Word power
Last week, I watched a preview of the new movie Vice – a riveting and at times shocking dramatisation of the life of one of the most powerful men most of us have hardly noticed…
Genre
They warned us! Review: Middle England by Jonathan Coe
They warned us. We were making a film for the British car makers British Leyland in their Midlands Longbridge factory. But the camera crew was using an estate car made by another company. A “foreign”…
Liam Glass gets a BookBub recommendation
This week I have exciting news: my novel has landed a prestigiousBOOKBUB RECOMMENDATION. They’re putting my debut noir thriller The Breaking of Liam Glass out to their massive mailing list for 99p/99c – for only a…
The one sentence at the heart of all horror stories
I’d hoped to avoid Halloween and horror stories… But I just got sucked in. It must be all the skeletons, zombies and pumpkin lanterns around here. I started thinking about what horrifies people and how…
English noir at the seaside? Review: MJ Arlidge’s thriller ‘Eeeny Meeny’
English noir or seaside noir? We’ve had classic Hollywood noir, Scandi noir and the fast-rising Tartan noir, north of the border. But what of English noir? Or perhaps even seaside noir – burgeoning at the…
Is cozy mystery crime the new hummus?
Now is possibly the best time ever to be a cozy mystery crime reader Sales of crime novels in the UK soared this year, overtaking general fiction for the first time. And, like hummus, it seems…
Crime writer turned detective – murder mystery review
Murder Mystery Review: Golden Age Detective Drama Can crime writers turn detective? More specifically, could this crime writer face his fears and take part in After Dark’s library-based murder mystery evening and solve the case?…
Why do we love crime?
Do you love crime, like me? We’re not alone. Turn on the TV, go to the cinema, walk into a bookshop – crime is everywhere. Yet, ironically, crime statistics are going down all round the…
Don’t trust Jed Mercurio – he’s a crime writer
Have you been watching Jed Mercurio’s latest series, Bodyguard? Do you trust him? A review in a paper this week said, not to worry: the bodyguard himself is the star role and the star always…
Living on the edge
It was one of these special places on the edge of things. Where you place a novel or screenplay is one of the most important decisions a writer makes. As I started planning the novel…
How seductive is the call of Sirens – review of Joseph Knox’s debut noir
Sirens – this week’s review in the Library Corner I was standing in Waterstones, asking for dark crime stories, when the assistant handed me Sirens – debut novel by Joseph Knox. Sumptuously produced in hardback,…
Chill out with Chili – Review: Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
We all love a good little-fish-in-a-big-pond story, when the little guy from out of town has to survive among the city-slickers. But we love it even more when the little guy turns out to be…
The unlikely rise of Eleanor Oliphant
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is on The Library Shelf today It’s an unlikely best-seller. A darkly humorous novel about a dowdy young woman with an abusive mother. who she only speaks to on the…
The murder to end all literary murders? Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz reviewed
The English love the countryside and never more than when there’s a corpse spreadeagled over the lawn. The country crime sub-genre appeared almost as soon as the detective genre itself. Three years after the first English…
Who’s afraid of the Maybot? John Crace’s I, Maybot, reviewed for the Library Corner
Most of us remember our first encounter with a mechanical life-form. Depending on when we were born, some of us had nightmares about Daleks. Others have had their dreams haunted by Transformers. Or Alexa. In…
Darkness in the Pacific: Review – Black Water by Louise Doughty
Agents, publishers, books on writing tell you to write about nice characters who grow and learn. Louise Doughty clearly missed that memo. Her characters are troubled, rarely nice, placed in dark situations. Nazi mass killing…
Should we legalise drugs? The Library Corner review: High Society by Ben Elton
Should we legalise drugs? Peter Paget MP thinks so. But he’s only a lowly backbencher in a government whose ministers hardly notice him as they rush past on their important business. But one day Paget…
Library corner: Futuristic mayhem – The Outer Spheres by Andrew Wallace
24th century princess Charity Freestone is fighting for her life against the massed forces of at least two diabolical business enterprises who have the power to inflict deeply unpleasant forms of torture, such as the…