In the Club

For me, Tuesday, 28 October, was a deeply memorable occasion. It was the day when I was formally confirmed as a member of the Detection Club. And because I’m a lover of the traditions of the genre, it meant a good deal to me that I’d been elected to join the oldest association of crime writers in the world.

There’s a pleasing, and highly appropriate, air of mystery about the Detection Club, which I gather has about 60 members in all. Even the precise date of its formation is uncertain – some say around 1928, others put it a year or two later. The first president was G.K.Chesterton, and he was succeeded by Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. More recently, presidents have included Julian Symons and Harry Keating; the current incumbent is Simon Brett.

Essentially the Detection Club is a social gathering, with three dinners in London each year. Last week’s dinner was held in the august setting of Middle Temple Hall, shown in the photos (but the exterior shots don't do justice to the grandeur of the interior.) My wife Helena and I had the delightful experience of sitting on the top table with the likes of P.D. James, Jessica Mann, Simon Brett and his wife Lucy, the eminent journalist Katharine Whitehorn (whose late husband Gavin Lyall was a member), and the guest speaker, Lynne Truss, famed for her best-seller about punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. With us was my Murder Squad colleague, Ann Cleeves, who by a happy coincidence is the other person who has just been elected to membership.

Peter Lovesey gave me a very generous introduction in the joining ceremony, and Robert Barnard did the honours for Ann. After it was all over, Lynne Truss, Frances Fyfield, Helena and I wandered through the streets of London in a torrential downpour, searching in vain for a taxi. Earlier the same evening, it had been snowing in London for the first time in October for seventy years. But for me, the reason why it was an unforgettable night was nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with the Detection Club.