Authenticity in fiction is tricky. That has been perhaps my biggest takeaway from the transition between non-fiction polemic and legal thriller. When I first started sketching my idea for The Cut Throat Trial, I identified authenticity as my lodestar. I wanted to show readers the criminal justice system as it really is, through the eyes of the people directly involved, rather than as a Hollywood screenwriter or tabloid editor imagines it to be. There is so much truth about the human condition played out in our criminal courts each day that tacking closely to reality would, I figured, create a far more gripping story and compelling cast of characters than anything I could invent. More truth in fiction than non-fiction, and all that.
I wanted readers to be able to breathe in the sticky, airless hum of our dilapidated court buildings. To feel the gentle buzz of the robing room, as egomaniacal barristers who, moments ago, were tearing chunks out of each other in court, take off their wigs and laugh uproariously. To reach out and touch the tension that mounts as an untruthful witness is led, by a series of carefully calibrated questions, to the climax of a cross-examination in which the implausibility of their evidence is laid bare. And to be exposed to perhaps the most enticing and fascinating dimension: the complexity. Not of the law, but of the people; contrary to popular renderings, this is not a world of heroes and villains, neatly divided into opposing camps. Every facet of human life and behaviour, every outward emotion and hidden motivation, runs through the heart of the cases that come before the courts, and extracting an easily-identifiable truth is all-but-impossible.
A better laboratory for a thrilling novel you would struggle to find. And it would be easy, surely? This, after all, is literally my life as a criminal barrister. Up to 70 hours a week. This should, I smugly told myself as I leaned back at my desk to take a swig of tepid mint tea, write itself.
Well.
Reality swiftly, unwelcomely, kicked down the door and entered the party. Because while criminal justice is, for all of those reasons above, utterly gripping, the trial process can be – as any juror will testify – tooth-bendingly dull. Parts of that – the delay, the frustrations at the inefficiency of the system – I wanted to capture. But I absolutely didn’t intend for readers to actually feel like jurors in a waiting room, hanging around listlessly for hours just waiting for something to happen. Even inside the courtroom, even in a murder trial where everybody is pointing the finger at each other, there are elements – the legal arguments, the dense science, the playing of hours of mostly-uneventful CCTV, the hundreds of pages of documentary evidence – which are less than exhilarating. My first draft actually encompassed many of these. I opted to include transcripts, tables and charts, legal documents – every hallmark of a genuine trial. And, it’s probably fair to say, the book was in parts unreadable. Necessary as they may be in the real world, they did not, I had to concede, need trouble a reader hoping to be entertained.
The characters posed a different, but equally unhappy, problem. The temptation not simply to base characters on the people I have met, but to incorporate them fully-formed, was, in the planning stages, almost impossible to resist. But they are so real and interesting! I kept grumbling to myself as I scrubbed out another lifted line of dialogue, conscious that, as much as anything, easily recognisable characters pose a fatal risk to an anonymous author’s anonymity. Eventually, after much reworking, I managed to forge what I hope are convincing and compelling amalgams, blends of multiple people I have encountered with a liberal lashing of fantasy.
But striking that balance has taken time. More than I, in my naivety, had appreciated. Writing about what you know is not, it turns out, easy.
So what I am left with – what now stands as my debut foray into fiction – is, I hope, realistic and authentic, even with my concessions to artistic licence. My modified rule has become not to remorselessly replicate reality, but to allow myself anything that would not cause me, as a reader, to ruin my partner’s evening by superciliously explaining How Very Wrong This All Is.
It's still a high bar. But I hope I have just about cleared it. If not, I’m sure I will hear about it in the robing room…
The Cut Throat Trial by S. J. Fleet aka The Secret Barrister will be published on 28 August 2025 (Picador) in hardback, ebook and audio.
It is one of the biggest trials of the year. Three seventeen-year-old boys are accused of the brutal murder of an elderly teacher on New Year's Eve. Each boy denies it. Each points the finger at the other two. But they can’t all be innocent. The three defence barristers have only one job: to persuade the jury that their client is not guilty. But they’re up against a prosecutor who needs to win the case, no matter the cost. Because when the game is murder, the competition is deadly.
My first published fiction was a short story. ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ won a competition at a seminar organised by a writers’ circle, and was duly published in a national magazine, and then in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the US. After that, there was no stopping me. Although my next published work was my debut novel, All the Lonely People, I’ve kept writing short stories, as well as editing anthologies of short crime fiction. I don’t keep count, but the tally at the moment is about seventy stories and forty collections, so you could certainly say that I’m as committed to the short form as I am to the novel.
Where did this love of the short story come from? It goes back a long way, that’s for sure. I can remember asking for, and being given as a Christmas present, a Crime Writers’ Association anthology when I was about thirteen. That book contained stories by great names of the genre such as John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin, and it fired my imagination. So did an anthology of ‘tales of terror’ edited by Crispin, which includes one of my all-time favourite short stories, the wonderfully haunting and enigmatic ‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Later, as I began to write fiction for publication, I found the short story liberating. You can do almost anything with it. ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ was an unorthodox type of mystery, and from time to time I’ve tried further experiments with the form. So ‘An Index’ is a crime story which takes the form of a short extract from an index to a book. ‘Acknowledgments’, which won the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham Prize, is a skit on those sections in books where the author acknowledges help received. For an American anthology with a Sherlock Holmes theme, I wrote ‘The Observance of Trifles’, a story in the form of a blog post, and accompanying comments.
Even if you’re not in the mood to push the boundaries in structural terms, the short form offers endless possibilities of subject, theme, and mood. There are ideas which, to my mind, suit a short story but not a novel. One day I went for a test drive in a car. The chatter of the showroom salesman gave me the idea for a story, but it was clear from the outset that it would only make a short piece, rather than a novel. The result was ‘Test Drive’, which was shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger. Occasionally, I read novels which seem to me to be just expanded short stories; an example I came across the other day is Miles Tripp’s A Man Without Friends, published in 1970, which contains a brilliant central idea connected with the vagaries of justice, but not quite enough (in my opinion, anyway) for a truly satisfactory full-length book.
A particular setting often inspires me to write a short story. Typically, a trip on holiday or to a festival (in pre-pandemic days, of course!) might introduce me to an interesting location that I’d like to write about. Not knowing the place in depth, I wouldn’t want to produce a novel with that setting. Maintaining authenticity for, say, five thousand words is much easier than in a book of ninety thousand words. So I’ve written stories set in places as varied as Hartlepool (‘Lucky Liam’) and Hawaii (‘Catch of the Day’). Wandering the darkened streets of Venice one night, I lingered in front of a shop window and a rather macabre thought sprang to mind. The upshot was a story called ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’, which won the CWA Short Story Dagger, and represented a real breakthrough in my crime writing career. And when I was hired to give a series of lectures about crime fiction to passengers on the Queen Mary 2, I read about the history of the ship while on board. This gave me the idea of writing a story set on the original Queen Mary: the eventual result was ‘The Locked Cabin’.
‘The Locked Cabin’ wasn’t an easy story to write. I began with the idea of a crime taking place on the ship, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I left it for a while, and then started thinking about the possibility of writing a short ‘locked room mystery’. The two ideas coalesced, and I was able to start work on it in earnest.
Something of the same kind happened after I visited Bletchley Park. I had an idea for a story about war-time code breakers, but somehow it didn’t come to life, so again I left it to simmer. Months later, I visited Jersey to give some talks about writing. Whilst on the island, I visited Gorey on a lovely sunny day, and thought that I’d like to use the resort as a setting. I came up with a way of combining this backdrop with the code breaking story. The result was ‘The Sound of Secrecy’.
There’s something else you can do with a short story. You can treat it as a professional exercise. When I first dreamed up the idea for the novel that became Gallows Court, I was very taken with it. The concept involved an extremely ruthless and fabulously rich young woman called Rachel Savernake, who arrives in London in 1930, and becomes involved in a series of bizarre murder mysteries. My thinking was that I’d try something fresh as a novelist, writing a book very different from my other work: an attempt to ‘break out’, so to speak. It was bound to be a gamble, especially given that I didn’t know how the novel would develop. So I decided to write a short story featuring Rachel, to see if I enjoyed writing about her and if I felt I could ‘soak’ myself in this rather unusual character for a year or two. I wrote the story, and found that I loved writing about Rachel. This encouraged me to crack on with the novel. One thing led to another, and the Rachel books have become my most successful novels. I never tried to publish the short story – it was simple a trial run, a way of acclimatising myself to a new type of crime writing. But I have recently written a story which features Jacob Flint, another key character in the series, although Rachel does not appear.
As a reader, I love a short story that has something special about it. Preferably an ingredient that would be difficult or impossible to replicate in a novel. So my favourite short story is Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. In the crime genre, you can’t go far wrong with the likes of the Jackson’s fellow American Fredric Brown or, in Britain, three authors who contributed to several of my anthologies: Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, and Peter Lovesey. Among contemporary writers, the American Art Taylor has won many awards and is a master of the form.
These days, we’re also frequently told that we live in an age of shortening attention spans. If that is true, then it’s one more good reason to relish short stories. They may not take long to read, but the best examples give lasting pleasure.
And Then There Were More Edited by Martin Edwards (Flame Tree Publishing) Out 23 August 2025
A CWA anthology celebrating members' fiction from over the years, Then There Were More is a delightful compilation of stories from some of the best crime writers of the last century. The first CWA anthology, Butcher’s Dozen, appeared in 1956, and was co-edited by Julian Symons, Michael Gilbert, and Josephine Bell. The anthology has been edited by Martin Edwards since 1996, and has yielded many award-winning and nominated stories in the UK and overseas. Founded over 70 years ago by John Creasey, the Crime Writers’ Association supports, promotes and celebrates this most durable, adaptable and successful of genres, while supporting writers of every kind of crime fiction and non-fiction. The full list of featured authors in this book is: Anne Perry, Christine Poulson, Andrew Taylor, Amy Myers, Judith Cutler, Gillian Linscott, Martin Edwards, Bernie Crosthwaite, Catherine Aird, Simon Brett, Yvonne Eve Walus, John Harvey, Kate Ellis, Zoe Sharp, Bill Knox, Cath Staincliffe, Liza Cody, Ann Cleeves, and Peter Lovesey.
More information about Martin Edwards can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook, at X @medwardsbooks and on Instagram @medwardsbooks. You can also sign up to his newsletter on his website. Information about the CWA can be found here and the Crime Readers can be found here.
I still remember the moment my agent said she could imagine me writing a thriller. I’d written uplifting book-club fiction and family dramas before, but she was spot on; I did harbour a secret desire to tap into my dark side.
Despite her recognising this, I have never thought of myself as having an easily detectable dark side. I am fortunate to have been born an optimist, but my extroversion and outward confidence belie an anxiety which is sometimes hard to manage. You’d think that would stop me from wanting to explore the more tense and scary aspects of this danger-riddled world, but no. I believe my anxious nature is partly what compels me to write psychological thrillers. Here’s why…
During anxious spells, my mind creates reels of worst case scenarios and plays them like films in my head. I can see terrible things happening on my internal screen and, irrationally, my brain tells me that visualising a nightmare situation will stop it from happening. It’s my way of risk-assessing then trying to account for, and mitigate, all eventualities. A faulty system, I admit, and therapy helps.
My brain creates the scenes I’m writing in the same way. In my working life, I invent a situation I need to happen, then type out what I see unfolding in my head. Recently, I’ve come to realise that these processes go hand in hand. In my worries, I’m telling myself stories of what could happen. In my writing, I’m doing the same.
If I combine the two, bingo, we have a thriller!
Hard as it is to believe, when I’m drafting, the process from internal film to fingers is not an entirely conscious one. I don’t always know what’s about to come out before the words are typed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a planner (even the idea of pantsing brings me out in hives), so I know where the plot is heading, but what I don’t always know is how it will get there.
A thriller needs red herrings and misdirection on top of the real signposts. Not knowing what these are until they are on the page can be quite the ride in itself. There are a number of scenes in The Woman in Ward 9 that made me shudder as the words appeared on the screen. One in particular made my scalp prickle with fear. It’s dark, and flowed from my fingers without a filter.
But it’s not real. It’s a figment of my anxious mind. What happens in that room on Ward 9 hasn’t happened to me, but I can imagine it vividly and hope that’s transferred onto the page. This is where I think being plagued with anxious thoughts and feelings plays directly into the writer’s hands. I’m an ex-Drama teacher, and used to teach Stanislavski’s technique of emotional memory. This is where the actor uses their true past experiences, a time when they felt a similar emotion, to find the feelings they need to portray in a scene.
The same technique can be applied to writing. You can’t portray an emotion convincingly, unless you have first experienced it. That’s why an anxious person is very well placed to write scary novels. Those feelings are already so near the surface!
Psychology is endlessly fascinating to someone with an unruly brain, and in my thrillers I have the opportunity to explore big questions that trouble many of us. Who can we really trust? Can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever really recover from our past mistakes? What impact does our upbringing have on us?
In fiction, as in life, every decision a character makes will inform what comes next for them. I can make terrible things happen to my characters, or I can solve all their problems and set them free.
But why would I do that? If my writing is an extension of my brain’s attempt to make my world safe by playing out all the scenarios so they won’t happen to me or the people I love, then fictional people have to suffer. And I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s better for people in books to go through hell than me… or you.
The Woman in Ward 9 by Naomi Williams (Headline Publishers) Out Now.
Laura Winters doesn't know why she has lost her memory, or why she was found alone, soaked in someone else's blood. The only thing she is certain of is that I am the only psychologist she can - or will - talk to. I have six days to help Laura unlock her memories and find out the truth. But what has she forgotten - and what is she hiding? And how does she know so much about me? With tension you could cut with a knife and twists that will have your head spinning, The Woman in Ward 9 is sure to keep you reading late into the night.
You can find Naomi on X @LTimoneyWrites. You can also find her onFacebookand onInstagram.
The Australian Crime Writers Association announced the shortlists for the 2025 Ned Kelly Awards for the Best International Crime Fiction, Best True Crime but also Best Crime Fiction.
Best International Crime Fiction Nominees
Return to Blood, by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster UK)
Leave the Girls Behind, by Jacqueline Bublitz (Allen & Unwin)
The Waiting, by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin)
A Case of Matricide, by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Text)
Moscow X, by David McCloskey (Swift Press)
Home Truths, by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
Best True Crime Nominees
They’ll Never Hold Me, by Michael Adams (Affirm Press)
A Thousand Miles from Care, by Steve Johnson (William Collins)
The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop, by Neil Mercer (Allen & Unwin)\
Meadow’s Law, by Quentin McDermott (HarperCollins)
The Lasting Harm, by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (HarperCollins)
Outstanding Crime Fiction from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Long-listed for the 2025 Petrona Award.
Twelve crime novels from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have made the longlist for the 2025 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.
They are:
Dead Island by Samuel Bjørk tr. Charlotte Barslund (Norway, Bantam)
Murder Under the Midnight Sun by Stella Blómkvist tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
The Widows by Pascal Engman tr. Neil Smith (Sweden, Legend Press)
Deliver Me by Malin Persson Giolito tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles (Sweden, Simon & Schuster)
The Dancer by Óskar Guðmundsson tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
Victim by Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger tr. Megan E Turney (Norway, Orenda Books)
Blood Ties by Jo Nesbo tr. Robert Ferguson (Norway, Harvill Secker)
The Sea Cemetery by Aslak Nore tr. Deborah Dawkin (Norway, MacLehose Press)
Shrouded by Sólveig Pálsdóttir tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
The Clues in the Fjord by Satu Rämö tr. Kristian London (Finland, Zaffre)
Ghost Island by Max Seeck tr. Kristian London (Finland, Mountain Leopard Press)
Pursued by Death by Gunnar Staalesen tr. Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda Books)
The longlist contains a mix of newer and more established authors including previous Petrona Award winners Pascal Engman, Malin Persson Giolito, Jørn Lier Horst, and Gunnar Staalesen.
Both large and small publishers are represented on the longlist, with Corylus Books having an impressive three entries. The breakdown by country is Norway (5), Iceland (3), Finland (2) and Sweden (2).
The shortlist will be announced on18 September 2025.
The Petrona Award 2025 judging panel comprises Jackie Farrant, the creator of RAVEN CRIME READS and a bookseller for a major book chain in the UK, Ewa Sherman, translator and writer, and blogger at NORDIC LIGHTHOUSE, and Sonja van der Westhuizen, a book critic for print and online publications in the UK and South Africa, as well as a blogger at WEST WORDS REVIEWS.
The Award administrator is Karen Meek, owner of the EURO CRIME blog and website.
The Petrona team would like to thank their sponsor, David Hicks, for his continuing support of the Petrona Award.
It’s been a signal year
for Stephen King followers as we had the release of his Crime Thriller NEVER
FLINCH featuring Holly Gibney….
…..though the undisputed master of the horror genre,
after this latest release perhaps Stephen King will be anointed the king of
crime fiction. Never Flinch features the return of Private Investigator Holly
Gibney, tasked to bodyguard the controversial feminist speaker Kate McKay. It
seems McKay is being stalked by a deranged brother [and sister] duo from a
radical religious sect intent on disrupting her promotional book tour….
And earlier this year
we were treated to Osgood R. Perkin’s re-working of King’s creepy story THE
MONKEY which has its roots in W.W. Jacob’s 1902 classic The Monkey’s Paw – and last
fall’s remake of the Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot miniseries [which hit British
Cinemas].
But next week sees the
release of The End of the World As We
Know It an original short story anthology based on master storyteller
Stephen King's #1 international bestselling classic The Stand.
Stephen King has fully
authorised a return to the harrowing world of The Stand through this original short story anthology as presented
by award-winning authors and editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene.
Contributors Tim Lebbon
and V Castro are delighted to be sharing their stories at the official UK
launch, in conversation with Sarah Maria Griffin on Tuesday 19 August at
Forbidden Planet London Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue London WC2H 8JR – the
signing starts at 1730 hours – for more details and tickets – Click HERE
More information about
the UK Launch next week Click HERE
and more about Stephen King’s work Click HERE
Shots Magazine would
like to thank Kallie Townsend or Hodder & Stoughton UK for information
about the UK launch.
....And from Horror Author and Co-Editor of The End of the World As We Know It - here's Brian Keene.....
“I get the willies when I see closed doors,” says Bob Slocum, narrator of Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened. Of course it’s not really the doors that frighten Bob; it’s what they represent. It’s the idea of something secret going on in another room. The closed door symbolises Bob’s paranoia; his pathological fear of secrets and betrayal that will set him off on a path toward madness. The closed door—that single, seemingly innocuous image—takes us to the heart of the character’s psyche, and the root of his fear.
Now, Joseph Heller is perhaps an unlikely reference point for a piece about a vintage-style whodunit, but I mention him here for a reason. You see, I’ve written a series of Golden Age-inspired mysteries which are built around my great fascination with the recurring motif of the locked-room mystery. For the uninitiated, the locked-room mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction dealing with so-called impossible crimes; typically murders with an air of something supernatural about them, as though the criminal possessed otherworldly powers. Inevitably, though, the solution to the mystery is rational, earthly, and eventually deduced by an ingenious sleuth via the process of ratiocination.
The locked-room mystery is the most ornate, labyrinthine construction in the crime fiction world; it’s a self-consciously surreal exercise in puzzle-making where logic and lateral thinking are paramount. But it’s also a surprisingly blank canvas for creative expression—at least, I’ve always found it that way. Once you’ve established the parameters of your puzzle, you can go pretty much anywhere. I tend to think this is the reason locked-room mysteries—more than any other crime subgenre—crop up in so many other fields of literature, including science fiction (such as Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, or Adam Roberts’s The Real Town Murders) and fantasy (Randall Garrett’s Too Many Magicians). There is so much scope for imagination and flights of fancy that it is a positively irresistible challenge for writers of all genres.
For me, the puzzle is important for several reasons. When done right, the locked-room mystery is a work of art akin to a perfectly constructed Swiss watch. Its moving parts all converge and coalesce to produce a single, immensely satisfying effect for the reader. But that’s not all; the solving of a mystery, or the restoring of earthly logic to a seemingly illogical world, is deeply cathartic.
There is often talk of classic mysteries scratching our collective itch to see justice done, and to see the good guys foiling the bad guys. Maybe this is true in some instances, but to me it’s an oversimplification. I think the real thrill of a locked room comes from its exploration of a deeper psychological mystery. The seemingly impossible puzzle upends our understanding of the world; it makes us question our senses, our logic, our very selves. And by the time the solution to the mystery is presented, and we see how we have been tricked, we’ve gained a deeper philosophical understanding of ourselves. We see that our perceptions are shaped by our interactions with the world around us. The locked-room mystery places this strange dialogue between our inner and outer worlds at the heart of the narrative.
The same is true of classic ghost stories, which dredge up images from the depths of our collective unconscious and present them as physical manifestations. In a way, ghosts are memories; projections of our own fear and trauma. Which brings me to the unpleasant business at Devil’s Neck.
The House at Devil’s Neck is the fourth in my series of spooky, Golden Age-inspired puzzle mysteries featuring magician-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector. Like the other titles in the series, it’s intended primarily as an entertainment; a piece of escapism. But it’s also an excuse to explore deeper and darker territory—in an oblique way, of course.
This time around, it is August 1939 and Spector travels out to a derelict mansion to participate in a séance. The date is highly significant, since the ghost who walks the halls of the house at Devil’s Neck is a soldier of the First World War. After the séance, circumstances begin to get out of control: one of the party is found dead; murdered in a locked room. Then another. And as the bodies pile up, the clock continues ticking, inching our characters closer and closer to the precipice of a fresh horror: the dawn of a Second World War.
So you see, The House at Devil’s Neck is a mystery in more than one sense. It’s about solving impossible murders and catching a Machiavellian criminal. But more broadly speaking it’s also about the bleak inevitability of approaching conflict, while the shadows of a previous conflict still loom large: ghosts, memories, or whatever you want to call them.
By the end of the book, the primary puzzles are solved. The “who” and the “how” have been deciphered, and the supernatural impossibilities unravelled. But the solution to the other, deeper mystery—an endless cycle of conflict, returning again and again like a vengeful spirit—remains elusive. It would take a greater detective than Joseph Spector to explain that.
The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 14th August at £20.
This gripping locked-room mystery sees Joseph Spector investigate his most sinister case yet: murderous machinations at a haunted manor house. A former First World War field hospital, the spooky old mansion at Devil's Neck attracts spirit-seekers from far and wide. Illusionist-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector knows the house of old. With stories spreading of a phantom soldier making mischief, he joins a party of visitors in search of the truth. But the house, located on a lonely causeway, is quickly cut off by floods. The stranded visitors are soon being killed off one by one. With old ally Inspector Flint working on a complex case that has links to Spector's investigation, the two men must connect the dots before Devil's Neck claims Spector himself as its next victim.
More information about Tom Mead can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @TomMeadAuthor and on Instagram @tommeadauthor. You can also find him on Facebook.
Tom will be speaking at Manor Farm Library, Ruislip HA4 7SU with Barbara Nadel on 15th August at 3pm. Tickets £2. For tickets see: https://tinyurl.com/fjf7esed.
He will also be speaking at Death in the Dales Festival with Martin Edwards & Dolores Gordon Smith on Saturday 18th October at 3.15pm. For tickets for the day see: https://www.sedbergh.org.uk/view-event/death-in-the-dales-festival-of-crime-2/
The Australian Crime Writers Association announced its shortlist for the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction:
Down the Rabbit Hole, by Shaeden Berry (Bonnier Echo) A Town Called Treachery, by Mitch Jennings (HarperCollins) The Chilling, by Riley James (Allen & Unwin) All You Took From Me, by Lisa Kenway (Transit Lounge) Everywhere We Look, by Martine Kropkowski (Ultimo Press) Those Opulent Days, by Jacquie Pham (Atlantic Monthly Press)
My first job in television was
making up stories for a soap. I couldn’t believe such a role existed - I had
loved telling stories all my life, and I was going to be paid for something I
had been doing since I was a child. I joined a team of story liners and, over
the course of a year, I wrote numerous stories about characters of all ages and
backgrounds - some of whom had appeared on screen for decades; others whom I
helped create. It was the best training I’ve ever had and, when I sat down to
write my debut crime thriller novel, INNOCENT GUILT, those lessons I had
learned at the start of my TV career proved invaluable.
INNOCENT GUILT began with an image: a woman
covered in blood, carrying a baseball bat walks into a police station. She
doesn’t say a word; she’s not injured, and the blood isn’t hers. Is she the
victim or the perpetrator? Who is she? What has she done? I wasn’t sure at
first, but I wanted to find out.
My lead character, Detective Leah
Hutch, is outside the police station when the mute woman appears, and we mainly
follow the investigation through her eyes. After several years of working in
series television, I have first-hand experience of how attached audiences can
become to characters, developing allegiances that bring them back to a TV show,
season after season. I wanted to create a central character with whom readers
would want to go on a journey across multiple books. I spent a while
pondering who Leah is and how she sees the world, but it wasn’t until I
started to think of the chapters as scenes that she really came to life. As I
wrote, I imagined her in each scene - how would she react to each conflict -
big and small? How did that drive the story forwards? The chapters became
shorter and sharper, and the words started to flow. Sometimes Leah surprised
me, and I had to change course from what I had originally planned. With each
draft, I got to know her better and discovered layers I hadn’t envisaged.
We mainly follow the story
through Leah’s eyes, but hers isn’t the only point of view in the novel: A
journalist called Odie Reid receives a mysterious tip-off about a dead body in
a park. She has history with Leah and tries to link the dead body to the mute
woman, determined to solve the case before Leah does. Thus begins a cat and
mouse game between two women who don’t like each other, as they investigate the
case in parallel.
When it came to structuring the
novel from two different perspectives, I turned to the world of television once
more. Since my days working on a soap, I have primarily worked on returning
drama series. I have spent hours helping screenwriters plot multiple story
strands across several episodes, building to the season climax, and I
approached INNOCENT GUILT in much the same way. The main difference was
that now, as opposed to working in a team, I was on my own. I have a fantastic
agent and editor, but in those early stages, it was just me and the blank page.
I am often asked how working on a
book differs from producing television drama and which I prefer: Writing books
is in many ways solitary, whilst TV is more collaborative, particularly when it
comes to the practicalities of TV production. Having said that, I’ve been
pleasantly surprised by how useful my TV experience has been, and I’m thankful
for those early days spent sitting in a room with my fellow story liners,
creating imaginary characters and talking about their lives as if they were
real.
Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (Quercus
Publishing) Out Now
Victim or murderer . . . Can she
discover the truth? On a misty autumn afternoon, a woman covered in blood
clutching a baseball bat walks silently into a London police station. The two
officers assigned to her case are DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle. But the
woman refuses to speak. She is not injured and the blood on the bat is not
hers. What has she done? Is she the victim or the perpetrator? As Leah and
Randle start their inquiry, a man is found battered to death in a nearby park.
Journalist Odie Reid receives a tip off and is determined to solve the case
first, trying to link this death to the woman held in custody. Leah and Odie
have history and very quickly their cat and mouse game becomes personal,
leading them both to the very darkest corners of their pasts.
A review
of Innocent Guilt can be found here
on the Shots Mag website.
-------------
British
Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of
well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives
in London, and INNOCENT GUILT is her first novel.
One
irretrievably damaged and the other an outcast.
Dóra
struggles to cope with life after taking a bullet to the head. Rado is the
child of refugees, his career shunted off the tracks due to his family
connections to an organised crime gang. But they’re the only ones available
when a troubled teenager vanishes from a school trip, and the trail gets darker
the further they pursue it.
Broken
takes place in a side of Reykjavík no visitor would ever want to see, as the
mismatched pair tread on all the wrong toes in the search for the missing
youngster. This takes place against the backdrop of a vicious vendetta and
price on Dóra’s head. A brutal turf war embroils Rado’s family as he and Dóra
follow the threads of corruption higher and higher, to the top of the exclusive
apartment block on the outskirts of the city.
The
first novel by award-winning screenwriter Jón Atli Jónasson to appear in
English, Broken is the first of a razor-edged crime trilogy shot through with
black humour and characters who leap off the page.
We reviewed Broken on its Hardcover release earlier this
month, writing at the time -
This
extraordinary crime novel debuted 2022 in the authors’ native Iceland, but is
now finally available in an English Language translation.Broken is a deeply thought-provoking
narrative, written in an urgent present-tense style making the reader pause to
collate and evaluate the proceedings as well as to take a breath. Written from
multiple viewpoints, terse dialogue with deftly placed social commentary - its
narrative pace is measured, but zings along with the velocity of the bullet
that impacts Dora’s head in Broken’s opening chapter.
Dora
works for the police in Reykjavík, shielded from ‘real’ police work by her boss
Ellioi, instead she’s left to manage administration / office work, though she
longs to return to working on the street. Ellioi hides his guilt [from the
assignment they shared and which left fragments of a bullet lodged in Dora’s
skull], by keeping her in the office, deskbound on minor cases - and away from
further danger. The cranial injury still causes Dora physical pain, constant
operations, and strict regime of medication - affecting her cognition and
distorting her personality.
So on the eve of Broken’s Paperback release in August, we
decided to have a chat with Quentin for our readers.
A
Karim: Could
you tell us a little about yourself and where the fascination for Iceland and
Icelandic culture / literature stemmed [and stems] from?
Q
Bates: It’s a long story… I had the opportunity for a gap year,
and a friend of my Dad’s said I could come and work in his net loft in Iceland
for a few months. The 17-year-old me couldn’t shake off English suburbia fast
enough. It didn’t quite work out as planned, as my A level results were pretty
poor. So I just stayed in Iceland and the gap year became a gap decade. During
that time I did several different jobs, went to college and started a family,
so some very deep roots were put down there. We relocated to England after a
while, for a variety of reasons. These days my wife and I try to split our time
between the south of England and the north of Iceland, as we have children and
grandchildren on each side of the ocean.
It was while I was at college that I started reading
Icelandic properly, and the book scene was very different back then. There was
practically no crime fiction other than translated mostly from English, and
Icelandic literature was mostly very literary, plus there were loads of worthy
biographies of captains of industry, political figures and whatnot, as well as
nautical stuff – I’ll come back to that further on.
AK: And reading, did you come from a bookish
family or was it your schooling?
QB: There
were always books at home and my parents didn’t push us in particular
directions, at least, we were never discouraged from reading anything. We were
just encouraged to read whatever we wanted. Dad gave me two Asterix books for
my (I think) eighth birthday, and that was probably a pivotal moment. I just
fell in love with the village of Indomitable Gauls. One of those two books was
Asterix in Britain, and I still think it’s the best one, gently and
affectionately skewering the foibles of the Rosbifs across the Channel with
their warm beer and terrible weather. It was much, much later that I figured
out that the translator was the brilliant Anthea Bell.
Of course I pillaged the parental book shelves. Dad liked
weighty 19th century literature (heavy going!) but that left me with an
appreciation of Hardy and others. He also loved Norse mythology, the ancient
sagas and Tolkien, and I inherited that. Although I read the Lord of the Rings
pretty much every year for a long time, it must be 20 years since I last read
it and I’m not sure I dare pick it up now. No, I haven’t seen the movies and
don’t want to… Mum’s tastes were broader, and ranged from Ruth Rendell and Ed
McBain at one end to Trollope and Maugham at the other. My first brush with
Nordic crime fiction was picking Sjöwall & Wahlöö from Mum’s
shelf, intrigued by the weird name, and I must have been 13 or 14 then. But
there was no more! There was no other Nordic crime fiction in English for
another couple of decades! By late teens I was reading George Orwell, Jack
Kerouac, Douglas Adams (loved HHGTTG!), Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn
Waugh, Robert Graves. After S&W came Maigret, and fortunately there was no
shortage of Simenon in English.
I’ve always been the oddball who scours the shelves of a
library or bookshop for odd foreign names. So as a teen I was reading writers
such as Jerome Weidman and Hans Helmut Kirst, who seem to be pretty much
forgotten today. I still have this habit, and given the choice of a safe pair
of familiar hands, or the first in a series featuring a crime-busting retired
Olympic lady hammer-thrower by an unknown Bulgarian author, I know which way
I’ll jump.
AK: And pivotal books that influenced your
desire to write your own work?
QB:
Maybe it’s more about the breadth than any particular author…? But, while I was
living in Iceland, English books weren’t always easy to get hold of. I think I
was at sea one time and had a few books with me, including a major bestseller
by an author whose name I’ll keep to myself. It was terrible, a truly dreadful
book. That brought home to me then than if that’s the kind of stuff that could
get published, then I might be in with a chance after all.
Much later on… it was the books of the brilliant French
author Dominique Manotti that showed me just how sharp, incisive, smart and
politically aware crime fiction can be at its best. I don’t think she’s writing
now, as she must be quite elderly. I got to meet her and shared a panel with
her at a festival, and I was like a star-struck schoolboy.
AK: I read your first published book was a
nonfiction work about fishing in the North Sea?
QB: That
was fun! I was working as a journalist, writing about maritime stuff, and
mainly to do with fishing – as that’s my professional background. I did trips
on five different boats and that book contains those accounts. One was supposed
to be four days on a Scottish mackerel boat that turned into twelve, another
was a four-day trip from Newlyn and the others were easier, just one-day trips
to sea. It was great fun, but the small publisher went out of business about
half an hour after the book appeared. So it was never going to be a bestseller!
I also wrote a book with the skipper of the Gaul – a trawler that disappeared
off the Norwegian coast in 1974. He had been on a trip off when the ship sank –
and I got to know him well. There had been all kinds of rumours of the Gaul
having been a spy ship, none of which held water. That was a labour of love…
The book took ten years, during which the wreck of the Gaul was located,
surveyed and an inquiry was held, so all that had to be built into the
narrative. That was quite an adventure. That book is now virtually impossible
to find and second-hand copies go for 100+ quid!
AK: And what made you write fiction? And why
Crime thrillers?
QB: It had always been at the back of my mind, along with
the thought that fiction was a mug’s game, the chances of being published so
slim that it was hardly worth trying. So I had to give it a go. That first book
came out of a creative writing course I took as a way of getting a weekly
afternoon off work… I later on found out that the deputy editor and the
advertising manager were also working on novels of their own, but that’s
another story. I expected to come out of the course working on non-fiction. But
one of the tutors was a serious Noir aficionado, and so Sam North was very
encouraging, and bears much responsibility for the decision to give crime
fiction a try – and it was obvious that it would be nuts to not make use of all
that knowledge of Iceland. Gunnhildur grew out of that – seven novels and two
novellas.
AK: And how did you start working in
translating Icelandic work into English?
QB: I
had translated a book while I was at college in Iceland – one of the set texts.
That was a seafaring tale, and the author (Guðlaugur Arason) became a very dear
friend. Working on a nautical trade magazine, I worked a lot with material from
other languages in one way or another, so I found myself translating a lot of
technical and news material. It was at one of the first Iceland Noir festivals
that Karen Sullivan of the then-brand-new Orenda Books was considering the
unknown Ragnar Jónasson and asked if I
could translate Snowblind. So I did… And then others came along looking for
translation, so I’ve been pretty busy with that over the last few years.
AK: Please tell us about how you discovered
Jon Atli Jonasson and deciding to not only translate his debut novel BROKEN,
but also to venture into publishing?
QB:
Corylus is me, translator Marina Sofia and Romanian publisher and author Bogdan
Hrib. We wanted to publish some new voices, authors we could see who weren’t
getting translation and publishing deals. It has been quite a learning curve!
Some of our authors – Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Óskar Guðmundsson and Stella
Blómkvist – have done well, while others have unfortunately done less well. We
have published a couple of absolute crackers, fantastic books that have sold
just a few dozen copies… All the same, I’m intensely proud of publishing Jérôme
Leroy and Elsa Drucaroff in English. Their books are amazing, even if we may
have caught a bit of a financial cold there!
I knew about Jón Atli’s book, and had translated an excerpt
for the Icelandic publisher, and I think that was even before it had appeared
in Icelandic. It was a real surprise when Jón Atli’s agent David Headley
offered us the book – as Corylus is a publishing midget. So I got to work. I
have to say, David is very shrewd and his faith in Corylus to do well for his author
feels like a seal of approval that we’re doing the right things.
AK: Did Jon Atli Jonasson’s screenplay for THE
DEEP and
your own background in North Sea fishing resonate?
QB: I haven’t seen The Deep. I was working as a fisherman
in 1984 in Iceland when Hellisey was lost and Guðlaugur Friðthórsson performed
that astonishing feat of endurance to swim to land. When a boat is lost,
especially when there’s a loss of life, the whole fleet (and the whole country)
feels it, takes it personally, as it could have been any one of us in the
water. I think every fisherman has a brown-trouser moment or two – I know I
do…At that time we all hung on the
radio. It was the first question when you came on watch – ‘any news?’ So I’ve
never been able to bring myself to watch it.
I’ll tell you something that does resonate – Among the
books I picked up when I was starting to read Icelandic were seafaring tales by
Ásgeir Jakobsson and by Jónas Guðmundsson. Today Ásgeir Jak’s son Jakob
publishes my books in Icelandic – and Jónas Guðmundsson’s son is Jón Atli. So I
had read practically everything by Jón Atli’s Dad, and didn’t realise the
connection until we first met, by which time I had finished the first draft of
the Broken translation. His father’s books were so pivotal for me 40 or so
years ago that it genuinely made me shiver when I realised who he was.
AK: And what’s next for [a] Quentin Bates and
[b] Jon Atli Jonasson [c] Corylus Books
QB: Well
to answer sequentially -
[a]
Translation has tailed off a bit. There are a few more translators at work now,
and it seems that larger publishers are becoming more reluctant to commission
translations, especially for new authors. Then there’s the whole AI thing, but
let’s not go into that here… The upshot is that I’ve had some much-needed elbow
room to get back to my own stuff, and I have a new lead character and a cast of
supporting characters in something new that’s now coming to completion, plus
draft outlines for what could become a series. I don’t want to jinx it by
saying too much, except that the setting is Nordic and the lead character was
once a cop...
[b]
There’s a sequel to Broken, Venom, which I’m reading at the moment, and it’s
every bit as meaty as Broken. From what Jón Atli has told me, this is a trilogy
and he’s at work on the third novel now – although I’ve a feeling this could
turn into a trilogy in four, five or more parts. This is powerful stuff with
such strong characters, so I hope it does. We have UK & Commonwealth
(excluding Canada) rights to Broken, so it’s sadly not available to readers in
North America. We’ve tried to find a partner publisher on the other side of the
Atlantic, but none of the ones we’ve approached has bitten. So if there’s an
interested publisher in the US or Canada, please step this way…!
[c] We
have a third novel (Murder Tide) by the mysterious Stella Blómkvist coming out
this summer, and the translation of the fourth (title not yet finalised) is
complete, so that’ll be out next year. And we need to have a chat with David
Headley about Venom for next year! Sólveig Pálsdóttir is hard at work, so her
next one could be for next year. We also have a second novel by Catalan author Teresa Solana for next year.
We’re weighing up options for authors from other countries… We see so many
proposals for what look to be fabulous books from around the world and it
genuinely hurts to have to turn them away. But Corylus is a tiny, tiny
publisher and there’s only so much we can do.
BTW, Corylus believes very firmly in artisanal translation
by human translators with passion for language, nuance and idiom. We’ll shut
the shop before we resort to AI translation.
AK Good for you - let’s keep literature
human not AI Technology - and thank you for your time.
More information about Quentin’s publishing venture – Click
HERE and
about his writing Click HERE
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