music, literature, plays. A great deal of the research involved sitting in the British Library for days on end, reading standard text books and PhD theses - though occasionally you would thrillingly be entrusted with some leather-bound seventeenth century book, that had actually been handled by just the sort of people you were writing about. In one such law book I found, between the pages, an arrest warrant, apparently still unserved three hundred and fifty years later - and when you looked at the crimes that the people named had committed, I’d have been a bit nervous about serving it on them too. I also visited historic houses and museums - I’ve used a lot of that material when describing places that John Grey has gone and what it feels like to be in a room with an open fire in the middle of the floor and no chimney. Then, for each individual book, I’ve had to research in detail the Sealed Knot or the death of Oliver Cromwell or the Great Plague or the Great Fire of London or shipbuilding or elections. You get to know a lot about a very short period of history! Interestingly perhaps, when I wrote Too Much of Water, I based the rapidly vanishing town of Eastwold on Dunwich in Suffolk - a great port in the Middle Ages but now reduced by coastal erosion to a few houses. I’d intended to visit Dunwich for obvious reasons, but the COVID pandemic stopped me travelling there until the book was more or less complete and it would have been pointless - I’d already formed my ideas about the fictional Eastwold. I found, in the end, it made surprisingly little difference and reminded me that I always end up using only a tiny fraction of the facts that I assemble. Most research is purely defensive - avoiding saying something that is clearly untrue. The reader doesn’t want to see page after page of erudite historical analysis. They are usually much less interested in (say) the exact process for the sequestration of royalist estates in the 1650s than you are as the author. It's all about what you leave out of the final work!
Alex: Do you ever base your characters on people you have encountered in real life?
Len: I think all of my characters begin as composites of various people I’ve met or seen on television. And, like most writers, I probably put a bit of myself into almost every character I write. All of that is however usually only a starting point. The characters grow, mysteriously, as the book progresses and the final version is often very different from what you started with. Characters also develop as a series progresses - the John Grey of the later books is very different from the youthful and rather naive law graduate of the first one.
Alex: Which was the last book you read that blew you away?
Len: I was very impressed by Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I do wish I’d written that.
Alex: How do you market your books?
Len: I enjoy writing. I don’t enjoy marketing. Not at all. That’s why I would never self-publish. But you can’t get out of marketing completely - so, I do Twitter and Instagram and maintain a website. It’s also why I attend conferences and visit book groups (though they can both be fun) and it’s why I do interviews like this one …
Alex: What are your interests aside from writing? And what do you do to unwind?
Len: I’m lucky to live on the coast and to be able to do a lot of walking and a bit of inexpert bird watching. I do the garden (I ought to be mowing the lawn right now). I listen to music. And I read - of course.
Alex: Which authors do you particularly admire and why?
Len: I admire Agatha Christie as somebody who, if she did not actually invent the crime genre, transformed our expectations of it. She was the first to come up with so many of the classic plots - the narrator did it, nobody did it, everybody did it, the one you thought had been murdered in chapter one did it. But as a stylist, I don’t think you can beat Raymond Chandler, at least in the crime field. Nobody else does dialogue the way he does it. His plots can be a bit careless, but it isn’t about the plots - it’s about attitude. Outside crime, I admire Hemingway for his ability to strip a story back to the bare essentials. PG Wodehouse is greatly underrated as a story-teller - again, there is scarcely a wasted word in any of his writing and his planning was meticulous. If you’ve pigeon-holed him as a bit of a lightweight, then you’re so wrong. And Evelyn Waugh combines complete cynicism with being very, very funny - but I doubt if I would have liked him as a person or that he would have liked me very much.
Alex: Thank you so much for sharing this, Len. It's been fascinating to hear how you go about this strange business of writing. I'm with you on Chandler and Wodehouse. I think Wodehouse is the one name that has popped up more in these interviews than any other - and deservedly so. So thank you again and good luck with your latest books.
Len: Thank you, Alex for inviting me to take part.
