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.

Blue Lightning and others

I’ve received a number of new and forthcoming books published by Pan Macmillan, and the range of titles illustrates the wealth of talent in that company’s list. Pride of place has to go to a book by someone I knew before she was famous! This is Ann Cleeves, whose marvellous Shetland Quartet is to be concluded by Blue Lightning. In this book, Jimmy Perez returns to his native Fair Isle, a place which I’d love to visit myself one day. I say ‘concluded’, but who knows whether Ann can be tempted to continue with a pleasurable series? I certainly hope so.

The Cemetery of Secrets is the latest novel set in Italy to be written by David Hewson. ‘In the ancient burial ground of San Michele, a young woman’s casket is prised open, something is wrenched from her hands, and an extraordinary story begins.’ It’s dubbed ‘A Venetian Mystery’ - competition for Donna Leon, then.

And then there is The Disappeared, by M.R. Hall, the follow up to his widely applauded novel The Coroner. Again, the central character is Jenny Cooper. The author’s CV includes screenwriting , television production and a career as a barrister, and this experience informs his fiction. Incidentally, I've learned that the author is not, as I deduced (so much for me as a literary detective), the Mathew Hall who wrote a pretty successful thriller called The Art of Breaking Glass some years ago. The Coroner is one of the books competing for the CWA Gold Dagger tomorrow night - an impressive achievement in any circumstances, but all the more so in the case of a debut novel.