Specific Gravity

Round-robin mysteries have featured several times on this blog, and I’ve mentioned that I find them rather fascinating. I shall have more news before long of an interesting reprint that I’m involved with, but in the meantime, I’m delighted to say that the first collaborative mystery that I’ve been involved with is now available.

It came into existence through an initiative of the lovely people who run the  Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Fiction Festival at Harrogate each year. This has become a major event for fans, and regularly features a host of international best-sellers. So I was extremely gratified when the organisers invited me to take part in writing a chapter of Specific Gravity, a mystery broadly (and in many ways, distantly) in the tradition of The Floating Admiral.

The story was to be started and finished by Stuart MacBride, who has become a superstar of the contemporary crime novel. Other contributors were to be Laura Wilson, Natasha Cooper, Martyn Waites, Allan Guthrie, Ann Cleeves, Charlie Williams, Zoe Sharp and Dreda Say Mitchell. Very good company to be in!

This joint enterprise was all about having fun, and I approached it in that spirit. There was no advance planning – each writer did their own thing. I wrote in a different style from usual, and really enjoyed writing my chapter. But then the project went very quiet for a long time, as consideration was given as to how to promote it. Now, at last, it’s emerged – and at long last, when I get a spare moment, I shall finally find out what happened in the story after I did my bit!  

If you fancy seeing what we all made of the project, take a look at Specific Gravity . Incidentally, having enjoyed contributing this one, I’m now involved with another round-robin project, though this one will be very different. More about that in the fullness of time...

Who Killed Mark Billingham?

The second event at the Harrogate Festival with which I was directly involved was a murder mystery dinner on Saturday evening. organised by Ann Cleeves. I was one of a number of authors (including Tom Cain and James Twining, two very successful thriller writers I hadn’t met before) to host a table of readers. The challenge was to solve the mystery of who had killed Mark Billingham (by atropine poisoning). The suspects were Natasha Cooper, Martyn Waites, Cath Staincliffe, and Stuart MacBride.

The puzzle prompted lively debate on our table and we guessed the solution correctly, as did several other tables (prompting a lucky dip to select the winner – not us). I thought this was a really good entertainment, and the readers really seemed to love it. Last year I was involved in the Saturday night dinner, but there was no mystery to solve. I hope something similar is done next year to build on the success of Ann’s event.

Later that evening came the quiz, a fave Festival event hosted by Val McDermid and (just to prove he wasn’t really dead after all) Mark Billingham. I was on a team of genuinely delightful people: Ali Karim, Rhian of the It's a Crime blog, Joni Langevoort (whom I first met a few years back, attending Malice Domestic in Washington DC), publisher Selina Walker and the recent CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger winner Andrew Taylor. We came a respectable third, but ended up gnashing our teeth that we didn’t figure out the right answer to the question which asked which novel by Perez-Reverte shares a title with a Scottish football team. I said to Val the following day that I still can’t believe I didn’t get that one!