Christopher Fowler

Now they're rather considered to be unpolitically correct because Blue Bunter was overweight or calorifically challenged.

So he's vanished from bookshelves, rather banned by librarians.

I think it comes up a lot because often it seems to be a mark of a good story well told, that it can be adapted for film or television.

And a lot of the books that were chosen were chosen because the authors had been forgotten and therefore the rights were very cheap and you could get hold of them easily.

But in the book, I tell the story of Alfred Hitchcock choosing stories for his suspense TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Now, many of those suspense stories were from short stories by women, mostly in America, who had worked during the war and had become very independent and had shown what they could do for the war effort.

And at the end of the war, were shunted back into the kitchens and back into suburbia.

wrote about their frustrations about being put back in this box and they wrote suspense stories often quite critical of family life and the claustrophobic home life and they often wrote great suspense novels Hitchcock recognized that and he started buying them up in huge quantities filmed many of them and

put out, I would say, probably 100 books that featured them, and actually helped to create this genre of the suspense writer, particularly the female domestic suspense writer, as we call them, as a separate type of fiction.

If we're talking about, most of these authors are from the 20th century.

They're not new authors because, first of all, it's rather offensive to call a new author forgotten.

Also, they reflect the books that I'd grown up with over the generations.

The old books that were hugely popular divided into fairly simple categories.

There was a sort of action man fiction that normally featured a spy or a pilot, somebody who was good with a spanner, basically.

There were the romantic historical novels, but above them all were the crime books, because from Sherlock Holmes to the present day, it has been the main category of popular literature and still is.

So, a lot of the authors, either they'd turned their hand to crime or they were lifelong crime novelists.

So, that's reflected by the number of crime novelists in the book.

And quite a lot of people have written horror stories.

Winston Churchill wrote a horror story, of all people.

So a lot of writers tried different genres, but they often came back to one or two that sold the most.