Interviews

The Corruption Of The Body: John Burdett

'Every man has seriously contemplated the inevitability of his own death, the corruption of the body, the worms, the disintegration...' John Burdett, author of The Godfather of Kathmandu, talks crime fction and bigger issues with Sean O'Leary

From Jeffrey Deaver To A Dalek: Leigh Russell On Her Fans...and Other Things

Leigh Russell's fans range from Jeffrey Deaver to a Dalek. And her first novel, 'Cut Short', has just been nominated for the prestigious CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger, an award whose previous winners include Patricia Cornwell, Minette Walters, Louise Welsh and Denise Mina.

Cut Short (July 2009) is the first of two psychological thrillers starring DI Geraldine Steel and was described by Jeffery Deaver as, 'a stylish, top-of-the-line crime tale, a seamless blending of psychological sophistication and gritty police procedure.' Road Closed (June 2010) received glowing reviews, from the renowned Times critic Marcel Berlins amongst others, and Dead End will be published in June 2011...

Under The Influence: L C Tyler

You know how it is. The bright lights are shining in your eyes. The interrogation has been relentless for almost an hour. You've told them all you know – and more. But still it goes on. You take a sip of tepid water and hope that they'll give you a break – but, no ...

"I think," says the chairman, "that we've got time for just one more question from the audience. Yes, you sir, at the back – the gentleman with the crazed expression and straw in his hair." "Could the panel tell us," says the voice from out of the gloom, "which other writers have influenced them and how?"

Flesh Tailor: Kate Ellis

have forgotten where exactly I heard the term 'Flesh Tailor', which is, apparently, an archaic title for a surgeon. But once those two words were planted in my head, they sparked off a series of ideas which brewed in my mind for a couple of years and led eventually to the creation of my latest novel, The Flesh Tailor, a story of wartime evacuees, a house which once belonged to an Elizabethan anatomist and the execution style murder of a country doctor...

Jason Elliot On The Network

In 2000 – long before everyone had an expert opinion on Afghanistan – a friend suggested I write a thriller set against events there. I had visited Afghanistan a dozen times since my first clandestine trip with the mujaheddin in the 1980s, written a book about it, and remained privately obsessed with the place...

The Only Brit Writing Scandinavian Crime Fiction

I find myself in the strange position of being the only British author writing Scandinavian fiction. Indeed I seem to be on the brink of devoting the next ten years of my life to a chunk of rock in the North Atlantic with the worst climate in Europe. Where The Shadows Lie, published this month, is the first in a series about an Icelandic detective named Magnus...

Not A Whodunit, But A Whowasitdunto? Erin Kelly On The Poison Tree

This is a detective novel without a police officer. I am in huge awe of anyone who can write a taut police procedural novel, but the stories that have always stayed with me longer after the book has been closed show the other side of that tapestry. I'm fascinated by what happened before the police arrive, and what is left behind after they have gone. The moment in classic crime fiction where the detective surmises the killer's motive and methodology always seem to me like synopses for fabulous novels that would never be written. The 'innocent' who kills, the ordinary person who is caught up in extraordinary and terrible events...

Writing Dark Blood: Stuart Macbride

Dark Blood came from a rather unusual place for me – real life. Normally I just sit myself down in a darkened room and make stuff up until something seems like a good idea for a book, but Dark Blood was inspired by the real life case of Stephen Beech. Now please note that I say 'inspired by', not 'based on', because those are two hugely different things. I really don't feel comfortable with the thought of basing a novel on a real case, because to me it just feels a little exploitative. A little sleazy. Taking someone else's pain and using it as the basis for a book ... it doesn't seem right. But for some reason I can justify taking real life events and going off on a tangent with them. Call me a beardy hypocrite if you like...

Road Closed: Leigh Russell Talks

I didn't expect to feel so excited about the publication of my second book, but I'm finding it as thrilling as the publication of CUT SHORT last year. I enjoyed writing ROAD CLOSED as much as I enjoyed writing CUT SHORT and am now enjoying writing DEAD END... I just love writing! One advantage of being so busy with writing and promotion is that I haven't had time to stress about how the second book in my series is going to be received, but I hope it proves as popular as CUT SHORT which sold out twice in six months and has just had its third reprint in a year.

War? It's A Crime....isn't It?

Here's my insight for the month: crime writers don't do war.

OK, so there's the odd exception. Anthony Horowitz is the most obvious, with his massively successful Foyle's War TV series. But he's about the only one I can think of whose sleuth operates during wartime, cracking civilian crimes...

Chris Simms On Cut Adrift

Chris Simms on writing about MI5 surveillance operations, CIA agents and a fearsome ex-member of Russia's special forces who is very handy with a garrotte...

Tattoo: Bryan Boswell On An Author's Life

I have been writing for money for longer than I care to remember, first as a reporter, then as a feature writer, then foreign political correspondent and war reporter in all parts of the world. In between I gained ambition and became news editor, assistant editor and finally editor of two fine newspapers, the tabloid Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and The Australian, my country's only national daily broadsheet and at that time the flagship of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire...

Attica Locke Rising

Crime Time asked Attica Locke, the author of the much-acclaimed Black Water Rising, how she felt about the amazing response to her novel...

Eliminating The Impossible: Leigh Russell Interviews Alistair Duncan

LEIGH RUSSELL, author of the runaway success debut crime thriller CUT SHORT, interviews ALISTAIR DUNCAN about his research into the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Two Tribes: Charlie Owen On Getting Published

I've kept all my polite rejection letters. I'm not sure why – I never intended that one day, if I ever got published, that I'd rush into the offices of editors and agents who'd rejected my synopses, shaking a fist and shouting, 'there, I told you so!' But I kept them anyway and enjoy reading them to remind me how lucky I was to get a break.

John Meaney's Pseudonymous Thriller

Edge, a near-future thriller depicting a Britain whose corrupt government has legalised duelling and whose civic services are breaking down, is wrtten by John Meaney (as Thomas Blackthorne). Meaney explains:

'I've used the Blackthorne name because Edge and its sequel, Point, are thrillers for a wide audience (while perhaps too violent for some of my normal science-fiction readership).

Phil Rickman On The Bones Of Avalon

Period fiction? I won't lie... I really didn't want to go there.

Look at it this way: CJ Sansom, PhD in history. Me, A-level history, Grade D.

But you know what publishers are like: as soon I mentioned once thinking about a thriller featuring the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee, I was never allowed to forget it. After two years and something approaching a veiled threat, I finally returned from a dawn raid on Hay-on-Wye with a pile of secondhand books on Elizabethan England and a sense of deep foreboding...

The Nicholas Le Floch Affair: Jean-françois Parot Speaks

Parot has plundered a rich seam of inspiration to create a series of best-selling crime novels centred on the enigmatic police commissioner Nicolas le Floch. Set in Paris, in the second half of the 18th century, each novel unfolds over a year. For UK readers, Parot's most recently translated novel is his fourth, The Nicolas Le Floch Affair, in which the detective himself comes under scrutiny for his involvement with an elegant Parisian socialite...

The Levels: Sean Cregan Speaks

The Levels was more or less an exercise in world-building. I had the basic character setup ideas - where Turner and Kate are at the start of things - but pretty much everything else came from the fundamental need to have a setting where no one had recourse to the usual authorities or social support structures that regular society depends on. That immediately imposes certain conditions on your location and leaves you with a string of questions. If your community has no help or interference from regular society, what does that do to you?

Deadly Communion: Sex And Death In Old Vienna

Prior to his appearance on the Psycho-Thrilers panel at London's Jewish Book Week, Frank Tallis talks about his latest Max Liebermann outing, Deadly Communion... As the century turned in 1900, the Viennese were obsessed with sex and death...

Death Watch: Jim Kelly On A Family Legacy

As the son of a copper, writing a series of police procedurals, I often think how my father would react to the books - especially now, just a few days from the publication of the next one - Death Watch.

Dad - or Det Chief Inspector Brian Kelly - was not a shy critic of fictional investigators. I have an image of him in later years, in an arm-chair, watching No Hiding Place, or Gideon's Way, and barking: "That's it - leave your bloody fingerprints on everything," as some hapless detective worked his way through the crime scene picking things up...

Lynn Shepherd On Murder At Mansfield Park

The thing that always occurred to me about Mansfield Park was how much it resembled the set-up of the classic English detective story - a group of characters in a relatively isolated setting, with plenty of simmering tensions and under-currents, and where the arrival of a charismatic outsider sparks a chain of ultimately murderous events...

Chasing The Dead: Tim Weaver On The World Of The Missing

About ten years ago, I read three thrillers in quick succession that immediately cemented my desire to write one of my own. 'Every Dead Thing' by John Connolly, 'The Poet' by Michael Connelly and 'A Simple Plan' by Scott Smith were an incredible grounding in the genre, weaving cheesewire-tight plots and fantastic writing; each very different but each making such an impression on me that my ambition to write a book – a desire that was always out there on the peripherary of my thoughts somewhere, from when I was still in my teens – quickly became much more than that...

John Burdett On "the Godfather Of Kathmandu"

Many trace the modern crime thriller back to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. A still more venerable ancestor would be Shakespeare's Macbeth. In both cases literary giants used acts of aggravated homicide to illustrate the most agonising dilemmas of their day. In both cases the moral crises were the product of profound revolutions of thought, which would soon lead to revolutions of blood. Less than thirty years after Crime and Punishment the Bolsheviks were slaughtering the Russian royal family and any aristocrat they could lay their hands on. Forty years after Macbeth Cromwell beheaded Charles I and Britain became a republic....

Loss: Tony Black Interviewed

Edinburgh hack-turned-PI Gus Dury is a changed man. He is off the Edinburgh streets and back with estranged wife, Debs. He has promised her that he won't get involved in any more dodgy cases which the police can't or won't solve. Above all, he's off the drink. In his pocket at all times is a half bottle of scotch, but although the label is worn to shreds, he has never so much as loosened the cap. But when his brother Michael is found dead with a bullet in his heart and Gus' life begins to unravel all over again...