Crime novelist has been forced to deny claims that she tricked readers into buying books she didn’t write herself
It is a gripping detective story typical of the queen of Nordic noir, leaving fans pondering the ethics of relationships and the dirty secrets of people with power and influence.
But for once, bestselling crime novelist Camilla Läckberg is not the author of this particular literary whodunnit, but its protagonist.
Continue reading...Strand Magazine will publish Blackmail, a tale of a blind Korean war veteran, found by New York editor Andrew Gulli
A New York editor and literary detective is celebrating the discovery and release of an unpublished short story by James M Cain, one of the greats of American noir, a “poet of the tabloid murder” whose works made famous on film include The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce.
“For all the work that you do,” said Andrew Gulli, editor-in-chief of the Strand Magazine, “like 2% of the time you hit the jackpot. I just feel so good. It’s worth it.”
Continue reading...Katrín Jakobsdóttir joins long list of fiction-writing politicians with book that came together during Covid pandemic
For 30 years, the disappearance of teenager Lára Marteinsdóttir from the windswept island of Víðey, off the coast of Iceland’s capital, tormented the nation. Until 1986, when Valur, a rookie reporter on a local newspaper, decided to investigate …
So far, so Nordic noir. But Reykjavík, published to promising reviews in Iceland this week, is a crime novel with a difference – it was written by the prime minister, albeit with the help of one of the country’s international bestselling authors.
Continue reading...Kicking off our new monthly guides to an author’s work, crime novelist Janice Hallett puts the spotlight on the creator of Miss Marple and Poirot
What with the chart-topping success of Richard Osman’s novels, and a new series by the Rev Richard Coles due later this year, cosy crime fiction seems to be having its moment. If you’ve already raced your way through The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice, why not try picking up a novel by the original queen of crime herself? Janice Hallett, whose bestselling crime novels The Appeal and The Twyford Code have seen her dubbed “a modern Agatha Christie” has put together a handy list to help you choose which one to pick.
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Continue reading...From piercing studies of colonialism to powerful domestic sagas, our panel of writers, all of whom had books published this year, share their favourite titles of 2021
Author of Klara and the Sun (Faber)
Continue reading...These fiendishly clever mystery novels have spawned pop culture icons, anime and a museum. And, best of all, honkaku plays fair – you have the clues to solve the crime
After a day of joyous wedding celebrations, a bloodcurdling scream echoes into the night. The newlywed bride and groom are found dead in their bed, stabbed with a katana sword, now thrust into the snow outside. Their bedroom was locked from the inside, and there is no way the murderer could have broken in to do the deed, let alone escaped without leaving a trace. How was this impossible crime committed?
Continue reading...Forbidden desires, strange obsessions and a singular talent for suspense... Carmen Maria Machado on the dark allure of the writer behind Ripley
There has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.
Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.
Continue reading...From Agatha Christie to Gillian Flynn, readers love an untraceable method or a villain who wins. Author Peter Swanson says there are eight examples of the perfect murder
Is there such a thing as a perfect murder? In real life, the answer is probably yes, though how would we know about it? Perfection demands that the murder be unsolvable, maybe even unrecorded – a victim disappearing off the face of the earth, a body never found, a killer never caught. In our world of forensic science and DNA evidence, the perfect murder must be as rare as a reclusive celebrity.
But we have fiction, and this is where we find an abundance of perfect murder attempts. I say attempts because the allure of most detective fiction hinges on the existence of an investigator – a Holmes, a Poirot, a Lisbeth Salander – who is smarter than the smartest of criminals. The perfect murder – like a perfect sonnet or a perfect roast chicken – is an ideal that can be approached but never entirely reached. Detectives, and storytelling tradition, get in the way.
When I set out to write a book in which a bookseller publishes a blog about his favourite fictional murders, only to find out that someone else is using the list as a blueprint for real crimes, I knew that part of the process of writing was going to be a whole lot of reading. So I set out to find a definitive list of perfect crimes and came up with a final tally of eight (or rather, my narrator Malcolm Kershaw did).
Christie's use of thallium as a fatal poison in The Pale Horse caused a brief uptick in the toxin’s presence in real-life crime
Continue reading...Revelations that the author of The Woman in the Window lied repeatedly about having cancer have not dissuaded HarperCollins from publishing a followup
Dan Mallory’s publisher HarperCollins has said that it intends publish a second novel by him, despite revelations that he had lied about having cancer.
Mallory, who wrote the bestselling thriller The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn, admitted in a statement this week in response to an extensive New Yorker investigation that “on numerous occasions in the past, I have stated, implied, or allowed others to believe that I was afflicted with a physical malady instead of a psychological one: cancer, specifically”.
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