Crime Time FM

THE CRIME TIME CHRISTMAS DEBATE: BEST CRIME FICTION OF 2021

Panellists: LAURA WILSON (novelist & Guardian crime fiction critic), MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI (publisher, critic, novelist & CWA Chair), AYO ONATADE (critic for Shotsblog & book prize judge), JAKE KERRIDGE (crime fiction critic for the Telegraph), VICTORIA SELMAN (novelist and podcast presenter) and PAUL BURKE (critic and podcast editor and presenter).
Master of Ceremonies: BARRY FORSHAW (writer and crime fiction critic for the Financial Times).
The panellists discuss their selections of the best crime writing of the year.
This is a podcast of the TV debate broadcast on 2/12/21.
The full list of books can be found at Crime Time

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate & Leigh

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,  

HB LYLE (BEN) chats with Paul Burke about his latest historical thriller THE YEAR OF THE GUN, Sherlock Holmes and the Irregulars, Nabukov, historical accuracy in fiction and how Wiggins narrowly avoids going down with the Titanic (very minor spoiler alert).

THE YEAR OF THE GUN
1912. Released from the Secret Service, Wiggins sets out for New York and his lost lover Bela. But after an altercation on board, he finds himself among the low-life of Britain's poorest city, Dublin.
Wiggins falls in with gangster Patrick O'Connell and is soon driving the boss's girlfriend around town. Molly wants O'Connell to support her Irish nationalist cause - a cause needing guns to defeat the British - and then they go to find them in America.
Finally, Wiggins can solve the mystery of Bela - and meet his old mentor, Sherlock Holmes in a story of escalating intrigue, danger and violence.

HB LYLE lives in South London with his partner and their twin daughters. After a career in
feature film development, he took an MA in creative writing, followed by a PhD, at the University of East Anglia, an experience which led to the creation of The Irregular. He also writes screenplays and teaches undergraduates.

Recommendations (Mentions)
William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise & Restless
George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman novels
Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes stories and novels
Erskine Childers - The Riddle of the Sands
Vladimir Nabokov
Mike Dash Satan's Circus

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

Paul Burke writes for NB magazine, Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Time and the European Literature Network. He also edits and presents the Crime Time FM podcast and is a book collector and lover of crime fiction. 

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,  

THE SEASON FINALE
THE PLOT THICKENS: Building tension and suspense. Lisa Jewell (THE NIGHT SHE DISAPPEARED), Louise Candlish (THE HEIGHTS) and Mark Edwards (HOLLOWS).

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,  

RAZORBLADE TEARS - WINNER OF THE CRIME TIME FM CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2021      

SA COSBY chats with Craig Sisterson about his novel RAZORBLADE TEARS, Winning the CTFM Novel Award, being the 'bard of broken men',  TV rights and entertaining readers.

Razorblade Tears: Ike Randolph left jail fifteen years ago, with not so much as a speeding ticket since. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.
Ike is devastated to learn his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Though he never fully accepted his son, Ike is broken by his death.
Derek's father Buddy Lee was as ashamed of Derek being gay as Derek was of his father's criminal past. But Buddy Lee - with seedy contacts deep in the underworld - needs to know who killed his only child.
Desperate to do better by them in death than they did in life, two hardened ex-cons must confront their own prejudices about their sons - and each other - as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.

S. A. Cosby (Shawn) is a Southern (Rural) Noir mystery writer. He resides in Gloucester, Virginia on the Atlantic coast. He worked a 60hr job at J. K. Redmond Funeral Home before becoming a full time writer. Cosby has published three novels; My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears and is working on a fourth.

Recommended:
Chester Himes
Daniel Woodrell
Wiley Cash
Kellye Garrett
Don't Know Tough - Eli Cranor
Winter Counts - David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Lady Chevy John Woods
Barbara Neely
The Prophets - Robert Jones Jr
Donald Goines
Bath Haus - PJ Vernon
David Joy
Eryc Pruitt
Stephen Post
Steve Weddle
Todd Robinson

Craig Sisterson is the author of Southern Cross Crime
A survey of Australian and New Zealand crime fiction and film.

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,  

PAUL CLEAVE chats to Paul Burke about his new psychological thriller THE QUIET PEOPLE, social media, elements of horror, Cameron and Lisa Murdoch, real life crime, and the Expanse.

THE QUIET PEOPLE: Cameron and Lisa Murdoch are successful New Zealand crime writers, happily married and topping bestseller lists worldwide. They have been on the promotional circuit for years, joking that no one knows how to get away with crime like they do. After all, they write about it for a living.
So when their challenging seven-year-old son Zach disappears, the police and the public naturally wonder if they have finally decided to prove what they have been saying all this time…
Are they trying to show how they can commit the perfect crime?
Electrifying, taut and immaculately plotted, The Quiet People is a chilling, tantalisingly twisted thriller that will keep you gripped and guessing to the last explosive page.

PAUL CLEAVE is Christchurch born and raised. Paul wanted to write horror but realised that crime – real life crime – is horror. He turned to writing dark crime fiction, writing first The Killing Hour, and then The Cleaner, in his mid-twenties. From that point on he's written dark tales set in his home city, introducing Joe Middleton – the Christchurch Carver, and Melissa, and Theodore Tate, and Schroder, and Jerry Gray, among others to the world.

Recommendations
Books
Michael Holding Why We Kneel, How We Rise
The Hate U Give Angie Thomas
Also discussed
Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
TV
The Expanse
Billions
Mindhunter

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

Paul Burke writes for NB magazine, Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Time and the European Literature Network. He also edits and presents the Crime Time FM podcast and is a book collector and lover of crime fiction. 

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,  

LUKE McCALLIN chats to Paul Burke about his new historical thriller WHERE GOD DOES NOT WALK, Gregor Reinhardt, WWI, Bosnia, inspirational literature.

WHERE GOD DOES NOT WALK: THE WESTERN FRONT, JULY 1918. Gregor Reinhardt is a young lieutenant in a stormtrooper battalion on the Western Front when one of his subordinates is accused of murdering a group of officers, and then subsequently trying to take his own life. Not wanting to believe his friend could have done what he is accused of, Reinhardt begins to investigate. He starts to uncover the outline of a conspiracy at the heart of the German army, a conspiracy aimed at ending the war on the terms of those who have a vested interest in a future for Germany that resembles her past.
The investigation takes him from the devastated front lines of the war, to the rarefied heights of Berlin society, and into the hospitals that treat those men who have been shattered by the stress and strain of the war. Along the way, Reinhardt comes to an awakening of the man he might be. A man freed of dogma, whose eyes have been painfully opened to the corruption and callousness all around him. A man to whom calls to duty, to devotion to the Fatherland and to the Kaiser, ring increasingly hollow...

Luke McCallin was born in 1972 in Oxford, grew up in Africa, went to school around the world and has worked with the United Nations as a humanitarian relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to normal people - those stricken by conflict, by disaster - put under abnormal pressures. He lives with his wife and two children in an old farmhouse in France in the Jura Mountains. He has a master's degree in political science, speaks French, and can just get by in Russian. When he's not working or writing, he enjoys reading history, playing the drums, and heading into the mountains for a run!

Recommendations:

 In English
Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong
Pat Barker: Regeneration
Jennifer Johnston: How Many Miles to Babylon?
Timothy Findlay: The Wars
Frederic Manning: Her Privates We
The Abolutionist: John Boyne
Sebastian Barry: A Long, Long Way

In French
Roland Dorgelès: Les croix de bois
Henri Barbusse: Le feu
Gabriel Chevallier: La peu
David Diop: Frère d'âme (‘At night all blood is black’ in English)
Jean Amila: Le boucher des Hurlus
Jean Rouaud: Les champs d’honneur
Thierry Bourcy: a series of novels about Célestin Louise, a policeman who joins the French army
Didier Daeninckx: Le der des ders ('A very profitable war' in English, and an excellent graphic novel by Tardy)
Patrick Pecherot: Tranchecaille (a brilliantly-written novel of a murder inquiry told through discordant and unsynchronised flashbacks, and terribly unreliable narrators)
Jean-Christophe Rufin: Le collier rouge (also a film)
Pierre Lemaitre: Au revoir là-haut ('The great swindle' in English: a film, and an excellent graphic novel, and the first novel in a trilogy that takes the reader up to the Second World War)

German
Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Way Back
Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel (a memoir, not a novel

Episode produced by Junkyard Dog
Music courtesy of Southgate & Leigh
Crime Time 

Paul Burke writes for NB magazine, Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Time and the European Literature Network. He also edits and presents the Crime Time FM podcast and is a book collector and lover of crime fiction. 

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,  

HEADS TOGETHER - the monthly magazine show on CRIME TIME FM. PAUL, VICTORIA and BARRY discuss the Crime Time FM WATCHLIST, the latest podcasts, January 2022 releases, book-to-film-to-book?, TV adaptations of favourite detectives, these extraordinary times for crime fiction and the little fella...

PAUL BURKE writes about crime fiction for Crime Fiction Lover, NB Magazine, Crime Time and the European Literature Network.

VICTORIA SELMAN is the bestselling author of the Ziba MacKenzie series killer thrillers. Her new thriller Truly, Darkly, Deeply will be published in 2022.

BARRY FORSHAW is the editor of Crime Time, author of several books on film and crime fiction and the FT Crime Fiction Critic.

The Watchlist:
Dolphin Junction - Mick Herron
Vine Street - Dominic Nolan
The Killing Hills - Chris Offutt
The Night Will be Long - Santiago Gamboa trans. Andrea Rosenberg
A Three Dog Problem SJ Bennett
Turf Wars Olivier Norek trans. Nick Caistor

January 2022 Crime Fiction:
Theo Clare, Simon Mason, Amen Alonge, CS Robertson, Dean Koonz, Louise Welsh, Matt Wesolowski & David Gilman.

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,  

Book Marketing Panel- On The Sofa With Victoria
With over 180K books published every year and more than 20 titles released every hour, how do you ensure yours stands out from the crowd? Quercus Publicity Director, Hannah Robinson, Chris McDonald (Blood Brothers) & Simon Bewick (Bay Tales/Noir at The Bar) share their thoughts along with  lessons learned from lockdown.

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,  

CHRIS OFFUTT chats to Paul Burke about THE KILLING HILLS, Kentucky, land and culture, spy fiction and photography.

THE KILLING HILLS: Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer's increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife. The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal - sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers - and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honour, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

CHRIS OFFUTT is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, the novels The Good Brother, Country Dark and The Killing Hills, and three memoirs: The Same River Twice, No Heroes, and My Father, the Pornographer. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among many other places. He has written screenplays for Weeds, True Blood, and Treme, and has received fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations.

Recommendations
British TV:
The Sandbaggers, Callan & Y Gwyll
Books:
Melissa Ginsburg The House Uptown
Domenic Stansberry The Ancient Rain
William McIlvanney Laidlaw trilogy
Mick Herron, Jean-Claude Izzo, Walter Mosley, Chester Himes, John le Carré & Massimo Carlotto.

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

Paul Burke writes for NB magazine, Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Time and the European Literature Network. He also edits and presents the Crime Time FM podcast and is a book collector and lover of crime fiction. 

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,  

HEATHER YOUNG chats to Paul Burke about her debut psychological thriller THE LOST GIRLS, storytelling, domestic abuse, ancient lands and family.

THE LOST GIRLS: In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes forever from her family’s summer house on a remote Minnesota Lake. Sixty years later, Lucy, Emily’s quiet and watchful older sister, lives alone in the lake house. When Lucy dies, she leaves the house to her grandniece, Justine. The lake house offers Justine an escape from her manipulative boyfriend and a chance to give her daughters the home she never had. But the discovery of a notebook, in which her great aunt has written the story of that devastating summer, forces Justine to realise there may be more to her inheritance than she first imagined. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.

HEATHER YOUNG earned her law degree from the University of Virginia and practiced law in San Francisco before beginning her writing career. She received an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and has studied at the Tin House Writers' Workshop and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her husband and two children. The Lost Girls is her first novel.
Heather Young's second novel The Distant Dead will be published by Verve in the spring of 2022.

Recommended
The Possible World Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

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

 Paul Burke writes for NB magazine, Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Time and the European Literature Network. He also edits and presents the Crime Time FM podcast and is a book collector and lover of crime fiction. 

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,