Harrogate Crime Writing Festival 2004

Mary Clarke's Soundbites

Did you come to the festival last year?

Martin Sixsmith:

No.

Boris Starling:

No.

Simon Brett:

Yes.

Simon Kernick:

Yes, I did. I was on a panel last year.

Andrew Taylor:

Yes I did.

Christopher Brookmyre:

No, this is my first time.

Bernard Knight:

No, this is the first time for me. I came up yesterday. We've got this Medieval Murders group, I go around a lot with that but this is the first Harrogate one.

Laura Wilson:

No, this is the first year but I heard such good reports of it, I thought, this is the one.

Martyn Waites:

I did, yes.

What made you come back?

Simon Brett:

They asked me. It's lovely. I think it's very well organised. It's a very good organising team, they've got the right mix of expertise, an editor, an agent and a writer, very good.

Simon Kernick:

On the one hand, my publisher was quite happy to see me come up here. It's quite nice to meet up with authors you don't see very often. Obviously, it being a solitary profession, we get such a rare opportunity to meet up with each other. It's also quite nice to meet up with the fans who come here. It's also an opportunity to sell some books. It's just good fun really. I don't get out very often.

Andrew Taylor:

The invitation, the blessed invitation. It's very clear from last year that this is going to be the sort of conference you want to come to. There's a lot of people, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of very intensive talent. I really like the idea that they've only got the one strand because you can get a real sense of what the Festival as a whole is doing, rather than being constantly torn between, "Shall I go to that panel or that panel?" I think that's a good system. There's some very interesting novelists here, too and indeed, readers and writers and journalists.

I think all the signs are very good. They've got a serious sponsor on board, they've got the organisation here from the Festival, they've got the infrastructure. They've got a good location and they've got a programming panel who are making some very shrewd choices. All the signs are very, very good.

Martyn Waites:

I got asked. I enjoyed it last year, I loved it. So I thought it was something I'd want to be involved with again. If they ask me, I'd love to come back next year.

How are you enjoying it?

Martin Sixsmith:

I woke up in Ireland this morning at 4:30 and drove from the west of Ireland to Dublin and flew from Dublin to Manchester, then drove from Manchester to Harrogate and arrived 40 minutes before the talk started. However, in that context, it's been excellent.

Boris Starling:

Great, mild hangover this morning.

Christopher Brookmyre:

I'm enjoying it, great. I've never been to anything like this before, Dead on Deansgate or Bouchercon or anything like that because it's just always logistically difficult. So it's been good fun. It's been very vibrant, very enthusiastic. The great thing about crime writers is there's not the same back-biting and snobbery you get from the more mainstream or literary writers.

Bernard Knight:

Very good. Spacious place, isn't it? It's nice to meet old friends here. Some of them are very familiar because as I say, we've got this group that go around doing medieval murders, Mike Jecks is our manager for that. We go to various places, public libraries are quite good, they like having real live authors and then some of the bookshops and some of the festivals.

Laura Wilson:

Brilliant, I had a great time. I think I'm actually the only person who got a train which arrived when it should. I got here last night and went immediately into the bar and had a wonderful time. The cabaret was brilliant.

What was your journey here like? Did everything run smoothly?

Martin Sixsmith:

Yes, like clockwork.

Boris Starling:

I drove up from Suffolk and got stuck in road works and torrential rain and so on.

Simon Brett:

Yes, I got the train from London and changed at York. I met Liza Cody on the train from York to Harrogate, so that was nice, I hadn't seen her for a while. I came on Friday and it was fine.

Simon Kernick:

I drove and it was actually really easy. I came up on Thursday afternoon and I made it from just outside of Reading in three and a half hours, in fact, just under three and a half hours, so it was a nice easy journey. I don't travel by train that much unless I really have to because it's too unreliable.

Andrew Taylor:

It's the sort of journey I'd rather forget, really. I got up at 4 o'clock this morning to come by train and I allow myself an hour or two spare because the trains are usually late on Saturdays but the trains were on time. The problem was when I got to the hotel. I thought I could maybe have an hour's sleep in my room but no, they don't let you into the rooms until half past two. They're very strict about it. It's cruel, it's cruel.

Christopher Brookmyre:

Yes, it was fine, by train. There were no delays, it all went fine.

Bernard Knight:

Terrible, six hours driving up the M6. I have to go back today, six hours back again, I expect.

Martyn Waites:

Not too bad but then I was so heavily sedated, dosed up with everything I could find because I've not been well. So I don't think I really noticed it that much.

What are you working on at the moment?

Martin Sixsmith:

Well, Macmillan's very kindly bought two books off me and the first one's about corruption and fear and loathing in British politics and the second one is about corruption and fear and loathing in international politics. It's a Moscow/Washington novel, which is where I was based for a long time, so that's my next one.

Boris Starling:

I'm working on one set in the London pea-souper fog of 1952, crime and conspiracy in four days when you couldn't see a thing. My agent goes, "It will make a great film." I went, "It will make a rubbish film. You won't be able to see anything."

Martin Sixsmith:

Maybe in black and white.

Boris Starling:

It'll have to be a radio play. It would just be a bunch of guys who couldn't see anything at all, all bumping into each other. I'm thinking of setting one in the Bahamas so I can get a trip there, that whole murder in Paradise thing.

Simon Brett:

I've just started a new novel which is actually not a crime novel It's 'git-lit'. It's a mature romance called The Penultimate Chance to Live. So far, I've only done where they are and who put them there and why. It's quite a relief.

Simon Kernick:

I'm just finishing up the edit on my fourth book which is going to be titled A Good Day to Die and it's a direct sequel to The Business of Dying, my first book. So it brings back my anti-hero, Dennis Milne, a detective turned hitman, from number one. That will be the end of that loose London based crime series. My fifth book will be bigger, not more conventional, but a bigger thriller. I'll be going for third person rather than first person which is what I write most of my stuff in. I'm looking forward to it, it will be a change. I won't change my writing style. Anyone who liked the first books will be just as happy, I think, with the next ones but it's a slightly new direction. I'm planning to develop it into a series, not quite sure how long a series. It's about detectives in a national crime squad. I've got at least two books planned and I've got at least two books contracted. So I guess the series will last as long as I'm published, certainly for a while. I've got some good ideas for it.

Andrew Taylor:

Well, having written lots of books set in the past recently, I think for the last eight years all my books have been set more or less in the past, I'm now working on one set in the present. On the first page I've got a mobile phone, text messages and laptops with characters using them all and it's very, very exciting to be back in the twenty first century. But I have got a back story developing in 1986 so I haven't stricken away entirely the lure of the past. I think Edgar Allan Poe was a hugely intensive thing to do in terms of time and energy and research. Really I needed a change. I could have gone on to another historical right away and I was, in, fact, mildly tempted to. I do want to do another one, I've got another one planned, in a similar sort of period, a similar sort of vein but I felt it would be much healthier to have a complete change first. There'll be a new Lydmouth coming out in October. The one I'm on now is the one set in the present and called A Stain on the Silence, which I think is a lovely quote. It's Samuel Beckett, I found out subsequently.

Christopher Brookmyre:

I've just finished a very long book with a very long title. It's called All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye. It should be out in May next year.

Bernard Knight:

I've just sent off the ninth Crowner John and I've got a contract for another one so I'll start that soon. I'm doing a Fifties book at the moment, sort of a cross between M*A*S*H and Somerset Maugham. It's based in Malaya, where I was in the Fifties. I've got another idea for a series, again probably a Fifties book. I don't want to do contemporary stuff, it's too difficult, the forensic work now. There's so many complications and political correctness, health and safety. It's much easier to go back a few years.

Laura Wilson:

Book number six. It's my first book in the third person. I'm a grown up writer now to do that. I'm finding it incredibly liberating but a bit scary. I keep writing "I" instead of "she" and I get terribly tangled up over too many pronouns in a sentence and whether it should be somebody's name. I've become much more aware of the mechanics of writing than I ever did when it was first person. It is liberating because you can describe things and do all these things I get told I don't do enough. It's fair to say it's got more adjectives. It's from the point of view of two particular people, in this case both women, although I like writing men just fine. It is still very harnessed to viewpoints and I don't think I could ever do the big overview author as God. It's not that I dislike it but I don't think it's me, I don't think I'll graduate to that. The ripples won't go more outward.

Martyn Waites:

I'm working on a new novel called The Mercy Seat which is going to be the start of a new series set in the Northeast and it's going to be out in January, 2006, closely followed by a sequel which is going to be out in July, 2006 which at the minute is called The Lost Profits. So I'm planning ahead. It's about a traumatised ex-investigative journalist but a completely new one to the one I've used before, severely traumatised. The series is going to have an over-riding arc as well, involving him and the search for his lost son. There's also a team he puts together in becoming an information broker, trying to do what he can to buy and sell information on different things. It's very interesting and the second one is actually more advanced than the first one at the minute.