Crime Time FM

POLICE PROCEDURALS (COP THRILLERS). Caz Frear (SWEET LITTLE LIES) and William Shaw (DS CUPIDI and BREEN & TOZER) discuss procedurals, the rise of the armchair detective and riding in Peter James' police car.

VICTORIA SELMAN
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.

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate & Leigh
Crime Time

TRULY, DARKLY, DEEPLY - VICTORIA SELMAN coming 7/7/22

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,  

NICOLA UPSON chats to Paul Burke about DEAR LITTLE CORPSES, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, WWII, Golden Age crime, the Hitchcocks and Gielguds, not so cosy emotions and the fun of writing.

DEAR LITTLE CORPSES: It takes a village to bury a child.
1 September, 1939. As the mass evacuation takes place across Britain, thousands of children leave London for the countryside, but when a little girl vanishes without trace, the reality of separation becomes more desperate and more deadly for those who love her.
In the chaos and uncertainty of war, Josephine struggles with the prospect of change. As a cloud of suspicion falls across the small Suffolk village she has come to love, the conflict becomes personal, and events take a dark and sinister turn.

NICOLA UPSON's debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels whose main character is Josephine Tey, who - along with Agatha Christie - was one of the masters of Britain's Golden Age of crime writing. She was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2018 for Nine Lessons and longlisted in 2021 for The Dead of Winter.

Recommendations:
JOSEPHINE TEY'S CRIME NOVELS
CHRISTIANNA BRAND GREEN FOR DANGER
NOEL STREATFEILD SAPLINGS
MOLLY PANTER-DOWNES ONE FINE DAY

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

JAMES WOLFF chats to Paul Burke about his two novels BESIDE THE SYRIAN SEA & HOW TO BETRAY YOUR COUNTRY, frequencies of conflict, spies are real people and what makes a literary spy novel.

BESIDE THE SYRIAN SEA: Jonas works for the UK secret service as an intelligence analyst. When his father is kidnapped and held for ransom by ISIS gunmen in Syria, he takes matters into his own hands and begins to steal the only currency he has access to: secret government intelligence. He heads to Beirut with a haul of the most sensitive documents imaginable and recruits an unlikely ally – an alcoholic Swiss priest named Father Tobias. Despite barely surviving his previous contact with ISIS, Tobias agrees to travel into the heart of the Islamic State and inform the kidnappers that Jonas is willing to negotiate for his father’s life. When the British and American governments realise they may be dealing with betrayal on a scale far greater than that of Edward Snowden, they try everything in their power to stop Jonas, and he finds himself tested to the limit as he fights to keep the negotiations alive and play his enemies off against each other. As the book races towards a thrilling confrontation in the Syrian desert, Jonas will have to decide how far he is willing to go to see his father again.

HOW TO BETRAY YOUR COUNTRY: Things are looking bad for disgraced spy August Drummond. In emotional free fall after the death of his wife, fired for a series of security breaches... and now his neighbour on the flight to Istanbul won't stop talking. The only thing keeping August sane is the hunch that there's something not quite right about the nervous young man several rows ahead - a hunch confirmed when August watches him throw away directions to a European cemetery seconds before being detained by Turkish police. A reckless August decides to go to the cemetery, where he meets a mysterious figure from the dark heart of the Islamic State and quickly finds himself drawn into a shadowy plot to murder an Iranian scientist in Istanbul. But nothing is what it seems, and before long August realises he has gone too far to turn back. As he struggles to break free from the clutches of Islamic State and play off British intelligence against their Turkish counterparts, he will find his resourcefulness, ingenuity and courage tested to the very limit of what he can endure.

James Wolff lives in London. He has been working for the British government for the last 10 years. His article for Crime Reads can be read here

Recommendations:
Edward Wilson Envoy
Alan Judd A Fine Madness
Len Deighton The Berlin Trilogy

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

CHRIS RICKABY & BARNEY THOMPSON, aka BEN CREED chat to Paul Burke about A TRAITOR'S HEART their new historical thriller featuring post WWII Leningrad and detective Revol Rossel.

A TRAITOR'S HEART Winter, 1952: Leningrad's icy streets are haunted by a murderer. The name is whispered everywhere – Koshchei has returned, the people say, Koshchei the Immortal. Koshchei, named after a sinister figure from Slavic folklore, is an invisible killer who cuts out the tongue of his victims and replaces it with a scroll of paper containing a few lines of what seems to be Italian verse.
Three thousand kilometres away in a labour colony above the Arctic Circle, threatened by the Thieves who rule the camp, former militia lieutenant Revol Rossel is close to death. As helicopter blades whip the snow into hallucinatory flurries, Rossel watches the arrival of a saviour he hates: Major Nikitin, the man who once cut off the former virtuoso violinist's fingers. 
Along with skilled aviator Tanya 'Vassya' Vasilievna, the two men must hunt Koshchei down. On the trail, they uncover more riddles, including one centred on the ruins of Hitler's bunker, the Fuhrer's own copy of a Renaissance manual for tyrants, and secret code hidden within that leads to a weapon of unimaginable power. A weapon coveted by the scheming plotters of Stalin's Kremlin.
What Rossel and Nikitin do not know is that the mystery and the murderer are inextricably linked. And to save themselves they must not only catch Koshchei but also uncover the identity of another ghost – a ghost hiding among the remnants of Hitler's once all-powerful Third Reich.

CHRIS RICKABY worked in advertising for 20 years. He has written and produced various TV programmes for ITV and 5 and created a cross platform novel called Shuffle. Chris is from Newcastle.
BARNEY THOMPSON harboured ambitions of becoming a conductor and studied under the legendary conducting professor Ilya Musin at the St Petersburg Conservatory, before diverting to a career in journalism. He has worked at The Times and the Financial Times, and is now editor and writer at the UN Refugee Agency.

Recommendation:
KOLYMA TALES Varlam Shalamov
KOLYMSKY HEIGHTS Lionel Davidson
THE NORTHUMBRIANS Dan Jackson
THE BERNIE GUNTHER SERIES Philip Kerr

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

THRILLERS: SHARI LAPENA (NOT A HAPPY FAMILY) & GYTHA LODGE (LIE BESIDE ME) discuss THRILLER WRITING on The Sofa With Victoria. What makes a good thriller, raising the stakes and building suspense.

VICTORIA SELMAN
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.

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate & Leigh
Crime Time

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,  

JOSEPH KNOX chats to Paul Burke about his novel TRUE CRIME STORY, male violence and misogyny, the pitfalls of making yourself a malign presence in your own fiction and insomnia.

TRUE CRIME STORY In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.
She was never seen again.
Seven years after her disappearance, struggling writer Evelyn Mitchell finds herself drawn into the mystery. Through interviews with Zoe's closest friends and family, she begins piecing together what really happened in 2011. But where some versions of events overlap, aligning perfectly with one another, others stand in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies.
Shaken by revelations of Zoe's secret life, and stalked by a figure from the shadows, Evelyn turns to crime writer Joseph Knox to help make sense of a case where everyone has something to hide.
Zoe Nolan may be missing presumed dead, but her story is only just beginning.

Joseph Knox was born and raised in and around Stoke and Manchester, where he worked in bars and bookshops before moving to London. He runs, writes and reads compulsively. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller and has been translated into eighteen languages. The Smiling Man and The Sleepwalker are the second and third books in the series. His latest True Crime Story is a standalone.

Recommendation:
Oxblood Tom Benn

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

In 2 separate interviews authors Heather Young THE DISTANT DEAD and Peter Murphy TO BECOME AN OUTLAW discuss their new novels.

Heather Young is author of two novels, The Lost Girls and  THE DISTANT DEAD (EDGAR NOMINATED). Heather lives with her family in Mill Valley, California.

THE DISTANT DEAD: A body burns in the desert... Does the boy who found it know more than it seems? 
Sal Prentiss, orphaned and burdened with a terrible secret, just wants a place to belong. Sal lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills, and finds himself at the centre of a brutal murder mystery when he discovers the body of his maths teacher, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles' compound.
In the seven months he worked at Lovelock's middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with Sal and was one of the few people to look out for the boy.
Nora Wheaton, the school's social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam - another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. For Sal's grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he's telling about his teacher's death.

Peter Murphy spent a career in the law, as an advocate, teacher, and judge in England and the United States, and served for several years as counsel at the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He has written and published nine novels: He lives in Cambridgeshire.

To Become An Outlaw: 1964, Apartheid South Africa. Danie du Plessis, the son of a conservative Afrikaner family, is poised to start a glittering legal academic career at one of South Africa's leading universities, when he falls in love with a student, Amy Coetzee. But there's a problem: he's white, she's not. Facing arrest, imprisonment and ruin, the couple flee South Africa, and settle in Cambridge, where friends find them positions at the University. They marry and have two children, and have seemingly put the past, and South Africa, behind them. But in 1968 Art Pienaar enters their lives, and, insisting that they have a duty to fight back, enlists their help in increasingly dangerous schemes to undermine the South African regime.
When Pienaar and a notorious drug dealer, Vince Cummings, are found murdered together, Danie's activities come to light, and he and his family find themselves in mortal danger. Danie is also threatened with criminal prosecution on behalf of a government desperate to maintain good relations with the apartheid regime. Danie knows he's sailed close to the wind. But has he become an outlaw? Can Ben Schroeder persuade a jury that the answer is no?

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

DON WINSLOW chats to Paul Burke about his new novel CITY ON FIRE, Rhode Island, the Iliad, Helen of Troy, borders, gangsters, Africa, Jane Austen and getting set up by Ken Bruen.

CITY ON FIRE:
Providence, RI, 1986.
Twenty-nine-year-old Danny Ryan is a hard-working longshoreman, loving husband, loyal friend, and occasional “muscle” for the Irish crime syndicate that oversees much of the city. He yearns for something more and dreams of starting over fresh, someplace far away.
But when a modern-day Helen of Troy triggers a war between rival mob factions, Danny is embroiled in a conflict he can’t escape. Now it is up to him to step into the breach to protect his family, the friends who are closer to him than brothers, and the only home he’s ever known.

Don Winslow is the author of nineteen acclaimed, award-winning, international bestsellers – including the No. 1 international bestseller The Cartel, winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, The Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Winter of Frankie Machine – several of which have been made into movies or are in development. A former investigator, anti-terrorist trainer, and trial consultant, Winslow lives half the year in Southern California and the other half in Rhode Island.

Recommendations:
Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noel Mostert
Jane Austen
The Romantic Poets
The Guards Ken Bruen

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network.

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,  

ALIS HAWKINS (Not One of Us), GAIL 'GB' WILLIAMS (The Chair) & PHILIP GWYNNE JONES (Vengeance in Venice) chat to Victoria and Paul about all things Welsh crime fiction and the Gwyl Crime Cyrmu Festival - 27-29th April & 2-4th May.
Featuring:
The Daniel Morgan murder, Mark Billingham, Ann Cleave, Mark Ellis, Elly Griffiths, Cathy Ace, Vaseem Khan, Abir Mukherjee, Chris Lloyd, Matt Johnson and many more...

For festival tickets:
GWYL CRIME CYMRU
https://gwylcrimecymrufestival.co.uk/

For information on Welsh crime writers:
CRIME CYMRU
https://crime.cymru/

Recommendations
Wilderness - B.E. Jones
The Lake Vyrney Killings - Simon McCleave (DI Ruth Hunter series)
Hard Return Rosie Claverton (Amy Lane mysteries)
Fortuna's Deadly Shadow & Fatal Solution - Leslie Scase

Victoria Selman is the author of the Ziba McKenzie Serial killer novels and Truly, Darkly, Deeply coming in July.

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate and Leigh
Crime Time

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover, NB Magazine and the European Literature Network.

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,  

AUSTRALIAN CRIME FICTION: CHRIS HAMMER (SCRUBLANDS & OPAL COUNTRY) & EMMA VISKIC (THOSE WHO PERISH out April - CALEB ZELIC SERIES) discuss the appeal of Outback Noir, aka Southern Cross Crime, aka Dingo Noir On The Sofa With Victoria.

VICTORIA SELMAN
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.

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate & Leigh
Crime Time

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,