31 March 2015

Rebus in Scots Gaelic at Aye Write!

An anthology of Ian Rankin's Rebus short stories has been published in Scottish Gaelic for the first time.

In Aye Write!, Glasgow's annual book festival, Rankin will discuss the new edition with its translator Gillebride MacMillan, who will also read from the new book. The event takes place on 19 April, with the main conversation in English.

Author profile: Sam Millar

"While most writers sit in their study and make it up, Sam Millar has lived it." - Cyrus Nowrasteh from Warner Brothers, on the screenplay of On The Brinks 
Born in West Belfast to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, Sam Millar joined the Republican movement during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

30 March 2015

Police officer publishes her first crime thriller


Originally from Ferbane in County Offaly, Caroline Mitchell lives in the village of Frinton-on-Sea in Essex. Besides being a married mother of four, she works full-time as a police detective.

Don’t Turn Around is the first in her "Detective Jennifer Knight series" of crime stories with a supernatural twist...

29 March 2015

More awards for 'Glassland' movie


Glassland has taken the Best Irish Film award at this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Its cinematographer Piers McGrail was also awarded the Michael Dwyer Discovery prize for his work on the film and on Let Us Prey and The Canal.

28 March 2015

CrimeFest 2015: an agenda to die for


CrimeFest is Bristol's annual convention for people who like to read the occasional crime novel as well as for die-hard fanatics.

Among the many highlights of this year's festival in May, Maj Sjöwall (who with husband Per Wahlöö created the Martin Beck series) is interviewed by Jack Reacher author Lee Child. Other big names include Sophie Hannah, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and our own Stuart Neville.

Authors, readers slam 'Clean Reader' app

by Lucy Dalton, News Editor

A new app that replaces "profane" words with "clean" ones in eBooks has been heavily criticised across social media all this week.

Here's a small sample of the backlash on Twitter. We don't claim it to be statistically "representative" of anything. But we think it's spot on because we too are unanimously against this form of censorship - of crime fiction or any other  writing.

27 March 2015

Author profile: Valerie Keogh

As a registered nurse, Irish author Valerie Keogh also wanted to have a nurse as a central character - a serial killer in her crime thriller called Deadly Sleep (2014).

26 March 2015

LA award for Dublin crime thriller


A Dublin crime thriller has won an Award For Excellence at the Indiefest Film Awards in Los Angeles.

Shot in black and white, the 86-minute film noir Spider’s Trap was written and directed by Alan Walsh and produced by Bootstrap Films and Blackhorse Film Productions.

25 March 2015

Love and crime in Oxford

"Love and Crime" is this year's theme at the annual crime and mystery weekend at St Hilda's College Oxford next August.

Sessions will include "Detecting Couples, "The Romance Of The Lone Detective", "Reader, I Murdered Him", and "Love: The Perfect Motive For Murder".

24 March 2015

Steve Cavanagh on lawyers and conmen

Steve Cavanagh has a dual career as a lawyer and legal thriller novelist, and has recently hit the headlines with his debut novel The Defence, the first of his series of legal thrillers.

Here he talks to Nottingham writer and blogger Rebecca Bradley about writing and research, how the law works in Northern Ireland and the US, artistic licence, John Mortimer (Rumpole) and what the difference is between lawyers and con artists.

Apologies for the sound quality.

23 March 2015

Author profile: Julie Parsons

"I had always loved reading thrillers as a Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith fan, and I thought it would be fun to write one. At that time in the mid 90s, very few people in Ireland were writing thrillers – most were writing either so-called literary fiction or women’s fiction, what’s called now ‘chick-lit’." - Julie Parsons

Julie Parsons was born in New Zealand. Her parents emigrated there from Ireland in 1947.

In 1955 her father went on a medical mission to the remote Tokelau Islands, but the boat on which he and 25 others were travelling disappeared. His body was never found.

The family returned to Ireland eight years later when Julie was 12.

She says she writes thrillers and mysteries because there is such a big mystery about her father's disappearance.

"I can’t solve the mystery of what happened to my father but I can, in my creative life, tell stories which have a mystery at their heart, and I can solve that mystery every time."


22 March 2015

Jonathan Dunne: talking to real-life crime figures for his novel



Jonathan Dunne talked to two major real-life criminals in Dublin as part of his research for his first crime novel The Takeover (2014). As he explains in an interview with Paul Brazill,

"They have long since retired and they had serious insights into the ugly side of crime. People tend to glamorize crime, these guys were careful to point out that crime is anything but glamorous. It’s a violent, dark world where life is cheap and prison is a certainty, regardless of how high you climb."

21 March 2015

Irish Noir at Theakston


This year's Theakston Festival in Harrogate features an "Irish Noir" session on Friday 17 July with Steve Cavanagh, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty, Eoin McNamee and Stuart Neville.

Established in 2003, Theakstons claims to be the largest crime fiction festival in the world. This year it is programmed by crime writer Ann Cleeves. Other guest authors include Arnaldur Indridason, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Lee Child, MC Beaton and Sara Paretsky.

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Festival
16-19 July 2015
Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, England
Twitter: @TheakstonsCrime

20 March 2015

More of Masterton's 'DS Kate Maguire' books on way



The hardback version of the fourth book in Graham Masterton's Cork-based "Katie Maguire" series is out on 1 April 2015.

Warning: this latest instalment is gory, dark and surreal, with a sudden ending. Taken for Dead begins at a local wedding in County Cork. The celebrations are shattered when the local baker's severed head grins gruesomely from the bottom tier of his own cake. DS Katie Maguire is baffled until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances.

The fifth book in the series, Blood Sisters, will revolve around the hunt for a serial killer who targets nuns. It will be published on Kindle on 1 June 2015, with paperback and hardback editions available from 8 October 2015.

Edinburgh-born Masterton, best known as a horror writer, began writing the series about the Irish detective while he was living in Cork for five years with his wife Wiescka, who has since died.

A Terrible Beauty (2002), the first in the Katie Maguire series, was republished in 2013 as White Bones, and was followed by Broken Angels (2013) and Red Light (2014).

23/03/2015 update: the author has told us that Blood Sisters is not the last in the series, as there will be "more coming in February 2016".

19 March 2015

Author profile: JJ Toner

Irish author JJ Toner writes police procedurals and historical thrillers.

His "Ben Jordan" series is set in Dublin from 2004 onwards, featuring DI Jordan of the "Organized Crime Unit".

In the first novel, St Patrick's Day Special (2011), Jordan's nemesis is criminal Aloysius Lafferty. In the sequel, Find Emily (2012), Jordan is fresh out of rehab, his career and marriage in tatters, with 24 hours to find a missing girl.

JJ Toner's "Black Orchestra" historical espionage / murder mystery series begins at the outbreak of WWII with the eponymous Black Orchestra (2013) - the Black Orchestra or Schwarze Kapelle is the real-life name of the German resistance movement within the military.
As the German army invades Poland and France, Abwehr signalman Kurt Müller discovers a colleague lying dead at his radio receiver in Berlin. The criminal police dismiss the death as suicide, but Kurt is not convinced. 

18 March 2015

John Connolly on 'The Wolf in Winter'

This extended interview with Irish author John Connolly marked the publication of his 12th Charlie Parker novel (and 13th story in the series) The Wolf in Winter.

The interview with broadcaster and author John kelly was originally broadcast on RTÉ's The Works in 2014.



Download the first chapter of The Wolf in Winter (PDF)

16 March 2015

Introducing CFI's 'Crime Shorts'



by Jake Harrington, Fiction Editor

Our "Crime Shorts" slot will showcase crime fiction short stories and flash fiction. We are looking for compelling tales, intriguing characters and clever twists.

So here we are now, entertain us.

14 March 2015

Second Daithi Kavanagh novel



The Brotherhood, the second book in Daithi Kavanagh's "Tadhg Sullivan" series, is released by Tirgearr Publishing on 20 May 2015.

Detective Tadhg Sullivan's life is falling apart after being exiled to County Clare from Dublin after falling out with the Minister for Justice and Garda Commissioner. His partner Helen has moved out, unable to live with his bouts of depression and periodic alcoholism. Sullivan is knocked out of his lethargy when a teenage girl goes missing not far from Ennis where he is stationed.

12 March 2015

Strong line-up at Chiplit Festival


Chiplit Festival
Chipping Norton Literary Festival
Witney, Oxfordshire
23-26 April 2015

The 2015 Chiplit Festival in Oxfordshire has a strong line-up including:
  • Lee Child, who has sold over 90 million copies of his books worldwide
  • Mark Billingham, whose series of novels featuring DI Tom Thorne has twice won him the Crime Novel Of The Year Award
  • Danish writing duo Dagmar Winther and Kenneth Degnbol who write crime fiction under the name of Sander Jakobsen
  • Paula Hawkins, whose crime debut is The Girl On The Train
  • Mel Sherratt who writes what she describes as "grit-lit": crime, psychological thrillers and suspense.
  • Sara Blaedel, author of the bestselling series featuring Detective Louise Rick and journalist Camilla Lind

11 March 2015

Next Benjamin Black: Even the Dead

In Even the Dead, Benjamin Black's consultant pathologist Quirke is back working in the city morgue, watching over Dublin's dead.

When a body is found in a burnt-out car, Quirke is called in to verify the apparent suicide of an up-and-coming civil servant. But Quirke suspects foul play. 
The only witness has vanished, every trace of her wiped away. Piecing together her disappearance, Quirke finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of Dublin's elite - secret societies and high church politics, corrupt politicians and men with money to lose.

This is the seventh book in Benjamin Black's "Quirke" series set in Dublin in the 1950s.

Format: ePub eBook
ISBN: 9780241197363
Publication date: 28 May 2015

10 March 2015

Maryse Rivière to give talk about her Irish crime novel

To launch this year's Franco-Irish Literary Festival, the Alliance Française has invited French author Maryse Rivière to Dublin to talk about her latest crime novel, Tromper la Mort, which is set in Ireland and France.

The novel has been awarded Prix du Quai des Orfèvres 2015.

The author will be giving her talk at the Alliance - one of the very places she describes in her book.

Date: Thursday 26 March – 6.30pm
Venue:  Alliance Française, Dawson Street, Dublin 2
Admission free

'The Fall' to return for third season



Jamie Dornan is set to return as serial killer Paul Spector in the BBC TV series The Fall. He has signed on for a third season despite his recent success in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Series writer Allan Cubitt says he has known the end game from the beginning, and sources within the BBC say this is to be the final season of the Belfast-based crime drama.

The BBC's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, told the Guardian: "The cat-and-mouse game between Gillian and Jamie has one last act to play out."

The show averaged 3.3 million viewers over the second season, making it one of BBC 2's highest performing dramas of 2014.

The second series ended on a cliffhanger, with Dornan’s Paul Spector lying shot in the arms of detective Stella Gibson (Anderson).

9 March 2015

Author profile: Thomas Paul Burgess

“White Church, Black Mountain just sucks you in. Like Brian Moore given a make-over by James Ellroy. Excellent stuff.” - Colin Bateman

Thomas Paul Burgess's debut novel White Church, Black Mountain (2015) is a political thriller set in Belfast that "explores a society’s hunger for redemptive catharsis".

At its beginning, DI Dan Watson of the Historical Enquiries Team enters an interview room for a routine consultation, only to find the younger brother of his late partner, who was brutally assassinated by the Provisional IRA two decades before.

"I killed my own brother... and he deserved what he got."

The action segues between the early 1970s and modern times, in a Northern Ireland where the fragile Peace Process is still haunted by crimes of the past.

Burgess has drawn from his own experiences as a community relations worker to create a fiction based on real events. He grew up on Belfast's Shankill Road and was a member of the band Ruefrex in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Burgess has degrees from the universities of Ulster, Cork and Oxford and has been published widely in the areas of cultural identity and community. He is now a senior lecturer at University College Cork. His academic research focuses on education, cultural identity and community work.

Official author website: Thomaspaulburgess.co.uk

Author on Twitter: @PolBrugha

Are you this author or their agent?  Contact us if you would like to add or update biography details.

8 March 2015

Shetland Noir: island gets first crime festival

Shetland Noir
13-15 November 2015
Mareel, Shetland, UK

Shetland Noir is the islands’ first crime writing festival which is held in association with Iceland Noir. The event aims to celebrate crime writing by bringing writers and readers together.

The authors will include Scandinavian writers Arne Dahl, Håkan Nesser and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. There’s also a strong Scottish presence from authors including Stuart Macbride, Denise Mina, Alex Gray and Ann Cleeves.

The islands have already been recognised as a setting for a Nordic crime thriller – Ann Cleeves’s sequence of six murder mysteries featuring detective Jimmy Perez is now a major BBC One drama starring Douglas Henshall.

Shetland Noir will be held in Mareel, the UK’s most northerly music, cinema and creative industries centre. The programme will be packed with workshops, readings and Q&A sessions, tours and much more.


7 March 2015

Crime theme at 16th Franco-Irish Literary Festival

This year's theme of the 16th Franco-Irish Literary Festival is crime fiction. Authors include Stuart Neville, John Banville and Cormac Millar from Ireland, while France is represented by Hervé Le Corre, Chantal Pelletier, Jean-Bernard Pouy and Didier Daeninckx.

Franco-Irish Literary Festival
Dates: 25-26 April 2015
Venues: Dublin Castle, Alliance Française, Dublin


6 March 2015

Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad set for TV



Euston Films’ Kate Harwood has joined forces with Alan Gasmer and Peter Jaysen of Veritas Entertainment to make a television series based on three of Tana French's murder mysteries, reports Deadline.com.

Harwood, Euston's Managing Director, is a former head of BBC Drama Production. Her credits include Luther and Criminal Justice.

From the 1970s to 1994 Euston Films was a prestige production house that began as a subsidiary of Thames Television. It had a  reputation for groundbreaking drama, including The Sweeney, Minder and Widows. It re-launched in September 2014 as a new label within FremantleMedia UK.

The three producers are meeting UK and US broadcasters and say they have a list of writers in mind.

The three Tana French novels - In The Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place - are set in the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. While each book follows a different case they include overlapping characters and storylines. The books have sold more than five million copies worldwide.

4 March 2015

Jill Leovy in conversation with Declan Hughes



Part of the Mountains to Sea Dun Laoghaire Book Festival, 18 March 2015

Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (2015) is based on a decade embedded with the homicide units of the LAPD. This gripping, immersive work of reportage takes the reader onto the streets and into the lives of a community wracked by a homicide epidemic.

Ghettoside provides urgent insights into the origins of such violence, explodes the myths surrounding policing and race, and shows that the only way to fight the epidemic successfully is with justice.

Jill Leovy has been a reporter for the LA Times for 20 years, and has been embedded with the LAPD homicide squad on and off since 2002.

In 2007 she masterminded and wrote the groundbreaking Homicide Report for the LA Times, ‘an extraordinary blog’ (New Yorker) that documented every one of the 845 murders that took place in LA County that year.

Irish author Declan Hughes's latest novel is All the Things You Are.

Venue: dlr LexIcon, The Studio
Time: 6.30pm
€10/€8 concession
More info here


3 March 2015

Forensics: The anatomy of crime

'Forensics: the anatomy of crime’
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London
26 February - 21 June 2015


'Forensics: the anatomy of crime’ explores the history, science and art of forensic medicine.

It travels from crime scene to courtroom, across centuries and continents, exploring the specialisms of those involved in the delicate processes of collecting, analysing and presenting medical evidence.

 It draws out the stories of victims, suspects and investigators of violent crimes, and our enduring cultural fascination with death and detection.

The exhibition contains original evidence, archival material, photographic documentation, film footage, forensic instruments and specimens, and is rich with artworks offering both unsettling and intimate responses to traumatic events.

 Challenging familiar views of forensic medicine shaped by fictions that came out of the sensational reporting of late Victorian murder cases and popular crime dramas, ‘Forensics’ highlights the complex entwining of law and medicine, and the scientific methods it calls upon and creates.

A wide programme of events will accompany the exhibition and a publication of the same name, by crime writer Val McDermid is available.

More info at the Wellcome Collection website.


2 March 2015

2015 Quais du Polar festival

27-29 March 2015
Various venues in Lyon, France

Crime authors at this year's Quais du Polar festival in France include John Grisham, Elizabeth George, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Dominique Manotti, Michel Bussi and Sylvie Granotier.

New thriller voices include: Kishwar Desai (India), Saul Black (UK), Dror Mishani (Israel), Gert Nygårdshaug (Norway) and French authors Elena Piacentini, Michaël Mention, Christophe Reydi-Gramond and Nicolas Matthieu.

Many events are free, but on a first come, first served basis.

More info: official site