The Crime Readers' Association

The return of National Crime Reading Month

25th May 2015

National Crime Writing Month is a UK wide annual reading festival promoting the crime genre. It is a major initiative, coordinated by the CWA, a non-profit group dedicated to the promotion of the genr...

SJI Holiday- Do you really need a writers’ platform?

20th May 2015

What is a Writers’ Platform? If you search online, you’ll find several definitions, some more complicated than others. But in basic terms, it is a group of things that you do to get your name noticed...

ON EDITING AND BEING EDITED – Natasha Cooper

18th May 2015

Looking back to my years in publishing, I sometimes wonder that I survived without feeling the blade of an axe in my head I knew my authors hated being edited nearly as much as I hated being caught be...

The Debut Dagger Dream – SJI Holliday

14th May 2015

You know what it’s like… you spend years working on bits of novels, maybe some short stories, maybe you even finish a novel but it’s so bad you let it disappear into a file on your computer that you k...

Eric Brown – The Book that Changed My Life

13th May 2015

A single event on a summer’s day, way back in 1975, changed my life for ever. I was fifteen and living in Melbourne, Australia, where my parents and I had emigrated the year before. I was kickin...

CWA Dagger in the Library

11th May 2015

Eleven authors have been longlisted for the CWA 2015 Dagger in the Library award, thanks to your votes. The longlist was compiled by YOU right and we’re thrilled that so many of you stopped by to vote...

CrimeFest and the CWA Diamond Dagger

11th May 2015

The CWA is excited to announce that the 2015 Diamond Dagger recipient Catherine Aird will be doing a series of appearances at this year’s Crime Fest. The acclaimed author, who follows in the footsteps...

When The Dust Settles – Jason Foss

5th May 2015

Every other Tuesday we feature a publication from leading independent publisher Endeavour Press. When The Dust Settles- Jason Foss When the young archaeologist Maddy Crowe is drafted in to work as cos...

CRA logoThanks and Welcome

1st May 2015

A massive thanks to our Featured Author for April- John Bayliss. We had four great posts from him. Hidden In Plain Sight The Butler Did It The Mystery of the Locked Room Mystery Lights, Camera, Write...

Case Files (Issue 14) is out now

28th April 2015

Case Files Issue 14 is now available. To sign up for your copy please follow the link below. http://www.thecra.co.uk/join-the-cra/ You will be added on our mailing list and will receive a weekly email...

My Writing History – Charlie Garratt

28th April 2015

I’ve written throughout my working life. For many years it was non-fiction; scripts for training videos, committee papers, research reports and community development guides. Then I emigrated to Irelan...

Spotlight on Mark Ellis

26th April 2015

  Mark was born in 1953 and grew up in Swansea. After studying law at Cambridge and being called to the Bar, he embarked on a roller-coaster business career which culminated with him being a foun...

Hidden in Plain Sight – John Bayliss

24th April 2015

You know the situation. You can’t find your keys. You look everywhere for them: in drawers, in cupboards, in the pockets of the jacket you were wearing three days ago, in the cat basket, at the bottom...

John Bayliss – The Butler Did It

17th April 2015

Despite the phrase ‘the butler did it’ being such a well worn cliché, there appear to be remarkably few cases of murderous butlers in the whole corpus of crime fiction—not even from the Golden Age, wh...

John Bayliss – The Mystery of the Locked Room Mystery

10th April 2015

We’ve all read them. We’ve all (hopefully) been mystified by them, too—those crime stories where how the crime was committed is as much of a puzzle as who committed it. They’re generally called ‘Locke...

Matthew Pritchard – Why Write Crime Fiction?

7th April 2015

Like most novelists, I write because I love to read. But when I first tried to set pen to paper, this posed me something of a problem. What was I going to write? After all, I loved to read everything:...

John Bayliss – Lights, Camera, Write!

3rd April 2015

If someone trained a camera on me whilst I was writing, I suspect that the results would not be as dull as you might expect. I don’t mean the typing part (which is dull), but the fact is that hammerin...

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