 |
|
||||||||||||
|
|
Saturday 4th July | |||||||||||
|
Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> Feature ArticlesCrime Pays For E-books: Dan Waddell On A New Trend At last year's Crimefest in Bristol, a few red wines to the worse, I found myself in discussion with a fellow Penguin crime author on the subject of ebooks. He believed they could be the future, while I played Luddite, extolled the staying power of print and rubbished the idea that some shiny trinket could ever replace the sturdy beauty of a good book The Glass Key 2009: The Nordic Crime Wave Rolls On The winner of the 2009 Glass Key is Swedish novelist Johan Theorin with his second novel Nattfåk (Night Blizzard). UK and US fans of his debut novel Skumtimmen (English title: Echoes from the Dead), clearly including the panel of judges for the CWA's 2009 International Dagger award which short-listed the novel this last weekend, will be delighted to know that his new book, under the title The Darkest Room, is already scheduled from UK Black Swan in July, and from Delacorte in the USA in September. Was Agatha Christie so conservative? Barry Forshaw in The Times asks how much did Agatha Christie's elderly protagonist, the English spinster Jane Marple, incorporate elements of the author's own veiled personality? Was Agatha Christie a feminist writer? Three Crime Talents: Tom Grace, Neil White and Peter De Jonge On Their Dynamic New Crime Novels Tom Grace on The Secret Cardinal Neil White on Last Rites Peter de Jonge on Shadows Still Remain (All three novels publshed by Avon) The Likeness: Tana French On Doubles 'In a lot of ways it's a book about identity, and what a tricky, vulnerable thing it is. I think most of us have had at least one moment when we want to simply leave our own lives behind, just put them down and walk away. In The Likeness, some of the characters actually follow that impulse: they try to erase their old selves and start over from scratch...' Far Cry: John Harvey On His New Novel As one of the most accomplished of British crime writers delivers an impressive new novel, John Harvey talks to Crime Time about the source of the book... Grisly Relics In Police Crime Museum What are the real horrors of the Black Museum? Barry Forshaw investigates in The Times... Dark Places started from a single image: a tiny Kansas farmhouse with a slaughtered family inside. Kansas is the country of Capote's In Cold Blood; I grew up in Kansas, spent half my life driving through its vast, flat landscape, wheat and corn on all sides. Kansas can feel wholesome one moment and quite ominous, almost alien the next.... The Name's Bond. Shaman Bond. The Very Secret Agent. As The Spy Who Haunted Me, the latest in Simon Green's delightful and inventive cycle The Secret Histories appears, he tells Crime Time how he keeps things fresh... I came to the crime genre via a different route than many others. Whereas other writers cite their early influences as being Chandler, Hammet, Parker, or even Christie, my reading pleasure was the pulp stories of R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. I loved the action-driven stories of Howard – whose Conan the Cimmerian typifies his style – and the weird, dark worlds of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. When I'd devoured all of their work and began looking around to widen my tastes... Cut Short: Leigh Russell On A Remarkable Novel A recent article about my writing was called 'Dead Bodies Everywhere', the title taken from the piece I'd written. It sounds macabre, but since I began devising plots for crime fiction, I really do imagine corpses wherever I go – not in a ghoulish sense, but as a problem to solve The Imperium Of Steves: DC Pae On A Highly Unusual Novel
The Night Following: Morag Joss Talks To Crime Time About Her Most Unusual Novel 'My first thoughts, prompted by a patch of insomnia, were about night itself: the darkness which seldom is complete darkness, the way moonlight illuminates yet bleaches out colour, the whiteness, rather than the blackness of night, the other-worldness, the visual tranquillity of night coming round after the brashly lit, multi-coloured confusion of daytime...' Brian Mcgilloway On Bleed A River Deep Bleed a River Deep, to my mind, will always be associated with the first time I introduced myself to someone as a writer. Despite the publication of my first novel, Borderlands, and having had the second, Gallows Lane, accepted, I still felt self –conscious about calling myself a writer... To tie in with the new DVD of Midsomer Murders from Acorn Media, a fascinating fact sheet about the making of the show has been produced — the body count has been (unsurprisngly) high... The Grisham Of Finance: Clem Chambers Clem Chambers' The Armageddon Trade has already been widely hailed ('Captures the nature of the traders behind the foolishness and greed stalking the financial markets' - Daily Mail; 'Like a digital-age John le Carré, Clem Chambers spins a gripping tale of terrorist apocalypse informed by a deep understanding of financial markets and computer technology' - Wired) and bids fair to make Chambesr a crime-writing star. Crime Time caught up with him... The Curious Case Of The Author Who Would Not Die In The Independent on Sunday, Barry Forshaw discusses our ambivlant attitude to the Queen of Crime... 'The characters are cardboard, the plots rely on chance and the settings are implausible. But no one can resist an Agatha Christie...' Can Barack Obama Save The Book Business? Charles Cumming, author of the splendid Typhoon (newly available in paperback from Penguin) raises some intriguing points about the most powerful man in the world... Crime Scene At The London Film Festival Like Man on Wire's Phillipe Petit, The London Film Festival always tries to establish a precarious balance, in its case between those films which, were it not for the LFF, would never been seen in this country; those for which the LFF provides a distribution or critical springboard, and those blockbusters which will fill the British multiplexes anyway, but which gather press attention for their gala openings As some truly chrishable Raymod Chandler reissues are readied, Simon Prosser — Publishing Director of Hamish Hamilton & Penguin — talks literary legacies and urban landscapes... Robert Rotenberg Talks About Old City Hall Old City Hall is proof that Robert Rotenberg is one of the most striking writers on the currect crime scene. Crime Talk asked him about the genesis of his writing career... Say Hello To Ray Banks And Goodbye To Callum Innes 'I think Britain's an incredibly fertile breeding ground for noir, I just don't think a lot of writers want to deal with it. I also think that the American crime novel has its roots more firmly in social realism than its British counterpart, and even now, when a British crime novel does deal with social issues, it's invariably through the lens of a police detective protagonist, who normally arrives after the real drama has taken place and who promises the reader some kind of easy resolution.' The Times On British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia Marcel Berlins in The Times on Barry Forshaw's British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia: 'The work is a trove of fascinating information that can be dipped into for months and years to come' The Times On British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia Marcel Berlins in The Times on Barry Forshaw's British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia: 'The work is a trove of fascinating information that can be dipped into for months and years to come' Historically Hardboiled: Rafe Mcgregor On The Architect Of Murder Twenty thousand war dead, the will of the wealthiest man in the Empire, the coronation of Edward VII, and murder and mayhem on the mean streets of Westminster... Next 25 |
