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Thursday, October 29
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Issue 5
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Ever wondered about the inner lives of crime writers? And what they get up to when they’re not writing? Three of our best-loved authors reveal something of themselves in Crime Club today: Ian Rankin, creator of grumpy Scottish detective John Rebus, shares his current favourite music; American thriller superstar David Baldacci has a powerful message for the US gun lobby; and Philip Kerr, whose Bernie Gunther novels give us a fresh take on Nazi Germany, makes a shocking confession. Read them all here, along with this month’s book picks and news from the world of crime writing.
When you click a link to buy any of the books featured in Crime Club, you will now be directed to Amazon.co.uk. We made this move because we think that’s the preferred shopping option for most of our readers — though if you could make it to an independent bookshop once in a while too, that would be great. Tell us what you think about Crime Club by emailing karen.robinson@sunday-times.co.uk.
Karen Robinson
■ The Times/Sunday Times Crime Club newsletter is published on the last Thursday of every month
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Criminal tendencies
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Ian Rankin
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Q.
Can you remember the first crime book you ever read?
A.
Shaft by Ernest Tidyman. I wasn’t old enough to see the film at the cinema, so the novel was the only option! Come to think of it, that’s true of a lot of books I read in my youth.
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Q.
Where did Rebus, your Edinburgh detective, come from?
A.
Rebus sprang fully-formed into my head as I sat in my student bedsit at 24 Arden Street, Edinburgh. A lot of family members were in the armed services, which may explain some of his back story. And he grew up in the same village as me. But we are not otherwise very similar.
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Q.
Why did you choose Edinburgh as the setting for the Rebus books?
A.
I had arrived in Edinburgh in 1978 as a student. I started writing about the city to make sense of it. Soon, I became fascinated by its past as well as its present. Crime fiction is good at peering into the past and causing collisions with the here and now.
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Q.
What’s your favourite Edinburgh pub? And do you regret turning Rebus’s favourite haunt, The Oxford Bar, into a tourist attraction?
A.
Well, of course I have to say that The Oxford Bar is still my favourite, though it does have competition from the likes of the Blue Blazer, Abbotsford and The Bow Bar. Do I regret that the Ox has become a tourist attraction? Not really, though it often bemuses the bar staff and the regular clientele.
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Q.
Will you ever be able to say: ‘That’s it, I’m done with Rebus’? Or do you have a dramatic end in mind for him?
A.
I have no particular end in mind for Rebus. He is growing old, of course, but so am I. I find it easy to relate to someone whose hearing, knees and eyesight are deteriorating! I never know when I sit down to start planning a new book whether Rebus will be the best fit for the story. And as the end of the newest book draws near, I’m never sure whether it will be Rebus’s swan song.
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Q.
Where do you get your information about police procedures — and crime-world methods?
A.
I sometimes contact someone in the police, if I have a specific question or problem. I also keep folders full of information gleaned from newspaper articles, personal interviews and reference books. But nothing beats a face-to-face meeting.
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Q.
Rebus loves the Stones, Steve Miller, Rory Gallagher, Van the Man, Tom Waits, etc. What's the last music that you bought?
A.
I seldom buy downloads — I prefer vinyl to CD — and I usually come home with multiple purchases. The latest splurge includes Bert Jansch, Robert Forster, Julia Holter, and New Order. Of those, I reckon only the Jansch would be in Rebus’s collection.
Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin is published by Orion on November 5
Read the first chapter here
Buy it here
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Philip Kerr: how to plan a heist
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I’ve often had the thought that, but for a good education — I trained to be a lawyer — I might have become a criminal myself. Indeed I once planned a wages robbery, quite seriously. I was training to be an accountant at the time and was part of a team of auditors at a very large manufacturing company in the Midlands. Being an auditor is one of the most boring jobs in the world and planning the robbery kept me going for a very dull fortnight in the summer of 1977.
The auditors were based in the company’s wages office and the clerks would throw us out of there for the day while they counted and then paid out the money. A couple of old geezers. No trouble, my son. Like taking sweets from a baby. They left the wrappers from the cash in the bin, so I was able to calculate that there was more than a hundred grand in cash to be nicked. That was quite a tidy sum in 1977. I had the shooter (my late father’s shotgun), the passport, the getaway car (MGB), the clown’s mask — you can’t pull a blag like that without a clown’ s mask, right? — the route to the airport, and the final destination (Brazil looked nice).
Fantasy? Perhaps. Fortunately for me, it all went wrong at the last minute; the company suddenly stopped paying in cash and moved to payment by giro, which left my plan in tatters. I left accountancy soon after that and became a copywriter in an advertising agency selling a different kind of fantasy.
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Looking ahead: our November picks
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A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George
Hodder & Stoughton
Lynley and Havers, the telegenic detective odd couple, ride again as George takes her time to lay a trail of murky psychological motives before the pair start to investigate a mysterious death. Satisfying stuff from the natural successor to James and Rendell as the new queen of English crime — even if she is American.
Buy >
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The Silent Room by Mari Hannah
Macmillan
Standalone Tyneside police thriller by the creator of the Kate Daniels series. Good cop DS Matthew Ryan goes Awol to fight for the truth about a colleague smeared as corrupt. High drama and thrills kept credible by well-drawn characters.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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NEW IN PAPERBACK In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward
Faber
Praised when it came out earlier this year, with comparisons to the Scandi masters, Ward’s debut opens up a very English town and its most troubling secret, as genealogist Rachel and detective Connie try to heal old wounds.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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The Yellow Diamond by Andrew Martin
Faber
Set among London’s global super-rich and the men and women who try to police them, with nicely observed detail and a plot that doesn’t take itself too seriously; new territory for the historical train-mystery specialist.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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The Hunter of the Dark by Donato Carrisi, translated by Howard Curtis
Abacus
Extravagantly plotted thriller in which the Roman police are outsleuthed in their hunt for a serial killer by clerics from a dark corner of the Vatican who know pure evil when they see it. Carries you along, for all its far-fetched theology.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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A Cold Death in Amsterdam by Anja de Jager
Constable
You’d be hard pushed to mistake Amsterdam detective Lotte Meerman for a little ray of sunshine, but her Dutch creator, who writes in English, gives the angst-ridden cop an engrossing debut mission into a cold case that comes dangerously close to home.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Cracked by Barbra Leslie
Titan
You wouldn’t expect a crack-addict sleuth to solve many mysteries, but Danny Cleary’s search for the truth about her sister's death, interrupted from time to time by the irresistible lure of a drugs binge, rattles between Toronto and LA with pace and smart dialogue. Spoiler alert: the drugs don’t do her in — this is the first of a trilogy.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home
Penguin
Despite a grim plot — young Indian sex slaves — this debut carries a hefty dollop of warmth and charm. Meet Cal McGill, floppy-haired eco-warrior and oceanographer who can identify the source of flotsam washed up in Scotland from his knowledge of ocean currents. Sparks come from DC Helen Jamieson’s simmering resentment of her arrogant boss DI David Ryan.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Numero Zero by Umberto Eco, translated by Richard Dixon
Harvill Secker
A slim volume from the author of medieval monastic mystery The Name of the Rose comes more-or-less up to date — 1990s Milan — with an edgy thriller harking back to the death of Mussolini. The perfect choice for lovers of European philosophy delivered with a rattling plot.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Dust and Desire by Conrad Williams
Titan
Revised and extended version of a 2010 title, in which potty-mouth PI Joe Sorrell gets about as far down and dirty as it’s possible to go in London and Liverpool before he works out who’s double-crossing him and why. The language is as rough, violent and ugly as most of the characters.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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The Darkest Day by Tom Wood
Sphere
Fists, feet and bullets fly in this fast-paced thriller from the dark side of international espionage as gun-for-hire Victor tries work out if he should trust Raven, an equally enigmatic assassin, or kill her. Great insights into the tradecraft and psychology of the professional hunter.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Silence by Anthony J Quinn
Head of Zeus
Magnificent meditation on the corrosive legacy of the Troubles in the badlands of Armagh and Tyrone wrapped in a complicated murder mystery where haunted detective Celcius Daly probes the bizarre death of an elderly priest and discovers difficult truths about his past.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Spider’s Web by Ben Cheetham
Head of Zeus
Fortuitously topical subject matter — a VIP paedo ring that has never been properly investigated — doesn’t allow the grim intensity to let up in Cheetham’s dark tale of prostitute murders and a woman obsessed by the childhood disappearance of her little sister.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Smoke and Mirrors by Elly Griffiths
Quercus
The seedy side of 1950s Brighton and the tawdry glamour of provincial panto form a well-drawn retro backdrop for Stephens and Mephisto’s latest engagement, as the detective and illusionist team up again to get to the bottom of some disturbing deaths.
Read the first chapter >
Buy >
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Gun control now: David Baldacci on US firearm laws
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Recently a United States court ruled that a gun store was liable for the shootings of two police officers because its employees were negligent in selling a gun to a person who was not legally authorised to buy it. It was a multimillion-dollar win for the plaintiffs and blasted a hole in the blanket civil immunity granted to the gun industry. This might be the watershed moment for those who desire reasonable gun control measures, which includes most Americans, cops on the street and even a majority of private gun owners. The only reason why reasonable gun control measures have not been successful is that the NRA is one powerful lobby and there are many elected officials in Washington who refuse to go against it.
However, oftentimes with private businesses, change only comes about because you hit them right in the wallet. Thus, if more lawsuits like this one prevail, I think we will finally see real change start to take place. I have always seen similarities between the NRA and the tobacco lobbyists. For decades the cigarette manufacturers were untouchable and you could count the legal victories against them on no hands, because there weren’t any. Then a hole was poked in the wall and then another and another and when damaging evidence came out that the companies were addicting their customers to nicotine, the dam was finally breached and everything came tumbling down. We can only hope for the same with gun control.
The US is the only developed nation in the world that suffers from mass shootings, week in and week out. There are more than 30,000 gun-related deaths a year in the US. More people have died in gun violence unrelated to a battlefield than in all the wars ever fought by the US combined. We regulate most things that people use and that can, when used improperly, hurt others, from cars to chemicals to explosives. Should guns be given a free pass because the Constitution said we had a right to bear arms to form a well-regulated militia at a time when there were no police forces and no standing army?
I don’t think any reasonable person would or could say yes to that question.
The Guilty by David Baldacci is published by Macmillan on November 19
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Criminal Utterance
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“It is out of the question that there would be other books featuring Wallander”
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Dan Israel, Henning Mankell’s Swedish publisher, says the author’s iconic Nordic detective will have no literary afterlife in the hands of another writer following Mankell’s death at the age of 67. Meanwhile, fellow Swede David Lagercrantz has just announced he’ll be writing two more follow-ups in the Stieg Larsson ‘Dragon Tattoo’ franchise
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Crime wave: the latest books news
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■ When you Google Shetland Noir you are rewarded with dozens of cute photos of glossy black Shetland ponies. The crime festival of the same name promises to be a less cuddly affair. For three days from November 13, writers including Ann Cleeves, Arne Dahl, Hakan Nesser, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Stuart MacBride and Alex Gray will gather at Mareel, in Lerwick, for some fascinating panel sessions, including a forensic examination of the differences between Tartan and Nordic Noir. Ponies not guaranteed. Crime Club readers can get a 10% discount on full festival tickets: call the box office on 01595 745555 and quote Crime Club Noir. See shetlandnoir.com for more details
■ Have you lost count of how many psychological thrillers there are with 'girl' in the title? Well, brace yourself for another one. Quercus has signed up The Girl Before, by American writer JP Delaney. According to editor Stef Bierwerth at Quercus, who will publish it next year, the novel 'injects new energy into a genre that has become so hugely popular'. 'Girl' titles are a genre now?
■ Another hit for the Faber Academy. Emma Flint, who completed its Writing a Novel course (fees £4,000) in 2013, had four publishers bidding for Little Deaths, a story set in 1960s New York and based on a true crime. Editor Francesca Main at Picador won and will publish the ‘dark, stylish’ thriller with its ‘powerfully complex anti-heroine’ in spring 2017. The creative writing school, housed on the fourth floor of Faber & Faber’s Bloomsbury offices, already counts SJ Watson as an alumnus.
■ All must have prizes? Not quite, but the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) is certainly generous with its awards, handing out ten a year. The last of 2015’s batch of CWA ‘daggers’ has been announced, and Michael Robotham (Life or Death), Karin Slaughter (Cop Town) and Smith Henderson (Fourth of July Creek) can now call themselves ‘award-winning’. Congratulations all round.
■ Eugene Chirovici published ten ‘literary mystery’ novels in his native Romania, to modest acclaim and even more modest sales. But just three years after he moved to Reading, The Book of Mirrors, the author’s first effort in English, has been bought by publishers in 29 countries in deals expected to net him a seven-figure sum. The book, which will be published by Century in 2017, is, says a publishing insider, a ‘sophisticated murder mystery’.
■ Well in advance of its publication, a TV option in The Widow by Fiona Barton has been snapped up by Playground Entertainment, which brought us Wolf Hall and The Missing. Publisher Transworld obviously has high hopes for this ‘cleverly unfolding’ story of a woman’s quest for the truth about her dead husband: it’s bringing the book out in January, the slot in which it had a huge hit this year with The Girl on the Train.
■ Some people like to knock prolific American thriller titan James Patterson for employing a squad of co-writers to help him churn books out at a rattling rate. But he’s supporting independent booksellers in the United States by handing out donations to cash-strapped retailers of $1,000 to $5,000. Americans can nominate their favourite bookshop worker and those picked by Patterson will receive a ‘bonus’ from the profits of his Jimmy Patterson children’s book imprint. I wonder, is there a wealthy British crime writer, with dosh rolling in from children’s books, who might consider doing the same here?
■ If you follow us on Twitter @timescrimeclub you’ll have seen our world exclusive reveal of the cover of Kate Summerscale’s next Victorian true-crime thriller, The Wicked Boy, out next May from Bloomsbury. Find out more here ■ We’re expecting verbal fireworks at the very first Crime Club event, Killer Women, on Thursday November 5. There are still a few tickets left, so come and join writers Louise Millar, Ann Cleeves, Lin Anderson and MJ McGrath at No 41 Mayfair for an evening of thrilling conversation about women and crime. Book your tickets for £10 here
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Crime in the papers
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Forget troubled detectives, bring back Murder She Wrote, says Deborah Ross
I would like to draw your attention to a type of screen character, the TV detective, or, more specifically, the ‘troubled’ TV detective. I think if I were to succeed Danny Cohen as director of television at the BBC — I admit t this seems unlikely but you never know, and I do interview well — the first thing I’d do is gather all the staff and say: ‘Enough with the troubled TV detective, already.’ And also: ‘Bergerac, didn’t he do all right, with no troubles at all?’
I suppose we could lay the blame at the feet of all those Scandi-noirs — The Killing, The Bridge and so on — although, personally, I would date it to earlier, when Jane Tennison started drinking and being all lonely in Prime Suspect. Or maybe it was Cagney in Cagney & Lacey. She was a bit of a drinker too, as I seem to remember. But I think you know you’ve reached peak troubled detective when, on Sundays you now have PC Claire Church (Anne-Marie Duff) running away from her past in From Darkness on BBC One, and then, on Tuesdays, also on BBC One, you have River, in which John River (Stellan Skarsgard) , having been traumatised by the murder of his policing partner, takes to psychotically hallucinating and talking to dead people in trees.
I’m barely interested in the troubles of people I know — I make the right noises, but am not really paying attention — so why I should be interested in those of PC Church or John River, I have no idea.
I yearn for the straightforward police procedural, with its inbuilt narrative arc: inbuilt beginning (the crime), middle (the investigation) and end (banging the perpetrator to rights) without contamination from angst, guilt or anyone experiencing an existential crisis.
And I yearn particularly for Angela Lansbury and Murder She Wrote. Now, there was a great detective. A 100 per cent clear-up rate — and she was only an amateur.
Published in The Times, October 15, 2015
Read here >
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Warts and all
Peter Kemp reviews Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith — JK Rowling's nom de crime.
Read here >
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Henning Mankell: obituary
Prolific Swedish crime writer and activist
Read here >
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This one’s got legs
In the Times, Marcel Berlins reviews Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith.
Read here >
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Mirror, mirror
The Reflection, by Hugo Wilcken, is a nostalgic nod to noir, says Fiona Wilson.
Read here >
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Crime roundup in The Times
Marcel Berlins on I Know Who Did It, a disturbing detective mystery by Steve Mosby and other new titles.
Read here >
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Final word
Kate Saunders on Ruth Rendell’s last novel.
Read here >
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Crime roundup in The Sunday Times
Joan Smith’s favourites include Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, City of Strangers, by Louise Millar, and Finnish hit Dark as My Heart, by Antti Tuomainen.
Read here >
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Icy relations
A Killing Winter by Tom Callaghan is reviewed in Joan Smith's Pick of the Paperbacks
Read here >
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Evidence of 140 years of crime
Richard Brooks studies the fascinating items of evidence on display at Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum — and those that were left out for being too gruesome.
Read here >
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Lawyer on the loose
John Dugdale reviews Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham and Peter James’s attempt at a ghost story — a break from his Roy Grace series.
Read here >
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Crime bestsellers
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Hardbacks
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Get Even
Martina Cole
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Make Me
Lee Child
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Golden Lion
Wilbur Smith with Giles Kristian
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The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
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Career of Evil
Robert Galbraith
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The Girl in the Spider's Web
David Lagercrantz
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Rogue Lawyer
John Grisham
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Trigger Mortis
Anthony Horowitz
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Tennison
Lynda La Plante
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Depraved Heart
Patricia Cornwell
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Paperbacks
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Lamentation
CJ Sansom
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Die Again
Tess Gerritsen
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The Burning Room
Michael Connelly
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Kind Worth Killing
Peter Swanson
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The Ice Twins
SK Tremayne
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The Thomas Berryman Number
James Patterson
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Little Girl Gone
Alexandra Burt
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I Let You Go
Clare Mackintosh
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Leaving Berlin
Joseph Kanon
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You are Dead
Peter James
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Free ebook
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Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
Harper Perennial
Times members can download this heart-breaking biography by Alexander Masters for free (offer closes October 31)
Download here >
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