Thanks for visiting during the last six years. The move is now complete and there will be no further posts here. But there will be here. I hope to see you there.
crimeficreader x
Thanks for visiting during the last six years. The move is now complete and there will be no further posts here. But there will be here. I hope to see you there.
crimeficreader x
Review can be found here.
Read the review here.
The review can be found here.
The review can be found here.
The review can be found here.
The review can be found here.
Full post can be found on the new blog here.
You can see that post here. And others too. Click on this link to see the new home for It's a Crime! Thank you.
Posted on new blog. Click here to see and comment.
This blog will close at the end of August.
Thank you for dealing with the inconvenience.
Posted on new blog. Click here to see and comment.
This blog will close at the end of August. Thank you for dealing with the inconvenience.
Posted on new blog. Click here to see and comment.
This blog will close at the end of August. Thank you for dealing with the inconvenience.
Posted on new blog. Click here to see and comment.
This blog will close at the end of August. Thank you for dealing with the inconvenience.
Posted on new blog. Click here to see and comment.
This blog will close at the end of August. Thank you for dealing with the inconvenience.
After six years, this blog will be moving and finally closed by the end of August 2011. The new site can be found here and all posts from here have been transferred there. From now until the end of August posts will run in parallel with comments closed on new posts here. A link will be made to the post on the new Wordpress blog for the purposes of comments and for ease of finding it. Please update your bookmarks, feeds and links etc. And - if you choose to come with me - thank you for doing so and for continuing to read. Sidebar links here will be updated on the new blog during August as time allows.
A post from February recording the BBC's decision not to recommission this series attracted quite a few comments. A couple more in the last few days draw my attention to it again. Zen has been aired in north America by PBS over the summer (with the final episode due on 31 July) and viewers there have found this site and left comments. Yesterday, Maclean's magazine in Canada reported on it in an article headed 'Intelligent viewers have spoken' - the title says it all.
Thanks all for the comments. Further comments can be left by clicking here.
Meanwhile, PBS has some new interviews (with Rufus Sewell and Ed Stoppard) to accompany the series, as well as further videos which you can find here. Sample below.
Watch the full episode. See more Masterpiece.
Authors: S J Watson (Transworld); M J (Melanie) McGrath (Pan Macmillan); Gordon Ferris (Corvus); Julia Crouch (Headline). In the chair: Val McDermid.
The inspiration for these debut novels:
S J Watson’s (SJW) inspiration came from a man whose obituary he penned. The man had such bad epilepsy he had an operation to remove part of his brain which then impacted his memory to the degree that each day meant the start of production of new memories with no long term retention. M J McGrath (MJM) spent time in the high arctic in order to research her non-fiction work. Here she met a female polar bear hunter who became the inspiration for her half-white, half-Inuit protagonist Edie Kiglatuk.
Gordon Ferris (GF) took his inspiration from what became his title: The Hanging Shed. In these buildings condemned men were led from room to room to the ultimate place that delivered the end of their lives in post WWII Glasgow. Julia Crouch (JC) runs and listens to music at the same time. As she pounded the terrain down in Brighton, a Nick Cave song – The Boatman’s Call, inspired by his relationship with P J Harvey – threw up a question in her mind: how can such passion arise in your steady-Eddy, beloved husband?
Continue reading "New Blood Panel, Harrogate 2011 #theakstonscrime" »
Here it is:
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)
Note that A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic) appeared on the CWA Gold Dagger longlist last week. The novels of Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards and Patrick McGuinness are debuts.
Congratulations to all!
The Reading Festival of Crime Writing has moved from September to November this year and runs from Thursday 10 November to Sunday 13 November. Currently running (and closing on 31 August) is an early bird offer where all 10 Victoria Hall event tickets can be bought for £30.
[Some posts on the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival coming up over the next couple of days. This little one is to satisfy those in need of a fix post-Harrogate.]
Blessed be those who release us from the grip of the Scandinavian crime novel and invite us to take some time out on the tundra.
M J McGrath – Melanie McGrath in her previous non-fiction outings – has a wonderful knowledge of life in the outer reaches of Arctic Canada, its history and politics, and its culture in the contemporary world. She shares all this in White Heat, managing to take in Greenland along the way. Her protagonist, Edie Kiglatuk, is a force to be reckoned with and a beautifully refreshing character in today’s world for this is a woman who takes family, responsibility and commitment seriously. She may be divorced but she still feels and acts upon her commitment to her stepson Joe.
Edie is an expert hunter and guide in a forbidding terrain. She takes two tourists on an expedition but returns with one dead, shot in mysterious circumstances. Canada it may be, and arms length at that, but with a sparse population the authorities do not operate as many of us would expect. When Edie reports this unfortunate occurrence, the Council of Elders in Autisaq are quick to deem it an accident with an overriding view to protection of their much needed economic income from tourism. Think hushed. Think hidden. Think under the carpet, if such flooring existed in this part of the world.
Friday night, at Harrogate, the following announcements were made at a reception held by the UK’s Crime Writers’ Assocation.
WINNERS:
CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr (Simon & Schuster) - WINNER
In the Place of Justice by Wilbert Rideau (Profile) - honorable mention
CWA International Dagger
Three Seconds by Anders Roslund & Börge Hellström, translated by Kari Dickson (Quercus) - WINNER
CWA Dagger in the Library
Mo Hayder (Bantam Press, Transworld) - WINNER
CWA Short Story Dagger
East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road by John Lawton from Agents of Treachery - commended
Homework by Phil Lovesey from The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime Vol 8 - WINNER
The Dead Club by Michael Palmer & Daniel Palmer from First Thrills - third prize
CWA Debut Dagger
What Hidden Lies - Michelle Rowe (South Africa) - WINNER
The Outrageous Behaviour of Left-Handed Dwarves – Graham Brack (UK) - highly commended
Nominee Lists for the three daggers to be presented at the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards on ITV3 on 7 October (with shortlists announced on 22 August):
Gold Dagger
Tom Franklin: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Macmillan)
Lucretia Grindle: The Villa Triste (Mantle)
Steve Hamilton: The Lock Artist (Orion)
Mo Hayder: Hanging Hill (Bantam Press)
Michael Koryta: The Cypress House (Hodder & Stoughton)
M. J. McGrath: White Heat (Mantle)
A.D. Miller: Snowdrops (Atlantic Books)
Denise Mina: The End of the Wasp Season (Orion)
John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger
Conor Fitzgerald, The Dogs of Rome (Bloomsbury)
Sam Hawken, The Dead Women of Juarez (Serpent's Tail)
Elizabeth Haynes, Into the Darkest Corner (Myriad)
Erin Kelly, The Poison Tree (Hodder & Stoughton)
Rosamund Lupton, Sister (Piatkus)
Danny Miller, Kiss Me Quick (Constable & Robinson)
S J Watson, Before I Go To Sleep (Transworld)
Jason Webster, Or the Bull Kills You (Chatto & Windus, Random)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger
Charles Cumming, The Trinity Six (HarperCollins)
Frederick Forsyth, The Cobra (Bantam Press)
Michael Gruber, The Good Son (Atlantic Books)
Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist (Orion)
Chris Morgan Jones, An Agent of Deceit (Mantle)
Craig Smith, Cold Rain (Myrmidon)
SJ Watson, Before I Go To Sleep (Doubleday)
Don Winslow, Savages (William Heinemann)
Congratulations to all!
The innocent might have thought phone hacking was the preserve of our official army of spooks but this week’s news developments prove otherwise and the lay out the consequences as they mushroom by the day. Profumo, Watergate, Enron: is the UK facing a weave of these in the biggest scandal and threat to the fabric of our establishment right now? Fed up of reading about it? Then it might be time to try some fiction.
Former MI5 Director General Stella Rimington and now thriller author with her Liz Carlyle series has moved to a new publisher – Bloomsbury – has a new book out, Rip Tide and a new website to boot. On the website you can even find a sample from Rip Tide in the ‘Advance Intelligence’ file. Below, she talks about her new novel.
Sometimes, fiction is more comforting than reality because you know it’s fiction…
Starts today!
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Leave your dogs barking with many a juicy bone,
Tinkle the piano and bang the drum
Bring out the readers, let the authors come.
Let helicopters circle whirring overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘this one’s dead’,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the scene of crime policemen wear forensic gloves.
All, from the North, the South, the East and West,
Abandon working week and Sunday rest,
From noon, through midnight, they talk, they sing;
Hoping it can last forever, on a prayer and a wing…
The perps are not wanted now: bang up every one;
Pack up your troubles and grab a Bettys bun;
Pour away with that wine as one very, very should.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
If you are travelling in the UK at the moment, you might want to pop into your station’s/airport’s WHSmith travel outlet to see what they have on offer in their books section. There you should find two novels from author Jake Needham in a promotion: The Ambassador’s Wife and The Big Mango.
To date, you may not have heard of Jake Needham and here’s why. Born in America where he qualified as a lawyer, Needham has practised law and lived in Asia for more than thirty years. That’s where his novels are set and that’s where his publisher, Marshall Cavendish is based. However, since July 15, Marshall Cavendish has made these novels available in the UK.
Continue reading "Jake Needham’s Asian thrillers hit the UK" »
Congratulations to Tom Pellereau (@Tom_Pellereau) this year's Apprentice winner! I loved him from the start. Here are some pictures of the jubilant Tom.
All earlier Apprentice 2011 posts can be found here.
Yes, to determine the final four it was a week of fast food. And as the final is on the TV tonight, this week’s post of the speedy and truncated variety too.
Teams this week were: Natasha and Susan led by Jim; Tom led by Helen.
Task: create a fast food outlet. Something original, added the voiceover.
I loved it that man in charge of a Soho Mexican food outlet was a South African. And the food. Oh dear. It just doesn’t look appealing does it? What’s the black stuff?
Susan: ‘… and even though we had some problems before on the previous task, all the air’s been cleared…’ Not according to Natasha’s face, no.
Susan eats in a lot of Mexican restaurants. So I have to ask: where’s the originality then Susan?
It could have been easy partnership between Tom and Helen but Helen soon asserted herself and made it clear who was in charge didn’t she? A touch of control freakery in evidence there.
And now for a big ‘shhh’. We should only whisper about the lack of knowledge of history in evidence when it came to branding British food. Tom and Helen seemed to think that Christopher Columbus was British and, having discovered the potato, brought it to these islands. I’d love to ask them where cherry genoa cake was first spotted and by whom.
Helen thought the pie and mash needed feminising by making smaller pies for the ladies. That’s a higher proportion of the junk stuff (fatty pastry) in the smaller model, Helen! But sales seemed to go well…
Jim thought it was 'another time for me to shine' but just escaped the taxi in the end.
We were told on You’re Fired that Natasha had been tired. But she looked like someone who lost all interest when she didn’t get her own way in that final team of three.
And who will be the winner? We will all find out tonight. The final is on BBC1 at 9pm, immediately followed by a Dara O’Briain analysis.
I really would not be surprised if Helen wins tonight and MyPy hits the street within a year. But without the Columbus mash.
Now and again a long memory serves me well.
The Daily Mail is quoting David Beckham on their new baby girl's name thus 'One reason is Harper's an old English name which we loved and one of the other reasons was Victoria's favourite book is To Kill A Mockingbird and the author was Harper Lee. It's a very strong, passionate book. That's where Harper came from.'
And yet, back in 2005 the Guardian disclosed this comment from Victoria '"I haven't read a book in my life," Beckham confesses. "I don't have the time." However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. "I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines."'
So when did she discover reading? Perhaps the stork has the inside story on that one.
Way too late. And after all those smiling faces in pictures. It makes it look like squeezing out an awkwardly placed belligerent blackhead is easier. Could News Corp be this millennium’s Ratner? Is anyone capable of believing that blind eyes missed all this? And again, British MPs do not look clean at all. It is time the UK revisited the concept of shame to be able to re-establish some decent ethics.
UK-based reader of crime fiction for many years.
Recent Comments