Capital Crime Announces Fingerprint Award nominations!

 

OVERALL CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

THE MURDER GAME by Tom Hindle

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE by Lisa Jewell

THE SECRET HOURS by Mick Herron

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE by Jo Callaghan

STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND by Liz Nugent

THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

FEARLESS by M W Craven

THE SILENT MAN by David Fennell

THE RULE OF THREE by Sam Ripley

THE ONLY SUSPECT by Louise Candlish

THE HOUSE HUNT by C. M. Ewan

HISTORICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

DEATH OF A LESSER GOD by Vaseem Khan

THE SQUARE OF SEVENS by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

THE MURDER WHEEL by Tom Mead

THE GOOD LIARS by Anita Frank

THE HOUSE OF WHISPERS by Anna Mazzola

TRUE CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

NO ORDINARY DAY by Matt Johnson

MY GIRL by Michelle Hadaway

VITAL ORGANS by Suzie Edge

UNLAWFUL KILLINGS: LIFE, LOVE AND MURDER: TRIALS AT THE OLD BAILEY by Her Honour Wendy Joseph QC

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS by Scott Walker

AUDIO BOOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

THE RUNNING GRAVE by Robert Galbraith (narrated by Robert Glenister)

THE LAST GOODBYE by Tim Weaver (narrated by Joe Coen, Brendan MacDonald, Peter Noble, Dominic Thorburn and Candida Gubbins)

THE BEDROOM WINDOW by K. L. Slater (narrated by Clare Corbett)

CONVICTION by Jack Jordan (narrated by Sophie Roberts)

OVER MY DEAD BODY by Maz Evans (narrated by Maz Evans)

GENRE -BUSTING BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Torzs

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE ALPERTON ANGELS by Janice Hallett

KILLING JERICHO by William Hussey

MURDER IN THE FAMILY by Cara Hunter

THE LOOKING GLASS SOUND by Catriona Ward

DEBUT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

DEATH OF A BOOKSELLER by Alice Slater

THE LIST by Yomi Adegoke

GENEVA by Richard Armitage

THE BANDIT QUEENS by Parini Shroff

THIRTY DAYS OF DARKNESS by Jenny Lund Madsen

Voting is now open and you can vote for your favourite book here.

Criminal Splatterings

Fans of The Saint will be interested to know that according to Deadline.com Bridgerton start Regé-Jean Page is due to star at the helm of the re-imaging of The Saint. More information can be found here. It is due to be based in part on Leslie Charteris’ 1920s book series and subsequent 1960s UK TV series starring Roger Moore. 

Over on Crimereads.com bestselling author Darynda Jones lists her 13 must read laugh out loud mysteries. A fantastic list which can be read here. Great to see such luminaries as Janet Evanovich, Carl Hiaasen and Donald E Westlake on the list. Who would I add? Sparkle Hayter of course!

Also on Crimereads.com one of my favourite historical crime writers Lindsey Davis considers the enduring appeal of the Roman Empire as a good setting for historical mysteries. The full article can be read here. The latest book by Lindsey Davis is The Comedy of Terrors and is the ninth book in the series to feature Flavia Albia. who longstanding readers will know is the daughter of her famous character Marcus Didius Falco. 

Fans of S A Cosby will enjoy the interview with him in the Guardian. But hey, the Guardian is clearly playing catch up to those of us who having been raving about him since last year when Blacktop Wasteland was published by Headline. The Shots review of Blacktop Wasteland can be read here.

Recently the crime fiction world have been shocked by the death of Mo Hayder from Motor Neurone Disease. The Shots team play tribute to her on the blog.

If you are like me a fan of podcasts – then you will be interested to note that James Ellroy is going to host about Los Angeles crime. Of course Crimereads has the scoop.

Fans of the Grantchester which is based on the novels of James Runcie will be happy to hear that filming on season 7 has begun. More information can be found here.

There are various crime and police procedurals to look out for in the autumn due to be shown on ITV. 

The Long Call which is based on the Anne Cleeves novel of the same name and will feature Juliet Stevenson, Ben Aldridge and Martin Shaw.

Martin Clunes will reprise his role as as the former London Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton in a new season of Manhunt.

Angela Black an Hitchcockian thriller that follows one woman as she risks everything she holds dear to fight back against the man who has suppressed and tormented her for most of her adult life is due to be shown in the autumn as well.

The exact dates of transmission have yet to be announced for any of these programme.

If you missed the Four Critics, Four Continents live event then you can watch it again here. We discuss our favourite books of the first half of 2021 and cover such countries as Nigeria, The Deep South of America, Japan, Sweden and New Zealand. 

Fans of Matthew Quirk's political thrillers will be pleased to here that according to Deadline.com, Netflix are due to film a conspiracy thriller series that is based on The Night Agent that was published in 2019. More information can be found here.

If you missed Crime Time's books of the decade event then don't worry. You can rewatch it below. Also you can find the list of all the books discussed on the Crime Time site.

A Statue for Jacob by Peter Murphy

 

“This debt was not contracted as the price of bread or wine or arms. It was the price of liberty.”

Alexander Hamilton

“Do you handle debt collection cases?”

With these words, a client draws a young lawyer into an extraordinary case, one which will take her back to the War of Independence, to a time when the future of the rebellious colonies hung precariously in the balance, and to the role of a forgotten hero in helping to secure America’s liberty. The young lawyer was a former student of mine, the case was real, and I worked on it with her for more than two years.

In the bitterly cold winter of 1777–1778, the revolutionary army under George Washington, badly beaten on the field of battle, bereft of even the most basic supplies and in danger of starving and freezing to death, retired in disorder to winter quarters on the west bank of the Schuylkill at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Between the end of 1777 and the spring of 1778, two things happened. First, the army received material support sufficient to enable it, not only to survive, but to emerge from Valley Forge as an effective and eventually victorious fighting unit. Second, a man called Jacob de Haven, a wealthy merchant and landowner who owned the land adjacent to Washington’s encampment, and who was Washington’s friend and a fellow-freemason, fell from a state of considerable wealth to a state of abject poverty within a short space of time. 

These two facts are connected. Jacob made loans of gold and supplies to Washington’s army, such loans, according to family tradition, amounting to about $450,000 value at the time. The Continental Congress had promised to repay all war loans after the war, with interest. But in Jacob’s case, the government failed to repay any of the principal or interest, and has never recognised the vital role he played in ensuring the success of the war.

Jacob’s family had repeatedly petitioned Congress for relief, but Congress had always turned a deaf ear. In March 1989, the family sued the federal government in the US Claims Court. Their lawyer, whom I had taught at South Texas College of Law while I was a professor there in the 1980s, was Jo Beth Kloecker. In January 1990, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that the family had missed the six-year statute of limitations by some two hundred years (!) even though the law did not even allow citizens to sue the government for more than forty years after Jacob’s death. Subsequently, a federal appeals court upheld the judge’s decision. The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case. 

Consequently, Jacob’s family no longer has any judicial remedy to recover a loan which, according to Alexander Hamilton, represented the price of liberty, was guaranteed by the Constitution, and for which the faith and credit of the United States had been repeatedly pledged. Above all, more than any question of money, the family wanted Jacob to be recognised as the national hero he was. Their goal was a statue for Jacob.

Jacob de Haven died in poverty in 1812. He lies buried in an unmarked grave, in a remote churchyard in rural Pennsylvania. There is no statue in his honour.

It was when the Supreme Court turned us down that I decided to write the de Haven story as fiction. It has been the most difficult task I’ve ever set myself as a writer. I gave the family the name van Eyck. I changed the characters of those involved beyond recognition, and wrote myself out of the story. But the most difficult challenge was to combine the historical background with the contemporary story of the lawsuit, and to give the whole story a very different ending. Part of the problem is that the historical evidence is very thin. We suspected that the government has documents relevant to the case, but the court would not order the government to produce, or even search for them – probably because the court had already decided that the case would end with the statute of limitations. Alexander Hamilton, no less, had provided us with our legal theory – that the loan was guaranteed by the Constitution, which overrode the statute of limitations. But in order to give the lawyers in the contemporary story something substantial to work with in terms of facts, I had to write it from a slightly more esoteric point of view. 

This took me back to my experiences in India, a country in which there is no demarcation between the mundane and the esoteric, where astrologers often give evidence in court cases, and where environmental law is sometimes made by considering which of the Hindu deities is most offended by the perpetrator’s conduct. That is why my lawyer, Kiah Harmon, is from an Indian family and understands why the usual lines of demarcation in a western country such as America do not always paint a complete picture. At the same time, I needed to my story to make sense rationally. I have lost count of the number of drafts this book went through. It has taken me more than twenty years to get it right in my own mind as a novel, and I’m hoping that its publication will be a catharsis for me.

I hope you will enjoy it, and that perhaps it might at last inspire someone to erect that long overdue statue for Jacob.

A Statute For Jacob by Peter Murphy (No Exit Press) Out Now

'This debt was not contracted as the price of bread or wine or arms. It was the price of liberty' - Alexander Hamilton Kiah Harmon, a young Virginia lawyer, is just emerging from the most traumatic time of her life when actress Samantha ('Sam') van Eyck walks into her office, unannounced, with the case of a lifetime. She asks Kiah to recover a 200-year-old debt from the US Government - a debt that Alexander Hamilton may have acknowledged. The selfless generosity of Sam's ancestor, Jacob Van Eyck, in making a massive loan of gold and supplies at Valley Forge, during the freezing winter of 1777-1778, may well have saved George Washington's army, and the War of Independence, from disaster. But it reduced Jacob to ruin. Despite the government's promises, the debt was never repaid, and this hero of the American Revolution died in poverty, unknown and unrecognised. Two hundred years later, Sam and Kiah embark on a quest to change that. But first, they will have to find the evidence, and overcome a stubborn Government determined to frustrate their every move. Will there ever be a statue for Jacob?

Books I am looking forward to in the second half of 2021

 So far the first half of the year has already seen a number of books that will no doubt end up on my end of the year lists. With six months to go until the end of the year the books that are I am looking forward to are as follows -

Razorblade Tears by S A Cosby (Headline Publishing) A black father. A white father. Two Murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph left jail fifteen years ago, with not so much as a speeding ticket since. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. Ike is devastated to learn his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Though he never fully accepted his son, Ike is broken by his death. Derek's father Buddy Lee was as ashamed of Derek being gay as Derek was of his father's criminal past. But Buddy Lee - with seedy contacts deep in the underworld - needs to know who killed his only child. Desperate to do better by them in death than they did in life, two hardened ex-cons must confront their own prejudices about their sons - and each other - as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.

1979 by Val McDermid (Little, Brown) The shadows hide a deadly story … 1979. It is the winter of discontent, and reporter Allie Burns is chasing her first big scoop. There are few women in the newsroom and she needs something explosive for the boys' club to take her seriously. Soon Allie and fellow journalist Danny Sullivan are exposing the criminal underbelly of respectable Scotland. They risk making powerful enemies - and Allie won't stop there. When she discovers a home-grown terrorist threat, Allie comes up with a plan to infiltrate the group and make her name. But she's a woman in a man's world ... and putting a foot wrong could be fatal

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Simon & Schuster) If you have a problem, if no one else can help, there's one person you can turn to.   Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way onto the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop. They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realises that being a Native-American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

The Nameless Ones by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton) In Amsterdam, four people are butchered in a canal house, their remains arranged around the crucified form of their patriarch, De Jaager: fixer, go-between, and confidante of the assassin named Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland. They are wrong. For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into the east. There is only one problem. The sixth.

Widespread Panic by James Ellroy (Cornerstone) Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in '50s L.A. He operates with two simple rules - he'll do anything but commit murder and he'll never work with the commies. Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - and it got to him bad. So Chief William H. Parker canned him. Now he's a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential Magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink and the scurrilous skank on the feckless foibles of misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites and potzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all! In Widespread Panic, we traverse the depths of '50s L.A. and dig on the inner workings of Confidential. You'll go to Burt Lancaster's lushly appointed torture den; you'll groove overhyped legend James Dean as Freddy's chief stooge; you'll be there for Freddy's ring-a-ding rendezvous with Liz Taylor; you'll be front and centre as Freddy anoints himself the 'Tattle Tyrant Who Held Hollywood Hostage'.

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin. (Cannongate) Lawyer Bobby Carter did a lot of work for the wrong type of people. Now he's dead and it was no accident. Besides a distraught family and a heap of powerful friends, Carter's left behind his share of enemies. So, who dealt the fatal blow? DC Jack Laidlaw's reputation precedes him. He's not a team player, but he's got a sixth sense for what's happening on the streets. His boss chalks the violence up to the usual rivalries, but is it that simple? As two Glasgow gangs go to war, Laidlaw needs to find out who got Carter before the whole city explodes. 

Love & Other Crimes by Sara Paretsky (Hodder & Stoughton) In this spellbinding collection, Sara Paretsky showcases her extraordinary talents with fourteen short stories, including one new V.I. story and seven other classics featuring the indomitable detective. In 'Miss Bianca' a young girl becomes involved in espionage when she befriends a mouse in a laboratory that is conducting dark experiments. Ten-year-old V.I. Warshawski appears in 'Wildcat,' embarking on her very first investigation to save her father. A hardboiled New York detective and elderly British aristocrat team up to reveal a murderer in Chicago during the World's Fair in 'Murder at the Century of Progress'. In the new title story, 'Love & Other Crimes' V.I. treads the line between justice and vengeance when the wrongful firing of a family friend makes him a murder suspect.

Sunset Swing by Ray Celestin. (Pan MacMillian) Los Angeles. Christmas, 1967. A young nurse, Kerry Gaudet, travels to the City of Angels desperate to find her missing brother, fearing that something terrible has happened to him: a serial killer is terrorising the city, picking victims at random, and Kerry has precious few leads. Ida Young, recently retired Private Investigator, is dragged into helping the police when a young woman is discovered murdered in her motel room. Ida has never met the victim but her name has been found at the crime scene and the LAPD wants to know why . . . Meanwhile mob fixer Dante Sanfelipe has put his life savings into purchasing a winery in Napa Valley but first he must do one final favour for the Mob before leaving town: find a bail jumper before the bond money falls due, and time is fast running out. Ida's friend, Louis Armstrong, flies into the city just as her investigations uncover mysterious clues to the killer's identity. And Dante must tread a dangerous path to pay his dues, a path which will throw him headlong into a terrifying government conspiracy and a secret that the conspirators will do anything to protect . . .

The Wrong Goodbye by Toshihiko Yahagi (Quercus Publishing) pits homicide detective Eiji Futamura against a shady Chinese business empire and U.S. military intelligence in the docklands of recession Japan. After the frozen corpse of immigrant barman Tran Binh Long washes up in midsummer near Yokosuka U.S. Navy Base, Futamura meets a strange customer from Tran's bar. Vietnam vet pilot Billy Lou Bonney talks Futamura into hauling three suitcases of "goods" to Yokota US Air Base late at night and flies off leaving a dead woman behind. Thereby implicated in a murder suspect's escape and relieved from active duty, Futamura takes on hack work for the beautiful concert violinist Aileen Hsu, a "boat people" orphan whose Japanese adoption mother has mysteriously gone missing. And now a phone call from a bestselling yakuza author, a one-time black marketeer in Saigon, hints at inside information on "former Vietcong mole" Tran and his "old sidekick" Billy Lou, both of whom crossed a triad tycoon who is buying up huge tracts of Mekong Delta marshland for a massive development schemeAs the loose strands flashback to Vietnam, the string of official lies and mysterious allegiances build into a dark picture of the U.S.-Japan postwar alliance.

Turf Wars by Oliver Norek. (Quercus Publishing) Since Capitaine Coste and his team's last case, calm appears to have returned to the SDPJ93 - but not for long. The summary execution of three young dealers - one them shot in the head in full view of a police surveillance team - is the signal for hell to be unleashed in the suburb of Seine-Saint Denis. Cocaine stashed in pensioners' apartments; a psychopathic gang leader of just thirteen at large among the high rises; a cult militia recruited from the boxing clubs run by the council; a deputy mayor found tortured to death in his own home. And, if all this wasn't enough to contend with, when a police intervention in a local estate fuels the residents' resentment towards authority, Coste finds himself faced with an army of merciless thugs capable of enacting a genuine revolution.

Murder Isn't Easy: The Forensics of Agatha Christie by Carla Valentine (Little, Brown) While other children were devouring the works of Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter, Carla Valentine was poring through the pages of Agatha Christie novels. It was this early fascination that led to her job as a pathology technician, trained in forensics and working in mortuariesNearly every Agatha Christie story involves one - or, more commonly, several - dead bodies, and for a young Carla, a curious child already fascinated with biology, these stories and these bodies were perfect puzzles. Of course, Agatha herself didn't talk of 'forensics' in the way we use it now, but in each tale she writes of twists and turns with her expert weave of human observation, ingenuity and genuine science of the era. Through the medium of the 'whodunnit', Agatha Christie was a pioneer of forensic science, and in Murder Isn't Easy Carla illuminates all of the knowledge of one of our most beloved authors.

Books to Look Forward to From Muswell Press

 February 2021

The Final Round is by Bernard O'Keeffe. On the morning after Boat Race Day, a man's body is found in a nature reserve beside the Thames. He has been viciously stabbed, his tongue cut out, and an Oxford college scarf stuffed in his mouth. The body is identified as that of Nick Bellamy, last seen at the charity quiz organised by his Oxford contemporary, the popular newsreader Melissa Matthews. Enter DI Garibaldi, whose first task is to look into Bellamy's contemporaries from Balfour College. In particular, the surprise 'final round' of questions at this year's charity quiz in which guests were invited to guess whether allegations about Melissa Matthews and her Oxford friends are true. These allegations range from plagiarism and shoplifting to sextortion and murder...

May 2021

Obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Alistair Haston heads off to Greece, where she is on holiday. Mugged on the harbourside in Paros, he is robbed of everything. So when Ricky a charming Aussie, shows up and offers Alistair a job recruiting tourists to pose for his wealthy boss, Heinrich, a charismatic, German artist, Alistair accepts. He soon realises that it is more than just painting that Heinrich has in mind. Swept away on a tide of wild parties, wild sex, fine food and drugs Haston sheds his reserve and throws himself headlong into the pursuit of pleasure. Until, the body of a missing tourist is found and the finger of blame points to Haston. His world collapses. Arrested but allowed to escape, the body count piles up and Haston finds himself on the run by land and sea on a journey more breathtaking and more frightening than his wildest dreams. The Lizard is by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart.

June 2021

The Rhino Conspiracy by Paul Hain. A veteran freedom fighter and friend of Mandela is forced to break all his loyalties and oppose the ruling ANC party - a party he's been a member of all his life - to confront corruption and venality at the very top. As he faces political attacks and sinister threats from a faction in the SA security services the ageing veteran finds his life is now endangered. Recognising the need for help, he recruits a young 'Born Free' idealist to assist him. She too is soon drawn into danger as together they stumble upon a clandestine plot at the highest level of government to poach and kill rhino and export their lucrative horns to South East Asia. Intent on catching the poachers and exposing the trade, they manage to install a GPS tracking device inside a perfect replica of a horn which they follow through a diplomatic bag into Vietnam. Anxious that intimidation by the security services will prevent them from exposing the truth, they decide to break cover in UK using a sympathetic British MP to reveal all they know in a House of Commons speech, under parliamentary privilege. But first they must establish the truth. Will they be able to do so, or will they be killed before they can? The stakes are high. Has Mandela's 'rainbow nation' been irretrievably betrayed by political corruption and cronyism? Can the country's ancient rhino herd be saved from extinction by poachers supported from the very top of the state.

July 2021

London is angry, divided and obsessed with foreigners. A dead Asian and some racist graffiti in Chinatown might trigger the race war that the white supremacists of the Make England Great Again movement have been hoping for. They just need a tipping point. And he arrives in the shape of Detective Inspector Stanley Low. He's brilliant. He's bipolar. He hates everyone almost as much as he hates himself. Singapore doesn't want him and he doesn't want to be in London for a criminology lecture. There are too many bad memories, like Detective Sergeant Ramila Mistry, who asks for Low's help. The dead Asian was Singaporean. Against everyone's better judgement, Low is plunged into a polarised city, where xenophobia and intolerance feed screaming echo chambers. His desperate race to find a far-right serial killer will lead him to charismatic Neo-Nazi leaders, incendiary radio hosts and Metropolitan Police officers who don't appreciate the foreigner's interference. No one wants him there, but too many victims with Asian faces keep him there. He craves vengeance, particularly when the murderer makes it personal and promises to kill the only woman that Low ever loved. The Chinese detective is the wrong face in the wrong place. But he's the right copper for the job. London is about to meet the bloody foreigner who won't walk away. Bloody Foreigners is by Neil Humphreys.

August 2021

My Name is Jensen is by Heidi Amsinck. Guilty. One word on a beggar's cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry Copenhagen street, the second homeless victim in as many weeks. Dagbladet reporter Jensen, stumbling across the body on her way to work, calls her ex lover DI Henrik Jungersen. As, inevitably, old passions are rekindled, so are old regrets, and that is just the start of Jensen's troubles. The front page is an open goal, but nothing feels right..... When a third body turns up, it seems certain that a serial killer is on the loose. But why pick on the homeless? And is the link to an old murder case just a coincidence? With her teenage apprentice Gustav, Jensen soon finds herself putting everything on the line to discover exactly who is guilty .

Call for Papers - Captivating Criminality 7: Memory, History and Revaluation

7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University  on the 2-4th July 2020 at Newton Park campus, Bath Spa University, Bath UK.

Professor Mary Evans. Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, UK.  

Professor Evans is the author of various studies of feminism and feminist writers.  Her most recent work ( with Sarah Moore and Hazel Johnstone ) is a study of detective fiction ( Detecting the Modern ) and the theme of that book, of how detective  fiction locates the central dynamics of the contemporary world, arises from her continuing interest in  the ways in which we  learn and acquire our social identities. She also wrote the seminal text, The Imagination of Evil: Crime Fiction and the Modern World.

Professor Thomas Leitch, Professor of English at The University of Delaware. USA.

Professor Leitch teaches undergraduate courses in cinema and graduate courses in literary and cultural theory. His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature of Film, both on adaptation. His credentials in crime fiction include three books he wrote or co-edited on Alfred Hitchcock and a book on Perry Mason and Crime Films, which was shortlisted for an Edgar in 2003. 

Dr Andrew Pepper, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. - 

Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and co-editor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2016) and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020). He has also written a series of detective novels set in 19th Britain and Ireland, all published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Call for Papers

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its seventh conference, which will be held in Bath, UK. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous six successful conferences, Memory, History and Revaluation, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre necessarily incorporates elements of the past – the past in general and its own past, both in terms of its own generic developments and also in respect of true crime and historical events. The CfP will thus offer opportunities for delegates to engage in discussions that are relevant to both past and present crime writing. 

As Tzvetan Todorov argued in “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” crime fiction in many of its various sub-forms has a special relationship with the past. In classic forms of detective fiction, the central event around which the narrative is organized – the murder – occurs in pre-narrated time, and the actual narrative of the investigation is little more than a form of narrative archaeology, an excavation of a mysterious past event than is only accessible through reconstruction in the present. But this relationship between crime fiction and the past goes beyond narrative structure. The central characters of crime writing – its investigative figures – and frequently represented as haunted by their memories, living out their lives in the shadow of past traumas. More broadly, crime writing is frequently described as exhibiting a nostalgic orientation towards the past, and this longing for the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian Golden Age is part of the reason it has been association with social and political conservatism. On the other hand, there is a strong tradition of radical crime fiction that looks to the past not for comfort and stability, but in order to challenge historical myths and collective memories of unity, order, and security. Val McDermid argues that ‘…crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.’ Thus, crime fiction has been used to challenge, subvert and interrogate the legal and cultural status quo. Crime fiction’s relationship with the past is thus inherently complex, and represents a fascinating, and underexplored, focus for critical work. 

Papers presented at Captivating Criminality 7 will thus examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance and policing, drawing on the multiple threads that have fed into the genre since its inception. Speakers are invited to embrace interdisciplinarity, exploring the crossing of forms and themes, and to investigate and challenge claims that Crime Fiction is a fixed genre. Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches.

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

True Crime

Gender and the Past

Crime Fiction in the age of #me too

Crime Fiction from traumatised nations

Crime Fiction and Landscape

Revisionist Crime Fiction

Crime Fiction and contemporary debates

Crime Reports and the Press

Real and Imagined Deviance

Adaptation and Interpretation

Crime Fiction and Form

Generic Crossings

Crime and Gothic

The Detective, Then and Now

The Anti-Hero

Geographies of Crime

Real and Symbolic Boundaries

Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity

The Ideology of Law and Order: Tradition and Innovation

Gender and Crime

Women and Crime: Victims and Perpetrators

Crime and Queer Theory

Film Adaptations

TV series

Technology

The Media and Detection

Sociology of Crime

The Psychological

Early Forms of Crime Writing

Victorian Crime Fiction

The Golden Age

Hardboiled Fiction

Contemporary Crime Fiction

Postcolonial Crime and Detection

Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Fiona Peters, Dr Ruth Heholt and Dr Eric Sandberg, to captivatingcriminality7@gmail.com by 15^th February 2020. 

The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. 

Conference Fees: The fee for CC7 will be 155 pounds sterling, with a discounted fee of 105 pounds sterling for students.

Books to Look Forward to from Orion Publishing (Incl Trapeze, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Gollancz and Orion)

January 2020

Backlash is by Marnie Riches. Keep your enemies close and your neighbours closer...  When Private Investigator Beverley Saunders is tasked with going undercover, she relishes the chance to disguise herself as a cleaner in order to get close to Manchester bad boy Anthony Anthony, aka 2Tone. Anthony's neighbours are suspicious of his wealth and sick of his anti-social behaviour, and Bev's just the woman they need to find out what's going on behind closed doors.  As Bev begins to infiltrate Anthony's world, she soon realises she's in danger - and this time, she might be too far in to get out. Alongside her sidekick Doc, Bev must fight to discover the truth - but when people begin to die, she has to ask herself - is exposing Anthony worth risking her own life?

Can you ever really know your neighbours?  When human remains are found in a ground floor flat, the residents of Nelson Heights are shocked to learn that there was a dead body in their building for over three years.   Sarah lives at the flat above and after the remains are found, she feels threatened by a stranger hanging around the building.  Laura has lived in the building for as long as she can remember, caring for her elderly father, though there is more to her story than she is letting on.  As the investigation starts to heat up, and the two women become more involved, it's clear that someone isn't telling the truth about what went on all those years ago...  The Woman Downstairs is by Elisabeth Carpenter.

February 2020

Things will never be the same again... Ben is driving on the motorway, on his usual commute to the school where he works.  A day like any other, except for Adam, who in a last despairing act jumps in front of Ben's car, and in killing himself, turns the teacher's world upside down.  Wracked with guilt and desperate to clear his conscience, Ben develops a friendship with Alice, Adam's widow, and her 7-year-old son Max. But as he tries to escape the trauma of the wreckage, could Ben go too far in trying to make amends?  The Wreckage is by Robin Morgan-Bentley

Witness X is by S E Moorhead.  She's the only one who can access the truth...  Fourteen years ago, the police caged a notorious serial killer who abducted and butchered two victims every February. He was safe behind bars. Wasn't he?  But then another body is discovered, and soon enough, the race is on to catch the real killer. Neuropsychologist Kyra Sullivan fights to use a new technology that accesses the minds of the witnesses, working with the police to uncover the truth. Will Kyra discover the person behind the murders, and if so, at what cost? And how far will she go to ensure justice is served.

False Value is by Ben Aaronvitch.  Peter Grant is facing fatherhood, and an uncertain future, with equal amounts of panic and enthusiasm. Rather than sit around, he takes a job with emigre Silicon Valley tech genius Terrence Skinner's brand new London start up - the Serious Cybernetics Company.  Drawn into the orbit of Old Street's famous 'silicon roundabout', Peter must learn how to blend in with people who are both civilians and geekier than he is. Compared to his last job, Peter thinks it should be a doddle. But magic is not finished with Mama Grant's favourite son.  Because Terrence Skinner has a secret hidden in the bowels of the SCC. A technology that stretches back to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, and forward to the future of artificial intelligence. A secret that is just as magical as it technological - and just as dangerous.

One Fatal Mistake is by Tom Hunt.  Her son accidentally kills a man.  They cover it up.  Then everything goes wrong.  When eighteen-year-old Joshua Mayo takes a man's life in a terrible accident, he leaves the scene without reporting the crime to the police. He hopes to put the awful night behind him and move on with his life. But, of course, he ends up telling his mother, Karen, what happened.  Karen has raised Joshua on her own in Cedar Rapids, Iowa--and she'd thought they'd finally made it. He was doing well in school and was only months away from starting college at his dream school. After hearing his dark confession, she's forced to make a choice no parent should have to make. A choice that draws them both into a web of deceit that will change their lives forever--if they can make it out alive.

The Holdout is by Graham Moore.  One juror changed the verdict. What if she was wrong?  Ten years ago we made a decision together... Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a

billion-dollar fortune, vanishes on her way home from school. Her teacher, Bobby Nock, is the prime suspect. It's an open and shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed.   Until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, persuades the rest of the jurors to vote not guilty: a controversial decision that will change all of their lives forever.  Ten years later, one of the jurors is found dead, and Maya is the prime suspect.  The real killer could be any of the other ten jurors. Is Maya being forced to pay the price for her decision all those years ago?

March 2020

Against all odds, Aydin Torkal - aka Sleeper 13 - broke free from the terrorist group that took him as a child and raised him into a life of violence and hate.   In the two years since, he's been tracking and killing all those responsible. But he's not done yet.  Now living a secret life in London, he receives a surprise visit from Rachel Cox of MI6. She needs his help to infiltrate a sinister new terrorist cell who've taken root in the USA. Aydin is initially reluctant. But when he learns that a member of the group is the brother of Aziz Al-Addad, 'the Teacher' responsible for Aydin's horrific upbringing, his mind is changed.   Aydin thought he'd broken free from life as an insurgent. But in order to scupper their deadly plans, he must now convince the world's most dangerous terrorist cell that he's one of them.  He must do it before the world suffers another deadly attack.  He will have to do it on his own.  He is IMPOSTER 13.  Imposter 13 is by Rob Sinclair.  

An international disaster.  A plane on route from London to New York City has disappeared out of the sky. This breaking news dominates every TV channel, every social media platform, and every waking hour of the Metropolitan Police and US Homeland Security.   A private tragedy.  The love of DCI Kate Daniels' life was on that aircraft, but she has no authority to investigate. This major disaster is outside of her jurisdiction and she's ordered to walk away.  A search for the truth.  But Kate can't let it lie. She has to find out what happened to that plane - even if it means going off book. No one is safe. And there are some very dangerous people watching her.  Without a Trace is by Mari Hannah.

Hi Five is by Joe Ide.  Christiana is the daughter of the biggest arms dealer on the West Coast, Angus Byrne. She's also the sole witness and number-one suspect in the murder of her boyfriend - found dead inside her Newport Beach boutique. Angus will do anything to save his daughter and he thinks private eye Isaiah Quintabe is just the man for the job - an offer IQ soon learns he can't refuse.  The catch: Christiana has multiple personalities. Five radically different ones - among them, a naive shopkeeper, an obnoxious drummer in a rock band and a wanton seductress.  IQ's dilemma: no one personality saw the entire incident. To find out what really happened the night of the murder, Isaiah must piece together clues from each of the personalities - before the cops catch up.

April 2020

She’s got nowhere left to hide. A year ago, in desperation, Felicity Lloyd signed up for a lengthy research trip to the remote island of South Georgia. It was her only way to escape.  And now he is coming for her.  Freddie Lloyd has served time for murder. Out at last, he's on her trail.  And this time, he won't stop until he finds her.  Because no matter how far you run, some secrets will always catch up with you….  The Split is by Sharon Bolton.

 

Blood Relations is by Jonathan Moore.  Who is Claire Gravesend?  So wonders PI Lee Crowe when he finds her dead, in a fine cocktail dress, on top of a Rolls Royce in the most dangerous neighbourhood in San Francisco.   Claire's mother doesn't believe the coroner: her daughter did not kill herself. But the questions about the Gravesend family pile up fast.  Until Crowe finds their secret home in San Francisco. Sleeping in an upstairs bedroom, he finds Claire and as far as he can tell, she's alive…

Last night my sister was murdered. The police think I killed her.  I was there. I watched the knife go in. I saw the man who did it.  And heard him laugh because he knows he'll never get caught.  He knows I have prosopagnosia - I can't recognise faces.  And if I don't find the man who killed my sister, I'll be found guilty of murder.  Remember Me is by Amy McLellan.

You Can Trust Me is by Emma Rowley.  You can trust me.  But can I trust you?  Olivia is the domestic goddess who has won millions of followers by sharing her picture-perfect life online. And now she's releasing her tell-all autobiography.  For professional ghost-writer Nicky it's the biggest job of her career. But as she delves deeper into Olivia's life, cracks begin to appear in the glamorous facade. From the strained relationship with her handsome husband, to murky details of a tragic family death in her childhood, the truth belies Olivia's perfect public image.  But why is Olivia so desperate to leave an old tragedy well alone? And how far will she go to keep Nicky from the truth?

Alison is more alone than she's ever been. She is convinced that her ex-husband Jack is following her. She is certain she recognises the strange woman who keeps approaching her in the canteen.  She knows she has a good reason to be afraid. She just can't remember why.  Then the mention of one name turns her life upside down.  Alison feels like she's losing her mind . . . but it could just lead her to the truth.  All in Her Head is by Nikki Head. 

The Devil You Know is by Emma Kavanagh.  How do you get away with murder? You lead the world to believe that it has already been solved.  Rosa Fischer has lived a perfectly normal life. That is, until the day that she discovers that she is not Rosa Fischer after all. That she is someone entirely different. But who?   She struggles to unpick the lies that surround her until finally she is left with a crime - one that was solved decades ago. A family dead in a barn, and a baby girl left to be found.  The thing about closed cases - no-one is investigating them. And when Rosa begins to dig deeper beneath the layers of the family annihilation, she discovers that all is not as it seems, and that the answers provided all those years ago may not be quite right.   Because if the dead people are not who you believe the dead people to be, who are they?   And what happened to the ones who were mourned in their place?

May 2020

Never Forget is by Michel Bussi.  BEFORE.  A man running along a remote clifftop path on an icy-cold February morning.  A woman standing on the cliff's edge.  A red scarf on the ground between them.  AFTER  The man is alone - paralysed by fear.  The woman is on the beach below - dead.  The red scarf is now perfectly - and impossibly - arranged around the woman's broken neck.  A handful of seconds. Two lives colliding. WHAT HAPPENED?

All Fall Down is by M J Arlidge.  "You have one hour to live."  Those are the only words on the phone call. Then they hang up. Surely, a prank? A mistake? A wrong number? Anything but the chilling truth... That someone is watching, waiting, working to take your life in one hour.  But why?  The job of finding out falls to DI Helen Grace: a woman with a track record in hunting killers. However, this is one case where the killer seems to always be one step ahead of the police and the victims.  With no motive, no leads, no clues - nothing but pure fear - an hour can last a lifetime...

The hero of The Poet and The Scarecrow is back in a new thriller. Jack McEvoy, the journalist who never backs down, tracks a serial killer who has been operating completely under the radar - until now.  Veteran reporter Jack McEvoy has taken down killers before, but when a woman he had a one-night stand with is murdered in a particularly brutal way, McEvoy realizes he might be facing a criminal mind unlike any he's ever encountered.  McEvoy investigates - against the warnings of the police and his own editor - and makes a shocking discovery that connects the crime to other mysterious deaths across the country. But his inquiry hits a snag when he himself becomes a suspect.  As he races to clear his name, McEvoy's findings point to a serial killer working under the radar of law enforcement for years, and using personal data shared by the victims themselves to select and hunt his targets.  Fair Warning is by Michael Connelly.  

June 2020

'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart.   But whose heart? There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia - herself hiding an unspeakable truth - to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern part of Italy: a perfect genetic enclave protected for centuries from the outside world.   The valley and the portrait are the only clues for a murder that occurred more than 70 years before. A red thread leading to the shadow of someone hell-bent on protecting a sacred secret.  The Sleeping Nymph is by Ilaria Tuti.

Inside Out by Chris McGeorge.  Kara Lockhart has just commenced a life sentence in HMP New Fern - the newest maximum security woman's prison in the country. She was convicted of a murder she is adamant she didn't commit.   One morning she wakes up to find her cellmate murdered - shot in the head with a gun that is missing. The door was locked all night, which makes Kara the only suspect. There is only one problem - Kara knows she didn't do it and she has no idea who did.   Being the only one who knows the truth, Kara sets about trying to clear her name, unravelling an impossible case, with an investigation governed by a prison timetable. Kara starts to learn more about her fellow prisoners, finding connections between them and herself that she would never have imagined.   Indeed it seems that her conviction and her current situation might be linked in strange ways...

The Unwanted Dead is by Chris Lloyd.  On the first day of the Paris Nazi occupation, four Polish refugees are gassed in a railway truck. A fifth commits suicide later that day. Paris police detective Eddie Giral is determined to find out what happened...   But as he investigates, he is led to shocking evidence backing up the rumours of atrocities coming out of Poland.   As Eddie tries to bring the killers to justice and uncover the truth, he finds himself in a more dangerous and sinister world than any he’s known before... 

Two sisters. One guilty of murder. A trial to discover the truth.  Alexandra Avellino has just found her father’s mutilated body. She believes her sister killed him.   Sofia Avellino has just found her father’s mutilated body. She believes her sister did it.   Both women are to go on trial together, in front of one jury. One of these women is lying. One of them is a murderer. Sitting in a jail cell, about to go on trial for murder, you might think that this is the last place she expected to be.   You’d be wrong. Fifty-Fifty is by Steve Cavanagh.  

July 2020

Dead Doubles is by Trevor Barnes.  The Portland Spy Ring was one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War. It seized international attention and revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB spies operating under false identities ('illegals').  The CIA's revelation to MI5 that a KGB agent was stealing crucial secrets from the sensitive submarine research base at Portland in Dorset looked initially like a dangerous but contained lapse of security by a British man and his mistress. But the unsuspecting couple passed the secrets to a Canadian businessman, Gordon Lonsdale. Lonsdale in turn led MI5's spycatchers to an innocent-looking couple in suburban Ruislip called the Krogers, who were transmitting the vital information to Moscow. A sudden defection forced the arrest of the spy ring.  The Krogers were discovered to be two of the most important Russian 'illegals' ever. The Americans had been searching for them for years. In a previous undercover life they had been a conduit to the KGB atomic spies at Los Alamos. And Lonsdale was no Canadian, but a senior KGB controller called Konon Molody - who years later turned out to have been running other key Soviet agents in the UK.

Like Mother, Like daughter is by Elle Croft.  How far would you go to reveal the truth about your own family?   Imogen Brown is a normal 16-year-old... and she feels like she doesn’t belong. She thinks her parents, Kat and Dylan, are hypocrites, playing the perfect family. But they’re in financial difficulty and Kat is trying to work things out, to save her tight-knit family.   One Friday evening, her parents have their biggest fight yet. When Kat goes to wake Imogen the next day, she’s not in her bed, and no one has seen her since school the previous day. Imogen has gone missing. 

Imperfect Women is by Araminta Hall.  Three women. Three best friends. Three untimely deaths   Eleonor, Nancy and Mary met at college and have been friends ever since, through marriages, children and love affairs.   So when Nancy is brutally murdered, Eleonor and Mary are determined to uncover her killer. But as each of their stories unfold, they realise that there are many different truths to find, and many different ways to bring justice for those we love... 

Neon is by G S Locke.  A detective desperate for revenge. A hitwoman with one last job. A killer with both on his list.  Detective Matt Jackson has reached the end. His beloved wife, Polly, is the latest victim of 'Neon' - a serial killer who displays his victims in snaking neon lights - and he can't go on without her.  Unable to take his life, Jackson hires a hit-woman to finish the job. But on the night of his own murder, he makes a breakthrough in the case, and at the last minute his hit-woman, Iris, is offered an irresistible alternative: help Jackson find and kill Neon in return for the detective's entire estate.  What follows is a game of cat and mouse between detective, hit-woman and serial killer. And when Jackson discovers it's not a coincidence that all their paths have crossed, he begins to question who the real target has been all along...

Hunted is by Alex Knight.  You're woken early by the doorbell. It's a young girl, the daughter of the love of your life. She's scared, covered in blood, she says her mother is hurt.  You let her in, try to calm her down, tell her you're going to get help. You reach for your phone, but it lights up with a notification before you touch it.  It's an Amber alert - a child has been abducted by a dangerous suspect.  The child is the girl standing in front of you.  The suspect? You.