Crime Central

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2011-10-14T14:09:00.003+01:00

Why I Love Kate Atkinson's Crime Anne Cassidy

2011-09-22T20:07:00.000+01:00

After reading BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM many years ago I was surprised to hear that Kate Atkinson had written a crime novel CASE HISTORIES. I’d thought of Atkinson as a literary writer and although I love Crime Fiction I didn’t think of it as literary.

CASE HISTORIES changed all that. Here was a brilliant, moving, pacey, clever crime novel. It was full of startling stories seemingly unrelated. The detective didn’t turn up for four or five long chapters and even then it wasn’t clear how he related to what had been described so far.

What a read! A book that described the powerful love of families and the terrible heartache of loss. Plus several wonderful whodunits and a great laid back detective. Jackson Brodie had the usual difficult past and his own heartaches but he also had the luck of the devil and crimes seemed to solve themselves around him.

When I heard there was a second book A JOLLY MURDER MYSTERY I thought no, bad idea, to follow up a brilliant book. It can never be as good. But it was, in an entirely different way. The same can be said of a further two books WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS and STARTED EARLY TOOK MY DOG.

Thank you Kate Atkinson for making crime fiction matter so much.

The Joys of Adermatoglyphia Malcolm Rose

2011-09-19T09:44:00.000+01:00

Why do we have fingerprints? Science isn’t sure. Some say they improve grip, but more recent research suggests that the ridges reduce friction. Maybe they are there to improve the sensitivity of our fingertips. One thing’s for sure. They didn’t evolve to reveal our identity to forensic scientists.

So, what’s this about adermatoglyphia? It’s a rare genetic mutation and it’s an attractive medical condition if you’re a criminal. Very handy indeed. I’m tempted to say groovy but that’s entirely inappropriate. People with adermatoglyphia have no fingerprints. Great! That’s the basis of a new crime story, surely. But hang on. So far, only five families worldwide are known to have this gene variation. That makes the premise somewhat implausible. Still, I’ve read many implausible things in crime stories and successfully suspended my disbelief.

I know of two other reasons for a lack of fingerprints. But, sorry, I’m keeping them to myself for the moment. Sooner or later, you’ll read about them in a novel.

Right. That’s fingerprint evidence taken care of. Now, how am I going to avoid leaving my DNA at the scene of my crime?

Why I Love SPIRAL Anne Cassidy

2011-09-12T09:02:00.000+01:00

SPIRAL is a French language TV cop drama. So far there have been three series. It was shown on BBC4 and gathered a cult audience. I love SPIRAL. Here are my reasons why:

1. The characters are believable. They have different aspects to their personalities. They can do good things for bad reasons and vice versa. I particularly like Laure, the female detective who has an explosive temper.
2. The plots are layered. There are a number of stories going on at one time, not all of them linked. They look at different aspects of the French law system.
3. The main crimes are violent and nasty and mean that I have to cover my eyes sometimes. I like this. Death and murder is violent and nasty and I want to feel uncomfortable watching it.
4. There is passion and sometimes love in the series. As in life it does not run smoothly.
5. There are parts of the series that are tremendously exciting. The end of series three was a race for time and I was moving around on my seat desperate for things to go right.

What more can you ask from an intelligent TV series?

A sideways glance at detectives Malcolm Rose

2011-09-09T09:11:00.000+01:00

Who is the best detective of all time? Elementary. Surely, it’s Sherlock.

Who is the worst dressed cop? Easy. Columbo.

Who is the hairiest? Tricky. Poirot in places or perhaps Miss Marple.

Who is the most methodical, irritating, funny and non-human detective? I know this one. It’s Malc in my own quirky Traces series.

Here’s the most important question, though. Who is the thinnest detective of all time?

The thinnest detective of all time? It’s got to be Skulduggery Pleasant, hasn’t it? After all, he is a skeleton. Not a gram of fat on him. The ultimate size zero – even thinner than most supermodels

X rated? Violence in YAF Anne Cassidy

2011-09-06T08:50:00.000+01:00

When I was a teenager some films had an ‘X’ rating. This meant that under eighteens could not go and see them. They contained explicit sex or violence.

Every teenage girl I knew was desperate to see an ‘X’ rated film and many tried dressing up, wore high heels and loads of make up and tried to pass for 18. I did and once I managed it and saw what I thought of as a very rude film!

When writing crime fiction there is always the question of how explicit to be. Not about sex because I truly believe that less is more when it comes to describing sex in words. No, I mean how explicit should we be when describing violence and death.

Many adult crime writers have gone down the bloody road of explicit violence. Mo Hayder’s books are great but can be stomach turning, likewise many of the serial killer sub genre. This may be OK for adults (or not). When you’re writing for young people it’s a different matter.

How explicit should a young adult novel be?

In the 1990s I wrote a crime book in which I described a girl who had a scar on her face. I said that she’d got this from an attack with a Stanley knife. The editor said this had to come out. It wasn’t the scar that was the problem but the image of a Stanley knife, an everyday tool. This was too plausible. I felt this gave the image an unpleasant reality. The idea of a knife attack can bring about any number of visuals, a penknife to an ornate machete. The term ‘knife’ was too general, too vague, it didn’t touch the reader. A Stanley knife could make the reader wince.

Ten years later I wrote a book which showed football violence STORY OF MY LIFE. The editor was unhappy with the fight scenes because they were too graphic. My argument then was that if one is to show violence then it should be horrible, disgusting. It should make the reader flinch. If we sanitize it, make it palatable, then we lose the shock value about how it can hurt lives.

I’ve been watching some of the 9/11 footage and still cannot get out of my head the image of a fireman guiding people from the building. There is the sound of thumps. One after the other. These sounds were people falling from the towers onto the ground behind where he was. They seemed to fall continuously making the fireman flinch. In ten years I've never forgotten this and I don't think I ever will.

Explicit violence? Maybe sometimes it has to be.

THE SIDEKICK'S SIDEKICK Anne Cassidy

2011-09-01T14:01:00.000+01:00

Every detective needs a sidekick. Holmes and Watson; Morse and Lewis; Inspector Wexford and Burden. When I wrote THE EAST END MURDERS in the 1990s the hero, Patsy Kelly had a best friend called Billy. Billy was mechanical and organised; Patsy was emotional and headstrong. They complemented each other and their discussions and arguments informed the reader about the development of the plot.

My new series THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS also has a headstrong and temperamental hero, Rose. At the beginning of the first book she is due to meet up with the ‘stepbrother’ that she hasn’t seen for five years.

Together they are investigating the disappearance of their respective parents who went out for a meal one night and never returned.

Joshua is Rose’s sidekick. He is organised and determined. But because he is emotionally involved and because we live in a technologically sophisticated age he needs a sidekick of his own. Enter Skeggsie. Skeggsie is a computer whiz and after a bit of fiddling round on the laptop he can access CCTV photos, maps, information. He can break codes and find identities via Facial Recognition software. Skeggsie is a buttoned up character who doesn’t show his feelings. He’s happier at a screen than with people. He’s fiercely fond of Joshua and sees Rose as a bit of a nuisance. His skills allow the plot to develop.

Skeggsie is the sidekick’s sidekick. In a movie he would be played by a ‘character’ actor and not get top billing. But without Skeggsie Rose and Joshua would be stumbling along in the dark.

I sometimes wonder if he needs a sidekick of his own.

My favourite sidekick? Lewis. His forbearance and patience and common sense were completely necessary for Morse to work.

There's more to this life than MURDER Malcolm Rose

2011-08-27T14:36:00.000+01:00

Theft has been on my mind. If I wanted a character to steal something valuable, what would it be? A mobile phone, an iPlayer, a Kindle, an iPad, a laptop, a car, a yacht, jewellery, someone’s credit card, cash? There’s a lot of valuable stuff out there. Quite a choice. But what if I wanted my character to steal something really really valuable? I might think of an important painting. But that sort of thing is closely guarded and hard to sell afterwards without specialist knowledge of the black market in artwork.

Gold. That’s expensive. But it’s also held in secure places and a decent quantity is very heavy. Difficult to walk away with a good pile. No. I’d want something very expensive but light and small. So, weight-for-weight, what’s the most valuable human-made object on the planet? I’ll get my character to nick that. Well, it’s a postage stamp. To be precise, it’s the 1855 Swedish 3 skilling stamp in yellow and it last sold for £1.42 million. Weighs almost nothing, costs a lot.

Wait. I used that theme in an old crime story called ‘Flying Upside Down’. Sadly, the book’s almost as hard to find as a yellow 1855 Swedish 3 skilling stamp. New copies from me (via www.malcolmrose.co.uk). Second-hand copies from the usual online sources.

Ten Things About THE KILLING Adele Geras

2011-08-24T12:03:00.000+01:00

The Killing is being repeated on BBC4 and rightly so. Adele Geras picks out the things that she loved about it.

1) The emphasis is on the effects of the crime on the parents of the murdered young woman and on the police who investigate it as much as on the crime.

2) The interweaving of a story about politics not only adds some extra twists but gives viewers who don't know much about Denmark a kind of easy way into understanding the political systems there.

3) The sensational aspects of the story are not dwelled on in a gratuitous way but dealt with very matter-of-factly.

4) Even in translation, the script is a good one.

5) Sophie Grabol as Sarah Lund is a star. No make up, that dreadful scratchy jumper and she is beautiful as well as clever, driven, haunted etc.

6 ) Her sidekick is terrific. Every detective needs a sidekick and he's one of the best.

7) All the politicians are potentially crooked which makes the political bits great fun.

8) Troels (and you learn how to say it properly by the end of 20 episodes) shouldn't really be dead fanciable but he is.

9) Nanna's parents are the best characters in the whole series. It's wonderful to watch their relationship develop.

10) Even if you emerge after 20 episodes with a whole lot of unanswered questions relating to the workings of the plot it's still the most exciting, twisty-turny, three-dimensional, brilliant crime series you'll see for ages. Only SPIRAL can compete.

Adele’s new book for children is CLEOPATRA
Now in paperback from Kingfisher Books.

TIME TRAVEL in CRIME FICTION Anne Cassidy

2011-08-22T09:08:00.000+01:00

When you write a crime novel it’s often a good idea to start with a dramatic event. In my book JUST JEALOUS I started with a girl staring at a dead body in a children’s playground. This happened on the morning of New Year’s Day. The boy had been shot and the girl clearly felt responsible.

What’s it all about?

In order to find out what led to this situation we have to travel back in time to September. The events start when the girl, Elly, and her best friend Carl (her secret love) are at the trial of Elly’s brother who is sent to prison for GBH. The chapters then go through the months that lead up to Christmas and the events that culminate in a boy being shot in a children’s playground early on New Year’s Day.

Crime novels are like this. If we are to start at a dramatic moment then we must whiz back and forth in time to tell out story properly.

Time travel can also be used to manipulate the reader. LOOKING FOR JJ is a story about a ten year old girl who kills another child. The story starts when she is released from prison six years later with a new identity. The details of the crime are kept from the reader for about a third of the book. The story is told in the present and the reader meets Alice and, I hope, gets to like her, to feel sympathy for her. The middle of the book goes back to when she was ten and the events that led up to the killing.

So the reader’s sympathies are with the killer BEFORE they read about the killing. This was a deliberate act on my part.

I like time travelling. I read a novel once (not a crime novel) that started at the end and worked backwards. This might be interesting…

Ruth Rendell - No Thanks Nick Green

2011-08-19T11:05:00.000+01:00

Ruth Rendell – no, she’s not for me.

Or so I used to think.

Her name was associated in my mind with whodunits, and the snob in me would have rather been caught reading something more worthy. Besides, I had a problem (still do) with the whole idea of crime fiction: the idea that you need a dead body before any reader will be interested. It’s ghoulish, and it makes me uncomfortable – killing for entertainment.

Then I came off my high horse long enough actually to read one of her books, and I discovered something. Ruth Rendell isn’t interested in dead bodies either. She’s interested in live ones. There’s always a murder, that’s true, but the drama comes not from finding out who did it, but from the sheer excitement of meeting an extraordinary cast of real – often grotesquely real – people. And the result is that you really care about the murder, when it comes, because the person who has died is usually someone you have come to know very well. You also make the uncomfortable discovery that the dividing line between murderers and ordinary people is thinner than you supposed. So thin, in fact, that it can be hard to see at all. After all, even her murderers themselves aren’t murderers, right up until that fraction of a second before they do it.

Now I get annoyed whenever I see Ruth Rendell described as a great crime writer. She’s not. She’s a great writer.

Nick Green’s Cat Kin books are published by Strident. They are available on Amazon. They are supernatural thrillers with a feline theme.

Making CRIME out of a RIOT Anne Cassidy

2011-08-17T09:49:00.000+01:00

The recent riots were grim. It’s awful watching young people (mostly) smash up the place in which they live. Then there are the headlines about feral youth and conscription and long jail sentences. I was a teacher for twenty years and experienced young people pushing the boundaries to see how far they could go. Mostly the adults who were in charge were able to hold and shape those boundaries so that most of the students found a face saving way to comply and get on with life just like the rest of us.

As a writer of crime fiction though the riots interest me in a different way. They concern the teenagers who I write for and about. They are a collective act of crime. Put the two together and I might have a book.

Every crime situation reported in the newspapers is a potential plot. The question is how to actually use the material. Here is the problem. A story about disenchanted youth going out and rioting isn’t enough to make a book work – at least as the story stands.

So the first thing a writer needs is a main character. There’s the boy who was doubly robbed and beaten on Barking station; there’s any one of the photographic images of looters, caught in a moment of self satisfaction; there’s the girl who jumped from the burning building.

Or, as a writer, maybe I’m more interested in the girlfriend of a boy who is involved. Or possibly the boy who is pulled along by the crowd as a laugh and ends up throwing a torch into a building. Or the girl who goes out in Croydon along with her mates to loot and is never seen again.

Then there is the shape of the book. It can’t run chronologically because there would be no suspense. A riot starts; it finishes; end of story. Maybe the book starts the morning after. Waking up with a sore head and not quite remembering what happened the night before. Maybe there’s a bloodied knife in among the main character’s possessions. Or possibly the best friend of the missing girl is phoning round to see where she is. Or the story starts as one young man is led down to the cells to start a long prison sentence and the book goes back and forth between his prison days and the night of the riot. Is he guilty? We won’t know until the end of the book.

I seem like a vulture tearing away at the entrails of this appalling episode. Or maybe I’m just a writer trying to go inside the events and find some individual stories.

I owe it all the crime… Celia Rees

2011-08-15T08:00:00.015+01:00

My writing career, that is.
I began by writing crime fiction and the genre that is still close to me heart. Thrillers are still my favourite kinds of books. Exciting, page turning and the best are as well written as anything else you’ll find on the shelves.

I first started writing when I was an English teacher, interested in my students’ reading, and this decided my audience. At the time (in the 1980s) among the few authors who wrote specifically for teenagers, certain names stood out.

American writers: Robert Cormier, Lois Duncan (who wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer) and Patricia Windsor; Alan Garner and Aiden Chambers in Britain were writing books that read like adult novels but with teenagers at the centre of the action.

Many (although not all) of these books were thriller and most of them American. My students loved them, but they wanted to know why there were so few written about British teenagers. People like them. They had a point and that was when I thought that I might have a go (as you do).
I enjoyed reading these books, too, but I was also interested in what was happening in the adult thriller market. There were an increasing number of crime books being published that had been written written by women with strong female protagonists: Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Sarah Dunant and Gillian Slovo were all writing books where the P.I. or the main character was a woman.

I thought maybe I could put the two things together and write a thriller for teens that would read like an adult thriller and would have strong female characters, in the manner of the writers I had come to admire.

This might have stayed just an idea but then a friend of mine told me a true story about how she’d taken a group of students on an Outdoor Pursuits trip to Wales and how they had got caught up in a murder hunt.

The story had all the elements I needed: a violent crime had been committed, a murderer was on the loose, heading to an isolated spot in the middle of no-where with a group of ordinary British teenagers heading for the very same place.

It was a gift and even then, before I’d started writing, I knew that such offerings happen rarely. It was just too good a chance to pass up and I used it as the central story in my first novel Every Step You Take (now long out of print).
I soon learnt that there was more to writing a thriller than a plot, true or not. I wove another true story into the narrative, involving a girl and a boy on the trip and a romance turned sour by male possessiveness, violence and jealousy.

For me, the best crime fiction is not just a sequence of violent actions or a series of puzzles, it tells us something about the human condition. Similarly, the best teen fiction is not issue driven, they are there as part of the action, the whole picture.

I went on to write more two thrillers, Colour Her Dead and Midnight Hour, before moving on to other genre. My thrillers are all out of date but I regard them with great affection. They were my proving ground. The place I learnt how to write. I have never forgotten or, I hope, lost the storytelling skills I learnt when writing them.

With my next book, I’m going back to my roots.

This Is Not Forgiveness - publishes February, 2012

Celia's website www.celiarees.com
Celia's Facebook Fan page:

Celia will be in conversation with Nicola Morgan at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday, August 21 • 12:00pm - 1:00pm
For more information go to www.edbookfest.co.uk

How I drifted into a life of crime by Helen Grant

2011-08-11T08:00:00.002+01:00

"I never meant it to happen“ must rank alongside "It went off in my hand“ as one of the world’s feeblest excuses. Nevertheless in my case it’s true; I simply drifted into a life of crime.

My first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was reviewed by The Guardian as "crime fiction“. The German edition, melodramatically retitled Die Mädchen des Todes, has KRIMINALROMAN (crime novel) emblazoned across the blood red cover.

My UK publisher even, in a fit of hyperbole, described me as the "Stieg Larsson of teen fiction“ (thanks, guys; it hasn’t escaped my notice that poor Mr. Larsson is dead).

All the same, I didn’t set out to write crime. My first forays into fiction were ghost stories (you can read one on my website at http://www.helengrantbooks.com/sea-change.php).

I’ve always been fascinated by tales of the supernatural, bizarre historical events and creepy legends, so it was natural that I should write that kind of thing myself.

When I wrote my first novel, we were living in Bad Münstereifel, a pretty little town in the German Eifel. As well as being a tourist draw and home to German folk singer Heino, Bad Münstereifel is one of the most haunted places I have ever come across. Amongst others, it boasts an eternal huntsman, a fiery dwarf and a headless ghost.

Helen Grant

I adored Bad Münstereifel and dreaded the day we would inevitably have to leave. The Vanishing of Katharina Linden was born of my desire to create a memorial to my time in the town I loved. I wove the genuine legends of the town into the plot and made local folk hero "Unshockable Hans“ a kind of symbolic hero.
In the book, Hans’ adventures inspire the young heroine Pia Kolvenbach to investigate a series of sinister events. At no point, however, did I think to myself, "I’ll write a book about disappearances and murder.“ I actually set out to write a book about a town I loved, legends that fascinated me, and (hopefully) sympathetic characters faced with personally threatening situations. I was quite surprised to hear the finished book described as a "crime“ novel!

Since then I have written two further novels, The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead.

Both of these indubitably contain crimes: I’ve written over a dozen bizarre and grisly murders now, plus one death by cherry streusel. However, my main interest is still the strange, the weird, the hint of the supernatural.

The Glass Demon, for example, was inspired by the true-life history of the Steinfeld Abbey stained glass, which vanished for over a century before being re-discovered by the mediaevalist and writer Montague Rhodes James, who wrote a ghost story about it.

Wish Me Dead was inspired by the witch trials that claimed thousands of lives in the Eifel. Bad Münstereifel itself is supposed to have had a coven of witches.

I am not inspired by true-life crime; in fact, had Bad Münstereifel ever experienced a chain of events like the one in my first book, I would probably never have written The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.

I am also a lot more interested in how my characters experience what is happening than in how the police or other authorities deal with it.
All the same, if you write a book with a crime in it, particularly murder, it is very difficult to avoid mentioning police investigations, and for this reason I have repeatedly picked the brains of the very helpful Polizeihauptkommissar Erich Trenz of the Bad Münstereifel police, to avoid making any mistakes with German police procedure.

Meanwhile my German editions continue to have KRIMINALROMAN printed on the front cover, the New York Times reviewed The Glass Demon alongside Ruth Rendell’s latest book in a round-up of crime novels, and my books are tagged as crime fiction on Amazon.

I never anticipated a life of crime, but it looks as though I’ve drifted into one!

My website: http://www.helengrantbooks.com/

You can follow me on Twitter @helengrantsays or meet me on Facebook at Helen Grant books fan page

Ranked and Filed: Getting the Police Right! - By Jo Cotterill

2011-08-07T08:00:00.001+01:00

I reached the copy edit stage of Sweet Hearts 3: Forget MeNot before I ran into a problem of authenticity.

The scene involved police officers investigating a crime at a garden centre. I’d written that there were plain-clothes detectives alongside the uniformed officers.

The copy-editor had written in the margin: ‘Surely plain-clothed not there?’ I was stumped. I wanted them there – they always turned up in TV dramas, after all. But I wasn’t entirely sure I was correct.

I emailed a friend, who just happens to be a police inspector. I can’t think why I hadn’t asked her before!

She said yes, of course there would be CID there; any crime where the damage was over £5k would involve detectives.

I was delighted (ha! One in the eye for you, copy-editor!) until she pointed out that there wouldn’t actually be an inspector there; the highest-ranking officer was likely to be a Detective Sergeant.

Oh bother!

So now I had to demote my DI to a DS and my DS to a DC. By the time I’d gone through the manuscript looking for all the acronyms, I could barely remember the letters of my own name.

I highly doubt that the readers of my ‘Sweet Hearts’ series will notice if I’ve got the wrong rank of police officer. But it’s nice to feel that you can be as accurate as possible!

(And the moral of the story is: copy-editors don’t know everything.)

To find out more about Jo Cotterill and the Sweetheart series go to www.ilovesweethearts.co.uk

Jo also blogs at http://.girlsheartbooks.com along with thirty other writers of girly fiction.

Read Jo's other Crime central guest Blog Household-weapon-of-mass-destruction

My teacher went to prison... By Yvonne Coppard

2011-08-03T08:00:00.002+01:00

My A level History teacher, Audrey Peckham, was a gifted storyteller.
She made the criminal scheming of royal courtiers, the bloody and murderous paths to the throne, as good as any murder mystery.

But a few years later, she was convicted of conspiracy to murder and went to prison.

She wrote a book about it: ‘A Woman in Custody’. It was a book that changed the system – what power words have, eh?

The book became a set text for people working in the prison system (a sort of how-not-to-do-it manual).

Yvonne Coppard

Her observations of life on the Inside remind us that one person’s crime is also a tragic back story for many other people connected with the crime or the criminal.

I love crime fiction because I love Criminal Law.
I have studied it, worked in it, debated its greatness and its stupidities hundreds of times in a thousand different places, including lecture theatres , pubs, living rooms and courts. And all through its tangled history runs the weave of real stories about real people.

Their lives are shaped by crime: as perpetrators, victims or powerless witnesses whose lives are changed forever by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they were presented as fictional characters, some of these people would be dismissed as ‘far-fetched’ or ‘unconvincing’. But they are living those far-fetched lives every minute of the day; they can’t put down the book and escape back into another, more ‘normal’ world, as the reader can.

Crime features in my stories from time to time ,(theft in ‘Copper’s Kid’, kidnapping in ‘Hide and Seek’), but although I don’t write crime fiction, I love to read it.
Detective stories are a favourite. Who dunnit? Who cares - as long as the journey to discovery is an entertaining one that takes me on a roller coaster and then sets me down satisfied.
But the real challenge as a reader is to find books that take you backstage to the plot and make you understand what it’s like to be caught up in a crime, whether you’re the criminal, the victim, the family or the friend standing on the sidelines.

These are always the stories that stay with me, and make me glad and grateful for my dull, un-criminal life where I can enter into the dark and murky world of crime knowing that I don’t have to stay there.

Yvonne Coppard

Yvonne Coppard has been travelling overseas, filling notebooks and writing non-fiction and short articles lately; she has just returned to the ‘proper job’ of writing after a sabbatical that was supposed to end last year, but was just too much fun to give up...

She is currently writing ‘Amelie’s Secret’, set in occupied France in 1944 and England in the present day, and hopes to finish it later this year. In war torn France, Amelie’s father, a doctor, works for the Resistance, in danger of his life from the Nazis. But it is Amelie who has to flee from France after one terrifying moment compels her to do something that will ruin her own life and shape the lives of two generations to come. Now Amelie is dying, and she wants granddaughter Cat to return to France and put things right so that Amelie can die in peace. But what did she do that was so terrible, and will the family be able to cope with knowing the truth?

No publication details yet - keep an eye on Yvonne’s web site for details of the book’s progress: www.yvonnecoppard.co.uk

Yvonne’s next published book, (unless ‘Amelie’s Secret’ goes much faster than expected,) will be
‘The Arvon Book of Children’s Fiction’ ( co-written with Linda Newbery).
A how-to book for writers, it will be published by Bloomsbury
– no firm date yet - but probably early in 2013

...................................

NOTHING A different kind of crime - Linda Strachan

2011-07-29T08:00:00.044+01:00

Janne Teller

At 4.30pm on 22nd August I will hopefully be in a tent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival listening to Danish author Janne Teller talking about her incredible novel - NOTHING

I am fascinated to hear what drove her to write it.

"A Lord of the Flies for the twenty-first century - bleak, existential and yet utterly gripping'

It has also been described as 'disturbing', 'horrifying', 'uncomfortable' and 'intriguing',

I found it was all of these things but it was also thought- provoking and fearless.

Pub. STRIDENT Publishing 2011

"When Pierre Anthon left school that day he realised that nothing was worth doing because nothing meant anything anyway.

The rest of us stayed on."

The children in Nothing are a class of 14yr olds. When one of their classmates leaves school telling them that nothing matters and life isn't worth the bother, they go to horrific lengths to persuade him, and themselves, that he is wrong. As he sits in a plum tree their efforts to create a 'heap of meaning', drive them to dreadful lengths.

I started reading Nothing and found myself beginning to wonder what does make life matter, and perhaps that is exactly what it is about.

But as I read on I found myself more and more cautious when it came to turning the page, almost afraid to discover just how far these children would go in their quest to persuade Pierre Anthon that he was wrong.

Nothing is the winner of:Le Prix Libbylit 2008, and the Best Children’s Book Prize awarded by the Danish Cultural Ministry.

The Danish Cultural Minister said;
"Janne Teller has written a novel about nothing less than the meaning of life. This book makes a deep impression on the reader and incites continued reflection."

David Almond is quoted as saying it is

'Bold, beautiful, terrifying . One of the greatest young adult books I have ever read.'

Nothing is one of those books that will challenge you, but I would suggest that it is not for the gentle-hearted and not for younger readers.

If you can, why not come along and listen to Janne Teller at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and hear for yourself what she has to say about it.

Nothing is always going to be a controversial book - so do you agree with the comments and quotes above?

It is, as always, up to you the reader to decide.

Originally published in Danish in 2000.
Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken 2010
2011 edition published in the UK by Strident Publishing

THE STERKARMS: A LIFE OF CRIME by Susan Price

2011-07-25T08:00:00.002+01:00

Continuing our look at Crime in Different Genre - SUSAN PRICE discusses her Sterkarm books.

If crime is your bag, then the Sterkarms supply it wholesale.

Their whole life is one of constant petty war-fare: they raid their neighbours and rob them, fight with them, kill them – and are raided and robbed in return.

They rob and murder for profit, for revenge, for honour.“Who dares meddle with me?” their anthem proclaims, and that is partly the point – to build so fearsome a reputation that no one will dare meddle with them.

One thing to be said for this way of life – it releases tension. At home the Sterkarms are affectionate, if a little boisterous and shouty. (Bottling things up and politely seething is not their style.)
As a visitor, if they have no quarrel with you, you will find them the most generous and attentive hosts possible, making every effort to ensure your comfort, and giving you the best of everything they have, even if the best, by way of food, is haggis and beer as thick as porridge.

Even if they do have a quarrel with you, you’ll be safe while within their walls. But once you leave… Then you’ll hear the hoof-beats coming up fast behind you.
Still, no matter how friendly you are with Sterkarms, don’t waste energy trying to make any kind of agreement with them. Since you’re a guest, they’ll smile, refill your cup with thick beer, pile your plate with haggis and say whatever they think you want to hear. It doesn’t mean a thing.

You’re not a Sterkarm, so you don’t count. No promise made to you has to be kept, no deal shook on has to be honoured.
Outsiders call them treacherous and untrustworthy liars. Since many of them are left-handed, it’s said that they shake with their right, and stab you with their left.(Their badge, a left hand holding a dagger, is known as ‘the Sterkarm handshake.) It’s said of them that, ‘..they rob and thieve and murder but have a hundred smiles and a thousand honeyed words to save their necks…’

Read an extract from the Sterkarm Handshake

Of course, you’ll hear a different tale from the Sterkarms. If they occasionally rob others, they say, it’s reparation for the many times they’ve been robbed. If, occasionally, they murder, it’s purely in self-defence, or honourable revenge. If they seem warlike and aggressive, then it’s only because it would be fatal to be thought weak - their neighbours would take their land, their cattle and everything they had. As for keeping promises: a promise is sacred to them – if made to another Sterkarm.

They have a point. Sterkarms – who you can meet in my books ‘The Sterkarm Handshake’ and ‘A Sterkarm Kiss’ – live in the first part of the 16th Century, in the ‘Debatable Land’ between Scotland and England.

It was a no-man’s land and a war-zone. Since both England and Scotland claimed it, and refused to come to terms, it was a high-road for armies, while neither country could – or had any real wish to – impose law there.

The Sterkarms livelihood was cattle-rearing, but the depredations of their neighbours and passing armies soon made that impossible without fortified towers and armed men ready to fight off raiders. And if the armed men are to hand, and you’re feeding them – well, why not lead them on a raid, and rob others, as you’ve been robbed? The change from cattle-rearing to cattle-rieving was inevitable.

It’s an age-old problem with crime: people are driven to it by necessity, but then it becomes an ingrained way of life, in which children are reared and trained.
I wouldn’t want the Sterkarms as neighbours, not at any price. But in their time and place they had the choice of riding, or being ridden down – and they chose to ride. With that, I can sympathise
For further information read this fascinating interview with Susan Price about the Sterkarms

Susan Price’s website: www.susanpriceauthor.com

She blogs at: susanpricesblog.blogspot.com

And at: kindleauthorsuk.blogspot.com

Household Weapon of Mass Destruction?- by Jo Cotterill

2011-07-22T08:00:00.004+01:00

OK, so a series called ‘Sweet Hearts’ might not sound as though it has much to do with crime!

However, in Book 3: Forget Me Not the heroine (Kate) works at a garden centre over the summer (where she meets and falls for a Mysterious Boy…) and one night there’s an attack on the centre and most of the plant stock is destroyed.

I was inspired, I confess, by a scene in a Midsomer Murders episode, where someone’s prize orchid collection is destroyed by a rival orchid-grower (or was it his resentful wife? I can’t remember).

How very visual! How awful, to have rows and rows of brown, shrivelled plants where only the day before they had been green and healthy.

But how could it be done?

At first I thought of acid. But how does one actually get hold of acid, I wondered? Not as easily as you might think (which is just as well).

So what else could you spray onto plants that would kill them? Something householdy – bleach? But that seemed a bit dull, and besides, you’d need tons of the stuff to kill shelves and shelves of plants. Caustic soda, suggested my dad. It’s easily available and eats through just about anything (eek, scary thought).

So that’s what my villain uses – an ordinary household item that’s usually used for unblocking drains – as a weapon of mass plant destruction. Kate, my heroine, comes into work to find a wasteland of dead and dying plants, including her very own flower display. All very upsetting, and also providing the perfect plot device for discovery of Evidence later on!

(and some time I might tell you about how I wrote the police scenes, with the help of a good friend who just happens to be a police inspector. Aren’t friends useful!)

To find out more about Jo Cotterill and the Sweetheart series go to www.ilovesweethearts.co.uk

Jo also blogs at girlsheartbooks.com along with thirty other writers of girly fiction.

..

Under the Spotlight - HEARTBURN by Anne Cassidy

2011-07-15T08:00:00.000+01:00

Heartburn is set in London- do you think it is important to set your
stories in a specific place or town?

I’ve lived in London all my life. When I set a story in an urban environment I use London, in particular East London. I know the streets and the feel of living somewhere urban. It’s full of noise and smells and movement. There are great contrasts in London. There are rows and rows of terraced houses and narrow streets alongside huge skyscrapers and big public buildings. I have used the area around Canary Wharf in a couple of my books. In Heart Burn I use the river at night. A dark ominous strip of water that seems to twist and turn through the heart of London.

What was your inspiration for this story. Was it a real life event?

No, in fact it was something quite different. I used to teach creative writing and have done many workshops for young people. One of the assignments I give them to do is to imagine they were standing on the street waiting for someone. That person is late and they are getting concerned. While they’re waiting something happens. When I was working on a new book I decided to use that format. Ashley is waiting for her best friend to come along. She is late. While waiting a boy she knows comes along. He tells her that Tyler Harrington, a boyshe was in a relationship with a year before, has been badly beaten and is in hospital. This triggers her memory of what was a painful affair. Inevitably she becomes involved in Tyler’s story.

Anne Cassidy

The story has a twist in the tail and I was curious to find out if you

planned it all out before you started writing it?

I never know how my stories will end. I have a plan for the first six chapters or so and then I hope the story will grow. The characters and the plot develop and any twists or secrets grow out of this. Of course this approach means an awful lot of rewriting. But that’s OK.

The relationship between Ashe and Tyler is an interesting one. Was that something that you decided on at the beginning or did it develop as you wrote about them?

I love writing about love affairs that go wrong, particularly if one person is carrying a torch for the other. I think longing is a powerful emotion and can make people do extreme things. So Ashley longs for Tyler but won’t admit it to herself. Putting herself in danger and trying to help him, this is the way she shows her love. When I was a teenager I was always falling in love. It was hardly ever returned so I spent a lot of time

Your books are often quite dark, and often don't have happy endings. Do you prefer to write books that end happily for the characters?

I just try to imagine what would happen in real life. Unfortunately there aren’t always happy endings. I try also to leave the ending a bit ‘open’ to let the reader think about what might happen. I made an exception to this rule with Heart Burn.

Can you tell us anything about your latest project?

I am currently finishing the second book of a four book series called THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS. It’s called KILLING RACHEL and I’m getting that euphoric feeling that it’s almost done!

These books start coming out in May 2012.

.............................................................

Pubescent Police and Pesky Parents by Malcolm Rose

2011-07-12T08:00:00.001+01:00

Malcolm Rose

Young people engage most with young people.

That’s a problem when writing crime stories for them. It suggests authors need to come up with young yet credible sleuths. Having the characters’ parents around is a bit of a pain as well.

In my quirky crime series, TRACES, set in a parallel version of the UK, families are organized differently. Parents hand over their five-year-olds to the school authorities for upbringing. And schools work differently – they are much more focused on career from an early age. The brightest students graduate into their careers at the age of sixteen. That’s how I can have a believable 16-year-old detective who has lost all contact with his biological family. Two birds, one stone.

I take a different approach in my JORDAN STRYKER series. In the first chapter, I simply blow up the hero’s family in a massive but realistic explosion in the Thames Estuary. Jordan is the only one to survive and he does so only with serious injuries. He needs modern robotic and medical technology to keep him alive. It’s an underground organization that funds his repair and body enhancements, turning him into a fourteen-year-old bionic agent. With the amazing resources at his disposal, it doesn’t really matter how old he is. There’s no lower age limit when the crime-fighting organization is secret.

But I’ve had enough of careful justification. If/When I write another crime series set in an alternative Britain (and, yes, it’s in the pipeline), I’m going to refuse to explain why my two main detectives are sixteen years old. I will trust the reader to accept that’s just the way it is.

Literature Festival with a difference!

2011-07-07T16:34:00.000+01:00

This weekend 9th and 10th July a very special event is taking place.
The Awfully Big Blog Adventure blog is celebrating its 3rd Birthday and holding the very first ever ONLINE LITERARY FESTIVAL, run entirely by children’s authors, and we want YOU to get involved in supporting us!

On 9th and 10th July 2011 40 (yes FORTY) children’s authors from the Scattered Authors’ Society, will be bringing you something new and special every half hour from 9.30am to 7.30pm.

There will be:
• Amazing Blogs
• Stunning Videos
• Exciting Giveaways
• Fascinating Interviews
• Mind-boggling Competitions

Join all the fabulous guests & contributors at the exciting ABBA Online Litfest!
To join in the conversation! Follow @AwfullyBigBlog on Twitter, tweet about us on the day and before, using the special hashtag #ABBAlitfest
Crime Central's very own criminal masterminds Anne Cassidy, Gillian Philip, Keren David and Linda Strachan are all taking part, as are some of our favourite contributors.

Look out for Anne Cassidy's blog Post: To Blog or Not To Blog? at 9.30am on SATURDAY morning.
Gillian Philip will be there At 12.30pm on SATURDAY with a Competition: Win 'Bloodstone' and 'Firebrand'
At 2.30pm on SUNDAY Fiona Dunbar & Keren David Video: In Conversation
At 5.00pm on SUNDAY Linda Strachan & Cathy MacPhail Video: In Conversation- tutoring creative writing at Arvon

And there are so many more fabulous authors taking part - There's something different every half hour on each day! See the Full Programme here.

Naturally, there will be virtual champagne and cake on the day, so come and join in on this fantastically fabulous literary party!

Agatha Christie - Adèle Geras

2011-07-06T08:00:00.004+01:00

When I was growing up, if you liked reading, you went straight on from Enid Blyton to Agatha Christie without drawing breath.

Nowadays,with dozens of detectives (including Poirot) vying for our attention in print and on the television screen, it’s hard to imagine a world where this wasn’t the case. Agatha Christie writes simply, briefly and her mysteries are most cunningly put together. She’s the perfect writer for young people and millions of teenagers of my generation (I’m 67) devoured her complete works with enormous pleasure.

I haven’t read Christie recently but I retain a strong memory of what her books gave me….the plots have long ago disappeared, though I do recall the more startling ones, such as Murder on the Orient Express.

The one I’ve chosen to highlight here is a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

It has a very startling plot twist, which I won’t give away, but apart from that, it’s a good one to begin with because it has all her main characteristics as a writer, so that if you like this one, you’ll love the others too.

Christie’s plots are like clockwork. That’s to say: they work. If you read her novels twice, you can see how every single thing she mentions is relevant to the unravelling of the puzzle. She is a genius and one who’s often dismissed by the literary establishment, but you can’t quarrel with sales like Dame Agatha’s.

There are good reasons why only the Bible outsells her books. Read her!

MODERN MURDER HAS IT EASY - Dennis Hamley

2011-07-02T08:00:00.001+01:00

It’s a pity about crime novels set in the present day.
All this DNA, mobile phones, CCTV, laptops, emails, even fingerprints – it seems criminals nowadays shouldn’t stand a chance. Though of course they do. Crime stories set in the present day are good to read and great to write: I’ve done a few myself.

But if you want to write a murder mystery of the old sort, one which is solved with just your eyes, your ears and your commonsense, you’ve got to think differently. And that’s where setting crime stories in the past comes in. You’ve got to work out the solution to the mystery for yourself because there’s nothing to help you. You don’t know where people are because there are no phones, not even landlines, you can’t move faster than walking pace unless you’ve got a horse, a letter will take months, nobody has thought about fingerprints and DNA wasn’t even heard of. That’s why I turned to writing crime stories set way back in the past – and decided to set them in the Middle Ages.

The figure of a seventeen year-old French minstrel lost in England stole into my mind and the Joslin de Lay Mysteries were the result.
They were published by Scholastic and came out between 1998 and 2001 – six novels set over six hundred years ago in about 1370, telling the story of Joslin’s quest from France to Wales to find his mother after his father was murdered. Being a minstrel, Joslin sings his way through the land because he’s welcome everywhere. He can sing in inns and taverns to ordinary people, he can sing in Oxford colleges, he can sing in castles to Earls. All of society is open to him.
He has his own big mystery to solve, which finally comes clear in the last book. But on the way, in every town he comes to – London, Oxford, Coventry, Hereford -murder stalks him.

Of Dooms and Death,
A Pact with Death,
Hell’s Kitchen,
A Devil’s Judgement,
Angel’s Snare,
The False Father.

Six separate mysteries, lots of dead bodies – and Joslin solves them all.

But it’s not just murder which follows him: a forbidding, threatening, evil character is hunting him across the land as well - and he possesses the key to the whole of Joslin’s story.

The Middle Ages really are another world. So much research to get everything right, all of it fascinating. Here are some ways in which I tried to make the facts come alive.

At the time the novels are set, Europe was just getting over the Black Death. So one of the books concerns the villain using the bubonic plague for his own ends to kill his victims.
The Hundred Years War, between England and France was on. It’s very important to the books. It sets off the first and is part of the solution of the last.
The Church believed some things couldn’t even be thought of because they were so dangerous. That meant that some books were forbidden: it was mortal sin to read them. One of Joslin’s mysteries concerns a forbidden book about something the Church thought was about the most dangerous thing of all. But some people read it and murder follows.

I loved writing these books. I said I’d do just six, separate novels but with a larger story overarching them. My hero wouldn’t die but I’d make sure there couldn’t be any more books about him.

When they came to an end and I finally had to say goodbye to Joslin I felt really quite upset. We’d been through a lot together but I knew he would be happy and well-provided for and I often think of him still singing and living with his wife, the girl he met in the first book and who he finds again in the last..
Joslin de Lay books are out of print at the moment. I hope they’ll soon reappear as ebooks and later on be published again as paper books. Because I think he’s worth it.

And so is historical crime. I may write some more, But they may be about an older and wiser Joslin.

Playing the System by Bryony Pearce

2011-06-25T07:04:00.000+01:00

Bryony Pearce: the picture of innocence

Would I ever commit a crime? I can safely and confidently say, no, I wouldn’t. I don’t download films or music over the Internet I don’t buy pirated DVDs and when I was a teenager, I once walked half a mile back to a sweet shop, because I had bought a penny chew (remember those?) and realised half way home that two were stuck together – I had to go back to pay the extra penny (don’t laugh).

I attribute this rather extreme form of honesty to my mother, who, when I was a toddler caught me filling my pockets with nuts in a hardware store (they are so very shiny, aren’t they?). She made the shop assistant (whose instinct was to tell me it was OK) inform me that she was in fact calling the police. Apparently I spent some considerable time terrified that I was going to prison and hiding every time I heard a police car! Thanks Mum.

My point however, is that although I would never commit a crime, I have thought about how I would go about it, y’know - if I did.

Nowadays we have excellent forensics, everything gets recorded, uploaded, downloaded etc. so the chances of really, properly getting away with any crime, well it’s kind of small. A criminal mastermind could perhaps do this – get away scott free with the will in his pocket, but I think a cunning criminal, one just clever, not genius, nowadays doesn’t try to duck the system, she plays it.

An avenging angel?

I live in a lovely village, but unfortunately there are some less than lovely people in it. Recently there has been a spate of burglaries (my own house was broken into, but nothing was taken thanks to a bat-eared neighbour who heard my garage door being opened and hit all the security lights). The police know exactly who is doing the B&E … but they can’t do anything about it. They’ve even caught the man with stolen goods in his hands, but can only get him on possession as he claims he’s looking after the stuff for someone else.

A couple of months ago, my neighbour caught this individual in her front room with a torch at 4am. The police had her word that he was in her house, they had his wet footprints on the cardboard box she had inside her back door and they picked him up at 420am sneaking back into his own home (they didn’t have to chase him around the village, they just went to his address and waited for him to turn up – that’s how confident they are in his identity). A couple of weeks later we heard that he wasn’t being prosecuted – there wasn’t enough evidence. He hadn’t actually taken anything from my neighbour’s house (she scared him off first) so they were letting him go. He got to pick up a nice benefits cheque and my neighbour hasn’t slept since.

Let’s look at some statistics …

2009	% of incidents reported to the police that are successfully convicted in the courts (attrition)	% of convictions after the case has gone to court (conviction)
Rape	6.5%	47%
Violence against the person	4%	71%
Burglary	4%	85%

Leaving aside the horror that is the statistic on rape (that’s a whole other discussion) we can see that in 2009 only 4% of cases of violence against the person that were reported to the police ended in conviction (and if the case is taken to court, there’s still an almost 30% chance of getting off).

So, for example, if I wanted to say, take revenge on, someone … let’s call him Mr Bat Curglar I could:

1. Make sure everyone knew I was completely OK with his night time ‘habits’ – because I’m such a forgiving soul

2. Visit the doctor and make sure I was down on record as suffering, and I mean really SUFFERING with horrible, uncontrollable PMT (just in case it goes to court you can use this one to get off with temporary insanity)

3. Establish that I am having a bit of car trouble

4. Run the bastard over next time he’s out and about at 4am

5. Leg it home.

Now I might not even be reported. But if I was, I have a 96% chance of never being convicted and then if I do go to court, a 30% chance of getting off. To help that along, I have a decent temporary insanity plea, established car trouble (the brakes weren’t working that well) and let’s face it, even if I do get sent down – I’d be out in six months anyway.

When you weigh all that up, getting caught hardly seems like a deterrent at all.

So there you go – my perfect crime. Revenge manslaughter, maximum six months in prison, if I’m unlucky and I’d probably pick up a nice benefits cheque on my release.

Sadly I’m sure a lot of individuals out there have weighed up those exact figures (Mr Bat Curglar for example) and come to the same conclusion.

It’s frankly terrifying.

Bryony Pearce's debut novel Angel's Fury is published on July 4.

Creating a Believable Psycho by Colin Mulhern

2011-06-21T06:52:00.000+01:00

Clash, published in March 2011, is Colin Mulhern's first book for teenagers. It tells the story of Alex, a young cage fighter, who goes off the rails when he witnesses a brutal murder and cannot fight anymore; and Kyle, a talented artist.

When I first began writing Clash, it was meant to go off in a totally different direction. Alex Crow was just the school nutter – a cardboard cut-out character whose only real job in the story was to chase Kyle. He was someone to be afraid of, someone to run from. At the time, the story was purely from Kyle’s perspective. But bit by bit, Alex came to life, and as he did so, he brought a whole load of baggage with him.

It all started with making Alex small and thin. I thought a bog-standard bully was a bit boring, so I changed the description. But in doing that I found that I had to justify why he was so scary to the other kids. I had to work out what was going on behind those eyes. What I ended up with was a snowball effect, where each reason I came up with filtered into the story line until the whole background of cage fights and his Uncle Joe blossomed. What began as a simple, uninteresting baddy suddenly began to muscle his way into the story until I reached a point where Kyle was battling for space on the page. That’s when I decided to put them up against each other and see how they’d do.

In those first drafts, I never really knew what to expect. Having someone like Kyle stand up to a psycho like Alex is great for a story, but for a writer, asking yourself how a normal, quite nerdy kid like Kyle balance out chapter space with a cage fighting psychopath, is a far more interesting question - and a difficult one to solve.

I think that’s what made Clash so interesting to write. It was a constant battle. The only way to keep the fight balanced was to deepen the boys’ characters with each successive chapter.

Looking back, if I’d never expanded Alex’s character, Kyle wouldn’t be a fraction of the character he ended up. But that’s what writing is really about – trying to find a way to make your invented character come to life, to stand up on the page and become real for the reader.

The Opposite of Amber: Gillian Philip interviewed

2011-06-19T06:00:00.003+01:00

One of my absolute favourite writers for teens is the Scottish writer Gillian Philip, whose books are thrilling, terrfiying - she doesn't shy away from 'difficult' content - and beautifully well written Gillian's latest book is The Opposite of Amber, the story of two sisters in a small Scottish town who fall into trouble and tragedy. I couldn't resist the chance to ask Gillian some questions about The Opposite of Amber, starting with the narrator, taciturn hairdresser, Ruby. - Keren David

One of the things I loved about this book was the narrator, Ruby, who seemed to be full of contradictions. She says very little, she's left school young and she's working as a hairdresser. She jumps to conclusions and she makes tough decisions. But her inner voice is so intelligent and poetic, so deep and thoughtful. How did you create Ruby's voice?

I think like all ‘book voices’, Ruby just grew on me. I knew from the start that she was a very monosyllabic, reserved person who was gauche in company and shy about expressing herself – indeed almost mute – but obviously that’s not ideal for the narrator of a whole book! Once I began to write from inside her head, I realised there was nothing reserved about her thoughts – that she was almost bound to be far more articulate in her own head, because she was repressing so much. She could be very grumpy and self-pitying at times, and she had to be able to express her anger somehow, and I found her (sometimes objectionable) thoughts more forgiveable when she could explain herself eloquently, but internally.

I was very impressed - and a little annoyed - that you managed to trick me right to the end - great sleight of hand. Is the plotting of a crime book something you enjoy? How much do you plan out beforehand?

Oh good! I hope you weren’t TOO annoyed... and I’m quite relieved that almost no-one has guessed, because I spent a lot of time worrying it was too obvious. That must be writers’ paranoia! I do enjoy plotting crimes (fictional ones), but it’s quite a haphazard process for me. I do plan it a little beforehand, but quite often things change unexpectedly, when characters don’t behave the way I thought they would, or unforeseen complications arise. This time, for once, I knew who the killer was from the start.

My absolute favourite character was Foley's vile little sister Mallory, who added comic relief. I was dying to know more about the Foley family, and indeed all the characters. Do you have to rein yourself in when it comes to developing minor characters? I get the impression that everyone has a long detailed backstory which is only given to the reader on a need-to-know basis.

Ah, I’m glad you liked Mallory. I have a soft spot for her, though she is diabolically awful. I have to rein in secondary characters in my head, because I do get interested in them, but I’m quite restrained when it comes to putting it on the page (that’s only now that I’ve learned the error of my ways – I used to overdo it enormously). I do know their backstories pretty thoroughly, though. I do remember that the appalling Ma and Pa Foley came about after I watched a dog training programme one night, where the parents actually did make daily roast dinners for their dogs, and stuck frozen pizzas in the microwave for their son.

How much research did you do for this book? I'm thinking about subjects like prostitution, drugs and serial killers.

More than usual. Normally I like to wing it to a certain degree, but for this book I had to find out details like what crack cocaine smells like, or how police forces share information. At one point I overcomplicated the prostitution subplot, which I blame on an overuse of Google. I had Jinn plying her trade via the web – I found a lot of sex workers promoting their business with websites – before I realised that she simply wouldn’t be that sophisticated, and she would be ‘winging it’ as much as I was. At that point I turned to a friend who had been a local policeman and picked his brains instead – I threatened to thank him in the acknowledgements for ‘help with prostitutes’, but he called my bluff, and I chickened out at the last minute!

And, leading on from that, these are strong subjects for teenage readers. Are there any taboos left, do you think? Personal and general. And has your appetite for challenging subject matter caused you problems getting published or with readers, librarians and booksllers?

It’s hard to think of a subject that would be completely taboo, even in the Young Adult market – there certainly seem to be no taboos left in adult fiction. If there’s a subject I personally wouldn’t like to touch, it’s probably the murder of a young child – but that’s a very personal thing.

I haven’t had problems with publishers – they’ll occasionally ask me to take out an f-word or two, but I’m usually happy to do that, and it usually makes the text stronger (an occasional obscenity always works far better than peppering the manuscript with them). Oh, and I’ve actually been ticked off by teen readers for swearing!

I have been told on the quiet, though, of an occasional school that won’t stock my books, or a shortlist that won’t have me – usually that’s down to fear of parents. The only time I’ve really been offended was when a school accused CROSSING THE LINE of ‘glamourising’ knife crime. Obviously they hadn’t read it.

I read this book a few weeks ago, and it's haunted me - especially the character of Nathan. Was it hard to move on as a writer?

Thank you – that is a really good thing to hear. I never intended to get so attached to Nathan myself, but his contradictions got to me after a while, and I became very fond of him (which of course doesn’t mean I cut him any slack). Funnily enough, though, it wasn’t so hard to move on from this one. AMBER was hard to write, and I spent a lot of time with the characters, and I was ready to say goodbye.

Saxby's School Visits by Simon Cheshire

2011-06-15T00:01:00.000+01:00

Simon and just some of his books

Like many children's authors, I get regular updates on what's popular in my books because I visit a lot of schools every year. One thing that's emerged very strongly is something that's been a complete surprise to me.

When I started writing my Saxby Smart detective stories, about a schoolkid private eye, I was very keen to make them different in some way, to give them a unique angle for readers to engage with: so I eliminated the sidekick role. Most fictional detectives have their sidekick, but I wanted to do something fresh. So Saxby has nobody trailing around after him, asking questions.

I leave that up to the reader. Saxby's narrative directly addresses the reader at all times, and literally stops to ask the reader questions about the case. I liked the idea of the stories being interactive, with readers being able to attempt to solve the crime at the same time (or before!) the hero of the story.

When the books started to be published over here in the UK, I assumed that this interactive element would make them more of a 'personal' read, not something you'd find on whole-class reading lists. But it's turned out that I was totally wrong.

Wherever I go, I meet teachers who tell me that the Saxby stories are perfect for reading to a class of 8-12 year-olds, or for the whole class to read along together. The interactive element means that everyone can get involved in unravelling the mystery.

Now that the books are starting to come out in paperback over in America, I'm finding that they're beginning to have the same impact in US schools. I'm looking forward to logging on during my regular Skype sessions with overseas classrooms and finding Saxby fans from coast to coast!

Does a detective need a sidekick? Which books work well in the classroom for older teens?

Find out more about Simon Cheshire and his best-selling books, including the Saxby Smart detective stories at www.simoncheshire.com

Incidental Crime by Rachel Ward

2011-06-12T07:30:00.001+01:00

Numbers 3 - published this month

There’s a lot of crime in my books, a heck of a lot. My books aren’t crime novels, though. Really, they’re about life and death and love. But along the way I write about car theft, drug dealing, rape, murder, kidnap...okay, now I see why my mum’s disturbed that her daughter writes books like these!

I’ve written three books now – the Numbers trilogy – and crime is there in the background of all of them, as are a whole range of social issues. My characters grow up in crime-filled environments. They are victims and they are criminals. They make stupid choices sometimes, choices that you wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I’ve been criticised in some places for letting my characters make the ‘wrong’ choices, but I want the people in my books to feel real. They’re the sort of people you might know from school, or maybe cross the road to avoid. And real people don’t live lives according to the manual – we do things we regret, make decisions on the hoof, sometimes recognise the right thing to do and do the wrong thing anyway.

The award-winning first in the Numbers trilogy

But books aren’t real life. They’re a skewed version of reality, and as a writer you can shape things they way you want them to be. So in my books I don’t necessarily tie up all the loose ends, but I do try to show that actions have consequences and I try and give a glimmer of hope (okay, you might have to squint to find it). People get hurt, physically and emotionally. Things are messy, but my characters try and deal with them as best they can. And in the end, whatever you’ve done, whatever gets done to you, you try and carry on, and hold on to what’s important. Life and death and love.

The first in Rachel Ward's Numbers trilogy won the Angus Book Award, the Oxfordshire Book Award, the Stockport Schools Book Award, Key Stage 4, the Hounslow Book Award and the Wandsworth Fabulous Book Award 2010. The final book Numbers 3 Infinity, was published on June 6. Find out more about Rachel and her books here.http://www.rachelwardbooks.com/

EGA interviews...Anne Cassidy

2011-06-06T00:35:00.000+01:00

EGA's keen readers

The Reading Group at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington, north London interviewed Anne Cassidy for Crime Central. Here's the first half of the interview..more next week.

1. What inspired you to become a writer?

I love reading books. I read book after book and one day I wondered if I could write a story. I tried a few things but realised that I was just writing for myself. So I joined a writer’s group and for two years went every fortnight and shared my stories and poems. It gave me confidence about what I was writing. One day I said to myself, I’m a writer! Once I’d admitted it it seemed that the next step was to write a novel.

2. How did you get into crime/mystery writing?

I love reading crime fiction. I love the fact that there is a mystery which will unfold over 300 pages. The writer knows what the secret is but the reader has to find out. When I decided to write my first novel I was working as a teacher and I wanted to write about teenagers, using my own memories of being a teenager. I decided to write a murder mystery where two teens overhear a murder during a phone call. They decide to find out what happened. It’s called BIG GIRLS’ SHOES and is long out of print.

3. Are you planning on getting into other genres?

No, I don’t think so. The crime genre is a popular and I’ve still got lots of stories to tell.

4. What is your favourite book out of all those you’ve written?

I have two favourites. The first is LOOKING FOR JJ. This is because it was so successful for me. It’s my best selling book and people still come up to me and tell me how much they liked it. The other one is a book with an odd title STORY OF MY LIFE. It’s a crime thriller with a boy, Kenny, as the main character. It’s fictional but the boy, Kenny, was definitely based on my son so this book has a special place in my heart.

5. What is your favourite book overall?

I don’t have a single favourite book. I like lots of books at different times. I’ve just read REBECCA by Daphne Du Maurier. This is an ‘old’ book but I had never read it and I enjoyed it very much.

6. Where do you get your inspiration from?

Inspiration is the wrong word. I get my ideas from real newspaper stories of crimes and terrible things that happen. I read something that moves me or makes me think a lot and so I file that away in my brain and it may turn into a story.

7. Like, Keren David's ‘When I was Joe,’ ‘Looking for JJ’ has a central character with an assumed identity. How did you research this?

I didn’t research it. I just tried to imagine what it would be like to pretend that you were a completely new person. To wipe away all links with the past, with the people you loved, friends and so on and start again, fresh. For some people it might be a good thing for others, not so good.

8. How do you choose names for your characters?

I work out the year they were born and then I go onto a website which lists the most popular names for that year. Sometimes I hear a name that I like a lot. I was doing a school visit and I signed a book for a girl called ELISE. I used that as the name of the main character in JUST JEALOUS.

9. Did you like writing as a child?

No, I was hopeless at school. I was terrible at English. I didn’t start writing until I was in my thirties.

10. Why do you like writing for teenagers?

I think it’s because I remember that time so well. Three or four years when I wasn’t a child and wasn’t an adult. It was a time of deep frustration and a sense of longing to be older. I hated school and for a while hated my parents (loved them again later). I felt that everyone had a better life than me and I wasn’t very easy to get along with. Oh, as well as that, I kept falling in love with unsuitable people. That’s why I remember it so well.

11. Do you have any relatives who are police officers?

No!

(If you're part of a school reading group and you'd like to interview a crime writer, let us know and we'll try and arrange it. almosttrue@hotmail.com)

Knife in the Playground by Tom Avery

2011-06-02T00:31:00.000+01:00

‘We have gathered you all together because, this morning, something shocking was discovered.’ This is how pupils at a London school were greeted in a special assembly one Monday – ‘A knife’s been found in school.’ They were then presented with exhibit A; a stained blade of dubious origin.

This was, thankfully, a fiction. This literacy project was created and run by class teachers at Torriano Junior School, one of which is me, Tom Avery. As well as teaching, I write, my debut book Too Much Trouble, published today, explores crimes of survival alongside other themes, themes, which I cannot help but take into the classroom.

From this shady start a shared narrative began in which the pupils took the role of experts addressing the issues explored. Led pre-dominantly by the pupils, this knife, its history, owners and usage, was the centre of the year six pupils’ learning experience.

Why was the issue of knife crime chosen?

The pre-dominant reason was the pupils themselves. In the heart of North London, Torriano Junior School, draws its intake from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities. However, despite their differences, the pupils there are all affected by crime, from hearing about it in the news to witnessing it first-hand.

The streets around the school are not strangers to serious knife crimes and the teachers were very aware that their pupils, who would shortly be leaving to attend local secondary schools, would also lose that innocence. Alongside this, gang mentality and behaviour was beginning to show in groups of pupils. It was felt that the issues had to be addressed.

What do you do with an illegal weapon?

The pupils decided that the right thing to do with the knife was report it to the police. Pupils wrote letters to the police to report the weapon and to share their concern over theirs and their community’s safety. ‘The police’, in the form of the teachers, wrote back to the pupils informing them of the operations which were currently running, the metropolitan police’s website is excellent by the way, and furnishing them with CCTV photos of the two possessors of the knife.

From here the pupils took the project in several directions. Leaflets about knife crime were created, in order to persuade people like our perpetrators to hand in their weapons. The photos were used as the starting point for drama pieces, play-scripts and narratives, which all attempted to piece together the events leading up to the knife being deposited in the school grounds. The real police were invited in to share in the project and give the pupils a richer experience of the issues. Witness statements were created, debates took place, awareness was raised throughout the school.

Was it a success?

If we measured the success of the project in output of work or English progress as defined by the DfE, the answer would be a resounding yes. If our measure was the pupil’s engagement and enjoyment of the project, the yes would be even louder. If, however, we looked at our original aims, to influence, away from gang and knife culture, the young people who took part in the project, the success remains to be seen.

Too Much Trouble won the Diverse Voices competition 2010. It is published today by Frances Lincoln.

EGA interviews...Anne Cassidy

2011-05-30T09:43:00.000+01:00

The reading group from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School interviewed Anne Cassidy. We ran the first half last week...here are the rest of their searching questions.

Award-winning author Anne

12. What inspired you to write Looking for JJ?

I was shocked and horrified at reports of two child murders in this country over the last forty years. The killing of James Bulger by two ten year old boys and the case of Mary Bell, a ten year old girl who killed two small children.

13. Out of all your books, which was the most difficult to complete?

None. The most difficult bit is always the middle. That’s where it becomes complicated and you have bad days and wonder why you ever started it!

14. Do you relate a lot to your main characters?

There is always some of me in the main character of my book. This is how I am able to write them convincingly. Even JJ’s temper tantrums came from times when I remembered exploding as a child.

The girls from EGA

17. Which book did you enjoy writing most?

I enjoy them all. Really. No lie. It’s much easier work than being a teacher.

18. Do you think your books help people who are going through the same things your characters face?

I don’t know. I just try and tell a good story. If my books change the way people look at something then that’s a bonus.

19. Who are some authors that you admire?

Some adult crime writers I admire are Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin and CJ Sansom.

20. Do you take characteristics from your friends and family and incorporate them into your books?

Yes, I do. There is often a well dressed older lady in my books with smart hair. This is my mum. There is always someone who supports West Ham. This is because my husband loves West Ham.

21. Does it take very long to finish a book?

It takes me six months to write a book.

22. Are you currently writing a book? If yes, when does it come out?

I’ve just finished a book called DEAD TIME which is the first of a series called THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS. This comes out in May 2012.

23. Do you think your books are suitable for all audiences?

Books find their own audience. If a very young reader picks up one of my books she or he will simply not be able to get into it. If a reader is too old they will not engage with it.

Are you part of a school reading group, and would you like to interview a crime writer? Get in touch at almosttrue@hotmail.co.uk and we will try and organise it.

Have you ever done it? by Hilary Freeman

2011-05-26T00:25:00.000+01:00

When people find out that I’ve written Lifted, a novel about a girl who achieves celebrity through

shoplifting, the first thing they invariably ask me is (you’ve guessed it): ‘Have you ever shoplifted

yourself?’

Hilary Freeman: has she?

It’s an interesting reaction. If I’d written a book about murder or armed robbery I’m sure nobody would dream of asking me if I’d killed anyone, or raided the local post office with a sawn-off shotgun and a pair of 15 deniers over my face. But shoplifting? It’s not like other crimes. It’s something we assume most people have done at least once in their lives - more a rite of passage than a sign of being bad or mad or dangerous. And that’s what makes it so fascinating.

While some people shoplift because they need to, the majority do it for the thrill, the buzz, the delicious risk of getting caught. Sometimes it’s a cry for help. Sometimes it’s just an expression of futility. The stats show that the more materialistic society becomes, and the more ‘things’ we all possess, the more young people seem to shoplift. Why is this? Why do people like Hollywood actress Winona Ryder, who appears to have it all, need to shoplift? How do we view them when they get caught? What does it say about the world we live in? These are all questions that I hoped to explore while writing Lifted.

So, back to that initial question: have I ever shoplifted myself? Now, that would be telling.

Lifted is shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year Award

Simon Cheshire's Three All-time Favourite Detective Stories

2011-05-23T00:01:00.000+01:00

The reason I started writing the Saxby Smart detective stories for 8-12 year-olds was that I'd always enjoyed reading crime fiction, and one day it suddenly occurred to me that I'd never actually tried writing any. Or, at least, nothing you'd specifically label as crime fiction. Since then, I've often been asked what my own favourites are, so here they are:

Firstly, there's The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, widely credited as the first detective novel ever written, and still a thumping good read. I have to admit, I love Wilkie Collins's work. I'm always surprised he's not more widely read these days, since personally I think he's a more accessible Victorian author than even Dickens. His later novel The Law And The Lady is another great detective yarn, although for some reason it's never presented as such. (It also contains an unintentionally comic female protagonist, all fluttering eighteenth century virtue and pre-feminism ideals!)

Secondly, another Victorian masterpiece: Conan Doyle's The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Few novels of any kind are as thoroughly atmospheric, and this one positively reeks of lonely, windswept moorland. It's odd that this is still perhaps the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, because it's so untypical of them. For a start, Holmes is, of course, absent for most of it.

Thirdly, The Maltese Falcon. Well, you just can't go wrong with Dashiell Hammett, can you? It's one of those books, like the novels of Edgar Wallace, that you feel you've got to read in a yellowed, dog-eared old paperback edition to get the full effect. American noire of the '30s is so powerfully evocative of its period, I always think it ought to be given to history students.

Now, where did I put my trenchcoat...?

Simon Cheshire is one of the UK's leading children's writers, and his Saxby Smart detective stories for 8-12 year-olds are among his most popular titles. You'll find more information at Simon's website www.simoncheshire.co.uk

A Cushion Out of Place by Claudia Hyde

2011-05-21T00:08:00.003+01:00

This crime story won a London heat of the National Young Crime Writer’s Competition in May. It will go forward to the national competition in June which will be judged by senior CWA members. We LOVED this story. Good luck Claudia - Anne Cassidy

Winning writer Claudia Hyde and Anne Cassidy

A Cushion Out of Place by Claudia Hyde

There was only one time in my childhood where I was happy. I mean, where I genuinely felt the phenomenon of happiness.

I can still recall the feeling of the squeaky leather of the psychiatrist’s armchair underneath my pinafore. I remember the noise it made, too; it was a high pitched whining noise, as if it were protesting from my weight. Not that I weighed an awful lot as a child; sometimes I refused to eat my meals even when I was starving hungry, just to upset my mother. That seemed to be my number one priority, to upset my mother. But I knew I could do it eventually.

“So tell me Ilse, what seems to be the problem?” Dr. Holtzmann said tapping his Swiss fountain pen elegantly against a cork clipboard. I knew for a fact that he wasn’t intending on writing anything on that clipboard.

“Well, she’s become very complacent recently,” my mother began. The vigorous ceiling lights of Dr Holtzmann’s office were reflecting off the surface of her pearls.

“I don’t think she’s been handling the…”

“Actually, if it’s alright with you, Frau Tessler,” Dr Holtzmann interrupted, “I would like to speak to Ilse.”

My mother looked dejected; she probably wanted to spend the hour long session complaining about me and have Dr Holtzmann agree that I was an unruly child and it was not her fault. She’d wasted her hour’s worth. It served her right, too. She reclined back onto her squeaky armchair, and rested her head on one well-manicured hand.

“What’s wrong, Ilse?”

I glared back at the doctor. Did he honestly expect me to pour out my heart and soul to a stranger who my sadistic mother was paying to agree with her?

“Perhaps we should have some privacy,” he whispered to my mother in confidential tones.

“So, what’s wrong, Ilse?” he repeated, as if he honestly expected me to reply. “Your parents tell me you’re not getting on with your younger sister.”

I scorned that sentence. My sister was three months old at the time. Of course we couldn’t get on, she was the most boring, useless lump of cashmere and baby spit I had ever met in my life. But Dr Holtzmann and my parents didn’t know the half of it. They were such ignorant fools.

I had snuck out of bed late in the night; I could tell because my parents were both asleep and the neighbour’s cat was yowling like it normally did at midnight. I creaked open the nursery door in my circus animal onesie, being careful not to wake my parents. I switched the light on dimly – I had to be able to see what I was doing – and made my way over to the crib. She looked like one of those strange Bavarian sausages my grandmother used to make for me – short, fat and pink, flecked with whiteness. I stuck my hand into the crib and pulled out a soft white cushion with tiny pink hearts embroidered onto it. The baby was still snoozing, her arms bent either side of her. It was all too easy, like taking candy from a baby.

No, no; it was easy, too easy. I had to challenge myself, otherwise it wouldn’t be any fun at all. I placed the embroidered cushion back in the crib and crawled back to my bedroom.

The next morning my parents had worried why the door was ajar and the light was on; they thought perhaps there had been a burglar break in during the night, but their worries quickly subsided when they realised there wasn’t so much as a cushion out of place.

Eventually, my parents stopped taking me to see Dr Holtzmann. I rarely said anything during the sessions, and when I did, it was only to ask my mother when we could go home. During those sessions, the only thing I could think of was my baby sister lying in the nursery, growing bigger and stronger while I wasted my time sitting on the squeaky leather armchair.

We’d gone home early from the park on one very rainy Sunday afternoon a few weeks later. We came flooding through the front door with our raincoats wet and shiny, and our Wellington boots squelching with mud on the beige jute carpet. The baby had been screaming non-stop ever since the rain had started. I didn’t see what she was complaining about; her pram had a see-through rain cover that kept her snug and dry while the rest of us wallowed in the weather. My mother took her up to the nursery whilst my father cleaned the boots in the kitchen sink.

I sat idly on the stairs waiting for something terrible to happen.

The screaming didn’t stop. It continued and continued; I could hear mother singing lullaby after lullaby, hushing and shushing, comforting and cuddling, but simply nothing worked. After a while mother ventured downstairs to sterilise a bottle, leaving the Bavarian sausage-baby screaming in her crib. I tip-toed upstairs to the nursery, seizing my opportunity. I picked her up; she was heavier than I remembered, but looked a bit more like salami than a Bavarian sausage because she was so red-faced. She was screaming so hard I could actually feel her vibrating in my hands, like a bomb.

“Stop screaming!” I shouted, loud, right in her angry, puffed-up face. “Stop it! Just stop it, stop it, stop it!”

Suddenly, the screaming stopped, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. Without realising it, I had been shaking her up and down like a Magic-8 ball. A smile as wide as the Danube crept onto my face. Everything was calm, everything was peaceful. I finally knew what it meant to be happy.

I placed the silent cadaver back in the crib with the embroidered cushion under her head. She looked well rested. And you know the best part? I knew this, this alone, would upset my mother more than I could’ve dreamed.

(Copyright:Claudia Hyde)

Taboos by Savita Kalhan

2011-05-19T09:23:00.000+01:00

The list of formerly taboo subjects for writers of teen fiction has become shorter and shorter. Now we can write about sex, oral sex, teen pregnancy, sexuality, drugs and suicide. There are lots of teen books that deal with those issues.

There are no subjects that are taboo any more, you might conclude, not even incest.

But go into any book shop and you will still be hard pressed to find teen books that deal with the kinds of crimes that are committed by adults on teens and younger kids, particularly abuse, whether it is physical, psychological or sexual abuse. And you won’t find a crime section in the kids’ department, although you will now find a teen section, so that’s a huge leap for all you teens out there. But within the teen section, books dealing with abduction and abuse will be few and far between. They are not considered suitable subject matters for kids to read about, and so have traditionally been taboo subjects. Even now, publishers tend not to want to take a chance on a book that might be deemed too ‘risky’.

But we all know these crimes happen. We read about them in the papers, hear about them on the news. They happen to young kids, older kids, teenagers and young adults. The point is they happen, but rarely figure in books for kids or teens.

I was lucky with my book, The Long Weekend. Despite the fact that it explores a taboo in teen/YA lit, it somehow slipped through the net, and it’s on the bookshelves of book shops and libraries. It’s about two boys who are abducted after school on a Friday afternoon by a paedophile, and yes it’s suitable for anyone over the age of 12.

As a writer I think it depends on how such taboo subjects are approached, how sensitively the subject matter is dealt with, and what kind of story it ends up being. The Long Weekend is at heart a gripping thriller that most teens just don’t want to put down once they’ve started it. It appeals to young adults – and even older adults, too.

I think it’s important to break through walls and go where others have not gone before as long as the writer knows what they’re doing – and remembers the age of their readership. There is still so much scope for breaking traditional taboos in teen lit.

Have you read a book recently that has been devastatingly good and that has explored a subject you have rarely seen on the shelves before?

For a chance to win a copy of The Long Weekend, check out the competition box at the top of the page

Crime, ghosts and laughs by Tamsyn Murray

2011-05-18T00:41:00.004+01:00

Even to my own ears, the elevator pitch for the first book I ever wrote sounds a bit grim:

‘My So-Called Afterlife is about a fifteen year old girl, who gets murdered in a London toilet and comes back as a ghost to catch her killer.’

The second book in the series, My So-Called Haunting, isn’t much lighter:

‘Hackney teenager Dontay dies in a gang shoot out and it’s up to psychic Skye to stop his brother from going the same way.’

I’m sure you’re getting the picture. It’s probably best not to ask about My So-Called Phantom Lovelife. My mother-in-law still hasn’t forgiven me for what I did to one of the characters.

So, from the descriptions above, you’d be forgiven for thinking I write crime novels , albeit with a supernatural twist. And on some level, you’d be right. When I was first thinking about writing a book for teens, it felt like scarcely a day went by without some report of knife crime in London. For me, the victims were all the more tragic when they were teenagers so it was natural that this should influence my writing.

But there’s a lot more to the Afterlife series than tragedy. I write for the lower end of the YA age range, so my books might cover death and suicide but I never forget who my audience is. Whether my main character is dead or alive, they’re typical teens. Lucy, from My So-Called Afterlife, is queen of the sarcastic one-liner, and she uses humour to get through her death. Skye is softer but still likes a joke and I ensure there’s plenty of comedy salted through the story to detract from the harsh realities of an inner city gun crime plot. It’s this humour which I hope lift the books out of being pigeon-holed as one particular genre and make them something unique.

The lightness of touch also means I can tackle some pretty full-on topics without depressing the reader – how many books have you read where a character was so horrendously bullied that she took her own life and yet there’s still the possibility of a happy ending? Or where a murder victim takes control of their own destiny and decides whether their killer is brought to justice or not?

I’m currently working on the fourth Afterlife book, which will be the usual genre-defying blend. And then I’m thinking about concentrating on a pure-blood YA crime novel, about a serial killer in London. One thing you can be sure of, though; there’ll be a joke or two in there somewhere. Humour has always helped us through our darkest days - long may it stay that way.

www.tamsynmurray.co.uk

How to Name a Detective by Simon Cheshire

2011-05-16T00:01:00.002+01:00

When I started writing the first of what are now eight volumes of detective stories, “The Curse Of The Ancient Mask”, I was going to call my schoolkid hero Ed Deadly. I thought that sounded like a great name for a detective.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a great name for this particular detective. When you hear the name 'Ed Deadly', what springs to mind? A hardboiled gumshoe? A darkened alleyway, a turned up trenchcoat, a fedora pulled low over the eyes...? Well, that's not what my detective is like, at all. He's still at school, and as a character he's miles away from Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. 'Ed Deadly' just didn't suit him.

So he needed a new name. OK, something-Smart, because he's quick-witted, he's intelligent. What-Smart?... Something beginning with S! Simon Smart? No. Steve Smart? Yuck. Sid Smart? Definitely not. In the end, out of sheer desperation, I logged on to a website that suggests names for babies. I clicked on 'Boys', then 'S' and scrolled down the list. I literally shut my eyes and stabbed at the screen.

Saxby. A medieval name, apparently, originally of Viking origin.

Perfect! From that moment on, his name was Saxby Smart. Well, at least it's memorable!

How do other writers name their characters? Are there 'villain' and 'hero' names? Leave a comment...

Meeting the Best Young Crime Writers - Anne Cassidy

2011-05-14T07:00:00.000+01:00

Anne with the winning writers

On Saturday 7^th May I attended a small gathering at the Earlsfield Library in Wandsworth.

Six young writers had been shortlisted by librarians from Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow, Kensington and Chelsea, Richmond upon Thames and Wandsworth in the National Young Crime Writers’ Competition run for the second year by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

The six shortlisted authors (in alphabetical order) were:-

Veronica Chow

Danny Culhane-Rodulfo

Claudia Hyde

Hassainah Khodabocus

Chloe Poulter

Belle Whitehead

The nationwide event organised by the CWA invited writers aged up to 18 to submit 1000 words of crime fiction.

The stories I read were terrific and made me think, for the first time, how effective this short ‘crime’ format is. A bite size narrative that doesn’t take long to read but leaves a shiver at the back of the neck for a long time afterwards.

CLAUDIA HYDE won with her story A CUSHION OUT OF PLACE.

This story will go through to the national final, which will be judged by senior CWA members. The national winner will be announced during National Crime Writing Week which runs from 13th-19th June.

Claudia Hyde’s story will be published on CRIME CENTRAL soon.

Creating a Criminal Mastermind - Ellen Renner

2011-05-12T00:05:00.005+01:00

I love writing villains, especially ones who aren't straightforward in their villainy.

Zebediah Petch is the villain of my second book, City of Thieves. He is the adoptive uncle of my hero, thirteen year old Tobias Petch.

He kidnaps Toby and coerces him into training as an apprentice thief. The resulting battle of will and wits, as Tobias fights to retain his identity and determine his own future, seems hopelessly mismatched. Toby's efforts at resistance are ground down one by one. But there is a wild card in the mix, in the form of the series anti-hero, Alistair Windlass, former prime-minister, murderer, traitor and calculating adventurer. (More of him in another post.)

Although my books have been praised for their twisty plots that keep the reader turning the pages, it's my characters that motivate me as a writer. I want to know who they are and why they do what they do. Zebediah Petch was a particular challenge. What sort of person turns his own family into a criminal gang?

City of Thieves is set in an alternative Victorian England and I wanted Petch to embody the entrepreneurial spirit of that age. Zebediah constructs a network of receivers, safe houses and retailers for the stolen goods. Like most entrepreneurs, he's a bit of a control freak. It's a family business, employing his sons, nephews, cousins and in-laws. Petch looks after everyone as long as they do as they're told. He's the embodiment of a Victorian patriarch, with a strong sense of family responsibility. He's also a ruthless entrepreneur, eliminating anyone who stands in his way.

Zebediah Petch is an orderly man. He believes in hierarchy, as long as he's at the top of it. He believes in family values, as long as he determines them. He's large, dominating in appearance and manner, and possesses an iron will, suitable for a man at his prime in the Age of Iron. His ambition and ruthlessness have made him the King of Thieves, but it's those very character traits that will ultimately prove his downfall.

Ellen Renner's first book Castle of Shadows was described in The Times as 'Gorgeously exciting and well written, with a hero as strong-minded and quick witted as its heroine, Renner's acute sense of psychology, politics and pace makes this one to revel in.' City of Thieves is the sequel. Castle of Shadows won the North East Book Award this week.

Simon Cheshire's Three Big Challenges of Writing about a Schoolkid Detective

2011-05-09T00:01:00.001+01:00

I love reading crime fiction, but when I came to start writing it for children I discovered that the life of a schoolkid detective wasn't going to be easy to chronicle.

1) My hero couldn't investigate murders. Or poisonings. Or stabbings. Or most other things that you might categorise as 'serious crime'. After all, he's a kid. The stories would need to retain credibility and realism (albeit a just-on-the-edge-of-what's-possible realism), so clearly I couldn't have him turning up somewhere and finding a dead body in a pool of blood. Readers wouldn't believe it. This leads into...

2) My hero would need to investigate interesting crimes. Which is obvious, really, but when you can't include murders, poisonings, stabbings etc etc, how do you get your hero involved in the world of crime in the first place? Clearly, having him investigate someone's stolen cellphone, or a missing sports shirt, might just possibly get a little dull for readers. He needed mysteries with a bit more meat to them. Just not dead meat, that's all. Which takes us to...

3) My hero would need complex, involving mysteries to tackle – cases which were significant, but not gruesome or out of his league. At this point, things became really interesting. I had a very specific set of perameters within which the stories had to function, and I had to find multiple plots which would present new and unusual scenarios to my readers.

So far, my schoolkid detective Saxby Smart has filled eight volumes of casefiles (twenty-four individual stories, since there are three stories in each book). I have to admit, each successive volume had been harder to write than the previous one (see 1, 2 and 3 above!), but he's still there, in his garden shed, with his battered old Thinking Chair and his files of notes.

Check out Simon Cheshire's Saxby Smart books here

From TV to YA...by Peter Cocks

2011-05-05T07:00:00.000+01:00

Peter's debut thriller, Long Reach

I have never considered myself a crime writer.

With a background in writing children’s TV, comedy and drama, I have had to bend my mind and writing skills – such as they may be - to a wide variety of genres.

From Basil Brush, to animations such as The Cramp Twins, to sketch writing on kid’s magazine shows from SMTV to Ministry of Mayhem. From shows that were commissioned from my ideas to ‘gun for hire’ work…even putting ‘words’ in Sooty’s mouth!

Peter cut his teeth writing gags for Basil

As TV budgets shrank, and my ambitions increased, I found that the more expensive ideas just could not find a home in British TV any more. My writing partner of 15 years, Mark Billingham (who you will now know as a best-selling crime author) and I pitched an idea to BBC for a long running , spooky kids thriller called Triskellion. The idea went through all the necessary development hoops but failed at the last hurdle: finance.

When Mark was approached by Walker Books to write for the young adult market, we developed the Triskellion idea into a trilogy of books for the 11+ age group with some success in the UK and USA

With Mark up and running as a best-selling novelist, I began to think of ideas for my next book.

I looked around and saw a market saturated with fantasy, from Harry Potter to Twilight. I also noticed that these books aimed at teens and young adults were being widely read by an older adult audience. Readers who want strong stories, simply told.

Skins: which books are equivalent?

With young, teenage kids of my own, and taking into account my TV background, I also saw that a wide gap had developed in programming. Most new shows were being made for pre-school age and the older programming was patronising and missing the mark for kids who had been brought up on Friends and were now watching Skins, Waterloo Road and Inbetweeners….Where are the books that do this?

I set out to write an unpatronising book aimed at these young adults. I felt I should write at an adult level, not shy away from strong emotion, language, sex, drugs and violence, addressing issues that might be part of my reader’s lives. So, I created Eddie, a 17 year old protagonist, guided by an inaccurate moral compass.

I put him, as an antidote to fantasy, in a gritty, violent, but also glamorous and tempting world where his moral standpoint would be tested on every level.

Eddie Savage is an everyman…you’d like him as your mate. He’s as tough as you’d like to be, but his need for emotional fulfilment makes him an attractive figure for readers of both sexes.

My novel Long Reach was published earlier this year. Early signs are good: Eddie is picking up male and female fans everywhere, and many of my reviews come from readers in their 30s and 40s. I am also getting feedback from schools telling me that reluctant readers, and teenage boys in particular, are relating to Eddie and reading at last.

I hope I have crossed over, and put a crime-based novel squarely into the YA readership. See what you think…

View the trailer for Long Reach here

Peter Cocks and Keren David are appearing at the Hay Festival on June 4, talking about thrillers. From the programme: These two compelling writers know how to deliver their thrillers ice-cold. Join them as they talk flawed heroes, plot twists and danger.
Book tickets here

Why I Write Crime Fiction for Teens by Savita Kalhan

2011-05-02T07:00:00.003+01:00

It all started out in a very roundabout way. I lived in the Middle East for several years, teaching English, but access to books was very limited. Most books were banned, so I ended up smuggling them in! I was reading everything I could lay my hands on, including lots of crime fiction and fantasy epics, teen books, YA and adult. When some books proved to be disappointing my friend and I decided we’d turn our hand to writing a book ourselves. I wrote a fantasy epic, which ran to hundreds of thousands of words, and had barely finished it when I returned to live in the UK. Somehow everything changed and I literally turned my back on epic fantasy literature and started writing teen and YA crime fiction.

I’ve always read teen and young adult books, so it came naturally to me to write it. There’s an immediacy about the plot and pace that I love and it suits my writing style.

But why crime fiction, you might ask? I adore a good thriller, the kind that takes you on a roller-coaster of a story and leaves you breathless but wanting more. And when you put it down when you’ve reached the end, you know you won’t forget it because it’s left a lasting impression on you. A psychological thriller will do that to you. It’ll be a gut-wrenching read; it’ll take you out of your comfort zone and challenge you. It won’t leave you behind at any point. It’ll make you care.

I hope I’ve created that in The Long Weekend. It’s fast-paced, it will definitely take you far out of your comfort zone, and when you reach the end, I don’t think you’ll forget it in a hurry. It breaks a traditional taboo in teen lit too – but more of that in my next blog here on 19^th May.

The Long Weekend comes with a few warnings: Not suitable for younger readers, but if you’re any age between 12 and 100 you’re fine. The other warning? Do NOT under any circumstances read it late at night! And that applies if you’re 12 or a 100. It’s a little bit scary...

Look out for The Long Weekend GIVEAWAY that’s running this month – a signed copy is up for grabs!

Interrogation - -Gillian Philip puts Linda Strachan and DEAD BOY TALKING under the spotlight

2011-04-28T20:55:00.000+01:00

****************
Linda,Dead Boy Talking is not only a fast and gripping read, but an extraordinary perspective on an all-too-common phenomenon.

What made you decide on that particular and unique narrative voice?
I was thinking about what I wanted to write about next , after Spider, and I had this image in my mind of a young boy sitting propped up against a wall - all alone - and bleeding out from a stab wound.
Going around in my head was the question - What is he thinking?
What if he was not someone who normally got into trouble, who hadn't gone out looking for a fight - but here he is bleeding to death in the street.
The title Dead Boy Talking and the first line 'In 25 minutes I will be dead' both seemed to come to me together when I was on a train, and I still have it scribbled in the notebook I was using at the time.
The first line gave me the structure which works as a countdown, building the pressure as we hear what Josh is thinking. But I didn't want to tell the entire story in his voice I wanted to tell the back story and be able to keep going back to Josh and his thoughts as he bleeds out.

The novel has a harrowing storyline and you don't shrink from the horror of events, with some brutal description. But you chose not to show the crucial moment of Josh's stabbing and to keep it "" o""ff-screen". Was that something that seemed natural from the outset or was it a deliberate choice?
It was not something I actually thought about very much, it seemed natural to do it that way. By the time we get to that point in the story I think I wanted to reader to find things out slowly, not spoon feed them, to keep them wanting to discover a bit more.
It is easy to imagine that you have to describe everything but it's not always the best way to tell the story.

Skye is an original and fascinating character. Where did she come from inside your head?
I honestly have no idea, as sometimes happens, she seemed to grow organically as she came into the story and became more and more important.
I knew I wanted her to be someone who was always a good friend to Josh and possibly wanted to be more, but who had her own issues to deal with, but she is not the kind of person to throw them open to the world.
What happened to her as a child just came out of nowhere, but it seemed to be right.

We get some very vivid pictures of what goes on inside Josh's head as his life slips away. Did you research the physical and psychological aspects of the dying process, or was this something you wrote by instinct?
Josh tells us that he has heard that it takes 25 minutes to bleed to death, so we only have his word for it. In fact it can take more or less time, depending on where you are stabbed, if you are running about etc etc.
I did do some research into the physical aspects of someone who is losing a lot of blood and how their body reacts- I asked the medics in the family who were very helpful, but most of the psychological aspects have come from trying to put myself into Josh's head - and hoping I got it right!

I found Gary a hard character to like (which isn't to say I didn't find him fascinating, even in his absence!) How did you feel about him and what he'd done to Josh?
Ah, Gary! Well, he was never supposed to be in the story at all. But I found I was having a problem trying to make it seem realistic for Josh to lose his friend Ranj and go off the rails a bit, when he seemed like such a nice ordinary boy with a good caring family and a happy life.
Then Gary walked into the story (well, he walked out, really) and I realised he was the reason Josh's life changed and that was the catalyst for the whole thing. Josh had looked up to Gary and felt he'd been let down by him, and his parents, even by his best oldest friend, Ranj. So Gary became a focal point and crucial to the story.
I didn't dislike Gary for what he did, because in some ways he was also the victim and he was only doing what he felt he needed to do for his own life. I don't think he had considered what his actions would do to Josh, or the rest of the family.

And the crucial question: Were you ever tempted to make the ending different - at any point in the writing process?

There were of course two possible endings but while I was writing it I had no idea how the book was going to end. It could have gone either way.
I really don't like planning. I start with a beginning, some characters and a vague idea where it is heading. The excitement of writing, for me, is to follow the characters whereever they lead and to be as true to them as I can.
I think if you know your characters well enough they will dictate what happens in a story and Dead Boy Talking was exactly like that.   When I came near to the end I did have to decide, but I think I chose the right one! I hope the readers do too.
                                                ---------
Many thanks Linda, and here's hoping the book has a huge impact.

What do I know about crime fiction? - The Bookette

2011-04-25T07:00:00.012+01:00

Becky- The Bookette

When Linda Strachan asked me to write about what makes a good crime novel I was more than a little apprehensive.

I mean, what do I know about crime fiction?

I thought about this more and more, I’ll be honest I don’t like to let people down. I figured there must be a reason she asked me for an opinion piece.

Am I opinionated? Probably.

The thing is I don’t really think I know anything about crime fiction. That’s because when I think about crime fiction I think of the following:

Adult fiction

The crime bit in Waterstones

Authors that I have never read including: Jo Nesbo, Karen Rose, Colin Dexter?

But then I thought well Linda can’t want me to have an opinion on these people. This would be just weird. I’m a children’s librarian. So then the penny drops and I realise she wants my opinion on crime in teen or preteen fiction.

I guess I can do that because now I think about it, I really do read such novels. Here are the crime authors I’ve read fairly recently: Keren David, Gillian Philip, Sarah Singleton, Anne Cassidy, Jenny Downham, Andrew Lane, Andy Mulligan and of course Linda Strachan!

You see I was thinking of crime fiction as a thriller, a whodunit, but in actual fact crime is a theme running through many contemporary teen novels. The issue of crime is relevant to teens today in a way that is so far removed from the murder mystery concept. The issue of gangs and knife crime has been all too relevant to our young people in the last decade.

Contemporary teen fiction explores many different examples of crime and deviance:

ILLEGAL POACHING in Sarah Singleton’s The Stranger

SHOPLIFTING in Hilary Freeman’s - Lifted

INCEST in Tabitha Suzuma’s Forbidden

RAPE in Jenny Downham’s You Against Me

PROSTITUTION in Kevin Brooks’ Candy

Crime and deviance feed into contemporary teen fiction novels because this is surely the time when teens experience peer pressure to try smoking, drink alcohol and experiment with illegal substances.

But crime is not a theme that is strictly for contemporary fiction, I have noticed a trend towards exploring the theme through paranormal fiction too.

Kimberly Derting’s The Body Finder is your traditional whodunit with a girl who senses corpses.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing crime feed into many more genres in the next few years if it hasn’t happened already.

So what makes a good crime novel? In my mind the same things that make any book a good book -

A main character that you can relate to

A significant problem that the main character must overcome

A plot that twists and turns and is fast paced

Witty dialogue

Description which makes you feel as if you are living the story

Humour

The author’s own unique way of telling the story

And for me personally,

A really dramatic opening scene!

Perhaps a novel about copyright theft would be a good place to start teens talking about the morality of illegal downloading. That could be the most relevant crime novel of the next decade. In case anyone is looking for an idea...

I guess Linda was right.............. I am opinionated!

(But in a good way, Becky! ..Ed)

Becky, The Bookette is a Children's Librarian in a London prep school and an excellent reviewer of children's and young adult fiction at thebookette.co.uk

..............

KEITH GRAY looks at his 5 top crime novels

2011-04-22T07:00:00.053+01:00

My favourite crime novels aren't really crime novels - if that makes sense.
Out of my Top 5 you'll only ever find one of them on the genre specific shelf in a book shop or library.

For me there are so many brilliant novels that use crime and criminals to drive the plot, or to motivate the characters, or to shine a glaring spotlight on and ring the alarms about society's problems.

It's not just 'who-dunnit?' that interests me. But also 'how-dunnit?', 'why dunnit?', 'wish-I'd-dunnit' and even 'here's-hoping-they-get-away-with-it.'

These are my top 5:

'The Bottoms' by Joe R Lansdale; A book that should be much better known. A coming-of-age story set in the backwoods of 1930s East Texas where both a serial killer and the terrifying Goat Man are on the loose. Simply superb storytelling with a dark, dark heart.

'Oliver Twist' by Charles Dickens - Forget the campy musical, this is a wonderful story of underworld skulduggery and a young boy trying to escape a pair of the best villains ever created.

'Holes' by Louis Sachar - This isn't such an odd inclusion to the list as you may at first think. The whole story is driven by crime and populated by criminals. It's funny, inventive and a story that's all about stories and the impact they have.

'From Hell' by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell - I've always been fascinated by Jack the Ripper and this graphic novel is without doubt the best recreation of his horrific crimes.

'Only Forward' by Michael Marshall Smith - Kind of like if Phillip Marlowe had taken part in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

One of those books I have to buy on a regular basis because I keep lending it to friends who never seem to want to return it.

What better recommendation can there be...?

Keith Gray is the author of several award-winning books for young people including the teen noir novel Malarkey

..........................

The Victim's Story - by Gillian Philip

2011-04-20T07:00:00.012+01:00

This week saw official publication day for my new crime novel, THE OPPOSITE OF AMBER.

Publication day, I always think, should feel like a birthday – well, it’s your book’s birthday after all – but the truth is, it usually passes unnoticed in the haze of activity before and after. There are blog tours (a lovely kind of tour where you never have to leave your desk), and the nervous wait for reviews...

I’ve been especially anxious about this one because it’s a bit of a departure for me. It isn’t as fast–paced as my other books; indeed it isn’t really a ‘thriller’ as the blurb describes it.

I found myself engaged by what was going on in my heroine’s head, and that seemed as important to me as the ‘whodunnit’ element of the story (and indeed it’s directly relevant...)

I got the idea for the story while watching a documentary about the infamous murders in the Ipswich in 2006. It focused on the families of the victims, who were all street girls, and it was moving to see that aspect of the deaths given prominence for once, rather than the horror. I think that’s what inspired me to write about the family of a similar girl, and how the death impacted on them – I didn’t want to write about the killer, or the investigation. The victim in a crime story so often seems almost an irrelevance...

So THE OPPOSITE OF AMBER is the story of two sisters whose different choices in life lead to very different paths. The older, more responsible Jinn is drawn into prostitution when bad boy Nathan comes back into her life, and Ruby fights in vain to get her sister back.

It’s a story about sibling love, and loss, and obsessive romantic love.

But it is, also, a murder mystery...

.............

Researching crime might be a dangerous business - Linda Strachan

2011-04-18T00:53:00.000+01:00

Writing about crime can be fascinating especially when you start looking in depth into exactly to how the crime might be committed and you discover there are lots of things you really do need to know.
Such as -

How do the police investigate a crime

How do you break in and steal a car?

How do you get it started?

How do bank alarms work?

But most of all how do you go about asking all the right questions without it looking like you are planning the next big bank robbery or murder?

'Honestly Officer, I was just doing a bit of research for a book.....!'

When I was writing Spider I did quite a bit of research . I went to meet a boy who had a history of stealing cars and 'joyriding'. He was nervous at first but once he started speaking he seemed quite happy to answer anything I asked. I got the 'voice' of Spider from him.

I interviewed a youth liaison officer to find out what he could tell me about youth car crime.

I went out as an observer with paramedic crew from the Scottish Ambulance Service and also found out how calls were taken in their control room.

I also went to watch the Fire Service training school as they set up a practice scenario for extracting people from crashed cars.

This was really useful to get the sound of crunching metal, and other noises, and I got a sense of what it must be like for those trapped inside a car after a crash.

Then there is the victim -

How does it feel if you work in a bank that is being robbed?

How does it feel if someone stabs you?

For Dead boy Talking I needed to find out what the physical signs were when someone is bleeding heavily from a stab wound, how quickly do they start to lose consciousness, and what other symptoms appear as time goes on.

How long would they have to live?

I had heard (and the main character Josh tells us this, too) that it takes about 25 minutes to bleed to death. But in reality it would depend on where you have been stabbed and how much you are bleeding. It can all happen much more quickly and take a lot less time than that, but Josh doesn't know this. As happens to many of us at times, we hear a snippet of information and assume that we know the whole story.

Research can be not only interesting but also quite a lot of fun.

The Society of Authors in Scotland have organised several tours of police stations for authors with the Lothian and Borders Police.

I went on a couple of these and had a chance to get on a police motor bike - okay - so they were wise enough not to let me drive it anywhere!!

We spoke to the armed police who demonstrated all the gear they have to carry around with them.

But we also got to see the police dogs and horses in training, probably my favourite part of the day.

Research into crime is fascinating and can be fun, but just watch out how you ask those potentially incriminating questions.

Someone might get the wrong idea.

Cover Anatomy by Cathy MacPhail

2011-04-15T07:00:00.062+01:00

JUST HOW IMPORTANT ARE COVERS ?

I think I know something about covers, after all I have been lucky enough to have the covers of my books changed several times. And I say lucky enough, because I think when a cover changes it gives your book a new lease of life. It looks like a brand new book, for a whole new set of young readers to discover.

The cover of Run Zan Run, my first book, has been changed four times, and is going to be changed yet again in November. When I saw the original Blackie cover of Run Zan Run, a girl dangling from a beam, I loved it. It said right away,’ girl in danger’.

The same cover image was used for the Puffin edition, but Puffin let Run Zan Run go out of print, and to my delight, Bloomsbury reprinted it.

The first Bloomsbury cover for Run Zan Run was this one, a close up of the sole of a trainer. It was an image of someone in flight, of someone being chased, and readers loved it.

When Roxy’s Baby came out Bloomsbury decided once again to change all my covers to bright bold colours, with little stick figures on them.

The cover for Roxy’s Baby was terrific. Black with the stick figure pushing a pram. The black alone was menacing. You knew this book was a thriller. The cover for Run Zan Run was bright orange with the stick figure on the run.

I was never sure about these covers. I don’t write bright colourful stories. But I trusted Bloomsbury, and they were doing this for me and for my books.And as time passed, I learned that for a lot of new readers these were the only covers they knew, and they liked them.

When Grass was published it was all change again. This time they were going for a stark black and white image. I loved these right off. They seemed to capture the mood of the stories I wrote. The boy cycling by the lake in Dark Waters, a full moon in the background.
The figure leaping in the dark in Underworld, the hooded boy looking up in Grass.
They all hinted at mystery and danger.

The only one I was not sure of was the original they presented to me for Roxy’s Baby. That was a girl’s hand holding a baby’s dummy. It looked like a book about teenage pregnancy, and I don’t write books like that. Roxy’s baby is a thriller, and I wanted the cover to show that. The final cover included an isolated pram. That hinted at the story inside, ’Baby in danger’.

Another great cover for Run Zan Run. A girl running, with the shadowy figure of a man behind her.

My next book is Out of The Depths, a dark, spooky thriller, and I have to admit, I loved the original cover Bloomsbury sent me. It was so creepy. The hooded monk in the crypt, and all you can see are his steely blue eyes. I was so excited by that one. ( Mind you, I did have several people who thought it was a hoodie on the cover and not a monk at all!)

Then, it was all change again. Bloomsbury decided that when Out of the Depths came out, they were going to change five of my covers, including Out of the Depths. The monk was given the old heave-ho, and in his place, there was a stark tree against a burnt orange background.

Run Zan Run is changing too, as well as Missing, Underworld and Another Me. I’m excited by these new covers, excited but a little apprehensive, as I suppose most of us are when we see the covers for our books.

Yet when it all comes down to it, does a cover really matter?

Think of your favourite books. Is it the cover you remember, or the story inside? I always loved Little Women but it has had so many covers and I can’t remember any of them. Salem’s Lot, another of my favourites?.....nope, can’t remember the cover of that either. Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Once, Millions, when these books are mentioned what are you thinking of. The fantastic cover? Or the fantastic story?

So, I'm going to look forward to seeing my books coming back out in November, all bright and shiny, and if they fail miserably I am certainly not going to blame the covers.

So, what’s your experience of covers? Do they matter?

OUT OF THE DEPTHS-First in the Tyler Lawless series-out Nov 2011
GRASS and MISSING see the Easter Kindle promotion on Amazon.

Adèle Geras reviews - THREE CRIME NOVELS FOR TEENAGERS

2011-04-13T07:00:00.000+01:00

PRETTY BAD THINGS by CJ Skuse. Chicken House. pbk. £6.99

This is a fast-moving and exciting novel which introduces us to twins, Paisley and Beau. Lots of it takes place in Las Vegas and I was half way through the book before I googled the writer and discovered that far from being American, she was a young British writer whose first novel this is.
Full marks to her, then, for the authenticity of that sassy, clever, pacy US teenage voice that just sings off the page. Paisley and Beau are looking for their father who's been in gaol but is now out. Their mother is dead and they've been living with the Grandmother from Hell. Paisley gets herself deliberately expelled from school and she and Beau set off on a quest to find their father.
Crimes, both petty and not so petty, are committed along the way. Be warned: the language is very blue indeed at times and disappointingly, the end leads straight to the sequel, so to speak which means: you're not actually at the end of the story. But all the way through, terrible things and funny things and even a few really touching things keep you turning the pages.
Opinion will be divided about the cover. All you can say with certainty is: it's eyecatching! The shout line, Get over it. Nobody dies is a bit enigmatic, but hey, maybe it's also intriguing enough to make you want to pick the book up. Give it a whirl.

LIFTED by Hilary Freeman Piccadilly Press pbk £6.99

If you or anyone you know has ever stolen anything from a shop; if you've ever thought of doing so, if you've even been tempted and even if you'd never dream of doing such a thing, this is a book you'll find fascinating.

Robyn shoplifts for the kick of it and not because she wants what she's stolen. She gives her loot at once to a charity shop and this makes her feel less guilty. She starts a blog to write a kind of diary of her experiences, under the pseudonym Ruby. Noah, the computer-geek neighbour who's in love with her, gives her all kinds of techie help. Things go from bad to terrible in no time flat and the unintended consequences of Robyn's shoplifting habit on her, her friends at school, her family and the media are brilliantly explored.
Ruby the blogger becomes a sensation all over the internet and you'll find it hard to put the book down before you've seen how everything works out. Freeman is a journalist and knows exactly how to structure the book for maximum effect. Good stuff.

HIDDEN by Miriam Halahmy Meadowside pbk. £6.99

Alix, who lives on Hayling Island, and her classmate, an Iraqi boy called Samir, find an illegal immigrant on the beach one day and decide to hide him from the authorities. This sets in motion a complicated and nail-biting sequence of events. Samir has his own problems at school. Alix likes Samir but is a little wary about his brother. Everyone is concerned about terrorism and no one really knows anything about the man who's been washed ashore.
People grow and learn throughout this book. They learn about the terrible things that are happening in other parts of the world.
They learn about their own parents. They are surprised by the way perceived enemies can turn out to be friends. This novel raises all kinds of interesting questions but never loses sight of the fact that what we want to read first and foremost is an interesting story about people we can get to like. Do try it for yourselves. You'll like it and it'll give you much to discuss once you've finished. Point this one out to your teachers...they'll thank you for it.

Adèle Geras has written novels for children of all ages and for adults. Her website iswww.adelegeras.com Her latest book for teenagers is DIDO (Corgi pbks)

Writing Victorian Whodunnits by Joan Lennon

2011-04-11T07:00:00.001+01:00

Writing detective stories set in the Victorian period is a bit like being handed an enormous, elaborately wrapped, chock-full-to-the-brim Christmas present.

Every day. There’s just so much stuff to work with. It was a time of such wild enthusiasm and energy and invention and discovery AND horror, appallingness and bizarre evil-doing. And all of it – the good and the bad – writ extra large. They never did anything small, those 19^th century types.

Joan Lennon

With The Slightly Jones Mysteries, I’ve got to play with both sides of the great Victorian divide. Each book is being built around both an audacious theft from one of the age’s wonderful new museums and the seedy underbelly of one of the age’s burgeoning cities. (Can you have an underbelly that’s seedy? If you can, then Victorian cities certainly did.)

In The Case of the London Dragonfish, my heroine moves from the grandeur of the newly-built Natural History Museum to the horrors of Newgate Prison, church crypts, and the cellar laboratory of a mad scientist in the mysterious Spirit Building, just in time to solve the case before (scariest of all) meeting Queen Victoria.

In The Case of the Glasgow Ghoul, she’ll be travelling north to unravel a mystery involving the Hunterian Museum and the Glasgow Necropolis. Are the thieves really a peg-legged man and a trained chimpanzee, or is the truth stranger still?

And then, it’s on to Cambridge for The Case of the Cambridge Mummy – I haven’t finished writing that one yet, but it already has bloomers and bicycles and mummies and a crazed professor who thinks she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen …

I have an indecent amount of fun at my job, I really do.

Cheers, Joan.

P.S. If you want to find out more about the series, visit Slightly’s Notebook at www.slightlyjones.co.uk

P.P.S. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have an age named after you? Go on, admit it ( and tell us) – you know you’ve thought about it! I just wish Joan Age didn’t sound so much like Stone Age …

How I Discovered My Voice As A Crime Writer - Anne Cassidy

2011-04-08T07:00:00.001+01:00

On 5 April the third instalment of Undiscovered Voices was announced.
Undiscovered Voices is a joint innovation between SCBWI and Working Partners.

It invites previously unpublished children's authors to enter an extract of a completed novel and have the chance to be considered by a judging panel of children’s book editors, agents, booksellers and literary scouts.

Melvyn Burgess with authors featured in 2010

The selected extracts will go into an anthology that is then circulated around the publishing industry.
The previous two anthologies have led to several impressive deals.

This year's deadline for entrants is 1 June and the anthology will be published in early 2012. There's no submission fee but authors have to be a member of SCBWI to enter.

Hearing about this made me think about my own beginnings as a writer. I began writing when I finished my university degree. My love of reading came from a study of literature and I admired the many great books that I had read. I loved Dickens, Lawrence, Greene and many others.

When I started writing I tried to imitate these great writers. I wrote short stories and poems on many serious themes.

At the same time as this I read a lot of Crime Fiction. I loved the pace and mystery of these stories. I loved the fact that they were set in present day and often reflected the sort of life I led.

After sending off a ‘serious’ novel I had written to a publisher I got a personal letter of rejection. The publisher said she liked my writing but felt that the story wasn’t gripping enough. She told me to go into a bookshop and see what was selling. See what people wanted to read.

I went into a bookshop and saw a huge number of crime novels. I was drawn to them because they were the kind of books I loved to read.

At the time I was teaching teenage boys in a secondary school.

I decided to write a crime novel for teenagers with a girl as the main character. She would solve a murder mystery and I would use my own teenage memories as material for her life. That book was published in 1990 -

BIG GIRLS’ SHOES

I found my own writing voice and have written crime fiction ever since. Maybe some of the UNDISCOVERED VOICES in this anthology will do the same.

Visit TALL TALES AND SHORT STORIES tomorrow to find out more about Undiscovered Voices.

http://talltalesandshortstories.blogspot.com/

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What makes you a criminal? - Linda Strachan

2011-04-06T07:00:00.000+01:00

Il ne s'appelle pas Napoleon

definition: One that has committed or been legally convicted of a crime.

What this basically means is that you are a criminal if you break the law.

The first 5 are fairly obvious,

1 Commit bodily harm - stab, punch, kick, hurt or murder another person.

2 Steal - a car, a DVD, someone’s personal possessions (phone, wallet, jewellery, coat, shoes).

3 (In some countries) it is illegal to drink alcohol under 21 - in others it is illegal at any age.

4 Destroy someone else’s property or destroy someone’s reputation.

5 Don’t pay your taxes, claim benefits from the state that you are not entitled to.

............but some laws are ancient and almost forgotten and others are just plain weird!

6 To enter the Houses of Parliament wearing armour.

7 drive cattle through the streets of London.

8 It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.

9 In France it is illegal to call a pig Napoleon.

10 In London it is illegal to flag down a taxi if you have the plague.

Over to you…

Crime doesn’t just happen here. They might be modern or ancient laws, from anywhere on this world or perhaps in another fictional or even fantasy world.

Have you heard of any weird laws?

Could you lie to the police? : by Miriam Halahmy

2011-04-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

Could you lie to the police?

This is the question that my new novel, HIDDEN, ( Meadowside Fiction, 2011) throws up for readers.

HIDDEN is about two teenagers who find an illegal immigrant washed up on the beach and hide him to save him from being deported.

Our hero, Alix, a fourteen year old girl, has never done anything remotely criminal before and comes from a very law-abiding home. But once she has committed herself to helping the immigrant because she believes he has a right to prove himself to the authorities, nothing will stop her seeking justice. Even if that means lying to the police. But she is wracked with guilt and terrified.

That’s it then, I think with a shiver, I’ve lied to the police. I bury my face in Trudy’s neck and wait for the handcuffs to descend.

On a recent school visit I asked all the classes I spoke to if they would ever lie to the police. They were silent at first and so I said,

“Well I wasn’t brought up like that and I’m pretty sure you weren’t either.”

Lots of nods of agreement around the room and I expected most people to say that they would never do such a thing. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear comments such as,

“It would depend on the circumstances....” and “I can understand why Alix did that.”

It had been anxious moment for me. I certainly didn’t want to advocate to young people that they should break the law. But I was very keen for them to understand the huge dilemma Alix was faced with and the decisions that she had to make, even though they were so difficult.

The important point in HIDDEN is that Alix only has to help hide the immigrant, a failed and very tortured asylum seeker, for a few days until he is feeling better and they can contact a refugee organisation to accompany him to the authorities and speak up for him.

Are there any circumstances when you would be prepared to lie to the police?

WHAT IF…….. Anne Cassidy

2011-04-02T22:17:00.000+01:00

People often wonder why I write such dark stories. I tell them that I am one of life’s pessimists. I spend a lot of time imagining bad things happening to me or the people I love. This could be the beginnings of madness, I guess but for me, it has turned nicely into a job of work.

I am a writer of Crime Fiction.
I write stories where bad things happen to good people. Or where ‘normal’ people have to make choices that might mean bad things will happen.

This comes from my own attitude to life. When I’m standing on an underground platform and the train is about to come in I say to myself What If someone pushed another person onto the lines in front of the train? What If I witnessed this? What if I told the police what I saw and then got a phone call late at night where someone said,

“If you don’t withdraw your story someone in your family will get hurt!”

What would I do then?

This is often how my stories start. I have a morbid way of looking at the world and always think that I will either be the victim of a crime or somehow sucked into a crime situation. In other words because of pure luck (or bad luck) my life will change.

So I write crime books and they almost always start with WHAT IF…

(Avoid me if you see me on an underground platform.)

Anne Cassidy’s new book is HEART BURN

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It's not funny, sometimes it's criminal - April Fools Day

2011-04-01T10:00:00.000+01:00

April

1 It's April Fool's Day today and I must admit I am not a fan of practical jokes. I think I probably stopped finding them funny when I was about 10.

Don't get me wrong I love a good joke, or a laugh, but practical jokers rarely seem to take into account the effect their pranks can have on other people.

To those who are inclined to practical jokes April Fool's Day must appear like a golden opportunity and a good excuse to get away with murder! (Apologies- couldn't help myself that just crept in!)

But BEWARE not everyone is so forgiving and when pranks are ill-conceived the result might be a criminal record.

A few years ago after the local McDonalds in a town in Santa Barbara closed for the night, the police got a call saying the premises were being robbed and the staff were being held at gunpoint. The police closed local roads and set up diversions to contain the situation, clearing all radio transmissions etc, until it was discovered that the call had been a prank in the name of April Fool's Day. As you might imagine the police were not amused and the caller was being traced. It was treated as a serious crime.

As a writer all the 'what if's' come into my head....

What if the caller was let off with this and then did it again- but this time it was really happening and a lives were in danger? Would the police be quite as quick to believe it wasn't another prank?
What if the police were so busy closing roads and dealing with this fake crime when a real crime was going on elsewhere?
What if the perpetrators of the real crime had heard about the prank and were using it as a cover, knowing the police would be busy elsewhere?
What if someone couldn't get past the closed roads and they were rushing to hospital and had to take a longer route which took too long?

So many possibilities.

Do you hate April Fool's Day, or are you a joker yourself?
Tell us your story..

......................

Mad Motives for Murder: by Malcolm Rose

2011-03-31T12:33:00.000+01:00

That’s “Mad Motives for Murder” written by me, not mad motives for the murders I’ve just committed. Anyway, why do people murder? Resentment, revenge, racism, robbery and rage are just a few obvious reasons. There are many more, including all those that don’t begin with r. But what brings on these strong feelings? Sometimes the underlying causes are quite surprising. All of these have actually happened and have been reported in the news.

Husband kills wife because she burnt a hole in his favourite shirt when she was ironing it. The weapon was the iron.

Japanese mother kills neighbour’s toddler to secure last place at local nursery for her own child.

Driver of ice-cream van murders rival with a home-made sword after a clash for the best spot for selling ice-creams.

Man kills wife and four others because his breakfast eggs were cold.

Chinese computer-gamer murders his friend for stealing his dragon sabre – a virtual object in an online game.

Lawyer (yes, a lawyer!) kills person sitting next to him in a cinema after an argument about noisy eating of popcorn.

Probably not a good idea to use any of these in a crime story. Your readers wouldn’t believe them. Do you know any other (genuine) weird ones?

Malcolm Rose is the bestselling author of the Jordan Stryker and Luke Harding series, among many others. When he says they aren't his own mad motives, I think he's another one who's protesting too much (see Anne Rooney). Re the popcorn, I'd have done the same as the lawyer.

Hercule Poirot and Stephanie Plum - Crime can be FUN: by Bryony Pearce

2011-03-24T12:04:00.000Z

I’ll say upfront that I don’t mean criminal activities should be undertaken as a form of entertainment (please nobody sue me). What I mean is that for well over a century, certain writers have proven that crime fiction can (and sometimes should) be FUNNY.

Reading ‘fun’ crime gives us a nice break from everyday life – a laugh along with the suggestion that we live in a comprehensible universe and that even death is a mystery that can be solved. Fun crime is worth reading.

At first glance Poirot and Plum are worlds apart. Christie’s first Poirot novel was published in 1920, the thirty-ninth in 1975. Janet Evanovich’s first Stephanie Plum novel was published in 1994 and the seventeenth just last year.

Poirot is an apparently asexual, utterly fastidious French speaking Belgian private detective, perhaps best embodied by David Suchet who played the role in the successful nineties television series.

Stephanie Plum is a ditzy Bounty Hunter from Trenton New Jersey, who constantly ends up in disgusting messes and perilous situations and whose love triangle with fellow bounty hunter Ranger and cop Morelli form the backbone of the series of books. She is due to be played by Katherine Heigl in the upcoming film of the first book ‘One for the Money’ (although I always imagined her as more of a Sandra Bullock).

Poirot travels, solving mysteries in places from an English country house to Mesopotamia and the Nile; Plum remains in Trenton, New Jersey, solving mysteries at the local funeral parlour or ice-cream shop. In seventeen novels the furthest she gets from home is a trip to Las Vegas.

And yet both Poirot and Plum are totally beloved of fans (I’m one of them) and I can say that I love both, partly because there are similarities that tie the books together.

Both writers are easy to read (I regularly recommend Evanovich / Plum to reluctant adult readers). In both sets of books the narratives are well-paced, the dialogue is lively and the setting is described with the minimum of description, but oh so effectively.

Both Poirot and Plum solve mysteries, both are in the ‘eccentric detective’ mould (like Sherlock Holmes), both have ‘a stooge assistant’ (Hastings and Lula) and both have real police to deal with (although Poirot’s relationship with Japp is strikingly different from Plum’s with Morelli).

Most other characters are stereotypes. In Christie we have the rich newcomer with his mysterious butler or secretary or the ne'er-do-well relative, in Evanovich we have the prostitute with the heart of gold, the crazy grandmother, the long suffering parents, the slimy pervert, the hot mystery guy, the roguish cop. All of these have a wonderful universality that means the stereotype is always welcome.

And the descriptions themselves are genius. Poirot as first described by Hastings

"He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. Even if everything on his face was covered, the tips of moustache and the pink-tipped nose would be visible.”

We can see Poirot with perfect clarity and there is a wonderful comical element to the way Christie puts the bird-like pose and pink tipped nose next to his ‘dignity’.

Evanovich has similarly wonderful descriptive passages, spare, yet telling us so much.

"My professional aspirations were simple - I wanted to be an intergalactic princess."

One of Plum’s less attractive suitors is described as having a tent in his fly made by his zipper. That’s pretty much all the description you get, but isn’t it enough?

It is the characters drawn by Christie and Evanovich that are so vital to the success of the books. And because the characters are so easy to imagine it is perhaps not surprising that Poirot and Plum have spawned films.

If One for the Money is as good as the book, I reckon you’ll enjoy it.

Bryony's debut novel ANGEL'S FURY will be published on the 4th July by Egmont Books

Things you didn't know about NEMESIS: Catherine MacPhail

2011-03-21T10:10:00.001Z

When I was asked to write a crime thriller series, I decided on a boy hero, mainly because when I write my books if I have written with a girl as the main character in one book, in the next I try to have a boy. I had just finished Roxy’s Baby. I needed a hero. Should he be a boy detective helping his policeman father to solve crimes? Boring. Could he be part of a teenage detective agency? Even more boring. I wanted him to be able to follow people, go from place to place, but how could an ordinary boy do that. I didn’t want him to have any special powers or gadgets to help him. I wanted him to be just a boy. Then I thought, what if he is a runaway? A runaway can go anywhere he pleases. And of course, hot on the heels of that thought...why is he on the run?

I hadn’t a clue, and because I’m too lazy to think things through I decided he wouldn’t have a clue either. He was going to wake up at the beginning of the first book, not know who he was, or how he got there. All he knows is that someone is after him, someone he calls the Dark Man, and he has to stay out of his clutches.

Then in each book he could solve a mystery, and in each book he gets a little bit of his memory back, until in the final book he remembers everything. And maybe wishes he hadn’t.

Good. Now I had my hero, and the idea for the story.

All I needed was a plot for each book. A mystery for him to solve. I think sometimes your brain is like a magnet. Things slam into it just when you need them. I needed a mystery? I found one.

There was a body found in a lift in one of the tower blocks in my home town. A resident pressed for the lift, the lift came and there was a man lying inside in a pool of blood. He’d been stabbed, and I thought right away, what if my hero wakes up in the stairwell in that tower block, and he finds that body...and then he gets the blame for the murder. I thought that would be a great way to begin a thriller, and I used it. We writers really do have a sliver of ice instead of a heart. We use everything!

I love putting things in my books that readers might not pick up the first time, but when they go back they realise the clue was there all the time. It’s called foreshadowing. I love it.

So here are a few things you might have missed if you’ve read my Nemesis series.

For instance, the clue to the whole mystery is there for all to read in the first Nemesis book, Into The Shadows. Even my editor missed that when she first read it.

When my young hero is asked his name he calls himself Ram, doesn’t know why, but it is another clue to the mystery.

In The Beast Within the Dark Man calls himself, Mr. McGuffin. The McGuffin was a favourite plot device of the film director, Alfred Hitchcock, something you thought was important but had no bearing on the story at all. The McGuffin didn’t really exist. And of course, neither does Mr. McGuffin.

How many beasts can you find in The Beast Within? Wilkie is called a beast, and Kirsten’s mum drives a Jaguar. There are lots more and it seems to me the beast that roams the Moorshap Mire is the least dangerous of them.

When Ram first stays the night with Uncle William and Aunt Mary there are books by his bedside. One of them, Hansel and Gretel, is another clue to what William and Mary have planned for him.

In Sinister Intent there is a character called Catman. Here in Greenock, there really is a Catman, all the children know of him. He roams the streets, never quite being seen. Probably nothing more sinister than a poor homeless old man, but for my story, he became something quite different.

I was watching a documentary set in Florida, and they were filming in the sewers. The man who worked down there carried a rifle. “ We get alligators down here,” he said. “ You never know when you’ll see them, and when they rush you, you gotta get shooting fast.”

Alligators in the sewers? Too good not to use in Sinister Intent.

The fair came to my home town, Greenock, which is on the River Clyde. I watched this huge Ferris wheel being erected right on the edge of the pier. I took a ride in it and when I got to the top, looking down at the dark water, I was sure it was going to topple over, and I thought...what if it did....? In Ride of Death, the Ferris wheel became a rollercoaster, and topple it did.

The climax in Ride of Death takes place in my own home town. Greenock. There really is an estate nearby just like Hanover House, and there are lots of tankers and other ships for the Dark Man to escape in. And of course, there really was a fair there when I was writing the book.

Cathy MacPhail recently won both the Red Book Award and the Royal Mail Award for her novel GRASS.

The Easy Part: by Bill Kirton

2011-03-17T13:25:00.000Z

There are as many ways to write crime novels as there are writers.

I’m usually more interested in whydunits than whodunits (although I do try to keep the reader guessing). So I start with the characters, think about their motives and work everything back from there.

But recently, I’ve been asked to write a sort of CSI thing for a local charity at which people get to do experiments, compare DNA, fingerprints, shoeprints, fibres and so on, as well as interview actors pretending to be part of the story.

So what this means is that I have to start with clues, not characters, just as the police do. They know who the dead person is and they find powder on a car seat, fibres in a crack in a shoe, DNA traces on a screwdriver, tool marks where someone has tried to force a door, and that’s it.

I never realised just how different it is for them, because they then have to find everyone who might be involved, eliminate some, then ask the right questions to sort out those who are telling the truth from the liars. And it’s that last part – being clever at interviewing – that makes the difference.

Compared with real detective work, writing crime is easy.

Bill Kirton is a crime writer based in Aberdeen. He has written the fantastic Cairnburgh series of detective novels based in that city. His latest ebook The Sparrow Conundrum has just been published, and a FREE downloadable extract is available at Smashwords - though I hasten to add that parts of it may not be suitable for anyone under 17.

AUTHORS FOR JAPAN! Please help - and bag a goodie!

2011-03-16T14:52:00.000Z

A special quick blogpost today - because if you head over to AUTHORS FOR JAPAN, a site set up by author Keris Stainton, you can bid for all kinds of fantastic book loot from some wonderful authors - and help the tsunami recovery effort at the same time. Do please head on over and take a look!

How Do You Lie About Everything? An Interview with Keren David by Anne Cassidy

2011-03-13T22:16:00.000Z

Anne Cassidy loved Keren David's WHEN I WAS JOE. She decided to interrogate Keren about it. She may bring charges at a later date.

Joe’s story is written in the first person. As a writer, was it hard to get into the mind of a teenage boy?

It was hard at the beginning, but became easier as I came to know Ty/Joe. I had several guiding principles – for example he rarely says what he is thinking, and he often acts impetuously, and I also thought a lot about what it might be like being a boy going through puberty. In the end his voice became very easy – easier than writing as a girl which I’ve just done.

What made you write about knife crime?

I didn’t set out to write about knife crime - the crime that Ty witnessed was going to be very much in the background, with the emphasis much more on the experience of taking on a false identity. But as I was writing there was a horrific spate of knife killings in London, and everything I was reading in the papers seemed to tell me more about Ty and his world. So the book became about knife crime as well - and considerably longer as a result.

The girls in your book, Claire, Ashley and Ellie all seem damaged in some way. Was this an important aspect of your story?

I didn’t really think of it like that, the characters grew with the story. Ellie, in fact, came from a plot-planning exercise at the evening class in Writing for Children that I was taking. We had to get into pairs and weave out characters into a story. My partner had a disabled athlete as her character and I had my witness boy – at the end of the session I asked her if I could nick her character and write the book - she agreed, I’m sure she didn’t think it would ever happen!

I do think that the three girls all represented things about Ty’s mum, Nicki, and his relationships with them were as much about his relationship with her as about the girls themselves.

There are twists and turns in the plot which leave the reader breathless. Did you plan it all out before you started writing?

Thank you! Not really - I had an idea of a start and end point, and I knew the backstory of the murder, but apart from that the twists and turns came as I wrote each chapter. My favourite twist just came to me as I was driving the car home from dropping my son at school - I nearly crashed the car, I was so excited!

Tell us about the sequel

Almost True, which was published in September 2010 carries on Ty’s story. He’s in even more danger, and he discovers a lot of secrets about his past and his family and the crime which he witnessed. I’ve just agreed with my publishers that there will be a third book about Ty, which I’m writing now and should be published in 2012.

Thank you, Keren. You may now leave the interrogation suite!

Pants on Fire: by Michael J. Malone

2011-03-10T11:33:00.000Z

‘So you tell lies for a living then?’ she arched an eyebrow and offered a half-smile.

“Well...’ I answered and wondered if she was looking down on me, or looking up to me. ‘ You could say that.’

Professional liar, that’s me. I spend hours making stuff up and let me tell you it’s great fun. (Sometimes, when the lies aren’t flowing – not so much).

I looked it up in the dictionary to be sure.

Liar – noun - someone who tells lies. Yup, that’s me.

Lie - noun – a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive. Fair enough. Guilty as charged. As a crime writer I often make such statements, but we call it misdirection. You look there, but I’m really going over here.

On the other hand if I didn’t also include the truth, the lies wouldn’t be quite so convincing. Every character I write about, I write about them in a manner that is true to them. Their actions and reactions are completely true to the person they are.

I work to find the truth of my characters’ emotions. How do they feel and why do they feel it? I hitch on to that and you, the reader (hopefully) take up their cause. Then for the crime writer those other truths are required. Whodunnit and more importantly in my view, why they did it. As a human being myself (I know – hard to believe) I am fascinated by other human beings and what makes them tick and in my humble opinion no genre gets to the heart of this more than crime fiction.

So, hands up. I make up lies and give them a core of honesty. And as all the best fibbers know, the most convincing lies are the ones that stick most closely to the truth.

Michael J. Malone is clearly a hot new crime writer in more ways than one. His debut novel BLOOD TEARS will be published by Five Leaves Publishing in spring 2012. He lives in Glasgow, reviews crime fiction for crimesquad.com, and I notice he isn't telling us who 'she' is.