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WEB NEWS, FEATURES & REVIEWSfeature:
Ten Great Crime Novels That You Should Have Read There's a kind of novel that can only be a crime novel. They are short. They are sharp – ostentatiously so - they are cool and the people are cold. news:
Modern Day Cold War Thriller To Harvill Secker Alison Hennessey, Senior Crime Editor at Harvill Secker, has acquired World English Language rights to thriller Plan D by Simon Urban feature:
The Year of Translated TV Dramas The announcements have been coming thick and fast over the last few days regarding new to the UK dramas from mainland Europe review:
Vanished By Liza Marklund This is a strange mix feature:
The Blaggers Guide To George Pelecanos The man Obama likes to take on holiday feature:
Altar Of Bones: A Literary Sensation But Who Dunnit? The publication of a crime thriller whose plot rests on a global conspiracy is fast inspiring its own, real-life literary conspiracy InterviewsThe inspiration for The Set-Up is very straightforward. I was working in the City when the Credit Crunch hit. The banks and other financial institutions will deny it now but at the time there was real PANIC. Proper, grown-up, grown-men-crying pandemonium. Everybody was drunk in the car when it suddenly ploughed into Joe Public. And, like all good alcoholics, they promised never to drink again until next time. The Emperor's Tomb: Steve Berry Talks To Crime Time Cotton Malone is known for his overseas exploits. He's a former-United States Justice Department operative, who retired from service early, and moved to Copenhagen where he now owns an old bookshop. His adventures have taken him to Europe (The Templar Legacy, The Paris Vendetta), Central Asia (The Venetian Betrayal), Antarctica (The Charlemagne Pursuit), and the Middle East (The Alexandria Link). But never to China... Until The Emperor's Tomb. An Agent Of Deceit: Chris Morgan Jones Talks To Crime Time was an investigator, of sorts; like the book's main character, Ben Webster, I was part detective, part spy. For eleven years I worked for a New York company called Kroll. Kroll is the world's largest investigations company: it checks out people before deals, advises clients on disputes, investigates and helps recover money from frauds. It does this all over the world, and gets involved in some fascinating situations. I worked in the London office and specialised in Eastern European work, particularly for Russians and in Russia... Cleansing Flames: R.n. Morris Talks To Crime Time The Cleansing Flames is the fourth novel I've written featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigator I took from Dostoevsky's masterpiece Crime and Punishment. I originally pitched a series of four stories to my publisher, so this novel takes me to the end of my plan... Dead End: Leigh Russell Talks To Crime Time Leigh Russell is the author of the Geraldine Steel crime series. The first novel, Cut Short was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association New Blood Dagger Award for Best First Novel. Road Closed is currently on an Amazon kindle promotion, and Dead End, the third book in the series, will be released in May. She talks to Crime Time... My plots normally come to me from a discovery. I find it fascinating that some amazing situations can be unknown or strangely secret. Take for example the DIA. Now it's easy to guess that the DIA is one secret service along from the CIA and that there may be an EIA, an FIA and a GIA in the top secret spy world of the USA. However, ask anyone whether they've heard of the DIA and they will say they've heard of the NSA, the DEA, the FBI etc but not the American intelligence agency that is as big, in headcount terms, as the CIA...
contributor: Leigh Russell The Seed Of An Idea: Simon Toyne On Sanctus It's a funny thing, I've spent my entire professional life working in a creative field yet it's only since becoming a novelist that people seem interested in where I get my ideas from. No-one cared when I worked in telly. Maybe it's because TV is a group effort and so there's no identifiable author; or maybe it's just because most TV is rubbish and doesn't contain any ideas worth enquiring about. Not so when you've written a book. So now when people find out what I do and ask the inevitable question I'm not used to it. I suppose I should have some witty/erudite/opaque retort at the ready but instead I tend to stare at my shoes, shrug a bit, and say something lame like 'I get ideas from all sorts of places'; because, truth be told, I don't really know where they come from... Mike Nicol On Killer Country And Payback When, as happened recently, a South African gang boss in his high-ticket BMW is taken out by a helmeted Serbian motorcyclist sporting a fifteen-clip Beretta, or a young British hubby on honeymoon fixes a hit on his lovely wife hours after putting into a Cape Town hotel, then the stakes for a crime novelist are pretty high. What can I say? Except thank heavens (or is this tasteless?), I got in first, and managed to write variations of these hits into Black Heart, and the two novels in the trilogy that preceded it: Payback and Killer Country. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like being a Swedish crime novelist where reality isn't such a harsh competitor... Guilt By Association: Marcia Clark Talks To Crime Time
contributor: Barry Forshaw The Hanging Shed: Gordon Ferris Talks To Crime Time The Hanging Shed is set in 1946 Glasgow. Why 1946? The immediate post-War years are an unmapped literary landscape. Writers setting books in the mid-20th Century pick either the war period itself or jump forward to the rock 'n' roll 50's or flower-power 60's. They're missing out. Britain in 1946 was a cauldron of change and upheaval. The country was broke, its empire disintegrating, and a million men were being dumped back into civvy street after six years in uniform. Now they had to fight for their jobs and a new role in society. Their estranged womenfolk had found a taste for independence and wage earning... A Dance Of Ghosts: Kevin Brooks: I fell in love with classic American crime fiction when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. There was no such thing as "Young Adult" literature back then – we had to go straight from Biggles to Balzac – and while I've always loved reading anything and everything – from poetry to Westerns, comics to physics – my first true love was, and always will be, the traditional American crime novel. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain, Ross MacDonald, John D MacDonald ... Not Safe: Danuta Reah Talks To Crime Time Writers write what they know. Like most clichés, this one contains some truth. I work for a charity that supports destitute asylum seekers, and Not Safe is the story that came to me as I listened to their accounts of difficult, often dangerous journeys of hundreds, even thousands of miles to find a safety that was denied them... Some might think it is a misnomer to call my Harry Tate thrillers a spy series. Spy fiction has traditionally been about grey men or women in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) working to acquire strategic information from foreign governments, and the Security Service (MI5) cracking spy rings and preventing those devious Johnnies with foreign accents using underhand methods to steal our secrets... The Delta: Tony Park Talks To Crime Time
contributor: Barry Forshaw The Survivor: Sean Slater Talks The Survivor is about a cop who runs into an Active Shooter situation at his daughter's high school. Of course, everything at Saint Patrick's High isn't as it appears, and soon Homicide Detective Jacob Striker finds himself in a very dangerous world, one that not only puts him directly in the line of fire, but his daughter as well... Island Of Bones: Imogen Robertson Talks To Crime Time Perhaps I should have expected when writing about a book about Lake District in the 18th century, given the wealth of legends, myths and magic that abound there, that odd things might happen, but it was still a rather chilling moment when I opened a guide to the area published in 1780 and found its original owner had the same name as my fictional hero. It was also a little strange that the volcanic eruption in Iceland stopped all those flights in Europe last year happened just as I was researching a similar event in 1783. I didn't encounter any bogles while exploring Derwent Water, but standing in the middle of a stone circle with Skiddaw looming above us, I wouldn't have been surprised... Saving Max: Antointette Van Heugten I am sure all authors have similar experiences in trying to get their first novel published. Perhaps mine didn't take longer than some (seven years), but I don't think many writers re-wrote their novels twenty-one times! So you won't think I am particularly dense, I should explain that in 2004, I completed the novel and got an agent. She felt strongly that the book should be rewritten from the perspective of Doaks, the detective, instead of Danielle, the mother... Channelling Du Maurier: Joanna Challis Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is my all-time favorite book. I also love the black & white movie with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, chillingly transcribed to screen by Alfred Hitchcock. So when my agent first came up with the idea of using Daphne as a fictional heroine, I blinked not once but twice. I never thought of writing as a real person. The first thing that flashed through my mind was 'restricted.' Unlike fictional protagonists, real people and more so real 'famous' people left behind a wealth of information... Blood Count: Reggie Nadelson Talks To Crime Time Blood Count, my latest book, is about a grand old apartment building in the Sugar Hill district of Harlem. Once, during the great days of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, this was known as the place to live, in a district called Sugar Hill because it was "everything that was sweet and expensive." All the jazz greats lived around here—Count Basie, Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington... Music Does It For Me: Julia Crouch The author of a striking new novel, Cuckoo, on her inspirations... Music does it for me. I'm a runner. I'm not fast and I don't do competitions and I only do it if the weather is behaving. But, three or four times a week, I run three or four miles along Brighton seafront and while I do I listen to music. It helps with keeping my weight down but more importantly it is a brilliant way of seeding ideas for my work Write What You Know: Simon Toyne On His First Novel, Sanctus The impetus for writing Sanctus was very simple. I had quit my job telling everyone I was going to write a novel. I figured that by doing this I'd have to really do it or end up looking like an idiot and never be taken seriously again... Tim Weaver on that not-so-difficult second book... My first book, Chasing the Dead, took ten years to write. It was a struggle every step of the way: rejections, disappointment, rewrites, more rewrites, more rejections, each one a little bit harder to take. I'm a particularly neurotic writer, which probably doesn't help, but Chasing the Dead constantly challenged me, even after publication where I'd look back, sometimes re-read the occasional passage, and think, "If only I could go back and change that..." Perhaps it's part of a writer's DNA to always feel compelled to edit, cut, swap and change; to always think you can get better. Or maybe it was just a very personal reaction to something I spent a really long time with – almost a third of my life... The Calling of the Grave: Simon Beckett When I was writing Written in Bone, the second book in the David Hunter series, a friend commented that it should be much easier than the first, as this time round I'd already established my main character. "All you need is a plot," he said. "How hard can it be?" Simon Beckett talks to Crime Time Big Machine: Victor LaValle Talks Sex, Death And Religion
contributor: Barry Forshaw |
