The Perfect Crime Writing Festival
Val McDermid delivered the annual lecture at the 2018 Noirwich Crime Writing Festival, on the subject of “What we really talk about when we talk…
Continue reading → ‘I don’t think crime writing is about murder at all’
Leo Benedictus writes about breaking rules and pushing boundaries.
There’s the Norfolk Noir of Henry Sutton and the Norfolk Noir of Harry Brett: both begin and end in Great Yarmouth, but Sutton’s stretches further, while Brett’s goes darker.
The first time I got a sense of the true menace of the Norfolk landscape was after I moved to the county to work for ITV News Anglia.
BBC One’s Death in Paradise is one of the top three most popular programmes on British Television, enjoyed on screen as well as in a…
One of the surprises of writing fiction is that when you finish your book, when it’s published and sent out into the world, it’s still not really finished. As people start to read the book, the characters develop and slip out of your control.
When you live through a trauma, and that trauma changes your life — And when you realise that trauma is actually part of a much larger societal problem, then as a writer, it becomes vital to write about it. Or at least that’s how it was for me.
When it comes to writing noir fiction, I have found that the most bizarre characters and plotlines are ones you just couldn’t invent.
I’m more jumble sale in a village hall than high end fusion cookery but there you have it. I’m not really a crime writer. Not a proper horror writer either. I’m a hybrid.
