DREAMING
OF A LIFE WITHOUT FEAR
I was pleased to provide the introduction for the anthology Dreams and
Desires Volume 3 as the net proceeds go to a New Orleans refuge for abused
women. I’ve dedicated this month's blog to the topic, so you can read more about
it by clicking
In Cold
Blog.
CHARTED TERRITORY
I also have an article in the January/February issue of The New Writer
magazine where I look at how to set out a non-fiction book. I’ve called it,
excuse the pun, The Heading Planner. This issue also has a feature about
how authors can garner publicity and another about the publisher from hell.
The info below this line was added prior to 3rd February 2009.
MONEY
FOR NOTHING
This month’s
In Cold
Blog, posted 6th January, looks at the life and crimes of Karen Matthews
who kidnapped her daughter in the hopes of claiming reward money for her safe
return. You couldn’t make it up.
STARVING IN A GARRETT
You’ll find my humorous article about writers’ earnings - Rags To Rags -
in the latest (December) issue of Mystery Women. This issue also includes
a piece by a Waterstones crime buyer plus dozens of crime fiction reviews.
MAKES SENSE
Check out my new link to
Sense
About Science on the Miscellaneous Links page and you’ll never fall for the
latest nonsensical health scare or alternative cure.
THE
BIG READ
British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia has
just been published by Greenwood World Publishing and will be on sale from
mid-January. This two-volume work has entries on most major UK crime fiction and
true crime writers and is edited by Barry Forshaw of Crime Time fame. Yours
truly wrote several of the entries as did numerous other scribes. The
encyclopedia retails at £90 (gulp!) so will hopefully be available from
libraries.
YELLOW
.... No, I’m not off to see Coldplay. The colour in question is The Yellow
Room, a new literary magazine for women edited by Jo Derrick. Jo previously
edited QWF - which stood for Quality Women’s Fiction - and persuaded me to speak
at the last ever QWF conference. (They’d decided months before that this was to
be the final countdown - I wasn’t the kiss of death.) Anyway, The Yellow Room
is 80 pages of well-crafted short stories, my particular favourites being
Decisions by Zoe Fairbairns and Bone Fever by Rose Bray. You’ll find
further details at
www.theyellowroom-magazine.co.uk
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
Mike Ripley gives
Youthful Prey an honourable mention in his
latest Getting Away With Murder column on
Shots. Mike - a seriously funny crime novelist - has recently been to
Claridges to toast the latest Dick-and-Felix-Francis novel, Silks.
Sadly, most authors don’t live the champagne life, unlike best selling scribe JK
Rowling who apparently earns about a trillion pounds a second. Most of us sell a
few thousand copies a year and earn the same - or less - than a Burger King
employee, sans the free lunch.
OUTMANOEUVRING
THE PAEDOPHILES
My latest true crime book,
Youthful Prey, was published on 25th August,
with an advance excerpt appearing in The Sunday Times. They used the interview
with undercover detective Ray Gardner, who spent ten years working on the
Paedophile Unit. For further details please go to the newly-added
YP page.
HERE
IS THE NEWS
The October Writers' News - a subscription-only print mag with a website
at www.writersnews.co.uk - features
Youthful Prey. They called my research both
gruesome and disturbing: just like the photo of me they used.
RADIOHEAD
If you’re an insomniac, you might have heard me being interviewed on Talk
Sport Radio in the early hours of Sunday morning. The host was in favour of
naming and shaming campaigns for child molesters but I explained all of the
reasons why detectives oppose this - it causes paedophiles to flee from their
registered address, after which they feel increasingly ostracised and become
even more dangerous. Most of the listeners who called in were from my native
Scotland because it was an English - but not a Scottish - Bank Holiday.
PICTURE THIS
I’ve put some new photos on the Author Bio page. Suffice to say, no one’s going
to confuse me with Liz Hurley, though I have been known to replace the
occasional button with a safety pin...
NEW LINKS
I’ve also added a link on the Crime Links page to
Pennant Books,
the publisher of Youthful Prey and other true crime tomes. It’s run by
Cass Pennant, the subject of the new British-made movie, Cass.
The other new link, on Miscellaneous Links, is to
Pipedown, the
campaign to end piped music in shops, shopping centres and restaurants.
BACK IN THE NEWS
Thanks to Allison & Busby
for making
Children Who Kill their backlist book of the
month. With the recent spate of teenage killers, it's all too topical.
TURNING JAPANESE
Children Who Kill has been translated into
Japanese and published by the respected publishing house Bungei Shunju so here’s
a link to
amazon.co.jp. Don’t all rush at once...
Seriously, it’s the first time I’ve seen a Japanese book and it was an
interesting experience. It reads from back to front and - I think! - bottom to
top and right to left, and has a dust cover, even though it’s a paperback.
MYSTERIOUS REVIEWS
The latest issue of Mystery Women includes a positive review of Sob
Story which I’ve added to - where else? - the
Sob Story page. This issue features an
interview with that rarest of beasts, a talking bookseller. (Getting information
on the trade is surprisingly difficult.) Check out Mystery Women’s
recently-revamped website
www.mysterywomen.co.uk for other crime fiction recommendations and reviews.
MODUS OPERANDI
The 2008 CWA anthology M.O. has just been
published and includes my revisionist history of Jack the Ripper’s murders,
Closure. The antho offers nineteen
such stories, and the authors include Liz Evans, Martyn Bedford, Amy Myers and
editor Martin Edwards. It’s published by Comma Press.
GOING MAINSTREAM
The mainstream press are increasingly interested in true crime - in recent
weeks, I’ve been featured in Woman’s Own, who were researching teenage
girls who kill, and The Times, which used my top six true crime list as
their Critic’s Choice.
SNACK ATTACK
Fellow true crime author Jimmy Lee Shreeve interviews me in his latest
book
Cannibals, which features notorious
cases such as Issei Sagawa and Nicolas Claux as well as lesser known flesh
eaters from around the world.
He also corresponded with - and met - a cannibal, albeit one who got lunch from
the mortuary rather than from a fresh kill.
A FAIR COP
My latest review for Tangled
Web is by former Flying Squad officer Dick Kirby. Tangled Web has had a site
crash so I’ve posted my review here until their recovery. Click
on Villains' cover to link to amazon.co.uk
Villains by
Dick Kirby
Published by Robinson in paperback price £7.99
ISBN 9781845295691
I’m
a huge Dick Kirby fan, having reviewed his earlier titles and interviewed him
about his life in the Flying Squad. So I was delighted when his publisher sent
his latest opus, Villains, to me.
The villains in question operated between the 40s and the 70s, masterminding
everything from not-so-great train robberies to hijacking whisky-filled lorries.
Safecracking was also popular in the days before manufacturers made more
sophisticated safes with better alarms. Needless to say, the best laid plans
often went awry, resulting in much black comedy, especially when the thief’s new
best mate turned out to be an undercover cop.
Some of these underworld figures dealt mercilessly with their enemies. The Krays
took a cutlass to two rival brothers whilst another ne’r-do-well put his enemy,
still alive, through an industrial shredding machine.
Often there was violence on both sides, with a sadist slashing or raping his
victim before becoming a victim himself of police brutality. In other instances
there was an uneasy truce between copper and criminal, with the latter acting as
a grass in order to secure a reduced sentence for himself.
Some of the villains got away with their heinous acts, but occasionally there
was a sense of natural justice, such as when a distraction burglar who had
robbed the visually-impaired failed to take his diabetic medication and went
blind.
This is a fast-paced, riveting read, made even more enjoyable by Kirby’s
trademark humour. It’ll appeal to anyone who lived through this era and to
younger readers with an interest in unorthodox policing or in the London
underworld. And British criminals who have fled to the Costa Del Sol - amusingly
referred to as ‘the chaps on holiday’ - will lap it up. Dick even thinks that he
knows the identities of the three unaccounted for Great Train Robbers. You read
it here first.
FURTHER READING
Over at
Tangled
Web, you’ll find my review of the excellent
Pariah, the aforementioned Colin Stagg’s
autobiography. I’ve also reviewed Corey Mitchell’s
superbly-written true crime opus, Strangler,
and the bittersweet Driving Miss Smith, the
biography of the late comedian Linda Smith.
TIME FOR CRIME
Crime Time issue 52 includes a few words (I think that they allowed me
300) on writing Sadistic Killers. You’ll
also find a well-deserved homage to the work of American novelist James Sallis.
IS IT HOT IN HERE OR IS IT JUST ME?
Forum (vol 41 no 12)
includes my feature Passion & The Perimenopause,
offering hope to everyone that’s hormonally-challenged. I recently found a
realistic appraisal of the subject online:
What women find attractive about men: A study conducted by UCLA’s Department of
Psychiatry has revealed that the kind of face a woman finds attractive on a man
can differ depending on where she is in her menstrual cycle.
For example, if she is ovulating, she is attracted to men with rugged and
masculine features. However, if she is menstruating or menopausal, she tends to
be more attracted to a man with duct tape over his mouth and a spear lodged in
his forehead while he is on fire.
DOWN UNDER
Sadistic Killers is now on sale in Australia
courtesy of Wakefield Press, and has just been reviewed by the unusually-named
Independent Weekly InDaily bulletin. For details please see the
Sadistic Killers page.