Features

The PI Case Files - Part 1

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Ah, the private investigator – staple reading for crime fiction lovers. Typically they’d have an office with the name of their agency emblazoned across the door. And inside, a desk to rest their feet on, with whiskey and a .45 in the drawer. In the…
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Features

A classic revisited: Gorky Park

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Ronald Reagan was steering his course to the White House when Gorky Park came out in 1981. Meanwhile, an ageing autocrat called Leonid Brezhnev, with mighty eyebrows, was the General Secretary of the USSR. In the West, we worried about mutually assured nuclear armageddon. The…
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Features

Interview: Bernard Besson

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When you read a thriller by Bernard Besson, you can be pretty sure he knows what he is talking about. The author is a former chief of staff for the French intelligence services, and now runs a successful consultancy specialising in economic intelligence and business…
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Features

Interview: Phil Rickman

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Phil Rickman is probably best known for his Merrily Watkins series. Set in Herefordshire and the Welsh borders they feature Merrily Watkins, the attractive, widowed vicar of Ledwardine. However, Merrily isn’t your average country vicar. She’s trained in exorcism or, to use the modern euphemism,…
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Features

CIS: An introduction to Michael Innes

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He’s one of the longest-serving literary detectives, but do lovers of classic crime still read the extravagant, erudite novels featuring Inspector John Appleby? Have crime readers even heard of Michael Innes, the pen name adopted by Scottish academic and author John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906-1994)…
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Features

Happy Birthday, Colin Dexter

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Once in a generation comes a writer whose words translate into film and television so successfully that the books and the novels become indivisible. Those of us who read Colin Dexter’s Morse novels from the beginning, in 1975,  may have had our own imaginings of…
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