In Memoriam - Lauren Milne Henderson

 In Memoriam

Lauren Milne Henderson (aka Rebecca Chance)

30th September 1966 - March 2026

It is with deep sadness that the crime writing community have learned of the recent death of the award-winning crime writer Lauren Milne Henderson. As well as being an author Lauren worked as a journalist for a number of well-known newspapers and magazines.

Under the name of Lauren Milne Henderson, she was the author of the Sam Jones series featuring sculptor turned sleuth Sam Jones. The first book in the series is Dead White Female was published in 1995 and it was followed by six more books.  Too Many Blondes (1996), The Black Rubber Dress (1997) Freeze My Margarita (1998) The Strawberry Tattoo (1999), Chained (2001) and Pretty Boy (2002)

 

Following on from her Sam Jones series she also wrote the Young Adult Kiss/Scarlett series starting with Kiss Me Kill Me in 2008 which featured 16-year-old Scarlett Wakefield who must clear her name after the last boy she kisses dies in her arms and she is accused of his death. There were 3 more books in this series published. Kisses and Lies (2009), Kisses in the Dark (2010) and Kisses of Death (2011). Kiss Me Kill Me was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2009.

For a long period, she was a regular attendee at a number of crime writing festivals especially Bouchercon during the 1990s and 2000s.

Under the name Rebecca Chance she was also the author of 10 glamourous thrillers and what was known as ‘Bonkbusters’.  Whilst all standalones previous characters could be found in other books.  The first book in the series was Divas (2009) and the last book Killer Affair (2017). Killer Heels (2012), Bad Angels (2012) Killer Queens (2013) and Bad Brides (2014) all made the Sunday Times Best seller list.

In 2002 together with Stella Duffy, Lauren edited Tart Noir an anthology of women-behaving-badly crime stories.

Lauren also wrote 3 romantic comedies between 2003 and 2005.

As a non-fiction author she wrote the Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating (2005). Alongside over 100 well-known crime writers she contributed to the Anthony, Agatha and Macavity Award wining Books to Die For where she wrote two personal essays under the names Lauren Henderson on Agatha Christie’s Endless Night and as Rebecca Chance on Have His Carcass by Dorothy L Sayers.

 Lauren was also one of the contributors to Barry Forshaw’s 2 volume British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia. She wrote the essay on Peter O’Donnell and Modesty Blaise. She was also featured in the Encyclopaedia as an author in her own right.

In 2014 under the name of Rebecca Chance and along with crime writer Laura Lippman a travel article was published in The New York Times entitled ‘Murder, They Wrote’ about a trip that they took on the Orient Express.

In 2020 Lauren Henderson short story #MeTwo won the CWA Short Story Dagger. It was published in the anthology Invisible Blood which was edited by Maxim Jakubowski and brought together various short stories focusing on themes of contemporary crime and social issues.

In 2024 Lauren attended the CWA Daggers that took place in London.  Rather sadly and with

much regret it was the last time we saw each other.   I have incredibly fond memories of hanging out with her especially when we managed to find ourselves attending the same Bouchercon. I specifically remember closing the bar with her in Baltimore. It was the second one I attended and it was a joy to see her as at the time I still knew very few people.

Lauren’s death is a great loss to the crime writing community and she will be sorely missed by not only fellow crime writers but all her fans. Our condolences to all of her family and friends.

 

 

In Memoriam - Mo Hayder

 

1 January 1962 – 27 July 2021

The crime fiction world have been deeply upset to hear the news of the sad death of Mo Hayder of Motor Neurone Disease on 27 July 2021. Alison Flood's article in the Guardian can be found here. Over on social media lots of crime writers have been expressing their condolences and paying tribute to her as they remember Mo Hayder. Her debut novel Birdman (1999) took the crime fiction world by storm and was an international best-seller. 

She was certainly a firm favourite with us over on Shots since her first book Birdman was published. Ali Karim interviewed her after her second book The Treatment (2001) had been published and the interview can be read here. There is also an interview with Christine Campbell. A review of The Treatment also by Christine Campbell can be read here. The treatment was not only a Sunday Times best-seller but it was also won the 2002 WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. Mo Hayder also wrote the screenplay for De Behandeling (2014) which was a Belgian film of an adaptation of her book The Treatment. 

Ali Karim also interviewed when her first standalone book (and my favourite) Tokyo (2004) was published. Tokyo was published in the US as The Devil of Nanking. It was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger

Pig Island her second standalone book was published in 2006 and was nominated for both a Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel and shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. Her fifth book Ritual (2008) and third book to feature DI Jack Caffery which was the first in The Walking Man series was nominated for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. This was followed by Skin (2009) the second book in the series.  Gone (2010) the third book in the series was nominated and won an Edgar Award for Best novel. 

A review of Poppet (2013) the sixth book to feature DI Jack Caffery series can be read here.

Her third standalone Hanging Hill was published in 2011.  Wolf (2014) which was the final book to feature DI Jack Caffery was nominated in 2015 for an Edgar Award. It was also announced in March 2021 that the BBC were filming Wolf in Wales.

It was announced in March 2021 that Cornerstone imprint Century had acquired two speculative thriller novels by her under the name Theo Clare. The first in the series, The Book of Sand, is due to be published in January 2022 as a lead title for Century and its sequel, The Book of Clouds, will follow in early 2023.

The death of Mo Hayder is a blow to the crime writing community and she will be sorely missed by not only her fellow crime writers but also her fans. Our condolences to her family and her friends.

The Book of Sand by Theo Clare (Published by Century) Out January 2022

SAND. A hostile world of burning sun. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. In the distance a group of people - a family - walk towards us. Ahead lies shelter: a 'shuck' the family call home and which they know they must reach before the light fails, as to be out after dark is to invite danger and almost certain death. To survive in this alien world of shifting sand, they must find an object hidden in or near water. But other families want it too. And they are willing to fight to the death to make it theirs. It is beginning to rain in Fairfax County, Virginia when McKenzie Strathie wakes up. An ordinary teenage girl living an ordinary life - except that the previous night she found a sand-lizard in her bed, and now she's beginning to question everything around her, especially who she really is … Two very different worlds featuring a group of extraordinary characters driven to the very limit of their endurance in a place where only the strongest will survive.

Photograph ©Ayo Onatade (2004)

JESSICA MANN by Mike Ripley

In Memoriam

September 1937 - 11 July 2018

Crime writer, reviewer, journalist and broadcaster Jessica Mann has died at the age of 80 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

©Jessica Mann

Born in London in 1937, Jessica was the daughter of Fritz and Lore Mann who had fled Nazi Germany in October 1933. With the prospect of a Nazi invasion of England in 1940, the two-year-old Jessica and her four-year brother were evacuated to America but returned to London in 1943 where Jessica learned ‘the received pronunciation and authoritative intonation of the St Paul’s Girls’ School voice’. She read archaeology at Cambridge and then law at Leicester University, but her first love appeared to be archaeology. Not only was her best-known fictional detective, Tamara Hoyland, an archaeologist but she married one – Professor Charles Thomas, noted for his excavations at Tintagel in Cornwall where the couple lived for much of their long married life.

Her freelance journalism, features, travel writing and reviews, have appeared in most national newspapers and magazines and as a broadcaster she appeared on Any Questions, Round Britain Quiz and Start the Week. She wrote more than twenty crime novels but will probably be best remembered for her non-fiction works; about female crime writers (Deadlier Than The Male), on evacuee children during WWII (Out of Harm’s Way) and on the position of women in post-war Britain (The Fifties Mystique).

Since the death of Phillip Oakes in 2005, she has reviewed crime fiction for the Literary Review, but I first met her in 1989 when she had just been replaced as the crime reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. It was a frosty first meeting, as I was the person who had replaced her – and the petite Jessica could be very frosty when the need arose. This did not stop us becoming friends. Jessica wrote kind reviews about my books and I had the pleasure of getting one of her titles, Funeral Sites, back into print as a Top Notch Thriller. (Originally published in 1981, the novel is a feminist take on The 39 Steps and on first publication was enthusiastically reviewed by Reginald Hill.)

When I was researching a novel set in sub-Roman Britain, Jessica acted as a go-between with her husband Professor Thomas, a noted authority on the period, who answered many of my idiotic questions. We also swapped notes on crime novels featuring archaeology and one of my abiding memories of her was sitting in the audience with her at a well-known crime fiction convention during a panel discussion on archaeology and crime. When it became clear that not one of the four featured authors actually had any experience (at all) of archaeological fieldwork, Jessica began fuming and her blood pressure was only lowered when I suggested, after fifteen minutes, that we break for the bar!

On the death of her husband, Jessica moved back to London and became a familiar face on the publishing social scene, although she was not afraid of offending – even boycotting – those crime writers whom she felt employed gratuitous violence, especially against women, in their fiction.

She also served on the CWA Committee and as Secretary to the Detection Club.  Her thirteenth novel A Private Enquiry was shortlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger. 

In Memoriam

22 February 1956 – 23 March 2018

© Shotsmag.co.uk 

On Friday 23^rd March 2018 the crime writing community were notified of the sad death of Scottish crime writer Philip Kerr by his wife novelist Jane Thynne via Twitter.

Philip Kerr was best known for his Bernie Gunther novels with the first one in the series March Violets being published in 1989. March Violets introduced readers to his sardonic, tough talking former soldier who fought in World War I on the Turkish Front and also an ex-cop. Gunther went on to work as a private eye in the pre World War II. The series blended fact and fiction and set mostly in Berlin, as Gunther carried out investigations against the backdrop of the rise of the Nazis, whose reach he is always trying to escape.

In March Violets Bernhard Gunther is a private eye, specializing in missing persons. And in Hitler's Berlin, he's never short of work... Winter 1936. A man and his wife shot dead in their bed. The woman's father, a millionaire industrialist, wants justice - and the priceless diamonds that disappeared along with his daughter's life.  As Bernie follows the trail into the very heart of Nazi Germany, he's forced to confront a horrifying conspiracy.

March Violets was followed by The Pale Criminal which was published in 1990 and A German Requiem in 1991. The first three novels later became known as The Berlin Trilogy and were published as such in 2012. 

In 1992 his standalone novel A Philosophical Investigation was published.  Set in London 2013: a world in which serial murder has reached epidemic proportions.

Tested positively by the government as one disposed to criminal violence, a serial killer breaks into the computer to erase his name, where he discovers a list of others so accused and hits on the horrifying idea: what if he were to become a killer of serial killers? A Philosophical Investigation was well received on publication with the narrative unfolding from a dual perspective. The killer's being told in first person and the detective's is told in third.

 

This was followed in 1993 with Dead Meat and Gridiron in 1995,  The Shot in 1999, Dark Matter (2002), Hitler’s Peace (2012) amongst others.  The most recent standalone being The Most Frightening Story Ever Told in 2016.

He returned to the Bernie Gunther novels after a 15 year gap with The One From the Other in 2006.  This was followed by A Quiet Flame (2008), If the Dead Rise Not (2009), Field Grey (2010), Prague Fatale (2011), A Man Without Breath (2013), The Lady from Zagreb (2015), The Other Side of Silence (2016) and Prussian Blue in 2017. His novel If The Dead Not Rise won the Crime Writers Association Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2009 as well as the Premio RBA de Novela Negra. It also won the Barry Award for Best British Novel.  The novels Field Grey, The Lady of Zaregb and Prussian Blue were all shortlisted for an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2012, 2016 and 2018 respectively. 

© Shotsmag.co.uk (Philip Kerr & Jane Wood)

The latest book in the Bernie Gunther series Greeks Bearing Gifts is due to be published in April this year.  In Greeks Bearing Gifts, it is Munich, 1956. Bernie Gunther has a new name, a chip on his shoulder, and a dead-end career when an old friend arrives to repay a debt and encourages “Christoph Ganz” to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company with a client in Athens, Greece.  Under the cover of his new identity, Bernie begins to investigate a claim by Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war. Witzel’s claimed losses are large , and, even worse, they may be the stolen spoils of Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz. But when Bernie tries to confront Witzel, he finds that someone else has gotten to him first, leaving a corpse in his place.  Enter Lieutenant Leventis, who recognises in this case the highly grotesque style of a killer he investigated during the height of the war. Back then, a young Leventis suspected an S.S. officer whose connection to the German government made him untouchable. He’s kept that man’s name in his memory all these years, waiting for his second chance at justice…  Working together, Leventis and Bernie hope to put their cases–new and old–to bed. But there’s a much more sinister truth to acknowledge: A killer has returned to Athens…one who may have never left.

© Shotsmag.co.uk  (Janet Ellis, Philip Kerr & Mike Ripley)

Between 2014 and 2015 three books in the Scott Manson thriller series were also written. The first in the series January Window (2014) introduced readers to Scott Manson a team coach for a London football club and all-round fixer. This was followed by Hand of God and False Nine both in 2015.

   

He was also wrote children’s novels using the name P B Kerr as well as a number of non-fiction books under his own name.

Over the years Shots have reviewed a number of his books including The Other Side of Silence, Hand of God, The Lady of Zaregb, A Man Without Breath, Prague Fatale and Field Grey. 

According to his publishers Quercus, Philip finished a fourteenth Bernie Gunther novel Metropolis, which will be published in the UK and US next year

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A 2011 interview on the Shots website can be found here. The Guardian have also reported on his death.

His passing is a great loss to so many; his family, authors and readers.  He will be solely missed.