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Friday 19th March | |||||||||||
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Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> Last June, I was contacted by British editor and former bookstore proprietor Maxim Jakubowski. He said he'd been approached by a London publishing house, asking if he would put together "a travel/reference book" that looked at 20 cities or places around the world through the eyes of the detective novelists most closely associated with them. Jakuboswki was recruiting writers to take on the 20 essays, and he asked me to participate in the project... J. Kingston Pierce in The Rap Sheet One of the most respected of writer/editors in the UK crime fiction field is launching a new imprint: MaxCrime, with stellar entries from Tara Moss, Mike Hodges and Barbara Baraldi... the countdown has started.... More Gems From Top Notch Thrillers Mike Ripley and Ostara Publishing are once more putting aficionados of the best genre writing in their debt with more tempting reissues in the Top Notch Thrillers series, including another Alan Williams novel. As The Resurrectionist gleans the usual rave reviews, the great Jack O'Connell travels to London... When I Was Almost Fab: In Brick Lane with a Werewolf of London... I know it's a cliché, made all the more distasteful by my advanced age, but there was a dreamlike quality to my first trip to London. Maybe it was just burnout.... I think this book began to take shape as I was reading reports on the Iraq war - specifically, on Operation Phantom Fury, the massive US-UK assault on Fallujah in November and December of 2004. It struck me - as it has struck many people - that the public attitude to what has happened in Iraq would have been hugely different if the fighting had been shown on TV as the Vietnam War was shown, instead of being presented to us by 'embedded' and therefore controlled reporters... Clem Chambers On The Twain Maxim It is not just the fantasy of a writer to come up with the perfect crime, it is a mental puzzle I think that most people have thought about. Thanks to the credit crunch, a lot of people have realised that there are plenty of perfect crimes and many are in the world of finance. I thought I'd make one of them the basis of my second book, The Twain Maxim... Simon Kernick On The Last Ten Seconds The idea for THE LAST TEN SECONDS came from a screenplay I wrote ten years back, at a time before I was a published author. The screenplay was called ONE BY ONE, and it was about a group of men brought together to kidnap a suspected serial killer from police custody, supposedly on behalf of one of his victim's relatives. But when they take him back to their isolated rendezvous, things go wrong very quickly indeed... Historical Crime Novelist Lee Jackson's New Book Available Complete - Free Top historical crime novelist Lee Jackson has made his new book available complete - for free. He writes: In lieu of a more conventional arrangement, I've put my most recent book online, gratis, on my site: http://www.victorianlondon.org/diary/index.htm New Hard-boiled & Noir From Gryphon There is a new collection of Hard-boiled / Noir Classics From Gryphon Books which offer some of the best hard crime and noir classics available. the company also offers some limited SIGNED copies by such names as Mickey Spillane, Mike Avallone, Howard Browne, and cover artists Robert Maguire and Ron Turner Dark Waters is essentially a conspiracy thriller. The core of the research was done on the Internet, accessing countless newspaper, magazine and opinion pieces on hacking, government secrecy, and the lies which surrounded the build-up to the war in Iraq. A trip to Miami gave me the atmosphere and feel of the locations. I visited the FBI in North Miami Beach, the Miami Herald offices, Miami Beach Police and Miami-Dade Police, not to mention visiting numerous locations across the city. A little nugget of information there, a little there... Cathi Unsworth On Bad Penny Blues Bad Penny Blues is based on a real crime and some real people, who lived and worked in the streets of Ladbroke Grove between the years of 1959 and 1965. It's a tale of prostitutes, Pop Art, swinging detectives and Spiritualism, in a post-War, pre-Swinging London where the dawning of the Space Age, the crumbling of the British Empire and the reconstruction of the capital inspired a wave of creativity in art, music – and murder... Amongst the more unusual London visitors intent on celebrating the autumn publication of John Curran's book Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks (Harper Collins) was Ragnar Jónasson, a young Icelandic lawyer. I came across Ragnar, along with his partner Maria, at several events in Reykjavik earlier this year, events surrounding the eventual award of the 2009 Glass Key to Johan Theorin... Fleshing Out My Characters: Craig Russell It's a funny old business, being an author. You spend months and months scribbling away in notebooks and tapping away at your laptop. In my case, when I get near the end of a book, it consumes all of my time. I have just completed The Long Glasgow Kiss, the second in the 1950s-set Lennox series, and one night last week I worked on until five in the morning to finish it... Cj Box: How High Concept Thrillers Conquered The Uk The already acclaimed author of Three Weeks to Say Goodbye on an all-conquering trend... 'So many words – both spoken and written – have been wasted in attempts to define the differences between crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. I will waste just a few more here...' Being an ever-loving Sherlock Holmes fan and collector, as well as a writer, it is only natural that I was tempted to try my hand at a Sherlockian pastiche, as have so many others. However, my stories are very different from many of the pastiches you may have read... Highsmith The Misanthrope: Morag Joss Vs. Barry Forshaw Morag Joss (whose excellent The Night Following has just appeared from Duckworth) exchanges views on the great Patricia Highsmith (whose novel Deep Water is now being filmed) with The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction's Barry Forshaw Myth And True: Writing Acts Of Violence: Ryan David Jahn It doesn't matter very much that a story doesn't hold strictly to the facts. As Voltaire said of God, if Kitty Genovese didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent her. The well-known version of her murder tells us something important about ourselves, and about what happens when "good men do nothing," and this, I think, is why it hit such a nerve with me... Vienna Bulletin: Crime Fiction In Austria Crime fiction in Austria, as in most European countries, is growing fast. In the early 1990s, there were just a handful of local crime writers: now there are close to 100. So how do Austrian writers promote themselves in a market dominated by books originating not only in the USA and the UK, but also from Italy, France, the Nordic countries, Spain etc, not to mention those from neighbouring Germany? One of Crime Time's favourite writers on his contribution to the new Mira anthology edited by Clive Cussler, Thriller 2 Getting Published: The Curzon Group Speaks 'My experience is not typical. I submitted a manuscript to three publishers and received a phone call after two weeks. Three months later, I was signing a contract for a three book deal...' Leigh Russell and the other members of The Curzon Group of crime writers on the trials and tribulations of geting published
When I was asked to do a companion volume to my Great British Fictional Detectives – this time on fictional villains – I thought I'd be revisiting many of the same books. Crime books have villains, I thought, so there must be lots of dastardly villainous characters in them for me to use. Not so many, as it turns out. Crime writers are good at creating detectives but flounder a little with their adversaries... As Titan begins an ambitious Sherlock Holmes reissue programme (focussing on non-Conan Doyle material), David Stuart Davies talks to Crime Time about his impressive contributions to the series... Crime Novelist John Dean On The Global Short Story Competition Competition tops £2,500 prize money: Certys director and competition administrator, the crime novelist John Dean, has said of The Global Short Story Competition "Every month we uncover exciting new stories from writers keen to have their voice heard...' The Rise And Rise Of Tartan Noir When the father of terse, tough US crime fiction James Ellroy coined the term "Tartan Noir" in the late 1990s to sum up Ian Rankin's success, little did he know that the Edinburgh author and his successors would quickly black out the literary sun... Ed McCracken in Herald Scotland 'Britain's Most Notorious Hangmen' follows Stephen Wade's last collection of biographies of executioners with Yorkshire connections. In this new work, he goes further back, hunting for details on the original Jack Ketch, 'Throttler' Smith and some other obscure seventeenth century hangmen... Next 25 |
