Name:- Simon Mason
Job:- Author
X:- @simonmasonbooks
Introduction: Simon Mason is the author of Juvenile and adult fiction. His 2022 novel A Killing in Novemberwhich was the first in his D I Wilkins series set in New Hinksey, Oxford was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and was a Sunday Times Crime Book of the month along with the second book in the series The Broken Afternoon (2023). In 2024 Missing Person: Alice the first in the Finder series was published. He also commissioned Barry Forshaw to edit the excellent and prize-winning two volume Encyclopedia of British Crime Writing (2009). His most recent book is The Dangerous Stranger (2026) the sixth book in his D I Wilkins series.
Current book? (This can either be the current book that you are reading or writing or both)
I’ve belatedly discovered Daniel Kehlmann, the astonishingly entertaining but erudite German writer, whose novels Tyll – featuring the eponymous folkloric trickster at large during the seventeenth-century wars of religion – and The Director – based on the life of Expressionist cinema director P. W. Pabst – have been my most thought-provoking and fun reads this year.
Why do you think anti-heroes are so interesting to readers
We’re all anti-heroes, I think that’s it; and as we connect with that fact through reading about them, it produces in us all the most profound emotions: shame, excitement, fear, anger, guilt and so on.
Which two anti-heroes or enemies would you invite to dinner and why?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (squabbling friends rather than enemies, and funny).
How do you relax?
I watch quite a lot of boring television, to be fair.
Which anti hero would you like to be on your side in a difficult situation.
Long John Silver. It’s important, when you get into those little jams, to have a stone-cold killer at your side.
If you were to write a book involving an anti-hero where would you set it and why?
I’ve always wanted to write a novel about the famously bad-tempered Sheffield United goalkeeper Fatty Foulkes of the early 1900s.
How would you describe your latest published book?
A bugger to write. I’ve been told not to keep saying that. So . . . adventures of a detective pantomime horse.
With Bad Apples: crime fiction’s enemies and anti-heroes theme at St Hilda's this year, who are you three favourite anti-heroes
Brer Rabbit, Becky Sharp and the aforementioned Long John Silver.
Which 3 films or television series featuring anti-heroes would you rewatch and why.
Matt Damon’s Ripley (at least partly for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Freddie Miles); the 1998 TV version of Vanity Fair (for Natasha Little’s Becky Sharp); Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (for them).
What are you looking forward to at St Hilda's?
Company.
The Dangerous Stranger by Simon Mason (Quercus Publishing)
On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.
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