The Crime Readers' Association

A Day in the Life of…Sara Sheridan

8th June 2016

Sara Sheridan writes the popular Mirabelle Bevan Murder Mysteries set in 1950s London and Brighton as well as historical novels set in 1820-1845. Fascinated particularly by female history she is a cul...

Why I’ll Never Use an e-reader by Matthew Pritchard

1st March 2016

  Over the last 18 months I have purchased three e-readers: one for each of my parents, and a third for a friend. Having seen the machines in action, I have been impressed by them but know for a...

Golden Age – Part 4 by Noreen Wainwright

30th January 2016

I have spoken a lot about the Golden Age as a genre. When you are immersed in a subject you see it everywhere and in Waterstone’s in Liverpool last Sunday, sure enough, there were just so many re-issu...

Golden Age – Part 3 by Noreen Wainwright

22nd January 2016

  Why do some contemporary crime writers decide to re-visit the golden age or indeed any other period of history? This is a popular trend but it is by no means a new one. In the 1970s, Ellis Pete...

How I Wrote Fever City by Tim Baker

17th January 2016

After a conversation with James Ellroy, Tim Baker began work on a noir thriller. Twenty years and one vivid dream later, the completed work FEVER CITY is being published by Faber & Faber on 21 Jan...

Golden Age – Part 2 by Noreen Wainwright

15th January 2016

  In my last posting, I mentioned the unreliable narrator crime novel and how popular this sub-genre has become. But, if we look at the decades since the golden age we can see many strands in the...

A Day in the Life of Jean Briggs

10th January 2016

A Day in the Life of …Or, should it be A Life in the Day of …? I go to bed with Charles Dickens. I wake up with Charles Dickens. He’s always interrupting me with his speeches, his fourteen...

Golden Age – Part 1 by Noreen Wainwright

8th January 2016

You might have noticed a relatively new trend in crime fiction publishing. In the midst of some of the prevailing big hits, you will see the re-issue of some of the golden age classics. One example of...

Diary of a Debut Author by Fiona Veitch Smith

3rd January 2016

“His name is Arthur and he’s dead.” That’s how I was introduced to my costume for a 90-second film promo for my debut crime novel, The Jazz Files. Arthur – God rest his soul – had apparently once been...

A Day in the Life: Behind the Scenes by AJ Waines

27th December 2015

One of the absolute joys of being a writer is that every day is different, largely because writers can play a much bigger part in the publishing process than they used to. Most authors now have a ‘pla...

The Importance Of Being Edited By Fergus McNeill

25th December 2015

        Somebody once said “The only thing worse than being edited, is not being edited.” I forget who it was, and those may not have been their exact words, but they made an extre...

Diary of a Debut Author by Vaseem Khan

20th December 2015

So . . . I am standing in a first-floor lounge at BBC studios in Manchester. It is 13th August 2015, 8.40am and in fifteen minutes I am due to walk onto the set of BBC Breakfast to talk about my debut...

Writer Seeks Readers By Fergus McNeill

18th December 2015

    Stories can connect people in all kinds of ways. I once drove over a hundred miles to speak at a library event. I had to take the afternoon off work to make sure I wouldn’t be late, and...

Are Some Writers Thieves? By Fergus McNeill

11th December 2015

  I steal a lot of stuff. There aren’t too many professions where you can freely admit that sort of thing but, happily, writing is one of them. I steal indiscriminately, from friends, from...

The Write Way? By David Hodges

6th December 2015

Since the age of 11, when I started writing, I always envisaged myself living in a garret at the top of some old Victorian house in Covent Garden, surrounded by books and with the smell of coffee from...

Why do we like the wrong people? By Fergus McNeill

4th December 2015

Most of us believe that our moral compass points in the right direction. We know the difference between right and wrong, and we generally hope that good will prevail over evil. So why, when we read, d...

Shetland Noir‏ by Mary Bale

1st December 2015

Extract from Threads of Treason and Pamela St Abbs Inspector Campbell Mysteries by Mary Bale. Thursday 12 November At about 7pm we passengers experience an extra quick journey to Sumburgh from Edinbur...

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