Gas lit in Wood Green

Thanks to Lee Jackson for the splendid ad!

The North London Historical Crime Writers will be taking part in the inaugural Wood Green Crime Festival. The festival runs from Monday June 9 to Friday June 13 (oops!). The line up so far is:

Monday 9th at 6.30pm

Danny King and Rebecca Gray

Tuesday 10th at 6.30pm

Gaslit Vices: Lee Jackson, Andrew Martin, RN Morris and Frank Tallis talk to Barry Forshaw

Thursday 12th at 6.30pm

Alison Joseph

Friday 13th at 6.30pm

Chris Fowler and Adrian McKinty

Venue:

Big Green Bookshop

unit 1, Brampton Park Road,

Wood Green,

London,

N22 6BG

Tel 020 8881 6767

Not bad, eh? See you there!

Interview with Sally Hinchcliffe.

Something a bit different for me. I'm promoting someone else's book! Feels weird, but you know I quite like it. I quite like being a little less self-centred for a day.

The book is Out of A Clear Sky (see above) and it's brilliant. The author is Sally Hinchcliffe.

Last week I cyber-interviewed Sally over several days. You can read the result on the fabulous Vulpes Libris blog, here.

At one point, Sally told me that she felt like she was being given the South Bank treatment and she imagined me asking the questions in a Melvin Bragg voice. Or should that be Sir Melvin Bragg? Or is it Lord, or Dame...? It's something, I know.

Man against cat.

This really happened today. Several times. I stopped her climbing on my lap so she climbed on my shoulder. Unbelievable.

It's a heroic struggle, writing, sometimes.

Summer reading for Christians?

The Gentle Axe reviewed from a Christian perspective.

Chicago Tribune's paragraph of the week...

... is one of mine!

They say:

Some nerve. British author R.N. Morris gets credit for gall: In "The Gentle Axe" (2007), a thriller recently released by Penguin in paperback, he channels Fydor Dostoevsky to come up with a sequel to "Crime and Punishment"—and more than gets away with it. This novel gives a vivid portrait of Russia in the 1860s.

A detective named Porfiry—you remember him from the original—tracks a mysterious killer:

Read the selected paragraph here!

Booklist review...

The American Library Association's journal Booklist ran a review of A Vengeful Longing yesterday. Here's a quote:

The Gentle Axe was a solid debut, a reincarnation of Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. But here Morris seems to have hit his stride. His characters come alive in all their destitution, pretension, madness, fractiousness, and humanity. His portrait of the city, abandoned by the well-to-do in summer, offers a rich, palpably fetid sense of place, and his depiction of nineteenth-century Russian society, festering with revolutionary notions and old grudges, is compelling.

— Thomas Gaughan, Booklist