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life.
    And there were other reasons for my choice. I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer’s internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn’t expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universeand that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution.
    Glancing now through
Cover Her Face
, I am struck by how conventional it is. This is very much a detective story in the mode of Agatha Christie even if it aspires to probe more deeply into the minds and motives of its characters. Here is the English village, the stock characters of priest and doctor, the anxious virgin who runs the home for unmarried mothers. The book is very much of its time. Today the victim, Sally Jupp, would not have found it necessary either to seek refuge in Miss Liddell’s home, or to take a job as a house parlour-maid with the Maxie family. The local authority would have provided her and her child with a flat and the local social workers would have helped her to furnish it, and welfare payments, although not generous, would have enabled her to survive. But I’m surprised how many readers say that they like
Cover Her Face
. It seems that the cosy, domestic, English village murder has never quite lost its appeal.
    After the book was finally finished and typed I had a stroke of luck. I was selected for a three-month residential course at the King’s Fund College for Hospital Administrators, then situated in the Bayswater Road. The head of the college was an ex-headmaster of Brighton School. He was a good administrator and I suspect had been a good teacher, but not immune to that particular brand of social snobbery which I have encountered more than once in the headmasters of minor public schools. But he liked me and was helpful to me, and I was invited by his wife to spend a weekend at their oasthouse in Kent. A fellow guest was the actor Miles Malleson, for me always associated with his incomparable portrayal of Dr. Chasuble in the film of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. He had written books about the theatre and I confided to him that I had just finished my first novel. He suggested that I send it to his agent, Elaine Greene at MCA, and gave me an introduction. My memory is that I took the manuscript in person. I can recall an imposing building in Piccadilly, the large letters on the brass nameplate, and meeting this dark-haired, rather intimidating American woman who accepted the manuscript but was not, as I remember, either particularly effusive or encouraging.
    Elaine was at that time married to Hugh Carleton Greene, Director General of the BBC, and after reading my manuscript she had gone with him to have lunch or dinner—I forget which—at All Souls College,Oxford. There she had sat next to Charles Monteith, a Director of Faber and Faber. Elaine, an enthusiast for detective fiction, had said how sad she was at the death of the crime writer Cyril Hare, whose novels, mostly set in the world of law, are some of the most elegantly written in