Breaking News!!! Title of new James Bond book revealed!

JAMES BOND RACES AGAINST A COUNTDOWN TO TERROR IN 

TRIGGER MORTIS

Anthony Horowitz lifts lid on title of new 007 novel and

announces “Pussy Galore is back!”

Anthony Horowitz reveals today (28th May), on what would have been James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s 107th birthday, that his forthcoming official 007 adventure is to be titled Trigger Mortis. In a move that will whet the appetite of fans worldwide and is unprecedented among recent Bond novels – the contents have always been shrouded in mystery until publication – Horowitz divulges that the secret agent’s new adventure begins in 1957, two weeks after the events of Fleming’s Goldfinger. Horowitz places Bond in the middle of the Soviet-American Space Race as the United States prepares for a critical rocket launch, and brings back the most famous Bond Girl of all: Pussy Galore! 

Horowitz is the latest contemporary novelist to tackle literature’s greatest action hero, and the first toplace his work directly within Fleming’s original canon. As well as Pussy Galore, the book features: brand new Bond Girl Jeopardy Lane; Jai Seung Sin, a sadistic, scheming Korean adversary hell-bent on vengeance; and breathless, globe-trotting adventure. Uniquely among latter-day Bond authors, Horowitz has included original Ian Fleming material: a treatment for Murder on Wheels, an episode of a television series that was never made. Fleming’s text sees Bond in the high-octane world of motor racing and it is his never-used plot that kicks off the action of Trigger Mortis.  

Anthony Horowitz said: “It was always my intention to go back to the true Bond, which is to say, the Bond that Fleming created and it was a fantastic bonus having some original, unseen material from the master to launch my story. I was so glad that I was allowed to set the book two weeks after my favourite Bond novel, Goldfinger, and I’m delighted that Pussy Galore is back! It was great fun revisiting the most famous Bond Girl of all - although she is by no means the only dangerous lady in Trigger Mortis. I hope fans enjoy it. My aim was to make this the most authentic James Bond novel anyone could have written.”

Like previous new James Bond adventures, Trigger Mortis was commissioned and

authorised by Ian Fleming Publications and the Ian Fleming Estate. Lucy Fleming, the niece of Ian Fleming, said: “What a brilliant birthday present for Ian - Anthony has written a James Bond book with a nail-biting adventure that could have come from Ian’s own typewriter. Anthony has cleverly incorporated Ian’s original ideas in to his own plot to produce a Bond book to remember.”

  

Jon Wood, Orion Publisher, said: “Anthony has delivered a stunning novel: non-stop action, a deadly, deranged opponent, and not one but two fantastic Bond women. His genius is to brilliantly capture the essence of a Fleming original and give it a 21st century edge. James Bond fans, and Anthony Horowitz fans, will absolutely love Trigger Mortis.” 

One of the country’s most successful writers, the prolific Anthony Horowitz has over 40 books to his name. He has written two official Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty, to both critical acclaim and commercial success, and his bestselling teen spy series, Alex Rider, has sold over 19 million copies. As a TV screenwriter he created both Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyles War. His play, Dinner with Saddam, opens at the Menier Chocolate Factory in September.  

Trigger Mortis will be published on 8th September by Orion Publishing.

For media enquiries please contact Jon Howells, Katie Brown or Lija Kresowaty at Riot Communications on 020 3174 0118;

jon@riotcommunications.com / 07766 396 844; katie@riotcommunications.com / 07748 592 813; and lija@riotcommunications.com / 07557 373 026

Official hashtag: #triggermortis

NOTES TO EDITORS

Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz is one of the country’s most successful writers, working across many media forms, including books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. His most recent book, Moriarty, was the follow-up to his first official Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk: both were Sunday Times Top 10 bestsellers. As well as his bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, the first of which was adapted into the 2006 feature film Stormbreaker, his other work for children includes the series The Power of Five and The Diamond Brothers. Further screenwriting credits include Poirot and the widely acclaimed mini-series Collision and Injustice. Horowitz is on the board of the Old Vic and regularly contributes to a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines. In 2014 he was awarded an OBE for his services to literature. He lives in London.

James Bond Books

· Over 100 million James Bond books have been sold worldwide.

· Ian Fleming wrote 14 James Bond books: Casino Royale (1953); Live and Let Die (1954); Moonraker (1955); Diamonds Are Forever (1956); From Russia with Love (1957); Dr. No (1958); Goldfinger (1959); For Your Eyes Only (1960); Thunderball (1961); The Spy Who Loved Me (1962); On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963); You Only Live Twice (1964); The Man With The Golden Gun (1965); and Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966).

· Fleming’s other works include the children’s favourite Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964), which was made into a film and stage musical; The Diamond Smugglers (1957); and a collection of travel writings called Thrilling Cities (1963).

· Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, currently holds the license to publish Ian Fleming’s entire James Bond backlist in print and ebook format, along with Fleming’s two non-fiction titles in the English language worldwide excluding USA/Canada.

· Other previous authors of official James Bond novels include: Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd.

· Steve Cole is the author of the new series of ‘Young Bond’ books, the first of which, Shoot to Kill, was published by Doubleday in 2014.

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and The Ian Fleming Estate

· Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. is run by the Fleming family and owns the copyright in Ian Fleming’s fiction and non-fiction books. The Ian Fleming Estate is also run by the Fleming family and owns the copyright in Ian Fleming’s personal letters, some journalism and other non-Bond writing. www.ianfleming.com

Orion Publishing Group:

· The Orion Publishing Group is one of the UK’s leading publishers with a list of award-winning fiction and nonfiction under three main imprints: Orion Books, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Gollancz.

· Orion Books has an excellent record of Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers. The Orion fiction list encompasses crime and thrillers, contemporary women’s fiction and historical novels. Major authors include: Linwood Barclay, Maeve Binchy, Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, Anthony Horowitz, Erica James, Cathy Kelly, Kate Mosse and Ian Rankin. The Orion Publishing Group is part of Hachette UK, which is a leading UK trade publishing group. Hachette UK is owned by Hachette Livre, the world’s second largest trade and educational publisher

SAUL BLACK: Serial Killers and Why we Love Them

Today's guest blog is the pen name of the acclaimed novelist Glen Duncan.

In a brilliant essay ‘Princes of Darkness’, published in the BFI’s companion volume to its Gothic film season in 2013 (Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film), screenwriter and novelist David Pirie makes a simple but invaluable observation: Count Dracula is a serial killer. A further observation, no less revelatory, follows: Hannibal Lecter is one of his direct fictional descendants.

What Dracula and Lecter have in common is that they’re presented to us as finished psychologies. Although Thomas Harris would later get into the dear doctor’s background, the definitive version is the one we find in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. In these two novels Lecter’s character, like his Gothic forebear’s, does not invite therapeutic questions. We’re not remotely interested in putting him on the analyst’s couch. He’s a terminal personality rendered so convincingly and thrillingly that it’s enough just to hang out with him and watch him in action, never mind the antecedents, never mind the Why? He’s a done deal. He’s his own brutally perfected Last Word.

This is one way of imagining serial killers, and it does much to explain our fascination with them. To read them, to watch them on screen, is to indulge in the same cathartic escapism provided by watching the antics of wild animals or boisterous plants: these are organisms doing what they do sans any of the moral or existential paraphernalia with which the rest of us are so annoyingly saddled. It’s liberating. It’s a blast. I have the impulse to kill people very often: tail-gaters, queue-jumpers, over-users of the word ‘basically’, anyone whose phone is set to emit that currently ubiquitous five note whistle (designed, presumably, by Lucifer); the problem is I lack the psychology. My cowardly frontal lobes are fine. If our pleasure in fictional sociopaths is vicarious wish-fulfilment, it raises the ticklish (if familiar) question: Without them to get us off imaginatively, would more of us be serial killers?

I repeat: This is one way of imagining the bad boys (and occasionally bad girls). It’s no coincidence that these ‘apex predators’ are so often presented as charming, erudite and classy, as likely to hum Bartók or quote Milton as to whack you in the face with a claw hammer. If they represent our latent or repressed selves, if they’re fantasies, then why not make them articulate culture vultures while we’re at it? No one wants to be a psycho with a comb-over and shell suit.

Psychiatric medicine and investigative journalism have, between them, debunked this myth and replaced it with a much less titillating truth: that by and large the people who do these things are dull and damaged, bereft of insight and driven by dreary compulsions, imaginatively and emotionally dead, cognitively impaired and not infrequently sexually impotent without the Viagra of psychotic violence. In short, they’re boring. More boring still, if the so called ‘psychopathic gene’ is admitted to the party. Granted it’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for serial murder, but still, it’s hard not to feel a bit short-changed if the great monsters reduce to nothing more snazzy than lousy DNA.

But even assuming the shrinks are right and the journos’ interviews genuine, our fascination lingers.

My optimist believes this is because we want to understand the puzzles - redundant in the cases of Lecter and the Count - of How and Why. My ludicrous optimist goes further: the better we understand the root causes, the more likely we’ll be to put time and energy into eliminating them.

My pessimist, on the other hand, says it’s because in spite of all evidence to the contrary we can’t shake the suspicion that there’s something serial killers know that we don’t. We think of them as beings who’ve been out beyond the moral boundaries - to visit God or the Devil or Nothingness - and returned bearing the experience’s inscrutable imprimatur. Our imaginative habit insists they’re the possessors of forbidden knowledge, even though our reason has long since identified the majority of them as morons - albeit lethal ones.

Either way - in our fictions, fantasies and fears - the serial killer is here to stay.

Reference: ‘Princes of Darkness’ by David Pirie in Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film, ed. James Bell, (BFI, London, 2013)

The Killing Lessons

When the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their work is done.  For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses - women abducted, tortured and left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them - has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens.  But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena's 10-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more terrifying than what she's running from.

The Killing Lessons by Saul Black (Orion) is out now price £12.99 

The Killing of Bobbi Lomax and the Importance of Settings in a novel

The Killing of Bobbi Lomax, my debut novel, focuses on the search for a deadly bomber in a small, devout town. It was so fundamental to the narrative to create an oppressive setting and to help with this I created my town as hemmed in on all sides by mountains and desert, essentially cut off from the outside world.  Its physical landscape matches the claustrophobic psychological state that many of its residents experience on a day to day within the controlling rules the Faith has established.

Because living in what's essentially a closed religious community is a world that many people in the Western world no longer experience, it was vital to make both my cops, Marty and Al, outsiders -- so that they could act as a conduit for the readers’ questions. As outsiders, both men have differing experiences and attitudes to the Faith and the world around them and we witness its impact on not just the townsfolk, but them as individuals. I hope that their position as outsiders, albeit to varying degrees, works to introduce the reader to the world of Abraham City. It was also vital, because one of the novels other key characters, Clark Houseman, is so compelling a study, that I create interesting cops, so that Clark not suck up all the narrative's oxygen. With that in mind it was vital to give Marty and Al intriguing back-stories and also give them a shared past like a long married couple. Obviously, it was important that this information be drip fed to the reader, little by little, otherwise there would just be too many establishing facts served in a dollop up front in the narrative rather than creating enticing multi-layered characters for the reader to unpeel like the proverbial onion. As written, the readers unravel the cops recent shared and individual pasts, as much as I want to reveal, for there is, after all, a prequel in the writing so no spoilers. Through Marty and Al we meet the other players in the drama, the townsfolk, many of whom are under suspicion of being the bomber, but others who are there to add light and shade and show us our cops on the case, individually and together and, in doing so, reveal their true personalities.  In Iran they say that you can tell how devout a woman is by how far back on her head she wears her headscarf, but just as in Iran, rebellion - even slight - is dangerous and the Faith are all too aware of that.

 

In Abraham City people can get the measure of you by what you choose to serve them as refreshment. But, conversely, this is a world where neighbours spy on neighbours, so what you are being shown may not be your neighbour's reality at all. So, suspicion and false accusation is rife. The Faith has made spies of its citizens and, in turn, those in power spy on all the citizens because to take their eye off the ball may allow dissenters to gather and grow and threaten the status quo. Best to cut off dissent before it can ferment. But when you do that you create enemies who might not strike back until you are least expecting it. To quote my ultimate writing hero, Shakespeare, “Revenge is a dish best served cold”. 

You can follow Cal Moriarty on Twitter @Calmoriarty

The Killing of Bobbi Lomax by Cal Moriarty is out now (Faber & Faber, £12.99)

Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child at Crimefest 2015

I have always considered the axiom ‘the past is never dead, for it lays the foundations for the future’ to be true – and the name Martin Beck is proof.

Following on from the enthusiasm for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Guardian featured this interesting feature on Martin Beck, and the writers Maj Sjöwall and her partner, the late Per Wahlöö - the writers of these remarkable crime novels from Sweden.

It might count as one of the most remarkable writing collaborations in the history of publishing. A man and a woman, a couple, sit down every evening to write. Dinner is over, their children are in bed. She's never written a book before. He's a published author, but not with anything like this. They write in long hand, through the night if necessary. One chapter each. The following evening they swap chapters and type them up, editing each other as they go along. They don't argue, at least not about the words. These seem to flow naturally.

Ten years, 10 books. Each book 30 chapters, 300 chapters in all. Every one centred on the same group of middle-aged, mostly unprepossessing policemen in Stockholm's National Homicide Department. Often, very little happens. Sometimes for pages on end. What is more, each book is a Marxist critique of society. Their mission – or "the project" as the authors call it – is to hold up a mirror to social problems in 1960s Sweden.

Unlikely as it may sound, the books have become international bestsellers, over 10m copies sold and counting. Classics of the thriller genre, they've been made into films and adapted for television. Subsequent generations of crime writers are fans. There's no doubt that the latest left-leaning Swedish author to hit the bestseller lists, Stieg Larsson, would have read them. Some say the couple wrote the finest crime series ever; that without them we would not have Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.

Read the full article here

In my travels, so many writers, especially from mainland Europe credit Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö for ‘opening the door’ for them, such as Erland Larsson [the late Stieg Larsson’s father] in an interview I recorded a few years ago [for Jeff Pierce’s The Rap Sheet]  and archived here, Roslund and Hellstrom also credited their influence here and here – and list goes on, for Martin Beck was the precursor for the contemporary police procedural.

The BBC in the UK produced audio plays of all ten novels featuring the laconic Martin Beck, and can be purchased here from the BBC

So last year at the close of Crimefest 2014’s key note event on the British Golden Age of Crime Fiction from writer / critics the Talented Mr [Mike] Ripley, Professors Barry Forshaw and Peter Guttridge, [ you can view that presentation here ] - Adrian Muller announced that [with thanks to Barry Forshaw, Lee Child and many others], he had secured a very rare visit to the British Isles of Maj Sjöwall, to speak at Crimefest 2015

As Shots Magazine have readers scattered throughout the world, we have recorded what must be considered one the key events in 2015’s crime fiction calendar, Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child.

A note first; the filming is a tad “gonzo”  [and split into 5 x 10 minute sections] so you are unlikely to see this film screened at Cannes anytime soon, and you will see a guest performance from Detective Peter Rozovsky [the man behind Detectives Beyond Borders] as he was photographing the event; and I asked the first question related to Stuart Rosenberg’s film adaptation, transplanting the action from The Laughing Policeman to San Francisco, and here’s the trailer

So without further ado, please take your seats for Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child at Crimefest 2015, in Bristol, England recorded 16^th May 2015

Part One : Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child

Part Two : Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child

Part Three : Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child

Part Four : Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child

Part Five : Maj Sjöwall in conversation with Lee Child

The ten novels that make up the Martin Beck mysteries are published by Harper Perennial and all available from the Shots Magazine Bookstore here

If you’ve enjoyed the Crimefest 2014 presentation on the Golden Age of British Crime Fiction, then we’d urge you to explore the work of these key writer/literary [and film] critics. Their work can be purchased with discounts from the Shots Bookstore –

Barry Forshaw’s work is available here

Mike Ripley’s work is available here

Peter Guttridge’s work is available here

Ayo Onatade’s Shots Report from Crimefest 2015 is archived here

Part One

Part Two

And for those interested in Lee Child, here’s last year’s interview at The Rap Sheet and here’s an older one from January Magazine and more information on the work of Lee Child is available from www.leechild.com  

We urge you to plan ahead for Crimefest 2016, details for all Crimefest information is available from www.crimefest.com and here’s a little video about what to expect, with commentary from some faces you will recognise

We hope to see you next year, as Crimefest is to quote Detective Peter Rozovsky “Bloody Top Biff”

Lee Child with Peter 'Detectives Beyond Borders' Rozovsky at Crimefest 2015