THE DEVIL'S MOON

COVER ARTWORK FOR FOURTH BRIGHTON BOOK...

...can be seen on my Facebook page. I'm too technically inept to be able to get a picture up on this site. The covers of the French translations are there too. And on Amazon, of course.

JOSEPH CONNOLLY

OXFORD BOOK FESTIVAL 20 MARCH NOON

Late request for me to interview Joseph. He is supposed to be on with novelist PAUL TORDAY but Mr Torday is ill so I'm filling in. It's fun being a sub - last time I did Oxford I did an In Conversation with LINDA GRANT at five minutes notice which we were both surprised worked out pretty well.

PETER JAMES & MICHAEL MARSHALL

FOYLES 19 MARCH 2013

Gearing up for what promises to be a great event, chairing these two thrilling writers and witty folk - who are also mates. Foyles, Peter and Michael - what's not to like? Especially when I can spend far too much money in Ray's Jazz on the top floor of the bookshop, just next to the event. Okay - let me rethink that.

FIVE CRIME SONGS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

CRIMESPREE

Only just seen a little piece I did for the great Crimespree website a couple of months ago...

FIVE CRIME SONGS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Bad boys and faithless women populated blues and country songs for decades. Broadway musicals have had their share, from the lovable petty crooks of Guys and Dolls through the switchblade gangs of West Side Story to the tiny crooks of Bugsy Malone and serial killer Sweeney Todd.

So, whittling my choices down to just five has not been easy but I tried to go for the unexpected.

1. EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE written and performed by Sting/Police

Sting’s anthem for stalkers remains a song of choice for wedding couples. Do they actually listen to the lyrics? Sting wrote it not in the throes of love but in the throes of possessive jealousy when his first marriage had just ended. “Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you” is essentially a bunny boiler alert. This is a guy you want to take a restraining order out on, not walk up the aisle with.

2. PSYCHO KILLER written and performed by David Byrne/Talking Heads

The person described in this early hit for Talking Heads, the hip band of the late seventies and eighties, isn’t the cold, emotionless psychopathic type we’re now familiar with. This psycho killer can’t sleep because his bed’s on fire and you’d better not touch him because his nerves are inflamed too. But it doesn’t matter that the psychological profile doesn’t fit – lead singer/songwriter David Byrne with those unblinking eyes staring out of his bony face is plenty scary, thank you very much.

3. VAMPIRES written and performed by Paul Simon

Unlikely as it sounds from the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” guy, Paul Simon was already into minor criminal activity with his first solo album. When he and his friend Julio were down by the schoolyard they were smoking dope. With the stage show/album “The Capeman” he graduated to murder and, in fairness, rehabilitation. This fifties-set study of a Puerto Rican teen gang, the Vampires, co-written by Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott, knocks West Side Story into a cocked hat.

The highlight of this particular song is an account of a fight between a skinny Puerto Rican and a big Irish kid “who looks like a ton of cold beef floating in beer.” I met Walcott once and, hoping to ingratiate myself with him, I gushed about how the word choice, the rhymes and the rhythm made this a truly powerful piece. (All of which is true.) He dismissed me with the words: “Paul wrote that one."

4. POTTER’S FIELD written and performed by Tom Waits

Tom Waits is the other poet laureate of America’s underbelly (Bruce being the first) and many of his early songs were inspired by a combination of film noir, Edward Hopper paintings and Charles Borkowski-like barflies. His “Invitation To The Blues” is essentially the first act of The Postman Always Rings Twice; his “Burma Shave” is Thieves Like Us.

“Small Change”, the title track of his second album, doesn’t mess around. Its first line is: “Small Change got rained on with his own .38.” His account of the young punk who got into an altercation by a jukebox is a short story masterclass in song. Much later, with “Trouble’s Braids”, on the album “Swordfishtrombones”, he spends about 90 seconds brilliantly describing the experiences of a wounded man on the run evading his pursuers before the man floats down a creek out of the song.

However, the one I like best is from his third album, “Foreign Affairs”. “Potter’s Field” is a story told by a stool pigeon who would “double cross his mother if it’s whiskey that they paid”. His nickname is Nickel and he knows where a guy is hiding out who stole half a million dollars in unmarked bills. The story is elliptical – the guy slept last night in a wheelbarrow “with only revenge to keep him warm” (and a siren for a lullaby)- but he also paid “a king’s ransom for a bedspread” sometime or other. And he may well be dead. If you want to find this fugitive, Nickel suggests you seek out Captain Charon, who sails from the Bronx across the River Styx. Wonderful stuff. I suspect Pelecanos and Lehane long ago listened and learned.

5. MACK THE KNIFE written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

No list would be complete without arch-criminal MacHeath from The Threepenny Opera. This guy is so cool he can even survive T S Eliot turning him into Macavity the mystery cat (and Andrew Lloyd Webber consequently turning him into a character in Cats). Bad, bad Leroy Brown, with his 32 gun and a razor in his shoe ain’t got nothing on Mack the Knife.

The song has been wrecked by so many (shame on Frank Sinatra) but I first heard the blowsy Bobby Darin version – it was one of the first 45 rpm singles I bought. On the label “Bertolt” is “Bert” and I assumed Bert and Kurt was just another Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building writing duo.

In the eighties, “Lost In The Stars”, a great collection of Kurt Weill songs sung by the rock royalty du jour, has Sting (who played MacHeath on Broadway) and Dominic Muldowney doing a great version of the song. Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear – and he shows ‘em pearly white. You betcha.

PROMENADE DU CRIME & LE DERNIER ROI DE BRIGHTON

FRENCH EDITIONS OF BRIGHTON TRILOGY

Babel Noir in France have now published the mass market paperback of "City of Dreadful Night" (known as "Promenade du crime" in France) with a neat little painting of suitcases at a railway station on the cover.

At the same time "The Last King of Brighton" is also out in France (Rouergue Noir edition) with a great noirish cover. It looks twice as thick as the English edition but maybe that's because my brilliant translator, Jean-Rene Dastugue, has added footnotes explaining Sixties UK pop music and British slang. We had a surreal exchange of emails in the course of translation as I tried to explain why a popular early Seventies joke was funny: "I thought Muffin the Mule was a sexual practice until I discovered Smirnoff"...okay, maybe you had to be there.

THE KILLER COOKBOOK

MY MURDEROUS RECIPE

Some months ago I was flattered to be invited to contribute a recipe to The Killer Cookbook to help raise money for Dundee University's Million For A Morgue scheme (www.millionforamorgue.com). This was foolhardy on the part of the editors, who've obviously never eaten round my place, but I came up with my signature dish involving stuffed chicken breast and undercooked lentils. (That last bit is not the recipe, it's just the way lentils always turn out when I do them.)

Anyway, no thanks to me, the recipe book has not only sold very well it has also been shortlisted in the Best Fundraising Cookbook in Europe category at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (alongside Chez Maxim of Paris, in a slightly surreal turn of events).

The cookbook is a good read aside from the recipes.

Further details on:

http://www.cookbookfair.com/index.php/gourmand-awards/finalists-2013-gg/cookbook-finalist

THE THING ITSELF OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK

FEBRUARY 2013

Busy times with the Brighton series. The second of the trilogy is just out in France as LE DERNIER ROI DE BRIGHTON and my terrific translator, Jean-Rene Dastugue, is working on the third, THE THING ITSELF, for publication later this year. THE THING ITSELF has just come out in paperback here. The fourth in the series, THE DEVIL'S MOON, comes out in the UK in May and the US in the summer.

"LE DERNIER ROI DE BRIGHTON"

PUBLISHED IN FRANCE IN JANUARY 2013

Just before Christmas I heard from my brilliant French translator, JEAN-RENE DASTUGUE, that THE LAST KING OF BRIGHTON will be published in France by LE ROUERGUE in January 2013. Exciting start to the year!

THE NEXT BIG THING

TEN QUESTIONS IN TEN MINUTES

Rosanna Ley (www.rosannaley.co.uk), brilliant best-selling author of “The Villa” invited me to be part of the Next Big Thing, a phenomenon which is expanding exponentially to take over the world. The deal is that I answer the following questions about my writing then recommend five other authors who also answer the questions and they in turn recommend five other authors, who…you see how quickly this is heading for global saturation? My recommendations are at the end of this post.

 1) What is the working title of your next book?

The Devil’s Moon is the final title. The working title was The Devil’s Dyke, then The Devil’s Altar.

 2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

A winter hike across the Devil’s Dyke with a break at the medieval Saddlescombe Farm; the discovery of a first edition of Aleister Crowley’s dire novel, “Moonchild”, with a long inscription in it, written in Paris; seeing a painting of flowers in the Brighton Museum and wondering why the artist, Gluck, titled it “The Devil’s Altar”.

 3) What genre does your book fall under?

Crime with a supernatural theme.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d prefer unknown actors but let’s say a younger Tom Hollander for my new character, pocket policeman Bellamy Heap; a younger Lesley Sharp for DI Sarah Gilchrist; a younger Liam Neeson for Bob Watts; an older Michael Fassbender for Jimmy Tingley; a younger Elizabeth Moss - Peggy in Mad Men - for Kate Simpson.

5) What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

That old black magic has Brighton in its spell…

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? It will not be self-published (though I have self-published my novella, The Belgian and The Beekeeper). It will be published by Severn House in Britain and the US and, in due course, in translation by Le Rouergue in France.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Six months longer than it should have because halfway through I almost totally changed the plot.

 8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

In some ways it is the flipside of my Millennial comic crime novel, A Ghost of A Chance. Although a mystery about Knights Templar features it is not a Dan Brown clone in any way.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

See above – “Where did the idea come from?” Add in that I wanted to provide employment for characters who have been twiddling their thumbs since the end of my Brighton trilogy.

 10) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If your idea of a good time is fish falling from the sky (a lot of fish); a Wicker Man burning on the shoreline of Brighton; and a (genuine) major mystery about what happened to the Knights Templar in Sussex in the then this is for you. Plus The Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, alongside Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, carrying out magic ceremonies on the Downs at the start of World War II to defend Britain from the Nazis…

And I’m passing the baton(s) to four fine writers (in no particular order). I hoped my fifth would be that fine Western writer, MIKE STOTTER (www.mikestotter.com) but he was AWOL when the deadline arrived. Here are my other four:

LYNN SHEPHERD (www.lynn-shepherd.com) - her new Dickension mystery, “Tom-All-Alone’s”, is the cat’s pajamas.

RUSSELL JAMES (russelljamesbooks.wordpress.com) - the Godfather of British Noir has been writing some terrific historical works of late, such as his new one, “The Exhibitionists”.

BARRY FORSHAW (www.crimetime.com) - his range of knowledge about crime fiction on the page and the screen is without equal. Check out his “British Crime Film” for an outstanding, page-turning account of the best of British cinema.

ALEX GRAY (www.alex-gray.com) - her tough Glasgow series featuring DI Lorimer has long been a must-read. The latest “A Pound of Flesh” is maybe her best yet.

THE THING ITSELF "ONE OF BEST MYSTERIES OF 2012"

KIRKUS REVIEW

Esteemed US literary magazine, Kirkus Review, has declared "The Thing Itself" to be one of their Best Mysteries of 2012. Who am I to disagree?