Mysterious Knitting Transcript

Caroline: A hallmark of a really good mystery, for me, is that while I'm reading it I can't see all of the tricks and devices that are making it function so well. Clues, red herrings, alibis, twists — they just flow easily past in the narrative stream, regardless of how painstakingly and deliberately the author worked to produce each apparently effortless effect. Like a swan, gliding smoothly across the surface of the lake while furious paddling occurs unseen beneath the surface, the best crime fiction does not show its workings.

But just because we cannot see all of that meticulous plotting does not mean that it isn't there. The design process for a classic golden age detective novel was intense and laborious, an act of weaving all the different threads together in a complex yet comprehensible pattern to produce a good result for the reader. Josephine Tey once referred to her writing of detective novels as "my knitting", and it seems to me that there is a strong connection between the two crafts — one works with words and the other with wool, but both require skill, foresight and a ferocious attention to detail if the final product is to emerge from the pen or the needles as desired.

So grab your yarn and start casting on, because today we're delving into some mysterious knitting.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Before we get stuck into our knitting, though, I want to talk to you about the future of Shedunnit. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that I don’t do this most of the time — I know it’s annoying when podcasters interrupt the content you came for right at the beginning with lots of plugs, so I save all of mine up for this one period every year that I call the Shedunnit Pledge Drive. And that begins today! For the next four episodes, I’ll be taking a couple of minutes at the start of each episode to explain how I've been able to make this marvellously niche, deeply researched and completely independent podcast for five years, and what you can do to help me keep doing it for many more to come.

It's really not a complicated explanation. This podcast still exists because the Shedunnit Book Club, which is the paid membership scheme that runs alongside the show, with a brilliant community of readers discussing books and short stories together every month and enjoying all of the bonus episodes that I make for them. The aim of this pledge drive is the same that it has always been: to add 100 new members to the club by the end of the year. This increase in membership will enable me to keep making the podcast for another year, paying my team properly for their work and meeting the rising costs of hosting and software, all while not putting up membership prices for anyone.

For previous pledge drives, I have spent many additional hours making extra perks to induce you to sign up — audiobooks of me reading classic detective stories and downloadable guides to the very best of golden age detective fiction. But honestly, this year, I just didn't have the capacity. Behind the scenes, I've kind of been struggling the last few months — feeling burned out, stressed, tired and sick — and I just wanted to focus on keeping the actual podcast going and the quality as high as I can. I hope you'll forgive me. All the perks from previous years are still available and you'll be able to download them as soon as you sign up, as well as the hundreds of hours of bonus episodes that have never been heard on the main feed.

If you like Shedunnit and want more of it to listen to, well, this is the way to do it. So, if any of that sounds good to you and you're in a position to support an independent podcast, you can visit shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive to do that now.

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I am not a very expert knitter, but I have been doing it for a long time, ever since my grandmother and my mother between them taught me when I was a child. Soon, every teddy bear I had was clothed in a lumpy garment of my own making. My grandmother was a knitter of great speed and flair — she thought nothing of trying out complex patterns of her own design and then ripping the needles out and unravelling it all again if it did not come out to her liking. All while watching television. My mother is much more practical and less dramatic knitter, and things usually come out how she intends them to. Many a time I have passed over my own project to her when I'm in a huff with it, only for her to fix my mistakes and knit me back to where I was before the meltdown in the time it takes me to make a cup of tea.

Even when doing it in my plodding, amateur way, knitting can be a meditative activity. Following the pattern's instructions means that you don't have to make any decisions, just keep counting stitches and rows. And while the hands are busy, the mind is free to wander, solving problems and making connections I hadn't even realised were bothering me. I don't think it's an accident that several prominent golden age sleuths, including Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, Patricia Wenthworth's Miss Silver and Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley, are all described as being regular knitters. The contemplative state of knitting seems to me to be ideal for puzzling out whodunnit in a murder case. Mrs Bradly intrigues me most of all, because although she knits, she is decidedly terrible at it. Her projects are usually described as being "mangled" or "shapeless", and yet she keeps at it — evidence, I think, that she likes the in the moment activity of knitting more than any future result that it might produce for her.

However, as much as I enjoy abdicating responsibility for a few hours and contentedly following my knitting patterns, I have always idly wondered about how these incredible documents are put together. And luckily for me, earlier this year someone reached out to me with an invitation to be part of a project that perfectly harnesses this curiosity about pattern making with my passion for detective fiction. Let's meet her, shall we?

Kate: I'm Kate Davies and I design knitwear.

Caroline: Kate designs knitwear, and does plenty of other things besides — she's the founder and creative force behind Kate Davies Designs, a publishing and knitting business based where she lives in Scotland. And the specific project that she asked me to be part of is called Margery Allingham's Mysterious Knits, a knit-a-long series of patterns and essays inspired by the work of the great detective novelist. Knitters and readers came together to form a club and over the last few months have been taking part in the project, reading Margery Allingham's books and knitting Kate's patterns. Now that we've come to the end of this first phase and all the patterns and essays are about to become a book of their very own, I wanted to get Kate's input on this question of the fundamental connection between detective fiction and knitting.

Kate: I'm like you Caroline, I just love detective fiction and I've always liked detective fiction. Different genres of detective fiction at different times of my life have gripped me and I've always loved knitting as well. I suppose it's that tendency that you have to see parallels between different nerdy obsessions in one's life speak to each other, don't they, in often unusual ways. But when it occurred to me that I might be able to combine my love of detective fiction with the knitting... It was about 18 months ago, that was extremely exciting to me particularly exciting, because I felt like the two very nerdy delights were going to collide in ways that seemed both logical and really pleasurable.

Caroline: I think that connection of logic and pleasure is really key here — for me, that applies as much to the sequence of deductions in a mystery plot as it does to the construction of a garment design. And it turns out, Kate agrees with me.

Kate: I felt that lots of knitters are also readers, lots of readers are knitters, those things often go together. And I suddenly started thinking about the many parallels between what you're doing when you're knitting, and what you're doing when you're reading detective fiction. How detective fiction is constructed, the kinds of ways in which plots are wrapped up neatly, or things are left hanging, and it just seemed to me to be an area very ripe and rich for bringing together and enjoying in a club format.

One way of describing it is the narrative pleasures you have from reading a nicely wrapped up plot are very similar, I think, to the kinds of pleasures you have from knitting and finishing a garment. You're going through different stages where you could have a body and two sleeves and things look like they're unresolved and hanging in the same way that two thirds of the way through a novel, you're thinking, how on earth is this all going to come together? Can all of these ends possibly tie up? But if you stick with it and stick with the narrative process of the garment or the plot, you're going to end up with a beautiful shape at the end.

You have to trust me or the detective novelist because all of those random bits that look like nothing on earth are eventually going to come together and, create a lovely shape at the end.

Caroline: There is a strong similarity between these two forms — the classic puzzle mystery and a well-written knitting pattern. Both require incremental advancement and a degree of trust that it will all add up correctly in the end. And, speaking for myself, the feeling of deep satisfaction I finish a pattern and know I did it all right does produce a sense of rightness in my brain that is a lot like how I feel when the solution to a clever mystery is revealed.

Part of this has to do with convention and constraint. Both the knitting designer and the crime writer are working with a form with well-defined set of tropes and rules and must shape their ideas to fit within this system. Margery Allingham in an interview with the New York Times in 1949, spoke about how she found having a pattern, or a shape, to work with aided rather than restricted her creativity. "One simply uses the thriller shape, as one uses the sonnet shape, in order to do a picture," she said, continuing: "I like the shape. It's a satisfactory shape, with, beginning, middle and end." Later in the conversation, she was asked her opinion on one of the biggest American crime writers of the moment, Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. She responded enthusiastically, again referencing this idea of how crime fiction must have a "shape" and knots to bring it all together. She said: "Now there's a chap who produces a beautiful neat shape. He describes an elegant knot and then pulls the whole thing out neatly as though it had been done by a conjuror."

There's a very woven, threaded quality to this thinking. Just as knitting transforms a single strand of fibre into a three dimensional object, Allingham is admiring Gardner's ability to produce elegant knots that bring his plot to fruition. It's something that Allingham was rather good at herself, this lightness of touch with theme and motif. I asked Kate whether she had found many direct references in Allingham's work to this idea of mystery writing as a literal sort of fabrication.

Kate: Allingham's books abound with that kind of yes, slightly madcap potential to create connections and develop ideas. Even though there isn't necessarily a lot in Allingham that's directly related to knitting, I think in terms of design and textiles and interiors, I think she's unmatched, really, at the level of detail that she provides. I think that when she talks about Canon Avril's study in The Tiger in the Smoke, you read that description and every element of it is palpable. The clothes, the wallpaper, the furnishings, even the way that things wear out I think in Allingham's novels, it's the level of detail that she gives is pretty much unmatched.

Caroline: After the break: It's Got a Bend in It.

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The similarities between mysteries and knitting patterns now well established, I think it's high time we turned our attention to how a pattern actually comes into being. I asked Kate what her process looks like.

Kate: I generally see a look, someone in the street or I see an outfit or a set of colours and then I think of the whole shape of the outfit or the set of colours that I'm going to put together and the design fits in as a part of that.

So I draw a sketch, but the sketch is not of the garment itself, it's of the garment in the context of an outfit or a look. The next step is to think about the colours and the construction. The meat and two veg of the pattern. What yarn am I going to use? How am I going to construct this? Is it going to be knit from the bottom up? Is it going to be knit from the top down? Is it going to be knit in pieces and then seamed? Is it a circular garment? And what kind of palette am I thinking of? Is this all about soft neutrals? Is it pastels? Is it bold and graphic? That kind of thing.

Caroline: It's fascinating to me that it's the fully formed garment or concept that comes to Kate first. As a knitter, my experience is so much on the micro level, stitch by stitch, row by row, that I don't really pay much attention to the bigger picture. But of course the designer has to think about that, just like a crime writer has to think of twist and the solution to their plot as well as which scene they're going to write first. Sometimes, Kate approaches knitting like this too — building a pattern around an idea she has for something technically experimental or innovative.

Kate: Sometimes I start designing, and the whole idea is about trying something completely new. I'm trying something with an experimental construction that I've never knit anything like that before, and that seems to me to be quite an interesting thing to produce, and I suppose that within that, there might be contained a level of complexity, or it might just be something that's unusual to me. I do try and accommodate lots of different kinds of knitting styles and techniques. But yes, I suppose that sometimes I do also like to push the boundaries and do something a little bit different in terms of the construction.

Caroline: Next, things get really technical.

Kate: Then what happens is the horror of the spreadsheet. I feed all of the information that I've got from my swatches and my ideas into Excel. And I grade the pattern. The depth of the armscye, the width of the body, the depth between the armpit and the neck, that's the yoke depth all of those things. I mash up all of those figures. That can take a long time, depending on what the design is, because you have to then think about body proportions, which are very different for someone with a 30 inch bust to someone with a 60 inch bust. It is a lot of maths, a surprising amount of maths. And you have to be serious about the maths because you don't want somebody to not be able to get a jumper over their head or suddenly to find that they've got a gigantic baggy armhole. Mathematical calculations are a key part of it, but I would say I'm not a naturally mathematical person, and I have to work hard at that side of it.

Caroline: Finally, though, once the maths is settled satisfactorily, the pattern must be written.

Kate: This is the fun part, because now you have to make all of that stuff intelligible to not just one knitter, but many knitters. Knitters who might come from different knitting traditions or have different experiences of reading a pattern, and that part I really enjoy because that's about making sure that what you want to happen on the needles is being explained very clearly in as few words as possible. I really enjoy creating clear instructions. I have a kind of in house style sheet and the pattern then has to go to the tech editor who will check my calculations, but also check that I have written the instructions in accordance with the guidelines that I myself have set in our in house style sheet. What I would say is that when you get a lot of feedback about a pattern being unclear in a certain part, you know you've got to think again about the way you're writing it and that makes you a much better pattern writer. There can be surprising moments of, you think that something's very clear, but there's just a way that a certain instruction is interpreted that introduces an element of ambiguity that say a German knitter just might not be able to follow in the same way that somebody who's English language speaking, and you want the German knitter or the Japanese knitter to be able to look at your pattern and to be able to make sense of it, and to be able to produce the same result.

Caroline: Once the pattern has been edited, test knitted, adjusted and tweaked, it can be published. Now that I know a bit more about all the many stages it involves, I am in awe of the variety and depth of the patterns Kate has done even just for the Margery Allingham project — every one represents many, many hours of time spent sketching, swatching, spreadsheeting and knitting. Each one has a tangible connection to an element of Allingham's work, from the name to the construction to the stitch choice.

Kate: I quite enjoy the Tansy pattern, which I designed for More Work for the Undertaker, in which when I designed it I was thinking very much of Miss Jessica Palinode in that book, who has a very unique style, which you'd probably describe as a kind of bag lady style, frankly, but I also think that there's an underlying hint of Edwardian elegance to her, and I wanted to try and capture that with a lovely lace panel designed just for her. It's a top down T shirt or sweater. You could choose to knit it with long sleeves or short sleeves and it has very attractive, I think they are attractive, lace panels running down each side of the neck and a twisted stitch panel over the front. So it's quite a simple looking garment, but it has these very nice lace panels that are leafy. They look leafy, or they look like ears of wheat, and I wanted those to suggest the rather strange brews that Miss Jessica makes by collecting weeds in Hyde Park, which she then brews up in the basement and feeds to unsuspecting visitors with varying degrees of delight or disgust. That isn't a punning title. I could have had a lot of punning titles for More Work for the Undertaker, but no, I chose to do a Jessica pattern instead.

Caroline: There are some great puns in Kate's pattern titles, such as one called Weaver B after a character in Allingham's 1940 novel Traitor's Purse, and my personal favourite, a design for a pair of knitted slippers titled Slippers Bellow after the starlet in Dancers in Mourning. There's even one called It's Got a Bend in It, after the catchphrase from the 1955 novel The Beckoning Lady.

Most ambitiously, though, was Kate's idea for what she called "The Goff Place Mystery", which didn't have a pattern of its own, but could rather be deduced from clues left in other designs.

Kate: This is a wrap or shawl which is designed in association with the novel Hide My Eyes. There's four clues and they're named after four characters in the novel. And as you proceed with the knitting, you're going east and west in the same direction that the novel travels across London.

But each clue of the pattern is associated with a character, but it also picks up on design elements that are echoed throughout the collection, and I guess what I wanted to do there was in the same way that when you're reading a plot or you're writing a plot, you land little clues and details for the reader, which are then picked up later on. So for example, a slip stitch pattern that I use in the Weaver B design also appears in the final clue of the mystery shawl. And the first clue of the mystery shawl also has a kind of stripey chevron that appears in the It's Got a Bend In It design that I associated with The Beckoning Lady. The design elements are echoed throughout the collection in much the same way that plot details might be peppered or picked up on throughout a work of narrative detective fiction.

Caroline: The process of creating this mystery shawl was nothing like Kate's usual way of putting together a pattern, but there was definitely something mystery-like about the way it all had to come together in sequence, without any one clue giving too much detail away too soon.

Kate: I started that design not knowing, A, what it was going to look like, or B, really, where it was going to end up. I had to work very closely with the test knitters to come up with interesting ways of dropping red herrings and wrapping things up neatly those were all elements that I had to think about and develop in order to create what I hope is a fun experience for the knitter, which they might experience as a process similar to reading a really good plot.

The approach to this design was more about a fun process than the end visual result. You're constantly worried about giving something away that actually is crucial to reveal later on. I've never written a work of fiction but I often wonder about that process, about going back and editing your work to make sure that there's enough detail provided to allow the reader to pick up on certain things that you want them to think about, but without giving too much away that's effectively going to spoil the suspense.

Caroline: I wondered whether, after all this experience infusing her knitting patterns with elements of detective fiction, which form Kate felt was the more difficult to weave together.

Kate: Writing a knitting pattern is much easier. A knitting pattern is a very predictable thing and a containable thing. I think writing is neither predictable nor containable. You can't write a knitting pattern that's more than, a certain number of pages long. Whereas your idea for a novel could just grow legs and mutate into some kind of 800 page behemoth. Which, someone may or may not want to read. There's a discipline to the concision and the predictable limits of a knitting pattern, which, despite the neat form and the recognisable shape of a detective plot it could still have three sleeves, couldn't it? In fact, sometimes perhaps it's preferable for it to have three sleeves. Because that's really surprising. That's not the mystery garment that you would want to be knitting though, is it really?

Caroline: As someone who was once following a pattern for a top and unintentionally knitted the whole thing upside down without realising it, I can never guarantee that I'm not about to produce a surprise third sleeve from my needles. But I know what Kate means, and I think it resonates with a deeper truth about both knitting and detective fiction. We like it because it is just surprising enough, and no more. The rules and constraints and techniques give us expectations, which we enjoy having fulfilled. After all, there's no fun in a mystery that doesn't get solved.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Kate Davies. You can follow along with her life and work at katedaviesdesigns.com and browse all of her patterns that we discussed and many more besides at shopkdd.com. There's also a link in the episode description where you can order the Margery Allingham's Mysterious Knits book, in which you will find all of Kate's crime fiction inspired patterns and my essay about knitting in detective fiction.

This episode marked the beginning of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive, the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year. If you’d like to be part of that and get an excellent free audiobook of pre golden age detective stories read by me, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.

All the books we mentioned in this episode are listed at shedunnitshow.com/mysteriousknitting. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.