The Crime Readers' Association

Latest News from Mirror Books

23rd June 2021

Murder 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. Castle

29th April 2021

The 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 Forman

29th April 2021

My 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 Dawson

26th April 2021

I 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 Scase

26th April 2021

In 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 Rouass

26th April 2021

In 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...

Changing Genres by Leigh Russell

29th March 2021

Writers 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...

Martina Cole Awarded the 2021 CWA Diamond Dagger

23rd February 2021

Martina Cole is the recipient of the highest honour in British crime writing, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger. The long-reigning Queen of Crime Drama is a publishing powerhouse. Ma...

Mr Dickens and Me, by J C Briggs

23rd November 2020

Claire Tomalin observed that: ‘everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens.’  Mine is Detective Dickens, the amateur sleuth who teams up with the Superintendent from Bow Street to investigate...

Dagger Winners Announced Online

26th October 2020

CWA Dagger Awards 2020 Winners Announced – Michael Robotham, Lou Berney, Trevor Wood, Casey Cep, and Abir Mukherjee win 2020 CWA Dagger awards. The winners of the 2020 CWA Daggers, which honour the ve...

Location, location, location by Candy Denman

22nd October 2020

When I was working on the long-running drama series, Heartbeat, we were often told that the biggest character we wrote for was the setting. How true that was. Whenever I tell people that I used to be...

‘Battling with the Muse’ by Diane M. Dickson

21st August 2020

I believe in The Muse. I am one hundred per cent convinced that there is a magic force that guides artistic endeavour. For interest mine is female, taller than me with longer, curlier, blonder hair, f...

‘Doing the homework’ by Andrew Bibby

21st August 2020

You mean, you do research for your novels? I understand very well why some readers may pose this question. Non-fiction books, fairly obviously, need to be carefully researched.  Nobody, I’m sure, woul...

New CWA Anthology Celebrates Vintage Crime

31st July 2020

A new short story anthology with a difference celebrates short stories from the archives of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA). Vintage Crime gathers gems from the mid 1950s, when the CWA began, unt...

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