Take The E-Train

Choo-choo! The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman (right) steams into the digital age with a short e-collection of short stories, titled DUBLIN EXPRESS. Quoth the Batemeister:

“‘Dublin Express’ itself first appeared in Maxim Jakubowski’s SEX IN THE CITY anthology of erotic fiction, the Dublin edition, and is chiefly notable for having no erotic content whatsoever; ‘Unhappy Endings’ was selected for this year’s MAMMOTH BOOK OF BRITISH CRIME; ‘NIPD Blue’ was my first ever short story, and the basis for a short film I directed was back in the 90s; ‘The Case of Mrs Geary’s Leather Trousers’ was the short story that originally inspired my Mystery Man novels; and finally ‘The Prize’, about an ex-terrorist who applies his old methods to conquering the art world, was originally broadcast on BBC Radio Four live from the Belfast Festival.”

  So there you have it. But lo! There’s more! Bateman has also deigned to e-publish is debut play, which was shortlisted for Best New Play at the Irish Theatre Awards last year. Back to the Batemeister:

“I think [National Anthem] is probably the best writing I’ve done. The play was premiered at last year’s Belfast Festival and was completely sold out. It was shortlisted for Best New Play at the Irish Theatre Awards but was scandalously beaten by another play.”

  DUBLIN EXPRESS can be found here, and NATIONAL ANTHEM can be found here, both at the cheap-as-chips, recession-busting price of £2.10.

Have Novel, Will Travel

FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES popped through the post-box the other day, said tome being a collection of essays on ‘Real Locations in Crime Fiction’ edited by Maxim Jakubowski and written by the likes of Barry Forshaw (Brighton, Edinburgh, Sweden and Venice), Sarah Weinman (New York and Washington DC), Peter Rozovsky (Iceland), John Harvey (Nottingham), Oline Cogdill (Florida), J. Kingston Pierce (San Francisco), Martin Edwards (Shropshire), David Stuart Davies (London), and Maxim himself on a selection of locations. It also - disclaimer alert - includes yours truly waffling on about Vincent Banville, Arlene Hunt and Declan Hughes, and the crime stories they set in good ol’ durty Dubbalin town. To wit:

Whether it be the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Ystad of the Swedish Wallander, Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco or Donna Leon’s Venice, the settings chosen by crime fiction authors have helped those writers to bring their fictional investigators to life and to infuse their writing with a sense of danger and mystery. FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES follows the trail of over 20 of crime fiction’s greatest investigators, discovering the cities and countries in which they live and work. Edited by one of the leading voices in crime fiction, Maxim Jakubowski, each entry is written by a crime writer, journalist or critic with a particular expertise in that detective and the fictional crimes that have taken place in each city’s dark streets and hidden places. The book includes beautifully designed maps with all the major locations that have featured in a book or series of books - buildings, streets, bars, restaurants and locations of crimes and discoveries - allowing the reader to follow Inspector Morse’s footsteps through the college squares of Oxford or while away hours in a smoky Parisian cafe frequented by Inspector Maigret, for example. Aimed at the avid detective fan, the armchair tourist and the literary tourist alike, FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES is the perfect way for crime fiction fans to truly discover the settings of their favourite detective novels.

  You’ll appreciate that I’m biased, of course, but it’s a lovely, detailed and not entirely unfunky piece of work …

“But When We Said ‘Stripped-Down Prose’ We Meant … Oh, Never Mind.”

Maxim Jakubowski has more than a couple of projects floating around right now with his editor’s imprint on them - the Dublin edition of SEX IN THE CITY features Ken Bruen, Colin Bateman, Sean Black and CSNI’s Gerard Brennan getting into a sweaty fret over erotic Dublin, while the eighth MAMMOTH BOOK OF BRITISH CRIME collection of short stories is due in the near future - but Maxim’s also got a novel of his own on the way. I WAS WAITING FOR YOU hits the shelves on November 1st, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

A young Italian woman flees her home in Rome and gets involved with the wrong man in Paris. Cornelia, the fearless stripper and killer for hire, who proved such a hit in previous novels, is back. And on another mission to kill. As the two women’s paths intersect, an English crime writer down on his luck is mistaken for a private eye and goes on a quest for a missing person. From New York to Paris, and then on a thrilling journey through Barcelona, Tangiers, Venice and then finally to a small medieval town outside Rome, the waltz with darkness of the three characters in search of love, lust and redemption becomes ever more poignant and mysterious. This is a sexy, sad, breathless, a memorable tale of lost souls caught in a spider’s web of their own making.

  Yes, yes, that’s all very fine and well, but here’s The Big Question: Where can we get a poster of that cover?

Fiddling With His Funny Bits: The Bateman Interview

With his latest ‘Mystery Man’ novel, DR YES, on the horizon, and a new play in the works, I recently interviewed Colin Bateman (right) for the Evening Herald. It went a lot like this:

FOR A MAN who recently lost his first name, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman is in remarkably chipper form.
  The prolific writer (25 novels and counting) of comedy crime novels that began with DIVORCING JACK was recently rebranded ‘Bateman’ to coincide with the publication of a new series character who goes only by the name ‘Mystery Man’ as Bateman spoofs the conventions of the traditional crime thriller.
  “It’s kind of a mixed blessing,” he says of his new moniker. “It has undeniably worked as far as the books are concerned - or maybe the books are getting better - in that there’s a recognition factor there. The downside, I suppose, is that if you don’t know it’s tongue in cheek, you’d think it was a bit self-important. And of course, now that I have that doctorate from Coleraine University, I’m officially a Doctor, so the new book could be DR YES by Dr Bateman. If I chose to, ahem, yank my own chain.”
  Fiddling with his funny bits, of course, is what led to the creation of Bateman’s choicest character to date.
  “Most of my books have been launched in Belfast’s No Alibis mystery bookstore,” he says, “and at a launch I generally read the first chapter of the new book: you don’t have to set it all up or confuse people with back stories and asides. But when I was launching DRIVING BIG DAVIE about six years ago I had a bit of a problem – the first chapter was all about masturbation, and my mother-in-law was in the audience. So I had to read something, and that something was a story I wrote over the weekend before the launch, actually set in the bookstore, and with a fictional version of the owner [Dave Torrans] cracking a humdrum crime in ‘The Case of Mrs Geary’s Leather Trousers’. It really was just to fill a gap, but it went down so well that at the next book launch I wrote another short story featuring the same character, and those two stories eventually evolved into the first novel.”
  Mystery Man’s schtick is that he is the antithesis of the conventional crime fiction hero: he’s a cowardly neurotic, a hypochondriac with all the fighting qualities of a cloistered nun, a man who excels only at “being paranoid and foolish and saying the wrong thing, mostly. Yep, it’s a thinly veiled autobiography,” laughs Bateman. “I think Mystery Man and Dan Starkey [the wise-cracking hero of Bateman’s previous series of novels] have a lot in common in that they both tend to open their mouths before they put their brains into gear. The difference is that Dan’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, and if he doesn’t exactly get away with it, he does have a bit of charm and swagger to him. Mystery Man you’d probably just want to hit with a hammer. I suspect I’m probably half way between the two of them.”
  The first in the new series, MYSTERY MAN, was a Richard and Judy ‘Summer Read’, while the second, THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, scooped the Last Laugh award at the recent CrimeFest bunfight in Bristol. The third, DR YES, will be published on September 30th, but Bateman isn’t resting on his laurels.
  “I think it’s important to keep the writing fresh,” he says, “so I’m always open to new challenges – the most recent being writing an erotic short story for Maxim Jakubowski’s Dublin-set anthology, SEX IN THE CITY, which story is chiefly notable for having no discernable erotic content.”
  Having previously written for TV, most notably the Murphy’s Law series that starred James Nesbitt, Bateman has now turned to writing for the stage.
  “‘National Anthem’ is about a composer and a poet,” he explains, “both exiles for twenty years, and with a certain level of fame, who are commissioned by the Government to create a national anthem for Northern Ireland to coincide with the visit of the American President. They’re very much up against a deadline: two men in a room with one day to compose it. But this isn’t the country they left, and they both have secrets which are exposed during the course of the play, secrets which also come back to haunt them. I should add that it’s a comedy, a farce, but maybe with a few points to make about how ‘we’ see ourselves, where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
  After that it’s back to another Mystery Man novel, and using comedy to continue to carve out a niche in what he believes is quickly becoming a depressingly homogenous genre.
  “In publishing terms,” he says, “crime fiction is the biggest genre, and the best-selling authors are selling phenomenal amounts of books. But I genuinely believe that 99 per cent of crime readers, if they were given just the books minus their covers and any identifying information, really couldn’t tell the difference between any of them.
  “I was at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a couple of months ago and I met many crime fiction fans, and they were all perfectly nice and lovely and I got a great reception and they laughed at my jokes, but it was absolutely clear to me that at the end of the day what they actually wanted was the next Jeffrey Deaver, or Patricia Cornwell or Karin Slaughter. They like the safety of knowing what they’re getting every time they buy a book, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but most of them just aren’t comfortable with the idea of crime comedy and won’t take a chance on it.
  “I think maybe readers have forgotten that there was a strong element of humour in crime fiction in the past - Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler had it in spades - but it seems to have been sucked out of it over the years in favour of blood and guts.
  “It’s not so much that comic crime is cutting edge,” he continues, “it’s just that I think anything that varies from the norm is always worth checking out. Comic crime fiction at least dares to be different. It also,” he grins, “dares not to sell very many copies.”

  DR YES is published by Headline on September 30th. National Anthem debuts at the Belfast Theatre Festival on October 20th.

  This interview first appeared in the Evening Herald.

On Mammoths And Woolly Thinking

I was thinking of writing a post full of mock-bluster and bravado about the inclusion of a story of mine in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST BRITISH CRIME 8 (ed. Maxim Jakubowski), claiming that, all things considered (other than the fact that I’m not actually British, unless you’re talking about how the UK and Ireland together make up the British Isles), I’m perfectly entitled to consider myself on a par with very fine writers like Ian Rankin, Colin Bateman, Kate Atkinson, Simon Kernick, Louise Welsh, Andrew Taylor, et al.
  I’m not, of course. I’m long way off par with those writers, and many others in the compilation, and all false modesty aside, I’m not entitled to delude myself that I am either.
  That said, it’s a massive shot in the arm. Not a shot of confidence, but the far more dangerous speedball-style blend of hope and conviction. Because the story wasn’t written as a conventional crime story, and remains, to me at least, something of an oddity - and right now, I have a novel out on spec that wasn’t written as a conventional crime novel, and is something of an oddity. And not only that, but I’m currently in the early stages of rewriting a novel that wasn’t written as a crime novel, which looks as if it too will become - my best intentions of lashing it into genre straitjacket notwithstanding - something a little off-kilter.
  And while it’s a massive leap of faith to believe that the publication of one story will necessarily lead to the publication of a novel, or novels, the inclusion of my story in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST BRITISH CRIME 8 offers just enough hope to give me the courage of my convictions.
  They do say, of course, that it’s the hope that kills you in the end …
  Anyway, I’m off back to the writing. In the meantime, here’s the full rundown on THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST BRITISH CRIME 8 - and congrats, by the way, to fellow Irish Brits Gerard Brennan and The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman on their inclusion:

The must-have annual anthology for every crime fiction fan – the year’s top new British short stories selected by leading crime critic Maxim Jakubowski. This great annual covers the full range of mystery fiction, from noir and hardboiled crime to ingenious puzzles and amateur sleuthing. Packed with top names such as: Ian Rankin (including a new Rebus), Alexander McCall Smith, David Hewson, Christopher Brookmyre, Simon Kernick, A.L. Kennedy, Louise Walsh, Kate Atkinson, Colin Bateman, Stuart McBride and Andrew Taylor. The full list of contributors is as follows: Sheila Quigley, Nigel Bird, Jay Stringer, Paul D. Brazill, Adrian Magson, Colin Bateman, Gerard Brennan, Matthew J. Elliott, Andrew Taylor, Lin Anderson, Christopher Brookmyre, Ray Banks, Declan Burke, Liza Cody, Simon Kernick, Stuart MacBride, Allan Guthrie, Ian Rankin (two stories, including a new Rebus), Nick Quantrill, Edward Marston, Nicholas Royle, Zoe Sharp, Robert Barnard, Simon Brett, Peter Lovesey, A.L. Kennedy, Roz Southey, Phil Lovesey, David Hewson, Amy Myers, Marilyn Todd, Peter Turnbull, Keith McCarthy, Alexander McCall Smith, Stephen Booth, Denise Mina, Mick Herron, Kate Atkinson and Louise Welsh.

Who Follows The Followers?

An interesting tome hoves over the horizon, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and rejoicing in the title FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES. To wit:

Whether it be the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Ystad of the Swedish Wallander, Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco or Donna Leon’s Venice, the settings chosen by crime fiction authors have helped those writers to bring their fictional investigators to life and to infuse their writing with a sense of danger and mystery. FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES follows the trail of over 20 of crime fiction’s greatest investigators, discovering the cities and countries in which they live and work. Edited by one of the leading voices in crime fiction, Maxim Jakubowski, each entry is written by a crime writer, journalist or critic with a particular expertise in that detective and the fictional crimes that have taken place in each city’s dark streets and hidden places. The book includes beautifully designed maps with all the major locations that have featured in a book or series of books - buildings, streets, bars, restaurants and locations of crimes and discoveries - allowing the reader to follow Inspector Morse’s footsteps through the college squares of Oxford or while away hours in a smoky Parisian cafe frequented by Inspector Maigret, for example. Aimed at the avid detective fan, the armchair tourist and the literary tourist alike, FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES is the perfect way for crime fiction fans to truly discover the settings of their favourite detective novels.

  Maxim let yours truly loose on the fictional private eyes of Dublin, but don’t let that put you off. The intriguing line-up includes Barry Forshaw (Brighton, Edinburgh, Sweden and Venice), Sarah Weinman (New York and Washington DC), Peter Rozovsky (Iceland), John Harvey (Nottingham), Oline Cogdill (Florida), J. Kingston Pierce (San Francisco), Martin Edwards (Shropshire), David Stuart Davies (London), and Maxim himself on virtually every city in Christendom not already mentioned.
  The title is due in September, and already I’m dreading its arrival - the fear of not coming up to the mark has me quaking in the boots I bought specially for the occasion. For what it’s worth, though, the ‘Dublin’ entry concerns itself with the private eyes created by Vincent Banville, Arlene Hunt and Declan Hughes, all of whom are terrific writers, and all of whom I quote liberally, so hopefully I can skate by on their talent.
  Incidentally, for those of you wondering where Benjamin Black comes into all of this, he doesn’t, given that his protagonist, Quirke, isn’t a private eye. Which is a shame, but there you go - that’s remits for you. Boo, etc.

Norn Irons

Yon Brian McGilloway has more than a few irons in the fire these days. Not only is he going to be yakking and yukking with one Lee Child over in Belfast’s No Alibis on Wednesday evening, the 24th, he’s also releasing THE RISING, the fourth in the Inspector Devlin series. the following week, Wednesday 31st, this time in Derry, at the Verbal Arts Centre. Quoth the blurb elves:

When Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is summoned to a burning barn, he finds inside the charred remains of a man who is quickly identified as a local drug dealer, Martin Kielty. It soon becomes clear that Kielty’s death was no accident, and suspicion falls on a local vigilante group. Former paramilitaries, the men call themselves The Rising. Meanwhile, a former colleague’s teenage son has gone missing during a seaside camping trip. Devlin is relieved when the boy’s mother, Caroline Williams, receives a text message from her son’s phone, and so when a body is reported, washed up on a nearby beach, the inspector is baffled. When another drug dealer is killed, Devlin realises that the spate of deaths is more complex than mere vigilantism. But just as it seems he is close to understanding the case, a personal crisis will strike at the heart of Ben’s own family, and he will be forced to confront the compromises his career has forced upon him. With his fourth novel, McGilloway announces himself as one of the most exciting crime novelists around: gripping, heartbreaking and always surprising, THE RISING is a tour de force – McGilloway’s most personal novel so far.

  For more details on both gigs, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, and staying oop North, the firm-but-fair guardian of Crime Scene Norn Iron, Gerard Brennan, announces the publication of REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED, a rather intriguing collection of crime short stories adapted from Irish mythology. Gerard was kind enough to ask me if I wanted to submit an offering to the anthology, which generosity I was stupid enough to decline, and I’ve already dislocated one hip trying to kick my sorry ass. Anyway, the line-up of contributors includes Ken Bruen, Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Garbhan Downey, Arlene Hunt, Maxim Jakubowski, Sam Millar, Tony Black and – oh yes! – Brian McGilloway, among others. Gerard and Mike Stone are on editing duties, and it sounds like an absolute cracker, chaps. Come the launch party, the dry Pimms are on me …

Bristol 2009: Natural Born Shillers?

I was a bit ambivalent about the Bristol Crime Fest this year, I have to say. On the one hand, it’s always terrific to meet up with people you only see once or twice a year, if you’re lucky, some of whom dandered out for a bite to eat on Friday night (L to R: award-winning blogger Peter Rozovsky (sans beard), Vincent Holland-Keen, Donna Moore, Ewan (aka Donna Moore’s other half), Cara Black, Chris Ewan, Rafe McGregor, and Your Humble Host). A good night was had by all, although some appetites were rather ruined by Ewan’s mention of Donna’s party piece, which she was gracious enough not to showcase …
  On the other hand, events / conventions aren’t really about the business of writing, but much more about the business of marketing. I shouldn’t really grouse about that fact, given that I was privileged enough to be asked to sit on two panels, one of which took place on Friday and was moderated by Donna Moore, alongside Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall. The panel went well enough, in that none of the panellists were chucked out any windows for boring the audience to tears, although I did find myself explaining why, exactly, I’d hijacked a mini-bus at the age of 15. Gosh, you get a bad rap and The Man never lets you forget it …
  But I only attended one panel I wasn’t involved with all weekend, and that for about 20 minutes, and that only because I got caught up in Ali Karim’s gravitational pull and he was already headed that way. The panellists were all interesting people, and two of them had published novels set in Greece (Paul Johnston and Anne Zouroudi), which is something I have a personal interest in, given that I’ve been working on-and-off on a novel set on Crete for the last five or six years, but … well, I don’t know. It’s hard to feel that you’re not really discovering anything you wouldn’t from reading between the lines of a back-page biog, I suppose … which isn’t to criticise the writers, because all the panellists I saw were pro-active and engaging. Maybe it’s just the case that writers talking about writing just isn’t very interesting, much in the same way as porn stars talking about sex isn’t very interesting. Or so I imagine …
  By the same token, and maybe it’s just that the dry sherries were in, the various conversations on Friday night were much more fun.
I had a particularly good one with Steve Mosby and Ali Karim (right) about a whole range of subjects – which is to say, of course, that Ali talked while Steve and I nodded occasionally. Still, there was a couple of fascinating topics, not least of which is the new demand in the US for companies which will maintain your on-line persona after your death, updating your Facebook, emailing your buddies, and even keeping your game-playing avatar hale and hearty while you sleep the big sleep. Perverse? Yes. Pointless? Yes. Chunky material for a Phil Dick-style book? Most certainly.
  Anyway, Friday was a good day, given that I bumped into Karen Meek and Norm Rushdie, and Dec Hughes and Brian McGilloway, and Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Maxim Jakubowski and Paul Johnston, and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours bitching about the publishing industry with Rafe McGregor, gentleman that he is. All of which went some way to off-setting the embarrassment I should have been feeling at attending Crime Fest with no book other than THE BIG O to promote, which was first published two years ago, and – technically speaking – has never been published in the UK. For shame, etc …
  Which brings me back to the whole being-marketed-at issue. Would I have been happier with the weekend if I’d had a book to market? Not really. And I should say that I’m not dissing Crime Fest here, because I think it’s a terrific experience, and brilliantly run, and I’ll be back again next year to hook up with like-minded folk. But, to be honest – and I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here – the whole issue of selling / marketing books is simply a necessary evil that follows on from the privilege of being published in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d imagine most writers would much prefer to live in splendid isolation, tossing a manuscript over the wall of their mansion every year or so to a waiting editor, leaving the whole business of promotion and generalised shilling to people who are trained and / or have a vocation for the selling side of things.
  Hey, maybe there’s a market for a company that could maintain an electronic avatar-style version of writers, 3-D simulations who go on the circuit and promote the books, while the real writer stays home and writes. Any takers?

And so to Bristol …

I had a ball last year at Ye Olde CrimeFeste (statue erected in my honour, right) and I’m looking forward to more of the same this year. What’s terrific about these conventions is that you get to stroll around for a couple of days pretending to be a bona fide writer and no small boy points his finger at you and says, “Oi, yon emperor-type ain’t wearing no clothes.” It’s a wonderful thing, pretending to be a writer … but then, pretending is what writers do best.
  The other great thing about conventions and festivals is meeting up with the people you only tend to see at such events. Writing being (in theory, at least) a solitary pursuit, and regarded by something of an anti-social affliction by those nearest and dearest who don’t write, it’s nice to chow down with like-minded folk. As always, it’ll be great to hook up with Irish scribes the likes of Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway and Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards, and also some people I’ve met on my travels over the last couple of years, including Paul Johnston, Martin Edwards, the uber-glam Donna Moore, Ruth Downie, Chris Ewan, and a few more. And then there’s my fellow members of the bloggoratti, being Maxine, Karen, Norm, Ali and – possibly – the Book Witch and Rhian, although I’m not sure they’re going to make it this year. And, of course, we’ll all be in awe of the award-winning blogger, Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, who’ll be doing his Uncle Travelling Matt impression in Bristol.
  Anyway, it’ll be dry sherries all round, so here’s hoping the old liver holds out. For those of you interested, I’ll drop a line on Monday or Tuesday (depending on the volume of dry sherries) to let you know how the panels went. I’m on two: Friday at 1.30, for ‘I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang: Writing About The Bad Guys’ alongside Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall, with Donna Moore moderating; and Saturday at 3.30, for Natural Born Killers: Maxim’s Picks, alongside Cara Black, Paul Johnston and – hurrah! – Donna Moore, with Maxim Jakubowski moderating.
  All in all, fun times ahead …

  UPDATE: The ‘Who Is The Sexiest Irish Crime Writer?’ poll is now open for business, people, in the top-left corner of the blog … The results will be skewed, naturally, given that Gene Kerrigan has removed himself from consideration, but what can you do?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 679: Maxim Jakubowski

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
DARK RIDE by Kent Harrington. It combines the right amount of noir thrills and erotic tension I seek in my own books.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Most French contemporary erotica written by women. Such a strong area of writing right now.
Most satisfying writing moment?
The moment a new novel or even a short story reaches the top of the hill and the downpart of the writing almost happens of its own accord.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series (once it’s collected into a single volume, of course; sorry, I cheated ...).
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any of the Connolly Charlie Parker books, as long as they get both the right screenwriter and director.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is constant knowledge of my own imperfections and laziness holding me back. Best is that sense of achievement when it’s on the printed page (and the inner glow when I get fan letters from Italian female readers who’ve felt deeply affected by my writing – it’s happened three times and all Italian!!!).
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Cornell Woolrich meets THE STORY OF O meets LOLITA meets anyone else along that road to nowhere.
Who are you reading right now?
Have just started Mo Hayder’s next book, RITUAL.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Romantically personal, noir, erotic. Oops, that's 4 words.

PARIS NOIR, edited by His Eminence Maxim Jabukowski, is published on November 1.

The Guns Of Brixton

Calling all festival junkies: the TCM Crime Scene jamboree kicks off in London on Friday, September 6, centring on the Ritzy Brixton and focusing on ‘the wealth of film and literature that has crime as its central theme’, and the word around the elves’ meagre campfire is that Quentin Tarantino (above right) will be in town. Can you confirm or deny, O festival director for literary input and all-round crime fiction demi-god, Mr Maxim Jakubowski, sir?

“Yes, he is, as our closing night feature will also be the British premiere of Death Proof. We also have five other Brit firsts on film-side and Lynda La Plante, Fred Vargas, Mark Billingham, Val McDermid, Colin Bateman, Natasha Cooper, Ruth Rendell, Martina Cole, David Suchet, Philip Glenister (from Life on Mars), Nigel McCrery on the books / acting front, plus a Claude Chabrol and A.E. Bezzerides retrospectives.”

Thank ’ee kindly, sir. Incidentally, the premiere of Death Proof will be screened at the Ritzy Brixton, and beamed to cinemas across the UK via satellite. Let’s hope the punters are a little more impressed than our very own movie-reviewing elf, Michael McGowan …