Author Tom Mead talks to us about his debut novel Death and the Conjuror and the art of writing a good red herring to give the illusion that the reader has cracked the case.
Tom Mead is a UK crime fiction writer who specialises in locked-room mysteries. Tom's debut novel Death and the Conjuror was published in February 2023 by Head of Zeus and is also available on our catalogue.
I grew up in a house full of murder mystery fans, surrounded by the classics. Before I actually picked one up and started to read it, I was drawn to the lurid painted covers on several Agatha Christie paperbacks. Those were the Pan editions, designed by the brilliant artist Tom Adams. I found some of that artwork particularly haunting - By the Pricking of My Thumbs and A Caribbean Mystery, for example. They certainly helped to stimulate my imagination, even before I delved into the fabulous books themselves.
I had been writing mystery stories for a few years when my noir pastiche Heatwave was selected by Lee Child for inclusion in his Best Mystery Stories of the Year anthology, published by Mysterious Press. This put me in direct contact with the powerhouse editor Otto Penzler, who runs Mysterious. Like me, Otto loves classic locked-room mysteries, so I decided to email him on the off-chance that he might be interested in reading a draft manuscript of a locked-room mystery which I had been working on during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. To my surprise, he was very enthusiastic about the book, and agreed to publish it. Death and the Conjuror came out in the US in July 2022, and was published here in the UK by Head of Zeus in February 2023.
Carr is famously known as the "master of the locked-room mystery" because he wrote almost exclusively in that subgenre, though he also had a real knack for evoking a sense of the uncanny and macabre, as well as a lovely fluid prose style. But I think his genius lay in his plots - the way he planted clues so deftly, and created such memorably fantastical mysteries. He was a real magician.
With pleasure! Death and the Conjuror is a locked-room mystery set in 1930s London. The retired music hall conjuror Joseph Spector is recruited by Scotland Yard to assist them in unravelling a string of seemingly impossible crimes: two gruesome murders and the theft of a priceless painting. It's my affectionate homage to some of my favourite Golden Age mystery authors, including Carr, Christie, Ellery Queen, Christianna Brand and many more. Hopefully it will appeal to fans of the work of Anthony Horowitz, Elly Griffiths, and the British Library Crime Classics series.
The function of a red herring is to misdirect the reader. I tend to think of mystery writing in terms of illusion - you are playing a trick on a reader in the same way a stage magician tricks an audience. But the interesting thing is that many readers are now attuned to the conventions surrounding the red herring, and can spot them from a mile away. So I think the best red herrings are the double-bluffs that play on the reader's expectations. These are very tricky to pull off, but when done right they're incredibly effective.
Absolutely! I wanted to evoke some of the eerie atmosphere and sheer tongue-in-cheek playfulness of the classic murder mysteries from the inter-war years. In my favourite titles, the emphasis is on presenting the reader with a challenge, but also ensuring all the clues are there in plain sight to give them a sporting chance at solving the mystery. I wanted to try and recapture that. It was also a perfect excuse to immerse myself in the era, which was a delightful exercise in escapism.
The second Joseph Spector mystery, The Murder Wheel, is published in hardback in October 2023. I really hope readers will enjoy it. A third, currently titled Cabaret Macabre, is in the works at the moment.
Reginald Hill's Good Morning, Midnight and P.D. James's The Murder Room. Currently I'm rereading some of the early titles in Paul Doherty's brilliant "Brother Athelstan" series; I just finished The Nightingale Gallery and I'm currently on The House of the Red Slayer. I'm also preparing a talk on obscure locked-room mysteries for a crime fiction conference at the British Library, so I'm going to be reading the incredibly hard-to-come-by titles The Death of Laurence Vining by Alan Thomas and Into Thin Air by Leslie Quirk & Horatio Winslow.
Whenever I'm asked for recommendations, I always say John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man. It is definitely one of the best locked-room mysteries of them all. The brilliance and audacity of its solution blew me away when I first read it, and I suppose you could say I am trying to give readers an echo of that same feeling in my writing.
As well as magic and classic mysteries, my other great passion is theatre. Commercial, experimental, classical, I love it all.
