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WEB NEWS, FEATURES & REVIEWSfeature:
Thrillers Including Simon Khoury And Simon Kernick Jeremy Jehu gets all het up about the latest batch of thrillers news:
A Night Of Crime In Belgravia On Wednesday February 8th, come and hear three of the UK's finest crime writers discussing their work at Belgravia Books in the heart of London. review:
Bereft By Chris Womersley Just once in a while, a thriller comes along that is so good it takes your breath away news:
John Hawkes Takes The Lead In Jackie Brown Prequel The Switch Now, before anybody gets too excited it needs to be stated right up front that, no, Quentin Tarantino has no hand in this feature:
Mark Billingham And Paul Johnston In Conversation So what nudged you towards the genre? news:
Century Buys Chatterton Crime Debut Century has acquired two novels in a new procedural crime series by author Ed Chatterton, billing it as "gritty, dark, visceral and utterly gripping". How Difficult Is It To Write A Crime Novel?
contributor: Iain Finlayson (half of Matthew McAllister) Mons Kallentoft In The Financial Times On Barry Forshaw's Death In A Cold Climate I met Barry Forshaw briefly at a dinner for crime fiction aficionados in London some time ago. He was the obvious authority in the room; I could see people straining to hear, weighing his words carefully. That evening, Forshaw came across as humble, intelligent and perceptive.
His new book Death in a Cold Climate is both intelligent and perceptive. Humble it is not. It is, to my knowledge, the most complete guide to Scandinavian crime fiction yet written in any language, an invaluable companion for anyone interested in the genre... Graham Hurley Talks to Crime Time... More than decade ago, thanks to an invitation from Orion, I became a crime writer. This wasn't a corner of commercial fiction I'd ever regarded with much enthusiasm but the fridge was getting emptier and – to be frank – I couldn't afford to say no to a three-book contract. But where to start? One answer would have been the crime shelves of my local library but that would have been a short cut to pastiche fiction and so I fenced off a couple of precious months and set about getting alongside working detectives. Tough call... All Crime Authors Depend On Expert Guidance
contributor: Leigh Russell The Times On Death In A Cold Climate
contributor: Iain Finlayson This overview of a literary phenomenon is as definitive as any aficionado could hope for.' Mark Edwards: Catch Your Death Catch Your Death started life as something very different to its final draft. My writing partner, Louise Voss, wanted to set a novel at the Common Cold Research Unit, a place near her hometown of Salisbury that for four decades had attracted volunteers who fancied a free holiday in the English countryside, doing their bit for Britain, the catch being that you were likely to be given a cold while you were there. I think Louise wanted to write a gentle love story about a summer romance in an unusual setting, but I immediately saw potential for a conspiracy thriller... Making Stuff Up With Stuart MacBride Most writers would agree that the best bit about writing is the hanging about in the bar at conventions. Second best is the bit where we get to make shit up for a living. Normally my books are set in Aberdeen, and as it's a real place with real streets and real businesses and real people there's a limit as to how much I can pull out of the fluff-infested tunnels of my imagination. I have to be at least reasonably true to the place. And I have to be careful what I say about certain institutions if I don't want to get ostracised or sued. Which is why I've gone "all made up, all of the time" for the new book, BIRTHDAYS FOR THE DEAD, setting it in the fictional town of Oldcastle – halfway between the shiny metropolises of Aberdeen and Dundee 12 Days Of Kindle: Crime, Thrillers & Mystery - The Winners & Losers 40 titles have so far made it to the 12 Days of Kindle: Crime, Thrillers & Mystery list and Harper Collins, Corvus (part of Atlantic) and Constable Robinson are the clear winners. A few more books are added daily throughout the 12 Days of Kindle but the battle of the 99p ebooks is shaping up into a 3 (or maybe 4) way battle It's probably, in part, at least, a function of my getting generally older and slower that caused my most recent book, Good Bait, to take longer than usual – some eighteen months, as against what used to be twelve. [And before that, nine, or even eight – never mind those far-off glory days of pulp, when my fellow scribes and I would churn out a 50,000 word, 128 page manuscript in four weeks.] IT'S THE 17th SPECIAL EXTRA CHRISTMASSY MARK BILLINGHAM NEWSLETTER Well, it's been quite a year one way and another. In the UK we had a Royal Wedding and summer riots. On the one hand we all sat and witnessed a gaggle of workshy layabouts whose actions cost us all a lot of money. Then there were the riots. You see what I did there? Yes, quitting stand-up comedy may well have been a very good move. Aside from the makers of William & Kate commemorative tea cosies, it was not the best of years for a great many people, most notably some of the world's leading tyrants. Several of those in the Top Ten International Despots (there's no such chart, for those eager to see who's made it to Christmas Number One) were either deposed or actually turned up their toes in 2011... Michael Ridpath brings Crime Time up-to-date... I am just finishing the final revisions to the third book in my Fire and Ice series set in Iceland. It is April 2010, and my detective, Magnus, investigates a murder on the rim of Eyjafjallajökull volcano. A group of foreigners are visiting Iceland: it turns out that they all work for Freeflow, an organization devoted to posting leaks on the web. Everyone hates them, so lots of suspects there. The book will be called Meltwater and will be published next May... Is The Writing On The Wall For Literacy?
contributor: Leigh Russell Sophie Hannah: Why Psychological Thrillers Are Good For You Crime Time favourite Sophie Hannah (her latest novel is Lasting Damage, with Kind of Cruel due in February 2012) talks dark pyschology... If you were walking down the street and you saw a knife-wielding maniac running towards you, you would know instantly what was happening and what it meant. You would think, 'Knife, sharp, dangerous, could kill me.' If you could, you'd run away. You'd probably head straight for the nearest police station, where you would report what had happened. This wouldn't be a problem for you, because you would have - you do have - the necessary concepts and vocabulary. 1% Inspiration... The Rest Is Sweat
contributor: Jennifer Hillier on Creep And while they're not wrong – making stuff up is my job and I do work from home – there's really nothing sexy about it. I spend all day in coffee-stained sweats (so not sexy!) and it can be very challenging to stay focused when there's a TV in the next room with episodes of Dexter saved on the DVR. Sure, some days are thoroughly productive. But there also more days than I'd care to admit where I feel like a hamster running on a wheel, getting nowhere... Box Nine: Jack O'Connell's New One The great Jack O'Connell (a Crime Time favourite author, published in the UK by No Exit Press) has a new venture: Box Nine, which is being published by MysteriousPress.com, in partnership with Open Road Integrated Media Dead Reckoning: Who Is Ad Garrett? Dead Reckoning teams science, forensics and plot in a fast-paced action crime thriller thanks to the skills of the two authors that form the team AD Garrett. But who is the pseudonymous author? Oxford Ransom: Veronica Stallwood After eighteen years, Veronica Stallwood is bringing to a close her series set in Oxford and featuring historical novelist, Kate Ivory. The fourteenth and final book, Oxford Ransom, is now published as an ebook for the Kindle and is available on Amazon websites... Sometimes the best intentions can lead to the worst results. When Great Britain took the moral high ground and agreed to end its lucrative export of opium from Imperial India to China in 1908, it unleashed a century of criminality. Just as America's misguided Prohibition of alcohol made illicit fortunes for the Mafia, so organised crime within the British Empire grew rich on its trade in illegal narcotics in the 20th century. Empire of Crime is the first book to reveal the full extent of organised crime inside the British Empire and how gangsters exploited its global trade routes to establish a new age of criminal networks that spanned the world... Meet Ruth Rendell And Pd James At An Exclusive Reception In Aid Of Rnib Fans of mystery and intrigue are invited to join Ruth Rendell and PD James for a Read for RNIB Literary Reception at one of London's hottest venues The Ivy, 6 October 2011. Money raised from ticket sales will help the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) provide reading services and equipment to blind and partially sighted people. My latest novel, Sequence is released was released on 5 September. After years of being compared to Dan Brown with Codex, despite the latter being the former, chronologically speaking, it's a plot and a structure which I feel is unique... Crime, detectives, time travel, heartbreak, love, loss, literary prose, street-speak, cutting edge technology, handmade tools, high tech futures and low tech ages, the bustle of L.A. and the bleak surrounds of a French village you've never heard of. Kill the Irishman: The War that Crippled the Mafia: Rick Perello The War that Crippled the Mafia - Crime Time talks to cop, mafia researcher and author Rick Perello about Danny Greene – the Irish-American racketeer who took on La Cosa Nostra, as in the film KILL THE IRISHMAN, released on Blu-ray and DVD on 26 September by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Over the summer of 1976, thirty-six bombs detonate in the heart of Cleveland while a turf war raged between Irish mobster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson, Thor, The Book of Eli, The Punisher, King Arthur) and the Italian mafia. Dust Devils: Roger Smith Talks To Crime Time For a while I had this chunk of dialogue running around in my head, delivered in a broad Texan accent (think Tommy Lee Jones): "I busted Nelson Mandela's black ass. You're looking at the reason he got sent to prison. I changed the course of history and that is no word of a goddam lie." New Directory Of World Cinema: Italy Appears A new addition to the acclaimed Directory of World Cinema series has appeared, focussing on Italy, with Crime Time editor Barry Forshaw supplying (among other things) essays on several key gialli, the stylish Italian murder thriller genre. The book, edited by Louis Bayman, is a thoroughly insightful and thought-provoking guide to Italian cinema and culture... Morse Set For Youthful Return, But Has Crime Had Its Day?
contributor: Sarah Freeman WHEN viewers – all 18 million of them – tuned into watch the final episode of Inspector Morse it seemed clear there was no way back. The opera-loving detective didn't get transferred to another force or retire to a more sleepy part of Oxfordshire, he breathed his last...
contributor: Barry Forshaw |
