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

Case Histories BBC1 – Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie

Finally, we now know that Case Histories, based on the Kate Atkinson novels, airs on Sunday 5 June at 9pm, the first of six episodes with the second following on Monday at the same time.  Jason Isaacs takes on the lead role of Jackson Brodie.

BBC site here for further info.  And from the Radio Times:

Troubled private investigator Jackson Brodie visits a regular client to help look for her lost cat - but the seemingly innocuous task takes a peculiar turn when her neighbours plead with him to find their sister, who went missing 30 years previously. However, his priorities become complicated when an old acquaintance arrives at his office. Crime drama, based on the novels by Kate Atkinson, starring Jason Isaacs and Amanda Abbington, with Sylvia Syms, Natasha Little, Fenella Woolgar and Phil Davis.

 

Crime in the Court, Cecil Court, London, June 21, 2011 – Major UK Crime Fiction Event

Some of you may have noticed that after CrimeFest I tweeted that the next major crime fiction event will take place in June as noted above.  This event is hosted by Goldsboro Books, an independent bookseller that I am more than happy to support.  I mentioned them here for good reason: in a time when we have lost so many independent booksellers Goldsboro has expanded because they know their customers and meet their needs.  And now, in their new premises following expansion, they are hosts to Crime in the Court.

There’s a little bit of history behind this.  When they moved earlier this year I did a bit of research wondering if they were taking on the premises of one antiquarian bookseller that had sadly closed down last year.  A search on the history of 23 Cecil Court highlighted this:

In March 1961 Elsie Batten, a 59 year old assistant in Louis Meier’s antique shop at 23 Cecil Court, was stabbed to death. Her murderer, Edwin Bush, was identified and caught within days following the circulation of Identikit pictures - the first case to be solved in the UK using the Identikit System, a significant advance in crime detection.

So, when you turn up on 21 June at Goldsboro Books – as I hope you will – remember that in the number 23 part of their premises a murder took place, and one that led to major developments in investigation techniques no less.  And do raise your glass to Elsie, a victim whose life we should honour.

But what of today’s times and this event? Well, Goldsboro, who specialise in signed first editions, have a troupe of successful contemporary crime & thriller fiction authors awaiting you on the evening of Tuesday 21 June.  At the time of writing these include:

S. J. Bolton, Mary Andrea Clarke, Ann Cleeves, Rory Clements, Lesley Cookman, Julia Crouch, Lindsey Davis, Paul Doherty, Patrick Easter, Gordon Ferris, Elena Forbes, James Forrester, Christopher Fowler, Meg Gardiner, M R Hall, Sam Hayes, David Hewson, Matt Hilton, Chris Morgan Jones, Erin Kelly, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Adrian Magson, Colin Murray, S J Parris, Linda Reagan, Mike Ripley, William Ryan, Michael Ridpath, Imogen Robertson, C J Sansom, Simon Toyne, L C Tyler, Martin Walker, Laura Wilson.

It’s a wonderful chance to meet the authors, buy signed copies and HAVE IMMENSE FUN!  Don’t miss it.  You can book your ticket here.  It’s only £5 and you will be refreshed, so what more could you ask for?

See you there!

And to confirm the friendliness of the establishment, here are two recent photos to prove it.

 

Proprietor David Headley and author Brian McGilloway at his recent book launch.

 

Author L C Tyler getting down but not dirty with young Toby Headley at the same event.

Hay Festival 2011

I can’t make it to the Hay Festival this year for various reasons.  Today, @MarDixon posted up some pictures and one in particular reminded me what I was missing.  This is so typically Hay:

The venues can be quite huge and packed to the edges.  The audiences can be made up of all ages with many taking it very seriously, to the point of being unforgiving, but a little humour is never far away.  When you look at this photograph you can understand that it might be good to be on stage and see a vast expanse of black only – until the lights kick in for questions at the end.  A lot of talent and dedication goes into each event, much of it hidden and taken for granted by those who attend.

I wish them well, all of them, and hope to return in the future.  For now, I am dealing with withdrawal symptoms but my ‘to do’ list is a major distraction.  Until I saw that pic…

You can view Mar's other pics here.

CrimeFest 2011

There is always a warm welcome at a gathering of crime fiction writers and devotees, and CrimeFest in Bristol is no exception.  In its fourth year in 2011, to say CrimeFest is in full swing is not to do it justice, for it runs as you’d expect a piece of precision engineering to run.  I hadn’t been for a couple of years and this year’s weekend had to be curtailed due to last minute work commitments, but I am so glad I went.  Many congratulations to everyone who participated, those who organised and those who supported from Heffers/Blackwell’s with their dedicated bookselling, to the various sponsors of the event.

Surveying the programme alone, one thing is clear: CrimeFest has a commitment to presenting you with a broader range of authors than the Harrogate Theakstons Crime Writing Festival for which I am a regular and devoted attendee.  There were author names with which I was not familiar; familiar names I had not read; and new names that both you and I will find beeping on our personal radars in years to come.  So, let’s start with the new, and the point at which I joined proceedings, at Saturday morning’s first panel of the day for debut authors.  This is a grouping close to my heart as one of the judges for the CWA’s John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award and I was familiar with the work of the majority of the authors on this panel.

Update regarding upcoming posts & news...

It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I am looking forward to this long weekend.  Saturday led to a catch-up on sleep so the planned posts are not coming as fast as originally intended.

I should manage to finalise my post on CrimeFest before Monday.  Last weekend I made it to Bristol for the Saturday at CrimeFest.  ‘Needs must’ can cause disappointment – paid work in my case – so I had been horrified to miss the Friday and the John Lawton appearance.  Luckily, he was still around on Saturday and we managed a catch up then.  And I have some news to impart as a result…

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 3

Who’d have thought we’d see a story with a massive character development arc in beauty treatment week?  Leon – the I am butch, I have a girlfriend boy – ended the programme a fully blown metrosexual man.  Will he be swapping beauty product tips with Vince by the end of week four?  I bet his suitcase will be far heavier on his departure from The Apprentice compared with arrival time.  Lotions and potions weigh a tonne.

Felicity’s team made a quick decision about location and it was thank you to the Birmingham girls time, with even Tom piping in.  But he subsequently had some concerns to raise and he raised them gently.  It was just one treatment room and it was on the third floor of the department store, a bit far away.  He was also concerned that the selected location had enough basins etc.  But all was fine because Melody – an expert, as she’s a Birmingham girl, said so.  She didn’t say why though.  And we all knew the debate was over when Felicity ended it with a curt ‘… So if you can just put that down Tom.’  Not a listening team leader then.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 2

No double helping this week, it was back to the normal Wednesday run.  But the frisson of excitement came from the first mix of the teams.  The boys – twice the losing team – must have thought this was a great opportunity.  Gavin certainly did, putting himself forward for, and winning the role of team of captain.  Vince looked disappointed, but that’s the equivalent of a motorway services sign with flashing lights: ‘I’ll show them who the real boss is in this task.’

On the other team, young Susan quickly took the reins and showed some pretty decent organisational skills.   Her team management and strategic tour de force was to come just a little later on the creation of the sub-team.  With a couple of staccato clicks of the tongue, her nemesis from last week – Edna – was despatched like a rocket into collection mode with the sub-team.  Like Susan, we didn’t see much of Edna later, or her gloves and we all escaped nightmares once the show was over.

Publishing’s Digital Revolution (1)



Following that little piece I wrote for The Bookseller’s FUTUReBOOK digital blog last week, here’s more from the media on the digital world:

The Bookseller reports on an FT column from Luke Johnson, where he makes some excellent observations on the publishing trade but is savaged in the comments.  The original column can be found via here (article of 10 May).  Johnson has made some crass comments before and I am not a big fan.  However, when he says ‘…Publishers must learn to sell direct to readers and forget about saving bookstores…’, I’d say he’s right on the money.  And when he says ‘…The inevitable disappearance of the vast majority of bookshops will remove a main marketing channel…’, I assume that’s a thought developed after his experience of ownership of Borders UK.

The Daily Mail picks up on the story that Amazon is wrecking the ‘publishing trade’ in its This is Money pages and in its main pages.

From PR Newswire, the press release that Hachette, Penguin, Simon & Schuster have all joined with AOL to create a site called Bookish launching in the summer.  Odd though, that the following quote appears almost at the bottom of the press release, for this is key is creating more competition for Amazon and fighting their increasing monopoly. 

‘It will also offer readers the convenience of purchasing print and digital books directly or through other retailers.’

‘…also offer…’ suggests an added benefit. It’s not. It’s the key driver.  See that Johnson comment above.  That's in the US.  What's the UK doing, I wonder...

A Lily of the Field – John Lawton

Sometimes an author simply blows your socks off.  Back in the 90s, a wander down Chiswick High Road led to a foray into WHSmith where I picked up a novel called Blackout in a 3 for 2 deal.  Shortly afterwards, I was back on the High Road, in another store, buying the second novel in the series, Old Flames.  I introduced a then friend to the novels who said of Old Flames, ‘I felt I was in the House, seeing Churchill walking down that corridor’.  And that comment is key, for I don’t believe any other author I’ve read evokes time, place and culture to the level of Lawton.  Back in the 90s, I thought Lawton might be a male ‘Mary Wesley’, writing of his own wartime experiences in old age.  I was wrong – he’s considerably younger – making the evocation even more startling and impressive.  Along the way, I may have lost touch with the ‘then friend’, but my bond to the ‘Troy’ series of novels remains as strong as ever.

A Lily of the Field is the latest in the series, published by Atlantic Books (for a new Grove Press imprint), a new publisher for the author in the UK.  ‘Lily’ is set in the period that Lawton has made his own: during and immediately after WWII.  Lily is certainly a novel that can be read alone, but it also draws on the other novels in the series, and their characters, some previously minor.  And Lily is, at this stage, perhaps Lawton’s most ambitious and rich novel, calling on various previous strands and curating them into a wider, global picture.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 1

So, with a double bill and a plot twist straight out of Tom and Jerry, this time around the apprentices will not compete to be hired but to gain an investment of £250k from Lord Sacch(arine) for their own business.  But some things don’t change and again we are presented with an ardent and earnest crew who don’t see the world as we normal people do.  It’s time, yet again, to forget the benefits of family, friends, social life and the rest of things ‘humanity’, for as someone said, it’s all about winning in business and that’s all that matters.  (But it’s good to sneak in a slot with a decent hair stylist & make-up artist, plus a pedicure and manicure, and some shopping for fab clothes when you can.  Learning how to pull a small piece of luggage with deportment and ease also helps.)  And no one’s the potential ‘apprentice’ now, all are potential ‘partners’.  Not that you’d see that from some of the behaviour.

With so many people in the early episodes, I won’t go into detail.  Let’s just look at some of the stars/highlights.