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WEB NEWS, FEATURES & REVIEWSnews:
Scottish Festival Celebrates Crime Writing The programme for Scotland's first crime-writing festival has been launched feature:
British Noir Celebrated Specifically Patrick Hamilton's 'Hangover Square' interview:
David Mark Talks About The Dark Winter And Being An Author! David Mark talks about the background to his debut novel, The Dark Winter news:
Crime On Tour: 29 May – 14 June 2012 This year, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate turns ten, and to mark the occasion it is taking to the road to bring an early taste of Festival fun to crime writing fans news:
Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year 2012 marks the eighth year of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award review:
Another Time, Another Life By Leif G.W. Persson Trans Paul Norlen Successfully blends both a police procedural, and political intrigue together with a dose of very dark humour and satire InterviewsThe Nightmare Thief And Designer Thrills
contributor: Meg Gardiner Talks to Crime Time Silas Quinn - A New Character For R.n. Morris. As well as my Porfiry Petrovich novels (the latest of which is out in May), I'm also developing some stories around a character called Silas Quinn. The first, called The Exsanguinist, was published in 2010 by the French publisher Editions Didier... R N Morris talks to Crime Time Wendy Robertson: An Englishwoman In France An Englishwoman in France is based on a connection through the centuries, of two crimes: the murder of a girl of twelve by two boys in a London suburb in 2008 and the judicial murder of a boy about the same age in 304 AD. The connection between these two murders is Stella – sometimes called Starr - whose happy-go-lucky attitude to her gift of seeing the dead screeches to a halt when her daughter Siri is savagely murdered and Stella cannot see her in this world or the next...
Write what you know. Immerse yourself in the genre you want to write in. That's always the first advice given to new authors. Girl 4 is my debut novel and the first in a series featuring Detective Inspector January David, a London detective specialising in violent crime, investigating an elusive serial killer who has already taken the lives of three women. I do not live in London. The last time I was in a police station was to earn £10 for taking part in a police line-up. And I've never really read any crime fiction. So what prompted an unpublished theatre graduate, working in computer software, to write a book in a genre he knew very little about? The Hollow Man: Oliver Harris Talks To Crime Time I wanted The Hollow Man to be a space where I could explore what really excited me about crime writing and police investigation. I was fascinated with the detective mindset: isolated from mainstream society, unable to swallow its moral platitudes, having to approach each situation clinically; breaking the world down to significant details. Yet I wanted clarity of sight that wasn't just bleak or cynical but slightly awe struck. It would be cold, certainly, and unflinching, but also obsessively, irresponsibly curious... The 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... |
