What larks! I have been invited to a second publishers’ party even though the Lent term is not yet out. It of course means another expedition to London and probably its seamy side, but the evenings are lighter these days and I am now of an age and infirmity where I can discount the long-standing advice of my friend Rodney Wingfield who has always maintained that the streets of the capital swarm with footpads and painted whores.

The event is the annual celebration of the crime and thriller list presented by those wonderful people at Mssrs Headline and Company, bespoke publishers in the parish of Euston, though the party takes place in the heart of West End. Eagerly, I push my way through the throng of theatre-goers, encountering several colourful characters offering to sell me small posies of flowers, which I politely decline, for the flowers are unattractive and “Skunk” seems such an ugly name for a lady’s corsage.

All the great and good of the crime fiction world are there, and also some writers, although as I arrive, those famous reviewers and arbiters of taste, Mr Peter Guttridge and Mr Barry Forshaw, immediately make preparations to leave! It is not, I am assured, anything to do with me, rather they have received “a better offer” of a dinner with rival publishers Orion!

Mr Guttridge making an early exit

It is certainly not my place to deny these hard-working scribblers the chance of a hot meal, for as I know from personal experience, journalism is an ill-paid profession, and so I bid them farewell as they fasten their cloaks and call for their carriages and I turn to mingle with the crowd of revellers.

I attempt to have a word with

Rob Ryan but he seems engrossed in

a good book, as does the vivacious

Louise Penny (below).

The party proceeds apace. I spot many a celebrity. There are Geoffrey Bradley, Esq. and Robert Cornwell, deep in conversation about the next issue of CADS magazine. Is that Anthony Lejune over by the potted palms? There’s John Dugdale, still showing the enthusiasm of youth, and Canadian Louise Penny, who has taken to the London scene with aplomb. I even manage a few words with two of my favourite authors, Veronica Stallwood and Robert Ryan, before a whisper sweeps the room that we revellers have been invited to another party, just around the corner, hosted by Lord Salisbury himself. (Or was that the Duke of Clarence or The Marquis of Abercrombie? To be honest, I was very tired by that time.)

As part of the Essex Book Festival in March, television producer Ted Childs participated in a sell-out seminar entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Morse and Lewis” with Morse creator, Colin Dexter.  Despite severe competition from veteran raconteur Dexter, Ted won the hearts of the 500-strong audience by announcing that a second series of Lewis was in production, with filming to take place in Oxford this summer for broadcast in February/March 2008.

     He also revealed that had John Thaw not opted to play the legendary Inspector Morse, one actor strongly in the frame for the part back in the 1980s was the late Ian Richardson.

The Daily Telegraph is, of course, never wrong, but its television guide last month may have been guilty of a little shall we say superficial reportage when promoting the pilot(?) film of a new thriller series. Instinct, we are told, comes from the pen of Lizzie Mickery who “has impeccable credentials – from Messiah to the The State Within, she’s created characters that viewers have found compelling.”

Now I’m sure Lizzie Mickery is an excellent writer of screenplays (despite being involved the Inspector Lynley Mysteries), but I do believe that the characters in Messiah (the blood-soaked saga starring the wonderful Ken Stott) were created by one Boris Starling in his novel of the same name. In fact, I distinctly remember sitting next to Boris Starling on stage at a Sherlock Holmes festival in Crowborough when the book came out and he managed to squeeze in the festival as part of his busy promotional tour.

I did actually manage to see Instinct when it was broadcast though I have to admit to a feeling of well-there’s-three-hours-of-my-life-I’ll-never-see-again by the end. The plot was simply incredible. Disbelief not only had to be suspended, but given a red card and sent off and there was a soap-opera symmetry in one character discovering a son he didn’t know he had and another finding a previously-unknown sister. Naturally “fahm-lee” became as totemic as in Eastenders, and almost as incestuous.

The scenery was nice, though; and I never thought I’d ever say that about Lancashire.

Was it one of the History Boys who said that history was just one thing after another? Of late it has seemed like one crime writer after another has turned to history for solace, inspiration or a larger advance.

Two years ago the flavour of the month seemed to be Roman Britain, with no less than four of us re-telling the story of Boudica, Queen of the Iceni so memorably played by Alex Kingston in the otherwise totally unmemorable TV film.

Manda Scott was into her four-book New Age trilogy of Boudica; M.J. Trow, author of the Inspector Lestrade spoofs, writing with his archaeologist son Taliesin produced (and mis-spelled) Boudicca: The Warrior Queen;  Norfolk crime writer Brian Cooper adopted the pen-name Richard Hunt for his version of events in AD60, Boudicca’s Battle of Britain; and my own fictional history Boudica and the Lost Roman managed to get disqualified from the Ellis Peters Award for not having enough crime in it.

Recently, I noted that Mei Trow is at it again, this time with his telling of the tale of King Canute, which he correctly spells as Cnut: Emperor of the North. This very same King Cnut also gets a passing mention in my own The Legend of Hereward, which I am reliably informed is now published by Severn House while word has reached me that even Tim Willocks, the author of Green River Rising and Bad City Blues, is harking back to the siege of Malta in 1565 for his latest novel, The Religion.

Also turning away from the dark side is the exquisite Sarah Dunant, creator of Hannah Wolfe, one of the best private eyes, either sex, either side of the Atlantic.

Sadly, Hannah Wolfe has not been around for a number of years now and the divine Sarah has switched her theatre of fiction to the mean streets of Renaissance Italy, most recently with In The Company of The Courtesan, published by Virago.

I first came across Sarah in the Cambridge Footlights production of the musical Cabaret. She was an absolutely stunning Sally Bowles; I was merely a backstage hand helping the chorus girls with their costume changes.

Ah, happy days.

If American lawyers are contractually obliged to become thriller writers, so to, it seems, is anyone British who is connected to horse racing, though none will ever achieve the National Treasure status of Dick Francis.

One of the latest runners (or should that be riders?) is jockey Graeme Roe who launches his third thriller Dangerous Outsider with mainstream publisher Constable after two previously self-published novels.

What struck me immediately about the book was the ringing endorsement “Another winner from Graeme!” splashed across the dust jacket. Not that that is an outlandish thing to say about a book by a jockey, far from it, but who is the avid fan making such a claim? A respected critic of crime fiction? A literary magazine? A fellow crime writer?

Step forward, Alan Brazil. Yes, Alan Brazil the tousled-headed striker who played for Ipswich Town and occasionally Scotland before ending his footballing career at lesser clubs, and who is now a TV and radio soccer pundit.

It’s actually not that surprising when you know that Alan is a dedicated horse racing fan and regularly attends horsey meetings here in the Eastern marches.

As someone who was often described as a writer of “soft-boiled” crime fiction, I wonder if my career with Constable would have prospered had I managed to get an endorsement from Stuart Pearce, say, or perhaps Norman ‘Bite-Your-Leg’ Hunter.

Back in 1999 I was moved to write that Jenny Siler’s first novel Easy Money was an “exciting, wham-bam road movie of a thriller and a stunning crime debut”.  I even had the pleasure of meeting Ms Siler on a visit from her native Montana.

I came across her name again a couple of years later when she organised an appeal to support fellow Montana-based writer James Crumley, who was ‘unwell’ and facing large medical bills.

Now her name comes up again but this time it has changed to Alex Carr, the author of An Accidental American [published by Orion], an excellent European-based thriller where the heroine is a professional forger of identity documents. So who am I to say which is Ms Siler/Carr’s true name?

The Accidental American is a true Euro-thriller, set in France, Lisbon and Beirut, where characters smoke with impunity and drive Twingos (a Renault but not the sort you’ll see on Top Gear) and Alex Carr does a good job of her location work.

Her editors, however, might have suggested the toning down of the more obvious Americanisms which, in this context do tend to jar on the reader slightly even if the heroine is partly American. Most notably, the repeated use of “Fall” for Autumn and the spelling of “theatre” as “theater”, even though in one passage, the publishers can’t make up their minds:

…at the Piccadilly Theatre, and my grandfather took us all to the opening night. I was eight at the time, too young for the theater…

Am I being picky? Or ‘carping’ as Dorothy L. Sayers would have said?

Probably.

My private secretary and general factotum Waldo, although getting on in years now, managed to accidentally lock himself in one of the wine cellars here at Ripster Hall recently. He had been busy filing some press cuttings from my early days in journalism, or so he claimed, and indeed offered me a torn and yellowed cutting from the Daily Telegraph as proof.

Dated December 1998, the cutting referred to my “Pick of the Year” selection of crime novels and waxed lyrical that five British crime writers

had “pulled out all the stops” that year. They were: Michael Dibdin (A Long Finish), John Harvey (Last Rights), Ian Rankin (The Hanging Garden), Minette Walters (The Breaker) and Reginald Hill (On Beulah Height).

Needless to say, as Waldo was rather too quick to point out, none of these books featured in the Crime Writers’ Dagger Awards that year, proving that I have the power to jinx even the most talented author writing at the top of their game.

Waldo has seriously suggested that I should offer a service to crime writers promising not to review them and certainly not praise them, in order to improve their chances in this year’s competition which will climax around May. He adds that this course of action “could be a nice little earner” though I’m not sure I know quite what he means by that.

The village shop here in Fenchurch St Paul does not normally stock The Times newspaper as the proprietor, Mrs Singh, regards it as dangerously left-wing, but earlier this month I was tipped off that a Saturday edition would contain a featurette on this year’s Diamond Dagger winner, John Harvey, by none other than the distinguished man of legal letters (at £75 a go), Sir Marcel Berlins, QC.

Naturally, I sought out a copy and read the relevant piece with avid interest. As Sir Marcel has been the Ripster family solicitor for several generations (though, oddly, he prefers the Italian term consigliore), I know his writing style well and was confident that he would do justice to his subject, as indeed he did.

My only caveat with an otherwise excellent article praising the work of the prolific John Harvey (who admits to having written at least 97 books) and his fictional detectives Charlie Resnick and, latterly, Frank Elder, is that there seems to be no mention of the marvellous television adaptations (done by Harvey himself) of Lonely Hearts (1992) and Rough Treatment (1993), starring Tom Wilkinson.

I remember at the time they were shown that their BBC2 (?) scheduling seemed erratic to say the least and I have long regarded it as one of the crimes of crime fiction that the series came to such a sudden halt and has never been repeated (as far as I know). It was the nearest British television had come then, and possibly since, to a home-grown version of

Hill Street Blues and I don’t think I can say fairer than that.

The first time I shared a public platform with John Harvey (possibly the only time) was at the inaugural national Crime and Mystery Festival held in Nottingham in June 1991; the festival that was to become better known as Shots On The Page running in parallel with the film festival Shots In The Dark.

John, Mike Phillips and I appeared in a panel discussion about crime fiction and were the only novelists there amidst the film makers and scriptwriters. Covering the event for the Daily Telegraph, Hugo Davenport described the three of us as members of “Fresh Blood – a group whose mission is to put a bit of American toughness into the British thriller” which was not strictly true. For although Mike Phillips and I (and Philip Kerr) had agreed to form some sort of group, John declined to join, although we did try to persuade him.

Eventually, the legendary Fresh Blood group was formed, the name coming from a chance remark by Michael Dibdin though by that time Phil Kerr had dropped out. The ‘membership’ was, from shaky memory, myself, Mike Phillips, Michael Dibdin, Mark Timlin, Denise Danks, Deborah Valentine, Maxim Jakubowski, Paul Buck, Russell James, Derek Raymond and Ian Rankin in absentia from his vineyard in the south of France. But not John Harvey.

His award of the Cartier Diamond Dagger this year obviously means that the powers that be have forgiven or forgotten that piece of mis-reporting by the Telegraph all those years ago. For surely, somebody “up there” held a grudge against Inspector Resnick, who was cruelly overlooked when it came to awards, until at the end of his ten-book career, he received a much deserved Sherlock Award.

I was proud to be there, that day at Murder One, when John received his finely crafter bust of the Great Detective from Sherlock Magazine editor David Stuart Davies and Edward Hardwick, who had proved himself an excellent television ‘Watson’.

Having already been awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger, Leeds-based Essex boy Robert Barnard is now in the running for an Agatha thanks to a Queen.

The ‘Agathas’ – probably the least known crime fiction awards in this country – are presented at Malice Domestic, the long-established convention unashamedly celebrating the more cosy forms of crime fiction. The Queen I refer to is, of course, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which is sadly little-read in Britain these days.

Bob Barnard is a regular contributor to EQMM, as it is known,  and this year not one but two of his short stories published there – Provenance and The Old Couple  - are nominated for an award at the Agathas at Malice Domestic 2007 which will be held in Virginia in May.

I know Robert to be a long-standing EQMM contributor to my cost, for as  far back as March 1990, he had a story titled An Exceptional Night published there, in which I featured as the manager of the sort of seedy King’s Cross hotel patronised only by impoverished novelists, migrant workers or unsuspecting visitors from the North.

Although referred to simply as “M. Ripley” throughout, the intricate description supplied of a small man with a belly and a sandy moustache bustled up, bringing with him a stench of bitter beer is obviously me.

I am delighted to see that those wonderful people at Allison & Busby are reprinting some of R. Barnard’s extensive backlist, including the wonderful Sheer Torture from 1981, though I have to admit that I have a reservation about his latest title, A Fall From Grace.

My reservation concerns the way Yorkshire detective Charlie Peace and his wife come to terms with impending parenthood. The happy couple, expecting their first child, proudly boast of Mrs Peace’s “bump” even pointing it out to complete strangers in a pub in Yorkshire (!), where such things may be noticed but are only discretely commented on. Not that that in itself worries or surprises me as I accept that times have changed since I lived in Yorkshire. Some women, for example, are now aware that they have the vote.

What does worry me is that both parents refer to the unborn baby as “The Foetus” both in public and private. Now when Lady Ripster was of child-bearing age, I was called-up into the Provisional Wing of the National Childbirth Trust and served seven years before that particular mast. In my modest NCT career (one gallantry medal and twice mentioned in dispatches), I never once heard a pregnant mother (nor a midwife for that matter) refer to her unborn child as “The Foetus”.

On 14^th February, a Valentine card (anonymous of course) was delivered to Ripster Hall, causing no small amount of domestic kerfuffle.

On closer examination this appears to be a promotional flyer for an address on the jolly old interweb, which in turn promotes a forthcoming book called Heartsick which seems set to cheer our summer reading on the beach, courtesy of publisher Macmillan, with a tale of “a soft blade in the stomach, a nail in the ribcage”.

I am sure those who were disappointed in the lack of graphic violence in the recent Hannibal Rising will devour this offering, which I am led to believe is the first thriller from American Chelsea Cain.

From that Biblical surname alone, let alone the blood-spattered promotional Valentine, one imagines a steely-eyed, white-coated writer who probably has a background training (or passing interest) in pathology.

Could this be the same Chelsea Cain who is the author of Confessions of a Teen Sleuth and The Hippie Handbook? who lives in Portland, Oregon?

And the same Chelsea Cain of whom it was said: “Chelsea Cain is the kind of person people move to Portland hoping to become”? And will that still be said after the book comes out?

I think we should be told.

I have tried to like the current Viking invasion of Scandinavian crime novels, I really have, but goodness me, there aren’t many laughs in them, are there?

I had great hopes for K.O. Dahl’s The Fourth Man published by Faber which promises to be the start of a series featuring Oslo cop Frank Frolich. Now I’m not sure exactly when this was first published in Norway and I certainly don’t want to get into a cat-fight about “crime in translation”, but certain things simply don’t read right.

Apart from a character simply called Yttergjerde, who might be a policeman but is certainly a triple-word score at Scrabble, and a superfluous map of southern Norway along with a not-very-helpful map of Oslo, the book begins promisingly enough with Frolich rescuing a woman who has wandered into a shop where an armed robbery is in progress.

The woman is, of course, a mysterious femme fatale and casual sex follows, along with enigmatic text (?) messages simply saying Come! (Perhaps not that enigmatic, if you think about it, especially when you learn she likes making love with Simple Minds playing on the stereo.)

Poor Inspector Norse falls madly in love, even when he learns she and her brother live together and the brother is something nasty in Organised Crime. To show a girl a good time, Frolich takes her to the Saga Cinema (a name which is only funny in English), but first of all, to a Burger King where she demands a milkshake “With vanilla” and says, rather prissily, that she only eats burgers at McDonald’s. Downtown Oslo sounds an absolute gas.

But back to Yttergjerde (which sadly has too many letters to be a winner on Countdown). At one point:

‘Yttergjerde’s face was in flux, a laughing mask stiffening into a gentle gape. Yttergjerde was shaken, as they say in boxing circles. He was at that stage when the shock has had its physical effect, but he still hasn’t begun to comprehend that he has been struck.’

Surely there must be one simple word in Norwegian for ‘gobsmacked’.

And that, I’m afraid, is when I gave up. I’m not saying it is simply a question of clunky translation, which could have been done with spot-on accuracy for all I know. What does worry me is whether a translator can get across the pace and rhythm of a good thriller.

A year ago I attended a panel chaired by the erudite Peter Guttridge (surely the hardest-working hack in crime fiction), who was introducing foreign crime writers and their translators (from French and Spanish in this case). In impish mood, I asked the visiting writers which crime novels (originally in English) they had read to try and get some idea if they had any concept of the British crime fiction market. The answers were uninspiring, but then crime writers are very badly read.

What was truly worrying though, was that the translators on the panel cheerfully admitted to rarely “if ever” reading crime fiction, unless it was a translation job. (And one of them couldn’t name a single living British crime writer, even though was sitting next to Peter Gutt…oh, I see.)

Such things make me as gloomy as a Scandinavian.

I never realised until the other day that my all-time favourite (and campest) Viking film, The Long Ships, was co-scripted by thriller-writer and former Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, Berkely Mather.

In those days Scandinavians were far from gloomy, enjoying a healthy life on the ocean wave, lots of strong ale and the odd bit of pillaging, as this jolly saga memorably showed. Who can forget Richard Widmark’s famous command to his Viking warriors: “No defense! No defense!” in an authentic (Californian) accent. And why didn’t Sidney Poitier win an Oscar for his menacing performance as the King of the Moors, with that memorable catchphrase: “You will ride the Mare of Steel!”

And then there was the little-known (here) Oskar Homolka, a sassy Scandinavian if ever there was one, who went on to play Colonel Stok in the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer films of Len Deighton’s books.

But I digress.

I knew Berkely Mather’s books, of course – the Geth Straker stories and his best-known novel The Pass Beyond Kashmir – and I was aware that he had been chairman of the CWA back in 1966. I didn’t know, though, that he had scripted an early episode of The Avengers, worked on the Robert Culp/Bill Cosby series I, Spy, scripted (often un-credited) movies such as Long Ships and Ghengis Khan  as well as a little pot-boiler called Dr No.

Such nuggets came to light when I heard that a biography was being planned of John Evan Weston Davies (1909-1996), Mather’s real name, by one of his sons and an appeal was going out for anyone who remembered the man rather than fans like me, who only knew his books.

Well before his magisterial Harcourt Encyclopaedia of Crime Writing becomes available later this century, the esteemed critic Barry Forshaw has turned his hand to a shorter, more consumer-friendly survey of the mystery genre.

Called, oddly, The Rough Guide to Penguins (though I may have misheard that) it is scheduled to appear in June. If this actually turns out to be a Rough Guide To Crime Fiction published by Penguin, then sadly I am unlikely to see a copy.

For reasons which I cannot fathom, other than that the staff there have been very busy of late showing off their tap-dancing skills on location in Antarctica, I appear to have dropped off the edge of the ice-shelf as far Penguin Books is concerned, for I have not received any books to review, press releases or even replies to emails for almost two years now.

So, once again, my apologies to all those jolly nice Penguin/Michael Joseph/Viking authors who have taken the time and trouble to send me such elegantly-worded death threats about their lack of review coverage, but I am not ignoring you.

Honest.

It is always comforting to know that our American friends continue to show the excellent judgement they are rightly famed for the world over, by recognising a humble Brit as the author of Best Novel in the 2007 Thriller Awards. At to whom has this honour gone?

Step forward, Lord Jeffery Archer for his novel False Impressions, a title curiously missing from the shortlists of domestic awards last year. Of course, the Thriller Awards are not actually made until the Thrillerfest Convention in New York in July, but surely the winner cannot be in doubt.

Also in the running for a Thriller Award, in the First Novel category, is Nick Stone’s Mr Clarinet, which has already garnered plaudits and prizes over here. Sadly, because it is published by Penguin (see “Happy Feet” above) I, of course, have never seen one.

I am delighted to discover, if somewhat belatedly, that the Erdington Library Crime Fiction Reading Group in Birmingham has celebrated its tenth birthday.

In its formative years, back in the last century, I must have been one of their first guest speakers, along with Chris Niles and Jane Adams. We were all welcomed warmly and I seem to remember that the hospitality included pints of mild ale in a local hostelry. They even produced a commemorative bookmark to promote our visits.

Since then, the group have enjoyed talks from numerous worthies in the crime field, including, so I’m told, Val McDermid, Mike Phillips, Larry Block and a double act I would have paid good money to see: John Connolly and Colin Bateman.

I was in the process of praising those wonderful people at Faber and Faber for promising a couple of real treats from two ex-pat writers this year when I heard the shocking news that Michael Dibdin had died at the ridiculously early age of 60.

Michael, that erudite and elegant scribbler leaves us with a final Aurelio Zen adventure in July, End Game, this time set in Calabria. I have no idea how Michael kept up with La Dolce Not So Vita in Italy from his home in Seattle with his wife, American mystery writer K.K. Beck, but he managed with aplomb.

He was without doubt the most stylish of his generation of crime writers, a generation in which I include myself.

Many years ago, he and I appeared in a fashion shoot for the magazine GQ, illustrating what the well-dressed crime writer ought to be wearing that season. It was, as far as I know, his last engagement as a professional model. It was certainly mine.

Another Brit living in exile (in Japan) is David Peace, who made his name with the stunning Red Riding Quartet set in the Yorkshire of the Ripper era and putting him up there with the late Derek Raymond when it comes to any mention of ‘British noir’ writing.

In September he gives us Tokyo  Year Zero which James Ellroy, no less, trails as “part historical stunner, part Kurosawa crime film”. Set in 1946 Tokyo, with Japanese detective Minami trying to forget the past, avoid a political purge and solve a double murder, I detect a faint scent of award nominations in the air. I do hope the judges of the Ellis Peters Historical Mystery Award have strong stomachs.

I have received, anonymously and in the traditional brown envelope, a flyer advertising a forthcoming “Publishers’ Cabaret”.

I suspect this is in response to my exclusive revelation that crime-writing diva Laura Wilson will be appearing, under her stage name of Lily  von Trapp, in this off-(Ealing) Broadway production of an underground version of The Sound of Music. It is my understanding that the audience is expected to join in the spirit of things by dressing as nuns.

Irishman Ken Bruen is finally getting the acclaim he deserves, having been ‘discovered’ (big time) in America and now pushed by mainstream publishers, Bantam, over here with his tough, Galway-noir thrillers Priest and Cross.

Ten years ago, Maxim Jakubowski and I included one of Ken’s short stories, Mother’s Ruin, in the anthology Fresh Blood 2 alongside contributions from similar ‘unknowns’ such as Christopher Brookmyre, John Baker and Charlie Higson.

In the introductory notes to his story, Ken was typically generous of the way in which the Fresh Blood movement had tried to reflect the change of tone of British crime fiction.

Here we have Jeremy Cameron, John Harvey, Bill James, Maxim Jakubowski, Stella Duffy, Mike Ripley, Gerry Byrne…turning the format on its head. And mugging the genre into the ‘90s…Twenty years down the pike they’ll say: Wow, wasn’t that when British crime went ballsy if not outright ballistic?

But that’s Ken Bruen for you, typically understated; but a man who truly deserves his overnight success – even if it has taken ten years.

{For anyone wondering, the Gerry Byrne Ken referred to worked in a Soho hostel for women and wrote a superb first novel called Ruby in about 1996. Along with Ken, I admired it very much at the time but have not heard of Gerry since.}

Pip! Pip!

The Ripster