2nd September 2018
I sometimes wonder if Robin Hardy’s cult movie The Wicker Man holds a magical allure for me because I was born at the same time as it was being filmed. This is probably vanity, as the film, the grandd...
31st July 2018
A macabre liturgy. A mysterious carving. An intriguing 200-year-old mystery. When Phineas Fox is asked to help with the music for bicentenary celebrations at Cresacre Abbey School, he does not expect...
31st July 2018
I wasn’t expecting to find I had combined an ancient law and opera for a book, but Song of the Damned, published in July 2018, turned out to have both elements at its heart. It’s not, of course, so ve...
31st July 2018
Left-wing terrorists kidnapped Aldo Moro in Rome on 16 March 1978. Fifty-five days later, on 9 May, his lifeless body was found abandoned in a Renault 4 hatchback in the heart of the city. He had been...
30th July 2018
When I was in my late twenties, I worked as a receptionist. Not any old receptionist, I worked in the staff health clinic in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia. It was confidential work. It wasn’t ju...
28th June 2018
Since bringing the 30-novel Mariner series of action adventures to a close and retiring from full-time teaching, I have been working on two parallel series of historical novels. One is a sequence of...
27th June 2018
Ask a serious crime buff to name the most prolific serial killer in history and many will no doubt say Harold Shipman, the Lancashire doctor who is thought to have killed more than 200 victims. Others...
27th June 2018
I find myself lurching into the morning routine around 6.45; rousing the boys for school (I have three, in their teens), sorting the washing (whites/colours), including remembering to put to one side...
6th June 2018
Michael Connelly – winner of the CWA Diamond Dagger 2018 Michael Connelly is to receive this year’s CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing. The Dagger award recognises autho...
5th June 2018
Is she the next victim? Or is she the culprit…? Alex South is a high-functioning alcoholic who is teetering on the brink of oblivion. Her career as a television journalist is hanging by a threa...
5th June 2018
Katherine grew up in Cornwall, and though she now lives in Cardiff, she can’t stop writing about her former home. Her historical crime series, Cornish Mysteries, blends real crimes with local folklore...
27th May 2018
Good afternoon, Simon and welcome to the CRA blog. Hello, and thank you for inviting me. For those of us who haven’t yet encountered the Charles Holborne series, would you object to the books being ca...
27th May 2018
One of the dirty little secrets that we crime writers are sometimes loathe to admit in polite society, is that when something really bad happens to a loved one, our second thought (after checking they...
27th May 2018
Yes, I know Terry Pratchett got here first but I can’t find the relevant quote from his Witches Abroad. I mean seriously. Why? Why do we sit down for many many many hours, busily writing long ex...
22nd May 2018
The Crime Writers’ Association announced the much anticipated longlists for the annual Dagger awards at a reception during CrimeFest in Bristol on the evening of Friday 18 May. Several titles ap...
11th May 2018
Case Files issue 31 – out soon! Case Files is an ezine that profiles new or forthcoming novels from members of the Crime Writers’ Association. Subscribing is free – and it let’...
2nd May 2018
National Crime Reading Month, an initiative promoted by the CWA, is now underway, with libraries, bookshops and writing festivals throughout the country hosting events and talks this month with author...
1st May 2018
Barry Forshaw, one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction, has written a lively, wide-ranging and immensely informed history of the genre as part of his award-winning ‘Noir’ series (that include...
30th April 2018
When people hear that I’m a crime writer, the question they ask most often is: where do you get your ideas from? I guess I’m not alone among crime writers in finding that’s the numbe...
30th April 2018
Have you ever been caught daydreaming? Missed your stop on the bus because your mind was miles away? Been hauled up for staring out of the classroom window as a child? If so, you probably learnt that...