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

New Blood Panel, Harrogate 2011 #theakstonscrime

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?

Reading Festival of Crime Writing: Ticket Offer

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.]

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!

Theakstons Crime Writing Festival – Harrogate (With apologies to W H Auden.)

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.

Some London-based crime fiction & crime-related events coming up in June…

Fancy a break from the tennis?  Or the rain?  (The two so often arrive together here.)

London Review Bookshop World Literature Weekend, taking place 17-19 June, is the only UK festival to specialise in literature in translation.  On the crime front there are two events that may be of interest:

Crime Fiction: Reading Scars - Behind crime fiction's gripping narratives, there often lies a more incisive portrayal of a society than can be found in more obvious commentaries; and it offers a way to confront ideas of good and evil in a shades-of-grey world, where simple moral certainties aren't so easy to find. Karin Alvtegen's psychological crime thrillers include Missing, which in 2001 won the Glass Key, the premier Nordic crime writing award, and Shadow and Betrayal. Håkan Nesser is also a Glass Key winner; his latest book to be translated into English is The Inspector and Silence, starring his detective Van Veeteren. The event will be chaired by Jakob Stourgaard-Nielson, Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL.

For Catalonia: Place of a Language, three very different writers come together to talk about how a besieged language can offer refuge, and how place, history and identity are knitted into that language. One of the authors taking part in this event is Teresa Solana, the award-winning author of two comic noirs, Not So Perfect Crime and A Short Cut to Paradise. Solana writes in Catalan and translates them into Spanish, and her novels are a blend of humour, merciless satire and detective thriller. Joining Solana on the panel is Ramon Llull Prize-winning novelist Najat El Hatchmi and Carles Casajuana, author and Ambassador of Spain to the UK. Barcelona-based literary translator Peter Bush is chair. This event takes place Friday 17 June at 2pm in the Stevenson Room at the British Museum.

Here’s a link and here’s the programme to download. Download WLW 2011 Final Programme [email]

 
Moving on, after hours on Friday 24 June, you could join in with an investigation at the National History Museum at 1900 where a body has been found in the museum’s garden.  The NHM says:

Its identity is unknown and the killer remains at large.  We need your help.  Join us to put your detective skills to the test as a crime scene officer.  At this unique, immersive evening event, you'll meet 3 of the Museum's forensic experts.  Learn how they use their knowledge to assist the police and solve crimes.  Find out tricks of their trade so that you can comb the crime scene, collect the evidence and process the clues.  Then take your evidence to trial where real barristers, police officers and a judge will demonstrate just how important forensic evidence is to a verdict.

Highlights include:

• collecting insect evidence in the garden crime scene with scientists Martin Hall and Cameron Richards, and 100s of live maggots
• fingerprint collection and identification workshop
• victim identification masterclass in the Attenborough Studio with Heather Bonney - learn how to identify sex, age and height by studying skeletal remains
• a mock court case in the Museum's Flett theatre.

That is surely a most unusual way to unwind on a Friday evening.  What a cracker!  Follow the link for more details and booking.

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.

Crime & Thriller Fiction Authors at the Hay Festival 2011 – Programme Information

The following is a copy of the various entries from the programme for this year, identifying the crime and thriller fiction authors.  It’s a pretty impressive line up and Friday 3 June appears to be a very good day to be visiting.  Some other events of interest follow at the bottom of this post.

Go to the Hay site to book tickets and you can also download the programme from here. Download Hay-Programme-2011

London Book Fair Day Two - Best Tweet

I can't find the original tweet, but this story is doing the rounds even now (from a tweet):

"It’s not often the London Fire Brigade turns up to a book launch party. Last night it was called out to bash a door down at Conville & Walsh offices in Soho as a guest had locked themself in the loo. The party was to launch S J Watson’s debut novel, Before I Go to Sleep..."

With thanks to the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary for the quote.

The bad use of English & grammar in that quote are not mine.  (Offers for edit & proofreading gratefully accepted.)

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Frestival 2011

The programme for 2011 was announced at last week's launch party and you can download it from their site, or here.  [Download 2011-TOPCWF-Programme]

For more on the party and the programme, including pics, see the blog of Keith B Walters here.  Keith is one of two 'official bloggers' this year, organised by The Culture Vulture site in association with the festival.  You can also keep up with Keith's commentary on twitter @keithbwalters.