Goldsboro
First Monday Meet the Authors
3 April 3 2017.
Judges’ Room, Brown’s Hotel,
Judges’ Room, Brown’s Hotel,
St Martin’s
Lane, London
The April 2017
First Monday was a very special occasion: the first anniversary of this highly
successful monthly event, originally taking place at the City University,
Islington, later at the Library Club, St Martin’s Lane, and now
well-established in the Judges’ Room of Brown’s Hotel, a venue prestigious yet
far from intimidating. This month’s line-up included four well-known speakers
and was, as ever, expertly compered by the leading crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw.
Denise Mina is the author of the much acclaimed Glasgow-set
police procedurals featuring Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, another series
with journalist Paddy Meehan, and the Garnethill novels. For her latest,
however, The Long Drop, she
has based her novel on the true-life crimes of Peter Manuel who was convicted
of eight murders in the 1950s. The story is told from the point of view, not of
the investigating office as in the recent TV drama series, but from that of
William Watt who had earlier been convicted of three murders actually committed
by Manuel. And Denise has also included information given to her by members of
the public who remembered the Manuel case and accosted her in the street with
their stories which no-one until then had been aware of.
Oxford resident Mick Herron
writes spy stories with a humour that is sardonic yet appealing. Spook
Street is the fourth in his Slough House series, Slough House where
spooks (ie. spies) are despatched when they are no longer welcome in the ranks
of the security services. The first in the series, Slow Horses, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association
Steel Dagger, while the second, Dead
Lions, was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger. The third in the series is Real Tigers. Spook Street, like the
earlier ones, features Jackson Lamb, head of the team of pen-pushing no-hopers
at Slough House: this time Lamb has to protect an elderly, mentally frail former
spook who, although retired, is nonetheless vulnerable.
Sabine Durrant, who had previously written for adults
and teenage girls, began to write psychological suspense novels when her first,
Under Her Skin, was published in
2014, and followed that with Remember Me
This Way. Her third novel is Lie With Me which, unusually for a
genre which usually features female protagonists, is narrated from a male point
of view. It is that of Paul Morris who had written years ago one acclaimed
novel and since then has been drifting steadily downhill, accepts an invitation
to spend the summer which turns out to be very far from the anticipated idyll.
Liz Nugent
has worked in Irish film, theatre and television with awards for her radio and
television dramas, and has written short stories for adults and children. Her
earlier psychological suspense novel, Unmasking
Oliver, won the 2014 Irish Book Association Crime Fiction Award. In this
story, Lying in Wait, a narrative told from several points of view, a
bitter, twisted mother will stop at nothing to achieve what she wants. The
author has been hailed Ireland’s answer to Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl).
There was time for a few questions and a discussion which centred on the psychological suspense genre and whether its practitioners and readership were entirely female or whether men read novels in the genre.
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Radmila May
Radmila May was
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional
work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of
her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published
late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal
flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a
third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology –
and is now concentrating on her own writing.
For details of the May event visit
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