France’s most acclaimed crime writer is a fan of both Stendhal and P G Wodehouse. Jake Kerridge meets the delightfully deceiving Fred Vargas.
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France’s most acclaimed crime writer is a fan of both Stendhal and P G Wodehouse. Jake Kerridge meets the delightfully deceiving Fred Vargas.
Owen has adopted a pseudonym to write the book. He maintains the book is essential to de-bunk some of the myths around the raid and gives a fascinating insight into the 38 minute mission that led to the death of the world’s most notorious terrorist.
Novelist Patricia Cornwell, first lady of crime fiction, is armed and dangerous. Mess with the money of this gun-toting global publishing phenomenon at your peril.
Mark Sanderson rounds up the best recent literary crimes and misdemeanours. Presenting reviews of “The Healer” by Antti Tuomainen, Pascal Garnier’s “The A26″, Roger Hobbs “Ghostman”, Belinda Bauer’s “Rubbernecker” and Linwood Barclay’s “Never Saw It Coming.”
Jake Kerridge profiles MC Beaton, the crime writer who’s the third most borrowed author in Britain.
The crime novelist Malcolm Mackay rarely leaves Lewis, his remote island home. So how does he set the books critics are calling ‘remarkable’ in the depths of the underworld?
Agatha Christie almost unwittingly gave away the fact that Britain’s Second World War codebreakers at Bletchley Park had cracked the German codes in a 1941 novel.
Barbara Nadel’s new detective novel “Deadline” captures the atmosphere of Istanbul. Inspector Cetin Ikmen is one of detective fiction’s most likeable investigators, despite his grumpy and unsociable character. Or perhaps because of it.
“The Three Day Affair” by Michael Kardos is a nicely paced, elegantly written crime story. Kardos can certainly write. However, unfortunately, the twist at the end of the story is a tad too obvious from the start.
“Empire of Secrets” by Calder Walton, a gripping account of British intelligence during the last days of empire, enthrals Dan Jones. It is cheering to note that Walton is a very good writer. The book fairly rips along, summoning in places the verve of a good spy novel.
Jake Kerridge reviews “Chamber Music” by Tom Benn, “The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter” by Malcolm Mackay, “Western Approaches” by Graham Hurley and “Rubbernecker” by Belinda Bauer.
Award-winning crime fiction author Robert Wilson, having written novels set in West Africa, Lisbon and Seville, has set his latest novel Capital Punishment in London. Here, he explains why London is such a vibrant and defiant city.
Somewhere in a publicist’s trash folder – maybe – a draft blurb likens this vertiginous murder mystery to the lost novel that JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote together after a night in a lay-by spying through misted-up windshields.
Mark Sanderson presents the best recent crime and thrillers. Among them are Michael Connelly’s “The Black Box” and “Harbour Nocturne” by Joseph Wambaugh.
Diana Souhami’s narrative has a jigsaw-like structure. All the time the reader tries to assemble the elements into orderly patterns but Souhami’s narrative is too clever to allow any neatness.
A rare manuscript of a James Bond novel featuring Ian Fleming’s handwritten corrections could fetch as much as £80,000 at auction, experts said today.
Made in Britain in 1924, “The White Shadow” is, in a sense, a lost Hitchcock classic. But in several other senses it isn’t.
Ahead of a debate on crime and literary fiction at King’s Place this evening, Laura Thompson asks whether all novels should aspire to the condition of crime writing.
In “Cruel Britannia”, Ian Cobain, a senior journalist at The Guardian, sets out to demolish this notion as a comforting myth. Britain, he argues, has always been willing to resort to torture. Cobain’s account of this appalling episode is a genuine contribution to history.
Julia Handford on Dashiell Hammett’s finale, on John Grisham’s “The Racketeer”, Jo Nesbos thriller “The Bat”, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir: “I remember you” and “The jewels of paradies” by Donna Leon.