Alanna Knight MBE

Alanna Knight, one of the stalwarts of British crime writing, has been awarded an MBE in the New Year's Honours List for services to literature, and her many friends and fans will be delighted that this prolific novelist, very popular both as an author and in person, has been recognised in this way.

Alanna is, as this award illustrates, one of Scottish literature's leading lights. In addition to her many novels, she is a biographer and playwright and expert on the work of that gifted fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a crime writer, she is probably best known for her long series of historical mysteries featuring Inspector Faro,and I was very pleased a couple of years back when she agreed to contribute a Faro short story, "The Case of the Vanishing Vagrant", to the CWA anthology Guilty Consciences.

Alanna has been a prominent member of the CWA for many years, and more than twenty years ago, she and her late husband Alistair organised a terrific CWA conference in Edinburgh. I remember that week-end vividly - it was great fun, and the Knights put a great deal of work into ensuring that everyone enjoyed themselves. My family and I have enjoyed her company many times since, and the Edwardses will certainly be raising a glass to her this Hogmanay.

Susan Moody and Stephen Murray

You might think that, over the course of rather more than 1600 blog posts, I'd have discussed at great  length all of the crime writers whom I know and like, and probably I should have done. But I haven't, and a conversation at Windermere reminded me of this. So I thought that I'd start filling in some of the gaps, with particular reference to authors whose stories I've included in anthologies that I've edited over the years. .And I'm beginning with two people who share the same initials but whose literary styles are quite different.

I first came across Susan Moody as a writer when I bought a paperback copy of her first book, Penny Black in the mid 80s. At that time, I was casting around for ideas for a crime series of my own, and assessing what else was happening in the market. Suffice to say that I was impressed with the witty and zestful writing. Fast forward a few years, and I met Susan in person, at about the time when she was starting a new series, featuring Cassie Swann, a bridge expert. I can't play bridge (I'm afraid that I once went to evening classes to learn, and found the tutor incomprehensible), but even so the books struck me as successful.

I was impressed by the versatility Susan displayed in a number of short stories which appeared in high profile anthologies edited by the likes of Tim Heald, and Liza Cody and Michael Z. Lewin. She even turned the long-running 'Gold Blend' TV commercials into a novel, and literary versatility doesn't get much more striking than that!  With this in mind, when I was asked to put together an anthology for the CWA, Susan Moody was one of the first people I approached to contribute. The resulting story, 'Moving On', with its viewpoint shifts, certainly lived up to expectations, and helped to make Perfectly Criminal a book I was proud to have edited. In recent years, Susan has been less prolific, but she came up with another notable story for Guilty Consciences, my most recent anthology, 'Deck the Halls with Poison, Ivy'.

Stephen Murrary is a contemporary of mine, but he achieved publication as a novelist rather more quickly, and was already well-established by the time I met him. His series of books featuring Alec Stainton, a quiet but likeable cop, achieved considerable distinction, and Stephen too contributed to a couple of early Northern Blood anthologies. The Stainton series came to an end, but when he supplied another good short story, 'Landfall', to Crime on the Move, I thought it was a sign that Stephen's crime novels would be hitting the bookshelves again before long. It hasn't happened yet, but I live in hope.

Another Mammoth!

The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries volume 10 is quite a mammoth title, and the book itself is nearly 600 pages long, so at £7.99 for a chunky paperback, it really represents good value. I hasten to add, though, that I am one of the contributors, so I don't claim to be totally unbiased. But Maxim Jakutbowski, the editor, is someone whose breadth of reading in the genre is genuinely impressive, so I'm confident that even the most hard-to-please crime fan will find plenty to enjoy among the 42 stories collected here.

My contribution is a story called "Squeaky". The plot drew one or two elements from a well-publicised real life case, but naturally the events and characters in the story are very different from those in the case in question. I must say that, of all the short stories I've written, "Squeaky" is right up there along with those which I feel worked best.

"Squeaky" first appeared in Guilty Consciences, the CWA anthology I edited in 2011, and a good many stories from that volume also feature in Maxim's collection, which I guess helps to explain why I like it! A number of stories from Best  Eaten Cold, the Murder Squad anthology, also appear. But I hasten to add that Maxim has also ranged very widely to include stories from the likes of Lee Child (with Sherlockian references!), Peter Turnbull (a very reliable writer who deserves to be better known), Neil Gaiman and Stella Duffy.

In his introduction, Maxim suggests that this may be the last in the current series. As he says,a decade is a very good run for an anthology, but it will be a pity if there are no successors. He does drop a hint that there may be positive news of some kind at a future date. The reality is that short story volumes are not popular with many publishers. But I am convinced that in these days of short attention spans, digital publishing offers great potential for the short story form and its writers. So, overall, I am optimistic. In the meantime, this traditionally published book is one that I am very glad to be associated with.

Looking back on 2011

So, today we say goodbye to 2011, and for me it’s been an immeasurably better year than the previous two. Events on the day job front dominated, above all negotiating and helping to implement my firm’s merger, and as a result of that, I’ve done much less fiction writing than usual. A pity, but a price worth paying, as I am now hopeful that I will have more time to devote to fiction in the future, reducing from full time working in the not too distant future. The photo was taken on a research trip around Ullswater and I hope the memories of that lovely day will inspire me to write more next year.

In publication terms, it was a productive year, though largely because of work I’d done in 2010. The Hanging Wood was published, and earned terrific coverage in The Times, The Guardian, The Literary Review and elsewhere. I was really gratified about that. Reviews are bound to be subjective, but they do matter to any writer (as well to his or her publisher.) And I also edited two anthologies, Guilty Consciences and Best Eaten Cold.

I was lucky enough to be directly involved in some great events, including no fewer than six festivals of different kinds – The Wordsworth Festival, the Newcastle Winter Books Festival, the Lymm Festival, Crimefest, the Harrogate Theakston’s Festival, and St Hilda’s Crime and Mystery Week-end. I wrote a new murder mystery event set in the 1920s, gave a range of talks, and was awarded a Red Herring for services to the CWA. So perhaps I was busier on the literary front than I realised at the time.

I was also very fortunate to spend a delightful week-end on the Isle of Man, much of it spent in the company of that fine writer Chris Ewan and his wife, as well as going on four trips overseas – all of which provided me with background material for future short stories.

I’ve read excellent novels by friends such as Peter Lovesey, Ann Cleeves and Kate Ellis, and the most impressive contemporary American book I read this year was The End of Everything by Megan Abbott. I also continued my research into the Golden Age and read some excellent books from the past. For me, the highlight among the latter was The Pursued by C.S. Forester, a remarkable discovery. I've also enjoyed discovering Jessica Mann's early work, and some classics by John Dickson Carr, Henry Wade, J.J. Connington, C.Daly King and others.

One area where I have been remiss is in keeping up with other people’s blogs. I’ve spent much less time on this than I’d have wished, but I must say that the quality of some of the crime-related blogs, many of which are listed on the blogroll, is quite splendid. And it seems to keep improving. An interesting feature is the increase in the number of blogs dealing with Golden Age books - very pleasing to see this trend.

I do feel very grateful for the interest taken in this blog by so many people, and when I get the chance to meet some of you in person (for instance, this year I’ve had the very welcome opportunity to chat with Dorte, Kerrie, Karen and Paul Beech among others) I find it an enormously enriching experience.

So – thanks for all your support and generosity in 2011 and let’s hope that 2012 is a good year for the crime fiction community, and (is this too much to hope for, given the economic climate?) is a better year for the world as a whole.

Guilty Consciences

I have finally received my copy of the brand-new Crime Writers Association anthology that I have edited. Guilty Consciences is published by Severn House, who have built up a very impressive crime list, and I must say that the dust jacket artwork is very much appeals to me. (Sorry I haven't been able to expand the image to make it more easily viewed - I'm still failing to get to grips with various aspect of posting on the updated Blogger system, as will be all too evident to those of you who have no doubt spotted a few glitches in the past couple of months....)

The book boasts a foreword by the bestselling novelist Peter James, who also contributes a brand-new story. Peter is the current chair of the CWA, and I was delighted to be able to include a story by one of his most distinguished predecessors, the late Harry Keating. Harry edited a couple of CWA anthologies, and as a tribute to him, I wanted to include one of his stories. Happily, his widow Sheila Mitchell was generous enough to locate and provide an obscure but very agreeable story about Inspector Ghote which had previously only been published in India.

There are a number of other delights in the book. We have, for instance, a story by that very distinguished writer Robert Barnard, and also a terrific story by Ann Cleeves featuring Vera Stanhope. But one of the great pleasures for me about editing these anthologies is the chance to include work by very good writers who are either not especially well known (yet) or who have not in the past focused on short stories.

A number of the contributors were persuaded to take a break from their novels to make submissions to the anthology, and they included Claire Seeber, Len Tyler, Sarah Rayne and Dan Waddell. I hadn't read short stories by any of them previously, but I was really delighted to read, and include, their contributions. The result, I very much hope, is a book which lives up to the high standards of the anthology over the past half-century, whilst giving it a fresh and distinctive identity of its own.

New books in 2011

I’m looking forward rather eagerly to a number of publications next year. When I first became a published author, I got a real kick out of seeing my manuscript turned into a ‘proper book’, and I’ve not lost the thrill of the experience, thank goodness. It really is exhilarating. The Serpent Pool appears in paperback in the UK early in January, and given the extensive and favourable reviews of the hardback edition, I’m hoping that reaction will again be very positive.

The Hanging Wood will appear, at least in the US, under the Poisoned Press imprint. I’m not yet sure what is likely to happen in the UK. Around the same time, my German publishers will bring out The Serpent Pool. Here is the proposed cover. The title, in translation, is ‘To Dust and Ashes’.

Take My Breath Away will be published by Five Star in the US in June, and although the book was written eight years ago, I’m absolutely delighted it’s having a fresh life. Of all my novels, it’s the one which I think was the most under-rated. Of course, it may be that authors are not the best judges of their own work. But even so...

On the anthology front, there should be a limited collectors’ edition of the CWA anthology, Original Sins. And the follow up to that collection, Guilty Consciences, may be out in May. I hope so, as it would mean we could launch it at Crimefest. But there’s still some work to be done before we can know for sure....