Forthcoming Books from No Exit Press/Oldcastle Books

 January 2023

Final Term is by Leigh Russell.When a pupil accuses a teacher of molesting her, his career and marriage are threatened... The girl's corpse is discovered in the woods, and the teacher becomes a suspect in a murder enquiry. The victim's best friend is then murdered so she cannot reveal the killer's identity. The investigating team are satisfied the teacher is guilty, apart from Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel, who believes the wrong man has been arrested. All of her colleagues disagree... but if she is right, the real killer remains at large.

Guns, Dames and Private Eyes: The Rivals of Philip Marlowe - Stories from the Golden Age of the American Pulp Magazines is edited by Nick Rennison. The prototypes of Raymond Chandler's immortal private detective Philip Marlowe first appeared in a magazine called Black Mask in the 1930s. Black Mask was not the only pulp magazine of the period to publish crime fiction. There were news stands full of them with titles like Dime Detective, Spicy Mystery Stories and Ten Detective Aces. And there were plenty of other private eyes in action. This was the era in which the hard-boiled American detective was born and Nick Rennison's anthology gathers an exciting selection of stories about the rivals of Philip Marlowe. From the intriguingly named Cellini Smith to the two-fisted female crime-solver Violet McDade, from the crime reporter Johnny Castle to the quick-witted, fast-shooting Marty Quade, these characters have their own style and originality. Authors like Norbert Davis, reputedly the favourite crime author of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cleve F. Adams and Robert Reeves may not have the reputations of Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, another famous name who began his career writing for the pulps, but they knew how to tell a thrilling story. They deserve to be remembered and admired, and this collection highlights more than a dozen of them.

February 2023

Robert B Parker's Fallout is by Mike Lupica. When two seemingly unconnected mysterious deaths occur on his watch, police chief Jesse Stone must pull out all the stops to unravel the truth and stop a killer from striking again. The small town of Paradise is devastated when a star high-school baseball player is found dead at the bottom of a bluff just a day after winning the team's biggest game. For Jesse, the loss is doubly difficult - the teen was the nephew of his colleague, Suitcase Simpson, and Jesse had been coaching the young shortstop. As he searches for answers about how the boy died and why, he is stonewalled at every turn, and it seems that someone is determined to keep him from digging further. Jesse suddenly must divide his attention between two cases after the shocking murder of former Paradise police chief, Charlie Farrell. Before his death, Farrell had been looking into a series of scam calls that preyed upon the elderly. But how do these 'ghost calls' connect to his murder? When threats - and gunshots - appear on Jesse's own doorstep, the race to find answers is on. Both old and new enemies come into play, and in the end, Jesse and his team must discover the common factor between the two deaths in order to prevent a third.

Too many people loved Kelly Rowland. One of them killed her, but was it the man in prison for her murder? Gethin Grey is back in the game. His wife may have left him and he's struggling with life as a single father, but now he's got his biggest case in years. The brutal murder of a young woman called Kelly Rowland has been the talk of the South Wales valleys. Even the conviction of a neighbour, a builder called Morgan Hopkins, failed to stop the gossip. There were too many other suspects still around, among them a pair of coppers: brother and sister. So Gethin was delighted when Morgan's family stumped up the money to pay him and his Last Resort Legals team to reinvestigate the case. But when a new lead takes him undercover into a support group for recovering addicts, Gethin has to confront his own demons. Moving from the former mining towns of the valleys to the shiny new waterfront developments of Cardiff, taking in adult puppet shows and piercing parlors, derelict mines and country clubs, Grey In The Dark is by John Lincoln and lays bare a world in which sex and money collide and everyone has their secrets. 

April 2023

Viper's Dream is by Jake Lamar. A hard-boiled crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between 1936 and 1961, Viper's Dream combines elements of the epic Godfather films and the detective novels of Chester Himes to tell the story of one of the most respected and feared Black gangsters in America. At the centre of Viper's Dream is a turbulent love story. And the climax bears an element of Greek tragedy. For the better part of 20 years, Clyde 'The Viper' Morton has been in love with Yolanda 'Yo-Yo' DeVray, a singer of immense talent but a woman consumed by demons. By turns ambitious and self-destructive, conniving and naive, Yo-Yo is a classic femme fatale. She is a bright star in a constellation of compelling characters including the chauffeur-turned-gangster Peewee Robinson, the Jewish kingpin Abraham 'Mr. O' Orlinsky, the heroin dealer West Indian Charlie, the corrupt cop Red Carney, the wife-beating singer Pretty Paul Baxter, the pimp Buttercup Jones and the brutal enforcer Randall Country Johnson. But Viper's Dream has a fast-paced vibe all its own, a story charged with suspense, intrigue and plot twists and spiced with violence and humour. It is also steeped in music. The Viper's story is intertwined with the history of jazz over a quarter century.

May 2023

Salvage this World is by Michael Farris Smith. There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley. In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence. Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.

August 2023

As a favour to her partner, Geraldine agrees to look into the disappearance of a young woman, only to discover that several other young women have also gone missing locally. They all vanished unexpectedly, without trace. When one of the missing women is discovered, unconscious and covered in mud, she dies without recovering consciousness, leaving Geraldine and her team in an urgent race to find the other missing women before it is too late to save them. Without Trace is by Leigh Russell.

September 2023

Master storyteller and award-winning author Chris Offutt’s latest book, Code of the Hills, is a dark, witty, and propulsive thriller of murder and secrets in a town where little is as it seems. Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related. Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

October 2023

Never Walk Away is by Nick Triplow. DS Mark (Max)Lomax is a former Demonstration Squad Officer – a Special Branch Unit dedicated to inflitrating political and extremist groups, a world he thinks he has left far behind. Following a botched stakeout of a north London gangster, he finds himself on enforced leave and is called back into his old world of half-truths and conflicting agendas. As he digs into the death of the civil servant, Max is obstructed at evry turn, forcing him to turn to the people he once infiltrated an betrayed for help. With political reputations on the line, the case becomes less about uncovering the truth, then burying it for good.

November 2023

Charlie Walden is the Resident Judge of the Bermondsey Crown Court, where he had hoped for a quiet life, but has found it to be anything but. With the job of balancing the needs of prosecutors, judges, 'Grey Smoothies' – the humourless grey-suited civil servants – and the overall needs of a Crown Court, he soon finds himself struggling to keep the peace with his own delightful humour. In this first full length Walden novel Charlie is faced with a number of topical issues he hadn't anticipated; invited to join the Court of Appeal he finds hmself faced with a case involving the 'confusion' of one of his team; in another, a Trans teacher must be penalised for defacing a statue; a huge and mysterious cat comes to the rescue in yet another case, and so the harrassed Judge must pick his way through this minefield of exasperating casesin order to keep eveyone from the cannabis lobby to the anti-slave traders happy with his judgments. No hope of that quiet life for Charlie then but as ever he picks his way through the issues of the day with satirical good humour, insight and wit in another entertaining look at the British Court system. A Week on Mount Olympus and Other Tales From the Bench is by Peter Walden.

Sherlock Holmes and the American Sherlocks

 

More than 130 years after his first appearance in print, Sherlock Holmes remains the most famous fictional detective in the world. Yet he and his dependable sidekick, Dr Watson, were not the only ones racing down Victorian and Edwardian London’s gaslit streets in pursuit of criminal masterminds. The years between 1890 and 1914 were a golden age for English magazines and nearly all of them published crime and detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes had plenty of rivals.

In the last few years I’ve compiled several anthologies of crime stories from that era. I’ve scoured the back numbers of old magazines and blown the dust off half-forgotten volumes of short stories in second-hand bookshops in search of Holmes’s competitors. In The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes I highlighted 30 of them. Some, like GK Chesterton’s Father Brown, still have their own fame. Others, such as Addington Peace, created by the man who gave Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the basic idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Percy Brebner’s Christopher Quarles, are scarcely remembered today. Some were such Holmes clones you wondered why their authors were never charged with plagiarism; others, like the wizened Hindu sage Kala Persad and Hagar, the Romany pawnbroker, were more exotic.

In Supernatural Sherlocks I gathered together stories of a special type of crime-solver – the occult detective whose investigations took in the supernatural world. The most famous of these is probably William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. In Sherlock’s Sisters I put together tales of women detectives. They range from Catherine Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, representative of what was known at the time as ‘The New Woman’, independent and intent on her own career, to the lip-reader Judith Lee who can never go anywhere without encountering villains discussing outrageous crimes, blithely unaware that their every word has been understood by the young woman on the far side of the room.

My latest anthology is American Sherlocks. The title is self-explanatory. Its heroes are transatlantic ones. We all have a picture in our mind of the archetypal detective of American fiction. He (and it very nearly always is a he) is a hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s. American crime fiction has a much longer history. 

It began with Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories (‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ etc) in the 1840s. It’s tempting to believe that then nothing much happened in American crime fiction between Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’ and the arrival of writers like SS Van Dine, Hammett and Ellery Queen in the 1920s but this is far from being the case. The USA had as many fictional crimebusters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Britain. Broadly, they fell into two categories.

The first was the dime novel hero. Dime novels, first appearing in the 1860s, were the American equivalents of British ‘penny dreadfuls’. They came in a range of genres, including crime fiction in which characters like ‘Old Sleuth’ and ‘Sam Strong the Cowboy Detective’ battled bad guys in stories that made up in lively action for what they lacked in literary sophistication. However, the major detective to emerge from the dime novel was Nick Carter. He arrived in 1886 and new stories about him were still being published a century later. I’ve included one from 1914 in my anthology. 

The second type of American detective was one modelled much more closely on Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s stories were just as popular in the USA as they were at home. Scores of American rivals to Holmes appeared in magazines and collections of short stories. The impressively named Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, known as ‘The Thinking Machine’, was even more cerebral than Holmes. Madelyn Mack, who chewed on cola berries for stimulus while exercising her formidable deductive powers, was a female Sherlock, working as a private detective in New York. The blind detective Thornley Colton was a wealthy New Yorker who took on cases purely for intellectual interest.

Both in the USA and in Britain there are plenty of Sherlock’s rivals to be enjoyed. In my five anthologies I have highlighted a few dozen. There are even more out there to be discovered and I hope to do so in the future. 

American Sherlocks Edited by Nick Rennison (Oldcastle Books) Out Now

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous of all fictional detectives but, across the Atlantic, he had plenty of rivals. Between 1890 and 1920, American writers created dozens and dozens of crime-solvers. This thrilling, unusual anthology features stories about 15 of them, including Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, 'The Thinking Machine', even more cerebral than Holmes; Craig Kennedy, the so-called 'scientific detective'; Uncle Abner, a shrewd backwoodsman in pre-Civil War Virginia; Violet Strange, New York debutante turned criminologist; and Nick Carter, the original pulp private eye. Editor Nick Rennison gathers together often neglected tales which highlight American crime fiction's early years.

Forthcoming books to look forward to from Atlantic and Corvus books

They call him Herod – a killer of unimaginable cruelty, with an unthinkable desire London is in the grip of a barbaric serial killer. Four women have been abducted in quick succession, their bodies mutilated and dumped. When a fifth woman is taken from her home, DCI David Rosen knows that time is running out... Then Rosen gets a mysterious phone call from Father Sebastian Flint, an enigmatic priest who seems to know rather too much about the abductions.  But it isn’t until Rosen discovers the existence of an ancient text – said to be the devil’s answer to the bible –that the true horror of Herod’s plan begins to unfold.  The Sixth Soul is the debut novel by Mark Roberts and is due to be published in February 2013.

Blessed Are Those Who Thirst is by Anne Holt and is due to be published in April 2013. In Oslo, crime scenes are being found covered with blood, but there is no victim. Only an odd series of numbers is left behind. When a girl is brutally raped in her apartment, Hanne Wilhelmsen quickly notices strange similarities with the blood-stained crime scenes. But the girl’s father has started an independent hunt for the rapist... Also by Anne Holt and due to be published in June is Death of the Demon. The cheerful façade of the Spring Sunshine Children’s home hides a brutal regime. When the manager is found dead in her office, Hanne Wilhelmsen is called in to investigate.

Welcome to fifth-century Britain: the Romans have left, the Saxons have invaded, the towns are decaying and the countryside is dangerous.  Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, an embittered ex-soldier who lost a limb in the Saxon wars, has become the trusted counsellor to Arthur, High King of all Britannia. So when a monk dies in horrific circumstances in Glastonbury Abbey, the Abbot calls for Malgwyn to investigate.  His search for the truth will draw him into an intricate web of religious, economic and political deceit – and a conspiracy that could endanger everything Arthur has fought for. The Divine Sacrifice is by Anthony Hays and is due to be published in April 2013

Traitor’s Field is the second book in the series by Robert Wilton (the winner of the inaugural Goldsboro Crown Award for debut historical novel) to feature John Thurloe.  It is due to be published in May 2013. As England tears itself apart, two spymasters fight for its future: It is 1648 and Britain is at war with itself. The Royalists are defeated but Parliament is in turmoil, its power weakened by internal discord.  Royalism’s last hope is Sir Mortimer Shay, a ruthless veteran of decades of intrigue who must rebuild a credible threat to Cromwell’s rule, whatever the cost.  John Thurloe is a young official in Cromwell’s service. Confronted by the extent of the Royalists’ secret intelligence network, he will have to fight the true power reaching into every corner of society: the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey.

False Gods of Rome is the third novel in the Vespasian series by Robert Fabbri. Sickened by Tiberius’s insane debauchery, Vespasian places his faith in the new Emperor, Caligula. Instead, he watches Rome’s shining star deteriorate into a blood-crazed, incestuous, all-powerful madman. Lavish building projects, endless games, public displays of his  relationship with his sister and a terrified senate are nothing to Caligula’s most ambitious plan: to bridge the bay of Neapolis and ride over it wearing Alexander’s breastplate. And it falls to Vespasian to travel to Alexandria and steal it. False Gods of Rome is due to be published in January 2013.

A Darkness Descending is by Christobel Kent and is due to be published in May 2013.  Silvano Rosselli, the gaunt, charismatic leader of a Florentine political movement, collapses at a rally. His longtime partner Flavia has disappeared, leaving him literally holding their new baby, at least until Rosselli’s formidable mother takes charge. Meanwhile, Sandro Cellini has been reduced to looking into a possibly fraudulent insurance claim. Soon he is drawn into the mystery surrounding Rosselli, and when Flavia’s fate is revealed, events take a terrifying turn.

No Way Back is by Matthew Klein and is due to be published in March 2013. Jimmy Thane has always taken the wrong path. Now he has one last chance to save both his career and his marriage – he has  seven weeks to turn round a failing company. But when the police start asking questions about the disappearance of the former CEO, Jimmy begins to wonder what he’s got himself into.  Then he discovers surveillance equipment in his neighbour’s house. And he begins to notice that his wife isn’t just tired, she’s terrified. Jimmy no longer feels like he’s living the dream – instead he’s plunged into the worst kind of nightmare.

Brodie is approached by the Jewish community in Glasgow to solve a series of thefts. But when the thief is knifed by a householder, who is then also murdered, Brodie’s easy case becomes a terrifying, violent mess. When Brodie investigates further, he discovers that the dead man wasn’t a brutalized Jew, but a sadistic camp guard. What starts as a small case soon escalates into a relentless personal quest for the truth. And when it begins to seem that the guards are protecting someone high up in the old Nazi organization, Brodie faces the biggest moral dilemma of his career.  Pilgrim Soul is by Gordon Ferris and is due to be published in April 2013.

Sherlock Holmes meets Flashman in the first instalment of Adam Carver’s adventures, a wonderfully exuberant piece of Victoriana.  It is 1870. When amateur archaeologist Adam Carver and his loyal but obdurate retainer Quint are visited by an attractive young woman, they are pitched headlong into an elaborate mystery which comes to centre on the existence (or not) of a lost text in Ancient Greek, one that may reveal the whereabouts of the treasure hoard of Philip II of Macedonia. With the scene shifting from the roughest and most genteel parts of the teeming metropolis to the fastness of a Greece gripped by political unrest, Carver and Quint soon realize that nothing is quite what it seems.  Carver’s Quest is by Nick Rennison and is due to be published in June 2013.