Theakston Festival Rounds Up Six Suspects On Crime Novel Award Shortlist

The shortlist for crime writing’s most wanted accolade, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, has been announced.

The shortlisted six were whittled down from a long list of 18 titles. The prize, created to celebrate the very best in crime fiction, was open to UK and Irish crime authors whose novels were published in paperback from 1 May 2017 to 30 April 2018.

The shortlist in full:

Mick Herron, Spook Street

Val McDermid, Insidious Intent 

Denise Mina, The Long Drop 

Abir Mukherjee, A Rising Man

Stav Sherez, The Intrusions

Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown

Val McDermid, Susie Steiner, and Mick Herron return as contenders after being shortlisted in 2017, the year Chris Brookmyre took the winning accolade.

Mick Herron’s espionage thriller, Spook Street, is the fourth in his award-winning Jackson Lamb series. His acclaimed series is based on an MI5 department of ‘rejects’ – intelligent services’ misfits and screw-ups. Herron’s writing was praised by critic Barry Forshaw for ‘the spycraft of le Carré refracted through the blackly comic vision of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.’

Val McDermid’s Insidious Intent features DCI Carol Jordan and Tony Hill, two of the most iconic characters in crime fiction. The LA Times said it was a novel that ‘shows Val McDermid deserves her Queen of Crime crown’. McDermid last received the Novel of the Year accolade in 2006.

Denise Mina could make it a hat-trick after winning the award in 2012 and 2013, she is the only author to date to have won the Novel of the Year in two consecutive years. The Long Drop has already attracted a wealth of awards; Mina was the first woman to win The McIlvanney Prize for The Long Drop.

Abir Mukherjee is the only author on the shortlist for a debut novel. A Rising Man, saw Abir Mukherjee picked as a 2016 New Blood author by Val McDermid at the Festival. She hailed it as, ‘One of the most exciting debut novels I’ve read in years.’ It too has won awards, including the CWA Historical Dagger. His sequel in the Sam Wyndham series is A Necessary Evil.

The Intrusions by Stav Sherez was a 2017 Guardian and Sunday Times book of the year, dubbed ‘A Silence of the Lambs for the internet age’ by Ian Rankin. The book was acclaimed by critics for its echoes of Emile Zola and influences from Graham Greene to Dostoyevsky.

Former Guardian journalist Susie Steiner’s first crime novel introduced Detective Manon Bradshaw in Missing, Presumed, a Sunday Times bestseller. Her follow up, Persons Unknown, a Richard and Judy book club pick, has attracted huge critical acclaim.

The 2018 Award is run in partnership with title sponsor T&R Theakston Ltd, WHSmith, and The Mail on Sunday. 2018 marks the 14th year of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award.

Executive director of T&R Theakston, Simon Theakston, said: “The shortlisted authors are already rich in awards, but there’s only one Novel of the Year, so it will be fascinating to see which of these remarkable titles prevails - all are simply outstanding.”

The shortlist will feature in a six-week promotion in libraries and in WHSmith stores nationwide. The overall winner will be decided by the panel of Judges, alongside a public vote. The public vote opens on 1 July and closes 14 July at www.theakstons.co.uk.

Helen Donkin, Literature Festival Manager at Harrogate International Festivals, said: “The public’s vote is incredibly important. It’s the readers that have real power when it comes to judging a book’s worth, so I’d encourage everyone to make their voice heard – it’s free and simple to vote online.”

The winner will be announced at an award ceremony hosted by broadcaster Mark Lawson on 19 July on the opening night of the 16th Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.

The winner will receive a £3,000 cash prize, as well as a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by Theakston Old Peculier.

Captain Paul Darac, The Genesis Of A Different Kind Of Detective by Peter Morfoot

Peter Morfoot has written a number of plays and sketch shows for BBC Radio and TV and is the author of the acclaimed satirical novel, Burksey. He has lectured in film, holds a Ph.D in art history, and has spent thirty years exploring the life, art and restaurant tables of the French Riviera, the setting for his series of crime novels featuring Captain Paul Darac of Nice’s Brigade Criminelle.

A few pages into my novel, Impure Blood, (Titan Books, April 2016) featuring Captain Paul Darac of Nice’s Brigade Criminelle, we meet the detective heading back to his apartment the morning after playing a gig with his jazz group.

As a tram snaked behind him into Boulevard Jean Jaurès, Darac left the Place and disappeared into the whorl of narrow streets and alleyways that made up the old town, a quarter known as The Babazouk. Exuding coffee, fish, flowers and drains, the Babazouk had the feel of the Moorish souk its name suggested - a shaded warren frequented by fast locals and slow tourists... Darac had acquired his roof-terrace apartment in the Plassa five years ago. It had proved a good move. The pan-tiled canopy of the Babazouk was an atmospheric habitat and it suited him to live suspended between the tangle of the old town and the Nice of the boulevards.

Darac’s world is set in stone for me now but when I began devising the series, (the second and third titles, Babazouk Blues and Box Of Bones are published by Titan Books in April 2017 and 2018), the detective was neither French nor led a double life as a jazz musician. How did he get there?

From the outset, I had qualities in mind for the character that expressed his strong individuality. But attesting to the essentially collaborative nature of police work, I needed him to be a team player, also. An interesting dynamic, I thought, and one that gave me the pleasurable task of creating a permanent cast of supporting players. But where should I locate these stories?

Over the years, I’d come to know Nice well and although it appealed to me as a possible setting, places closer to home were ahead on points. I knew that plumbing the depths of a criminal justice system very different from the UK’s wouldn’t be easy. And my so-so French meant I would need an interpreter to interview officers of Nice’s Police Judiciaire, something I deemed essential should I proceed. It seemed far more practical to set the series in, say, my native Yorkshire.

The Côte d’Azur, though, has compensations for the researcher. And not just the restaurants. The light, the inspiration of generations of artists, is magical. The beauty of the Alpes Maritimes mountains and that eponymous azure coastline is stupendous. But as a crime writer, I needed more than light and beauty. I needed darkness and despair. Are there serpents slithering around in this paradise? Oh yes, they’re there. Aplenty. Nice, as exotically beautiful as any Mediterranean resort, has its fair share of big city problems and crime. Yet I was still unsure.

It was thinking further about my detective-to-be that decided the issue of the setting for me. The turning point was reading an article in The Observer penned by Europe Correspondent, Jason Burke. Entitled: France’s Tough Cops Wield A New Weapon: Culture, the piece focussed on the work of three artists of differing backgrounds and approaches. They did, however, have one thing in common. All three were serving police officers. In the article, chief of police, poet and best-selling author Philippe Pichon made this assertion: “A poet can be a policeman and a policeman can be a poet.” That was my light bulb moment. Added to the picture of Darac I’d already formed, I knew that enlisting him into the ranks of this new generation of artist cops, Poètes Policiers, as they’re dubbed, was the way for him to go.

The question now was to determine the art form.  A music lover, I felt that jazz with its characteristic tension between structure and improvisation would give me the most relevant and interesting possibilities. And Nice’s long love affair with the medium seemed right, also. Headlined by Louis Armstrong, the city’s jazz festival of 1948 was the first in history.

So Darac was coming together. A senior police officer who plays jazz in a quality group, a significant player therefore in two different sorts of team, was someone I was looking forward to getting to know better. I was intrigued that, unlike some of his fictional counterparts, he was a character drawn to living not so much on the edge but on the borderline. A man who chooses to position himself at points of junction or collision with the world. As Impure Blood unfolds, those collisions become ever more treacherous. For the sake of the subsequent novels in the series, let’s hope Darac makes it.

Impure Blood by Peter Morfoot (£7.99,  Titan Books)

In the heat of a French summer, Captain Paul Darac of the Nice Brigade Criminelle is called to a highly sensitive crime scene. A man has been found murdered in the midst of a Muslim prayer group, but no one saw how it was done. Then the organisers of the Nice leg of the Tour de France receive an unlikely terrorist threat. In what becomes a frantic race against time, Darac must try and unpick a complex knot in which racial hatred, sex and revenge are tightly intertwined.