Christmas Crime in Cambridge by Mike Ripley

(L to R - L C Tyler, Ayo Onatade & Richard Reynolds)

Last night’s “Christmas Chrime” party at Heffers majestic bookshop in Cambridge – a festive celebration of crime fiction complete with mince pies and mulled wine – had added value this year as it also saw the official launch of the new anthology called, very appropriately, Bodies in the Bookshop, from Ostara Publishing.

Devised by Heffers’ crime fiction supremo Richard Reynolds and edited jointly by the Detection Club’s Len Tyler and Shots’ very own Ayo Onatade, the Bodies anthology celebrates the famous ‘Bodies in the Bookshop’ parties held at Heffers for twenty years with twenty stories of murder, mayhem and a surprising number of rather lethal bookshops!

Among the distinguished – positively star-studded – cast of contributors are: Andrew Taylor, Peter Lovesey, Simon Brett, Stella Duffy, Christopher Fowler and Ann Cleeves and at the launch itself a goodly number of contributing authors were on hand to sign copies, including Cambridge’s own Alison Bruce and Michele Spring, Suzette A. Hill and Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Nicola Upson, Mandy Morton & Richard Reynolds

All those assembled used the launch party to join in a toast in honour of the late P. D. James, following a heartfelt tribute from crime-writer Nicola Upson who described Phyllis James as ‘a friend of crime writing and a friend of Heffers’ to whom everyone in the room – readers and writers – owed a significant debt'.

Pix show:

L C Tyler, Ayo and Richard Reynolds

Nicola Upson, who paid tribute to the late P D James, and RR.

Angel Touch's Silver Jubilee

Shots’ incorrigible ‘Getting Away With Murder’ columnist Mike Ripley (aka The Ripster)is celebrating a personal Silver Jubilee this year.

A new Telos Crime edition of his 1989 novel Angel Touch has been published this week to mark the 25th anniversary of the title winning the first ever Last Laugh Award created by the Crime Writers Association to celebrate comedy in crime writing. Nowadays sponsored by Goldsboro Books and presented during the annual Crimefest convention, winners of the last laugh have included Carl Hiaasen, Janet Evanovich, Christopher Fowler and Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Angel Touch --

London in the late 1980s - the era of Thatcherism and Loadsamoney - is an exciting but

sometimes dangerous place to live. Fitzroy Maclean Angel gets by partly through gigging as a jazz trumpet player, partly through taking illegal fares in his de-registered black taxi cab, and partly through...well, just being in the right place at the right time. And, as he often says himself, it's better to be lucky than good. In "Angel Touch", his second escapade, the streetsmart Angel comes to the aid of his neighbour, the sexy financial analyst Salome, and finds himself carrying out an undercover investigation into an insider trading scam amongst the coked-up whizzkids and mega-rich wheeler-dealers of the City. And things turn even nastier when a fatal car crash turns out to be anything but an accident...

SHOTS of the Year 2013

The annual Shots of the Year Awards selected by Shots Magazine’s Mike Ripley are announced in the December edition of his Getting Away With Murder column, and are as follows:

 Crime Shot of the Year: the zany, frantic and utterly enthralling Death On Demand by Paul Thomas [Bitter Lemon Press] which saw the return of maverick Maori detective Tito Ihaka and showed that the Godfather of crime writing in New Zealand is back with a vengeance.

Thriller Shot of the Year: Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith [Simon & Schuster]. Whistle-blowing journalists, oligarchs, corrupt policemen and an outrageous political scam in contemporary Russia with, in Arkady Renko, one of the great fictional heroes of the last thirty years.

Historical Shot of the Year: This was the closest one to call with some seriously good historical thrillers from D. J. Taylor, Sam Eastland and John Lawton, but the title goes to Dead Man’s Land by Rob Ryan [Simon & Schuster] which gloriously dared to put Dr Watson (and an off-stage Sherlock Holmes) on the Western Front during WWI in an engaging mystery which also says much about the role and status of women at the time. Ryan’s tour-de-force narrowly pipped Andrew Taylor’s Scent of Death set, intriguingly, in colonial New York.

Comic Shot of the Year: Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen [Sphere]. After a few quiet years by his standards, Hiaasen has recently reasserted himself as the crime king of belly laughs, most of them in deliciously bad taste. With Bad Monkey he is back on top form even if the title character (a veteran animal actor from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) hardly gets a look in.

Debut Shot of the Year: City of Blood by M.D. Villiers [Harvill Secker]. A quite stunning first novel but visiting the parts of Johannesburg described here without a heavily-armed escort is not recommended. Martie de Villiers has created a formidable detective duo (one white, one Zulu) and enhanced South Africa’s growing reputation as a major player on the international crime writing scene.

Shot in Translation: (from the Italian) Everyone in their Place by Maurizio de Giovanni [Europa]. Fascinating mix of Christie-like whodunit and spooky thriller set in 1931 Naples. Police detectives Ricciardi (who has a sixth sense and ‘sees dead people’) and the weight-conscious Maione make a great team, contending with a summer heat-wave, Fascist politics, the attractions of several females, the aristocracy, a curious OVRA (Mussolini’s Gestapo) agent and a society murder.

Reissue Shot of 2013: Blue Octavo by John Blackburn [Valancourt]. Great to see this 1963 mystery set in the world of antiquarian book dealers back in print. A disgracefully-forgotten author in his native Britain, Blackburn’s reputation is thankfully being rescued by enthusiastic American fans.