 |
|
||||||||||||
|
|
Thursday 18th March | |||||||||||
|
Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> 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.... 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... The Perception Of Crime Fiction: Val Mcdermid Speaks As Fever of the Bone appears in paperback, one of Crime Time's favourite writers talks violent death and dark places with Julian Maynard-Smith More Than A Thriller: Ak Shevchenko On Bequest The author of Bequest on his inspiration: I feel rather humble that I was given the chance to recount, through several characters, the stories of various Soviet generations – the war generation (through the diaries), the "generation of crushed hopes" of the sixties (the story of Oxana) and finally, through Taras, the story of my own generation. A generation that was brought up with Soviet communist ideas, but reached adulthood to see those values dissolve. The "Soviet" identity disappeared, but the sense of national identity, with which we grew up, was distorted. For me Taras's story is about survival (or rather, not surviving!) of the post-Soviet generation The Unreliable Narrator In Unreliable Times: Henry Sutton On Get Me Out Of Here There are literary monsters and literary monsters. Depends where you put the emphasis. How you pronounce monster – with an appalled grimace or a sly wink. A cheeky grin, even. Whichever, invariably they're one hell of a lot more fun than the good guys... Henry Sutton on his remarkable new novel A writer of true crime has to strike a balance between detailing the circumstances of the crime, but avoiding sensationalism. Many of the crimes in this book were, of themselves, quite sensationalist. For example, the murder committed by Michael George Tatum, left his victim battered beyond recognition. Some of the pictures preserved at the National Archives might well be deemed much too graphic to include in this volume, so had to be omitted... First Contact: Patrick Woodrow On Shifting Goalposts For Grisham, it's the law. For Dick Francis, horse-racing. I'm basing mine on the great outdoors. My second thriller (FIRST CONTACT) is set in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. And we're off to the Himalayas in Book 3. Other settings in the series will hopefully include the desert, the arctic, and the high-seas... Two months ago I signed off page-proofs for Confession, the fifth book in the Jacquot series, and returned them to my editor at Preface. After a year spent writing and editing, holed up in a drafty garden shed in the Cotswolds, suddenly the book's done, dusted, out of my hands. And after the usual post-partum low – a couple of lost, aimless days during which I think of all the things I could have written, should have written, but didn't – suddenly I'm free to pack my bag and head south again to research Jacquot's next adventure. It's as good a way as any to get rid of the blues and start afresh... Perspectives On Agatha Christie: From Proverbs To Poisons When I started researching my book Agatha Christie at Home, published the year that Agatha Christie's house Greenway was opened to the public for the first time, I hadn't realised just how many other people had written about the less obvious aspects of her life and works. As I ferreted through libraries in search of material on Agatha's enthusiasm for acquiring and decorating houses (at one point she owned eight) and on her home county of Devon which provided inspiration and backdrops for several of her novels, I came across all sorts of angles to the work of the crime novelist – her use of proverbs, an analysis of her poisons, cover designs... Not So Elementary: Daniel Smith On The Sherlock Holmes Companion There can be few people alive today who do not have at least some awareness of Holmes. But how many of those know him through the original stories? How many more instead know only the legendary image of the deer-stalker and curved piped (neither of which, incidentally, came from Conan Doyle's pen)? Would they be surprised to learn that Holmes was a cocaine-taking, bi-polar, martial arts expert? Or that staid old Watson was a boozer and gambler with "experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents". The Gigolo, The Heiress And The Blackmail Plot The Gigolo, the Heiress and the Blackmail Plot: Richard Shears Gives Crime Time Short Essay on True Crime Style: 'When I was asked to write a book about a Swiss gigolo who plotted to seduce the richest woman in Germany - and the 26th wealthiest in the world - before attempting to blackmail her with sex videos of them together, I eagerly took up the challenge...' Lost World is a road trip, a heady journey through contemporary Brazil which is a country of contrasts; provincial, miserable, rich, fertile, warm and violent all at the same time. Maiquel, a professional killer being hunted by the police, decides to go after his daughter who has been kidnapped by his former lover... My Tough Readership: Arnaldur Indridason Talks To Crime Time The new Indridason, 'Hypothermia', is regarded by many as his best book; it won Iceland's top crime prize and a nomination for Scandinavia's prestigious Glass Key award in 2008. It is his 6th novel to be translated into English, and he is published in over 30 different languages. All of the novels are set in Reykjavik, and give an insight into the idiosyncratic minds of the Icelanders – Indridason believes that crime stories are excellent arenas for writing about the society you live in, and draws on the capital's more sinister characteristics – the merciless climate, its high suicide rate (one of the highest in the world) and increasing numbers of missing persons. Cemetary Lake: Paul Cleave On A Distinctive Crime Novel 'Christchurch is a great setting for crime – it has two sides to it, there's the picture perfect setting you see on postcards everywhere, but there's also a dark, Gotham City feel here which has, sadly, turned this city into the murder capital of New Zealand....' Thomas H Cook: My Characters Are Fighting Inevitability Thomas H Cook is the crime writer's crime writer, someone who in the course of 24 novels and a couple of true crime books has visited most of the staples of the genre, but whose reputation, and high-standing among fellow-writers and critics, has been built by a series of unclassifiable suspense novels... an interview with 'the last of mid-list writers' by Michael Carlson Blindman's Bluff: Faye Kellerman On Her New Novel It is always a tragedy when anyone dies untimely and expectedly. But when the ultra wealthy die under unusual circumstances, their untimely demises often do not evoke pathos. Rather, their deaths elicit shock – how could that happen to someone so rich - followed by much speculation and gossip. Thrown into the mix is always a little Shadenfroid, the little something in the back of one's mind that says that the rich had it coming Next 25 |
