Crime Time FM

Northern Ireland author ADRIAN MCKINTY chats to Craig Sisterson about the return of Sean Duffy in his new novel THE DETECTIVE UP LATE, the mystery of sales v awards,  pitching to the Beeb, giving it another go.

THE DETECTIVE UP LATE: Slamming the door on the hellscape of 1980s Belfast, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy hopes that the 1990s are going to be better for him and the people of Northern Ireland. As a Catholic cop in the mainly Protestant RUC he still has a target on his back, and with a steady girlfriend and a child the stakes couldn't be higher.
After handling a mercurial triple agent and surviving the riots and bombings and assassination attempts, all Duffy wants to do now is live. But in his final days in charge of Carrickfergus CID, a missing persons report captures his attention. A fifteen-year-old traveler girl has disappeared and no one seems to give a damn about it. Duffy begins to dig and uncovers a disturbing underground of men who seem to know her very well. The deeper he digs the more sinister it all gets. Is finding out the truth worth it if DI Duffy is going to get himself and his colleagues killed? Can he survive one last case before getting himself and his family out over the water?

ADRIAN MCKINTY: was born and grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford University before moving to New York in the mid 1990s. His first novel Dead I Well May Be (loosely based on his experiences as an illegal immigrant in the US) was published in 2003. In 2012 after moving to Australia with his wife and children he began publication of the critically acclaimed Sean Duffy series. In 2019 after giving up writing Adrian had a global hit with his standalone novel The Chain. Adrian's books have won the Edgar Award, the Ned Kelly Award (3 times), The Anthony Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Recommendations
SA Cosby Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed, Blacktop Wasteland.


Craig Sisterson is a features writer and crime fiction expert from New Zealand who writes for newspapers and magazines in several countries. In recent years he's interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at festivals on three continents. He's been a judge of the McIlvanney Prize and Ned Kelly Awards, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. He lives in London with his daughter. He is the author of  SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME: The Pocket Essentials Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of Australia & New Zealand.

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Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

GRAHAM HURLEY chats to Paul about his new war novel THE BLOOD OF OTHERS, the Spoils of War series, Operation Jubilee - the raid on Dieppe, reimagining WWII, Stalin, Mountbatten, writing 'ogres' and coming over from TV documentaries.

THE BLOOD OF OTHERS: Dieppe, August 1942. A catastrophe no headline dared admit.
Plans are underway for the boldest raid yet on Nazi-occupied France. Over six thousand men will storm ashore to take the port of Dieppe. Lives will change in an instant – both on the beaches and in distant capitals.
Annie Wrenne, working at Lord Mountbatten's cloak-and-dagger Combined Operations headquarters, is privy to the top secret plans for the daring cross-Channel raid.
Young Canadian journalist George Hogan, protege of influential Lord Beaverbrook, faces a crucial assignment that will test him to breaking point.
And Abwehr intelligence officer Wilhelm Schultz is baiting a trap to lure thousands of Allied troops to their deaths…
Three lives linked by Operation Jubilee: the Dieppe Raid, 19 August 1942. Over six thousand men will storm the heavily defended French beaches.
Less than half of them will make it back alive.

GRAHAM HURLEY is the author of the acclaimed Faraday and Winter crime novels and an award-winning TV documentary maker. Two of the critically lauded series have been shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel. His thriller Finisterre, set in 1944, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

Recommendations
The Kindly Ones Jonathan Littell

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

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Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

David Thomson chats to Paul Burke about the completion of his fictional trilogy - SUSPECTS (film noir), SILVER LIGHT (Westerns) & CONNECTICUT (screwball comedy). We also chat the American dream, actors, how fiction sheds light on life and vice versa.

SUSPECTS: Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime - short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. Thomson sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. Then these characters start to meet each other outside the films as if they were real people with real needs and passions. The book is becoming a novel. The names and faces are familiar to us. All these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society.

SILVER LIGHT: From 1865 to 1950, the American West, its rich, colourful characters, and its many faces - historical, mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may be Wyatt Earp's son. Silver Light artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul.

CONNECTICUT: an enchanting yet haunting celebration of screwball romantic comedies. Now a trilogy is completed with Connecticut. Why Connecticut? Because that lovely, liberal state has been set aside as the resting place for every disturbed person in the nation! At first, this seems like an opportunity for meeting up with the merry ghosts of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, William Powell and Margaret Sullavan. We get glimpses of Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve. But then the wild comedy darkens as we realize that Connecticut itself is on the edge of a demented and cruel war that challenges all its inmates to keep seeing the comic side of mishap and madness.
The trilogy is revealed not just as a set of dazzling stories. But a commentary on how far we have all been steered towards delightful but dangerous fantasies by the movies. Aren't we all screwball now? Is Connecticut safe to visit?

Recommendations: Chinatown, The Killing, In A Lonely Place, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Red River, The Searchers, Bringing Up Baby, Sullivan's Travels, My Man Godfrey, The Lady Eve.

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

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Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

NICOLA MONAGHAN chats to Paul Burke about her new thriller, WISH YOU WERE HERE, Dr. Sian Love, Nottingham, Alan Sillitoe, DNA.

WISH YOU WERE HERE: DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous?
Former police officer and DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own detective agency and cohabiting with her partner, Kris. Her life is thrown into chaos once again when a teenage girl shows up at her office, claiming to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing in Nottingham over fifteen years ago - but refusing to allow Sian to test her DNA.
Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned in her days in the police force and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

NICOLA MONAGHAN Nicola Monaghan is the author of the Sian Love mystery series including the critically acclaimed Dead Flowers and, now, Wish You Were Here. Her debut novel The Killing Jar won a Betty Trask Award, the Authors' Club First Novel Prize and the Waverton Good Read. She taught creative writing for many years and is currently writing a thriller about that experience, as well as studying for her PhD at the University of Nottingham. www.nicolamonaghan.com

Recommendations
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Liz Nugent - Strange Sally Diamond & Our Little Cruelties
Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, Tana French & Kate Atkinson

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

SAM LLOYD chats to PAUL BURKE about his new thriller THE PEOPLE WATCHER, hinterlands, The Hobbit, surviving rejection, fulfilling a dream, character and boiling a frog.

THE PEOPLE WATCHER: Meet Mercy Lake. She likes to fix things: broken toys, old appliances. People.
She watches them in the dead of night, identifies what their lives are lacking and gives it to them . . . quietly. So quietly, they don't even know she exists.
Then Mercy meets Louis. He believes that some of those she watches deserve punishment, not help. But when people start getting hurt, Mercy must decide if the ends can ever justify their increasingly violent means.
And soon, their activities draw the attention of the very person Mercy is desperate to avoid. Someone who will go to extreme lengths to make her pay for knowing their secret . . .

The People Watcher is a shiver-inducing, heart-pounding suspense thriller that will keep you up into the early hours - perfect for fans of Stephen King, Alex Michaelides and Catherine Ryan Howard.

Sam Lloyd grew up in Hampshire, where he learned his love of storytelling. These days he lives in Surrey with his wife, three young sons and a dog that likes to howl. His first thrillers, The Memory Wood and The Rising Tide, were published to huge critical acclaim in 2020 and 2021

Recommendations
Katherine Ryan Howard The Trap

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

This episode is sponsored by Bantam, Transworld, Penguin - thank you for your support.

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

Paul Burke presents the latest review show featuring crime fiction titles released this month - mostly anyway. The selection is heavy on the noir and psychological thrillers with a couple of in translation novels and a de rigour pulp.
*Apologies for any mangling of French and Swiss German names.

Novels Reviewed

None of This is True by Lisa Jewell Century
The Honeymoon Kate Gray Welbeck
The Summer Girl Jenny Blackhurst Canelo Crime**
The Conspirators GW Shaw Quercus
The Bone Hacker Kathy Reichs Simon & Schuster 
The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction Robert Goddard
Girls Friends Alex Dahl Head of Zeus***
The Stranger in the Seine Guillaume Musso trans. Rosie Eyre Weidenfeld and Nicolson*
The Ice Cream Man Big Boy Pete Stark House Press
The Murder of Anton Livius Hansjörg Schneider trans Astrid Freuler Bitter Lemon*
Dead Man Driving Lesley Kelly Sandstone Press****

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

**Sponsored by Canelo Crime - thank you.

***Publication of this novel has been delayed  until April next year. Apologies for getting anyone's hopes up if you've listened to this review, you can pre-order of course . I've withdrawn this review now.

**** Sadly Sandstone press demised recently, the publication of this novel has been delayed probably to September/October. Apologies for misleading anyone.  Best wishes for all the authors and staff  concerned .

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Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

CANELO CRIME SPECIAL:
Authors LOUISA SCARR Out of the Ashes  & MARION TODD A Blind Eye join VICTORIA for a mid season special to discuss why readers love police procedurals, breaking free of tropes, and what makes a good detective.

CANELO CRIME

Mentions for:
Kate Atkinson, Joseph Knox, Russ Thomas, Jane Casey

VICTORIA SELMAN
SundayTimes bestselling author of Truly Darkly Deeply
Amazon Author Page: https://amzn.to/3xmvMeS
Website for news and giveaways: http://www.victoriaselmanauthor.com
Twitter: @VictoriaSelman

We love to hear from our listeners! Find me on Twitter @VictoriaSelman and join in the chat using #OnTheSofaWithVictoria

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Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Thank you to Canelo Crime sponsors of this episode of #OnTheSofa

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

VERN SMITH chats to Paul Burke about his crime novel SCRATCHING THE FLINT, editing the anthology JACKED, Toronto, corruption and policing.

SCRATCHING THE FLINT Set in pre-9/11 Toronto, detective noir Scratching the Flint takes place over twelve days during the spring of 2001. Smith's two-tone anti-fraud team of Alex Johnson and Cecil Bolan are back in their first full-length novel to investigate a vintage car theft ring à la MacGyver. When witnesses end up mocked and murdered, proof becomes a relative term to Cecil. Racked with guilt while the system sputters, he covertly assumes the role of not just investigating officer but also that of crown attorney, judge, and executioner, driving the case to a conclusion as brutal as the future.

VERN SMITH is the editor of Jacked, a new crime fiction anthology. He is author of the novels Under the Table and The Green Ghetto. His novelette, The Gimmick-a finalist for Canada's highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award-is the title track to his second collection of fiction. A Windsor, Ontario native and longtime resident of downtown Toronto, he now lives on the outskirts of Chicago.

JACKED Edited by award-winning crime-fiction author Vern Smith, JACKED runs the gamut in crime fiction. From hard-boiled to humorous to gritty noir to straight-up mystery, the anthology promises to please the most diverse and discriminating reading audience. With offerings from heavy-hitters like Matt Witten, Andrew Miller, Meagan Lucas, Eric Beetner, and Allison Whittenberg, and equally impressive contributions by relative newcomers to crime fiction, like Paul Alexander, Zephaniah Sole, and Meredith Craig, JACKED is a debut anthology not to be missed.

Recommendations:
AB Patterson - Harry Kenmore PI: At Your Service (others in series)
Alex Cizak, Andrew Miller, Scotch Rutherford - LA Stories: Three Grindhouse Novellas
Uncle B Publications

Mentioned:
Donald Goines
Clarence Cooper jr
Evelyn Lau

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

Newly minted CWA Historical Dagger winner DAVID DV BISHOP chats to Paul Burke about his new historical thriller RITUAL OF FIRE, Renaissance Florence, Cesare Aldo, Savonarola, Aldo no 4 and smells.

RITUAL OF FIRE Florence. Summer, 1538.
A night patrol finds a wealthy merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main square. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way. Does this new killing mean his fanatical disciples are reviving the monk’s regime of holy terror?
Cesare Aldo is busy hunting thieves in the Tuscan countryside, leaving Constable Carlo Strocchi to investigate the killing. When another merchant is burned alive in public, the rich start fleeing to their country estates. But the Tuscan hills can also be dangerous.
Growing religious fervour and a scorching heatwave drives the city ever closer to madness. Meanwhile, someone is stalking those powerful men who forged lifelong bonds in the dark days of Savonarola.
Unless Aldo and Strocchi work together, all of Florence will be consumed by an inferno of death and destruction.

DV BISHOP is the pseudonym of award-winning writer David Bishop. His love for the city of Florence and the Renaissance period meant there could be only one setting for his crime fiction. The first book in the Cesare Aldo series, City of Vengeance, won the Pitch Perfect competition at the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival and the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction Book. It was also shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Bishop was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship while writing that novel. He teaches creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Ritual of Fire is his third Cesare Aldo novel.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Abir Muckerjee
Vaseem Khan
Andrew Taylor
Anna Mazzola

Mentioned:
The Bitter Remedy Alis Hawkins
Gallileo's Daughter Dava Sobel
Forbidden Friendships:  Homosexuality & Male Culture in Renaissance Florence - Michael Rocke

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,  

WALTER MOSLEY - CWA DIAMOND DAGGER WINNER - chats to Paul Burke about EVERY MAN A KING, his writing, his characters, personal inspiration, American politics, good thoughts for writers and hope & belief.

The most prestigious Dagger of all, the Diamond Dagger is for a lifetime contribution to crime writing in the English language and is nominated by CWA members.

WALTER MOSLEY was born in LA in 1952. His African-American father Leroy from Louisiana joined the great migration north. His mother Ella, of Russian Jewish descent, was politically engaged which resonates in Mosley's work. 
Mosley took up writing at 34 with Gone Fishin' but it was Devil in a Blue Dress that was first published to acclaim in 1990, winning the John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 1991. Set in LA in 1948, Easy Rawlins is facing a murder charge when he takes a job searching for a white woman. Then stone-cold killer Mouse arrives from Houston, he's more terrifying than any of the chiselled giants in Mosley's novels.
Devil in a Blue Dress was filmed in 1995 starring Denzil Washington as Easy and Jennifer Beal as Mosley's first femme fatale Daphne Monet, Don Cheadle chills the blood as Mouse. Yet there are too few screen incarnations of Mosley books. Lawrence Fishburne played Socrates Fortlow in 1998's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey starring Samuel Jackson appeared on Apple TV+ in 2022. Mosley has worked as a scriptwriter on, amongst other shows, Snowfall, 2018, and Star Trek Discovery, 2019.
In all Mosley has written 60+ books; crime, literary, sci-fi and erotic fiction, two graphic novels, two plays, short stories and six nonfiction titles. He has often written features for the New Yorker and The Nation.
Mosley's fiction centres on irresistibly engaging antiheroes, one would be an achievement but five such is remarkable - PI Easy Rawlins (15 novels), ex-con Socrates Fortlow (3), New York bad man making amends Leonid McGill (6), Fearless Jones (3) and ex-cop Joe King Oliver (2).
The novels are about race, rampant capitalism and inequality in American society. Mosley lives in LA and Brooklyn and engages with the history of both places. He chronicles America, post-WWII to the present day, the story of African-American America and the lives of the poorest people in society.
Mosley has received acclaim throughout his career including the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2016. Down the River unto the Sea, 2018, won an Edgar the following year and Mosley was the first black male recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2020. There's also the PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award, the NAACP Image Award (3 times) and a Grammy and this list is by no means exhaustive.
In June 2018 Mosley with Kellye Garrett and Gigi Pandian set up Crime Writers of Color, a collective for authors from underrepresented backgrounds, now with over 350 members internationally. The organisation won the prestigious Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America at the Edgars in April.
He has no intention of putting down his pen...

Recommendations 
Killer Of Sheep - D. Charles Burnett
A Woman Under The Influence - D. John Cassavetes 

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

Produced by Junkyard Dog

Crime Time

Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023-2026 & National Crime Reading Month
& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 2024
2024 Slaughterfest,