Crime Thrillers for Winter and Christmas by B.P.Walter

Winter and Christmas has been a time for mysteries and thrillers for many years, with readers seeking warmth from both pulse-racing, tension-driven stories or cosier, more leisurely whodunnits. I’ve always been drawn to crime fiction at this time of year – I think it’s the sense of comfort driven from order being made out of chaos. Pandemics aside, this time of year can be very hectic, thanks to bustling shops and Christmas gatherings, so there’s something intrinsically soothing about finding order and method on the page even if it sometimes alludes us in real life. My novel The Woman on the Pier isn’t detective-focused, but it does feature a central character setting off to solve a particular mystery and make the guilty (or person she perceives to be guilty) face up to their alleged crime. I’ve always found this structure compelling on the page and I hope readers find the book similarly enthralling if they choose to curl up with it by the fire on a cold winter’s night. And on the subject of curling up with a book (perhaps by the Christmas tree with a few mince pies), I’ve brought together below five of my favourite winter-based thrillers, both new and old, that would make for perfect seasonal reading.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

Fans of 2019 movie Knives Out should certainly turn to this Christie gem from 1938. That terrifically enjoyable film features a lot of nods to Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, with bickering families, mysterious outsiders, a bloody death of the family patriarch and an ingenious solution. Christie apparently wrote this because her brother-in-law complained that the murders in her books were ‘getting too refined’ and apparently wanted to read a story with ‘a good violent murder with lots of blood’. Well that’s certainly what she delivered here, with the bloody throat-cutting and nightmarish sounds happening at the top of an old manor house. Once you’ve finished the book, 1994 ITV adaptation of the novel starring David Suchet is also definitely worth a watch, especially for the superb casting, helping it skilfully handle certain tricky aspects of the plot that are hard to pull-off well onscreen. 

The Dark by Emma Haughton

Now moving to something bang up-to-date, Emma Haughton’s thriller The Dark is one of the most impressive books I’ve read all year. It’s an autumn tradition of mine to take myself off on a reading retreat (not an established one, I just book myself into a hotel and just read book after book after book). When you’re doing really sustained amounts of reading, it’s common to want breaks and do something else for a bit – however this did not occur with this utterly gripping novel of arctic-based murder. Playing out in a confined environment, this is essential reading for those who enjoy Agatha Christie’s more single-setting based novels (And Then There Were None of course comes to mind) and the recent (and similarly enthralling) hit BBC drama Vigil. 

Silent Night by Nell Pattison 

This is a novel so covered in a cold, chilly atmosphere (thanks to its superb scene-setting) the pages themselves practically crack with frost as you turn them. Following the investigation that unfolds after a death at a school trip for deaf students, Nell Pattison’s characters are very vividly drawn and the haunting terrain of the snowy woods is eerily evoked. 

Shiver by Allie Reynolds

One of those books you can’t help but fly through, Allie Reynold’s debut thriller Shiver is an excellent whodunnit that at times borders on suspense-horror. Like The Dark, it’s also a well-pitched examination of what happens when you group people together for a tense period in an extreme situation, with the secrets in their past steadily coming to the surface. 

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

This is the only of my five not specifically set in winter, but it still makes of absorbing reading on dark, chilly evenings. I think I also have a lot of associations with this book and Christmas, since it was the first of P.D. James’s novels I read, back when I was 13 years old and suffering from flu in December. It was the perfect medicine: James’s mysteries are so well-thought-through, and this one takes place within the confines of a wonderfully atmospheric location: a restful retreat for the rich on an island just off the Cornish coast. Expect brutal killings, pleasingly methodical crime-solving and a very tense final act. 

The Woman on the Pier by B P Walter (Published by Harper Collins) Out Now

Two strangers meet on the pier Only one walks away... Screenwriter Caroline Byrne is desperate to know why her daughter Jessica died, murdered in Stratford when she was supposed to be at a friend's in Somerset. When Caroline discovers the messages Jessica had been sending a boy named Michael, she realises it's because of him. Because he failed to meet her that day. He's the reason why her daughter is dead. And so she makes a choice. He's the one who's going to pay. That is her promise. Her price.

More information about B P Walter can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @BarnabyWalter and on Instagram @bpwalterauthor. 

Iain Maitland's Five Detective Duos

I began reading detective novels when I was 10 or 11 years old back in the early 1970s. I started, as many do, with Agatha Christie and loved the Poirot and Hastings stories. I then went on to Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories. Here are my favourite five.

5. Morse and Lewis – Colin Dexter

I read the first three books, Last Bus To Woodstock, Last Seen Wearing and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn soon after they came out in the mid- to late- 1970s; hand-me-downs from my Grandpa who loved crime novels. For me, Morse is a great character – on the page, he’s world-weary and battered and makes mistakes following false trails. Lewis – Welsh in the early books – is a good foil.

The TV series takes Morse and Lewis in a different direction and is equally wonderful – so much so that Dexter started writing with the TV characters in his head rather than his original creations. My favourite is The Secret Of Annexe 3 with an old-school Morse and a twisty, turny plot plus some stoutly un-PC characters that might explain why it was never adapted for TV. 

4. Dalgliesh & Others

P.D. James’ detective Adam Dalgliesh ran through 13 novels with a range of partners; Martin, Masterson, Massingham and Kate Miskin. The first, Cover Her Face, in 1962. The last, The Lighthouse, in 2005. An astonishing span of time. I was introduced to these by my mum who had read them all and said that they got better and better.  My favourite two - and you’ve really got to begin at the beginning – are Cover Her Face (1962) and The Private Patient (2008). Dalgleish investigates the violent death of a maid at a manor house – shades of Christie – in Cover Your Face and, as Commander Dalgleish, returns to country house territory on the death of a patient at a cosmetic surgery clinic there. ‘Better and better’, as my mum said.

3. Harcus and Laird – Claire MacLeary

I love MacLeary’s books and have read three so far -Cross Purpose, Burnout and Runaway. These are gritty thrillers set in Aberdeen and feature the mismatched duo of Maggie Laird & Wilma Harcus. The characters are as much of a strength as the plots with Maggie and Wilma being a chalk and cheese odd couple. Lots of humour here – Big Wilma’s my favourite. Start with Cross Purpose.

2. Matthew Ryan and Eloise O’Neill - Mari Hannah

I came to The Silent Room and The Death Messenger after reading Hannah's DCI Kate Daniels series. One of the great strengths of Hannah’s work is that it is underpinned by know-how and understanding of how things work – if memory serves, she worked in the probation service and her partner was in the police force. That shows. I’ve just finished reading The Death Messenger and it’s even better than The Silent Room IMHO. I adore the premise – DVDs of crime scenes with chilling narrations of the murders there - are sent to the police. The killer is taunting the police – come and catch me. Ryan and O’Neill are on their way.

1 Hakim and Arnold – Barbara Nadel

An Act Of Kindness is the first book in this series, featuring Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim who run a detective agency in London's East End. I’ve been reading these since the first one came out in 2013 through to Displaced in 2018. I’ve just pre-ordered the next one, A Time To Die, which is available this summer.

Barbara has a strong background in mental health. She was a mental health advocate for the mentally ill in a psychiatric hospital. That knowledge shines through in her work. I’ve just discovered another Nadel series, Inspector Ikmen, set in Turkey, and there are 20 of these. I’m halfway through Belshazzar's Daughter, the first, and it’s fab.

"He's back, Carrie. The Scribbler is back." DI Gayther and his rookie colleague DC Carrie have been assigned a new caseload. Or rather, an old one ... cold cases of LGBTQ+ murders dating back to the 1980s and beyond. Georgia Carrie wasn't even born when the notorious serial killer began his reign of terror across the East of England. Roger Gayther was on the force that failed to catch him and remembers every chilling detail. Now, after all these years, there's a sudden death featuring The Scribbler's tell-tale modus operandi. Can Gayther and Carrie track the murderer down and bring him to justice before the slaughter starts agaiThe Scribbler by Iain Maitland (Published by Saraband)

"He's back, Carrie. The Scribbler is back." DI Gayther and his rookie colleague DC Carrie have been assigned a new caseload. Or rather, an old one ... cold cases of LGBTQ+ murders dating back to the 1980s and beyond. Georgia Carrie wasn't even born when the notorious serial killer began his reign of terror across the East of England. Roger Gayther was on the force that failed to catch him and remembers every chilling detail. Now, after all these years, there's a sudden death featuring The Scribbler's tell-tale modus operandi. Can Gayther and Carrie track the murderer down and bring him to justice before the slaughter starts again?

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The Scribbler from Contraband Books, the crime imprint of Saraband Books, is the first Gayther and Carrie novel. If they can catch The Scribbler and bring him to justice, Gayther and Carrie will be back again in the second book in the series, The Key Man. 

IainMaitland.net

Twitter.com/iainmaitland     

St Hilda's 2017

So, this morning I have left a rather wet but bright London on my way to one of my favourite Crime and Mystery Conferences. St Hilda's weekend.

This time last year I drove and had the delightful company of the wonderful Sarah Weinman (who was giving her first ever paper) and my friend Kirstie Long.

This year I have reverted back to what I normally do and that is catch the coach.  Specifically the Oxford Tube!  It is in my opinion one of the most convenient ways to get to Oxford from London and to St Hilda's specifically as the coach drops you less than 10 minutes walk (by my calculations anyway) from St Hilda's.

View from my room

St Hilda's (as it is fondly known) is one of the few crime and mystery conferences that I try and not miss. It is also the oldest.  I have forgotten when I started attending but I can say it must be at least 15 years ago and I don't think I have missed one.  The closest I came to missing St Hilda's was the year there was a significant birthday in the family and I ended up doing a mad dash back to London from Oxford and returning again so that I could take part in the family festivities.  It is also the only conference that I organise my leave around.  That is the power of St Hilda's.

This year there is so much to look forward to.  The theme is Another Crime, Another Place: the role of location in crime fiction. Lots of new authors giving papers such as Stella Duffy who is presently finishing a Ngaio Marsh novel,  Yrsa Sigurðardóttir who will be giving the main Conference lecture, Abir Mukerjee whose novels are set in India, Lin Anderson, Mark Billingham (to name a few) and a mystery themed play/ quiz as well. 

It is going to be lots of fun and I shall be tweeting, taking photographs and hopefully blogging as much as possible over the weekend.  So do come long for the ride. The only thing you may wish is that you were here in person.

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Books to Look Forward to from Faber and Faber

July

The Girl in Green takes us deep into heart of Iraq, as British journalist Thomas Benton is persuaded by ex-US soldier Arwood Hobbes, and supported by relief worker Marta Strom, to embark on what may be a fools' errand, as they try to atone for their failure to save a local girl over twenty years previously, after Operation Desert Storm. Timely and telling - 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the Gulf War and is election year in the U.S. - The Girl in Green explores the troubled landscape of the Middle East, and the West's foreign policy agenda, with all the wit, skill and insight of his acclaimed first novel.  The Girl in Green is by Derek B Miller.

Wilde Lake is by Laura Lippman. ‘Lu' Brant is the newly elected - and

first female - state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in which her revered father famously served. Fiercely intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death in her home. As Lu prepares for the trial, the case dredges up painful memories, reminding her small but tight-knit family of the night when her brother, AJ, saved his best friend at the cost of another man's life. Only eighteen, AJ was cleared by a grand jury. Now, Lu wonders if the events of 1980 happened as she remembers them. What details might have been withheld from her when she was a child? The more she learns about the case, the more questions arise. Propelled into the past, she discovers that the legal system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all the answers and that the truth might be a dangerous thing to learn.

August

And now I stood here, on a desolate airfield in the Arkansas wilderness, a stone's throw from Texarkana. Darkness drawing in on me. Cross country to see a man I never imagined seeing again. On the strength of one desperate telephone call...' Having left Texarkana for the safety of the West Coast, reporter Charlie Yates finds himself drawn back to the South, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, as an old acquaintance asks for his help. This time it's less of a story Charlie's chasing, more of a desperate attempt to do the right thing before it's too late.  Black Night Falling is by Rod Reynolds

The Other Widow is by Susan Crawford.  'We have to stop seeing

each other ...  It isn't safe. For us.' He turns toward her, and even in the darkened car she sees his fear. The affair is over. Moments later, Joe's car skids off an icy road. Desperate to keep her life intact, Dorrie runs from the wreckage - but now someone is calling her from his phone. Joe's wife knew he was cheating. On her own in the wake of his death, Karen can't shake the feeling that someone is watching her. Investigator Maggie Brennan is immediately suspicious of the life insurance claim following the crash. The policy was a recent purchase, and she doesn't believe in coincidences. As the fates of these three women become more tightly entwined, they're brought closer to a terrifying truth.

September

A Deadly Thaw is by Sarah Ward.  2004: In Bampton, Derbyshire, Lena Fisher is arrested for suffocating her husband, Andrew. Spring 2016: A year after Lena's release from prison, Andrew is found murdered in a disused mortuary. Who was the man Lena killed twelve years ago and why did she lie about his identity? When Lena disappears, her sister, Kat, follows a trail of clues delivered by a teenage boy.

  

October

The Mistletoe Murders is by P D James.  As the acknowledged 'Queen of Crime', P. D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. Four of the best of these have been drawn from the archives and published here. P. D. James' prose illuminates each of these perfectly formed stories, making them ideal reading for the darkest days of the year. While she delights in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at family gatherings, her Christmas stories also provide tantalizing puzzles to keep the reader guessing. P. D. James embraces the challenge of the short-story form, and ingeniously weaves the strands of plot, setting, characterisation and surprise to create a satisfying whole within only a few thousand words. From the title story about a strained country-house party on Christmas Eve, to another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and two cases for James' poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh.

November

Sitting in the departure lounge of Kirkwall Airport, Finn Sullivan just wants to get off Orkney. But then he meets the mysterious and dangerous Maddie Pierce, stepping in to save her from some unwanted attention, and his life is changed forever. Set against the brutal, unforgiving landscape of Orkney, Crash Land is by Doug Johnston and is a psychological thriller steeped in guilt, shame, lust, deception and murder.

Kitty Peck and the Daughter of Sorrow is by Kate Griffin. Summer 1881: the streets of Limehouse are thick with opium...and menace. At eighteen Kitty Peck has inherited Paradise, a sprawling criminal empire on the banks of the Thames. Determined to do things differently to her fearsome grandmother, she now realises that the past casts a long and treacherous shadow. Haunted by a terrible secret and stalked by a criminal cabal intent on humiliation and destruction, Kitty must fight for the future of everyone she cares for...

Big Read 2016 Honours Queen of Crime P.D James

The Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival has launched its annual Big Read.  Readers across the North are being invited to celebrate the life and work of one of the world’s greatest writers, PD James.

In partnership with Faber & Faber and libraries and reading groups in the North of England, the 2016’s Big Read is James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.

The Big Read initiative aims to encourage as many people as possible to celebrate great crime writing by reading the same novel at the same time.  An Unsuitable Job for a Woman introduces Cordelia Gray, the first modern female detective in crime fiction. 

At the time of creating Cordelia Gray, P.D. James worked as a civil servant in the crime department of the Home Office. Regarding this novel, she wrote: 'I wanted to have a young heroine of courage and intelligence who faces the problems of life with a determination to be successful in a job which everyone else thinks she won't be able to do.

The Big Read begins on Monday May 9 and runs until Friday May 13, with free events in libraries across the North with Festival Reader in Residence and bestselling crime author, Mari Hannah. Hannah is the award-winning author of the Kate Daniels crime fiction series.

Mari said. “It’s a particular honour to be taking PD James on the Big Read, not just because of her brilliance and legendary status but because of the novel itself. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a classic crime novel introducing a lead character ahead of her time. PD James was a true pioneer who gave the rest of us something to chase.”

PD James was the Grande dame of mystery, linked with the golden age of detective writing and the successor to Agatha Christie. After Christie’s death she was called the new Queen of Crime.

Made famous by her most iconic character, detective Adam Dalgliesh, James began writing aged 40 and went on to write over 18 novels and has collected numerous awards and honours. Aged 91, she received the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award in 2011. She died in 2014, aged 94.

Literature Festivals Manager Gemma Rowland said: “We are enormously proud of the Festival’s outreach and literacy initiatives. The Big Read is one such project which aims to encourage local people to get reading together. Thanks to the generous support of publisher Faber, the Festival has been able to distribute 1500 copies of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman to local reading groups through our partner library services across Yorkshire, Middlesbrough and Tyneside for free.”

P D James (1920-2014) – A personal reminiscence by Mike Ripley and Obituary

Within two minutes of hearing the news on the BBC’s 2 p.m. bulletin yesterday, I was telephoned by the East Anglian Daily Times for a reaction to the death of Phyllis James.  This interest by a regional newspaper was no random act of news-gathering as Phyllis is revered in East Anglia partly as a former resident of Southwold and partly because several of her famous crime novels had atmospheric Suffolk settings, not the least of them being the coastal village of ‘Monksmere’ in her 1967 Unnatural Causes which begins with the famously gruesome opening: The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast.

As she often said when asked the perennial question ‘How do you write your books?’ it was, for her, a question of place.  Only when she had fixed on a setting – and not before – did plot, characters, suspense, and solution begin to coalesce.  This was often, though not always, a distinctive physical, geographical place like the East Anglian coastline, which she caught so beautifully in Death in Holy Orders (2001) or other dramatic seascapes such as the Dorset coast of The Black Tower (1975) or ‘Combe Island’ off Cornwall in The Lighthouse (2005).  She proved to be just as comfortable describing (or more accurately, letting her characters observe) urban settings, notably Cambridge in high summer in An Unsuitable Job For a Woman (1972) and London – and in Original Sin (1994) specifically the River Thames.

Sometimes the setting was a specific place, and as Phyllis James wrote crime novels, it could be a specific place where something very nasty has taken place, as in the bloodstained vestry of St Matthew’s church Paddington in A Taste For Death (1986) with its two almost decapitated bodies.  I remember there was something of a furore when that book – with that opening chapter - came out for it gave lie to the suggestion that P. D. James was a writer of “cosy” mysteries.  True, she wrote traditional English detective stories and did so with a skill, which did – and will forever – rank with the best of Allingham, Marsh, Sayers and Christie but she was far from a cosy writer.  Murder, in her books, was never bloodless or provided simply as an artifice to the plot.

From Agatha Christie she learned the lesson not to make her series detective an eccentric, if not bizarre, character and from Dorothy Sayers she learned the danger of falling in love with her central protagonist.  And so her hero Adam Dalgliesh was, from the outset, created as a professional policeman with an established (albeit tragic) family history whose career loyal readers would follow as he ascended the giddy heights of Scotland Yard over the years.  His creator imbued him with the qualities she admired (in both sexes): intelligence, courage, sensitivity, and reticence.

When writing about this process and her own career in Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), she said, interestingly: If I started today it is likely that I would choose a woman, but this was not an option at the time when women were not active in the detective force.

Nor were they particularly dominant in crime fiction.  It is easy to forget that when P.D. James’ first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962; the best-seller charts were dominated (and internationally dominated) by male thriller writers. Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, and Ian Fleming were well into their stride and the careers of Len Deighton and John Le Carré were just taking off.  True, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were still active, but there seemed to be a trend towards spies rather than detectives and exotic thriller locations, from the Arctic to the Amazon, rather than small English villages like St Mary Mead.  Also, most notable innovations in crime writing appeared to be taking place in America rather than Britain, spearheaded by Ed McBain and Ross Macdonald.

A woman writing traditional English detective stories with a strong sense of Christian morality seemed to be swimming against the tide, but that is exactly what Phyllis James did, although she once admitted to me that the real incentive to sell that first novel was to pay for a new carpet in the living room!

Although her skill as a writer was recognised by the critics, commercial success did not come overnight but by the time Anglia Television began to serialise her novels in the 1980s, she was well on her way to becoming a household name.  She won three Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association, though amazingly never a Gold Dagger – and equally surprisingly was never elected CWA Chairman, something I had to look up, as it seemed so unlikely.  She was, however, the 1987 recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement though at that time, her writing career was probably only just approaching the halfway mark.

In a writing career spanning 52 years, she was not a prolific author – certainly not by crime-writing standards – producing 20 novels, 14 of which featured Adam Dalgliesh.

The first P.D. James book I read, though, was not a Dalgliesh but her stand-alone 1980 novel about adoption and ‘lost’ children, Innocent Blood.  To this day I think it remains my favourite and I was rather proud to hear Ruth Rendell, in a radio tribute to Phyllis yesterday, say that it was also her favourite.

I first met Phyllis through the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, of which she was the Patron for many years.  She gave the first annual Sayers Memorial Lecture at Witham in Essex (where Sayers had lived) and I gave the second.  We both returned to Witham in 2007 to launch the Essex Book Festival and, after the formalities were done and dusted, she joined me in an impromptu question-and-answer session with visitors to Witham public library.

When one would-be novelist asked, rather plaintively: “What do you have to do to write a book?”  Phyllis and I answered loudly and in perfect unison: “Read!” though we had not, honestly, rehearsed.

At the funeral of her friend and fellow Detection Club member Harry Keating in 2011, she gave a heartfelt oration of which I know Harry would have approved.  At the wake after the service she was naturally sombre, but as charming and polite as ever.  We talked about her forthcoming novel Death Comes to Pemberley and she hinted that not only did she have an idea for the ‘next Dalgliesh’ but also for the one after that.

I have no idea how far she got with the next Dalgliesh, but she always said in public that her detective hero “would die with her” and it seems, sadly as if he has.

I cannot say I knew Phyllis well.  We were of very different generations and traditions when it came to crime writing, but British crime writing in particular is a broad church and Phyllis was a charming, wise, and supremely talented pillar of that church.  I doubt we will see her like again.

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Pictures courtesy of Mike Ripley and the Shots Collective.

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Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh.  James began writing in the mid-1950s.  Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962.  Many of James's mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the UK's bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service, in which James worked.  In 1991, she was created a life peer as Baroness James of Holland Park and sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative.

She revealed in 2011 that The Private Patient was the final Dalgliesh novel.  As guest editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme in December 2009, James conducted an interview of BBC Director General Mark Thompson, in which she seemed critical of some of his decisions.  Regular Today presenter Evan Davis commented that "She shouldn't be guest editing; she should be permanently presenting the programme". During the 1980s, many of James's mystery novels were adapted for television by Anglia Television for the ITV network in the UK.  The BBC has adapted Death in Holy Orders in 2003, and The Murder Room in 2004, both as one-off dramas starring Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh.

Her novel The Children of Men (1992) was the basis for the feature film Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine.  She wrote 14 novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, 2 novels featuring Cordelia Gray and a number of non-fiction books.

P D James was the President of the Society of Authors between 1997 and 2013.  She was a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.  She also held Honorary Fellowships of both St Hilda’s College Oxford and Girton College Cambridge to name a few.

Her books won a number of awards and were shortlisted numerous times as well –

1971 Best Novel Award, Mystery Writers of America (runner-up): Shroud for a Nightingale

1972 Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: Shroud for a Nightingale

1973 Best Novel Award, Mystery Writers of America (runner-up): An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

1976 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: The Black Tower

1986 Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award (runner-up): A Taste for Death

1987 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: A Taste for Death

1987 CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger (lifetime achievement award)

1992 Deo Gloria Award: The Children of Men

1992 The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! 1992: Devices and Desires

1999 Grandmaster Award, Mystery Writers of America

2010 Best Critical Nonfiction Anthony Award for Talking About Detective Fiction

2010 Nick Clarke Award for interview with Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson whilst guest editor of Today radio programme.

In 2008, she was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame at the inaugural ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards.

The Guardian obituary can be found here and here.  From the Independent and the Telegraph.  The BBC also have a video interview with Nick Higham who talks about her work.