Harrogate and Legal Eagles

I got back home this afternoon after a truly exhilarating time at the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate. It was great to catch up with old friends and also to meet some nice people for the very first time.

This was the very first time I've been asked to be on a panel at Harrogate. The title was 'Legal Eagles' and it proved to be a real treat. This was due in no small measure to the fact that it was very well moderated by an eminent Yorkshire lawyer, Peter McCormick. I've known of him for many years, but we'd never met before.

My fellow panel members were a delightfully diverse group. The brilliant Frances Fyfield is someone I've been lucky enough to know for a long time, but M.R. Hall is a barrister turned novelist I've met more recently, having twice shared a platform with him at Crimefest. Helen Black, a solicitor whose work has been compared to Martina Cole's, is a friend of a friend whom I'd only met very fleetingly in the past.

It was a really enjoyable session, and the hour flew by. The feedback from audience members was great, and I felt thrilled to be speaking at the hotel most famous as the place where Agatha Christie hid during her disappearance in 1926. Quite a place, quite a weekend.

Saturday Selection

I seem to be one of the few people who haven’t got round yet to reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The Christmas break, and a bit of concentrated reading in between eating and drinking too much, can’t come too soon! Meanwhile, I’ve just received an advance copy of the follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s published by Maclehose Press on 8 January, and it looks good.

Helen Black is a childcare lawyer, and that is, I know, a rewarding but often difficult job. She has, however, managed to find the time to write a couple of crime novels, and the new one, A Place of Safety, is published by Avon on 22 December as a paperback original. The word ‘gritty’ appears in the first line of the press release, and the subject matter isn’t comfortable – an alleged rape of a young refugee.

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn, is published by Macmillan, but not until 9 March. However, it looks as though this one will be getting a big push on the publicity front. There’s an admiring quote from a very distinguished Macmillan author, Minette Walters, and the publishers describe Nunn as ‘a major new talent in global crime fiction’. Quite a claim. The book is set in South Africa in 1952 and ‘explores a divided society through the frame of a classic murder mystery’. One to keep an eye on.