Bristol Crimefest
May 24th, 2010 by adminForgive me, dear readers, for my prolonged absence from my own blog - my mind has long been occupied with the plot and planning of Book Five, to the detriment of just about everything else life has to offer. But I was pleased to have a break from Book Five’s sin of Pride - or Hubris (the gravest sin, in ancient Greece) - to attend this year’s Bristol Crimefest.
The event was beautifully organised, as usual, and attendance was excellent, boosted by a large contingent from the States, who pulled no punches with questions which ocassionally floored even the most eloquent crime writers. Guest of honour this year was the lovely Colin Dexter, who’s always such an entertaining speaker, I wonder whether he might have had an alternative career writing comedy.
The high spot for me was hearing Marcel Berlins interview Agatha Christie’s grandson, Matthew Prichard, and John Curran, who has the enviable job of going through Agatha Christie’s notebooks, trying to work out how she wrote those wonderful novels. I was lucky enough to sit with both gentlemen at dinner, and would highly recommend John’s book, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, to anyone with an interest in how a crime-writer’s mind works. Most intriguing was the fact that Mrs Christie, it seems, had no idea when she began a book how it was going to end, or ‘whodunnit’. This was true even of some of her best-known works; and, since I always say it would be really dull to know ‘whodunnit’ as one starts to write a book, I feel quite gratified that my ‘one page at a time’ method was employed by one of crime’s greatest-ever writers.
I spent a little time with my good friend Chris Ewan, author of the very funny Good Thief’s Guides, who narrowly missed winning this year’s Last Laugh Award for Comic Crime fiction - as did Malcolm Pryce, a fellow Bloomsbury author. Who else did I see there? Peter Guttridge, Ali Karim, Michael Ridpath, Yrsa Sigurdardottir (who had managed to make the trip, ash-free, from Iceland), Joan Brady, EV Seymour… I believe a good time was had by all. Why not come and join us, next year?