Fascists – the Perfect Villains? by Jason MonaghanWe all hate fascism, agreed? If not, stop reading here. When we were young, ‘the Germans’ were the baddies in our games, on TV shows and those stalwart WW2 films. Only when I began to study hist...
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe by David LeighMy book started its life in late 2007, the same month I had flown from Panama to Miami and on to Manchester, via Atlanta, Georgia, to bring Anne Darwin home to face the music. Anne was the wife of ‘Ca...
‘From the slush pile to the Sorbonne’ – Peter Lovesey on the lows and highs of short story writingMany stories ago, I found a second-hand book published in 1947 called The Queen’s Awards. It contained the winning short fiction in a competition organised by the two American mystery writers, Frederi...
‘The C Change in Undercover Policing’ by Stephen BentleyHaving now written two non-fiction and several fiction books about undercover cops, I know a thing or two about authenticity when writing fiction involving characters who are undercover police officer...
‘Entering the secret world of urban gangs’ by Jennie EnsorWhat goes on inside closed groups has always fascinated me – whether it’s a dysfunctional family unit, an urban gang or a Metropolitan Police murder team. All three feature in my fourth book, Silenced...
A Talent for Murder by Matthew BoothIt has been a long time coming. Since I first encountered Sherlock Holmes when I was 11 years old, I wanted to write crime and detective stories and, over the years, I wrote several crime novels (unpu...
First Love by Maxim JakubowskiIt might appear perplexing to some that the latest book by the erstwhile owner of the Murder One bookshop and current Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association happens not to be a crime and mystery nove...
A Theft, A Dog and a Man called Harold by Peter BartramOne of the pleasures of crime writing is when research turns you into a ‘snapper up of unconsidered trifles’. (The Winter’s Tale, Act 4 Scene 3, if you were torturing yourself to remember where the qu...
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...
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