IT'S A CRIME! (OR A MYSTERY...)

Death on the Marais – Adrian Magson

Let’s start with a bit about the author.  I fear that in some quarters Adrian Magson may be better known for his contributions to Writing Magazine, but in Magson we have a prolific writer.  He wrote short fiction and features for women’s magazines, contributing over the years to worldwide publications, as well as writing comedy material and stories for BBC radio before turning to crime thrillers.  By the time Crème de la Crime was sold to become an imprint of Severn House, Magson had notched up five novels with them.  Then, last year, in the space of only two months Magson launched two new series: the Harry Tate spy thriller series with Severn House and the Inspector Lucas Rocco mystery series with Allison & Busby.  Here, the focus is on the first Lucas Rocco mystery, Death on the Marais which comes out in paperback in May 2011; the second in the series, Death on the Rive Nord follows in August.  The Rocco series is set in France in the 1960s.  Magson’s prolific skill for such a venture stems from time the author spent living in northern France in the late 1950s.   And now for the novel…

Sample a beautiful piece of writing – hitting the shelves May 1st

Prologue

London: March, or even February, 1948
A Park

It had not been the hardest winter.   That had been the previous winter–the deluge that was 1947.  London like an iceberg, the Home Counties one vast undulating eiderdown of white, snowbound villages in Derbyshire dug out by German POWs many miles and years from home–a bizarre reminder that we had “won the war.”  War.  Winter.  He had thought he might not live through either.  He had.  The English, who could talk the smallest of small talk about weather, had deemed 1948 to be “not bad” or, if feeling loquacious, “nowt to write home about.”  But now, as the earth cracked with the first green tips of spring, the bold budding of crocus and daffodil that seemed to bring grey-toothed smiles to the grey faces of the downtrodden victors of the World War among whom he lived, he found no joy in it.  It had come too late to save him.  This winter would not kill him.  The last would.  And all the others that preceded it.

He took a silver hip flask from his inside pocket and downed a little Armagnac.

“André, I cannot do this anymore.”

That is the opening of A Lily of the Field by John Lawton, published by Atlantic Books’s new imprint in the UK, Grove Press on May 1.  I have just started reading it.  Truly beautiful writing.

You can find a signed first edition with Goldsboro Books here. 

Or a copy at Amazon here.

The Royal Wedding

Back in 1981, I was in France on holiday when our future King married for the first time.  A group of us from school had to make do with looking at the pictures as soon as the latest edition of Paris Match hit the shelves.  So, in 2011, it made for an enjoyable morning and part afternoon to be able to watch today’s royal wedding live.  However there was one image that led me to tweet this “Beatrice looks like she's arrived straight from an overnight goth party!”

 

I think it was the combination of extremely dark and heavy eye make up, the texture of her coat just beneath the collar, and the hat that looked like it had come from wardrobe at the Dr Who studios that did it for me.   What was she thinking?  And did neither she nor her sister actually look into a mirror when planning their outfits, let alone before they left the palace?

But to counterbalance the above, there was more than one moment of pure joy captured on camera today.  Celebrating a job well done, after almost everyone had left the abbey a verger was seen performing cartwheels down the aisle.  Here it is.  And congratulations to the happy couple!

 

The big black hole in the internet...

My apologies to MacLehose Press, author Craig Smith, fans and makers of TV drama Zen and the underlying Michael Dibdin novels, and the subjects of posts in the foreseeable future.  It is an unfortunate quirk of the internet - and one experienced before here - that sometimes a Google trawl does not pick up posts as it should.  Since the post on Treblinka, Google is picking up only the home page of this blog and not its individual posts.  I have logged this 'incident' with Typepad Help but previous experience informs me that this might resolve itself in the future, in its own quirky way, and with no help from Google (do try contacting them with such a problem, if your blood pressure's up to it).

Meanwhile, if any techie readers have some insight I'd be so grateful to know, and I will continue posting into the ether/mud.  Never take anything or anyone for granted dear readers.

BBC Controller Danny Cohen on why no more Zen...

"You can't keep on doing everything if you want to bring in new things. I felt that we risked having too many male detectives and arguably we have had maybe too much crime ... Detectives and crime is the real staple of quite a lot on the BBC but also a huge amount of ITV drama ... I want to broaden the palette a bit."

The rest can be read here at The Guardian.

Dear Mr Cohen, you can also try listening to your audience and scrap the crap before the good.  (And understanding your audience.)  Your actions are like cancelling Christmas my dear.

Cold Rain – Craig Smith

Published by small independent press Myrmidon Books in the summer of last year, Cold Rain makes for an absolute gem of a surprise.  This is good solid, atmospheric writing piled with suspense and tension.

David Albo is an associate professor of English at a mid-western university.  To the outsider his life looks idyllic: a perfect wife; an adoring and adored stepdaughter; a plantation-style mansion and no obvious money worries.  But Albo wrestles with a problem with alcohol and as the novel opens he’s about to return to work after a sabbatical, having managed to keep off the demon liquor for two years.  Where the garden to which he returns should be experiencing spring and getting rosy, Albo soon finds it descends into a version of hell.

‘I turned thirty-seven that summer, older than Dante when he toured Hell, but only by a couple of years…’

Albo finds himself the subject of a sexual harassment claim and is soon trying to make sense of the conspiracy betrayal and jealousy around him.

An unusual strand to this novel comes in the form of Albo’s childhood memories and how his late father’s second hand car salesman philosophies and principles shaped him.  And with a plot that holds nothing back from Smith, we have a story that exposes just how evil people can be.

Craig Smith is an author to keep logged into your search engines for the next one.  Myrmidon Books have already published other novels from the author: The Painted Messiah and The Blood Lance and a further novel, Every Dark Place, follows in July 2011. 

Links: the author’s own pages; the author at Myrmidon Books; Cold Rain at Amazon UK.

Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory – Chil Rajchman (MacLehose Press)

To coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day in January of this year, MacLehose Press reaffirmed its commitment to publishing works of literature aimed at keeping the flame of remembrance alive. In an interview, publisher Christopher MacLehose said ‘I think there has to be a real literary response to the tragedy of the Holocaust… The priority I think is to educate the next generation and their children. And the more that the books we publish are real and of irreproachable quality the more you can give them to be read.’

In 2011 the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘untold stories’. Until very recently Rajchman’s account of his experience of Treblinka, as one of its few survivors, remained untold. He recorded his story in a notebook even before the war was over. This remained in the possession of his family and has been published for the first time in English by MacLehose Press this year.

This is a book that should be read. Indeed I hope it is at least as broadly read as Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.

More Crime Drama on ITV – Case Sensitive

This airs on Monday and Tuesday, 2 & 3 May at 9pm.  From the press pack: 

ITV has commissioned a new two-part drama, Case Sensitive, based on the highly acclaimed and chilling psychological suspense novel Point of Rescue from Sophie Hannah.

When Geraldine Bretherick and her 5-year-old daughter Lucy are found dead in the bath of their luxury home, the case divides new DS Charlie Zailer and her DC Simon Waterhouse.  Is it murder, suicide or something even more sinister, and how watertight is the alibi of the husband Mark?

Meanwhile, when Sally Thorne, a working mother with a husband and two young children, hears of the deaths, she is shocked and appalled.  Months before she'd met Mark Bretherick at a hotel and had a brief but passionate affair with him.  Now she feels the need to get in touch with him again to offer her sympathy.  Her friend Esther does not think this is very wise.

Case Sensitive stars OLIVIA WILLIAMS (The Ghost, Dollhouse, An Education, The Sixth Sense, Rushmore) in the lead role of DS Charlie Zailer and DARREN BOYD (Whites, Personal Affairs, Little Dorrit, Green Wing) as DC Simon Waterhouse. They are joined by RUPERT GRAVES (Garrow’s Law, Single Father, Sherlock), RALPH INESON (Waterloo Road, The Bill, The Office), and AMY BETH HAYES (Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Whatever it Takes, Misfits).

And from Sophie Hannah’s tweet feed: …they've done 3rd nov first and are filming the others in the autumn.

A trailer for Ann Cleeves’s Vera on ITV and an interview with Brenda Blethyn

As noted in a previous post, this series airs on ITV1 on Sunday May 1, at 8pm.  A trailer is now available online, via Pan Macmillan, on Vimeo (link here for other videos from them).  I admit speaking to Ann last year at Harrogate and expressing concern that Brenda Blethyn was renowned for her ‘ditzy’ performances.  Ann told me of the hard work and dedication Blethyn was putting into her performance and her concentration on getting the accent right.  It certainly shows in this trailer; what a wonderful performance from Blethyn.  Could this turn out to be the best received new (or indeed existing) TV crime drama in the UK this year, and the best performance?  Find out more about Ann and her work here, with the Vera Stanhope novels on this page. For reading them in order? Start here on Amazon with the first in the series.  Collectors’ signed editions for this author can be found here.

And here’s an interview with Brenda Blethyn about her performance and the series, with more clips. I have dated, diarised and alarmed for Vera.  Have you?

 

Shocking Breaking News: Daily Mail Oversight on Updating Books Pages

Like many, I may take a swipe at the Daily Mail now and again, but I do like their books pages (Fridays).  Mainly, they select books for mass market popularity and hence the commercial end of the market, with wide appeal.  But they don't paddle in the dregs just as they don't try to starch in some high brow.

This week - could it be Royal Wedding fever? - they appear to have forgotten to update their online book pages.  But it's the era of the Middleton story grand chase with only a few short days to go before the nuptials.  I can just imagine their employees investigating this one in intricate detail.

‘Is she too thin, do you think?’
‘Not yet, by the looks of it.’
‘Speak for yourself. Look at those bones.  She’s really thin.  I’m worried about her. Can we run that?’
‘Can we count her ribs? She might have an extra one.  It could be a story as big as Anne Boleyn's.’

And let's not overlook sister Pippa, bottom right.  How handy to spend an evening out showing off her legs.  Now we can all share in 'Pippa's Perfect Pins'.  Do you reckon someone called Alice is doing the headlines?  Alice's Alluring Alliteration...