How I Came To Write ‘Appointment in Tehran’, by James StejskalWest Berlin, 1980. We knew it was going to happen sometime soon. When exactly was a mystery. It was one of those closely guarded secrets that would only be revealed when it was successful or went spec...
‘The Marriage Trap – what to do with the love interest in period detective fiction’ by Fiona Veitch Smith“Excuse me, miss. I think you’ve dropped something.” He held the camera under one arm like the bellows of a bag pipe, while with the other he thrust something in her direction. A book. The one she had...
True Crime? How we bottle up and serve real-world acts of depravity, by Ed WhitfieldThe British fascination with murder has a long and illustrious literary history. From Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts to Kate Summerscale’s The Wicked Boy,...
When close confinement was a choice, by Kate EllisMy twenty-fifth Wesley Peterson mystery, The Stone Chamber, begins with the execution-style murder of Robert and Greta Gerdner at their home in the Devon countryside. DI Wesley Peterson suspects that...
‘Crime in Trying Times’ by J.G. HarlondDo you actually know anyone who is entirely good? Or entirely bad, with no redeeming qualities? I ask because as a crime writer I create both goodies and the baddies: those who do their very best in t...
The Dinosaur Who Came In From the Cold by David HodgesWhen I first discovered my desire to write, it was in virtual prehistoric times, when publishing houses like Methuen, Herbert Jenkins and Collins – to name just a few – adhered to simple publishing pr...
The Challenges of Writing From Multiple Perspectives by A.A. ChaudhuriI’m hugely excited that She’s Mine, my first psychological thriller, is coming out with Hera Books in August. Unlike my Kramer & Carver legal thriller series, I chose to write it in the first pers...
‘The Real Golden Age of Murder – Pistols, Bombs and Motor Bandits’ by Joan LockI wasn’t feeling like writing another book just now partly because I too often seem to choose a subject needing a great deal of research but, despite not previously being attracted by the subject, I...
CWA Daggers 2021 AnnouncedChris Whitaker, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, Michael Robotham, Vaseem Khan and Peter May win 2021 CWA Daggers. The winners of the 2021 CWA Daggers, which honour the very best in the crime writing genr...
‘Codes, Ciphers and Cryptic Clues in Crime Fiction’ by Vaseem Khan“The Da Vinci Code meets post-Independence India.” That’s how MW Craven, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger, has described my latest novel, The Dying Day. I can understand why. The book, set in Bombay in 1...
‘Scribbler Sleuths’ by Andy Griffee‘Police Calls’ were one of my regular duties as a 20-year-old cub reporter on the weekly Poole and Dorset Herald during the early 1980s. It involved an early morning drive to the town’s ma...
Sea views, enviable location: shame about the unexpected visitors!Beverley Jones talks about her new novel The Beach House and how beloved childhood stories provided sinister inspiration for adult nightmares. Once upon a time (in the 1980s), there was a little girl...
Latest News from Mirror BooksMurder at Roaringwater Murder at Roaringwater is the inside story of a young Frenchwoman, Sophie Toscan du Plantier. In this notorious and unresolved crime, the victim seemed to have a premonition of...
The Invitation by A.M. CastleThe Invitation: join A.M. Castle for a closed circle murder mystery I have always wanted to write a closed circle murder mystery, so I suppose I’ve been lucky – the UK’s first lockdown gave me the mea...
WHAT MAKES A WRITER, by Jay FormanMy father was a psychiatrist and he often told me that psychiatrist’s children are the most messed up people on the planet. He may have been right. Like every other writer I’ve been told “no” more tim...
HISTORY: THE DEVIL’S SCRIPTURE by Jeff DawsonI lived, some years ago, on a Ladysmith Road. It joined another called Kimberley, thoroughfares of solid, red-brick terracing. Show me any British suburb, built c.1900, and I will give you streets nam...
Caught Doing the Bear, by Leslie ScaseIn this article I am going to express some of my personal views on the writer’s use of language in historical novels, both as an author and as a reader. By the use of language, I mean not just the wor...
Writing Forgotten Women by Saeida RouassIn 2015 I came across a Times newspaper article that detailed the crimes of the ‘Moorish Jack the Ripper’. The article was printed in 1906 and offered a gruesome description of a series of murders of...
Man as Monster and the Milgram Experiment by Bryony PearceI’ve always been intrigued by man-as-monster; equally frightened and fascinated by the idea that someone who could help an elderly neighbour with their shopping, let local kids play in their garden an...
Changing Genres by Leigh RussellWriters are wordsmiths. We spend our time playing with words, seeing how we can use them to communicate. But ideas as well as language inspire the books we write, and these ideas can pop up unbidden f...
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Case Files 52
The CRA Newsletter: September 2021
The CRA Newsletter: August 2021