30 April 2015

Legal eagles turn to crime fiction


Belfast solicitor Steve Cavanagh, whose legal thriller The Defence is currently getting rave reviews, is not the only real-life lawyer to turn his hand to crime fiction lately.

Dublin date for Dennis Lehane


Dennis Lehane, who is currently working on a US remake of Love/Hate, will be talking about the show in Dublin this May. The Irish-American writer is penning the adaptation - this time with an Hawaii setting - for Showtime.

29 April 2015

Jane Casey wins at Edgars

Irish author Jane Casey has won the Mary Higgins Clark award at this year's prestigious Edgar Awards for The Stranger You Know (2014).

It's the fourth in her series of police procedurals set around London and featuring DC Maeve Kerrigan.
He meets women. He gains their trust. He kills them. That's all detective Maeve Kerrigan knows about the sadistic serial killer she is hunting. Then the evidence starts to point to a shocking suspect: DCI Josh Derwent, Maeve's partner on the police force.
Another leading Irish crime writer, Stuart Neville, has The Final Silence (2014) nominated for Best Novel in this year's Edgars. Other nominees in the category include Karin Slaughter, Stephen King and Ian Rankin. The full list of Edgars winners will be announced tonight.

Ben Kiely's 'Proxopera' is republished


Benedict Kiely's Northern Ireland "Troubles" novella Proxopera, originally published in 1977, is being republished by Turnpike Books.

28 April 2015

Author profile: Michael Russell

"The world needs a detective who can milk a cow! He can still shear a sheep as well as find a killer." - Michael Russell talking about his Stefan Gillespie character
Michael Russell has an extensive background in scriptwriting for leading TV dramas, and is the author of the "Stefan Gillespie" detective novels set in Ireland between the two World Wars.

Sophie Hannah and Paul Perry in the dock


Dublin-based author Paul Perry and Manchester-born Sophie Hannah are both poets and crime fiction writers. For Poetry Day Ireland 2015 on 7 May at 7pm they will be giving readings in the atmospheric setting of Green Street Courthouse in Dublin.

27 April 2015

Crime time at Derby Book Festival

The impressive line-up for the first Derby Book Festival has more than 60 events and activities, including several sessions with top crime fiction writers...

The Monday Grilling: Pat Mullan


In Interview Room #4 this week: Pat Mullan (right).

His M.O.: poetry, short stories, best-selling thrillers.

What's under the spotlight: his crime fiction work, in particular his "Ed Burke" series about a burnt-out lawyer who quits the New York rat race and ends up investigating murder and corruption in Ireland.

Chief interrogator: Lucy Dalton.

How do you balance your poetry and thrillers hats?
When I am engrossed in a thriller I must stay focused. But I have poetic thoughts that do invade. I simply scribble those thoughts on paper and put them in my poetry folder.

25 April 2015

Blasts from the past... Gerald Griffin


Gerald Griffin (12 December 1803 - 12 June 1840)

A poet, playwright and journalist, Gerald Griffin's most famous work is his novel The Collegians. Yet it's much better known today in its stage adaptation by Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn.

24 April 2015

New Billy Roche TV serial set in Wexford


Post-production has concluded on Clean Break, a standalone four-part TV drama filmed in Wexford and Dublin. Written by Billy Roche, the serial is set in "a community driven by love, greed, status and revenge".

Mel Healy's new novelette: 'Way To Go'


The Kindle version of Ghost Flight, the latest novel in Mel Healy's series featuring Dublin PI Moss Reid, also includes a new novelette, Way To Go.

Kelly Creighton's crime thriller



"A brilliant crime debut, chilling, compulsive and beautifully written. 
- Brian McGilloway on The Bones of It
Belfast-born writer Kelly Creighton is a community arts facilitator and journal editor. She also writes short stories, poetry, reviews and interviews. Her debut crime novel, The Bones of It (2015), is a psychological crime thriller set in present-day County Down.

23 April 2015

Declan Burke on Goldsboro Last Laugh shortlist

Declan Burke's 2014 novel Crime Always Pays (Severn House Publishers) has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award.

22 April 2015

Author profile: Erin Hart

"I first heard the story in the summer of 1986: two brothers cutting turf in the west of Ireland stumbled upon the perfectly-preserved, severed head of a beautiful red-haired girl." - Erin Hart on the real-life story that inspired her first novel, Haunted Ground
Erin Hart's crime novels feature American pathologist Nora Gavin and Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire, who are engaged in the recovery of artefacts and human remains from boglands.

21 April 2015

Jarlath Gregory: 'The Organised Criminal'

Jarlath Gregory’s crime thriller The Organised Criminal is set against the Troubles. First published on Kindle in October 2014, it is now out in paperback.
Jay O’Reilly reluctantly returns home to Northern Ireland after three years, for the funeral of his cousin. Jay's father, a big-time smuggler, makes a proposal. Jay in turn plans to double-cross him and escape with the money, but nothing goes according to plan.

20 April 2015

Author profile: Anna Sweeney

"A mystery with plenty of twists and turns, and one that is entirely faithful to its time and place." - Declan Burke reviewing Deadly Intent in the Irish Examiner.
Anna Heussaff is a novelist writing in Irish under her own name and in English under the pen name Anna Sweeney. Her two crime novels in Irish, Bás Tobann (2004) and Buille Marfach (2010), are both set on the Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland.

'An Bronntanas' in world distribution deal


Irish-language crime thriller An Bronntanas (The Gift) has secured a worldwide distribution deal via French company Lagardère Entertainment Rights. The five-episode thriller was first broadcast on TG4 in 2014.

19 April 2015

New crime novel by Neil Jordan

Author and film director Neil Jordan has turned to crime fiction with his latest novel The Drowned Detective.

Sofi Oksanen: 'All nations have untold stories'



Award winning writer Sofi Oksanen has won more awards than any other contemporary Finnish author. Her latest novel When the Doves Disappeared will be published in Ireland and the UK next month.

17 April 2015

Hay Festival has a feast of crime


This year's Hay Festival will have a big-screening of the whole of series two of Peaky Blinders starring Cillian Murphy. The gangster drama's creator, Steven Knight, talks to Alan Yentob on the same day (22 May).

16 April 2015

Peter McKenna: king of 'Red Rock'



by Tom Comiskey

Peter McKenna is probably best known as the "showrunner" - creator, executive producer, initial chief writer and overall brains - behind TV3's serial Red Rock, first broadcast on 7 January 2015.

Liam Neeson in Mark Mulholland movie deal

Dundalk-born author Mark Mulholland's debut novel A Mad and Wonderful Thing (2014) is to be filmed by Alan Moloney of leading Irish film-maker Parallel Films and co-produced by Liam Neeson - the actor's first time behind the camera.

15 April 2015

Author profile: Kevin McCarthy

"A dark, brooding, morally complex masterpiece" - the Belfast Telegraph on Peeler
Kevin McCarthy is the author of the "Sean O'Keefe mystery" series of historical crime novels. It begins with Peeler (2010), a war story and murder mystery set in west Cork in 1920 during Ireland's War of Independence.

14 April 2015

Nidge goes to Hollywood


Love/Hate star Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is among the cast of The Infiltrator, an upcoming film about an undercover US agent who embeds himself with Pablo Escobar's drugs cartel.

13 April 2015

'Numb': diary of a real killer or a hoax?

Did a British journalist live a double life as a psychopathic serial killer? That's the amazing claim of Numb: Diary Of A War Correspondent. 

The new book claims to be based on the diaries of a real-life reporter whose letters after his death reveal that he was involved in gang rape and murder, as well as the loyalist mutilation and murder of a Catholic in Northern Ireland in 1981, and the capture and repeated sexual abuse of a young Bosnian woman in Sarajevo in 1994 until she took her own life.

In the book, published in Dublin by Liberties Press, the war correspondent's identity is disguised as "Alan Buckby", with the author listed as "Anonymous".

12 April 2015

Lewis, Endeavour and Gently set to return


Several long-running police series on UK television are set to return. ITV has commissioned a ninth series of the Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis with Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox, alongside Angela Griffin as Detective Sergeant Lizzie Maddox.

Dublin dates for Alexander McCall Smith



Alexander McCall Smith will be giving a talk in the Smock Alley Theatre on 21 May as part of the 2015 ILFD (International Literature Festival Dublin).

He will also give a free reading at the Abbey Presbyterian Church on Parnell Square North on 20 May at 6.30pm for "Words on the Street - European Literature Night".

11 April 2015

Edna O'Brien turning to crime?



by Tom Comiskey

Is Edna O'Brien's next book a crime novel? Her literary agency Ed Victor Ltd has already revealed that The Little Red Chairs will be "about a war criminal masquerading as a healer, who settles in an Irish village".

10 April 2015

Author profile: Kevin Brophy

Galway-based author Kevin Brophy's work includes two Cold War thrillers rooted in East Germany in the days before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Crossing (2012) was followed by Another Kind Of Country (2014):
Santiago, 1973: Rosa lives a privileged life among the ruling elite. When violence erupts with the Pinochet coup, her socialist parents are the first to be taken. Forced to flee across the Andes, she finds herself rescued by a Stasi spy, and escapes behind the Iron Curtain to Germany.

9 April 2015

Author profile: Karen Perry



"Like Gone Girl, it's told alternately by a husband and his wife. At the very beginning, something very shocking happens . . . It's the most gripping thing I've read for ages" - Evening Standard
Karen Perry is the pseudonym of Dublin-based authors Paul Perry and Karen Gillece. Their first book together was the suspense thriller The Boy That Never Was (2014), also published as The Innocent Sleep.

8 April 2015

Billingham and McDermid for Belfast fest


Several big crime fiction events will be taking place in the Black Box in Belfast alongside the music and theatre at this year's Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.

Award-winning crime writer Mark Billingham joins forces with country duo My Darling Clementine to present "a dark and glorious mix of song and story" on Saturday 9 May at 2pm.

7 April 2015

Joe Murphy's Monto murders


Joe Murphy's latest novel I Am In Blood: Old Murders Never Die is set in modern-day and Victorian Dublin. He describes it as "a multi-layered, Gothic tale of obsession and bloodshed".

6 April 2015

'The Criminal's Wife': crime fiction for literacy project


Available on Amazon from 15 April, Dublin writer Colette Caddell's new novella The Criminal's Wife is the latest paperback in the Open Door series.

The books are for both general readers and anyone trying to improve their literacy.

5 April 2015

Some Håkan Nesser interviews





"There is no such thing as a Swedish way of writing a crime story," says best-selling Swedish writer Håkan Nesser.

Author profile: Brian O'Sullivan

Brian O'Sullivan's debut thriller Beara: Dark Legends (2013), the first in a planned trilogy, introduces his character Muiris "Mos" O’Súilleabháin.

The reclusive historian is lured from seclusion to locate the final resting place of legendary Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhal. The story is set in West Cork and switches back and forth between the early 1960s and 2008.

4 April 2015

Author profile: Catriona King


Catriona King grew up in Belfast and moved to central London to live and work as a doctor. She also trained as a police forensic medical examiner, and worked with the Metropolitan Police.

In recent years she has lived and worked in Belfast, basing her "DCI Craig" crime novels in Northern Ireland, with the Docklands Coordinated Crime Unit based in "one of Belfast's most colourful and oldest districts", Sailortown.

Wrongful Convictions Film Festival

The first International Wrongful Conviction Film Festival will take place on 27 June 2015 at Griffith College, Dublin.

It is part of the Irish Innocence Project's campaign to generate funds and raise awareness of wrongful convictions. The festival will take place alongside an international conference on wrongful convictions on 26 June.



The provisional programme for the film festival includes:

3 April 2015

BOTM: The Living by Léan Cullinan



Our April "Book of the Month": The Living (2014).

The author: Léan Cullinan (pen name of Léan Ní Chuilleanáin).

2 April 2015

The Last Hours of Laura K



The BBC's Writersroom has launched a game-changing "immersive online murder mystery" that puts the audience at the heart of the story.

The Last Hours of Laura K consists of 24 hours of "raw" footage (from fictional surveillance programme SATURNEYE) of Laura's final hours before her murder.

1 April 2015

Sheena Lambert: Lakes and Lego

Irish writer Sheena Lambert has made a quirky series of videos to promote her new crime novel The Lake (2015) and first novel Alberta Clipper (2012). One involves Lego bricks, and the other has the theme "You can't press flowers on a Kindle."



Camilla Läckberg on Scandi noir


Sometimes called "the Swedish Agatha Christie", here Camilla Läckberg discusses Scandinavian crime fiction.