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| Thursday June 28 2018 | Issue 37 |
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By Karen Robinson
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This month we're celebrating Crime Club's birthday with three candles on the cake. We started the newsletter in June 2015, when American crime icon Sara Paretsky was the first in a long line of global superstars to undergo our Q&A grilling. Since then, Walter Mosley, Hideo Yokoyama, Jo Nesbo — and plenty of our best homegrown talent — have all given us frank and sometimes surprising answers. This month it's the turn of Danish sensation Jesper Stein, a multiple bestseller in his home country. Sometimes there is a time-lag before the best overseas crime and thriller fiction comes our way in translation — there are two French novels in our pick of this month's crop that have definitely been worth waiting for. I hope you continue to enjoy Crime Club. Please get in touch with any comments or feedback.
■ Find previous issues of Crime Club here
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| Karen Robinson |
| The Sunday Times |
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Meet Linwood Barclay
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The Incident Room is the most intimate and sought-after gig at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival — and it's the perfect place to hear global thriller sensation Linwood Barclay reveal how he builds suspense in his bestselling books, and the ideas behind his new novel, A Noise Downstairs. The event, at 6.30pm on Saturday 21 July, has already sold out, but Orion Books, Barclay's publisher, has two tickets for one lucky Crime Club reader to win. They will also receive two signed hardback copies of A Noise Downstairs — and three runners-up will each get a signed copy. Enter here by Friday July 6. Winners will be chosen at random. Click here for the full programme of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2018.
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Q&A: Jesper Stein
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Your detective hero is Axel Steen. Is he very like you?
He is me when I’m daydreaming. And me when I wake up in the middle of the night in terror.
Unrest is the first of your five Steen novels to hit the English market. How has he developed through the series?
He is developing rapidly towards the bottom of existence in the first three books. He is still doing his job, but it gets more and more difficult. And in the fourth book... No, I won’t tell you that, I think you’ll have to read them.
Crime fans love Scandi cop heroes. Who are your favourites, and how does Steen honour the tradition?
Axel is one of the darkest representatives of Scandi crime, the dirty cousin of Harry Hole, the speed-talking, drug-abusing grand-cousin of Harry Bosch and a guy who really would enjoy having a pint with John Rebus in the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh.
You used to be a journalist — what drove you to crime fiction?
Before Unrest, I had written a biography of a famous Danish homicide investigator that gave me the confidence to live my dream out. My experiences as a war correspondent and police reporter are everywhere in my novels — in particular, Unrest echoes cases from my time as a cop journalist. It features a young Latvian au pair who was dragged through Copenhagen one summer night and raped three times, while hundreds of people passed by without stopping to intervene. That is a real case that I covered in court.
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen — or is it? What are you telling us about your city in the Axel Steen books?
The drug and especially the hash market is the biggest criminal economy in Denmark, causing drive-by shootings and gang killings many times a year in Copenhagen. It is the ugliest and most beautiful city in the world, full of lust, drunks, hope and broken dreams: energetic, vibrant and violent. Something is rotten in Copenhagen, but I love it.
Tell us a secret
I’m a passionate Liverpool fan and I read poetry every day.
Tell us a joke
A guy is driving on the freeway. His wife calls and says: “Honey, be careful, they’ve just said on the radio that someone’s driving the wrong way on the freeway.” He replies: “It’s not just one, honey, everybody is driving the wrong way.”
Unrest by Jesper Stein, translated by David Young, is published by Mirror Books. Buy it here / Read first chapter
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Shanghai's dirty thirties
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Paul French on the racy past of the location of his new thriller
In the 1930s, Shanghai was the most wide-open city on Earth. No passports required. Simply walk down the gangplank, proffer any name you liked, invent a back-story, and the world’s fifth-largest city was yours to conquer. I thought I knew all there was to know about old Shanghai, but there was more to uncover writing City of Devils.
Massive nightclubs would host glamorous entertainers, like those pictured, and the casinos of the Badlands district stayed open 24/7 despite the night-time curfew imposed due to Japanese attacks on the city. Most had at least three floors of gambling, and roulette was the most favoured game of chance. Rampant inflation meant the Chinese dollar was worthless, and most other currencies were too easily faked — so Shanghai adopted the Mexican silver dollar. The croupiers bit the coins to test their authenticity.
During prohibition in America, entrepreneurs in Shanghai took advantage of their country’s super-lax customs system. They shipped in tequila from Mexico, marked the barrels “Pig bristles” (then a major Chinese export for toothbrushes) and shipped the booze to Californian speakeasies for enormous profits.
When prohibition was repealed, the same Shanghai smugglers got together with New York gangsters to export large amounts of Chinese opium to America, where it was refined into heroin. They bought cruise ship tickets for washed-up American cabaret dancers looking to get home — and gave each of them a package. United States customs men were too polite to search ladies in those days.
Old Shanghai ran every kind of sting imaginable. The editor of Shopping News, a local rag that offered social gossip, would inform seemingly upright married men that the paper was running an article about them and their girlfriend out on the town — unless they cared to make a sizeable donation towards printing costs. Then there was the all-male brothel that catered to the needs of bored Shanghai housewives with its Latin lovers. The Madam would later invite the ladies into her parlour for afternoon tea, then play them the movie she’d secretly made of their afternoon trysts — film that could be destroyed for a hefty price.
City of Devils by Paul French is published by riverrun. Buy it here / Read first chapter
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Looking ahead: our July picks
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Hell Bay by Kate Rhodes
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Simon & Schuster
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With the tiny Scilly island cut off by bad weather, the killer of 16-year-old Laura must still be on Bryher. DI Ben Kitto leads the investigation, using his Met police chops with care as he penetrates the heart of the community he grew up in to expose underlying troubles.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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★ Star pick
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The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry
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Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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Sexy, sophisticated reworking of John Webster’s 17th-century revenge tragedy. Power — erotic, political, religious — plays out in a Rome that feels more La Dolce Vita sixties than now, as beautiful American actress Vittoria’s life spins out of control when her brother Johnny introduces her to an important politician and they begin an affair. When Johnny’s schemes escalate into unexplained deaths, dark forces come out of the shadows to exact vengeance, if not justice.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Baby’s First Felony by John Straley
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Soho Crime
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The first new Cecil Younger yarn for 17 years is a rip-roaring stomp through the crims and crazies that constitute Younger’s “community”, as criminal defence investigator in a small Alaska fishing town. Straley sets them all spinning in a plot involving drug wars and exploited teenage girls.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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★ Star pick
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The Boy at the Door by Alex Dahl
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Head of Zeus
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The life of spoilt yummy-mummy Cecilia unravels in the upmarket seaside town of Sandefjord, as her American-Norwegian creator brings a Scandi angle to the psychological thriller. Dahl used to live there, so the social detail is sharply observed, while Cecilia’s desperate bid to keep up appearances when an unwelcome reminder of her past arrives in town gives the story multiple twists and surprising depth.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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★ Star pick
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Sins as Scarlet by Nicolás Obregón
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Michael Joseph
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Troubled and lonely Iwata has left the Tokyo murder squad and returned to Los Angeles as a private investigator. When he starts to look into the death of a transsexual prostitute that the police don’t seem to care about, his sleuthings in the “ethnoburbs” uncover a murky world that it seems some people are intent on keeping hidden. Evocative, perceptive writing.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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It All Falls Down by Sheena Kamal
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Zaffre
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Second outing for Vancouver-based Nora Watts, who heads to the urban desolation of Detroit (rental car nicked the first time she parks it) to unravel family secrets — but not without opposition from forces unknown. Nora retains a youthful freshness and frankness, though her eyes-wide-open street smarts sometimes fail. Flawed and very real, she’ll make you root for her.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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The French Girl by Lexie Elliott
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Corvus
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The high-flying London lives of a group of university friends are thrown into turmoil when French police discover the body of a young woman who went missing 10 years earlier — when the friends were holidaying in the house next door to the victim’s. What really went on during that idyllic Provence holiday? And could one of them really have murdered Severine?
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Destroying Angel by SG MacLean
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Quercus
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It’s 1655, and Captain Damian Seeker is charged with enforcing Oliver Cromwell’s iron grip on the north of England. He finds a labyrinth of conspiracy and score-settling in a small Yorkshire village peopled with characters who are true to their era in status, occupations and habits — anyone for manchet loaves? — yet relatably contemporary in their scheming, greed and passions. A rich and pungent stew of ye olde detail contains a pacey, seditious thriller.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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★ Star pick
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Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo, translated by Howard Curtis
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Europa Editions
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Prepare for total immersion in the back streets and dives of Marseilles — beguiling, beautiful, lawless and deadly. Fabio, Ugo and Manu grew up there, but only Fabio became a cop: the complex, charismatic hero of the Marseilles trilogy of corruption, revenge and friendship deeper than love, which Izzo completed before his death in 2000.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Yellowhammer by James Henry
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riverrun
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A summer’s day in 1983 dawns in rural Essex with the discovery of two dead bodies, setting a meticulously-plotted investigation running for DI Nick Lowry and his team — with unhelpful scrutiny from higher police powers. Dodgy antique dealers and boozing coppers evoke the time and place. James Henry will be talking about Yellowhammer at various venues around Essex: see here for details
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Vernon Subutex Two by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne
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Maclehose Press
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This is alternative Paris at its most passionate, angry and funny. A motley crew of tattooists, political and sexual radicals, porn stars, street people and general bad-asses share an interest in former record shop owner Vernon (don’t think High Fidelity) and the last confessions of a dead rock star. Spiky rants on the sick state of bourgeois society enliven and provoke — it’s all très cool.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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The Death Knock by Elodie Harper
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Mulholland
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The danger feels real in this young-women-in-peril gripper which opens with student Ava already at the mercy of an extreme misogynist whose views reflect those of a disturbingly violent “men’s rights” website. When emotional TV reporter Frankie starts to cover the story, will she become a target?
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Cold Desert Sky by Rod Reynolds
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Faber & Faber
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The third Charlie Yates novel has our hero and his wife Lizzie in 1946 Los Angeles — and the reporter with a nose for trouble is up to his neck in it. The tarnish of Tinseltown shows through as Charlie investigates the case of two missing women, following a lead into the desert to the building site that is the nascent Las Vegas, and into yet more danger.
Read first chapter
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Buy this book
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Win Nicci French collection
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Psychologist Frieda Klein has been through some terrifying experiences at the hands of her creator Nicci French (actually husband-and-wife writing team Sean French and Nicci Gerrard). But it's all about to end, as Day of the Dead will be the eighth and last Klein thriller. To mark the occasion, publisher Michael Joseph is offering five Crime Club readers the chance to win a set of five books from the “The Best of Nicci French” collection: Killing Me Softly, Secret Smile, Beneath the Skin, The Memory Game and The Red Room. All the titles come with new introductions from some of the biggest names in crime fiction. Enter here by Friday July 13. Winners will be picked at random.
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National treasure with a shocking past
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A notorious scientist was the real-life model for the villain in TP Fielden’s latest novel
Picture a lonely Dutch-born chemist, marooned in the back streets of Hull in the 1920s and working for a brewery. He has a dream, and it is in two parts. The first is that he can rescue the minds and the health of a nation shattered by the First World War, seeking their solace in planchette boards, in mediums, in quacks and snake-oil salesmen. He can find a better, surer, way to ease their grief and their pain.
The second part of his dream is that his therapeutic invention — the “Rejuvenator” — will make him rich. Very rich.
He creates a black box which produces a low level of electricity, and with it a wholly bogus scientific paper entitled A New Electronic Theory of Life, and people start to buy it. In their thousands; in their tens of thousands.
Its overnight success carries him from Grimsby to a sprawling clifftop mansion in Salcombe, Devon, via the magistrates’ court at Chapel-en-le-Frith, where he is charged with 18 counts of indecent assault, gross indecency and buggery with teenage boys to whom he gave a ride in his chauffeur-driven limousine. His name is Otto Overbeck and by now he is rich enough and celebrated enough to buy the best legal defence and to be believed by the bench — it is his word, not that of a handful of working-class youths, they choose to believe.
Overbeck buys his Devon mansion and renames it after himself (it is now a National Trust property), creating as he does so one of the most spectacular gardens in the South West. Gradually he slips into respectability and eminence — despite the fact that his “Rejuvenator” did very little to repair the damaged bodies and souls of the thousands who bought it.
Wouldn’t you want to murder him?
In my fictionalised version of his life, Otto — now a Swedish chemist called Bengt Larsson — gets the just desserts that perhaps should have come his way. It’s up to my heroine, Judy Dimont, the dazzlingly clever local newspaper reporter (and former naval intelligence operative) to unravel the mystery of his death.
Resort To Murder by TP Fielden is published by HQ in paperback on June 14. Buy it here / Read first chapter
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Crime wave: the latest books news
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■ TV tie-in Weidenfeld & Nicolson is reissuing Sharp Objects, Gillian “Gone Girl” Flynn’s debut 2006 novel, to coincide with the HBO/Sky Atlantic “limited series” based on the book. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who made Big Little Lies, and starring Amy Adams, pictured, the thriller about a journalist returning to her home town to investigate the abduction and murder of two girls is scheduled for UK broadcast on July 9. Watch the trailer / Buy the book / Read first chapter
■ Westminster mystery revived The Division Bell Mystery by Ellen Wilkinson, first published in 1932, turns Robert West, a parliamentary private secretary, into an amateur sleuth to probe the political ramifications of the murder of an American financier (Big Ben’s chimes muffle the sound of gunshot). Wilkinson was elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough East in 1924 and “her political experience gives colour and warmth to the drama,” says Rachel Reeves MP in an introduction to British Library’s new edition. Wilkinson’s own life was not without drama: she wore bright colours, enjoyed affairs with married men, was well-known in Westminster for her propensity for falling over, and died after taking an overdose of a prescription medicine. Buy it here / Read first chapter
■ Crime pays Abir Mukherjee, author of the acclaimed Sam Wyndham novels, is on a mission: to find a debut crime writer from a BAME (black, Asian, minority ethnic) background and give them a £5,000 advance for their first book. “Different viewpoints mean different stories … a wider, richer literary atmosphere”, says Mukherjee, who grew up in the west of Scotland as the child of Indian immigrants. Ann Cleeves will be a fellow judge of the entries competing for the deal with publisher Harvill Secker. To enter, submit your first 5,000 words and a plot outline here between July 9 and September 9.
■ Talking of Cleeves... The organisers of Bloody Scotland, held in Stirling from September 21 to 23, are offering five Crime Club readers the chance to meet Ann Cleeves and Louise Penny, two of the most successful, and most charming, crime writers in the world. Click here to enter the competition to win a pair of passes to the exclusive get-together on Sunday September 23, followed by their big festival appearance at Stirling’s Albert Halls. Crime Club members can bag tickets to the event at the reduced rate of £8 using the code TCC; book yours here. The competition and ticket offers close at midnight on July 10. Winners will be contacted by email within 28 days. Prize is as stated and there is no alternative. Other authors at this year’s Bloody Scotland include Peter James, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Frank Gardner, MC Beaton and Irvine Welsh. View the full programme here and follow @BloodyScotland for updates.
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CSI: a guide for rookies
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From fingerprints to burst blood vessels, here’s what Alison Bruce has learnt while studying for a degree in crime scene investigation.
■ As silent as a morgue? No, a morgue isn’t necessarily quiet at all. The equipment can be noisy but, more unnervingly, so can the bodies, with sounds ranging from groans to farts. And they don’t just make noises — they can move too. Gases are released during normal decomposition and it is these which create the noises. When the bodies are not stored properly, these same gases can cause small spasms and rocking movements.
■ We all have fingerprints, right? Wrong! Fingerprints form in the womb and even identical twins do not share the same fingerprints, making them an extremely useful identification tool — when you can find them. There’s a rare genetic condition called adermatoglyphia which causes people to be born without fingerprints, and prolonged use of some cancer drugs can cause fingerprints to temporarily disappear. Cutting-edge developments will allow information about a subject’s gender and lifestyle to be gathered from fingerprints: something for crime writers to make use of.
■ Murder in their eyes? Petechiae are small red spots caused by broken capillaries. In the eyes of a dead person they can be a sign of murder. A pathologist will look at a victim’s eyes if there’s suspicion of asphyxia because the pressure caused by smothering, hanging and strangulation can cause capillaries to burst. But — red-herring alert — using chest compressions to save a victim can cause the same effect.
■ “We found a footprint outside the window.” No one in crime detection would say this — unless the culprit was barefoot. What’s more likely to have been left behind is a “footwear mark”, from a shoe or boot, and what a real CSI would say.
■ Gore: what is it good for? I don’t write overly gruesome books but, once in a while, a plot calls for it. There is a scene in my fourth novel, The Silence, where my detective, Goodhew, is called to an accident between several lorries. Beneath the debris is a body which has been hit with such force that the intestines have been expelled through the mouth. Is this possible? It is rare, but the answer is yes.
I Did It for Us by Alison Bruce is published by Constable on July 26. Buy it here / Read first chapter
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Win DCI Banks books
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Yorkshire's longest-running fictional detective, Peter Robinson's DCI Banks, is still going strong 31 years after his debut book, Gallows View, appeared in 1987 (he was just a humble DI back then). In his new thriller, Careless Love, the hardworking copper and his reliable sidekick Annie Cabbot are confronted with the discovery of a young girl dead in a car and a smartly-dressed gent dead on the moor — is there a connection? To celebrate the publication of Careless Love, Robinson's 25th Banks thriller, publisher Hodder & Stoughton is offering five Crime Club readers the chance to win three of the backlist: All the Colours of Darkness, Friend of the Devil and Piece of My Heart. Enter here by Friday July 13. Winners will be picked at random.
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Crime bestsellers
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Hardbacks
1 The President is Missing by President Bill Clinton & James Patterson
2 The Outsider by Stephen King
3 Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz
4 Dead If You Don't by Peter James
5 The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride
6 Ultimatum by Frank Gardner
7 The Killing Habit by Mark Billingham
8 Capture or Kill by Tom Marcus
9 Ghost by James Swallow
10 Snap by Belinda Bauer
Paperbacks
1 Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
2 Sleeping in the Ground by Peter Robinson
3 The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
4 The Midnight Line by Lee Child
5 Don't Let Go by Harlan Coben
6 Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly
7 The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
8 A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré
9 Haunted by James Patterson
10 A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena
Lists prepared and supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan, taken from the TCM for the four weeks ending 27/06/18
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karen.robinson@sunday-times.co.uk
@timescrimeclub
