At Clayton

Last Sunday saw another gathering of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association, this time at a brand new venue, the Dunkenhalgh Hotel at Clayton le Moors, which is not far from Accrington in Lancashire.

The event was organised by Roger Forsdyke and I shared a table with a number of old friends, including Roger and his wife Penny, Kate Ellis and her husband, and Meg and Percy Moss, as well as Diane Janes, whom I’d met for the second time at Windermere just three days earlier. The conversation ranged widely, as Roger – a very experienced senior police officer - discussed ‘cold cases’ (of special interest to me in view of the fact that DCE Hannah Scarlett heads a cold case review team of my invention) and ‘intelligence-led policing’ (also known as ‘gossip-led policing’.)

I asked Roger whether the transparent police bulletin boards that one often sees on programmes like Crimewatch UK are now standard issue. But he told me he’d never seen one actually used – they all appear to belong to the BBC’s Props Department - more traditional whiteboards are still the order of the day.

Roger is organising next year’s CWA conference, to be held at Lincoln. There will be plenty of guest speakers and I’m looking forward to it already. The photo of Roger, incidentally, was taken by Roger Cornwell. Roger and Jean are proprietors of Cornwell Internet, and amongst many other things they look after the CWA website, as well as the sites of many leading authors - and some publishers too. Anyone looking to engage web expertise might well benefit from hiring their services.