Crime writer Bill Kirton talks us through his relationship with his (fictional…) detective, Jack Carston.

A recent interview with a good friend, the journalist Sara Bain, forced me to think about my relationship with the main character in my contemporary crime novels, DCI Jack Carston. I’ve known him for about 20 years now and I think he’s getting ready to retire. He first came into my head in the early 90s and now, five books later, the compromises he’s had to make are beginning to get to him.

He started because the UK publisher, Piatkus, liked a stand alone thriller my agent had sent them but wanted a police procedural instead, so I set about writing Material Evidence. The ending/solution was based on an actual case I read about in a book on forensic medicine, but the interest came from Carston and the team I found around him. I say ‘I found’ and that seems to be how it was. They all emerged, with their tics, foibles, ways of speaking and relationships ready formed.

Carston himself is curious about things, a creative thinker; he’s interested in people but routines bore and frustrate him. His opinion of some of his superiors is relatively low but his wife, Kath, makes sure that his self-esteem doesn’t get so high as to make him obnoxious. In fact, the love and humour in their marriage is one of the strongest themes running through the books.

Why did he choose to join the police? Well, he’s always wondering what makes people (including himself) tick and likes solving puzzles. At first he joined because he was idealistic and wanted to be on the side of the good guys – but the job has made him more aware that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms, especially when it comes to people’s motives for what they do. His high success rate derives from the fact that he’s not only fascinated by people, he cares about them, too. He’s not obviously ‘flawed’, has no particular rituals, doesn’t drive a flash car, and his only addiction is his wife. He has a temper, is sometimes childish, doesn’t tolerate fools, despises people who don’t respect the rights of others and is driven mainly by compassion.

I’ve followed him through five books so far and, without any conscious plan on my part, he’s definitely evolved – and in a specific direction. The job has taken him more deeply into the psyches of other people (and his own) and, if he had any moral certainties to start with, he certainly doesn’t now. When I first wrote about him, he solved the case by using the testimony of the various suspects to get into the mind of the victim. The picture he saw there was pretty bleak. But the way he did it – using the physical evidence, but building a picture of who the dead woman was – told me I was dealing with someone who trusted his insights into behaviours. In the next book, things were clearer because there was a definite ‘baddie’. Even then, though, the murders and the motives were surprising and not at all clear cut.

It was The Darkness that signalled the real change. He found himself sympathising with someone who was living a normal life helping others but who was also guilty of very serious crimes. It had quite an impact on him and when, in book four, Shadow Selves, his investigations brought him in contact with highly intelligent people in a university and hospital, the pettiness, self-importance and corrupt nature of some of the people there put another dent in his certainties.

And in the latest book, Unsafe Acts, at the same time as he’s trying to solve two murders and unravel a plot to sabotage an offshore platform, a vindictive superior officer decides he’s had enough of Carston’s unconventional approaches and he faces a charge of indiscipline. It makes him wonder whether he should actually leave the force.

I’m not yet sure of the answer to that, but I will be when I start book six, which might well be the last in the series.

Bestselling US author Gregg Olsen writes on the new wave of Young Adult crime. 

There’s been kind of a YA Gold Rush lately, with lots of famous authors of adult crime fiction jumping in with tales of murder and mystery (John Grisham, Harlan Coben, Kathy Reichs are but a few on my side of the pond). You have John Connolly.

While I can’t speak for those authors, I can tell you by looking at the content of their most recent books that they are approaching the YA reader with the same substance and style as they do for their adult readers.

I know I do. In fact, I get quite irritated when someone brings up the subject of YA crime being somehow a lesser effort.

Really, in this day and age, should a reader expect anything less? No matter 14 or 40, by now readers have seen more police work, more forensic science, more, yes, blood and guts, than we could have imagined even fifteen years ago. Everything in pop culture is so much louder, darker, bloodier, than ever. Shock doesn’t even shock like it used to. YA crime authors understand that. They don’t pander to it, but they, as their heroes and heroines might say “get“ it.

The world has shifted lately. And the truth is poor old Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew wouldn’t stand a chance against the antagonists in the new spate of YA crime novels.

I’m not saying this is bad or good. Or even sad. It just is.

When I wrote Envy and Betrayal, I knew that I had to be true to the spirit of young people, but never talk down to them by leaving off the page what really needs to be there. Every bloody detail? Not so much. Do I keep it clean because the readers are so young? Not really. I keep it reasonably clean because that’s how I write my adult mysteries too.

(Except for Victim Six, of course. But that’s another story. A very nasty one at that.)

Real is good and I know that. When a teenager ends up on an autopsy table, I spare no details. I want the reader to be there with her or him. I want them to feel the chill of the blade. I need them to understand the outcome of murder in a way that seems more real than an episode of CSI.

That’s easily done. Books like mine don’t come with irritating soundtracks while the techs go about their work. That’s a good thing. So when someone suggest that YA crime fiction is somehow less than what is written for adults, I shrug. Then I think of ways to kill them. Ways that will keep the youngest readers still turning the pages.

  Betrayal is out now. 

“I was working as a mountain guide in Snowdonia when a journalist was commissioned to ghost my story. I’d been writing articles and broadcasting my own talks for years so I refused permission, did it myself and Space below my Feet became a best seller. But it wasn’t until I came to research the second book, on mountain rescue, that the idea of crime writing surfaced. Until then I hadn’t known that the police harboured suspicions regarding the survivors of fatal incidents in lonely places – not always but on enough occasions to intrigue me as a writer. After all, where better to set murder than in a wilderness where there are no witnesses and only the scavengers know where the bodies are buried? So when Gollancz asked me to give them a crime novel, citing my experiences, I did so. I found a hook: explosives had been discovered in the basement of a tower block in Northern Ireland. My first mystery, Lady with Cool Eye,  set in Snowdonia, featured terrorism and introduced Miss Pink, a magistrate. It was followed by some fifteen more in the series; the last, Retribution, is now a Kindle book. There were to be a similar number of stand-alones: harder, wider ranging, giving me more scope with different protagonists: women, men, cops, killers.

Mine are novels of place and I revel in the field-work, going to any region that promises excitement: the Outer Hebrides, Colorado canyons, Isle of Skye, Death Valley. I drift, making myself available for something to pounce: that crucial idea that will form a book. I travel in a Jeep, sleep out, know the bliss of no light being visible other than the stars. I avoid campgrounds and dangerous animals – mostly – but attract others curious about this intruder on their space: foxes, coyotes, and the delightful furry tarantulas attracted by the moths round my lamp. Food poisoning, heat exhaustion, feral dogs are an occupational hazard; I’ve been lost more often than I can remember: in deserts, canyons, the Olympic rain forest, but all was grist to my mill. There is little that happens in my books that I haven’t experienced, barring the murders, and even those one has dreamed of committing in a fantasy of retributive justice or just wholesome rage. Abuse features in many of my stories: abuse of children, animals, the environment, women. Cue the Battered Wife, now on Kindle, is a case in point. I write about what I know.

Basically crime writing hasn’t changed much since I was reading Conan Doyle in my teens. Crime is crime is crime. No change in the motivation for murder either: still greed, jealousy, revenge. In Murder and its Motives Tennyson Jesse also cites “lust for killing” which now translates to psychopathic sprees. No change then but ramifications and exploration into depths. Sex has arrived: a given in today’s chaotic climate, on the one hand liberated, the other prurient, and as for violence: where will it all end? I’m not shocked by the bound and living victim locked in the boot of a torched car (although sickened by the pathologist’s comment that he was roasted); de-sensitisation has set in. How can X follow his or her last sensational climax? And then you read Ruth Rendell’s A Sight for Sore Eyes and know that, with no explicit violence, no torture or bloody savagery, unsurpassed horror can be demonstrated by writing of such refinement that the reader’s own imagination is galvanised to the last delicious shudder. No change, only evolution.

Cue the Battered Wife

A bird watcher’s photograph reveals a human hand in an eagle’s nest.

Vivien Reid, celebrated explorer and author, darling of the media, is devastated when her publisher drops her from the list. An admirer and one-time editor, Rupert Lasco, seizes his opportunity and pushes her towards writing crime novels, which she must set in the mountain country with which she is so familiar.

The proposal starts to bear fruit and Lasco moves into Vivien’s remote Highland lodge where propinquity results in progress from successful teamwork to affection and marriage, Lasco also winning over the fiercely loyal secretary and handyman who have found their own niches working with Vivien whom they adore. On the other hand the macho, hard-drinking neighbor, Alastair Semple, regards Lasco with overt hostility.

A mediocre climber, he has been taken out by Vivien occasionally and finds it humiliating that she should now reject him, citing the demands of the new book. Semple is contemptuous of both book and new husband and takes out his frustration on his wife, Aileen. His fortunes are low: once the local laird he is reduced to running a pony-trekking business, aided by his wife’s dour step-father while her mother attends to the domestic side of two households. Aileen is a loose cannon, neurotic and careless, existing on drink and drugs.

Semple’s frustration and rage escalate, culminating one afternoon in sadistic jibes aimed at Aileen before his violent exit at a time when bad weather is moving in. Next morning the glen awakes to deep snow over and the dawning awareness that the laird is missing.

http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/gmoffat.html

The Crime Readers’ Association is pleased to announce an exclusive film competition for subscribers, in association with the British Film Institute. Find out more below:

“Born in East London, Hitchcock lived in the city for the first half of his life and worked in its film studios for almost twenty years. London was the star of many of his films, and Hitchcock is our star for the London 2012 Festival.

Two years ago we began a major fundraising campaign – Rescue the Hitchcock 9 – in support of the BFI National Archive’s biggest single project to date: the full restoration of the director’s nine surviving silent films. The development of Hitchcock’s work during the silent era is crucial to an understanding of his filmmaking style, but none of the titles has benefited from full archival restoration in the digital age. Now, thanks to the generous support of our BFI Members, hundreds of Hitchcock fans, trusts and foundations, corporate partners, rights-holders and archives around the world, we can look upon these films afresh.

We begin our story with a series of landmark presentations of silent films across London, screened together with scores commissioned from some of Britain’s most exciting musical talents. From August to October we present a complete Hitchcock retrospective at BFI Southbank featuring more silent film firsts and unmissable events, while everyone will have the opportunity to join our celebration with national and international presentations of his work and global access to the BFI’s knowledge and unique collections online at www.bfi.org.uk/hitchcock ”

Tickets for the three month season are now available for booking, along with talks on a wide range of topics, from Hitchcock’s music to his use of space.  We are pleased to offer a FREE pair of tickets to any screening (see the range here) for CRA subscribers. To enter, just sign up to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook – or, if you’re already doing all those things, share or RT us to your friends. To allow you plenty of time to choose a screening, the closing date is 6 September. Good luck!

Masterminding enough horrific crimes between them to give even hardened pros like Sherlock and Morse the collywobbles, this year’s Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards shortlist showcases the UK’s most wanted crime fiction and drama.

The winners of 13 Awards will be announced at The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards on Thursday, 18 October at the Grosvenor House Hotel. The awards include the CWA Gold Dagger for the Best Crime Novel of the Year, the CWA Steel Dagger for the Best Thriller of the Year, and the CWA New Blood dagger for the Best New Crime Writer of the Year, alongside the Specsavers Bestseller Dagger and Film and TV-based Daggers.

Will it be a case of second time lucky for MR Hall who is looking to take home the illustrious CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year sponsored by Constable & Robinson, for The Flight after missing out to William Broderick in 2009? It’s anyone’s guess as the barrister-turned-screenwriter slugs it out against Irish journalist Gene Kerrigan’s The Rage, a suspense driven storm of violence set in the backstreets of Dublin. Australian Chris Womersley’s Bereft is also jostling for glory, his broadcaster’s ear put to full use in a novel which quivers with the cadences of fear, set against the lurching menace of the Spanish Flu epidemic. All three should be wary of NJ Cooper, previously Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, whose latest novel Vengeance in Mind is also shortlisted. Her victim is discovered pinned to the kitchen table by butcher’s knives, brutally castrated. With an opener like that, Cooper proves she isn’t an author to be trifled with. The winner will be presented with their Dagger by bestselling author M.C. Beaton

The CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger, sponsored by Goldsboro Books, also looks set to require some forensic analysis to work out a winner from such a well matched crop of talent, all delving into the psychological frailties of the human condition. Wiley Cash’s Land More Kind than Home drags readers into the religious fanaticism of his Deep South youth, its murky underbelly revealed through the smothering of an autistic child. Tanya Byrne also explores the loss of innocence and neglect in a compulsive first person exploration of identity from inside the Archway Young Offenders Institution in Heart-Shaped Bruise. They will wrangle for the top spot with psychologist Tom Wright’s first novel, What Dies in Summer, whose tale of a Texan serial killer preying upon young girls draws on personal experience and those of his patients, and Ewart Hutton’s Good People which exposes the depraved brutality hidden behind the manicured lawns of rural respectability.

The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (sponsored by Ian Fleming Publications) will be hotly contested too. Former Mi6 worker Charles Cumming, regarded as one of the best of the new generation of British spy writers, will see A Foreign Country thrash it out against Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, another tale of uttermost loyalty to one’s clan, as the bitter power rivalries of a cheerleading squad are revealed. They’ll fight it out against two novels revelling in the threatening darkness of cyber space, Robert Harris’s The Fear Index oozing with the stench of paranoia, whilst Neal Stephenson’s Reamde which portrays the jarring, poisoned world of hacking.

Competition is as fierce as ever amongst the best known names in the trade, with Stuart MacBride, Ann Cleeves, Kathy Reichs, Jo Nesbo and Anthony Horowitz all shortlisted for the Specsavers Bestseller Dagger. This award honours the success of authors throughout their careers, and is chosen by the reading public.

Readers can check out the official website at www.crimethrillerawards.com  and to register their vote for the favourite bestselling author online. The winner will be presented with the Bestseller Dagger at the awards ceremony on the 18th October, after all the votes are counted on 12th October.

Peter James, Chair of the Crime Writers Association, commented: “I am very proud that this year’s Crime Thrillers Award shortlists show a truly broad-range of high quality work, by great authors, in the most popular of all fiction genres.”  

TV/Film Daggers:

The cream of acting talent is also recognised at the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards with categories for Best UK and International Crime Series, Best Actor, Best Actress in a Crime series and Best Film.

The British public will also have the chance to vote for their favourite detective duo by phone vote. The shortlist is as follows:

• DCI Banks – DCI Alan Banks & DS Annie Cabbot – Call 090 16 16 14 01
• Above Suspicion – DC Anna Travis & DCS James Langton – Call 090 16 16 14 02
• Scott and Bailey- DC Jane Scott & DC Rachel Bailey – Call 090 16 16 14 03
• Lewis – DI Robbie Lewis & DS James Hathaway – Call 090 16 16 14 04
• Whitechapel – DI Joseph Chandler & DS Ray Miles – Call 090 16 16 14 05
• Vera – DCI Vera Stanhope & DS Joe Ashworth – Call 090 16 16 14 06

The vote opens on the 7th September at midday.

Dame Mary Perkins, Specsavers founder, said: “As someone who personally enjoys a bloodcurdling read, it’s been a pleasure to be a part of the Crime Thriller Awards, almost since their very beginnings. Last year’s Awards were another great success and we’re very proud to be involved in this annual showcase of world class writing, acting and production.”