Special Guests: Crime Fiction & True Crime
To Tell the Truth, Anna Smith
After working as a chief reporter for Scotland’s The Daily Record, Anna Smith published her first novel, Spit Against the Wind, in 2003, to critical acclaim. Her debut was followed by The Homecoming in 2005.
Smith went on to begin the Rosie Gilmour series in 2011, with the latest novel released in February of this year.
In To Tell the Truth, the second book in the crime series about journalist Gilmour, Smith draws on some true investigations she conducted as an award-winning journalist in Glasgow.
Attempting to recover from the events of the first book, The Dead Won’t Sleep, protagonist Gilmour takes a much needed holiday, but finds herself covering an abduction after a three-year-old girl is taken from her parents’ holiday home in Spain.
Smith says the things she was exposed to during her time as an investigative journalist lead to a fascination with the types of stories depicted in her books. “As a journalist, the stories I covered varied from whatever big news story was breaking anywhere in the world, to investigations and exposés. Crime and thrilling writing, for me, just grew from there.
A Success in Any Language: Stephen Booth
Last week British international best selling crime writer Stephen Booth was in Dublin to speak to The Literary Society at Trinity College Dublin. Freelance journalist Vanessa Baker caught up with him as he stepped off the stage.
Stephen Booth started his writing career in the newspaper business in Cheshire, in 1974. A specialist rugby union reporter, working night shifts as a sub-editor on the Daily Express and The Guardian, his fiction career didn't kick off until 1999. Then, in rapid succession, he was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger competition for new writers, then won the £5,000 Lichfield Prize for his unpublished novel The Only Dead Thing, and signed a two-book contract with HarperCollins for a series of crime novels.
In 2000, Stephen's first published novel, Black Dog, marked the arrival in print of his best known creations - two young Derbyshire police detectives, DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry. Black Dog was the named by the London Evening Standard as one of the six best crime novels of the year - the only book on their list written by a British author. In the USA, it won the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel and was nominated for an Anthony Award for Best First Mystery. The second Cooper & Fry novel, Dancing with the Virgins, was shortlisted for the UK's top crime writing award, the Gold Dagger, and went on to win Stephen a Barry Award for the second year running.
A Kind of Cruel. Sophie Hannah
Niamh O'Connor, best selling Irish crime writer and True Crime Editor of the Sunday World newspaper, talks to crime writing legend Sophie Hannah for writing.ie
So the first time I ring Sophie Hannah, she can’t talk because she forgot her son had chess club. And this is the first issue I want to tackle when we catch up. What is it that draws an academic and a poet, the daughter of a Marxist scholar and a Whitbread nominated mother, whose son is ... let's face it ... genetically predisposed to grandmaster glory, to write about the worst aspects of human nature?
But of course I’ve underestimated the psychological thriller writer who’s an expert at subverting the plot that readers thought they’d seen coming. And if I thought she was going to say, ‘crime books are commercial,’ I couldn’t be more wrong.
"I’m not one of these literary writers who looks down my nose on crime writing," Hannah says. "I love every aspect of the genre. From the age of twelve or thirteen, I loved Agatha Christie. It’s very important to me to absolutely comply with every rule of the crime genre and not be ambiguous about it. I try to play fair within the rules while being as inventive and different as possible and thinking up stories readers cannot guess. And anyway, I’m not an academic. No way am I an academic. [She was a fellow commoner in creative arts in Trinity college, Cambridge and a research fellow of Wolfson college, Oxford!!!] I only scraped a 2.1 in my degree because the 98pc I got in creative writing which pulled me up."
Lee Child on Writing, Reacher & The Affair
So there’s this guy called Jack Reacher (no middle name) whose mother was French, who’s ex US Army Military Police, who travels across the USA with nothing except a toothbrush. He’s 6’5’’and weighs 220-250lbs, has dirty blonde hair, ice blue eyes. And he knows how to kill people.
And then there’s this guy called Lee Child (not his real name) who is originally from Birmingham in the UK, who lost his job in TV and went to New York, with possibly not much more than a toothbrush. He’s damn close to 6’5’’, had sandy blonde hair and ice blue eyes. And he writes books. About a guy called Reacher who knows how to kill people.
But these aren’t just any books, Lee Child’s Reacher series began with The Killing Floor which won the Anthony Award in 1998, and have gone on to sell in their millions. Child became the Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield in 2008, and in 2009, funded 52 Jack Reacher scholarships for students at the university. In 2009 too, he was elected as President of the Mystery Writers of America.
Each one of the now sixteen Reacher novels is a standalone, enabling a reader dip into the series at any stage. And each one is guaranteed to keep you hooked from the opening line and will astound you with detail, plot twists and masses of interesting information. Reacher is a character who is larger than life, a true comic book hero, but who, like Child, has a logical mind that retains facts, facts he uses in true Holmesian style to inform him in every situation....
Mark Edwards on Killing Cupid
Chances are, you’ve already heard about Mark Edwards and Louise Voss. The biggest self-published e-book success story to date on this side of the Atlantic, the clever duo pushed two novels – Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death – to the top of Amazon.co.uk’s bestselling fiction charts and then inked what was reportedly a six-figure deal with Harper Collins. Even more impressive is that they did all this within a matter of months.
To coincide with the launch of her new blog, Self-Printed right here on writing.ie, Catherine Howard took time out to talk Mark Edwards, to find out exactly how he and Louise worked their magic.
Welcome to Writing.ie, Mark. How did you come to decide to self-publish? Walk us through the decision.
My writing partner, Louise Voss, and I have spent a very long time trying to 'make it' (whatever that means!) as writers. About 8 years ago, we wrote our stalker novel, Killing Cupid. At that time, Louise had a publishing deal and an agent, but neither of them were interested because they didn't want Louise to write thrillers. We managed to sell the TV option, but it never got made…
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