Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr
Michael Carlson
Greeks Bearing Gifts appeared just around the time of Philip Kerr’s death; it is the thirteenth Bernie Gunther novel and one more was finished and is due to be published. As a number of tributes noted, his best work may not have been in the Gunther series (particularly A Philosophical Investigation), but March Violets is certainly one of the outstanding debut novels for any series characters, very much in the Chandler tradition but set not in LA but Nazi Berlin, and the series was compelling because Kerr made Bernie Gunther one of the most interesting series detectives.
Our Kind of Cruelty: Araminta Hall talks to Crime Time
Our Kind of Cruelty is a dark story of obsession and delusion. Mike and Verity have been together for nearly a decade, since university. They have enjoyed an intense, passionate relationship, in which they’ve played a secret game they call ‘The Crave.’ This involves them going to a bar and waiting for Verity to be chatted up, so that Mike can swoop in and rescue her, something which turns both of them on. Now however, Verity is marrying another man, but Mike is convinced this is just another hand in their Crave and that really nothing and no one can separate them.
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Snap by Belinda Bauer
Ruth Morse
Sometimes authors really do burst upon the scene; I remember the year Belinda Bauer seemed to pick up a bouquet of prizes at the CWA awards dinner. From me, she gets the Humane Detection award many times over, and Snap, her latest book, is at her confident best. Like Mick Herron, she can tell a story, take the point of view of her characters, and—wonderfully—seed them along the way so that they can flower.
Law & Order, the Americans, and the 40 million dollar question: G.F. Newman talks to Crime Time
G F Newman
This April BBC Four will broadcast Law & Order, my highly controversial 1978 quartet
which exposed corruption in the criminal justice system. Because of all the legal dust it
raised many changes in the law resulted – but not before the then Director General of the
BBC, Ian Trethowan, was summoned to the Home Office to explain himself.
If you google Law and Order, you’re likely to discover a lot more about the American TV
series. Is there a connection? You bet!
The Lonely Witness by William Boyle
Woody Haut
If you’ve read William Boyle’s Gravesend (my review of which you can find here), you will certainly remember Amy. In fact, Boyle’s latest, The Lonely Witness, begins pretty much where Gravesend ends. Amy’s girlfriend, Alessandra has left Amy and Gravesend where she grew up to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. Leaving Amy, raised in Queens, on her own, a foreigner in a place in which Alessandra is her only connection.
Friends and Traitors: John Lawton talks to Crime Time
John Lawton
There’s an anecdote David Hare wrote down — I forget where — about meeting Hugh Carleton-Greene in the days when Greene ran the BBC. Greene had Hare tagged as a ‘mischief-maker’ and Hare subsequently titled his essay ‘Ah, Mischief!’ adding ‘I have never seen a man so delighted by a single word.’
Consent by Leo Benedictus
Barry Forshaw in The Financial Times
Creepy, obsessive, insidiously persistent: stalkers deserve a prominent place in any catalogue of contemporary social evils. Celebrity cases and growing anxiety about the decline of privacy in a high-tech era have helped give their activities a grim salience in recent years. It is this unease that Leo Benedictus expertly taps in his second novel, Consent, a queasily compelling thriller
My Beautiful Affair: Brad Parks talks to Crime Time
Brad Parks
The affair started early in the morning, under cover of darkness, off in a cozy corner where no one took notice.
The Pathetic Predator – C.L. Taylor Talks to Crime Time
C L Taylor
When it comes to characters there’s one phrase in the reviewer’s arsenal that would pierce the heart of even the most hardened writer – ‘pantomime villain’. Those two words, along with ‘two dimensional’ can unravel an author’s confidence faster than an empty signing line. No author sets out to write a cliché or a cardboard cut-out. We want our antagonists to be as real to the reader as they to us, but even the most established writer can occasionally produce a dud.
New Titles from PS Publishing
In the 1960s Jerry Cornelius was the coolest assassin on the Ladbroke Grove block. By the 1970s The Condition of Muzak had won the Guardian Fiction Prize and The Final Programme was a feature film starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith and Sterling Hayden. In the 1980s the world’s first cyberpunk continued to inspire a generation of writers including William Gibson, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and bands like the Human League
The Longest Sentence: Sarah Hilary talks to Crime Time
Sarah Hilary
The author of Come and Find Me (Headline) on her favourite prisoners... Some of the best characters in crime fiction belong behind bars. Think of Hannibal Lector taunting Clarice from his cell, or Paul Sheldon shackled to Annie Wilkes’s bed. The dynamic between...
Crime and Thriller shortlists for the The British Book Awards 2018 announced
Barry Forshaw
The seven category shortlists for the 2018 Books of the Year Awards are announced today by Chair of the Judges and Editor of The Bookseller Philip Jones who said: “The true range, breadth and brilliance of writing and publishing is demonstrated in these shortlists, from the unexpected triumphs to the brand juggernauts. The year 2017 was marked by big books that got bigger, break-outs that broke further, and conversation starters that spoke louder.”
TOWN ON TRIAL, John Guillermin, director/Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray
Barry Forshaw
I suppose I should begin with a disclosure – I was happy to provide a to-camera extra discussing this Blu-ray issue of a classic tale of murder and detection. As I wrote in British Crime Film, John Guillermin’s Town on Trial (1956), issues of class – on the peripheries in earlier British films – are now up for grabs
Writers of Crime and Spy Fiction Should Stand Up for What They Believe
Edward Wilson, author of South Atlantic Requiem
A diary full of events and signings may well be very good, but the ultimate gig for a spy novelist is to be shot at dawn by firing squad. I doubt if Erskine Childers signed copies of A Riddle of the Sands for the men who executed him, but any surviving copies dated 24 November 1922 would be utterly priceless! Childers did, however, shake hands with each of the firing squad and obtained a promise from his 16 year old son, the future Irish President Erskine Hamilton Childers, to shake hands with every man who signed his death warrant.
Defectors by Joseph Kanon
Michael Carlson
It’s 1961 and Simon Weeks, a publisher in New York, is arriving in Moscow to work with a writer whose book he will edit. The author is his older brother Frank, a former CIA agent who defected to Moscow after a career spent spying as a double-agent for the KGB. Frank’s defection cost Simon his job in the State Department, and also cost him his respect for the big brother he always idolized
Out of Thin Air: Anthony Adeane talks to Crime Time
Anthony Adeane
Every Icelander knows about the Gudmundur and Geirfinnur cases. It is a story so deeply embedded into the national consciousness that even those born long after the disappearances are well versed in the particulars. A phone call. A meeting at a café. A strange clay head. On an unusual island where crime is rare and murder almost non-existent, this is the Icelandic crime story, one that continues to enthral a nation almost forty five years after two men vanished into thin air and left behind barely a scrap of evidence about their whereabouts.
Supernatural (& Other) Sherlocks: Nick Rennison talks to Crime Time
It’s easy to assume that there’s never been a time like the present for variety and vitality in crime fiction. All those Nordic noir thrillers, cosy crime stories, police procedurals, serial killer tales and historical mysteries. Yet my experiences researching crime stories for my anthologies of short fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras give the lie to such an assumption. There was at least as much wide-ranging originality in evidence in the 1890s and 1900s as there has been in the last twenty years. Supernatural Sherlocks, published last year, collected together 15 stories about psychic detectives
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton & Maigret Enjoys Himself by Georges Simenon
Barry Forshaw in the Financial Times
Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton & Maigret Enjoys Himself by Georges Simenon