Our Man in Edinburgh or Peter Guttridge on the town.....

Peter Guttridge is our man in Edinburgh. As well has chairing panels, Peter has agreed to send us a blog so we can keep up with him and fellow authors attending the Festival. So here goes with the first one....

So I walk into the yurt that acts as the writers’ room for authors at the Edinburgh book festival and all around I see crimewriters – and, for me, ghosts of crimewriters. No, I’m not going doo-lally, it’s just that a place you visit each year for a number of years holds the instant reminder of those previous visits. So over there is where the late lamented MICHAEL DIBDIN quaffed whiskey with his chair, PAUL JOHNSTON, and snarled about the ignorance of a reviewer who’d given him a bad review of his latest Aurelio Zen. That reviewer would be me and later that day IAN RANKIN led a gaggle of crimewriters (a gaggle? Maybe that should be An Alibi of crimewriters - or A Clew?) to the Oxford Bar, the seedy drinking place of a certain copper called Rebus and Dibdin and I had a very pleasing, if drunken, conversation in which I did not mention (am I a coward or sensible?) that I was That Reviewer. I stand by my review – but not enough on that occasion to admit that I’d written it.

And over there by the sandwiches and wine and whiskey I see DAVID SIMON, creator of THE WIRE, and his wife, the beautiful and talented LAURA LIPPMAN, who were here last year (or was it the year before?) for David to talk Wire-related stuff with me. I probably saved his life by calming the audience when he committed the cardinal sin of discussing cricket as if it was (intake of breath) a Scottish sport not an English one…

Today, in reality, IAN RANKIN has just wafted out. CHRIS BROOKMYRE is just arriving, looking very cheery before his evening sell-out event. REG HILL is being wry as ever in the corner there where he’sbeing interviewed by an intense young journalist. (That used to be me.) ALEX GRAY is happy to be here though in mourning for her 15-year old cat, who died this morning. JAKE ARNOTT, not really a crime-writer but nearly, is in fine fettle discussing the need for a Brighton Rock sequel whilst bewailing the classic film’s new remake. And PHILIP BARUTH, author of the literary thriller THE BOSWELL BROTHERS, mentions in passing that he’s standing as senator in Vermont in a few day’s time…

And me? Well, I’m here to chair a raft of events but I’m also carrying around – like a stupidly precious cargo – the just-arrived early copy of my new novel, City of Dreadful Night and planning the marketing for its official publication in September.

Much more later.