It’s such a strange feeling walking down a street that you have known in your imagination all of your life. Fleet Street in London is like that. Somewhere that instantly conjures images of newspaper inked pages, and the sounds of printing presses and typewriters in smoky rooms.

As I walked along with crime writer Mark Billingham, even with all the newspapers now gone, the street’s architecture is still quite magical. Along one side there are cobbled alleyways threading down to the ancient Inns of Courts. In other places the buildings loom over you as you approach the Royal Courts of Justice. Mark says that in the 1920s the street was a crime nexus. It was the British Empire’s beating heart of criminal gossip that fed the journalism, and bestselling thriller writing career, of the star of this Saturday’s 4 Extra archive showcase: Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?

Edgar Wallace's (1875-1932) life seems the stuff of fiction. Adopted by a Billingsgate fish porter in London, and largely self-educated, he was the newspaper boy who became one of the most famous writers in the world. He sold millions of books, but he was plagued by debts. He left Britain for the United States in 1931, only to die in Hollywood in 1932, aged 56, after writing the original story for King Kong. His body was returned by ocean liner in honour, only to be reunited with an ocean of outstanding bills.

Mark wanted to investigate why a crime writer, whose publisher declared him the 'King of Thrillers', a celebrity superstar whose books sold in their millions, seems to be fading from memory today. Even during his own prolific lifetime Wallace experienced literary snobbery, despite his incredible success. Mark’s search was a London journey. The city was Wallace’s criminal muse. On its streets Mark tracked down some experts that could help with the Wallace mystery, like biographer Neil Clark (Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, The History Press).  There’s no Edgar Wallace museum, so Mark and Neil met at the next best thing, the Edgar Wallace pub, just of Fleet Street.

From the BBC archive we hear some of Wallace best creations, including sleuthing in The Mind of Mr JG Reeder (Radio 7 2007), and comedy in the racing tips of Educated Evans (Radio 4 1996) starring Roy Hudd. We also hear from Edgar’s daughter Penelope Wallace (who sadly died in 1997), talking about her father’s storytelling abilities. And at the British Library’s Sound Archive Mark meets Dr Stacy Gillis, teacher of detective fiction at Newcastle University, who is fascinated by Wallace’s ability to promote himself. Remarkably we can hear Wallace doing just that, in 1928 recording, reading his story The Man in the Ditch.

The final part of Mark’s odyssey sees him arrive at Portland Place, very close to BBC Broadcasting House, where Wallace brought his family, and servants, to live for a time. The house is now part of the Chinese Embassy. On the pavement outside is where Mark met Professor David Glover, from Southampton University author of Wallace’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. When we arrived David was clutching something precious too him, a still brilliantly yellow 1927 edition of an Edgar Wallace classic novel. David Glover’s thoughts on Wallace’s career, and the fate of most popular fiction writers, serve as prelude to the final archive treat: a 1951 BBC radio version of one of Wallace’s biggest successes, a tale of murder and vigilante revenge, The Ringer (1926).

At one point Mark Billingham asks one of our Wallace experts: “with my heart thumping, is this the fate of the popular thriller author, to largely fade from view and memory?” For a moment I thought Edgar Wallace was in the room with us.

Peter McHugh is the producer of Radio 4 Extra’s Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?

• Listen to Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much? at 0900 and 1900 Saturday 14th March 2015 and BBC iPlayer Radio and on the Radio 4 extra web site.

• Archive Featured: Sweet Tea and Cigarettes (Sweet Talk Production for BBC Radio 4, 2004), The Mind of Mr JG Reeder (Radio 7, 2007), To Keep the Memory Green (Radio 4, 1989), Educated Evans (Radio 4, 1996) and The Ringer (BBC Radio Light Programme, 1951).

 

Hello,

I read with particular interest Mrs Dalloway’s London crawl.  She covers a part of the West End that I have managed to write about to death over the last few years in this newsletter.  It is odd how the very names – Regent Street, for instance, or St James’s Park – ring as resonantly (almost) as Skiddaw and Snowdon and even the Bristol Channel.  City walks are more popular, partly because more people have time to do them and partly because of the decrease in pollution.  We can now walk along canals that were once full of rusty bicycles and garbage.  We can now go through streets that were once barred to all except policemen in groups.  The air has cleared extraordinarily and the fumes of London have more or less evaporated.  The Chinese come to study how we control pollution.

Hello,

I read with particular interest Mrs Dalloway’s London crawl.  She covers a part of the West End that I have managed to write about to death over the last few years in this newsletter.  It is odd how the very names – Regent Street, for instance, or St James’s Park – ring as resonantly (almost) as Skiddaw and Snowdon and even the Bristol Channel.  City walks are more popular, partly because more people have time to do them and partly because of the decrease in pollution.  We can now walk along canals that were once full of rusty bicycles and garbage.  We can now go through streets that were once barred to all except policemen in groups.  The air has cleared extraordinarily and the fumes of London have more or less evaporated.  The Chinese come to study how we control pollution.

Dickens’ Night Walks are a wonderful read and Iain Sinclair’s walks around the circumference of London are in a category of their own.  Will Self is a walker – I believe he is a sort of professor of walking at Brunel University.  I do not seek to disparage this, but as I am up in Cumberland his precise title does not come to mind.  Having just landed in Cumberland, it brings with it a welcome fog.

It was no sweat at all to leave what will be the hottest day of the year in London for the cool of Cumbria.  I use cool in an old-fashioned way meaning not so hot.  I use hot in an old-fashioned way meaning warm.  It’s an old-fashioned place, Cumberland.  Up on Virgin Rail, one of the joys of which is to hear the announcement when you go to the lavatory that you must not put hopes and dreams, your ex’s sweater, bills or goldfish into the bowl before it is flushed.  It’s a poem all of its own.

Up here – or do we say down?  (After reading Virginia Woolf I think we’d better say down.)  Down here in Cumbria for the tercentenary of the school which I went to.  It started with a dozen or so boys in St Mary’s Church and became a grammar school, and is now a comprehensive of 1,300 pupils drawn from one small town and stunningly, dazzlingly successful.  A very model comprehensive.  If these things can be compared – though that is quite difficult – it’s far better in the field of opportunities and sympathies with varying skills and levels of achievement than ever it was in my day.  Labs have outstripped Latin.  Non-brutal sports have outstripped rugby.  There’s so much to do I wonder that they have time to spend in the classroom learning, but they do that as well and in force.  From this one comprehensive, people stream into Oxford, Cambridge and many comparable universities throughout the British Isles.

The only drawback about the evening is that I’ve been asked to make a speech at the end of the dinner, which means that I’ll be nervous throughout and even worse than usual company to those on my right and left.  No drinking of course.  The speech has to be short, I was told.  As if this would help.  Short speeches are the hardest.  Lloyd George wrote all there was to be said on that particular subject.

Still – hey-ho.  Off we go to this lovely sandstone building, which used to be all in awe as the school and is now surrounded by a plantation of laboratories, extra libraries, study rooms, sports rooms, etc, etc.  Wigton is very lucky to have a place like this and I was lucky to go there at a time when there were three or four wonderful teachers.

So, down memory lane.  Lashings of nostalgia.  And at about twenty past ten, a glass of wine.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

Download this episode to keep from the In Our Time podcast page

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This new series of Publishing Lives sets out to remedy that omission, and I have to say that Melissa and I are delighted with the strange, and often moving, stories we have discovered. In the process, we have not only paid tribute to some truly great 20th century women whose influence on the world of books was decisive, we also describe careers whose experience will resonate with the book world today.

The truth about publishing in Britain has long been that the majority of books published, bought, and read, are first and foremost the special concern of women writers, women editors and booksellers, and of course women readers, up and down the country.

Forget the prophets of doom. This is a golden age of reading. The hungry consumption of the printed word is at an all-time high; at Renaissance levels, in fact. Among new readers, new fiction, above all, has become a women’s business. In the 19th century, names like Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) were the exception not the norm.   The Bronte sisters, indeed, had to masquerade as men  (Currer, Ellis,  and Acton Bell) to attract the attention of their Victorian metropolitan publishers.

Today, however, from Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson and Lorrie Moore in North America to Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel in the UK, it is women writers who set the gold standard. Once upon  time, the prize formerly known as “Orange” was a lonely (at times, even controversial) pioneer in promoting women writers.  Increasingly, however, in the 21st century, book prizes are becoming almost exclusively about women writers and their works.

So, to look at the literary contributions of several brilliant and fascinating women -- as we do in this new series of Publishing Lives -- -- really is a no-brainer. Three of the women in question (Kaye Webb, Norah Smallwood and Carmen Callil), are principals in their own stories. Two (Livia Gollancz and Lady Helen Hamlyn) are vital witnesses to the achievements of, respectively, a famous father (Victor Gollancz) and a powerful husband (Paul Hamlyn).  In addition to these voices, we also have rare and fascinating contributions from John le Carré (on his memories of Gollancz), A.S. Byatt (on her recollections of Norah Smallwood), and the famous author-illustrator Shirley Hughes on what it was like to work for Puffin’s Kaye Webb.

It’s also fascinating, through the medium of recorded sound, to rediscover lives that have already become slightly buried in the recent past. There have been so many upheavals in the British book world in the last twenty years (Amazon, Google and the digital revolution; the e-book; global publishing in English, etc.) that it’s easy to forget that some extraordinary individuals have left a vivid mark on the literary culture of their times.

We start with the amazing force of nature that was Kaye Webb, the irrepressible and dynamic promoter of Puffin Books during the 1960s and 70s.  Hers was the poignant story of a woman who escaped her own heartache by enriching the lives of a generation of kids.

Then we go on to explore the life of Norah Smallwood (coincidentally, my first boss), the Edwardian grande dame of independent publisher Chatto & Windus,  who owed her promotion both to luck (the outbreak of the Second World War) and also to her indomitable drive for literary excellence in the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Iris Murdoch, Laurie Lee,  A.S. Byatt and Dirk Bogarde. Norah was rather a dragon in her day, who excited strong opi opinions. Separating gossip from actuality  was, occasionally, quite taxing. In the making of this programme, it was an especially spooky moment for me to listen again to that voice which, when I was twenty-three, could sponsor a unique, occasionally unnerving, combination of awe, panic, and exhilaration.

Finally, we conclude with a Publishing Lives scoop, a rare BBC radio portrait of the great Australian womens’ publisher, and co-founder of the Virago Press, the feisty feminist Carmen Callil. This enthralling episode breaks new ground in another way, too. Virago was the triumph of a team effort, a revolutionary cultural collective,  which included Ursula Owen, Lennie Goodings, and Harriet Spicer. For various complex reasons,  these women have, in the past, been disinclined to speak freely of their joint Virago experience. Here, in a mood of mellow reflection, they look back with nostalgia: some fascinating moments.

In this new series of Publishing Lives you can hear the people who transformed the bookshelves in front of you reflect on what it was like to change the world -- with ink and paper, and apple-green paperback books.

• Publishing Lives on BBC Radio 4 from Monday 10th March
• Interviews and hightlights of Books & Authors on Radio 4
• Download the Books & Authors podcast

Robert McCrum writes for The Observer

Asking a magician how do you do that? Maybe it's an inbuilt human curiosity to know how things are done that makes us try and uncover the secret rules of the creative process. Movies at home now come with directors' commentary, and behind the scenes secrets, letting you discover that the scary alien was actually made from boxes of oysters. Will I be scared next time I watch? It feeds a need but does it nurture the dreams found in the suspension of disbelief? 

Mark Billingham - bestselling crime writer and creator of Detective Inspector Tom Thorne - and I, made a Radio 4 programme together about the TV detective Columbo. It was a labour of love. Behind the raincoat, cigar and forgetfulness was a story of tantrums, Oscar winning directors and inspiration in great Russian literature.

It was fascinating to go behind the wizard's curtain, but I had mixed feelings when we talked again about Mark choosing some of his favourite crime solvers on the radio. Especially when we plumped for the title: Mark Billingham's Rule Book of Crime. Is it fair to give the game away?

Crime writing, is after all, a puzzle. Crime writers have Hansel and Gretel DNA – forever dropping clues. Trying to bring order to the chaos at the scene of a crime. Mark thinks all crime writers 'borrow', that all 'are standing on the shoulders of giants'. Even if those shoulders are often those of the 'little old ladies' of the Agatha Christie 'Golden Age' of crime in the 1920s & 30s.

 

Mark's crime obsession was kick-started in school by an unusual teacher's love of the greatest detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes. Mark's taste for the darker side led him to the mean streets of Raymond Chandler and a rejection of the 'cosy' world of the whodunit.  Of course tastes change, the crime formula is refined in the webs of PD James's Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, another of Mark's favourites. Currently the world is in the chilly grip of 'Scandi-crime'. Mark was taken with the thoughts of Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell – creator of Wallander – on crime and punishment, when he appeared on Radio 4's Bookclub.

But there is nothing like discovering a hidden gem, the vital clue in a story, for yourself.  And that's what Mark did in the BBC archive when he found a radio detective series original. It ran from the late 1970s into the early 1980s on BBC national radio. It starred an actor who was in a one off 60s TV classic and was the voice of a classic children's cartoon. It was penned by a writer that worked on TV police dramas Z Cars and Softly Softly. Just who and what could it be?

Like every good crime novel, the final twist will be revealed in Mark Billingham's Rule Book of Crime.

Listen to Mark Billingham's Rule Book of Crime

Visit the 4 Extra website

Looking through the list of Bookclub recordings brings back some extraordinary memories... of Joseph Heller talking about Catch 22, Wendy Cope reading poetry in a basement studio in Broadcasting House while the story from New York was coming in on September 11, 2001, Muriel Spark reading from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, having driven from Italy across the Alps in an old car to be with us. It's wonderful that, thanks to the Radio 4 archive, all 156 programmes can be listened to: they're a journey across our literary landscape.

Each year, with Dymphna Flynn, my producer, we look back on the previous twelve months and - without exception - surprise ourselves at the range and the quality of the authors who've come along to sit with a couple of dozen readers (we never have more, because we know the difference between a reading group and an audience...). Take the first five months of 2003. Alan Bennett, Salman Rushdie, William Trevor, Beryl Bainbridge and P.D.James. Beat that. Or the autumn of 2008. Colm Toibin, Gore Vidal, Michael Morpurgo, Fay Weldon and Amitav Ghosh.

The memories come flooding back from so many of them. I've been lucky enough to be able to record each edition since we started in 1998, though there have been some hairy moments when events conspired to intervene. Overwhelmingly, authors have been more open that we might have expected. Even some with a reputation for reticence - John Irving comes to mind - opened up when faced with readers who had come because they wanted to discuss that month's book. The questions have, from time to time, been astonishingly acute. Both the Israeli novelist David Grossman and the Canadian Anne Michaels were taken aback by the directness (and intelligence) of our readers, and there were uncomfortable moments.

But usually there's a good deal of hilarity as well as high seriousness. Jilly Cooper's lurchers insisted on snoring through a recording in a polo club in Gloucestershire; the floor in Dr Johnson's House creaked all the way through our programme with William Trevor; and one author - only one - forgot to turn up. Sometimes there have been confessional moments (Douglas Coupland found himself revealing more than he intended...) and often an electricity that was unexpected, as when Tony Parsons discussed Man and Boy in a prison, after which one of the readers (who had asked a series of highly intelligent questions) told me: "I was once the most wanted teenager in the country."

The reason why the archive matters is that it reveals how resilient the reading habit is in our culture. Death of the book? Forget it. The phenomenon of the reading group/bookclub that's been so remarkable in our time, which the programme has been able to celebrate, is evidence of something more profound: the extent to which fiction still sustains and excites people of all ages. The Radio 4 experience, through the programme and particularly with this archive, makes that point, simply and incontrovertibly.

Of course we've talked about lots of non-fiction, too - history and biography have produced some of our most memorable recordings. I can't count the number of times after a recording that it's been one of our best programmes - William Hague on William Pitt, Clive James on his Unreliable Memoirs (in which he spoke about his relationship with his mother in a way he has never done anywhere else), Alan Bennett on Writing Home.

This archive is a treasure trove. I only wish the unedited versions were available too...Untold riches. But that's for another day.

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub

• The next episode of Bookclub, produced by Dymphna Flynn, on Sunday at 1600, features Jennifer Johnston.
• The Bookclub interview archive is on the Radio 4 web site. There's another remarkable archive of author interviews on the BBC Archives web site.
• The picture shows Tony Parsons recording his Bookclub in prison.

A few weeks ago, at the Bristol Old Vic, Sue MacGregor announced to the audience that this was to be her final programme as the regular presenter of A Good Read. Our guest reviewers were the acclaimed actor Timothy West, who has a strong connection with the theatre and with Bristol, and the best selling novelist Amanda Craig. But, for many in the audience, the chance to see a Radio 4 legend in the flesh and watch an edition of a Radio 4 favourite being made was their main reason for being there. The demand for tickets exceeded the capacity of the theatre. That edition was broadcast on Radio 4 this week and, not surprisingly, listeners have been in touch with us expressing both their regret that Sue is stepping down from the programme and their concern that she is leaving Radio 4 (definitely not true) and asking who could possibly fill her shoes?

Here in Bristol, where A Good Read has been made for more than 30 years, we're also sad that Sue has decided to finish this particular chapter of her long and illustrious career. I'm glad to say we will still be working with her on other programmes for Radio 4. In fact we're making a programme with her right now about the legendary broadcaster John Freeman and, of course, she still presents her superb series "The Reunion" but we also understand, better than most, why she has called it a day.

Sue holds the record for being the longest serving presenter on the programme. Seven years. She narrowly beats Edward Blishen who presented A Good Read between 1990 and 1996. Over that period she has read and reviewed around 500 books from cover to cover. That works out at roughly 70 books a year. How many of us, in our time pressured lives, get through more than one book a week? Another challenge for the presenter of A Good Read is that, for each programme, there is a personal book choice to make. At the beginning this isn't too difficult. If, like Sue, you are a genuine lover of books, titles come thick and fast. But, by the fifth year, it starts getting harder. You can't, of course, choose any title that has been featured in previous programmes and, faced with a reading list that never diminishes, finding time to read books for personal pleasure becomes impossible. You become a reading machine. I remember Sue telling me that the concept of holiday reading was a distant memory as she was voraciously devouring books to see if they were good enough to recommend to Radio 4 listeners. Sue did find 150 original titles for her own personal choices which is a feat in itself. And, like the consummate professional she is, it sounded effortless.

A Good Read is a special programme and guests are happy to come on to talk about their own choices and curious to read what others have picked. Lord Carrington, Prue Leith, Fay Weldon, Jo Brand, Nick Horby, P D James, Sir Roy Strong, Jon Snow and Sir Digby Jones are just some of the people who have appeared on the programme while Sue has been presenting. They enjoy it because the programme is driven, at its core, by a personal passion for books and a basic need in most of us to talk about something we love. Of course, at times, not everybody agrees but fervent differences of opinion make for compelling radio.

The programme began in Bristol in 1979 so, in effect, A Good Read was the first popular broadcasting book club long before anyone had even heard of Oprah Winfrey or Richard and Judy. Listeners often write to tell us how they've discovered their own personal all-time favourite through a recommendation on the programme. There was an extraordinary reaction from listeners when Josephine Hart presented Bernard Schlink's novel 'The Reader' as her choice back in September 2003. Sue and her guests have dissected and discussed all genres - biography, historical novels, fiction, romance, crime, graphic novels and even self-help manuals. As long as the books are still in print, widely available and in paperback then they are eligible for review on A Good Read.

Sue MacGregor has been a wonderful ambassador for the programme and A Good Read has flourished with her at its helm over the last seven years. Her intelligence, warmth and genuine enthusiasm for books could be heard in every programme. Her preparation was meticulous. No short-cuts or skim reading for Sue. She read every book properly. Her ability to chair each discussion with authority and inquisitiveness but always putting listeners first is what makes her one of our best broadcasters. So who can follow her? Well, for us, the search has begun but we intend to take our time to get it right. Ultimately A Good Read is about wonderful writers and wonderful books and conveying the passion we share for them.

Clare McGinn is Editor of Audio & Music Production at BBC Bristol

• Listen to Sue MacGregor's final edition of A Good Read on the Radio 4 web site.

It's been a strange week, locked in a studio recording a novel about secrets and conspiracy in Stalinist Russia and then dashing 8 floors up, to conspiratorially huddle over the short list of this year's BBC National Short Story Award intent on ensuring total secrecy until the announcement on Thursday's Front Row.

There is a sense of both relief and excitement now that we have reached this point. Relief to have finally got through all the hurdles, from the box loads of entries in the spring, to the complications of contracts in a digital age, from the casting of Cumbrians to the challenges of the short-listing meeting. This year the judges seem to have been particularly passionate in their defence of, or coruscating in their demolition of, some entries! And for the first time we felt we must add a commended category for stories from Edna O'Brien and Graham Mort.

There have naturally been various minor alarms along the ways - a couple of the stories are brilliant and don't need to be abridged - in fact they are written with such economy in their totality, that they are too short for our 30 minute slot! Unfazed by this potential hiccup we have come up with two solutions - the wonderful Irish writer Colm Toibin has promised to reveal his favourite classic short stories after David Constantine's clever and concise tale on Monday, and kindly Gardeners' Question Time will take up the slack on Friday before Hugh Quarshie reads Aminatta Forna's tender story of a love remembered and lost.

The casting was trickier too, with several stories with first person narrators and specific regional or age requirements. Sarah Hall's powerful coming of age story is deeply rooted in north Cumbria and the lovely people at The Theatre by the Lake in Keswick have helped us find the perfect voice. Meanwhile Helen Oyeyemi's story is deliberately unplaced - she told us 'the village itself I feel much more vague about - it could even be Muslim rural Africa, but an Iraqi accent would be true to the story too.' Of course for radio such ambiguity is hard. We have to fix on a voice and thus a suggestion, at least, of place - see where you think Sirine Saba is speaking from.

In these multi-platform days of youtube and twitter we have to find pictures for radio - always an odd idea given we spend our lives saying that radio creates the best pictures! For David Constantine's story Rob Howells has been delving into the picture archives in search of Morecambe Bay - which did appear eventually but only after he'd viewed over two hundred pics of Eric and Ernie. Water and floods resonate through Jon McGregor's poignant and disturbing portrait of a lonely man too. The continuity of the river below his dwelling was the pervading image.

There have been a lot of wonderful trails on Radio 4. Not normally one to step in front of the mike, preferring to lurk on the other side of the glass, I have found myself on air at the most surprising times. It was particularly disconcerting to be drifting off to sleep last night thinking I recognised the actor! But amusing to learn that one of my team, rather groggy and half asleep, leapt out of bed on hearing the Big Brother voice of his leader coming out of the radio at 6.30 in the morning.

Finally, however, it is exciting to be at this point again - with the five stories about to be made public, a chance for the audience to join our debate on Facebook before what I predict will be a polite but fiercely fought tussle at the final judging meeting for the winner. And then of course we'll all be sworn to secrecy all over again until the 29th. Good thing I'm picking up tricks on enforcement from my current recording!

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

• The shortlist was announced by James Naughtie on Thursday's Front Row. David Constantine, one of the shortlisted authors, was interviewed by Kirsty Lang on Friday's programme.
• Listen to the five shorlisted stories on Radio 4 at 1530 each afternoon this week, starting today with Tea at the Midland by David Constantine.
• More about the awards, including past winners, on the Radio 4 web site.
• You can download all five of the shortlisted stories to keep after they've been transmitted.
• The hashtag for The Awards is #NSSA
• The picture shows The Midland Hotel in Morecambe Bay. It's by Ted and Jen. Some rights reserved.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pqfb3

It's in the can! All ten episodes of Rebecca Stott's compelling new novel The Coral Thief, are recorded and edited and ready for broadcast.

When I was searching earlier in the autumn for a Book at Bedtime to fill January's wintry evenings, my editor handed me The Coral Thief to see if it might fit the bill. And it did. A pacey thriller, a passionate and heady love affair, peppered with scientific ideas and historical insights, it seemed just the right combination for an ear-catching listen.

Once I had the green light from Radio 4's commissioning editor, the hardest part began: the abridging process. Because of the complicated nature of the tale, the interweaving of detailed fact and an imaginative, page-turning - but in truth, complicated - plot, a highly experienced abridger was necessary - we were turning the book round quickly too. Despite, or because of the challenges, one of the most interesting parts of my job is to work with the abridger, in this case Viv Beeby, making the tough decisions on what should go and what should stay.

Some of the detail had to be sacrificed - a plot like this lends itself to nail-biting endings but you have to ensure you can mold the episodes so that the characters, ideas and the period atmosphere maintain their substance. There was much illuminating detail we wanted to retain. For instance, the bronze horses taken down from the Arc de Triomphe by Wellingon under pressure from the Venetians who wanted them back speaks volumes about the political machinations in Paris following Napoleon's surrender. Then there are the moving sequences where Lucienne describes the experiences of her family during the worst excesses of the French Revolution which say so much, not least about her personality and what drives her.

Casting is crucial - and this time, unlike some others, the narrator's voice was clear to me from the start. I'd worked with Dan Stevens earlier in the year, reading William Fiennes' The Music Room and I knew he could carry off both the drama and the science entwined in the book. I felt he would bring our narrator, Daniel Connor, a young ambitious and engaging natural scientist, to life brilliantly. I knew that he could also lift Lucienne Bernard off the page and make this beautiful cross dressing thief sound seductive and charismatic, and all with a French accent.

Dan was enticed by the book and subsequently the scripts. Well prepared, once in studio he got stuck into telling the story and recreating the characters. He quickly nailed our English narrator, and Parisian temptress, as well as a sinister French detective, a Scottish professor and a number of brigands and thieves. Once we'd finished, the author, Rebecca Stott, came in to record her fascinating reflections on writing the novel; listen to her describing how she recreated a Paris that would be lost by the mid-nineteenth century when the wide boulevards we know today were built. Paris in the days of The Coral Thief was more akin to our pictures of Dickensian London - and a perfect setting for a novel of intrigue.

Listen to Rebecca's reflections here:

Elizabeth Allard is producer of The Coral Thief

• Rebecca Stott's The Coral Thief is this week's Book at Bedtime. Listen again here.
• Jane Garvie interviewed Rebecca Stott about The Coral Thief and her upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren on Woman's Hour before Christmas. Listen again here. She's also got a fascinating Q&A about the novel on her web site.
• The picture shows an inscription on the walls of the Paris quarries. It was taken by Zoriah. Used under licence.

The nice people at Book Trust have sent us some pictures from the awards ceremony Monday night - and there are more here on Flickr.

Shortlisted Lionel Shriver's got an excellent piece about short stories in The Independent. She writes:

Exchange Rates, short-listed last month for the National Short Story Award, was the first proper short story I've written since I was 22. While a couple of other "stories" have been published meantime, they were both, sneakily, excerpts from novels.

And in The Times, Margaret Drabble, a judge, writes:

Short stories aren't just very short novels, although a few celebrated writers, including John Updike and Alice Munro, have published volumes using overlapping characters or imagined neighbourhoods that create an effect of a tapestry of interwoven lives -- not a continuous novel, but a series of episodes, cumulatively evoking a time or a place or a way of life.

Book blogger Elisabeth Baines (Fiction Bitch) likes the winner:

...short stories, as I'm frequently saying, are closer to poetry than novels, and this short story bears all the hallmarks of that: a linguistic attention and the structural and verbal patterning at which Clanchy as a poet is supremely practised, and it is these elements which create the control of emotion and tone for which this story has been rightly praised, and make it so moving.

Charlotte Williams, blogging for The Bookseller, is particularly pleased with the podcast:

Perhaps a small thing in itself - and of course Radio 4 has long been a champion of the form - but this podcast could be seen as part of a bigger scheme: with short story collections notoriously difficult to sell in print, maybe people are waking up to the different ways to get the form out there?

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• The winner was announced live on Monday's Front Row.
• Story is a campaign for shorter stories. It's run by Book Trust, co-organisers of the awards.

Editor's note. Update: of course, the award has now been announced. Kate Clanchy is the winner. The Telegraph covered the announcement, as did The Guardian. Congratulations to Kate Clanchy! - SB

Not long now until our final meeting in a discreet London venue, to pick this year's winner. Which isn't going to be easy at all.

Meantime, not only are the stories going out on air each day at 1530 and available in the normal 'listen again' fashion - as are the five interviews with the authors on Front Row - but for the first time, and for two weeks only, we are able to offer the five stories as a podcast and as downloads for your MP3 player. It's very easy to do - just visit the series' podcast page where you'll find directions. Either subscribe to the podcast and get all five stories delivered to your MP3 player or right-click to download each story to your computer directly - to keep forever.

And the animated video clips, are all still available here. It's proved an interesting process finding visuals which reflect but don't distract from the audio - and my colleagues Rob and Hannah have done an excellent job I think. You can also check out Naomi Alderman's blog where she has written a lovely piece on her native Hendon.

And for those of you who prefer to read the stories in the old-fashioned way, Short Books have just published a beautiful anthology containing all five and an introduction from our Chair Tom Sutcliffe, which is available in all good book shops, and a perfect treat for Christmas.

As for me, I'm just going to re-read the stories one more time.

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

• In the press, chair of judges and Front Row presenter Tom Sutcliffe wrote a hymn of praise to the short story for The Independent. Alison Flood in The Guardian remarked on the all-female shortlist. Janice Turner in The Times notes that although she can't remember her cleaner's second name, shortlisted author Kate Clanchy can and has written a whole book about hers. The South Yorkshire Star notes with pride that shortlisted author Jane Rogers teaches at the region's Sheffield Hallam University and the Manchester University press office is pleased to point out that faculty member Dr Jennifer Rowntree helped Sara Maitland with her shortlisted story The Moss Witch as part of 'a unique collaboration between scientists and authors'.
• The winner will be announced live on next Monday's Front Row at 1915.
• Story is a campaign for shorter stories. It's run by Book Trust, co-organisers of the awards.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/open-book/neglected-classics/

We are coming up to half-way through our initiative to bring to light brilliant books that have been unfairly/unreasonably/incorrectly/shamefully cast aside - by public indifference/daft publishers/the cruel hand of fate/rotten luck. Mariella Frostrup, Queen of Books, is interviewing a glittering group of 10 authors on Open Book. Each author champions a book that - in their view - has been unreasonably neglected.

The authors are: Ruth Rendell, Susan Hill, Beryl Bainbridge, William Boyd, Colm Toibin, Michael Morpurgo, Hari Kunzru, Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope and Howard Jacobson.

Last week Mariella interviewed five of them - and in this week's programme (Sunday 1600, repeated Thursday 1600) she will interview the other five. All ten of them are passionate about their neglected classic - so the obvious thing to do is to read the lot.

But in the meantime - vote. Because you will decide which one of these books is top of the neglected classics pile and we will then adapt it on Radio 4 - probably in the Classic Serial slot. So you're helping shape the schedule. Who knows - we might even do more than one of the ten.

You vote by going to the website. Voting will start immediately after Open Book is transmitted on Sunday.

We'd also like to hear what your favourite neglected classic is. And we may well reflect what you say on the programme too in coming weeks. I have my own neglected classic - which I happen to believe is the finest novel, neglected or not, written in the twentieth century. I am afraid/delighted you will end up hearing it at some point on Radio 4. But for the time being I want you to vote for the ten glorious specimens on offer. We have already received a lot of correspondence about Neglected Classics - so please do your literary duty!

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

• The choices of the ten authors involved are on the Neglected Classics home page and that's where you can vote too.
• Listen again to last week's programme with the first half of the choice. Sunday's programme will have the second half.
• The picture, A Rainbow of Books, is by Dawn Endico and is used under licence.