Acknowledgments by Martin Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

was heard to mention that professional publication could also be a part of the prize – as it has been. In the space of a few convivial hours an idea had become a project and a partnership.
    The essential ingredient – what one might perhaps think of as the soul of the prize – was one aspect that wasn’t touched upon that day. A few weeks later a small working party from the MAS and the CWA met in the British Library over coffee and cake. Any number of details were amicably agreed, including the important stipulation that there would be no discrimination between previously-published, un-published or self-published writers. All entries would be anonymous so the winning story would emerge by merit alone. We agreed easily that it was to be a story somewhere within the crime or mystery genre but this still left a multitude of options – comic, paranormal, historical, cosy, noir, procedural, psychological, puzzle. Margery Allingham herself had written in most of the styles as well as offering some short stories that have nothing ‘criminous’ at all. What, if any, guidance should be given to the long-list readers and the judges?
    We knew that we could rely on our judges to strive for the best but still we felt that something should be offered to help resolve any cases of deadlock. Agatha Christie once said of Margery Allingham ‘Everything she writes has a definite shape’ and this obliquely provided our answer. We turned to Allingham’s own definition of the ‘mystery’ novel as a box with four walls – four ingredients, perhaps – ‘a killing, a mystery, an enquiry, a conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it.’
    In retrospect this looks rather a hefty requirement for a 3,500-word short story but it was only intended for use in emergencies. Reading the winning story, Martin Edwards’s ‘Acknowledgments’ it seems to me that he has come much closer to the heart of the matter – and to the secret of success in Allingham’s own best tales. The voice of his narrative is so perfectly pitched (as it is in ‘Neighbours’ and in ‘Are you Sitting Comfortably’, the two companion stories included here). The narrative style of ‘Acknowledgments’ teeters expertly along on the edge of what Allingham would probably had called ‘awfulness’. Edwards has said that he got the idea for the story from actual examples and, regrettably, ‘Acknowledgments’ is so nearly believable. Allingham was a mistress of the gentle art of allowing characters to give themselves away through their own unchecked ramblings. I think she would have relished the comic allusiveness that gives us Dean Woodthorpe of the Poe Agency, Mary Lou McGillicuddy of the ‘virtual enterprise’ Ferreting Facts and Pixie Simpson, the ebullient but elusive publicist and Facebook friend.
    Allingham herself would probably have found some gnomic and pseudo-philosophic way of summing up, whetting the appetite and leading the reader into the narrative whilst giving away nothing of the plot. Consider the opening of ‘Is there a Doctor in the House?’: ‘If Dectective-Constable Macfall had been a man with charm about him this story would have been too tragic to relate and as it is, with him the thickest dunderhead God ever put breath into, it has an element of great sadness’ (
The Allingham Case-Book
1969). I don’t have that skill. All that I can confidently do is commend Martin Edwards’s ‘Acknowledgments’ as the worthy first winner of the CWA Margery Allingham short story competition and state with complete conviction that she would have loved it.
    Julia Jones

Acknowledgments
    Writing a book such as this involves embarking on a voyage of discovery, metaphorical as well as literal. On this particular mystery tour, I have been fortunate once again to be accompanied by a good many people, and it would seem…quite