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Thursday 2nd September | |||||||||||
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Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> Feature ArticlesAMERICAN DEVIL by Oliver Stark (Headline) marks the debut of a striking outstanding new talent. 'An impressive debut... Stark is an exceptional new British talent', said the Daily Mail. Stark made his first attempt at crime fiction at the age of sixteen. Needless to say, this never reached publication... unlike his gripping debut novel. He talks to Crime Time... Horrible Shocks: Peter Guttridge On City Of Dreadful Night There is a folder of photographs in the English National Archives, within a bigger folder of documents. If you're not careful you don't realise they are photographs - but you need to be careful. For when you open them you get a horrible shock. Depending on the order the last person has left them in you're going to see a pair of legs hacked off at the top of the thigh standing to unwieldy attention against a white tile wall... The Anatomy Of A Novel: Writing The Anatomy Of Ghosts The ever-reliable Andrew Taylor has produced another remarkable novel with his his forthcoming The Anatomy of Ghosts. 'Kingsley Amis once remarked that there are two sorts of books: the ones that you think will be hard to write, and indeed they are, and the ones you think will be easy to write - and they are hard to write, too. For me, The Anatomy of Ghosts fell into the first category...' Elvira Sellerio, the publisher behind Sciascia and Camilleri On 3 August, Elvira Sellerio, 74, died in Palermo. Together with her photographer husband Enzo, she founded the Italian publishing house Sellerio in 1969; she always claimed that it had been a gamble to start a publisher in Palermo, but they were helped by the fact that they were friends with Leonardo Sciascia Riding the wave of recent popular Nordic crime novels — beginning, but not ending, with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" — Jouko Sipila, 39, has begun publishing English translations of crime novels written by his brother, Jarkko, a journalist in Helsinki. This autumn, Sipila's publishing company, Ice Cold Crime, will begin publishing a second Finnish mystery writer... CHRIS STELLER in the the Star Tribune The Baker Street Phantom: Fabrice Bourland Fabrice Bourland, author of the much-acclaimed The Baker Street Phantom, is interviewed by Anna Brown: 'So enthralled by the Victorian era is the author Fabrice Bourland, that he freely admits he would prefer to have lived during that time. "Life is too fast now, too hurried," he sighs. "I'd love to live at a different pace, with horse and carriages, horse-muck in the streets, no motor cars..." The Cartography of the Underworld My latest book, Maps of Hell, is an example of that extremely rare thing - a stand-alone novel within a series. Although the protagonist, crime writer and sleuth Matt Wells, appeared in The Death List and The Soul Collector, I wanted to change as much as I could in order to increase the tension. So Matt finds himself naked and imprisoned at the start – but worse, he has no idea who or where he is, never mind how he got there. James McCreet, Author Of The Vice Society, On The Irresistible Lure Of Murder What is it about the crime genre that has so repulsed and captivated audiences for almost two hundred years? Perhaps the vicarious thrill, the taboo of criminal empathy, the car-crash urge to look upon what is certain to shock and sicken. Whatever it is, this too-human fascination with murder is one of the central preoccupations of my own books set in Victorian London. How often do you get the chance to marry your love of murder and mayhem with the great poets? I've done just that in my debut novel, ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS. It was many years in the making: the first bit of an idea began to germinate when I was working in the White House, going to graduate school at night and dating my husband. We used to spend date nights watching a great show called THE PROFILER. The idea that psychology could be used to predict deviant behavior got under my skin, where it lay dormant for ten long years. An exit from the political world coupled with a marathon read of John Sandford books and one whopping bad nightmare made the idea rear its ugly head and demand: Write Me... A Crime Time Exclusive: SPECTER'S WAY by the great Steve Aylett! When Sam's apartment was burgled, he called the police. You might ask why he tried such a daredevil stunt. He knew some martial arts but was so slow that in any given fight he reacted to the blows thrown in the previous one. Faced with seven cops, he was punched in the nozzle several times and didn't recover especially fast... The Killer Inside Me: Reflections In The Shattered Glass There was a moment, about halfway through Lou Ford's beating of the masochistic prostitute Joyce Lakeland, when I started to feel squirmy, and I am not often put off by violence in films. When Lou later beats to death his fiance Amy Stanton, it wasn't quite as queaze-inducing, though it was perhaps uglier, because Amy's submission to Lou up to then has been mental, not physical, and Amy has twice nearly extracted herself from it... South Africa is a society still divided by race, and increasingly, wealth. Predatory crimes like home invasions and carjackings frequently bridge that divide. Wake Up Dead begins with a violent collision between privileged Cape Town and the Flats – a South African gunrunner and his American ex-model wife are carjacked – an incident so commonplace that it wouldn't even make the local news. What fascinates me is to look beyond the statistics, to get into the people who are flung together by these violent events, and the impact on their lives... This is compulsive stuff - try to pick it up and put it down quickly – you'll find it's not an easy task. A quirky and opinionated volume that trawls extensively thrillers past and thrillers present, Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads examines many of the most compelling thrillers of all time as told by some of the biggest names in thriller writing today... A Bitter View: Sweden and its Crime Fiction Crime Time asked Sofia Odberg of Sweden's important Norden Agency (whose clients include Camilla Läckberg, Mons Kallentoft and Carin Gerhardsen) about her country's image in crime fiction (particularly in the work of Stieg Larsson) — the answers are instructive... "I'm going to get the louse that killed you. He won't sit in the chair. He won't hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just below the belly button. No matter who it is, Jack, I'll get the one. Remember, no matter who it is, I promise." With these words Mike Hammer, P.I. accepts the case and goes head first into a mystery story the likes of which had never before been seen. Writing a story filled with violence, sex, drugs, prostitution, beer, and guns, Mickey Spillane had created in I, the Jury a literary revolution in the world of the hard-boiled detective novel... After two previous excursions with 'The Last Exile' and 'The Mephisto Threat', I thought it high time I added an international dimension to the next Paul Tallis story and sent him to an area of conflict. There were a number of contenders, but I swiftly settled on Russia, more especially Chechnya... Mike Ripley's Angels In Arms: A New View I found a copy of Mike Ripley's ANGELS IN ARMS waiting for me. Unable to resist starting it on my lunch break, I am already guffawing my way through the pages - what fantastic and potent mix of crime and comedy... Elly Griffiths: Spare Me The Twins Elly Griffiths is the author of the Ruth Galloway novels (the latest is The Janus Stone, published by Quercus), which are set on the Norfolk Coast of England. She has a problem with twins... Nicholas Royle On The Face On The Cutting-room Floor Nicholas Royle - author of Antwerp - on an abandoned edition of Cameron McCabe's novel The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor: In 2001, the then-independent Harvill Press saved four great London novels from oblivion by publishing handsome new editions of Henry Green's Caught (1943), Gerald Kersh's Fowlers End (1957), Alexander Baron's The Lowlife (1963) and Maureen Duffy's Capital (1975)... 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... Next 25 |
