Announcing The Traitor - a new Bibliomystery

This summer I undertook an interesting project, commissioned by Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. For the past few years, Otto has been publishing a series of limited edition stories which are 'Bibliomysteries' - concerned, in one way or another, with the world of books. A number of wonderful authors - the likes of Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, R. L. Stine, Jeffrey Deaver, Megan Abbott, and Joyce Carol Oates - have featured in the series, so I was flattered to be invited to join them. And as luck would have it, within hours of Otto putting the proposal to me, an idea flitted into my head...

The stories are short, but not very short. The requirement is that they must be at least 10,000 words long and to do with books, but otherwise, the author has free rein. This is liberating. I was conscious that I'd never written a story of this length - almost a novella, you might say - and so here was another interesting challenge. I realised that the story would need to be different from a conventional short story as well as from a novel. The story concept needed to have enough meat in it to justify the length. Luckily, the idea that had sprung to mind fitted the bill.

Otto sent me some illustrative examples of stories in the series, including an Edgar winner from John Connolly and Andrew Taylor's The Long Sonata of the Dead, which supplies a pleasing coda to his wonderful Roth Trilogy. The idea of the series is that they are only available from Otto's bookshop, and that there are limited signed editions as well as paperbacks. The pressure, of course, is to write something good enough to stand in such company...

The result of my labours was The Traitor. This introduces a new character, the 'book detective' Benny Morgan. When lockdown came to an end, my first trips included visits to Llandudno and Shropshire, and both settings feature in the story. It's a mystery concerned with obsessive book-collecting and I really did enjoy writing it. Publication is in September and further details may be found  here

 

 

Hidden and The Field of Blood - reviews

I’ve caught up with the final episode of Hidden, which I’ve reviewed here before, and also seen another recent BBC TV crime show, The Field of Blood. The contrast between the two was striking.

Hidden first. It was full of action and plot developments, but it all became pretty incoherent. A sad waste of the talents of a cast that included David Suchet as well as the charismatic Philip Glenister.  Disappointing.

The Field of Blood, unlike Hidden, was not originally written for TV. It was a two-parter adapted from a novel by a talented author, Denise Mina, though I haven’t read it. Set in 1982, the story concerns a young woman, Paddy Meehan, who is keen to make her way in journalism.  The abduction and murder of a young boy gives her a chance. But her own youthful cousin becomes a suspect.

The script was an odd mixture. There were some good lines, but the first episode was painfully slow at times, and there was a weird and monotonous insistence that Paddy was fat and plain. Jayd Johnson, who played Paddy, is certainly neither. And I also felt the repellent sexism of the newspapermen was rather unsubtly depicted.  

But the pace picked up, and the second episode was excellent. David Morrissey and Peter Capaldi, in relatively small parts for such notable actors, were very good, but Jayd Johnson was at the centre of everything that worked best. And the story had some interesting things to say about families - also a theme of Hidden. The Field of Blood tried to do less than Hidden, but in the end made much more of an impact.