July 17th, 2010 by admin.
I am absolutely thrilled to have a lovely review - by author Tom Nolan - in the Wall Street Journal, ahead of the publication of The Messenger of Athens in the States this coming week. Mr Nolan describes the book as ‘bucolic noir’, which seems very apt to me.
Here’s what he says:
‘Even further removed from modernity than Saint-Denis is the fictional Greek isle of Thiminos, the setting of Anne Zouroudi’s astringent “The Messenger of Athens.”
The island recalls “timeless, ageless Greece,” thinks an outsider, “as if ancient pan pipes might have played here, only moments ago.” Locals still slaughter their own goats, and those who transgress against centuries-old traditions of family honor may meet equally harsh ends.
The discovery of the corpse of a young married woman, said to have been having an affair, at the bottom of a Thiminos cliff is soon followed by the arrival of a stranger named Hermes Diaktoros. The corpulent, fastidious Hermes, a native of Athens, disagrees with the local authorities, who have ruled the woman’s death a suicide. But he is not a police detective: “I work for . . . a higher authority. Call me a private investigator, if you like.”
Patient and courteous (up to a point), the Athenian goes about his business with the prescience of an oracle and the diligence of a Fate. “I don’t just want to find out who killed her,” he says of the dead woman. “I want to know who was responsible for her death. Which is not necessarily the same thing.”
“The Messenger of Athens” is a cautionary tale about the deadly sin of lust—a riveting story told with the help of flashbacks and in a mix of first- and third-person voices. It proves as surprising as a classic detective story, and as sad and inevitable as an ancient Greek drama.
Mr Nolan, thank you.
I had a most enjoyable outing early this week, to the Ranmoor book group in my ex-home town of Sheffield. They were a lively and hospitable bunch, and Michael, at whose house we met, had a beautiful 1804 piano whose history held an intriguing - almost uncanny - tale. Thanks again to you all - and let me encourage other book groups to follow the Ranmoor group’s lead, and consider inviting the authors of books you’re reading to one of your meetings, if the author lives within a reasonable distance. Many authors I know would happily consider joining you, especially if there’s a glass of wine and a few peanuts thrown in - but do tread careful on the writer’s ego. You can usually track an author down through their publisher’s publicity department, or a quick Google should throw up an agent’s name.
On Saturday 24th July I’m off to the Harrogate Crime Festival, where I shall be hosting a table at the Murder Mystery dinner. I’m looking forward to it - a little practical sleuthing sounds great fun.
July 4th, 2010 by admin.
I had the pleasure, this week, of visiting the beautiful Woodborough Hall in Nottinghamshire, in the company of my good friend, comic crime writer Chris Ewan. It was our honour to be the closing event of the Lowdham Book Festival, organised as always by the dynamic and book-devoted Jane Streeter. Supported by a large and lively audience which it was a pleasure to entertain, the evening was made, for me, by Chris’s fascinating introduction to the world of lock-picking, and I was proud to master the (dubious) skill of opening a pretty heavyweight padlock without the benefit of a key. Definitely a party trick worth practising.
June 5th, 2010 by admin.
I feel honoured to have been asked to write a guest-blog at Murder is Everywhere, a site run by six international crime writers including Yrsa Sigurdardottir in Iceland, and Leighton Gage in Brazil. Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip - who I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with at Crimefest - are also regular contributors. Their blogs are hugely entertaining and thought-provoking - have a read for yourself.
www.murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com
Here’s what I wrote.
On Fact Being Stranger Than Fiction
I’m a sucker for quirky news-stories – the ‘And finally…’ kind that newscasters finish up with on slow news days: dogs who swim oceans to get home to families in Cowdenbeath, babies who swallow razor-blades and live to tell the tale. (My son ate most of a Marmite jar once, but that’s another story). There was a story I made a note of recently, where some poor boy was lost in the New York subway system for eleven days. He survived, apparently, on a diet of news-stand confectionery and snacks. And if there isn’t a novel in that little snippet, I’ll eat my hat.
My attention was recently grabbed by a ghoulish tale from the Italian city of Naples, where unscrupulous foragers had been raiding local cemeteries for coffin wood, and selling it to Naples’s restaurants as fuel for pizza ovens.
Now that would definitely put me off my Quattro Stagioni. Or a sad story from Athens, where, in the course of the demolition of an apartment building, a man’s mummified body was found in a bedroom. He was reckoned to have been dead for over a decade – and the twist in the tale was, that beside him in the bedroom were share certificates and cash that made the deceased worth millions. Money can’t buy me love, indeed – but what a gift that story is to a writer of fiction.
In truth, I’ve yet to build a book on one of these intriguing true-life accounts, though I do have, fermenting in the back of my brain, a story that came to mind as I was on a tour of Leeds’s Armley jail (a terrible place: within half an hour, I was suffering horrible claustrophobia, but the tour lasted three hours, and – guess what? – you can’t see yourself out). But it seems to me, if I ever ran out of ideas from my own (happily fertile) imagination, I wouldn’t have far to look for real-life plotlines which might, quite frankly, stretch readers’ credulity. If I were writing cut-and-slash crime, for example, would anyone believe in a second Yorkshire Ripper stalking the streets of Bradford? Too unlikely, surely. Yet just last week, lo and behold, Bradford saw again – for real - the horror of a prostitute-murdering serial killer.
So, is it legitimate to ‘steal’ a real-life idea, and turn it into fiction? Well, of course it is. Writers have been doing so for centuries. The trick, though, is to take the germ of an idea, and work magic on it, put flesh on the bones to create a unique and memorable story. And I have definitely been guilty of using incidents from my own life in my books – with the names changed to protect the innocent, of course. Any writer worth his salt takes notes – either mentally, or in one of those ubiquitous notebooks we all have – of those little happenings which are all around us, in day-to-day life. If you keep your eyes open (and if you have a writer’s – frankly nosy – disposition), you can’t go wrong.
I was on a crowded train once, and seated across from me was a blind man with a guide dog. As we pulled into Birmingham New Street station, the blind man – and half the carriage with him – was preparing to disembark. The blind man wanted his suitcase, which was somewhere in a great stack of luggage near the carriage door, and he asked a man to pass it to him.
“Of course,” said the man. “What does it look like?”
And the blind man said, “I don’t know.”
Boy, did my ears prick up! There followed a fascinating ten minutes whilst various disembarking passengers and the train’s guard tried to help the blind man find his suitcase. Was it tartan? He didn’t know. Did it have a label on it? Bless him, he didn’t know that either. So then they started asking him what was inside it, and opening up the bags on the rack. Eventually they identified his suitcase from medicines packed inside. Or did they?
For me, the possibilities for stories from that one incident are myriad. Did the blind man end up with his own suitcase, or someone else’s? What might he have taken that he shouldn’t have? What might the guard have found, opening up random bags off the rack? And was the blind man really blind, or playing games? Let your imagination run, and you’ve a plot before you know it.
My favourite train story, though, is dear to me because train travel – which I enjoy, mainly for its people-watching potential - is so often marred, these days, by idiots on mobile phones. My friend’s father struck very unlucky once, and ended up ensconced with three strangers at a second-class table, with one of the strangers – a businessman - determined to spend the whole lengthy journey shouting into his mobile. My friend’s father – and his fellow-travellers – were subjected to the businessman’s loud bonhomie and bragging for over an hour, until somewhere outside Burton-on-Trent, the businessman needed the toilet. And – poor fool! - he left his mobile on the table.
Quick as a flash, the elderly woman sitting opposite the businessman (she had been quietly knitting up to this point) stood up, slid open the window, dropped the businessman’s phone out of the moving train, and sat down. When the businessman returned to his seat, that wonderful, wicked woman was back at her knitting, and my friend’s father was apparently absorbed in his newspaper. The businessman spent several minutes searching for his phone, before sitting down to finish his journey in baffled silence.
Great story, no? And it’s one of those you just couldn’t make up.
May 24th, 2010 by admin.
Forgive 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?
January 5th, 2010 by admin.
First and foremost, let me wish a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010 to you all, and offer my thanks to everyone who’s bought and read my books during the last year - your support is always appreciated. Secondly, I offer a reprimand to myself, as a quick check before I wrote this revealed it was September when I last updated this blog. And it was only just becoming autumn - now we in the north of England are immersed in one of the coldest winters I can remember, with snow thick on the ground, night-time temperatures diving into negative numbers and the British transport system well and truly ground to a halt. (Yes, I appreciate those of you where real winters are common would find our conditions laughably mild….).
After a seasonally snowy start to the festive season and indulgence in the charming holiday traditions still upheld here, my son and I spent Christmas in Kent, fitting in visits to the O2 arena for the festive market there and to a pantomime at the theatre in London’s Greenwich (Mother Goose - probably one of the most entertaining pantomimes I’ve seen, and I have seen a good few pantomimes - love ‘em!). Since we got back to Derbyshire, the winter weather has really bitten hard, and I’ve barely left the village. This enforced ‘imprisonment’ has had two effects: one, a daily dose of cabin fever as I glare at the undriveable roads and resign myself to another day ’snowed in’; and two, a remarkable increase in word production on Book 5 in the series which is moving things along very nicely indeed (I can hear my agent cheering from here).
So it’s an ill wind, even if it’s an icy one. It’s likely to be a week or two yet before this little British winter lets up; who knows what mysteries for Hermes I might have conjured up by then? In the meantime, I have a couple of dates already in the 2010 diary for trips out and about. I’m very pleased to be travelling to Barcelona at the beginning of February as part of the city’s Black Novel week, and I’m also looking forward to Bristol Crimefest in May.
The snow will have melted by then, surely…?
September 27th, 2009 by admin.
I can’t believe September has almost been and gone, but the leaves falling in the wood and the distinct nip in the morning air tell me it must be so. If I’m honest, my disbelief is rooted, in large part, in my dismay at my failure - in my own eyes - to have achieved much of anything this month, creatively speaking (let’s hope neither my agent nor my publisher are reading this…).
And yet it has been an interesting month. I was very honoured to be invited to speak at a Lord Mayor’s reception at Sheffield Town Hall, where I met the wonderfully committed team who put together the city’s annual Off the Shelf literary festival. I met a lovely bunch of people at Uppermill library near Oldham, and gave a reading at my most striking venue yet, beautiful Oakham castle. As we head into October, I’ve got a pretty full calendar of events lined up, so do check the events page; if I’m in your part of the world, it would be lovely to meet you.
I’ve put the first few words on paper for book 5 (no title as yet), but have got slightly sidetracked with a short story I’m working on. It’s been a while since I’ve done any short fiction, and I’m enjoying the mental challenge of conveying mood, setting and characters in a very limited number of words. The other ‘task’ (it’s hardly work…) I’m very happy to be engaged in is reading Chris Ewan’s new book, ‘The Good Thief’s Guide to Las Vegas’. If you haven’t read any of Chris’s books, I recommend them to you - witty, quirky and very, very pacy, all are first-class entertainment from first page to last.
I’m very pleased to report that ‘The Lady of Sorrows’ has had the stamp of approval from Helen, my lovely editor at Bloomsbury, who says the Lady is my best book yet. There’s no wonder I think she’s lovely, is there? But whilst there’ll be no resting on laurels, I can’t help wondering if my slow pace this month reflects the fact that the Deadly Sin I’ve chosen for book 5 is Sloth…
August 24th, 2009 by admin.
It’s a long time since I wrote my blog, but my excuse is a long absence in Greece, where it was, of course, hot. Here in the temperate climate of the UK - and especially the northern counties - it’s easy to forget how hot that hot is. Before my departure, my elderly neighbours were complaining how they couldn’t sleep in the heat of the English summer. The average night-time temperature was 11c, with a daytime maximum of 19c…
Greece was, as always, wonderful - the sea so blue and perfect for swimming and snorkelling, the kafenions shaded and the drinks served extra cold, the food fresh and imaginative. But there are two things I spend more of my Greek time on than anything else - people-watching, and suffering from boat-envy.
The Greeks - especially in the island villages - can be quirky people. They do things differently there, and they are allowed to do things differently because their lives are not constrained by absurd Health & Safety regulations. Amongst the more interesting sights I saw (all in the notebook, of course) were two men struggling to carry a brick wall and an eighty-year-old man re-hanging shutters by straddling an upstairs windowsill (he drew a small crowd, but no-one offered to help: no-one wanted to spoil the show).
I fell in love - as usual - with several dozen boats, yachts, cruisers, call them what you will - not the flashy gin-palaces that fill the Mediterranean ports in summer, but the toys of the uber-wealthy, all quiet good taste and understated style - the boats where the crew spend the time the owner’s family is ashore busily giving the chrome and brass an extra polish. Those beautiful boats made me think of their owners’ lives, and how far removed they are from the concerns of us ordinary mortals. In fact, they gave me an idea for Book 5….
I’m pleased to say, by the way, that I finished book 4 - The Lady of Sorrows - two days before I went to Greece. I’ve had the thumbs-up from my agent, so it should be at the publishers for their approval this week. Fingers crossed….
July 3rd, 2009 by admin.
It isn’t often the thermometer hits the heady heights of the high twenties here in Derbyshire, but it’s managed it this week, and after a trip to the local supermarket earlier this week, my in-car reading (on a tarmac carpark, admittedly) was an impressive 33c. Everyone around me is complaining about the heat, and even our cat (a true gourmand, under normal circumstances) has stopped eating.
You’ll hear no complaints from me: this is summer weather as it should be - hot, sultry, calming (with apologies to everyone commuting - I appreciate heat is not calming in standing traffic on the M25, or on the tube). But it’s this kind of heat which moulds the Mediterranean temperament, because to rush about in it is madness; far better to take your time, have another cold drink in the shade, and get around to what you had to do manana, or avrio, as they say in Greece. My son and I are booked on a flight to the islands in a couple of weeks, and I’m really looking forward to a month there. Except the temperature’s been up as high as 40c. I’ll let you know if I find that kind of heat calming when I return.
Meantime, I’m pleased to let you know I’ve joined the Curzon Group - a group of crime writers whose aim - in a tongue in cheek way - is to wrest the crown of crime writing from American hands and bring it home to Britain. I’m a huge fan of American crime, and US writers have led the field for many years - think Michael Connelly, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell. But there’s an untapped seam of home-grown talent emerging now that could really give those writers a run for their money. Britain produced some of the best-ever thriller authors - Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Conan Doyle. Can those days return? The Curzon Group believes they can. As a start, we’re doing an airport tour to promote British books as beach reads, starting at WH Smith’s East Midlands airport on 15th August. It’s a 5am start for me, so if you’re flying that day, a cup of heavy-duty caffeine from Costa Coffee would be much appreciated…
May 30th, 2009 by admin.
I have been in a Welsh state of mind for the past week or so. Firstly, I went to see the fabulous Rhydian at Sheffield City Hall. For those of you who don’t know, Rhydian won the X-Factor talent show on UK television last year. He is, I believe, a Welshman born and bred and it shows in his voice which is absolutely amazing. I know Rhydian is a bit like Marmite - love him or hate him (I am in the former camp, in case you hadn’t guessed) but anyone who has heard him sing must surely acknowledge that he is a world-class talent. That being so, I was slightly surprised that he was so absolutely unspoiled - he seemed slightly bemused by his own success, and very pleased that we had all turned out just to see him. And he had the good manners to thank the ladies who had made the sandwiches on his tour, and the bloke who had driven his bus. A star in the making, for sure.
Then on to Wales itself, for a week in the lovely town of Aberdovey. I was full of good intentions, and took my laptop with me to continue work on the second, almost readable draft of Book 4, which is as yet untitled. Needless to say I didn’t get far - I was easily distracted by the seashore which I have always found irresistible. We did some walking, and some fishing too, but only got a few mackerel; it’s too early in the season for bream apparently (either that or we were incompetent fisherpeople). Wales is somewhere I think I would quite like to live, if I were not happily settled in Derbyshire. It’s a country which has an old-fashioned feel to it (in a very good way) - there are proper shops and not too much traffic. And I am absolutely fascinated by the Welsh language, which seems to be unique and unpronounceable. Whoever thought of stringing so many consonants together without the benefit of vowels? I think I shall do some research into the origins of Welsh, maybe even try to learn a few words. If I succeed, I’ll put a sentence or two up here, just for the benefit of my Welsh readers (and Rhydian too, of course…).
May 18th, 2009 by admin.
I had the pleasure of visiting Crimefest in Bristol last week. It was my first crime conference so I was a little unsure what to expect, but what I found were scores of crime fans (a number had flown in specially from the US) and crime writers (both British and foreign) with a smattering of agents, editors and critics thrown in for good measure. The event - held at the very comfortable Marriott Royal - was extremely well organised, with two writer panels running concurrently almost every hour during the day and social events scheduled for the evenings. If you’ve never been to one of these events, I highly recommend it. It’s a great opportunity to meet writers in an informal setting (ie in the bar), and the panel discussions cover crime writing in all its many guises, from gory to cosy and all points in between.
There were a few familiar faces there, and it was great for me to talk informally to other crime writers about the business of writing and to catch up with some insider gossip (very interesting - too interesting, in fact, to repeat here - sorry…). I had a discussion over dinner with Simon Kernick, Paul Johnston, Declan Hughes and Stephen Booth over the optimum length for a book, and was surprised to discover mine are shorter than many. Should I make them longer? I’m happy to hear your views! Stephen is from this neck of the woods - or at least he sets his books here in the Peak District, and in fact he’s made a murder scene out of an ancient site only half a mile from our house…
Back at the grindstone, the second draft of book four is progressing well. The paperback of ‘The Taint of Midas’ was published last week (you can’t miss it in the bookshops - its cover’s a wonderful yellow) whilst ‘The Doctor of Thessaly’ comes out early in July. I’m still waiting for the Doctor to appear on Amazon, but if you’d like to pre-order, it’s available on Waterstone’s website, and Borders. Just don’t read the blurb too closely; whoever wrote it (not me!) seems unaware that Thessaly is not an island of my imagination, but a real part of Greece, similar to an English county. Don’t go looking for the town of Morfi on the map, though - it isn’t there…
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