SERIAL KILLERS, GALLOWS HUMOUR AND DESERT ISLAND DISCS

BRISTOL CRIMEFEST 5-8 JUNE

A hectic few days in Bristol as Adrian Muller and Myles Alfrey produced a British version of the Left Coast Crime festival they had mounted there in 2006.

I interviewed JEFF LINDSEY about his books featuring Dexter, the charmingly awful serial killer. Lindsey was a lot of fun and gave a killer speech (so to speak) at the gala dinner.

Had a good chat with IAN RANKIN. We’ve done quite a few things together over the years so it has become a problem finding fresh approaches. Adrian, the co-organiser of CrimeFest, suggested we start with music. It was a good way to go.

We played a couple of clips of music from Rebus’s “backlist” – The Who and Them, as I recall – which apparently went down fine but on stage seemed to last forever. Before we went on Ian was as happy as Larry (whoever he is) that he’d picked up the special edition of the new Paul Weller CD in Fop, a great Bristol music store, having failed to get it anywhere in Edinburgh or online over the previous two weeks.

We moved away from music, of course, to talk about Ian’s childhood when he was growing up as quite a lonely child in Cardenden (Car-Dead-End has he called it), then his early success as a writer. He’s always interesting on the crime genre. He talked a bit about the way the traditional English crime novel is very close to the pastoral novel in which there is chaos then order is restored whilst the American hard-boiled is basically the Grail myth.

Great stuff.

For the rest it was the usual mix of panels. I burbled on about researching my article-turned-into-book on the Great Train Robbery and chaired an event on comic crime fiction. That last panel is always a tough one because the audience expects non-stop laughs and it doesn't work that way. We gave it our best, though.

FIVE INIMITABLE CRIME NOVELS

Observer - June 2008

The Observer asked me to do a piece about crime fiction for one of its booklets. As part of it, I was asked to choose five essential crime reads.

In the event, the newspaper used only three of my five, seemingly at random and without my explanations for the choices.

Here are the five. I deliberately avoided the classics, from Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle through Sayers, Christie and Chandler to the moderns. Instead I chose oddball novels that really stretch the form. In date order, they are:

1) E.C.Bentley: Trent's Last Case (1913).

This pre-Golden Age crime novel is written in a flamboyant style that takes getting used to but its unorthodox structure - amateur sleuth solves crime (sort of) but story continues - is thoroughly modern.

2) John Franklin Bardin: Devil Take The Blue Tail Fly (1948)

Bardin wrote three hallucinatory psychological novels in three years. The third, full of mysterious incidents, is told by a mentally disintegrating patient in an insane asylum. Brilliant.

3) WIlliam Hjortsberg: Falling Angels (1978)

P I Harold Angel is hired to find disappeared WWII crooner, Johnny Favorite, by a Monsieur Louis Cyphre. Genre-bending, supernatural brilliance ensues. (Filmed as Angel Heart.)

4) Peter Lovesey: The False Inspector Dew (1982)

A shoal of red herrings surround the cruise-liner in this brilliant riff on the Crippen case.

5) Mo Hayder: Tokyo (2002)

Missing film of the 1937 Nanking Massacre leads to an ambitious but consummate blend of horror and crime.

ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL

Goethe Institute, 3 June 2008

At the Bruno Ganz dinner in Hay I met some really nice people from the Goethe Institute - and an interesting woman from the Austrian embassy who confirmed the gulf between "high" and "low" culture in her country by declaring "I don't think I've ever read a crime novel - I prefer novels of substance."

Bavarian Andrea Maria Schenkel isn't sure she's a crime-writer but her debut novel, The Murder Farm, is extraordinary, however you define it.

She and her translator, Anthea Bell, were fun to interview and we talked some more over the Quercus dinner later. Schenkel is primarily a painter but has now caught the writing bug big time. Her second novel will be out later this year.

SPITTING IMAGE, TRAMPLING ON SUNSHINE, BRUNO GANZ - AND THE YELLOW WAGTAIL...

HAY FESTIVAL PART II - LATE MAY 2008

"I was once spat on by a witch doctor - he was a friend of the family." Only at a book festival would you get such a wonderfully surreal remark.

It came at the end of RAYMOND TALLIS'S entertaining circumnavigation of the head via ear-wax, yawning, tears, saliva and - yes - spitting. (Though not the brain, which he regards as "over-rated".)

He'd talked about the fact that, however useful saliva is, we don't even like our own, never mind someone else's (except in specific situations). "Would you drink a glass of your own saliva?" he asked. He concluded that, therefore, spitting at someone is almost universally A Bad Thing.

Not so, insisted a lady from the audience, making the remark above.

Alas, her remark was greeted with howls of laughter from the audience, almost drowning out her plaintive explanation: "My father was a missionary."

Ray (if I may) is a convivial chap and we've done events together before. Still, I was slow to note that his final slide - titled A Fine Head - in the presentation part of the event was the very photo of me that graces my homepage...

Given that Hay had been deluged with mud and rain for the past week, I hoped that ROBERT MIGHAL talking about his book on Sunshine would lift the spirits. And it did, sort of.

Robert is full of energy and I think I blew things with him when we met before the event because there was a brief contact of his splayed-out right foot and my rather large left one as we sat down on a bench to discuss his book.

He was dressed for sunshine: bright blue suit, blue t-shirt with a yellow sun bursting out of his chest, and bright yellow trainers. Not by the time I'd trodden on one they weren't. Best question from the audience: "What's the significance of a tan-line?" Robert, obviously not into signifiers and signified, was a bit flummoxed,

I did about half a dozen other events that I really enjoyed: MICHELLE DE KRETZER AND LINDA GRANT were illuminating; PATRICK WRIGHT and MISHA GLENNY (separate events) barnstorming; ISMAIL KADARE inspiring; MARIA WYKE and HELEN RAPPAPORT (separate events) both informative and moving in their different ways.

The treat for me, however, was a dinner in honour of BRUNO GANZ, one of my favourite German actors. I'm old enough to remember him in three great films from the late Seventies: Herzog's remake of Nosferatu; Wim Wender's Highsmith adaptation The American Friend; and Rohmer's The Marquise von O.

In other words, he worked with three of the greatest nutters in the movies at the time: director Werner Herzog was a known nutcase, Klaus Kinski, who played the Dracula character in Noseferatu, once threatened to shoot Herzog when down the Amazon on another film (or vice-versa); and Tom Ripley in The American Friend was played by - at the time - drunkard and druggie, Dennis Hopper (in a cowboy hat, yet).

Alas, the dinner was something of a disappointment in that Ganz wasn't saying much. When I forced myself upon him (socially speaking) to find out about the nutters he was diplomatic, though he did say he and Hopper had had a fist fight early on in filming and after that things had been fine.

In my first report from Hay I was a smart-arse about seeing a YELLOW WAGTAIL and identifying it as such. Turns out what I saw was probably a GREY wagtail. The grey wagtail - go figure - is also mostly yellow, though it has a longer tail. I never said my O Levels were in twitching...

GLOBAL WARMING, BLACK SWANS, REVOLUTION AND MUD. LOTS OF MUD.

THE HAY FESTIVAL PART 1 - Late May 2008

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I'm writing this about two feet from a little river in the garden of a pub on the Welsh borders. I came down to Hay yesterday for Bank Holiday Monday, 26 May, straight from Brighton, and I haven't been able to get a phone signal since I got here. However, this place has wi-fi. It's a really lovely spot and, for the moment, there's no-one else here. So it's me, the ripple of the water, the cooing of pigeons and a yellow wagtail hopping around a few yards away. I'm guessing it's a yellow wagtail because it's wagging its tail furiously, has a yellow breast and yellow under its tail. I've got O levels, you know. Although, thinking about it, that yellow under its tail could be something else…

It's also relatively dry today. I chaired three events yesterday. Brighton the day before had been sunny so I was wearing my summer clobber. In Wales it was gales, storms, and flooding. I had to park my car in a field and it got stuck in the mud when I arrived, never mind nine hours later when I left. In those nine hours I almost froze to death in my (mud-splattered) Nicole Fahri linen suit – your point being? The audiences were in winter overcoats, wellies and scarves – as indeed were my interviewees.

Perhaps appropriately, my first event was chairing SIR DAVID “call me Dave” KING and GABRIELLE WALKER talking about global warming. I think they probably tried to get me bumped as chairperson. I’m not upset about that: I’m guessing they Googled me, came to the website, saw the daft novels I write and made the (perfectly understandable) inference that therefore they had defined me.

When we met, Gabrielle realised we’d done an event in Edinburgh together about her book on the atmosphere, so she was cool. Dave was clearly good friends with Rosie Boycott, all-about-media-person and for a time in the 90s my editor at the Independent. In the Green room they were talking dinner that evening. She was in Hay to do some (excellent) chairing. She was in the front row at the event and asked pretty much the first question. It was one of those you dread: it had a two minute preamble. I love the word “succinct”, don’t you?

My second event was trying to quiz NASSIM “random acts’ TALEB, a man I’d loved meeting in Edinburgh in 2007. He didn’t like sharing the stage with another panellist on that occasion so I figured this time he would be in his element – and he was, though equally fidgety. He went through his Black Swan thesis and we had a chat and the questions from the audience were great. They included an incisive one from a cancer specialist who did high-end research. He questioned Taleb’s remarks about the way advances in such research are made totally by accident. The audience were chilled to the bone but still loved the event, as did I.

My last event was interviewing HUGH HUDSON - the director of Chariots of Fire (remember that?) - about the restoration of his disastrously received third film, Revolution. The interview was before and after a screening of said film. 400 people had bought tickets for this event but because of the shit weather only about 30 turned up. The venue was freezing and water was seeping up from the ground.

So I sat there, my summer mocassins (how do you spell that?) taking in water, clutching the lapels of the aforementioned Nicole Fahri jacket around my neck. The lapels had an interesting detail, if you’re into detail (I am but then I was a tailor in the Mod era): a button behind the left one, a button hole on the right. They were for show but they worked and helped keep me warm. As the film went on – with a new voiceover from Al Pacino - I heard the thwock and thwock again of seats closing as one after another of the audience members left because of the cold. By the end there were about 20 of us for the Q&A. I could hardly stop shivering but I loved the chance to quiz Hudson – who looked warm as toast in a long overcoat with a jumper wrapped round his neck. Still a terrific film too.

THE SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM, THE DIAMOND DAGGER-WINNER-IN-WAITING, AUSTRALIA’S BEST & A MISERY MEMOIRIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

The Brighton Festival Part II -May 2008

Had a great time with KEITH ALLEN at the Theatre Royal. (There was an audience there too.) I didn’t feel I’d brought out the best in him when we did an event in Cheltenham last year so wanted to try again. He obviously thought the same. “Is it going to be better than last time?” he said when we met backstage.

I’m relieved to say that it was. He was on fine form and the audience was out for a good time. On stage, we’d explained that his signing session would be brief because he was catching a ferry that night to drive a van down to Budapest to start filming his role as the Sheriff of Nottingham for the next series of Robin Hood. In the pub after with my old friend Frank, a fan of Allen, I must have been approached by about six people who’d been in the audience asking why he was driving himself. Like I would know?

VAL MCDERMID was a hoot on the following Saturday. Her gigs are always a great combination of intelligent analysis of her own novels /the crime genre and hilarity. She has flatteringly said that she likes doing events with me and that makes for an easy time on stage. Deservedly, she got a standing ovation at the end.

She was doing Brighton partly because her book , A Place of Execution, had been chosen as the city’s annual public read. The event came about ten days after SUE GRAFTON had been inaugurated into the Crime Writers’ Association hall of fame – better known as the Diamond Dagger award for an outstanding contribution to the genre.

Now I’m sure Grafton is a perfectly lovely woman and a talented writer but I can’t quite see what her outstanding contribution has been. An alphabet? We already had one. (And, besides, Ed McBain was already doing that, though not sequentially.) Val, on the other hand, aside from being a massively best-selling author with a large numbers of books to her credit, has reviewed for many years and been particularly encouraging to debut authors (including me). She was a judge on the CWA Debut Dagger for a long time, set up the Harrogate Crime Festival (which has been a massive success) and still teaches crimewriting at the Arvon foundation every other year.

You might have gathered I have a bee in my bonnet about this – I think it is appalling that she has been overlooked yet again whilst contemporaries Ian Rankin, John Harvey et al have been recognised by the award. (Both worthy recipients, I hasten to add.)

How the Diamond Dagger award is decided is a bit complicated. CWA members vote and the votes are totted up but then, I believe, the CWA committee makes the final decision.

Hope they get their act together next year. I rather circuitously asked Val about it backstage. She was, of course, too classy to comment. Well, for publication.

Author Liam Brown, my terrific successor as programme director of the Brighton book festival, actually reminded me how good Australian novelist TIM WINTON is several years ago. He was lobbying to have him as one of the City Reads when I was involved in the process. I hadn’t read Winton for a while and immediately got hooked again. This is a circuitous way of saying what a delight it was to chair Winton's event in the Old Courthouse in Brighton a week after my McDermid event. He was appearing with JULIE MYERSON. The combination seemed at first unlikely but their new novels had a remarkable amount in common (rite-of-passage being the least of it), as they also did as writers.

Myerson, who combines novel writing with family commitments and a regular gig on Newsnight Review had flown in that morning from the Cannes film festival. Winton was shy before the event – he said he didn’t enjoy talking about his work – but loquacious on stage. The two of them got a good conversation going, which is what I hope for when I’m chairing. I have no ego about my part in those things: I just listen and make sure I’m ready with another pertinent question if they dry up.

No fear of AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS drying up. The best-selling US misery memoirist was polite but disengaged before his event . Once he got on stage he was off and running. A consummate performer he was also attentive to questions. What I find intriguing (and refreshing )about him is that his memoir, Running With Scissors, describes a terrible childhood – but hilariously. However, he is starting to wear out his life-story. He was in Brighton to talk about his latest, which deals with his alcoholic, college professor dad . No laughs in this one.

There ‘s been a lot of scepticism lately about the truthfulness of misery memoirs . Burroughs had a long piece about his first memoir (yes, he’s on a roll) in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago and there was legal action by the family he writes about in it. I did ask him about that – not as robustly as Paxman might have but this was, after all, Burrough’s event – and he didn’t duck the questions. He says he ‘s going to write a novel next. I wonder if any misery memoirists – who are, almost by definition, self-obsessed - can write anything other than autobiography .

BRIGHTON FESTIVAL

Pessimism, hope and a daft short story - May 2008

For an utter pessimist JOHN GRAY turned out to be a lot of fun. Sure the world is going to hell and there's no hope for any of us - he even ridicules the concept of hope - but in the gaps between the pessimism there are a lot of smiles. In his event - based on his book Black Mass, in which he rubbishes the notion of progress - he was unrelentingly negative but before and after he was most amusing.

Actually, he was amusing during the event too but his message doesn't offer much hope. That was Saturday 3 May - my godson's birthday - happy birthday, Nick - then on Monday 5 May I read a short story as part of a Brighton Moments event at the Komedia. It was my story and I read it aloud and everything. Seemed to go well. It's in the anthology Brighton Moments, published now. The worrying thing is that for the reading I had to reduce the text by half and I managed it effortlessly. I could probably, just as easily, reduce the rest of the story down to such a degree that the question occurs to me - did I need to write it in the first place?

Tuesday, 6 May was CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH, the human rights lawyer - and what an inspiration he was. He has moved on from defending Death Row prisoners to defending the prisoners incarcerated without any rights at Guantanamo Bay. What was so great about him - as if what he does isn't enough - was his genuinely self-deprecating manner. And his clear interest in other people. For me, a major event.

CATCH UP!

17 April 2008

I hate my service providers. They decided to upgrade from php 4 to php 5 - even as I write this I haven’t foggiest idea what it means– claimed they told all their customers but they didn’t tell me and left me with a non-working website for almost two months.

Helpful when I pointed out my problem? (When I finally got through to them: “You are 27th in the queue but your call is important to us…” Oh really? Fuck right off.) Not in the least. (Helpful, that is – sorry, little side-ramble there.)

Fasthost (for you are the scumbags of which I speak), in the immortal words of John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a dodgy French accent: “I bare my bottom at you.”

Okay, enough intellectualising. So since the start of March this website has been down whilst life has been whizzing by. So, catch-up, update, any other phrase with up in it…

CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT: rewriting the damned thing. Again. I’ve been living with this bloody book for so long it had better win some awards, I tell you.

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY: aha – this is a new one. With my journalist’s hat on I’m writing a 26,000 non-fiction booklet about the biggest British 20th century crime for the National Archive, due for delivery at the end of April, publication a couple of months later.

THE OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL: despite years of pleading, my first time chairing stuff here. It all took place in early April in Christchurch, which is a magnificent-looking college. (Hogwarts in certain popular films.)

My first gig was a return event with Peter “Dragon’s Den” Jones and Levi “Reggae Reggae Sauce” Roots (real name Keith.). We’d done a good event in Cheltenham last October so Peter had asked for me again, which was very flattering. (Or an indication of what a soft interviewer I am.) It was good fun and I’ve no doubt I’ll be seeing Levi separately at festivals as he has his own book (and CD) out in June.

As I was leaving the college at the end of my stint – I’d just chaired Helen Dunmore and Katie Hickman rather nervously (lovely as they are, they are awesomely brainy) – when I got a call back. Linda Grant had been expected to do a solo event but, quite naturally, she was expecting to be interviewed. She was very understanding of the fact I’d only seen her new book ten minutes before the event. She was great so it was a shame she had a relatively small audience.

The Year Ahead & City of Dreadful Night

5 January 2008

Apologies to those people who have been unable to access the website (or me via the website) - it was hijacked by a hacker and I couldn't access it either for almost two months.

Eh bien, it's functioning again as, more or less, am I. It's been a busy start to the year. I've just sent off three short stories for publication in two separate anthologies later this year - more details later. And the first of the Brighton trilogy is sitting on my desk in front of me waiting to be posted to my agent.

The title I've plumped for is City of Dreadful Night. You might get the reference. Some of my friends hate the title, some love it. It may change but that's it for now. And this is it for now. Happy New Year.

Nick Madrid - ten years on

5 September

I was thinking of my first novel, No Laughing Matter, when I was wandering around Edinburgh in August. It's ten years since it came out and I must say that it seems a lifetime ago.

I did my first event to promote it in Edinburgh. I was on a panel with the editors of an anthology of Scottish comic writing and Arabella "Does my bum look big in this?" Weir. The director that year had called the event "Laugh Yourself Silly" and as we filed on stage the entire audience seemed to be sitting there, arms crossed, as if to say "Go on then, make us laugh".

A couple of weeks ago when I was doing my annual walk along the Water of Leith from Stockbridge through Dean village to the modern art gallery I was remembering the toad crossing in NLM. I'd transplanted it from a road near Lewes in Sussex to this quiet stretch near the mineral well.

Ah, nostalgia. I'm about halfway through the seventh Nick Madrid novel, Look Back in Agra, which I'm trying to write at the same time as I'm writing the Brighton trilogy. Ten years on it's very different in tone from NLM, unsurprisingly, but I hope just as funny.

I'm also hoping that Cast Adrift, the sixth, will come out in paperback early next year. I'll let you know as soon as I know.