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Latest news and gossip from the world of crime fiction
Thursday, August 27 Issue 3
Crime is not just for reading! The convivial world of crime fiction (really) presents tremendous opportunities to get out there and mingle with writers and fellow fans. We’ve got an exclusive priority booking deal for you for this year’s The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, and news of our first Crime Club event, a sensational evening with four leading female crime writers. But if you want to just stay in and read, that’s fine: our pick of September’s new titles will keep you safely indoors for the next month.  I hope you enjoy this third Crime Club bulletin’s mix of news, views, reviews and gossip — let me know what you think here
Karen Robinson

■ The Times/Sunday Times Crime Club newsletter is published on the last Thursday of every month.
Linwood Barclay: give me an ordinary hero

I like heroes who have regular jobs. I’ve written novels where the lead character was a high-school teacher, a landscaper, a graphic artist, and, in my most recent thriller Broken Promise, a small-town newspaper reporter. Make that a laid-off small-town newspaper reporter. I like putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to see how folks who’ve never dealt with anyone more threatening than a surly clerk handle themselves when coming face to face with evil.

Don’t get me wrong. I love thrillers starring tough guys like Jack Reacher, James Bond or Jason Bourne, but I have a hard time identifying with them. In my spare time, I don’t go to the shooting range or hang glide or rappel down the sides of mountains. (Confession: I like model trains.) I’m never that worried about my favourite spies and ex-military types. When a gang of thugs wielding pool cues corners Reacher in a bar, I’m much more worried for the thugs than I am for Reacher.

You’ll likely find those heroes battling international terrorists or hunting serial killers. And as nightmarish as acts by those types of villains are, they’re not the kinds of things that keep most people awake at night.

If my friends are staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, it’s more likely because their teenage daughter still isn’t home. Or maybe they’re worried they’re going to lose their job. Could be they’re wondering why their spouse has become more distant, is staying late every day at work.

Writing about an ordinary hero allows readers to immediately imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist. What I’m hoping they’ll think is: “This could actually happen to me.”

I want to get people where they live. I want to bring the fear home.

Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay is published in paperback by Orion on September 10



Photograph: Bill Taylor
Meet Killer Women at the first Crime Club event
Deadlier than the male? Join The Times and The Sunday Times Crime Club and Times+ for an evening with four Killer Women.  Hosted by Louise Millar and Lin Anderson (co-founders of the Killer Women group of female crime and thriller writers) and featuring special guests MJ McGrath, above, and Ann Cleeves. The four will discuss what it means to be a woman crime writer, female detectives and crimes against women. There will also be the opportunity to put your own questions to the panel. The event will take place in London on November 5 and tickets cost £10. For further details, visit www.mytimesplus.co.uk
Criminal tendencies
We interrogate Lawrence Block

Q. What inspired you to become a crime writer?

A. I started out knowing only that I wanted to be a writer. The first story I sold, shortly after I’d turned 19, was a crime story. Over the next several years I wrote in various genres, and found that I seemed most at home in crime fiction.

Q. You’ve written more than 100 novels — what drives you to keep working?

A. Most of the time, nothing. I’m not all that driven. With this one, I was thinking about the remarkably generous reception of Borderline, a Hard Case Crime reissue of an early book of mine, and thought it might be fun to write something similarly direct and hard-charging and pulpy. Twenty seconds after that, I got the idea that quite rapidly evolved into The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes.

Q. How important is humour in your work?

A. Even in the darkest books — the Matthew Scudder novels, my post-9/11 New York novel Small Town — the characters say amusing things. Not because I feel it’s important to the average reader, but because they flow out of the characters.

Q. Doak Miller in the The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes is pretty graphic about his sex life — why do you think that's an important aspect to his character?

A. That’s who he is and how he relates to his world. My characters come to me, they take form and come to life on the page or the screen, and I’ve learned not to tamper with the process.

Q. Do you prefer women to be heroines or hot femmes fatales?

A. I’ve written quite a bit from a female viewpoint, and my oeuvre includes books published under a female pen name, Jill Emerson. The protagonist of Getting Off, Kit Tolliver, is as fatale a femme as one could imagine.

Q. Which great crime writers have influenced you the most?

A. Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] was an early influence, and Fredric Brown and Rex Stout. But I was never trying to write like any of the writers I admired. I was trying to find my own voice.

Q. How much has the crime fiction market changed since you started out?

A. Crime fiction used to be a backwater: the only books that achieved much in the way of sales or critical reception were generally marketed as something other than what they were, and the publishers didn’t take them very seriously themselves. Well, all of this changed, obviously. And here I sit, still writing the bloody things.

The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes is published by Titan on September 25

Read the sexually explicit opening pages here

Buy the book here

Looking ahead: our September picks
Make Me by Lee Child

Bantam

After a disappointing excursion into London, Reacher’s back where he belongs: a small American town that’s hiding big, bad secrets. It’s his — can you believe it? — 20th adventure. Bring it on.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

I Know Who Did It by Steve Mosby

Orion

Two coppers, each haunted by a tragic back story, and a young woman who believes she’s come back from the dead: Mosby keeps it gritty and springs a few deft surprises in this confidently handled police procedural.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Liar Liar by MJ Arlidge

Penguin

Edgy and tautly paced provincial procedural: a female detective with a penchant for masochistic sex is eluded by a smarter-than-average arsonist as he rains fire and death on Southampton.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Romanzo Criminale by Giancarlo De Cataldo, translated by Anthony Shugaar

Corvus

Through the violent gang La Banda della Magliana, who rise from bungled kidnapping to kings of the Roman underworld, former judge Giancarlo De Cataldo probes the murkiest corners of a deeply corrupt Italy. A bloody and rewarding epic of modern Italian history.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

NEW IN PAPERBACK The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

Faber

Lauded for its Strangers on a Train plot homage, but never mind the Hitchcock: this high-concept American thriller delivers a breathtaking James M Cain-type twist that keeps you hooked.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Death at Whitewater Church by Andrea Carter

Constable

Introducing inquisitive young solicitor Ben O’Keeffe, who’s dragged a bagful of dark secrets with her to the wild northwest corner of Ireland in Carter’s debut ‘Inishowen mystery’. A promising start.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

The Jackdaw by Luke Delaney

HarperCollins

No surprise that a police procedural written by a former policeman is a bit plodding, but seriously disturbed DI Sean Corrigan’s quest to stop ‘The Jackdaw’, who’s offing bankers live on the internet, keeps the pages turning.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

NEW IN PAPERBACK Painting Death by Tim Parks

Vintage

At the literary-fiction end of the crime spectrum, this sparkling dark comedy brings back engaging serial murderer Morris Duckworth, respected Verona husband, businessman and aesthete, for a third urbane dice with fate.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

NEW IN PAPERBACK An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell translated by Laurie Thompson

Vintage

Strictly one for Wallander completists, this slim novella finds the original Scandi Eeyore discovering a dead body when he goes to view a country home for sale.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler Olsen, translated by William Frost

Quercus

Those zany Danes from Department Q, led by odd but endearing detective Carl Morck, find tragedy, cover-ups and all kinds of weirdness on a remote Baltic island over a marathon 600 pages.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Silenced by Anne Randall

Constable

Just what Glasgow needs — more criminals, and the cops to catch them. Randall’s Wheeler and Ross tangle with organised crime to catch a particularly nasty psycho.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Blade of Light by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Mantle

The publication of Camilleri’s 19th Montalbano novel is timed to coincide with the author’s 90th birthday. Between tucking into seafood delicacies, the canny Sicilian detective manages to unravel the truth about a suspected mafia hit. Fun in the sun.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

NEW IN PAPERBACK The Forsaken by Ace Atkins

Corsair

County Sheriff Quinn Colson’s beat is a pocket of the down-at-heel rural south, where his attempt to unravel a cold case brings him into conflict with corrupt politicians, unethical lawmen and well-connected criminals. American crime at its tough, atmospheric best.

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

NEW IN AUDIOBOOK Lamentation by CJ Sansom

Pan Macmillan

The latest in CJ Sansom’s bestselling Shardlake series throws the lawyer into a religiously divided court, in the dying days of Henry VIII, and a deadly threat to the hero’s mentor, Queen Catherine Parr.
Click here to listen to an exclusive extract.

Buy >

The Murderer in Ruins by Cay Rademacher, translated by Peter Millar

Arcangel

Winter 1947, and as if war-blasted Hamburg didn’t have enough to deal with, there’s a killer on the loose. Complex and historically rich detective thriller: should a good German cop trust his new British bosses or his old colleagues?

Read the first chapter >

Buy >

Competition: win a £2,000 garden makeover
Enter our competition to win a £2,000 garden makeover. 100 runners-up will win a copy of one of the summer’s big thrillers, Black Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin.
Criminal Utterance

“There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie’s prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime”

Christopher Hitchens on Agatha Christie. Fans will mark the 125th anniversary of her birth at the Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, September 11-20

Tennison’s first steps on the beat
Lynda La Plante has written best-selling crime thrillers and acclaimed TV dramas, including the Prime Suspect series that starred Helen Mirren as DI Jane Tennison

The first television script I wrote was for the talented producer Verity Lambert.  In 1983, she gave me the opportunity to write Widows, based on a short treatment I had sent to Euston Films, and since our first editorial session I have continued to use her advice in all my scripts. Widows was initially very over-length, but Verity taught me how to edit. I also remember her asking why my leading character, Dolly Rawlins, didn’t appear until page 48.
 
Another important lesson Verity taught me: if you can see it on screen you don’t need to describe it with dialogue. By the time all six episodes of Widows were completed I had learnt how to write one strong line instead of ten mediocre ones.
 
With a novel you have the luxury of detailed descriptions, so plots can move at a slower pace. When writing for the screen it is crucial to create cliffhangers, so the script needs to move much faster. I also have to be conscious of budget. In a book I can have 20 police officers, five squad cars and a helicopter. On screen that becomes five police officers, one squad car, a wind machine and lots of flashing lights on poles. 

I am enjoying the process of adapting my new novel Tennison, about Jane’s early police career, for television. Set in 1973, some of the atmosphere will come from the music and styles of that era. In the book I have written the song lyrics and described the fashion, but on TV we’ll play the music — and it will be a lot of fun working with the costume director to find the clothes. I want to bring the early seventies to life on the screen, while making sure the pace moves and keeps the viewer watching.  

Tennison by Lynda La Plante is published by Simon & Schuster on September 24


Photograph: ITV/Rex
Crime wave: the latest book news
■ Crime Club subscribers and Times members can beat the queues to see star writers including Paula Hawkins and SJ Watson at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival with exclusive priority booking from tomorrow. The line-up for the festival, on October 2-11, also features Charles Cumming, Ruth Ware and Tammy Cohen. Bruce Robinson, who wrote and directed Withnail and I, will discuss They All Love Jack, his new exposé of Jack the Ripper, and Mark Billingham and Christopher Brookmyre will present their acclaimed evening cabaret show of ‘cheap laughs and dirty stories’. Full programme details on cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature.
EXCLUSIVE PRIORITY BOOKING OFFER From August 28 Crime Club subscribers/Times members can enjoy priority booking at mytimesplus.co.uk/Cheltenham. Public ticket sales start on September 2. 

■ Of 2014’s eight graduates from London City University’s first two-year MA in crime and thriller writing, two already have publishers, and several more have agents, says Claire McGowan, senior course lecturer (and published crime writer), who deems it “a good hit rate” compared with the uni’s literary writing MA. First into the bookshops, from Faber, is murky retro Americana The Dark Inside by Rod Reynolds (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here). To get on the course, says McGowan: “You don’t need a degree — we’re looking for aptitude and enthusiasm.” 

■ Murder House, Penguin’s latest offering from the James Patterson thriller factory (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here), bears the name of co-writer David Ellis and treads fresh territory for crime books, offering digital readers extra features to help the story along, including maps, floorplans and police reports. Exclusively available to sample here are two audio clips — the coroner’s grisly report and the opening of part three of the book.

■ Are the French coming to knock the Scandis off the top of the crime tree? MacLehose Press certainly thinks so this month. Pierre Lemaitre’s Camille, translated by Frank Wynne (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here) won the CWA International Dagger 2015: the final part of the trilogy that began with Irène is now in paperback. Three more new titles are Talking To Ghosts by Hervé Le Corre, also translated by Wynne (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here); Arab Jazz by Karim Miské, translated by Sam Gordon (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here); and Loser’s Corner by Antonin Varenne, another Wynne translation (read the first chapter here, and buy the book here).  

■ The Gone Girl bandwagon rumbles on — or is that the sound of barrel-scraping? Weidenfeld & Nicolson proudly announces autumn publication of Gillian Flynn’s The Grownup, but before you block out your calendar for a reading marathon, it’s only a short story. And it’s already been published, in Rogues, an anthology edited by George R R Martin, that came out in 2014. Still, it might keep fans going till the film of Flynn’s Dark Places, starring Charlize Theron, comes out next year.

■ Something to look forward to for winter Sunday evenings: filming has just started on a second series of ITV show Grantchester, based on James Runcie’s books about Sidney the sleuthing 1950s vicar (he drinks, he smokes, he has sex, he solves crimes — and he preaches sermons) and his pal Geordie the hard-boiled copper. James Norton and Robson Green will be starring again, and producers at Lovely Day hope to match the 6.6m viewers (and stonking 24% share) of the first series. “We’ll be delving deeper and darker than before,” they promise. Praise the Lord.

■ Allison & Busby is republishing the works of Alexander Wilson, a former spy and secret service officer, whose thrillers were bestsellers in the 1920s and 30s, starting with The Adventure of Tunnel 51, which pits Sir Leonard Wallace, the one-armed Sherlock Holmes-ish head of British Intelligence, against murderous Russian agents fomenting revolution in imperial India. The actress Ruth Wilson, the author’s granddaughter who played the terrifying Alice Morgan in Luther, said: “It’s thrilling to see his books back in print and reaching a new audience. I’m sure my grandfather would be delighted.”

Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones

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Crime in the papers

Scooby-Doo for grown-ups

After the previous Crime Club’s look at Annie Dalton, above with daughter Maria, and pet detective fiction, The Times sniffs out more animals dispensing ruff justice. (Photograph: Martin Pope)

Read here >

Crime roundup in The Times

Marcel Berlins’s picks of the month range from the fields of Texas and the wetlands of Brazil to the confines of a nuclear submarine.

Read here >

Thrillers roundup in The Sunday Times

A standalone Sophie Hannah and an intriguing account of postwar Britain that blurs the line between spies, lies and Ted Heath impress John Dugdale.

Read here >

Kathy Reichs: ‘The ones I can’t solve stay with me’

The forensic anthropologist-turned-writer on when she first turned her mind to crime.

Read here >

New Girl with Dragon Tattoo novel ‘a stunt’

The late Stieg Larsson’s partner says the author would be ‘appalled’ by the continuation of his trilogy.

Read here >

The Krays on film

Tom Hardy is playing both the homicidal twins in a new film. How did he do it?

Read here >

The Oligarch by Joseph Clyde

‘In the tradition of Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré’: Michael Binyon relishes an intelligent thriller about a plot to assassinate a Putinesque Russian leader.

Read here >

Crime bestsellers
Hardbacks
  1. The Girl on the Train

    Paula Hawkins

  2. Speaking in Bones

    Kathy Reichs

  3. Pretty Girls

    Karin Slaughter

  4. Black Ops

    Stephen Leather

  5. I Am Death

    Chris Carter

  6. Finders Keepers

    Stephen King

  7. No Cure For Love

    Peter Robinson

  8. Private Sydney

    James Patterson

  9. What Remains

    Tim Weaver

  10. You Are Dead

    Peter James

Paperbacks
  1. Gray Mountain

    John Grisham

  2. I Let You Go

    Clare Mackintosh

  3. Runaway

    Peter May

  4. Flesh and Blood

    Patricia Cornwell

  5. Personal

    Lee Child

  6. Prayer for the Dead

    James Oswald

  7. The Eye of Heaven

    Clive Cussler and Russell Blake

  8. The Girl Next Door

    Ruth Rendell

  9. Women’s Murder Club

    James Patterson

  10. Burn

    James Patterson

Lists prepared and supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan, taken from the TCM for the four weeks ending 19/08/15
Free ebook
Cold Killing by Luke Delaney

HarperCollins

Times members can download Cold Killing by Luke Delaney for free (offer closes August 31)

Download here >

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