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

John Lawton News and Interview

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CWA Dagger Announcements at Harrogate

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!

#hackgate, spooks and Stella Rimington

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…

 

Jake Needham’s Asian thrillers hit the UK

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.

John Lawton's A Lily of the Field reviewed in the UK media

There's an excellent review this weekend by Roz Kaveney in The Independent. (And it's a wonderfully written review too.)

I hear on the grapevine that the Daily Telegraph may be covering the novel shortly, possibly this weekend, and will update this post with a link if so.

Previous reviews from across the pond include The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Canada's Globe and Mail.

 

[Update: not online yet, but I have a pic of the Jeremy Jehu review in today's Daily Telegraph, see left.  He's thinking as I am thinking (below).  Let's hope we are both right for this is a wonderful series.]

I have been picking up on a bit of a buzz about Lawton recently and one of those reviews notes 'the work of a writer at the peak of his powers'.  He was shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger the other week.  I wonder if 2011 will be the year when he reaps more than his usual crops of potatoes, onions, leeks and garlic?

 Find this, his latest novel and current availablity of his work on Amazon here. Like collecting? Go to Goldsboro Books.

 

The author will be at Goldsboro Books's Crime in the Court event on 21 June (18:30 to 20:30).

A mere stone's throw away is Goodwin's Court, home of Freddie Troy in Lawton's novels, pictured left as it is today.

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year Longlist 2011

Open to British and Irish authors whose novels were published in paperback in the period 1 January 2010 to 31 May 2011, the longlist was announced today:

Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer (Corgi)
From the Dead, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
Blood Harvest, by S J Bolton (Corgi Books)
61 Hours, by Lee Child (Bantam Books)
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber)
A Room Swept White, by Sophie Hannah (Hodder)
The Woodcutter, by Reginald Hill (Harper Fiction)
Rupture, by Simon Lelic (Picador)
Sister, by Rosamund Lupton (Piatkus)
Dark Blood, by Stuart MacBride (Harper Fiction)
Fever of the Bone, by Val McDermid (Sphere)
Fifty Grand, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail)
Still Bleeding, Steve Mosby (Orion)
The Twelve, by Stuart Neville (Vintage)
Random, by Craig Robertson (Simon & Schuster)
The Holy Thief, by William Ryan (Pan Books)
The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew Taylor (Michael Joseph)
A Capital Crime, by Laura Wilson (Quercus).

Congratulations to the authors.

The shortlist will be announced on 1 July and the winner will be announced on the Thursday of the festival weekend.

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.

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?

 

Wales Book of the Year Longlist 2011

The Wales Book of the Year Longlist for 2011 was announced by Literature Wales yesterday.  Find further details here.  Congratulations to the authors listed.