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On the hunt for exhilarating new crime fiction reads this autumn? Enter the Noirwich + The Crime Vault book bundle giveaway competition!
In celebration of Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2023, we’ve teamed up with The Crime Vault to gift one lucky winner with the ten unmissable crime fiction books listed below.
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We were honoured to welcome the award-winning Soviet-Ukrainian American and French novelist and artist Yelena Moskovich for the annual Noirwich lecture 2022. Moskovich’s ground-breaking novels trenchantly atomise and repurpose tenets of crime fiction to explore fractured identities, living histories and uncanny sins.
Their timely lecture – a transcript of which you can find below – reflects on the volatility and mutability of the written word and the world, and explored what if crime wasn’t a story being told, but a language being spoken?
There are things we think and things we do. Terrible, terrible things. There are feelings we feel and secrets we keep. Terrible, terrible code. I had never thought of myself as a crime writer. Though in retrospect – which happens to be the only way crime can be viewed, by looking back – I suppose I’ve always been a wayward type. More of a wildcat of language than a writer. In short, I have always been terrible. From a young hooligan of melody to a ripened offender of prose, I’ve told stories by going against the grain of storytelling.
In my first novel, The Natashas, Cesar, an immigrant actor vying for the role of a serial killer in a TV series, finds himself following a strange woman. We think the wires of reality and performance have crossed and surely he will kill her. But when he walks up behind her, she turns around and she tells him it’s too late – she’s already been murdered. She sings him a song and asks him to carry her pain.
In my second novel, Virtuoso, there is a bar called The Blue Angel, where people who exist and don’t exist can meet.
In my third and most recent novel, A Door Behind A Door, characters cross in and out of a purgatorial underground between America and the former Soviet Union.
I never thought of myself as a crime writer because the world of my writing is lawless by nature, and those who inhabit it, trespassers of form. In my stories, no one dies, because they are already dead. No one breaks the law, because the laws are already broken.
I stated in an essay I wrote about crime fiction that “all Russian literary work is a crime novel.” (By Russian, to be precise, I mean Russian-language works, which of course stem from all the post-Soviet Russian speaking countries.) This is in part because these literary works, like the Slavic character, exist inside a philosophical crime scene. We are not concerned with the human moral dilemma as much as the human metaphysical dilemma. The pain and poetry of being alive.
In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the teacher Medvedenko asks Masha, “Why do you always wear black?”, and she replies, “I am mourning for my life.” There is a simultaneous seriousness and satire in her response. Part of living is killing life and mourning for the life that we have killed.
Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall from the tree – or in this case – the cherry doesn’t fall far from the cherry orchard, and I can’t escape this Slavic literary heritage. It may seem like a Hellish consciousness with which to lead a life, but to us – life isn’t life without Hell.
And as I admit further it in the essay, it’s true, I’ve always liked novels where people go to Hell. Since the Soviet Union was built upon the communist rejection of religion, our Hell is a bit different. It is not a moral Hell. It is rather a place of transgression and truth. Above, upon our dear Earth, is a social and political code. Below, in our beloved Hell, there is the opportunity for truth – to contemplate, to face, and to integrate the spectrum of human conscious and unconscious intention free of right and wrong. It does not mean there are no consequences and no structure. It is far from the derelict anarchy the West has culturally defined it to be. It is actually a place governed by the purest rules of humanity, the innocence and the shame of our desire to live.
Within these spaces of existence, death becomes more of a hallway, a rite of passage, or a journey towards the purity of the self. In all my works, I write about immigration as a kind of death, a departure wherein the immigrant becomes the literal and figurative ‘departed.’ But there are many kinds of immigration as there are many dimensions of borders that one can – or is forced – to cross. For example, puberty is an immigration we all share – where our hormonal and physical body crosses the border from childhood towards adulthood. Loving someone is also a kind of immigration, across the border of the self to the other.
Then there are the extreme cases of immigration we are most familiar with via the media, refugee and asylum seekers escaping mental, emotional, or physical persecution. I could share with you in detail my own experience of having been a Jewish refugee from Soviet Ukraine to America in 1991 at age 7. And there is much to say about the experience of refugees and asylum seekers and their relationship to language and form. But unfortunately, this relationship does not garner much interest in the culture or arts. Artists or writers who come from geopolitical trauma are met with a narrative obligation to be creative ambassadors of their historical context. The world wants anecdotes and explanations, testimony, and pathos. These expectations are often our ticket into the arts and literature.
But being a difficult child of patronage, I’d rather stay terrible, terrible, and difficult. This is why I’m not going to go through my experience as a refugee from Soviet Ukraine or its parallels with the current war. I’m not saying this is not an important subject. But in general, I’m not so interested in subjects at all. I’m interested in the phenomena of a subject, its language, its movement, its way of coming into life and dying out.
In this respect, I’m inviting you into the metaphysical sense of immigration, or the journey of dying, of killing, and of being killed. What if this journey wasn’t a subject, but a phenomenon? Which brings me to the question at the heart of this lecture: what if crime wasn’t a story being told, but a language being spoken?
The queer experimental artist and writer, Renee Gladman, talks about ‘the inner anguish’ of language. The friction between something dying and something new being born. This twist in being also appears in the form containing language. Gladman goes on to speak of ‘a novel tired of its form.’ This phrase has stayed with me over the years. This is perhaps the perfect description of every novel I write. A work in resistance to itself. Writing that doesn’t want to be what it is expected to be. A novel that comes alive in its own disgrace. Though Gladman doesn’t point to this directly, her words evoke a certain criminality of a work. A way that the text, in order to exist as itself, must become an outlaw.
Roland Barthes, the French philosopher and semiotician, proclaims ‘language is never innocent.’ Barthes is firstly speaking of intentionality, whether conscious or subconscious. From the time a baby starts formulating the sounds they overhear, the blocks of language have significance and will to them. The baby does do not need to understand the structure of language in order to use it with connotation. As it pertains to literature, Barthes is pointing to the capacity of creative consciousness. The writer is composing with what words mean and with what they don’t mean, what they could mean and what they don’t want to mean. The writer is taking the subconscious existence of language out of its familiar shadowy place, and flipping the light switch on it.
I’m not sure if Barthes also intended this idea to extend to the cultural guilt inherent in language, but I’ll go there on my own and take the connotative leap. The rules of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and gender allotment of nouns come from the ways voice, its purpose and expression, has been sanctioned throughout history. The building blocks of language are a product of the socio-political regime. A regime which has been (and continues to be) heavily governed by religious moral code. Language existed as a way to spread the guidelines of holy texts and in turn keep people in line. Language existed to create empires, fortunes, military. Language existed to profit, to exploit, to control.
And so a writer is left in a peculiar position. How to use a guilty language?
Monique Wittig, a French writer and queer activist, wrote in her novel Les Guerillieres : “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. …You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
If the very mechanisms of the grammar we use today are constructed from centuries of crimes upon the voices and speakers and their languages, we as writers must go to Hell – so to speak – to go down into the underworld of the text, beneath grammar and syntax and lexicon as we know it, and remember or, failing that, invent form and language.
Queerness, in its essence, is an act of the imagination. It is existing in what does not yet exist. In José Esteban Muñoz’s book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, he writes:
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. (…) we must dream and enact (…) other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
It is not merely as a poetic idea that queerness incites dreaming. As Carl Jung described, dreams allow for a mythology that has been forgotten by the day to exist at night. It’s a mythology in hiding, one that must not only be found, but made safe enough to step into the light. In the underworld, this mythology both yearns and refuses to be seen. This is Gladman’s anguish of language, a lingual anxiety.
Barthes also described this lyricism of our personal pain, stating that “each of us has his/her/their own rhythm of suffering.” We don’t often consider the intersection been crime and poetry in literature. Though a wonderful example is the crime novel written in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, by the Australian poet Dorothy Porter. My last novel, A Door Behind A Door, can also be described as a sort of crime novel in verse. Not just for the way the story unfolds in lyrical episodes, almost like a succession of poems, but also in the lyricism that is used to place and advance the plot – particularly when the plot begins to blur into surreal or imagined spaces.
For example, in this novel: Oxana, a mother who loses her husband then her young son in a tragic drowning, is murdered by an eight year old boy who lives in her building, Nikolia or Nicky. Nicky stabs her to death and yet doesn’t understand his own actions. He seems to have entered a trance and have been pulled to commit an crime that has no link to any personal intentions. This enigma stays with him for the rest of his life. But as the novel continues, we start to wonder if perhaps it is the woman herself who created the murder to be able to die from grief, and therefore unconsciously beckoned an innocent boy up the stairs with a knife.
When she dies, though she doesn’t quite die, she immigrates. We find her again in a small town in America, at a diner, dipping fries into a strawberry milkshake. She is told by a mysterious waitress that her name is now Sally and she must learn it. She repeats her name as she sees the waters of the Black Sea where her son died. The passage is a short stanza. It goes like this:
Sally. Sally. Sally. I sailed.
I felt so alone that my skin could have peeled off with the wind.
This sparse stanza contains her whole metaphysical immigration, from devastation to grief to a distant quiet. This simultaneously becomes a manifested literal immigration in the form of a teleportation from Ukraine to America.
The boy-murderer, Nicky, makes a similar journey. He knows that he will go to Hell for what he has done. He is put in prison, and as Olga, another neighbor describes: “Nicky was a bad boy and he went to prison to become a bad man.” But his years in prison become a portal through life, and he also magically immigrates through time and space to this small town in America. Olga, who immigrated to this town with her family long ago, doesn’t understand why he is here and not in Hell. Nicky explains: ‘To get to Hell, they take you through America. There’s a door behind a door.”
Growing up on Slavic literature, my inspiration for this episodic form made of sparse poetic lines came more from Alexander Pushkin’s quintessential novel in verse ‘Eugene Onegin”. I also thought about Russian crime novels, like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Evgeny Zamatyn’s The Flood. For those not familiar with the latter, it’s a much overlooked novella about a flood that eerily brings out violent impulses between a husband, wife and an orphan they adopted. I thought about these works and wondered – Could crime be unhinged from its story and made lyrical and queer ? Queer in the sense of queer characters, but also queer as in – imagined beyond our here and now into the ‘then and there’.
In the Jewish-Ukrainian writer, Margarita Khelmin’s daring masterpiece novel Klotsvog, a sort of soap-opera telling of the persecution and survival of Ukrainian Jews, the narrator rarely and vaguely refers to the horrors of war and the ethnic cleansing she survived as a child. She states without much feeling: “At the hospital, during evacuation, I’d heard the moans of the injured without arms, legs, and tongues. The only thing left from the entire person was the moaning.” There is a leitmotif of the musicality of suffering throughout the novel, not just as subject, but in the Khemlin’s dry and tempo-ed language. And yet, Khemlin creates a world where the dead live amongst the living, their music a shadow of our human walk.
In my first novel, The Natashas, there is a group of girls and women who exist without themselves. As one of them explains, “There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them.” I’m evoking the trafficking of women and girls from East to West. But on a deeper level, I’m inventing a language for the fragmented self. Just as Wittig, in her novel, The Lesbian Body, cuts the first person “I” (which is 2 letters in French Je) in half with a slash so it is J/e, as an attempt to disown the self, I intersect various storylines, lyrical screams, proverbs, that slash each other as the story advances.
“To be dead, there is no need to die,” Marina Tsvetaeva writes in Letter to the Amazon. Herein lies a different sort of crime. One that has nothing to do with the story – the who, what, when, where – but with the chasm of storytelling. In this chasm, the crime is no longer the event, but a language. It has not been committed but is being committed – over and over, with no finality to the breach of life. The crime and the criminal is out of sync. At times the crime seems to be happening ahead of the criminal and the criminal is catching up to it. At times the criminal is guilty before the crime has even been conceived.
Fragmentation and re-assembly is not only the corner stone of the mystery format of fiction – the gathering of clues – but a psychological exploration of the self, especially as insight into the effects of trauma on the psyche. I’m particularly interested in the construction and sense of reality of those who have experienced trauma as well as those with mental health neurodivergence.
From an early age, educators and care-takers alike noticed that I had a different way of storytelling. Highly creative and quick on my feet with languages, at the age of 7 I went from Russian to Hebrew to English, 3 different alphabets I learned simultaneously. It may be that refugee children become rapidly resilient as a way of creating safety and control for themselves in a drastically mutable environment. But for me, language as a whole, felt intuitively multi-dimensional. I held it both in fragments and its entirety, and had no need for linear organisation of narrative.
Three decades later, I’m an author whose work is described as experimental. I have no qualms with the label itself, but I do think it’s important to look at the reputation of this category.
There are many people who have a very different relationship to language and story. I’m one of those people. It may be shaped by my personal history or my own neurodivergence. I do have a way of experiencing the world and people that is perhaps atypical. But my rendering of this experience is not a stylistic choice. Most of the time, experimental literature is seen as a reaction to so-called traditional literature. As if it cannot exist on its own, but in relationship to the norm. This echoes our societal perception of those with a difference in mental, emotional, or physical abilities. They are often defined and categorised in relationship to a majority or norm – a norm that has been constructed within a system that functions and profits from the existence and measure of this normality.
I have ceaselessly been encouraged to make my writing more accessible, more cohesive. I have been nudged to iron out my fractured prose into something with less poetic divergence. It’s been alluded to me that I would certainly sell more books that way. I would be nominated for more prizes and get more funding that way.
I agree that every publisher, editor, agent, and reader has the right to like what they like. But I can’t help but be troubled by the reputation of experimental writing as reactionary, a sort of tantrum or fuss that lacks the level of sophistication or craft we associate with traditional canonical literature. When in truth, experimental writing merely takes interest in its own phenomenology, it braves the underworld of the text, seeking Hell. And yet this writing is deemed: tedious, dense, laborious, or even self-indulgently anarchic.
I do wonder why there is so much energy put into protecting this sort of patrimony of writing within the so-called norm, the need to discourage and contain writing that puts writing into question. Is it that writing like this is a threat, not just to the literary canon on which modern fiction is built, but to the societal and political structure at large?
If we look at Russian-language literature, writing that comes out of one of the most censored regimes, it has opted for another solution to this dilemma: Russian-language writers figured out that literature needs a decoy. This decoy is what it said. And literature happens in what is not said.
Reading Russian literature is a different way of reading, something actually more akin to the experience of reading experimental works. It’s a sort of reading in the dark with night-vision, where we can see language move in the wild, beyond its decoy.
Crime is precisely about darkness. It happens in the dark, always in the dark, even if it’s daylight. It is born in the shadow that our human glow has cast, in the black spotted vision of our blinding light. Most of crime fiction – let’s say most of fiction, regardless of genre, actually – is focused on the thought, feeling, and action contoured in the subtextual darkness. But what would this contouring look like if it was not revealed through the character’s relationship to themselves, the other, or the world, but the relationship between the text and the story?
An early poem of the Russian-Jewish poet, Boris Pasternak is called The Blind Wander at Night. It’s about a blind person crossing a square at night. It’s about navigating a darkened world. It’s about what it means to see and to not see. While Soviet verse prided itself on a diligent meter and rhyme scheme, this poem jumped out of these poetic credentials, with no discernable poetic scheme, and yet a distinct and strange melody. An experimental poem. It seems to step on its own feet, to stumble, to grope for light and catch itself on the walls of its own syntax.
I just want to share an excerpt of this poem:
“The blind live by touch.
Touching the world with their hands,
Without knowing light and shadow
And feeling the stones:
Walls are made of stone.
Men live behind them.
Women.
Children.
Money.
(…)
It’s terrible to die at night.
It’s terrible to die by touch.”
I want to read the same section in Russian so you can hear the way in which it grazes a rhyme scheme, but stumbles out of it.
Слепые живут наощупь.
Наощупь,
Трогая мир руками,
Не зная света и тени
И ощущая камни:
Из камня делают стены.
За ними живут мужчины.
Женщины.
Дети.
Деньги.
(…)
Плохо умирать ночью.
Плохо умирать наощупь.
A near generation later, the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky solidified the writer’s tactility towards language. In his poem Author’s Prayer, he describes the work of a writer, “I must live as a blind man / who runs through rooms without / touching the furniture.”
Darkness becomes a threshold, a way towards voice. The writer traverses this darkness as if walking down their own throat towards the act of speaking. In this darkness, the voice carries and contours the area, delineates it so that the echo fills the hollowness and outlines a space we cannot yet see. The dark allows us to distort time and territory, to stretch out one footstep into an entire life.
In another poem, Tsvetaeva evokes this poetic spatiality in relationship to the writer. “A poet starts her speaking from afar. / The speaking takes the speaker far.” It is not the body that carries the voice, but rather the voice that carries the body.
There is a dismembering of the physical self in this poetic space. The voice can travel where the body cannot. The arm can reach where the eye can’t see. The mouth can taste what the brain cannot identify. The suffering, pain, injustice, disconnection, isolation amongst others, can be evoked in the dismembering of the literary senses, chronology, point of view – and so on. In this way, a story does not to be told, but rather put into movement.
The African American Vietnam veteran and poet Yusef Komunyakaa wrote, “I am this space my body believes in.” Physical reality is made tangible through our belief in it. At the brink of creation, there is a suspicion, and language as suspect. It means what it means and what it doesn’t mean to mean. It says what it says and can’t quite say. It asks what it asks and what it already knows the answer to. It assembles in grammatical order and roams wild. It starts and it ends and it has always been speaking. And if I can offer anything to you all today, it’s to go to Hell and be as terrible, terrible, terrible as you haven’t even yet imagined.
For his tenth novel The Hard Way — having all the world to choose from as a final setting for their readers — Lee Child sent Jack Reacher to an isolate farm in the county of Norfolk. Agatha Christie’s Poirot could find adventure in the rivers of Egypt or on a railway through Euro-Asia, but Alan Hunter’s master detective vacationed in East Anglia. Following bombing raids over wartime London, frequent executions in Tudor duchies and a destructive 11-year rule of an English Republic; C.J. Sampson based their own historical crime novel, Tombland, in Norwich.
Norwich, to the eye of its beholders, doesn’t present as much grandeur as the rues of Paris, or feel like the imperial-modern goliath of central London. It is quiet, some might see it as peaceful, but doesn’t conceive the same Iberian fairness as Catalonia or the Algarve. It’s elegant, but only hints at the scenes of a pristine Dutch village with some of their pastel-coloured river houses besides the Wensum. Its temperature can rise, but not to the same heights of the Neapolitan coast. Its winters can be cold but can’t compare to the dark that clouds Reykjavik or Stockholm. It is a stereotypical rural county, and so, what have the open eyes of crime writers found that beckons them to its main city?
For his first historical crime novel, Martyr, the author Rory Clements connected to his home and history, lifting names from graves in Norwich Cathedral to title his cast of Shakespearian spies. That is how the working women of his fictional Tudor London became a homage to the old merchant traders that built up the city’s industry.
Francis Beeding (a pen name of two writers) found the county’s connection to the rest of the country so interesting, he wrote two great bestsellers — Death Walks in Eastrepps and The Norwich Victim — that combined the simplicity of the Norfolk lifestyle with the wild adventures of serial killers.
In broader scopes of design, S.T Haymon wrote and plotted the fictional city of Angleby based on her knowledge of Norwich. Having already written several books on East Anglian history, Haymon navigates through a map of fictional landmarks, such as the village of Mauthen Barbary in The Death of a Pregnant Virgin and the Brutalist fixtures of Bullen Hall in Stately Homicide. One could see the fixtures of the real city hall, newly built by the time of the books publishing, escaping the prose before curator Chaz Shelden is pushed from its Lion-mounted windows into a moat of eels.
Evidently there is an appeal to the city’s quaintness and isolation from Britain’s major capitals. From the historical past to the early-modern United Kingdom, we can see the deathly allure. It falls in line with Cabot Cove from Murder She Wrote, the county Midsomer from Midsomer Murders, and (a personal favourite) Amity Island from Jaws. It fits perfectly as the ancient foundation turned to havoc by one interloping act.
Norwich could be classified as a ‘nowhere’ land which amplifies the scale of one’s crime. Whilst being a city with so much rich potential to explore, it has been reckoned as an intellectual niche for crime writers. Read these aforementioned stories and you will see no greater testament to how Norwich is a gem for the crime writer to mine.
Finley Little was born in Worcester, England and is currently living in Norwich. He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing and is working on self-publishing several short stories. You can find him on his Instagram account @Fictioncanbestranger
David Peace is probably most well-known for The Red Riding Quartet – a four-novel chronicle based on the decade prior to 1984 when the Yorkshire Ripper, corruption and hyper inequalities ravaged the hinterland of the Pennines. It was made into multi-award winning TV drama and broke the acting careers of Andrew Garfield and Rebecca Hall. But his other novels are equal literary giants: GB84 recovers the undeclared civil war following years of high inflation and the breaking of the unions’ power and industry – and the communities which built the UK. There’s the two histories on football legends, Red or Dead and The Damned United, and Patient X, the meditation on Japanese short story writer, Ryunosuke Atukagawa followed by the Tokyo Trilogy: Tokyo Year Zero, Occupied City and, most recently, Tokyo Redux.
Not only does Peace’s work span decades, cultures and literary techniques, he repeats his intense process of production time and again to create polyphonic tomes. Undaunted by raw unfiltered detail, he focuses on the most culturally relevant detail (Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Soviet food boxes full of, as I recall, revolting spam and canned apple, brown dust masquerading as coffee – yes, starvation will make you stoop that low) and patterns, rather than literal fact. Peace seems to be creating a song from the noise. Some feel frustrated by a crime novel with no resolution, but the neat ending is not Peace’s aim. It’s not resolution but the deconstruction of myth, allowing the reader to see the processes of crime within time and place. Peace’s disassembling of history is fearless: nothing is sacred but truth.
In a time of overblown soundbites and memes, his paragraph-free prose of pattern, rhythm and voice create an intimate link with the reader. Reading Peace’s novels is like a meditation or litany; it’s not so much the content you remember, but the steady pattern, the steady removal of artifice. While there is a whole subgenre of Ripper lit, none produce the scorching analysis, at once panoramic and microscopic, of Peace’s Quartet. He is the conductor of this polyphony – and it is a polyphony, an entirely new sound made up of many different sounds – which has such a visceral impact on the reader. The resolution, if there is one, is finally seeing a thing for what it is.
Peace grew up in the North of England in the 1970s, when the UK music press was the forge for a new critical culture, where readers could engage in ideas as diverse as comics, cult films, new musical forms and radical underground politics. Music, particularly the ‘press’ that introduced it, created an alternative collective cultural common made up of an intricate network of news bulletins, lyrics, fanzines, rival weeklies and monthlies such as NME, Melody Maker, Record Mirror. It was always polyphonic and formed the conversation which nourished and built up an entire culture as well as subcultures. Music is not that anymore, commodification having removed that liminal space music provided. Music is no longer the soundtrack of the twenty first century; crime is. We understand ourselves through crime – not music – now.
And Peace gets this. From the rhythmic ‘ton-ton’ in his Tokyo novels, the repetitions, and rhymes in GB84 and Red Riding, the patterns and refrains, his novels are curated like albums. It is this talent for obsessive cultural detail and rhythm which allows him to recreate news events from the past, handling time like a camera: panning out, zooming in, cutting across, reframing, cutting. These techniques become a moral filter for undigested fragments of history leaving the true patterns and rhythms of ‘what went wrong’. His novels occupy that haunted space previously occupied by music journalism of the 1970s-80s, a place that is curious, in stark defiance of its context, that creates perspective, stranded between the past and an unreachable future.
The paradox of Peace’s unresolved crime fiction is that its effect on the reader is surprisingly calming. It shouldn’t be but there is no one left to hate. Like an expert watchmaker, Peace carefully dismantles time in such a way that the reader can finally see it, and themselves, clearly. Crime fiction should entertain but, if it doesn’t also bring insight, it’s just fodder for the same ghoulish appetites mainstream media serves. Crime fiction goes where the true crime documentary can never go: the collective cultural subconscious, pulling at threads and nuances abandoned as flotsam, enabling the reader to make connections and see the whole through the specific. If more people in the UK had read GB84 instead of The Da Vinci Code, we would not be reliving it now. If more people in Japan had read Tokyo Redux, maybe the events of this summer need never have happened.
Reading a David Peace novel feels sacred, a space where you can retreat into some dark, quiet place to examine indignities. Many crime novels are page-turners, but few resonate on such a deep level. Peace is Dickens for our times of crime.
It was such a privilege to interview him for Noirwich 2022 and ask him about his process.
NB: How long does your research take and how do you fit your writing round it?
DP: At one time, I would have said it was roughly a year of research and a year of writing – though it was never quite as clear cut as that – but the research now seems to just take longer and longer. Tokyo Redux, in terms of both research and writing, took over ten years, and went through three very different drafts, but it was also interrupted by writing Red or Dead and Patient X (though that book had been ongoing for some time). But as I’m researching, characters and scenes are coming to mind from the material I am researching, and so there are notebooks of both research and of writing and, at some point, hopefully, the writing just takes over from the research. Not to be too pretentious, or mystical about it, but the research is ‘the key to the door’, and at some point, the research enables me to step through that door into the world – the time and the place – I want to write about.
NB: You studied Japanese short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa and it is clear structure and repetition is an important technique of yours. To what extent do you think Japanese writers have allowed you to develop the uniquely intricate yet sturdy structures of your historical crime fiction?
DP: Japanese literature was first and foremost a way to help me try to learn about the country I was (and still am) living in. I was always fascinated by the history of Tokyo, in particular, and then, as I began what became the Tokyo Trilogy, novels, poetry, plays – along with music and film – became a way to learn about, and try to ‘imagine’ post-war Tokyo; keys to the doors again. In particular, Kafū Nagai, Osamu Dazai and Ango Sakaguchi were very influential in the writing of Tokyo Year Zero and Akutagawa, too; a quote from Akutagawa starts Tokyo Year Zero, the structure of his short story ‘In a Grove’ suggested the structure for Occupied City, and the character of Kuroda Roman in Tokyo Redux echoes traits of Akutagawa himself. I also read and re-read a lot of Japanese crime fiction, too: classics such Edogawa Rampo, Seishi Yokomizo and Seichō Matsumoto, but also more recent writers such as Natsuo Kirino, Hideo Yokoyama and Kaoru Takamura. And so I am sure the influence of many, many Japanese writers is present in my writing.
NB: In the light of the recent shooting of Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe, do you think the Tokyo Trilogy could one day become a quartet, like Red Riding?
DP: Well, originally, it was going to be a quartet, and I would like to write about Japan again, at some point. But in many ways, the shooting of the former PM Abe is very much connected to the events and history covered in Tokyo Redux; the roots of this killing go back to Abe’s grandfather and his links with the Unification Church, the CIA and various Japanese right-wing groups and fixers, all of which were collaborating in trying to halt the post-war rise of Communism within Japan.
NB: All your novels are liminal, on the edge of becoming something else. What do you think that ‘something else’ will be in our current myopic times? Are there any writers you feel are creating a new structural form for historical crime?
DP: I believe crime fiction has the potential, and the obligation and responsibility, to be the great moral literature of our times, seeking to understand why crimes take place in particular times and particular places. And so, I am always seeking to try to better fulfil that potential and obligation. In this quest, I was and still am inspired by Jean-Patrick Manchette, and by Ted Lewis and Derek Raymond, and by Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy. And I am always looking for books and writers who are pushing the boundaries of what “crime fiction” can be, and so, for example, I greatly admire Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk; Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor [and which was recommended to me by Tom Benn who, himself, is pushing the boundaries of crime fiction]; Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth; The Treatment by Michael Nath; Brazilian Psycho by Joe Thomas; and in Japan, Out and Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino; 64 and Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama; and the recently translated Lady Joker by Kaoru Takamura. In short, read a lot, write a lot!
NB: Your ability to create a polyphonic whole out of so many disparate but distinct voices is incredible. How do you find your voice(s)?
DP: That’s very kind of you to say so, Nina, thank you. As I’ve just said above, reading and writing a lot is important. I spend a lot of time ‘practicing’ writing, experimenting, and trying to improve. But, ultimately, I think the voices are born from the research, from stepping through that door, and then just listening, trying to hear and record the voices of the victims, the voices of the dead …
Nina Bhadreshwar is a writer and illustrator, usually doing beauty and music editorials on both sides of the Atlantic. She has been writing crime fiction in secret for decades and has just finished her first crime fiction novel for publishing at UEA.
@ninabhadreshwar (Instagram)
Website: www.bhadpublicity.com
This competition has now closed.
Looking for electrifying new crime fiction reads this summer? Enter the Noirwich + The Crime Vault book bundle giveaway!
In celebration of Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2022, we’ve teamed up with The Crime Vault to gift one lucky winner with ten unmissable crime fiction books.
Sound good to you? To enter the competition, all you have to do is fill out your details via the link below. Your details will only be shared with the University of East Anglia and not passed on to any other parties, unless you have opted-in to their newsletters. Full terms & conditions can be found below.
THIS COMPETITION HAS NOW CLOSED
The Crime Vault is the place to discover great crime and thriller books and ebooks online. They offer recommendations and competitions to win the latest bestsellers and crime classics, plus brand-new titles never before available in the UK. Showcasing exclusive material by internationally bestselling authors alongside thrilling new voices, all these great reads are available to buy through their online retail partners at the touch of a button on their website: www.thecrimevault.com
Follow The Crime Vault on Twitter and Facebook (@TheCrimeVault)
Terms and Conditions
The prize draw (the “Prize Draw”) is open to people aged 18 and over living in the UK who enter their details on the Noirwich competition entry page.
Employees of Noirwich Crime Writing Festival, The Crime Vault, or anyone else connected with the Prize Draw may not enter the Prize Draw.
Entrants into the Prize Draw shall be deemed to have accepted these Terms and Conditions.
Only one entry per person.
Noirwich accepts no responsibility is taken for entries that are lost, delayed, misdirected or incomplete or cannot be delivered or entered for any technical or other reason. Proof of delivery of the entry is not proof of receipt by Noirwich.
The closing date of the Prize Draw is 23:59 on Monday 29 August 2022. Entries received outside this time period will not be considered.
One winner will be chosen from a random draw of entries received in accordance with these Terms and Conditions. The draw will be performed by a random computer process. The draw will take place on Wednesday 31 August 2022.
The winner will receive a bundle of 10 books from The Crime Vault. Book titles are subject to change.
Noirwich accepts no responsibility for any costs associated with the prize and not specifically included in the prize.
The winner will be notified by email on or before Friday 2 September 2022 and must provide an email address. If a winner does not respond to Noirwich within 5 days of being notified by Noirwich, then the winner’s prize will be forfeited and Noirwich shall be entitled to select another winner in accordance with the process described above (and that winner will have to respond to notification of their win within 5 days or else they will also forfeit their prize). If a winner rejects their prize or the entry is invalid or in breach of these Terms and Conditions, the winner’s prize will be forfeited and Noirwich shall be entitled to select another winner.
The prize will be sent to the winner by post.
The prize is non-exchangeable, non-transferable, and is not redeemable for cash or other prizes.
Noirwich shall use and take care of any personal information you supply to it as described in its privacy policy, a copy of which can be seen here, and in accordance with data protection legislation. By entering the Prize Draw, you agree to the collection, retention, usage and distribution of your personal information in order to process and contact you about your Prize Draw entry.
Noirwich reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, this Prize Draw with or without prior notice due to reasons outside its control (including, without limitation, in the case of anticipated, suspected or actual fraud). The decision of Noirwich in all matters under its control is final and binding and no correspondence will be entered in to.
The Prize Draw will be governed by English law and entrants to the Prize Draw submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.
Content warning: murder, death, execution, violence, violence against women, anti-Semitism.
Perhaps you’ve heard from Norwich locals of how aa soldier of the Eighth Hussars named Frank Miles entered The Gardener’s Arms pub on Timber Hill in the June of 1895 and bludgeoned a woman named Millie with a brewer’s bung picker. He then willingly handed himself in to the local police, reasoning his actions as being “provoked by her conduct”. Millie was his wife, the daughter of the Gardener’s landlady, who had estranged from Frank and went to live with her mother. Many of the local papers claimed she was working as a prostitute, servicing the allure the murders at Whitechapel had fostered into the public reader base; but in truth Frank had seen her with another man in passing and come to the pub to confront her on the subject. It is still vague what her “conduct” had been like that night, but Frank soon found his charge for unlawful wounding would (after, eventually, Millie suffered fatally from her injuries) become a trial over murder. On June 19th, a Wednesday, the city Sheriff called for his execution. Even Frank was sure he would hang, but he was saved by an outcry of the people. It was a crime of passion, said the public, perhaps many believed the papers’ claims that Millie was a sex worker who had betrayed her marital oath. Why should poor Frank die? In a letter to his mother, thinking he would soon be meeting an end of a rope, he stated “I did not intend to beforehand, and would now I believe give all the world if it were in my power not to have done it. I hope God will give me grace truly to repent, and forgive me for what I have done.”
He is saved his sentence through the plea of the Home Secretary, who has been informed of his case through a petition of more than 6,000 signatures asking him to intercede and falls to Frank’s side. Instead, Frank served a ten-year sentence in HMP Parkhurst, where he died in 1905. The Gardener’s Arms has always held a second name since, known more famously by the locals as The Murderers.
Then, maybe you know about the martyrdom of William of Norwich. In 1144, a boy who was found to have been brutally murdered in the secluded wood of Mousehold Heath, the body was recognised as a local tanner’s apprentice last seen alive on Holy Tuesday. The religious flare to the boy’s death continued to grow in parts; he was allowed a burial on Easter Monday, became a regular figure in the local parish sermons and, soon, locals were swearing of a ritualistic re-enactment of the crucifixion had taken place.
No investigation ever occurred (at least none that could find the evidence we desire today that could lead to a certain culprit) but the Christian imagery from the written accounts helped point grieving locals to their Jewish communities. William’s uncle, a priest for the synod, demanded a trial of Norwich’s Jews and was prepared to instigate the judicial functions of the times; a trial by ordeal. Could the community hold a hot iron for an allotted time or dig out a stone from boiling water, and the injuries they acquired be healed in three days, they were innocent. If the marks were deemed not to have been healed, they were guilty. This would have been a large feat for an entire Jewish community to participate in and is labelled by historians as the first known accusation of the “blood libel”, the antisemitic accusation that Jews practiced ritual murder. This trial never took place. Trying to stop further bloodshed, the Sheriff of Norwich intervened to offer protection to the Jewish community. And without a killer, the case grew in interest. Thomas of Monmouth would write a seven-volume epic on the event which blamed a secret cabal of Jews in the French city of Narbonne of organising a European-wide plot of murders. This story read today is bizarre, outlandish, fabricated and disgusting. Two years on from William’s death, a Jewish man would be murdered in the city, but again no one was ever brought to justice. Years went on and the local clergy tried to build a cult of personality around the demise, trying to sanctify William as a saint but never reaching the levels of hysteria that could solidify this belief. Some modern accounts even accuse the clergy of murdering William themselves as a way to build a case against the growing Jewish populace. Or maybe it was a lone killer with no religious motive at all. Or an accident that occurred on the Mousehold that was misinterpreted as murder. Poor William… he would never leave that heath alive.
And if you know all that, you might just remember the ten days when a gangster came to the city to wait for death. On the 21st September 2000 a frail half-of-a-man would check in to room number 4 of the Town House Hotel. It hadn’t been a long trip, he had only come indirectly from Wayland Prison, where he had spent the last three years before being released on compassionate grounds. In fact, this person hadn’t been a free man since 1969, when the courts sentenced him to a thirty year minimum incarceration alongside a gang of companions linked to a string of violent acts and multiple murders. They had been enforcers, nightclub owners, racketeers, ex-soldiers, blackmailers and criminals of the worst reputation to Scotland yard. Two of the sentenced were his brothers.
The final getaway had been planned by the man’s wife, Roberta, who had picked the spot for its locality to the River Wensum, a perfect view when having a pint in the sun. She decided to ask the landlord the more-than-simple question, “how would you feel about Reggie Kray staying here?” Booked specially was the hotel’s couple suite, a popular choice for newly-weds, with the room focused around a four-poster hardwood bed in the centre. Mr Kray was not a healthy man and spent much of his time in this bed in drug-dulled agony. Not long after the stay began, the press had found him and encircled the hotel. Old friends from the East End of London travelled to see the newly free crime lord now fatally afflicted by his bowel cancer. He was no longer the tough boxer-built presence he and his twin brother had been feared for, fatally decrepit at 66 he couldn’t impose he same enigmatic persona that had built his popularity. Reporters were kept away, camped outside to wait for the inevitable. And by 30th September the killer of Jack “the Hat” McVite, one half of the twin rulers of the East End, succumbed in a four-poster bed in room number 4. To prevent the news getting out, Kray’s body was hidden in the landlord’s apartment whilst a distraction could be made, at which point the body was wheeled out into an ambulance. Even after the corpse had been removed, the morbid would rent the room specifically for its status as the abode where Reggie Kray died.
Perhaps you know these local natters, perhaps not. Perhaps their factuality allures you to them, but there are so many similar stories, and never a lack of crimes in the nearby world. But one case in a large police file of stories rarely has the subtle allure to become something of a legend. You might have heard of how Mary Anne Wright poisoned her husband and her father at Wells-next-the-Sea but was stayed her execution by a mysterious pregnancy. You could have been told of how James Bloomfield Rush, who was hung in 1849 for the murder of his landlords at Stanfield Hall, attended by a crowd of 20,000 which included the author, Charles Dickens. Did you know of the 1645 witch trials that hanged five women for colluding with the forces of darkness? Or the body snatchers of St Nicholas’ Church Yarmouth who set up a trading route of the dead with the universities in London? So shows the dark sides of the City of Stories, an old city which has housed all kinds before. Murderers, thieves, criminals perhaps a cult or two. This is the influence of the crime writer, the murder historian, the journalist, the keenly intrigued. It can be found in every city in Britain and around the world if your able to find the right narrator. And there’s many a voice in the City of Stories that’s just that…
Finley Little was born in Worcester, England and is currently living in Norwich. He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing and is working on self-publishing several short stories. You can find him on his Instagram account @Fictioncanbestranger
Mary Paulson-Ellis is the award-winning author of The Other Mrs Walker (Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year), The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing and Emily Noble’s Disgrace.
Ahead of her Festival workshop on using history and memory in your fiction, she has provided five top tips on embarking into the dark heart of crime fiction.
Crime is an elastic genre, it takes all comers, from Patricia Highsmith to Alexander McCall Smith, from Daphne du Maurier to Barbara Vine. So rather than putting yourself in a box before you begin – be that police procedural, cosy crime, domestic noir or any other of an ever-expanding milieu – concentrate instead on exploring whatever crimes and misdemeanours spark your imagination in your own distinctive way. Once your work is done, like Cinderella you can fit your foot to the appropriate shoe. Or make a new one if it doesn’t fit at all.
We’ve all heard the acronym, KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. But while simplicity can be your friend when writing – stripped down prose for example, or a neatly executed plot – sometimes it is also the enemy of the long form. Crime in real life is never black and white, so it shouldn’t be on the page either. Whether it’s complexity of theme, of character motivation, or even dialogue (where everything that really matters lies beneath the words actually being spoken), take courage and embrace the grey.
Most of us have the luxury of writing from a place of safety, be that a kitchen table or a favourite coffee shop. But inside, our heads teem with worst-case scenarios. The loss of a loved one, perhaps, or the horror of a violent death, even the terror of the blank page. Imagine placing all that fear and its resultant anxieties into the hands of your protagonist? Suddenly the dark abyss becomes a font of possibilities. Stand with them on the edge and look down. Now give them a push, see how far they might fall.
William Faulkner’s famous saying, ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past’, is the perfect key to writing rich, authentic crime fiction. Your characters might try to hide from their past, or struggle to overcome it, but like the darkest shadows of the imagination, it will always be there. Whether it’s about atoning for past wrong deeds, or grappling with the shifts in law, investigative practices and social attitudes that open new opportunities for justice, the past is a weapon and you can wield it to considerable effect.
A great premise can be electrifying, getting the reader to turn those pages fast. But ultimately it is a hollow experience if the characters playing it out are subservient to the plot. The Queen of Crime, Val McDermid says that writing crime fiction is like constructing a three-legged stool: it requires plot, setting and character to work. Take one away and the rest fall. But the best plots begin and end with character. And the richest most authentic settings are characters in their own right. So think of your protagonist as an onion and begin to peel away their layers. Once you get to the sliver of silver at their core, then your writing will fly.
Sunday 12 September, 10am – 12noon or 2 – 4pm BST, Online, £35
Times bestselling novelist Mary Paulson-Ellis is known for her dark, atmospheric dual-timeline detective novels set in Edinburgh. Join her for an informal, interactive online workshop exploring the ways that memory and history can be used to haunt the present in your crime story.
A brilliant opportunity for insight and advice from the award-winning author of The Other Mrs Walker (Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year), The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing and Emily Noble’s Disgrace.
This online workshop will take place online via Zoom. Instructions will be sent to you a few days in advance.
Want to stay ahead of the crowd with the latest crime fiction reads? Looking for electrifying new books that keep your eyes glued to the page? Enter the Noirwich x The Crime Vault book bundle giveaway!
In celebration of Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2021, we’ve teamed up with The Crime Vault to gift one lucky winner with ten unmissable crime fiction books.
Sound good to you? To enter the competition, all you have to do is fill out your details via the form below. Your details will only be shared with the National Centre for Writing and not passed on to any other parties, unless you have opted-in to their newsletters. Full terms & conditions can be found below.
This competition is now closed.
The Crime Vault is the place to discover great crime and thriller books and ebooks online. They offer recommendations and competitions to win the latest bestsellers and crime classics, plus brand-new titles never before available in the UK. Showcasing exclusive material by internationally bestselling authors alongside thrilling new voices, all these great reads are available to buy through their online retail partners at the touch of a button on their website: www.thecrimevault.com
Terms and Conditions
Internationally acclaimed writer Megan Abbott (‘A legend for good reason’ – The Washington Post) will deliver the 2021 Noirwich Crime Writing Festival Lecture, it has been revealed today.
Abbott, the bestselling and award-winning author of The Turnout and Give Me Your Hand, frequently explores the threat of violence at the centre of women’s lives. Her highly-anticipated, original festival commission will focus on adaptation and crime writing in the era of Netflix and HBO. Previous Noirwich Lectures include Attica Locke on colonialism and theft, George Alagiah on environmental destruction, Val McDermid on gender and violence, and Arne Dahl on crime and class.
Now in its eighth year Noirwich is a crime writing festival that interrogates the way we live now through this rich and multidimensional genre. Known for its innovative programming, the Festival is delivered by the National Centre for Writing and the University of East Anglia (UEA). The 2021 Festival will be a hybrid programme with in-person creative writing workshops at Dragon Hall, home of National Centre for Writing, as well as free online events to extend the reach to international audiences.
Joining Abbott on the top bill are David Peace (Red Riding Quartet, The Damned Utd and the Tokyo Trilogy) and Korean American novelist Steph Cha who won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for her crime fiction novel Your House Will Pay. The programme will also include a showcase of the freshest new voices in crime writing from UEA’s MA programme and a celebration of over 50 years of creative writing at the university. Further programme announcements will be made in the coming weeks.
Peggy Hughes, Programme Director, National Centre for Writing says:
‘This year’s Noirwich programme blends international crime writing with home-grown talents, workshops for aspiring crime writers and conversations with masters of the form. David Peace, Steph Cha and Megan Abbott will be joined by UEA alumni Femi Kayode and Cat Ward among many others in a festival programme that gets under the bonnet and spies through the magnifying glass on this most popular, imaginative and dexterous of genres.’
Dr Nathan Ashman, Lecturer in Crime Writing at the UEA, says:
‘Noirwich returns this year with a thrilling line-up of international and UK-based writers operating at the very cutting edge of their craft. Alongside a headline lecture from Edgar Award winning novelist and screen writer Megan Abbott, the festival will feature an exciting array of workshops, discussions, and events, including conversations with Steph Cha, celebrated author of the explosive and suspenseful 2019 thriller Your House Will Pay, and David Peace, an award-winning British crime writer and author of the acclaimed Red Reding Quartet and Tokyo Trilogy. It is an exciting and dynamic festival programme.’
The eighth Noirwich Crime Writing Festival will take place from 9 – 12 September 2021. All events, (excluding the workshops) are free, however booking is essential. For programme and ticket updates, see noirwich.co.uk and follow @NOIRwichFest and @WritersCentre on Twitter.
Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2021 is sponsored by The Crime Vault, the crime/thriller community of Little, Brown. With support from Arts Council England and Jarrold.
Below is an extract from Swimming in the Dark (Upstart Press, 2014) by Paddy Richardson, which was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Award. You can order a copy of the novel here.
She can see the river now, a blue-green snake beneath the road.
Always there was the river. Rushing in after school, hauling on togs and running, leaping off the rocks, churning through the water. They’d be down there hours in the summer. The smell of thyme, like eucalyptus except fainter, sweeter. The grey-blue colour of it, the feel of it scratching her bare legs. The way the soles of their feet toughened up, turned into leather in the summer months. Sometimes Mum came down to find them, baby Serena under one arm, a packet of fish and chips under the other. Thursday was Benefit Day. Fish and chips, maybe ice cream. Mum’s box of wine.
If it hadn’t been for the men, it could’ve been all right.
It could’ve been all right but it wasn’t.
Did you ever wonder why? Ever wonder why I left the way I did? Ever wonder how I was getting on in Dunedin with no one to help me, no one that I knew? Did you ever wonder if I was scared?
She’s tired but she’ll keep on driving. Not long to go. Roxburgh, now. The wide main street with the churches, the pubs. Not long. It’s getting towards the end of the day and the sun’s lowering, bright and glaring on the windscreen. Past the dam, and she’s climbing now, taking the corners gently. She’s winding downwards. On the last stretch.
When she lived here Alex was the world. Everyone knew who was important, who owned the businesses on the main street, who lived in the big houses. Alex was the world and if you were important you could do what you liked. If you were important you could take someone little and stamp them out flat.
Nearly there and she’s still scared. Scared of going back. When she left she wasn’t going back. No matter what happened, she wasn’t ever going back. Now she has to. No choice.
Still, there’s nowhere else like this; the burnt, golden land, the rocks like great looming ruins glinting silver in the evening sun. Fruitlands, with the crumbling stone buildings beside the road, the pine trees jutting out of sand and rock, the houses dotted up on the rise of hill and there, at last, the bridge.
That bridge was her last memory of the place. Getting up in the early morning, pulling on her jeans and T-shirt, grabbing her jacket. Taking her bag and moving slowly and silently through the house, turning the door-handle, slipping through and easing the door shut behind her. She pulled the hood of her jacket up over her head, wove her way through town, keeping away from the main streets. Along the river, then up onto the bridge. She walked across it, her head down, too afraid to look up.
She was over the bridge, walking to the top of the rise when she heard the whine of a truck easing into a lower gear. She put out her thumb.
Paddy Richardson is the author of two collections of short stories, Choices and If We Were Lebanese and seven novels, The Company of a Daughter, A Year to Learn a Woman, Hunting Blind, Traces of Red, Cross Fingers, Swimming in the Dark and Through the Lonesome Dark. Traces of Red and Cross Fingers were long-listed for the Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Award and Hunting Blind and Swimming in the Dark were short listed. Four of her novels have been published overseas, A Year to Learn a Woman, Hunting Blind and Traces of Reds have been translated and published by Droemer Publishing, Germany, and Swimming in the Dark by Macmillan, Australia. Through the Lonesome Dark was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Novel Award and longlisted for The Dublin International Literature Award.
Paddy has been awarded Creative New Zealand Awards, the University of Otago Burns Fellowship, the Beatson Fellowship and the James Wallace Arts Trust Residency Award. She has been a guest at many writing festivals and was one of the New Zealand writer representatives at both the Leipzig and Frankfurt Book Fairs in 2012 when New Zealand was the guest of honour. In 2019, she was awarded the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington where she spent six months writing and researching her latest novel to be published in 2021.
Paddy lives in a beautiful part of our world, on the Otago Peninsula in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she swims, walks, reads and works as a full-time writer.
Paddy is a UNESCO Virtual Writer in Residence at the 2020 Festival.
Here, Noirwich UNESCO Virtual Writer in Residence Paddy Richardson reflects on her home city of Dunedin in New Zealand, and its relationship with writing and crime fiction.
On the globe, our little country, New Zealand; three narrow islands at the end of the world and Dunedin, there, right down the end.
Dunedin is a place of hills, trees and harbour, the central city spreading towards the enclosing hills, the houses tucked in amongst them. Out on the peninsula, the albatross soar, the seals bask on rocks. On clear days the sea sparkles, on others the mist comes in, a soft flowing veil of grey. Our buildings are a mix of grand Victorian and semi-modern, the beautiful stone buildings beside the Leith River which form the oldest part of the university, the grand railway station, the now disused prison buildings, gothic and harsh, once the scene of the only hanging of a woman in New Zealand.
Dunedin, at one time the wealthiest city in the country after gold was discovered nearby, has a chequered history of grandeur, wealth and lofty hopes. We are the only city to have castles, two of them in fact, now serving as shrines to the men who wanted to implant European opulence in this land. One is now a crumbling ruin whereas the other has been coaxed over years into its past splendour. But while it has been made beautiful again, Larnach Castle is a place of bygone scandals, secrets, deaths and ruin. If you slide past the black curtain into the third wife, Constance’s, boudoir, you feel a shiver in the atmosphere; rigid respectability mixed with disappointment, loss and heartbreak.
Dunedin is a writers’ city. The Octagon, placed in the centre of our main streets, is presided over by Robbie Burns’ statue and many of the paving stones are embossed with writing from our most famous writers, Janet Frame, Charles Brasch, Dan Davin, James K. Baxter. The University of Otago Burns Fellowship, a year’s residency for writers, means that poets, playwrights, novelists come and go in this city leaving their mark.
There is atmosphere and inspiration in our history, our buildings, our breathtakingly beautiful landscape and mood-changing climate. Over the past years, crime fiction has flourished in New Zealand. Here in Dunedin, Vanda Symon’s Sam Shephard series gives us a sassy young female Dunedin police officer who takes the reader into what Vanda sees as ‘a wonderful mix of moody, gothic architecture and happily grubby and tired modern buildings amongst a diverse and off-beat population.’ Writer, Jane Woodham says ‘it was easy to set my first novel Twister in Dunedin as the city’s gothic architecture and sometimes morose weather helps to create the grim atmosphere we have come to expect in a crime novel’. Finn Bell also uses Dunedin and the far south as settings for his award-winning crime fiction novels whereas Liam McIlvanney recalls his home, Scotland, for inspiration-entirely fitting within a city often referred to as the Edinburgh of the South. Maxine Alterio, one of Dunedin’s best-known writers, has also veered into suspense fiction with her latest novel The Gulf Between set in and near Dunedin and in Italy.
As for me, Dunedin, continues to be the city where I love to write. My windows look across the harbour. I watch as the words take shape.
Paddy Richardson is the author of two collections of short stories, Choices and If We Were Lebanese and seven novels, The Company of a Daughter, A Year to Learn a Woman, Hunting Blind, Traces of Red, Cross Fingers, Swimming in the Dark and Through the Lonesome Dark. Traces of Red and Cross Fingers were long-listed for the Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Award and Hunting Blind and Swimming in the Dark were short listed. Four of her novels have been published overseas, A Year to Learn a Woman, Hunting Blind and Traces of Reds have been translated and published by Droemer Publishing, Germany, and Swimming in the Dark by Macmillan, Australia. Through the Lonesome Dark was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Novel Award and longlisted for The Dublin International Literature Award.
Paddy has been awarded Creative New Zealand Awards, the University of Otago Burns Fellowship, the Beatson Fellowship and the James Wallace Arts Trust Residency Award. She has been a guest at many writing festivals and was one of the New Zealand writer representatives at both the Leipzig and Frankfurt Book Fairs in 2012 when New Zealand was the guest of honour. In 2019, she was awarded the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington where she spent six months writing and researching her latest novel to be published in 2021.
Paddy lives in a beautiful part of our world, on the Otago Peninsula in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she swims, walks, reads and works as a full-time writer.
Paddy is a UNESCO Virtual Writer in Residence at the 2020 Festival.
Has there ever been a time when True Crime – as opposed to the fictional version – has had such a high profile? Whether in television documentaries or podcasts, accounts of famous murders or heists are never absent from the airwaves. True Crime books, meanwhile, tend to fall into two different categories. There are the memoirs of the protagonists – criminals, detectives, victims, lawyers – and there are the works of writers, reporters and historians. It’s hard – very hard – to say what the best ones are in two such crowded fields.
Of the latter category, two of the deservedly best-known are, of course, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn. The former explores the story behind the murders of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959 by two ex-cons, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The latter is about Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and an examination both of his character and of the bungled police investigation that allowed him to carry on killing. Of the more than fifty books about or by the Kray twins, John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence remains the best, not least because of the remarkable access he had to the twins at the time when they were still busy posing for David Bailey photos.
Putting our fascination with killers into context is Judith Flanders’s wonderful book, The Invention of Murder, which explains how Britain as a nation became intrigued by criminality and gore in Victorian times. And the potential pitfalls of the true crime genre are brilliantly highlighted by Janet Malcolm in her book, The Journalist and the Murderer. It opens with a famously provocative sentence: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’
Most professional criminals are men but Gone Shopping by Lorraine Gamman tells the story of Shirley Pitts, a shoplifter who operated in the 1950s and 1960s. When she died in 1992, she was buried in a £5,000 Zandra Rhodes dress that she did not buy over the counter. Above her grave was a floral tribute in the shape of a Harrods shopping bag and the legend ‘Gone Shopping’, hence the title.
Of books by protagonists, these by former criminals stand out: Gentleman Thief by the late cat burglar, Peter Scott, who stole Sophia Loren’s diamonds in the 1960s. Scott ruefully admits that although he was described as a ‘master-criminal’ in fact ‘a master idiot would have been a better description.’ A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun by Noel ‘Razor’ Smith is, unlike too many memoirs of professional criminals, remarkably candid about the pointlessness of choosing bank robbery as a career. He recounts one occasion when he tried to hold up a newsagent’s with a Luger pistol and was told by its Ugandan-Asian proprietor, with commendable sang-froid, ‘Your gun is unloaded – you are minus the magazine. And you swear far too much for such a young man.’ Smith bought a Mars Bar instead and told him to keep the change.
Of other memoirs, I would add two thoughtful books: Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom and Erwin James’s Redeemable. The former is by the ex-Glasgow-hardman-turned-artist, the latter by Erwin James, who was jailed for life for two murders in 1984 and tells his remarkable story with commendable frankness and introspection.
Police memoirs – like criminal memoirs – can sometimes be rather unreflective and self-aggrandising. Two recent books that are neither of those things, are Good Cop, Bad War by Neil Woods and Graham Satchwell’s An Inspector Recalls. The former is an account of the life of an undercover drugs squad cop who is now an advocate of changing the drugs laws. As he puts it: ‘fighting to end the War on Drugs will do more to harm the gangsters than anything I ever accomplished as a cop.’ An Inspector Recalls is a very honest account of life as a detective with the British Transport Police.
Books by those who have been victims of crime are much rarer; we remember the names of the murderers but rarely of those murdered or attacked. The serial killers, Fred and Rose West, prompted many interesting books, including Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing, Howard Sounes’s Fred & Rose and Brian Masters’s She Must Have Known. But one of the most revealing is by Caroline Roberts, who was 16 when she was attacked by the Wests but managed to escape. Years later in the trial of Rose West, she bravely gave evidence on behalf of ‘all those girls who didn’t make it”. Her account of what she suffered and her sometimes grim experiences at the hands of the press is equally poignant.
Duncan Campbell has been writing about crime for nearly half a century. He was the crime correspondent of the Guardian and chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association. He has written extensively on the subject of crime for various publications, including Guardian, Observer, Esquire, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Radio Times and Oldie. He has written four other books on crime: That Was Business, This Is Personal; A Stranger and Afraid; If It Bleeds and We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain. Duncan was the first presenter of BBC Radio Five Live’s Crime Desk and the winner of the Bar Council newspaper journalist of the year award. He has appeared in numerous documentaries about crime and was the consultant on the 2018 film about the Hatton Garden burglary, which was partly based on an article he wrote about the case for the Guardian. Underworld, the definitive history of Britain’s organised crime is published by Penguin.
Duncan is leading an online true crime writing workshop on Saturday 12 September at 10am and 2pm BST. Find out more below.
Anyone else struggling with a book buying obsession? Got a weekend getaway coming up and need some reading to bring with you? We’ve got you covered!
To celebrate this year’s Noirwich Crime Writing Festival which is taking place online for the very first time, we’ve teamed up with The Crime Vault to gift one lucky winner with a bundle of ten of the hottest crime writing reads of the summer.
To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is enter your details via the entry form below. Your details will only be shared with the National Centre for Writing and not passed on to any other parties, unless you have opted-in to their newsletters. Full terms & conditions can be found below.
The competition will close at 11.59pm on Wednesday 2 September 2020.
The Crime Vault is the place to discover great crime and thriller books and ebooks online. They offer recommendations and competitions to win the latest bestsellers and crime classics, plus brand-new titles never before available in the UK. Showcasing exclusive material by internationally bestselling authors alongside thrilling new voices, all these great reads are available to buy through their online retail partners at the touch of a button on their website: www.thecrimevault.com
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Have you planned your Festival experience yet?
We’ve created a handy one-page digital guide to the Festival weekend, with links to each event and details on where they will take place. Click the image below to download it.
This year Noirwich is taking place online and each session can be accessed by a URL link that will be emailed directly to you 24 hours before the start date. Workshop participants will receive further instructions on how to download and use Zoom.
Attica Locke’s writing has explored race, prejudice and the anxieties of Trump’s America. Now, in a specially commissioned lecture, she will uncover the power inequalities inherent in the nation’s favourite genre: crime fiction. Locke, who is also a screenwriter on the acclaimed series Little Fires Everywhere, will deliver the 2020 Noirwich Crime Writing Lecture.
The hard-hitting Noirwich commission is expected to tackle structural inequalities at the individual and global level, with Locke drawing on examples from her own writing including Blackwater Rising, which investigates the enormous power of oil companies. Previous Noirwich lectures include Val McDermid on gender and violence, George Alagiah on environmental destruction and Arne Dahl on crime and class.
The 2020 line-up also includes Oyinkan Braithwaite, the author behind the literary sensation My Sister the Serial Killer, the New York Times best-selling writer Sophie Hannah, investigative journalist and writer Duncan Campbell and Olivier Norek, one of the writers behind the hit French TV series Spiral. The programme will also include a showcase of the freshest new voices in crime writing from UEA’s MA programme and a celebration of 50 years of creative writing at the university.
Henry Sutton, Professor of Creative Writing and Crime Fiction at the UEA, says:
‘Crime writing has always been of the moment – as we adapt to a new virtual world our programme has an added urgency, pertinence and crucially accessibility. These are important voices for a complicated time. We hope Noirwich 2020 will engage new audiences, and create the widest possible community of readers and writers.’
Peggy Hughes, Programme Director, National Centre for Writing says:
‘Crime fiction has never felt so important – for diverting and thrilling readers in huge numbers during these complicated days, but also for exploring the fractures in a society made more divided by this pandemic. We’re really thrilled that Attica Locke will deliver this year’s lecture, and that her words and ideas, and those of many other brilliant participants, will reach an international listenership as we move online. We hope you’ll join us!’
Noirwich Crime Writing Festival will take place from 10 – 13 September 2020. All events are free, however, booking is recommended. Online writing workshops are £35 and booking is essential.
Each year National Centre for Writing and University of East Anglia work together to bring you some of the most talented, exciting and fresh voices in crime writing. Your generous support will help keep this not-for-profit festival going, giving crime writers and readers the space to discover and explore new and great works. Please donate today during checkout, thank you.
Denise Mina is an award-winning Scottish crime writer, playwright and comic book author, and this year joined us for a panel discussion joins us on the pod for a fascinating discussion exploring genre, the notion of high and low art and the power of crime fiction to explore progressive politics.
Steph McKenna is asking the questions. Hosted by Simon Jones, who is getting excited about NaNoWriMo.
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Earlier this year, Denise was selected by National Centre for Writing patron Elif Shafak as one of ten brilliant women writers in the UK. Find out more about the International Literature Showcase here >>
Yrsa was the inaugural UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence at Dragon Hall in September, during Noirwich 2019.
‘Iceland’s crime queen’, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, joins Kate Griffin on the pod to discuss her writing, how she balances being a bestselling author with having a day job – and why she wants to keep the day job – and shifting between crime, horror and children’s literature.
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Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.
Sara Collins blew the audience away with her insight and readings at our First Offenders panel at Noirwich 2019. We caught up with her behind the scenes to delve deeper into her views and experiences of representation in literature.
Writer Sara Collins joins us on the pod to talk about representation in literature – both behind-the-scenes and within stories.
Sara was in town to discuss her debut novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton at the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival.
Hosted by Steph McKenna and Simon Jones.
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The King of Helsinki Crime and the ‘funniest writer in Europe’ Antti Tuomainen joins us on the pod to talk about his books including The Man Who Died and Little Siberia, plus how the crime fiction genre is the perfect engine for telling stories.
Many thanks to the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) for supporting Antti’s visit to the UK.
Meanwhile, Steph and Simon introduce the Early Career Awards, launched TODAY, including the news that we are now running the Desmond Elliott Prize.
We also share the writing prompt from our first drop-in writing session; “Out of the ashes rose…” Fill in the rest by sending us your microfiction responses on Twitter @writerscentre!
Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.
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James Henry is the pen name for James Gurbutt, who has written four Inspector Frost prequels based on the character created by the late R D Wingfield. James’ foray into the world of birdwatching in Suffolk provided the backdrop to his latest crime novel Yellowhammer.
Before I started to write my own crime series, I authored four Inspector Frost prequels, all set in the fictional town of Denton. Having spent several years as a writer inhabiting a landscape created by Frost’s creator, R D Wingfield, I wanted my own series to be rooted in a very clear idea of place. In fact, the main attraction of a different book was to write about an area I knew inside out – not, so to speak, from the outside in. So it was to be Colchester and West Mersea for Inspector Lowry in Blackwater. I would use real street names and real places and I did my research. In the early Eighties, Colchester police station was located on Queen Street and that is where you will find DI Lowry. You’ll also find him, often, in the pub – many of which are still serving; some of which have disappeared.
In the second Lowry novel, place was still important but the idea for the title, Yellowhammer, is the name of the bird I see and hear them as I run through the lanes near where I live in North Essex. The key to this novel is the countryside, and for me yellowhammers are symbolic of the farmlands surrounding Coggeshall and Kelvedon where the book is set. All summer they are there atop of the hedgerows with their distinctive call. Detective Nick Lowry is a birdwatcher, he would know a yellowhammer in a flash, but he would not necessarily understand the bird’s significance to some of the local people – and to know that you will have to read the book.
Join us for a fascinating evening of ‘eco crime’ as Noirwich continues with A Birder Murder! Steve Burrows and James Henry, two acclaimed crime writers with a passion for birdwatching and ornithology will delve into the local landscapes that inspired their novels.
Louise Doughty is an award winning author of nine novels. Her previous bestseller Apple Tree Yard has been adapted into a successful television series for the BBC starring Emily Watson. Doughty completed her MA in Creative Writing at UEA and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from the university. Her latest novel Platform Seven is out now.
Every novel begins twice.
The most obvious beginning is when the author starts to write: a line or a paragraph – some dialogue, a thought, a visual image, perhaps.
The novelist commences writing, the novel begins: not necessarily where it begins, mind you. It might begin a third of the way through, or with a scene that floats around in the chronology of the book before settling, like an errant butterfly, in the place that pleases it best.
My last four books have all begun at the beginning, which does tend to keep things simple. Whatever You Love began with a scene in which the police come to a woman’s door to tell her that her child has been killed in a hit and run accident. Apple Tree Yard opens with a scientist on the witness stand at the Old Bailey, giving evidence in her own trial; Black Water with a man lying awake in a hut in a rural Indonesia, listening to the rain on the roof and convincing himself he is about to be killed.
Platform Seven began for me with a strong image of Peterborough Railway Station on a freezing cold winter’s night, a man entering the station and crossing the covered walkway, shoulders hunched, on his way to take his own life. I knew that the narrator of the novel was going to be the woman observing him do this and I knew that she was also dead but I had not the faintest idea how or why.
But each of these books had another beginning, one that occurred a long time ago, when the seed of an idea was planted, even though I had no idea at that point in my life that I would end up a professional novelist. Platform Seven actually began around thirty-five years before I started writing it.
I had spent the whole of my childhood in the same small town in the East Midlands and when I left to go to university in Leeds, my route home involved changing trains at Peterborough Railway Station. After five years in Leeds, I did the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and the journey back home from Norwich also involved changing trains at Peterborough Railway Station. Following my year at UEA, I moved to London for the rest of my adult life, and as a non-driver my journey back to visit my parents was always – yes, you’ve guessed it – changing trains at Peterborough Railway Station. I spent many a cold winter night there, inadequately dressed and shivery, and my standing joke was that if I had been bad and went to Purgatory when I died, I would find myself trapped on Peterborough Railway Station. Clearly the idea stuck – and I found myself writing a scene from the point of view of a ghost to whom that has happened some three and a half decades after I had first make the joke.
What this means is that we are all carrying multiple potential novels around inside us, sometimes for many years before we even know we can write. They are there, lying in wait, for what? For some impetus or desire to bring them out, accompanied with the technical ability and facility of language to give them expression? Sometimes, they seem to be waiting for a catalyst event, what one friend of mine calls ‘the lightbulb moment’. My joke about Peterborough Railway Station as a metaphor for Purgatory may have been a seed planted in my youth – but if there was a lightbulb moment, it was probably some time around the death of my mother, my last surviving parent, a loss that released me from having to pass through the Station, released me as my ghost, a young woman called Lisa, is released, when the mystery of her death is solved. The novel began then, even though it had begun thirty-five years before. Every novel begins twice.
I wonder what else is dormant, inside, waiting for the catalyst that will give it shape and form.
It’s a mysterious, albeit heartening thought.
Don’t miss Louise Doughty at Noirwich this year for the launch of her latest novel Platform Seven.
Born and bred in south London – and not the Somerset village with which he shares a name – West Camel worked as an editor in higher education and business before turning his attention to the arts and publishing. He has worked as a book and arts journalist, and was editor at Dalkey Archive Press, where he edited the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology, before moving to new press Orenda Books just after its launch. West Camel shares his thoughts on ‘the new noir’ ahead of Noirwich 2019.
Noir seems to have spread across Europe like wildfire in recent years. Wherever I look when attending book events, fairs and conferences, I see a new country pushing its noir titles. And when I’m editing reviews for the European Literature Network and working on The Riveter magazine of European Literature, ‘noir’, ‘noirish’ and even ‘noiresque’ are peppered throughout the copy. I could be forgiven for wondering how so many authors have written so many noir titles in such a short space of time?
The truth is, they didn’t. Spurred by the success of the Nordic countries, whose noir literature kicked off this trend, many publishers, agents and literary organisations in other European countries are now describing their long-established crime and thriller writers as noir. In the UK the proliferation of noir-style festivals – including Noirwich – has meant there are many more opportunities for crime writers to meet their readers. In fact, as I have experienced at Orenda Books, the publisher I work for, noir is one of the principal drivers of the recent and refreshing mass-market interest in translated fiction.
It is, however, too simplistic to see noir just as rebranded crime. Noir covers a wider range of sub-genres – psychological and domestic thrillers, detective stories, police procedurals and PI tales all have a place in the shade of its umbrella. What readers do want from any noir title, though, is a certain sinister quality – in both setting and character – and a pervading sombre tone, one that no catharsis is able to lighten; not completely anyway.
With Euro Noir well established, and easily recognised by readers, some noir writers are now experimenting with the genre – seeing how far they can push its boundaries and test their readers’ appetites. One such author is Antti Tuomainen. Crowned the ‘King of Helsinki Noir’, Antti published five extremely dark, extremely serious crime thrillers, including the prize-winning The Healer, and most recently The Mine. Then, in 2016 he published The Man Who Died (Orenda Books published David Hackston’s English translation in 2017), a comic, philosophical, thriller-cum-crime-caper that has strong noir credentials – not least the central premise: the protagonist believes he’s being slowly poisoned, probably by his wife. In its review, The Times presented Antti with another crown: ‘the funniest writer in Europe’.
So can noir really be funny? Antti has since seen great success with another piece of comic noir – Palm Beach, Finland, which offers a similar combination of hilarious criminal mishaps, dark moments, and philosophical introspection. His next novel, Little Siberia (published this autumn in the UK by Orenda Books), I can reliably inform you sees him repeating the same trick. Funny noir is definitely here to stay.
Another Orenda author, Simone Buccholz, is pushing the limits of noir in a different way. Like Antti, Simone had published five crime novels – hers all part of a series. But then, having changed her publisher, she had what she describes as a ‘reset … I stepped back and thought of a new way to write the characters and look at the series’. In Blue Night (published in German in 2016, in Rachel Ward’s English translation in 2018), Simone focused on one of her characters, Chastity Riley, and found a voice for her that took her writing in a new direction: a hard-boiled, poetic, almost avant-garde stream of consciousness that has the darkness of noir and still delivers all the essentials of the police procedural. Blue Night was followed by two more Chastity Riley novels – Beton Rouge (2017/19), and Mexico Street, whichwon this year’s German Crime Fiction Prize, and will be published in the UK next spring.
It is the flexibility of Euro Noir – the variety of genres it can encompass – that makes it ideal for literary ground-breakers like Buccholz and Tuomainen. They can feel comfortable in its dimly lit corners, and come up with new ways to beckon their readers into the darkness.
Don’t miss Simone Buchholz and Antti Tuomainen in conversation at the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival on 14 September. They’ll be discussing the continuing popularity of Euro Noir and dissecting how humour and crime translates. Tickets available now.
Follow West on Twitter @west_camel.
Martin Walker is a prize-winning journalist and the author of the popular Bruno detective series set in the Périgord region of France.
Bruno was still glowing from his morning canter at Pamela’s riding school as he sipped his first coffee of the day at Fauquet’s café and scanned the headlines of Sud Ouest. Balzac, his basset hound, was waiting patiently at Bruno’s feet for his customary portion of croissant when the dog felt rather than heard the vibration of the phone at his master’s belt. Balzac slumped glumly onto his belly and lowered his head onto his paws, knowing that this meant his morning treat was likely to be delayed.
‘Bonjour, Florence,’ said Bruno after checking the caller’s number on the screen. ‘This is an early call. Everything okay with the children?’
‘We’re fine, Bruno, but I’m worried about Claudia. She was really sick last night at a lecture in the castle in Limeuil, but there was no answer when I called just now to see how she was. And her landlady says she never came home.’
Along with several of his friends, Bruno had instantly liked and befriended Claudia, an American student from Yale University working on her doctorate in art history and studying with an eminent local scholar. ‘Maybe she met a boyfriend,’ he suggested.
‘I don’t think there is one, at least not in France. Bruno, she really wasn’t in good shape last night, dizzy and white as a sheet. I wanted to walk her home, but she said she’d be fine, just needed to lie down and rest.’
‘Did you check with the urgences?’
‘No, I have to get the kids to the maternelle.’
‘Okay, I’ll take care of it.’
Bruno ended the call, knowing instantly that he wouldn’t be able to perform his usual morning role, managing the traffic at the town’s nursery school. He called the local fire station – the pompiers also served as the local emergency medical service – to learn that they had not been called out the previous evening. Then he phoned the town’s medical clinic. They also reported nothing unusual. He paid for his coffee and croissant and climbed the steps to the mairie to tell the mayor’s secretary he would be going to Limeuil. Back downstairs, he installed Balzac in the passenger seat of his van and set off past the fire station, past the town’s vineyard and up the long sloping hill that led to the top of one of the prettiest villages in France, and one of the oldest.
Bruno knew there had been an Iron Age hill fort on this site before Julius Caesar’s Roman legions stormed it. They then built their own fortification to command the strategic hilltop that overlooked the point at which the River Vézère flowed into the larger Dordogne. What Florence had called the castle was a modern addition, little more than a century old and erected by a former doctor of the sultan of Morocco who had retired to his native Périgord. He bought the hilltop, ruins of the old medieval fortress and all, and commissioned a new house designed, Bruno assumed, to look like one of the
French Foreign Legion forts in the Moroccan desert. The original white stucco of the walls and battlements was now grey, and the building held the gift shop, café and offices of the team of young gardeners who tended the sprawling hilltop for the town and had turned it into a popular tourist attraction. The castle’s large rooms with their view over the two river valleys were now the local cultural centre, hosting lectures, literary events and occasional art exhibitions.
The previous evening there had been a lecture by a local historian on the archaeology of Limeuil, which Bruno would normally have attended but for the weekly meeting of St Denis’s town council. It had been a routine session, and Bruno’s only role had been to report on the progress of the plans he’d drafted for the free concerts, night markets and fireworks displays that were mounted for the summer tourist season. This role as impresario for civic entertainments gave Bruno huge pleasure. The session had ended early, and after a brief vin d’honneur for a veteran council member who was retiring, Bruno and the mayor had taken him for a convivial dinner at Ivan’s bistro. Bruno had been home and in bed with the latest issue of Archéologie magazine soon after ten and asleep by ten thirty, and looking forward to riding his horse, Hector, at seven the next morning.
Limeuil’s hilltop car park was already full, the cars bearing number plates from the Netherlands, Britain and Germany, although it was April, still early in the season for tourists. Bruno left his van outside the nearby restaurant and followed Balzac up the twisting path into the gardens, not yet open to the public, and asked for David, the bearded young man who ran the place. Bruno found him weeding in an area called the apothecary’s garden, full of medicinal plants and herbs. As always, whatever the weather, David was wearing ancient leather shorts and several layers of T-shirts, and he and Balzac greeted each other like old friends.
‘I haven’t seen anything unusual this morning, but I’ll ask the others,’ David said when Bruno explained the reason for his visit. ‘Do you want us to organize a search for her?’
Bruno nodded. ‘I’m told she was feeling dizzy, so she may have fainted. Were any of the staff at the lecture, someone who saw her leave?’
‘I’ll call a staff meeting, organize a search,’ David said, pulling out the kind of whistle used by sports referees. ‘We’ve got a school group coming in forty minutes, but we should have enough time.’
He blew three quick blasts, and from various spreads of foliage, past the giant sequoia tree and water garden and around the heap of stones that were all that remained of the medieval tower, two young men and two young women emerged with secateurs or spades in their hands. Each put out a forearm for Bruno to shake rather than offer a muddied hand and then bent down to greet Balzac as David explained the reason for his visit.
‘I was at the lecture,’ said Félicité, whom Bruno remembered from his tennis class when she’d been a schoolgirl. ‘I know Claudia and I remember she got up, said something to Florence and left very discreetly not long after the speaker dimmed the lights to start showing slides. Florence said later that Claudia wasn’t feeling well.’
‘What time would that have been?’ Bruno asked.
‘We were all there by seven, and I think the lecture started by seven fifteen. The part with the slides came a few minutes later,’ Félicité said. ‘There was fruit punch before the talk began. Maybe it disagreed with her.’
The search began while Bruno, Balzac at his heels, went down the hill to Madame Darrail’s house, where Claudia had rented a room. Built on a slope so that the entrance from the street seemed to lead into a small, single-storey building, the house once entered revealed a much-larger home. Stairs led to a second, lower floor down the slope of the hill, with the rooftop of another house below. The widow of a man who had run the local canoe-rental centre, Madame Darrail was a dour woman of about sixty with a trim build, dark brown eyes, a sallow skin and iron-grey hair. She spent her summers in the kiosk by the river, taking bookings and money and handing out life jackets while her son, Dominic, ran the canoe business. A native of Limeuil, she was accustomed to walking up and down the steep slopes three or four times a day at a pace that left Bruno breathless. This morning, he felt himself lucky to find her at home.
‘Ah, Bruno, you must have got my message,’ she began, a worried expression on her face that eased into a faint smile as she noticed Balzac and bent down to pet him. ‘About the American girl.’
‘There was no message on my mobile,’ he replied. ‘If you called the landline, I’ll get it later when I get back to the office. But that’s why I’m here. Florence from the collège was worried about Claudia and called my mobile. She said she’d spoken to you.’
‘I last saw Claudia around six yesterday when she got back from work. She’d said she was going out to a lecture, so I’d made some soup and put out some cheese for her, but she said she couldn’t eat a thing. She had cramps, you know, so I made her some thyme tea and she took a pill and felt well enough to go to the lecture. I had an early night and didn’t realize until this morning when Florence called that Claudia hadn’t been back. Her bed wasn’t slept in.’
‘Can I see her room?’ Bruno asked. ‘Is it unusual for her not to come back? Does she have a boyfriend?’
‘First time I’ve known her not to have slept here, not that she’s been with me long. She never spoke of any boyfriend here. But I think there was somebody in America. She used to have his photo sitting next to her bed, but I don’t see it now.’
‘And do you know what pills she was taking?’
Madame Darrail shrugged. ‘There are some medications in her room.’
Madame Darrail lived on the top floor of the house, with a kitchen and dining room to one side of the entrance hall and a living room and her bedroom on the other. Along the hall was a series of framed photographs, one that seemed to be of her wedding, another of an attractive city of white buildings climbing a hillside from a port, which Bruno thought might be Algiers. The next two were of military men, both in parachutists’ uniforms and wearing red berets. One was a stranger, but the other was the unmistakable General Jacques Massu, his tough features slashed by a brisk moustache. He had been a loyal Gaullist from 1940 until his death.
‘Massu,’ Bruno said, pausing and looking at the photo.
‘A great soldier,’ she said. Bruno nodded, although he thought
Massu’s temporary victory in suppressing the Algerian independence fighters had been a classic example of a military victory that was also a strategic defeat. Massu’s use of torture had hardened Algerian resistance while at the same time eroding support in France for the war.
‘And the other soldier?’ he asked.
‘My late father. I left Algeria as a baby with our whole family.’
Bruno nodded again. Something like a million French settlers had left around the time that de Gaulle had negotiated Algerian independence. Madame Darrail moved on to a staircase at the far end of the hall. It led to a lower floor that contained two bedrooms and a separate bathroom. Each bedroom had its own sink.
Claudia’s room had a magnificent view over the Dordogne Valley, and a narrow balcony with just enough room for two folding chairs. The room held a double bed that was neatly made, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a mirror and a small table and chair. A rucksack was under the table, which was piled high with books on art. A smaller pile of paperbacks stood on a bedside table. Postcards of what looked like paintings by Old Masters were sellotaped to every wall.
Tucked into the gap between the mirror and its wooden frame were family photos. Two of them featured a young girl of about nine or ten years old standing between two people, probably her parents. The man was tall, bald and had his hands on the little girl’s shoulders. The woman was plump with fine eyes and a cheerful expression, as if she smiled a lot. Behind them was a large garden with steps leading to an imposing terrace and mansion. Despite its old-fashioned style, the building looked new. Another photo, which seemed to have been taken five or six years later, showed the same girl with the same tall man with a third person clearly cut out of the photo.
On a glass shelf above the sink a cosmetics case was open, and Bruno saw two pharmacist’s containers of yellow plastic and an opened packet of an extra-strength painkiller, an ibuprofen. One container came from a pharmacy in New York City, another from a store in New Haven, Connecticut. Bruno did not recognize the names of the drugs but scribbled down the details. In the wastepaper basket beneath the sink were some used paper tissues and a photo that had been torn in half. Bruno donned a pair of evidence gloves and put the two halves of the photo together. It showed the head and shoulders of a handsome young man holding a tennis racket, with a handwritten note in English that said, ‘All my love to darling Claudia. Ever yours, Jack.’
‘All her clothes are here as you can see. Lovely dresses, Armani and Chanel, but most of the time she seemed to wear jeans and sweatshirts,’ said Madame Darrail, opening the wardrobe. ‘And her lovely silk nightie is under the pillow. It’s a Lanvin. When she’s not out at work she’s working in here on that little computer of hers.’ She looked around quickly and then said in a tone of surprise, ‘Funny, she must have taken it with her.’
Bruno was leafing through the papers on the desk, mostly printouts or photocopies of what seemed like articles in various learned journals in French, English and Italian about the French Renaissance and the art and sculpture of the period. There were piles of handwritten notes on similar topics, each headed by the name of a specific museum or château. A sketch pad contained a series of pencil drawings of Limeuil and its two bridges over the rivers, of the castle and its gardens and several quick sketches of the market in St Denis. They were so good that Bruno recognized two of the people. Claudia was a talented artist. Alongside all the papers was an iPhone, still plugged into its charger, lying on top of a blue American passport.
Bruno picked up the passport and read that Claudia Ursula Muller had been born in Philadelphia and had a French student visa that was valid for two more years. She was twenty-five years old. Her passport showed she had visited Thailand, Singapore and Britain during the past year. In the phone’s case was a small flap that opened to reveal two credit cards. One was a platinum Visa card and the other a black card issued by Muller Investment Trust, of which Bruno had never heard. As Bruno touched the phone screen it came alive with the photo of a white cat staring impassively at the camera. Below it a keyboard of numbers seemed to require him to enter an access code to open the phone, so he put it back down.
‘Did she have a handbag or a purse?’ he asked.
‘I never saw a handbag; she always had that computer case. When she paid the rent, it came from a man’s wallet that she kept in her back pocket. She paid me with a cheque on a French bank account, but I forget which one. Claudia kept some other papers in the wallet, like her driving licence and student card, that sort of thing, but there’s no sign of it here.’
‘Who’s staying in the second bedroom?’ Bruno asked, wondering if the landlady had made a point of prying into her lodgers’ affairs.
‘One of the girls who works in the gardens up the hill, Félicité. She and Claudia are friendly. What do you think has happened to the girl?’
‘She may have been more ill than you thought and collapsed somewhere. The gardeners are looking. But if you’ll let Balzac sniff her nightie, he might be able to track her down.’
Martin Walker will be in conversation with M.J.Carter at the ‘A Taste of Murder: Gourmet Crime’ event at Norwich Crime Writing Festival 2019. Grab a Bloody Mary and take a seat at the chef’s table as we embark on a palatable journey through their gourmet crime books; encountering French café rituals and heinous celebrity chefs along the way. Book tickets here.
Melanie Cook, PR & Marketing Manager, VisitNorwich
It’s curious that even in the 18th century, coffee houses were as popular as ever. Though in those days, they were packed out with men whilst the women did the service.
Today, if you visit the Museum of Norwich at The Bridewell, there is a recreated coffee house exhibit, particularly memorable for the historically-accurate wig you can try on while you’re here.
While the hairpiece may have gone out of fashion, the places we hold dear for our oat milk favourite flat white are as important to us as ever. Whether you want a bit of peace and quiet, a chat, a chinwag or a break with a book, these are my top five favourite places to grab a coffee and drink in the history of this wonderful city.
This beautiful 14th century thatched building is a hidden gem in Norwich, even though it sits proudly on Norwich’s most complete medieval street. Close your eyes and picture a cobbled street with ancient, leaning buildings and you’ll summon a picture pretty close to how Elm Hill looks today. And The Britons Arms is truly inviting. It’s cosy and quaint with a quintessentially English offering of savouries and cakes, all homemade daily. Don’t miss the lush private courtyard garden in good weather.
This is the largest open-air market in the country, and has been in its current space for over 900 years. Recently it has seen an influx of artisan food makers and producers, meaning the hungry (or thirsty!) visitor is never stuck for choice. It’s the place for breakfast or lunch from around the world and a quick stop coffee, especially if you love people watching.
Scandi style chic plus a bakery equals Bread Source. On the cusp of opening its third cafe in Norwich – surely that says it all. And you can’t have a coffee here without trying their signature Cinnamon Bun! Like making the most of your breakfast or brunch experience? You won’t be able to resist the coffee and unlimited toast offer, with at least 6 types of bread which you toast yourself.
The Strangers were a group of Protestant refugee weavers who fled the low countries in the 16th century as a result of religious persecution. They were welcomed in Norwich where they helped create a prosperous textile industry, and where their influence is still felt today. Right in the heart of the Norwich Lanes, sit at the window in Strangers Coffee House – named after neighbouring Strangers Court – and take it easy with an espresso and pecan pie.
Situated in a beautiful building designed by architect George Skipper – a leading Norwich architect of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. This is French style coffee, served in a beautiful brasserie styled by Martin Brudnizki design studio. Order breakfast al fresco and enjoy your hot drink served in a silver coffee pot with complimentary refills. Wear your best Insta outfit here.
Please note, these events took place in 2019.
Indulge in some crime-themed cinema this September with the Film Noir season of Vintage Sundays at Picturehouse Cinemas!
Each Sunday, Cinema City brings classic films back on the big screen where they belong. Starting on 8 September, you can dive into the dark heart of Hollywood with five classics from the likes of Orson Welles and Billy Wilder.
Billy Wilder’s paradigmatic film set the template for the genre when first released in 1944. Insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) schemes the perfect murder with the beautiful wife of one of his clients (Barbara Stanwyck): kill her husband and make off with the insurance money. But Walter’s colleague (Edward G. Robinson) – a shrewd insurance investigator – has a feeling that not all is as it seems with the widow’s claim.
Humphrey Bogart delivers one of his best performances in Nicholas Ray’s hard-boiled, LA-set thriller. Dixon Steele (Bogart), a moody, volatile Hollywood screenwriter who’s had his heyday, is accused of murdering a coat check girl from a showbiz restaurant. Laurel (Gloria Grahame), an actress who lives in Dixon’s apartment complex, provides an alibi for her neighbour when questioned by the police, and the pair start a relationship. But the chief of police is unconvinced of Dixon’s innocence and, after learning of his violent past, Laurel begins to question if she is putting herself in danger by staying with him.
Director Robert Siodmak brings Ernest Hemingway’s gripping short story of robbery and betrayal to the big screen. Two hit men walk into a diner asking for a man called “the Swede” (Burt Lancaster). When the killers find the Swede, he’s expecting them and doesn’t put up a fight. Since the Swede had a life insurance policy, an investigator (Edmond O’Brien), on a hunch, decides to look into the murder. As the Swede’s past is laid bare, it comes to light that he was in love with a beautiful woman (Ava Gardner) who may have lured him into pulling off a bank robbery overseen by another man (Albert Dekker).
Beginning with perhaps the most celebrated tracking shot in history, Orson Welles’s bravura film noir is a shadowy tale of murder, malevolence and police corruption. When a car bomb explodes on the US-Mexican border, Mike Vargas (Heston), a Mexican official investigating drug trafficking, is drawn into the case. Vargas is convinced that American cop Hank Quinlan (Welles) is planting evidence to incriminate the prime suspect, and he becomes obsessed with exposing Quinlan as a rotten apple. Quinlan then seeks revenge by conspiring with gangsters, who terrorise Vargas’s wife Susan (Leigh). Welles gives a stunning performance as a man increasingly depleted of humanity, and his deliriously daring thriller with a dark emotional core is one of the greatest of its genre.
Nicola Rayner is one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction. She has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, The Independent and Time Out Buenos Aires and her debut novel, The Girl Before You, was runner-up in the Cheltenham First Novel Competition in 2018. At First Offenders, Nicola will be joined by a panel of debut writers to discuss finding inspiration, writing an attention-grabbing debut, and their personal stories of getting their big break. Here, Nicola shares her top tips for emerging crime writers.
My mother recently unearthed a drawing from my childhood. It’s a self-portrait. In it, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, aged four, a pen in my hand and a happy smile on my face as I stare at the pages in front of me. I’ve captioned it, “Me doing my book.” It’s taken the intervening 35 years to get “my book” published.
In my day job, I write about dance. I remember watching the ballerina Daria Klimentová receive a National Dance Award in 2012. Jumping for joy, she said: “It’s only taken me 30 years of doing ballet every day to get here.” It reminded me that writing shares a lot in common with dance: it’s about practice and incremental progress. The bulk of the labour is done on one’s own, at the ballet barre, so to speak.
Like all novelists, I’ve always loved reading and there are certain authors I’m completely devoted to. Among contemporary writers these include Kate Atkinson, Maggie O’Farrell, Alice Munro, Julie Myerson and Sarah Waters. As for all-time greats, I’ll always have a huge soft spot for Arthur Conan Doyle, Daphne du Maurier and Dorothy Parker.
My favourite books are both pacy and lyrical. They’re suspense novels, but their writers have a wonderful way with language too. Those were the sorts of books I always aspired to writing. Du Maurier was a particularly big influence in my formative years – not many things come close to the twist in Rebecca (or the cruelty in it too; du Maurier is excellent at cruelty) or the way My Cousin Rachel keeps you guessing right until the last page.
I read that book around 25 years ago and I still think of it almost every day. You’ll find its central question in almost every thriller and certainly every work of domestic noir: can I trust you? Are you who you say you are? It’s a question that hounds my protagonist, Alice, all the way through The Girl Before You. Is her husband telling the truth?
When I was looking for tips on how to start as a writer, my mum used to push me forward, at Christmas drinks parties, to talk to the author Molly Lefebure, the mother of a family friend. Lefebure, a forthright sort of person, used to tell me quite stridently: “If you want to be a writer, WRITE. Writers write.” As a shy teenager, I was daunted by such advice, but I can appreciate the truth of it now. You don’t know what sort of writer you are until you begin.
Similarly, Stephen King in his classic On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft advises just getting on with it – recommending a daily word count that you stick to. It’s a good idea, and can certainly help you progress quickly, but if your life looks anything like mine – i.e. normal, busy – there will be times when you will fall short. All I can add to his and Lefebure’s words of wisdom are: stick at it, keep going back to the barre.
And sooner or later, a story will emerge. Because we all work differently, it might be something you want to plot out carefully or it might be an idea that develops more organically. For me, it was the latter. I wrote The Girl Before You in a laborious, inefficient way over many years, writing in fragments in lunch hours, weekends or on my mobile phone during my commute. It took a long time to come together.
Then, of course, I had to rewrite it. When the initial structure, initially told from five points of view, was too unwieldy, I had to retell the story from the perspective of three women – Alice, who spots on a train the face of a girl, Ruth, who went missing when they were at university together; Ruth’s sister, Naomi; and Kat, Ruth’s best friend at university. Rethinking the story a second time round was possibly even more painful than the first, but I persevered and I was fortunate in that process to have the support of a local writing group – something I would definitely recommend new writers seek out.
I also have my parents to thank for my rather dogged approach. When I was a child, my father, an entrepreneur, kept the famous Calvin Coolidge quotation taped to the inside of his suitcase: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not… Genius will not… Education will not… Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” After he died, my mother adopted his motto for herself.
It took me almost ten years to complete The Girl Before You – more if you count my early attempts at the kitchen table. Considering how long it took me, I feel I should have something more groundbreaking to share with writers who are beginning their journeys, but essentially all I have is: discover what you’re interested in, make a start, find the right support group for you. And then persist.
Nicola Rayner is on the guest panel for First Offenders at Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2019. Discover your next favourite book from our selection of the best debut novels in crime writing and hear from the emerging superstars that write them. Book tickets here>>
Summertime and the living is… easier when you know how to mix up a delicious cocktail! Luckily for you, Big Tom have done the hard work and crafted their own powerful blend of spices and tomato juice so that you can make the ultimate Bloody Mary. Every. Single. Time. As the region’s notorious crime writing festival returns this September 2019, we grilled the expert mixer providers of The Bloody Brunch for their favourite recipe so that you can taste-test to your heart’s content over the summer…
At Big Tom, we like to think vodka should be added according to personal preference. This is why we suggest mixing it according to what tickles your fancy!
But here’s a rough guide for you:
Purchase a combo ticket to The Bloody Brunch and gain access to both Sunday morning events at the National Centre for Writing, Dragon Hall as well as your own complimentary Bloody Mary.
Celebrate your Sunday in style with a complimentary Bloody Mary and a pair of tickets to our Bloody Brunch double-bill, courtesy of Noirwich Crime Writing Festival and The Times and Sunday Times Crime Club.
A firm favourite of the Festival each year; the Bloody Brunch takes place in the beautiful medieval surroundings of Dragon Hall and is the perfect opportunity to sip a cocktail in the sunshine, mingle with like-minded crime fans and experience some of the most exciting and engaging writers at work today.
This year’s Bloody Bunch features the following events:
To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is enter your details on the Noirwich competition entry page. Your details will only be shared with the National Centre for Writing and not passed on to any third parties. Full terms & conditions can be found below.
Don’t want to leave it to chance? Purchase your tickets to the Bloody Brunch here.
The Bloody Brunch is presented by The Times and Sunday Times Crime Club, with support from Big Tom and Ghost Vodka.
Terms and Conditions
1. The prize draw (the “Prize Draw”) is open to people aged 18 and over who enter their details on the Noirwich competition entry page.
2. Employees of the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival, The Times and Sunday Time Crime Club, or anyone else connected with the Prize Draw may not enter the Prize Draw.
3. Entrants into the Prize Draw shall be deemed to have accepted these Terms and Conditions.
4. Only one entry per person.
5. Noirwich accepts no responsibility is taken for entries that are lost, delayed, misdirected or incomplete or cannot be delivered or entered for any technical or other reason. Proof of delivery of the entry is not proof of receipt by Noirwich
6. The closing date of the Prize Draw is 23:59 on Friday 16 August 2019. Entries received outside this time period will not be considered.
7. One winner will be chosen from a random draw of entries received in accordance with these Terms and Conditions. The draw will be performed by a random computer process. The draw will take place on Monday 19 August 2019.
8. The winner will receive two tickets to the Bloody Brunch at Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2019, and two complimentary Bloody Marys at the event.
9. Noirwich accepts no responsibility for any costs associated with the prize and not specifically included in the prize (including, without limitation, travel to and from the event).
10. The winner will be notified by email on or before Tuesday 20 August 2019 and must provide an email address. If a winner does not respond to Noirwich within 5 days of being notified by Noirwich, then the winner’s prize will be forfeited and Noirwich shall be entitled to select another winner in accordance with the process described above (and that winner will have to respond to notification of their win within 5 days or else they will also forfeit their prize). If a winner rejects their prize or the entry is invalid or in breach of these Terms and Conditions, the winner’s prize will be forfeited and Noirwich shall be entitled to select another winner.
11. The prize will be sent to the winner by Noirwich by email.
12. The prize is non-exchangeable, non-transferable, and is not redeemable for cash or other prizes.
13. Noirwich shall use and take care of any personal information you supply to it as described in its privacy policy, a copy of which can be seen here, and in accordance with data protection legislation. By entering the Prize Draw, you agree to the collection, retention, usage and distribution of your personal information in order to process and contact you about your Prize Draw entry.
14. Noirwich reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, this Prize Draw with or without prior notice due to reasons outside its control (including, without limitation, in the case of anticipated, suspected or actual fraud). The decision of Noirwich in all matters under its control is final and binding and no correspondence will be entered into.
15. The Prize Draw will be governed by English law and entrants to the Prize Draw submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.
Now that Noirwich 2019 has been revealed, we thought we’d take a retrospective look back at last year’s festival. If you’ve never been to Noirwich before this will give you a taste of what to expect in September.
2018 was the fifth Noirwich, bringing the region’s largest annual celebration of crime writing back to the city for four days of author discussions, workshops, readings and signings.
The launch event at Jarrold celebrated the 21st anniversary of Nicci French’s career and the finale to the Frieda Klein series. Nicci is in fact a partnership of married writers Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. You can listen to the event on the National Centre for Writing podcast:
The Noirwich Lecture was delivered by none other than Val McDermid, presented by The Times and The Sunday Times Crime Club. Val needs no introduction and her lecture examined the genre of crime and its role in society. You can listen to the entire lecture here:
Nicola Upson was in town for the weekend and delivered a workshop on the Friday about writing detectives and historical fiction. Noirwich is always about writing crime fiction as much as it is about reading it. We managed to track down Nicola for a separate chat:
Winnie M Li was part of the ‘Writing Wrongs’ panel, alongside Eva Dolan and Mari Hannah, discussing how crime fiction can help us to make sense of the world and process personal trauma and tragedy. Winnie joined Elspeth Latimer on the podcast to delve into the subject:
Every year at Noirwich we have a focus on debut authors, as discovering new voices is critical to the continual evolution of the genre. One of our ‘Killer Debuts’ in 2018 was Amer Anwar, who spoke to us about the challenges of finishing his first novel:
The Sunday drew a huge audience for the Death in Paradise conversation with series creator Robert Thorogood, who shared fascinating insight into the process of having the show commissioned and how it has evolved over the years:
Matt Wesolowski was discussing adaptation and talked to us about the notion of ‘hybrid’ writing’. His novels incorporate transcripts from podcasts and audio interviews, disrupting many of the conventions of both the genre and what we think of as a novel. Here’s Matt on the National Centre for Writing podcast:
The weekend was rounded off by Noirwich Live, an evening of short readings from local authors, competitions and a chat with Elizabeth Haynes. Elizabeth was talking about her latest book The Murder of Harriet Monckton. Elizabeth is a fascinating writer who uses the annual write-a-thon NaNoWriMo as a way to kickstart her projects. We talked to her about writing 50,000 words in a month as well as her latest book:
Every year we see new writers and new audiences at Noirwich, all sharing a love of the crime genre. We look forward to Noirwich 2019, with headliners George Alagiah, Louise Doughty and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Season passes are now available!
On the hunt for exhilarating new crime fiction reads this autumn? Enter the Noirwich + The Crime Vault book bundle giveaway competition!
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We were honoured to welcome the award-winning Soviet-Ukrainian American and French novelist and artist Yelena Moskovich for the annual Noirwich lecture 2022. Read a transcript of their lecture here.
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UEA MA Crime Writing Graduate Helen Marsden reviews our 2022 event 'Murder Most Modern' with Scarlett Brade and Bella Mackie.
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UEA MA Crime Writing Graduate Helen Marsden reviews the Noirwich Lecture 2022, delivered by Yelena Moskovich.
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