Natasha Cooper is the author of several different
series, but she is mostly known for her Willow King series, Trish Maguire
Series, and Karen Taylor series. A former chair of Crime Writers Association.
She has also chaired the Theakston’s Crime Writing Festival. Her 2012 novel Vengeance
in Mind was longlisted for the CWA GoldDagger.
Current book? (This can either be the current book
that you are reading or writing or both)
Many years
after retiring from writing fiction, there is a novel battering away at the
inside of my brain and I think I will write it.But it’s too new to say much about it, except that in a way it’s about a
lost boy, who may or may not be an anti-hero.
Why do
you think anti-heroes are so interesting readers?
I think a
great many of us worry about the hidden nastinesses in ourselves and so it’s a
wonderful refreshment to become lost in a story about someone who just doesn’t
care about the nastinesses in themselves, hidden or otherwise.
Which two anti-heroes or enemies would you invite to
dinner and why?
This is a very difficult one for me to answer because
my invitations to dinner are hugely selective and include only those of
unimpeachable respectability, genius-level intelligence, Venus-de-Milo levels
of beauty (but with more arms), and an ability to leave in order to let me get
back to whatever book I’m reading in bed by 10.30.Also, I don’t allow smoking in my house and
so Jackson Lamb would never be invited.
How do you relax?
Always with a book, usually in a deep hot bath,
sometimes with an icy gin and tonic by my side.
Which anti hero would you like to be on your side in a
difficult situation.
I think I would probably go for Lalla Rook from A
Sociopath’s Guide to Successful Marriage, who would neatly kill anyone who
was annoying me.
If you were to write a book involving an anti-hero,
where would you set it and why?
If I write the one battering the inside of my brain,
it will be set partly in a small pretty town in Hampshire, partly in the grim
raininess of North Wales, and partly in glorious Oxford.
How would you describe your latest published book?
Gold-Dagger-shortlisted Vengeance in Mind opens
with the naked corpse of a rich man, skewered to his wooden kitchen table with
large chef’s knives through his wrists and ankles.Bits of him are in the kitchen bin.Naturally the obvious suspect is….
With Bad Apples: crime fiction’s enemies and anti-hero’s theme
at St Hilda's this year, who are you three favourite anti-heroes
These are all very difficult questions.I like Lalla Rook, as above; I very much like
Roddy Ho, but he’s perhaps a little too sad and lacking in power to be a real
anti-hero.But his boss Jackson Lamb is
right up there.
Which 3 films
or television series featuring anti-heroes would you rewatch and why.
If only I had
some bit of Apple kit, I could sign up to Apple television and watch and
rewatch The Slow Horses.But I haven’t,
so I don’t.
What are you looking forward to at St Hilda's?
It must be nearly a decade since I was at a St Hilda’s
crime weekend and I have the happiest memories of nearly twenty years of such
weekends, which I always enjoyed.I like
the time given to the speakers’ papers and the way no one at St Hilda’s is
selling themselves or their books.Instead,
they are all sharing their love of the genre and their knowledge of its most
fascinating byways.
Vengeance in Mind by N J Cooper (Simon
& Schuster)
Sir Dan Blackwater, well known
businessman and philanthropist is found dead one morning in his home on the
Isle of Wight. Pinned to the kitchen table with butcher's knives, he has been
castrated in what looks like a gruesome act of revenge.
The only other person on the scene is his own PA, Sheena. But when DCI Charlie
Trench brings her in for questioning, he discovers that she can't remember a
thing about the events of last night - the shock seems to have caused her to
lose her memory.
Unsure whether to believe Sheena's story, Trench calls in forensic psychologist
Karen Taylor to help unblock Sheena's memory. But as Karen begins her
investigation, she will discover there is much more to the Blackwaters than
ever met the public eye. And as she lifts the lid on a truly scandalous
history, she will put herself in more danger than she could possibly imagine.
Information as to how to buy online tickets can be found here.
I
was fascinated to read the recent buzz about Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s switch
from historical fiction to contemporary crime. The move seems to have been an astute
one, with rumours of 20-way screen-rights bidding wars already abounding
– (is ‘fascinated’ the right word, you may be asking – but it is, honestly, no
jealousy at all, zero, zilch).
The
news made me think of the fluid lines that separate crime and historical
fiction. Authors seem to move from one to the other quite regularly – Anna
Mazzola has recently switched from historical to legal thrillers, and some guy
called Shakespeare even made the move, dumping his history cycle to plunge into
the contemporary world of Elizabethan mores in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
My
own – marginally less-heralded – switch came in 2022, when I published a Victorian-set
novel called The Plant Hunter, after writing a series of five contemporary
crime books. The change was less discombobulating than I had imagined. My crime
novels, the Spike Sanguinetti series, are set in present-day Gibraltar. I did
not grow up on the Rock myself, but had passed through there one summer, and been
intrigued by the fact that so many of the names on the shop doors were of
Italian rather than Spanish or British extraction. I dug into this anomaly on
my return home, and discovered that the majority of Gibraltarians can trace
their ancestry back to Genoese migrants who settled on the Rock during the period
of the Napoleonic Wars. Deciding that Gibraltar might make for an unusual and unexplored
crime setting, I hopped on the cheapest EasyJet and booked myself into a B&B
in the heart of the old town. Wandering around the narrow streets with a notebook
and disposable camera, I tried to imagine my way into the life of a local Gibraltarian.
Where had I been born? Where had I gone to school? Where did my friends and family
live? Slowly, I built up the texture of Spike Sanguinetti’s life, and Shadow
of the Rock, the first book in the series, came into being.
The
process of imagining my way into the world of Victorian London and China (for The
Plant Hunter), and more recently of Restoration-era London and Essex (for my
new book, The Saffron Thief) was remarkably similar. The only difference
was that I couldn’t physically walk the locations, so had to take books and
maps as my guide (the work of the late lamented Liza Picard was particularly useful).
It seemed that crime and historical settings were in fact close cousins.
But
similarities also lead to dangers. In both cases, I took a tumble into the same
pitfall. With the crime series, I was so immersed in Gibraltar and its ways
that I overlooked the need for a well-worked and compelling plot. As a result,
my first attempt at a novel set in Gibraltar (titled The Hollow Mountain)
found me an agent, but not a publisher. People seemed to enjoy the start of the
book, and its setting, but then the grip on the reader began to recede. I had
fallen so much in love with the setting, it seemed, that I had overlooked the
need to make the mechanics of the book work. I had to scrap that novel, and
start again, spending all my time on plot, safe in the knowledge that I had learnt
enough about the setting to let it seep out as I wrote. The result, several
years later, was Shadow of the Rock, and I was back in business.
I
swore to myself that I would not make the same mistake when it came to historical
fiction – but I did. Before starting The Plant Hunter, I reread reams of
Dickens, and gorged myself on contemporary accounts of 19th-century
China (Sir Robert Hart’s journals were particularly useful). I then began to
write the book in dense Victorian vernacular, painstakingly crafting each
sentence to sound appropriate to the era. It was a monster effort, and I was sure
that readers would find themselves astonished by the act of ventriloquism. They
weren’t. In fact, I soon found myself without both agent and publisher.
In
the end, I had to scrap that first historical book too, and start afresh, focusing
on plot and character, and hoping – once again – that my research would
percolate through while I was telling the story. In the end, the new,
better-plotted version seemed to work (minus the cod Victorian language), and
my writing career was back on track.
So
– conclusions about the switch between the two genres, the leap from CWA to
HWA, if you will. The similarities between the two genres make the move
appealing, and eminently doable. But beware becoming so immersed in setting –
be that a physical one in contemporary crime, or a temporal one in historical
fiction – that you overlook the key truth. Readers quickly take wherever or
whenever a book is set for granted and start to look for something more than
that – strong writing, well-developed characters and page-turning plotting
being foremost among them.
The Saffron Thief (HarperCollins
Publisher) Out Now
In
1666, England's saffron industry is booming, with the spice fetching a
staggering £4 per pound—rivalling gold. Fabian Smith, the sensible second son
of a Holborn poulterer, has sacrificed his dreams of adventure for family duty.
But when the Great Fire claims his father and his reckless brother plunges them
into debt with a ruthless conman, their home—and freedom—hang in the balance. Desperate
to save his family, Fabian hatches a daring plan: steal the fortune they need.
His target? The wealthiest saffron grower in Saffron Walden. Disguised and
determined, he arrives just in time for the harvest, only to discover that the
townsfolk are far more cunning than he expected. As danger closes in, Fabian
must navigate treachery and his own heart, racing against time to save
everything he holds dear.
More
information about Thomas and his books can be found on his website. He can also be found on
Instagram @tlmogford on X @ThomasMogford
Shots
Magazine recalls Sarah Water’s being awarded the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger
by the Crime Writers Association in 2002. The award announcement was made at a
reception at the Crime in Store bookshop in Store Street, Covent Garden in
London, on Wednesday 30th October 2002.
The
book was also short-listed for the Man Booker Award. The Ellis Peters judges
described it as a dark and subtle novel. It is set in Victorian England and,
the judges say, creates a stunning atmosphere of wickedness and fear. "Scene after scene brilliantly brings
to life the period and the characters involved in a cunning scheme to defraud
an heiress."
Chairman
of the judges, Susanna Yager, said: "Fingersmith
announced itself as the winner as soon as we read it. It is an outstanding book
in any category."
Sarah
Waters said, "It is wonderful to
have won. My passion for historical fiction was what got me writing in the
first place."
The
Historical Dagger Award was sponsored by Publishers Headline, Little Brown and
the estate of Ellis Peters [the pen name of Edith Pargeter].
Following
the announcement in October, it was formerly presented to Sarah Waters at the CWA The Macallan
Awards Lunch in London on 7 November 2002 at The Brewery, in Chiswell Street, East
London.
Click
Here for photos
and short report from 2002 [because the Internet never forgets its History].
Incidentally,
it was in 2002, that the Crime Writers Association in partnership with Ian
Fleming Publications awarded the inaugural Steel Dagger to John
Creed for best thriller for The
Sirius Crossing [the pen name for Eoin McNamee] – More
information about John Creed / Eoin McNamee CLICK HERE.
Sarah: I’m a little bit tired. We had an early start and then a long
time at the airport but it’s very nice to be here. I’ve never been at the Celsius
232 festival before.
John:Do you speak any languages?
Sarah (laughing): Not really apart from a smattering of French and a bit
of German. I’ve been practicing Spanish a little bit on Duolingo but only for
about a week……I can say I want an ice-cream…..
.......................Laughter..................
John:Oh, but in this heat that’s a very
important thing to be able to say!
Sarah: I agree.
John:Can we talk about your origins. I know you're Welsh, but you were
brought up in Middlesbrough
Sarah: I lived in Middlesbrough for a few years. Originally my Father
worked near Milford Haven in a big oil refinery [in South Wales] and my Dad got
a job when I was about 8 up to another Refinery Area in the North-East - so we
moved to Middleborough; But we returned to Pembrokeshire [South Wales] - so I
had this weird 5 years in the middle, in the North East of England.
John:Were you a good student at school?
Sarah: I was, I’m afraid. I was a bit of a swot! I think many writers
start off like that.
John: I've read that you wanted to be an archaeologist.
Sarah: Oh yeah I did!
John:But it wasn’t an Indiana Jones influence?
Sarah: No, this was pre- Indiana Jones. I think, actually, a big
influence was the Tutankhamun Exhibition which was about 1975, not that I went,
because it was in London and we were in Pembrokeshire, but it was everywhere in
the media, wasn't it?
Then I went to Kent to study for a Degree in English and American
Literature. I finished that wanting to do more study [this was in the days when
you could get academic grants], so I continued my studies, completing an M.A and
then moved to London. I still had a hankering towards academia, so after a
couple of years I went back and did a PhD in London.
John:When you were younger I guess you read a lot?
Sarah: Yes, I did, I did. We weren’t really a bookish family in the
sense that we didn’t have books knocking around the house. I remember very
fondly that my dad would take me to the library. I read what seemed to me to be
a lot. We used to watch a lot of telly as well, which I’m still very fond of.
Yeah, I remember getting to the age of about 10 and being able to make a
choice… that wonderful thing of making your own choices about what you want to
read. The school classroom had its own little library. I found some great
books.
John:Are there any books you read that stand out in your memory?
Sarah: There’s one I
talked about quite recently briefly on the radio. It was The White Mountains by John Christopher,
which was the tripods. Did you ever read that?
John:Yes, I did. At school!
Sarah: I only ever read the first one though I’ve read the others since
in the trilogy, and God, it was terrific! Just that whole kind of… it starts
off like a historical novel but then you realize it’s in the future and that
just really captivated me. And I read lots of ghost stories and horror stories.
And Doctor Who books. So I was always into gothic from an early age.
John:Ghost stories and horror stories? That’s the sort of thing I like to
talk about! When you say horror, are we talking about the Herbert Van
Thal books?
Sarah: Yes!! …….laughter…… In fact I’ve been ordering
them up again recently to revisit them. They’re a real mixed bag. There are
some really dreadful stories and some really, quite misogynistic stories but
they are all mixed up with some real classics by people like Ray Bradbury and
Angus Wilson. You know “Raspberry Jam”,
do you remember that? That onereally
stuck in my mind. So they’re an interesting thing to revisit. And those covers!
Some of those covers, I still feel a sort of slightly child’s thrill…
John:The head…
Sarah: The head in the bucket!
John:The hand with the eye in the middle!
Sarah: And also there was one which is like a face in a muddy field.
It’s like a corpse’s face…
John:…coming out of the ground.
Sarah: Yes. In fact, I’ve got that in my study. I have to have it with
its cover down because it still bothers me the way it bothered me as a child.
Even though I loved reading them.
John:And ghost stories? I suppose M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and others
of that ilk?
Sarah: Yes, but I don’t know that I was encountering them much at that
age. They were like children’s anthologies of ghost stories that I was reading.
Sarah: Yeah, Mary
Danby! So, I loved those and it was also the time of… did you ever get “The
Unexplained” magazine? That was from when I was a young teen…
John:I don’t think I did actually.
Sarah: God, I loved that magazine so much. –and I believed every word in
it. And I was reading the Erich Von Daniken
books, you know, Chariots of The Gods, when I was about 14 and believed every
word (laughter).
John:And Super Nature by Lyall Watson…
Sarah: Yeah. I didn’t actually read that one, though. But I’ve never
lost my enthusiasm for that kind of thing.
John:And what else? I read that other influences include the likes of
Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Shelley, and the Brontes. Do you revisit the old
classics?
Sarah: Yes, I do actually. And there are some Dickens, even though I’m
such a fan - I only recently read [for the first time], A Tale of Two Cities,
which is great!
John:
It is a good book though I read it a long time ago in the late 80s. While it’s
hardly original to say, Great Expectations is the one that I have always loved.
I think it’s because it was the first Dickens I read.
Sarah: It is wonderful though, isn’t it? I reread Bleak House recently
and that’s amazing. You can’t beat Dickens, really.
John:Can you tell me what the London North Writer’s Circle is/was? And does
it still exist?
Sarah: It was a writing
group. This was just as I was about to get published. And I think writers
groups, like book groups in which I’dalso been for a long time, they weren’t as common then as they are now.
So it was somebody… actually, I’ll tell you who it was, it was Charles Palliser.
He wrote a book called The Quincunx;
that was his big book in about 1988, 1989. I went to an event he did. I said I
was writing and hoping to get published and he said he’d just left this book
group so I joined it. I wasn’t there for very long but it was interesting. We
shared our work and commented on each other’s.
Sarah: You’ve got to read it. It’s a lesbian classic. Or is it a trans
classic? Because that’s an interesting thing. It’s a really, really interesting
book written in 1928 and just talks very, very frankly about a woman who grows
up feeling different, masculine, attracted to other women and the trials and
difficulties she faces. So it’s incredibly honest and a bit earnest. I mean
Radclyffe wasn’t the greatest writer in the world and she was so determined to
make this book like a bit of a crusade and it’s terribly earnest but it’s
really very, very moving.
John:Back around 2002 I was introduced by my sister Jean to a book called Fingersmith, which
she gave to me and told me I was going to love it. And I did! I thought it was
marvelous. Unfortunately I lent it to someone else and never got it back.
Sarah: Ah, never lend a book, it never goes well.
John: But your first book
was Tipping the Velvet. Tell us about
that for new readers not so familiar with your work.
Sarah: Well, its set in the 1890s about an oyster girl in Whitstable,
Kent who sees a music hall artiste, Kitty Butler, a male impersonator, falls in
love with her and joins her act. She gets her heart broken, lives a bit of a
rackety life in Victorian London and then marries the right girl, well, meets
the right girl in the end. So it’s kind of picaresque.
John:Did you say it was bawdy or am I imagining that?
Sarah: It did get called bawdy quite a lot but I think by today’s
standards, it’s probably quite tame.
…………………Laughter……………….
John: Affinity was next in
1999. That book involves spiritualism. I was going to ask if you were interested
in the subject but I know now that you are.
John:Would you say then that Fingersmith was the book that really put you on
the map?
Sarah: Yeah, that was a
really big year for me because the book got me on a couple of shortlists, the
Orange Prize as it was then and the Man Booker Prize and in the same year Tipping the Velvet had been adapted for
TV so that came out in the same year. Suddenly I was getting a lot more
attention than I had got before. In a nice way!
John: I would hope so! And
you were happy with the Tipping the Velvet TV adaptation?
Sarah: Yes
John:That was with Sally Hawkins, right?
Sarah: It was! She was unknown then. It was one of her first roles. She
just had a minor role, actually. Rachael Stirling had the main role.
John:I would like to see it but it hasn’t been on Spanish TV to my
knowledge.
Sarah: It’s very creaky looking back at it now. Even Fingersmith, which
is the one where Sally Hawkins had the main role, I was always very fond of
that, but even that looks very slow now. It’s amazing how quickly styles of
storytelling change on TV.
John: Ok, The Night Watch, 2006. Set in the 1940s, a tale of loss and
betrayal.
Sarah: Yes, against the backdrop of The Blitz
John: Was that adapted for TV?
Sarah: Yeah, it was actually. The BBC did that in 2011. It was a
one-parter, a 90-minute adaptation. That was ok. It had some great moments. It
had Anna Maxwell Martin in it who was great. Claire Foy too.
John:The Little Stranger was next in 2009. I first came across it in an
English text book for students who are preparing for Cambridge English exams.
Sarah: Oh really??
John:They had a snippet from the book followed by questions.
Sarah: What did they ask, I wonder? Was it just comprehension questions?
John:
That’s right. I was looking for the book yesterday but I couldn’t find it.
Cambridge change the books fairly often.
Sarah: A pity.
John:
Anyway, it’s a ghost story…
Sarah: A poltergeist, actually. I loved writing that book. I really felt
like I was reconnecting with my childhood interest in ghosts and such.
John:Ok. The Paying Guests in 2014.
Sarah: A long time ago! That’s my last book. It’s 12 years ago.
John:Time flies…
Sarah: I know! It speeds up as you get older, doesn’t it?
John:It sure does!
John: During the pandemic, during lockdown, did you say, ¨Oh. I’m going to
write a book!”?
…….Laughter…..
Sarah: The thing is, lockdown didn’t make that much difference to me.
John:Well, you couldn’t go out.
Sarah: No, but I was still working away at home just as usual and in
some ways it was a release that I didn’t have to go out but that was when I was
working on this book that I went on to abandon.
John:Do you want to talk about that or are you not really happy to?
Sarah: I’m happy to talk about it. It was just… it was another slightly
Gothic story set in the early 1950s. You know, I think I made some very basic
wrong decisions about who was telling the story, so I might go back to it and
look at it from a different angle. I don’t know about that but maybe…
John:Going back to The Paying Guests, it was set in the 1920s and there is a
lesbian relationship which is the backdrop to a murder investigation.
Sarah: Yes, there is. I’ll tell you writing that gave me a whole new
respect for crime writers, because suddenly I had to juggle, I had to think
about, the moment that a police inspector walks in and starts looking around. I
had to just be thinking about the jeopardy, you know, it was really interesting
about what he knew, what they knewhe didn’t know, what he might find out next,
you know? The sort of things that you always have in a novel, really but just
much more intense in a crime story.
John:
Did you plot it out very carefully or did you follow the muse?
Sarah: No, all of them I have to plot out quite carefully because they
are often fairly complicated plots. I want to know where I’m going when, I
start.
John: I heard you were invited into The Royal Society of Literature in 2009
which is an extraordinary honour.
Sarah: Yes and I was actually made a
fellow…….you get to sign your name in a big book using… [when I did it]….. you
had a choice of using Byron’s pen or Charles Dickens’s quill pen.
John:Wow, really?
Sarah: Yes, so I chose Dickens, obviously, and the person in front of me
used it …..however….. it collapsed in their hand.
John:What? No!
Sarah: It just collapsed so I had to use Byron’s. So I said, well, can I
at least hold it? So I held this broken pen of Dickens’s.
John:Oh, that’s sad
Sarah: They’ve got a whole range. They’ve got a Jean Rhys pen, a George
Eliot pen…
John:Interesting
Sarah: Yeah but it just means that … well, it’s quite a nice,
prestigious thing, I suppose and also sometimes they appeal to fellows for
support in campaigns or to do stuff for them.
John:
And to cap it all an OBE in 2019.
Sarah: Oh God, yeah…
John:You went to Buckingham Palace, did you meet the Queen?
Sarah: It wasn’t the Queen, it was Prince William. My parents came and
they loved it so that was nice.
Sarah: Were they all crime titles or were they a range of novels?
John:They weren’t all crime, no.
Sarah: Isn’t that interesting? Of course, we do live in a world where
women are being killed all the time so in some ways in just kind of reflects
life and the dangers of being a woman. I haven´t read the article, I’ve just
seen the headline but I suspect what has changed, I know what has changed in
like dramas, for example is that it’s dealt with slightly differently now, you
know from the feminist perspective, post Me
Too, quite rightly or there’s not that lingering attention on the
perpetrators as much as there used to be. I suspect something is definitely
shifting in the way that we tell stories about the murders of women but I was
surprised that that was still a dominant part of modern fiction.
John:I often ask people I meet if they are reading a book or if they have
one to recommend.
Sarah: I am currently
reading a book of short stories called Salt
Slow by Julia Armfield who wrote a book a few years ago called Our Wives UnderThe Sea, which is a slightly sci-fi story and she’s a really great
young writer, I think. It’s very gothic and it’s sort of women’s bodies and
strange things happening to women’s bodies but in a quite empowering sort of
way. So I’m enjoying them very much.
John: Are you a music lover?
Sarah: Do you know what? I feel terrible saying this because it sounds
so philistine but I don’t really listen to music for itself.
John:It’s just on?
Sarah: Yes, it’s just on and sometimes it can be just cheesy pop. I love
the way… you know, if I listen to Greatest Hits radio which has a lot of 80s
and 90s, I just love the way a pop song , and it can be the cheesiest pop song
in the worldfrom some point in your
youth, can set off this extraordinaryintensity of feeling. I love that about pop music.
John:Can you remember the first record you bought?
Sarah: Yes, it was Hit Me With
Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury.
John: Love it! Even my mother loved that!
Sarah. Oh, my mother loved it too!
……………Laughter……
John: A film?
Sarah: A film. Oh, I just watched Marty Supreme. I know it’s a bit late.….Sarah sees John frown.... smiling…..Didn’t you like it? Oh my God, I loved it!
Why didn’t you like it?
John:Marty really got on my nerves.
Sarah: He did? Actually, my partner was a bit like that. Lucy. We
watched it together and she just wanted to give him a bit of a slap but I just
totally went with it and just believed in him.
John:It does have its good moments like the “bath” scene.
……………Laughter………….
Sarah: I liked the energy of it and it actually really cheered me up
because I think we live in such a politically awful time and then there’s
climate change and everything. Art and Literature can be a bit po-faced at the
moment but this had such great energy. Oh, I also watched Sinners which also
had this extravagance, like maximalist and I thought that was really heartening
somehow, just the fact that there is still this creative energy around and
people are prepared to just really go for it. We need something like that, you
know, just like throw everything at it but in a very controlled kind of way. I
thought it was brilliant.
John:I have to agree. I loved Sinners.
Sarah: Yah! We Agree!
John:Well, that was a potted history of you, Sarah!
Sarah: Yes, it was like a whistle-stop tour of my whole career
Vaseem Khan is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India, and the Q Mysteries, beginning with Quantum of Menace, the first in a murder mystery series featuring Q from the James Bond franchise. In 2026 it was shortlisted for Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.
His debut, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published 2015-2020, and is translated into 17 languages. In 2017 The Perplexing Theft ofthe Jewel in the Crown won the Shamus Award for the Best Original Private Investigator Paperback. Vaseem Khan was awarded the 2018 Eastern Eye ACTA (Arts, Culture, Theatre Award) for Literature.
In 2021, Midnight at Malabar House, the first in the Malabar House novels set in 1950s Bombay, and introducing India’s first female police detective, won the CWA Historical Dagger. The fifth novel in the series City of Destruction won the Fingerprint Award.
Vaseem is a former Chair of the Crime Writers Association and also co-hosts the popular crime fiction podcast, Murder Junction. When he’s not writing, he works at University College London’s Dept of Security and Crime Science
Current book? (This can either be the current book that you are reading or writing or both)
I’m currently putting the final proof edits to The Man with the Golden Compass, the second in the Q mysteries, featuring Q from the Bond franchise, out in October 2026. Fresh from successfully reinvestigating his childhood friend's mysterious death, Q is hired as a civilian contractor by the police in his sleepy hometown to look into the unsolved murder of tech millionaire turned online antique dealer, Lawrence Noble. Noble was tortured and killed, a circular object made of gold and inscribed with mysterious runes found in his pocket… And, yes, Commander James Bond gets to make an appearance in the novel. These books are essentially Q playing amateur detective in a small English town. The first, Quantum of Menace, was shortlisted for two major awards.
Why do you think anti-heroes are so interesting to readers
No one likes a smarmy nice guy, always following the rules and being a goody two-shoes. I’d rather have some maverick who doesn’t mind punching some old lady in the face if that’s what it takes to get the job done. Anti-heroes have a magical quality of cool about them; they’re magnetic and unpredictable, which means you never know what to expect. Isn’t that what we want from fiction?
Which two anti-heroes or enemies would you invite to dinner and why?
I’d love to have Sauron from The Lord of the Rings over – I always thought he was misunderstood and just needed an arm around the shoulder and a friendly ear – if Gandalf had been more sympathetic there would have been no war for Middle Earth. And I’d also have Lady Macbeth over. Everyone’s always ‘oh, but it was Lady M’s fault’. As far as I’m concerned Macbeth was a grown-ass man who could have said no. Mrs Macbeth was just ambitious. Nothing wrong with that.
How do you relax?
Relax??? What’s that? I think I last relaxed in 1987 when I ran my bicycle into a lamppost and banged my head and was knocked out for a while… I play a lot of cricket which is supposed to be relaxing, but when some snotty sixteen-year-old is bowling very fast with a very hard cricket ball at your head it doesn’t seem that chilled out.
Which anti hero would you like to be on your side in a difficult situation.
Dirty Harry as played by Clint Eastwood. I mean who’s going to mess with a man holding a gun bigger than most rocket launchers?
If you were to write a book involving an anti-hero where would you set it and why?
I already did! The Malabar House novels are set in 1950s India, just after Indian independence, and feature India’s first and only female police detective, Inspector Persis Wadia, working with English criminalist, Archie Blackfinch. Persis doesn’t mind breaking the rules – because it’s the only way to prove that she’s as good as any man on the force. In the latest, The Edge of Darkness, she is banished from Bombay to the northeastern jungles of India, a place called the Naga Hills, where headhunting tribals continue to operate. When she discovers the headless corpse of the local governor inside a locked room at the Hotel Victoria, she is tasked to investigate before the region explodes in all out political war… These books are for those who enjoy award-winning historical mysteries.
How would you describe your latest published book?
The Girl in Cell A came out in paperback recently with a beautiful new cover. This is my first psychological thriller, set in small town America. Orianna is sent to prison aged 17 for the murder of the heir to the wealthy Wyclerc mining dynasty. She claims she cannot remember what happened. The book is told by two narrators: Orianna’s therapist in prison, trying to open the black box of her memories, and Orianna herself, eighteen years later, having served her prison term, returning to her forested home town to investigate. It’s a murder mystery, a big family saga, with unreliable narrators, small town secrets, and lots of shocking twists and turns. Check it out!
With Bad Apples: crime fiction’s enemies and anti-heroes theme at St Hilda's this year, who are you three favourite anti-heroes:
Lisbeth Salander – I love The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I really wouldn’t want Lisbeth as an enemy. Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon - I wish I could be as effortlessly cool as Humphrey Bogart in the film. Dr Hannibal Lecter - OK, so I know he occasionally murders people and eats their livers BUT… he’s witty, urbane and intelligent and only kills people who are rude, which I think is fair.
Which 3 films or television series featuring anti-heroes would you rewatch and why.
The Silence of the Lambs
A Fistful of Dollars
The Godfather
What are you looking forward to at St Hilda's?
The enormous lunches at the big knob table or whatever it’s called. Oh, and attending some really great sessions at the festival, of course!
The Girl in Cell A by Vaseem Khan (Hodder and Stoughton)
The world knows her as the girl in cell A. Convicted of murder at seventeen, infamous killer and true crime celebrity orianna negi has always maintained her innocence. But if she didn't kill Gideon Wyclerc... Orianna has a blind spot over that fateful day: she can't remember what happened. Forensic psychologist Annie Ledet is tasked with unlocking the truth. ....Then who did? Orianna grew up in eden falls, ruled by the insular Wyclerc dynasty and its ruthless patriarch , Amos. As their sessions progress, Annie reaches into Orianna's past to a shattering realisation. ... Scandal. Sex. Power. Race. And murder. Between guilt and innocence lies a fallen eden.
Information on how to buy online tickets can be found here. The programme can be found here.
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