April First Monday Crime, Part One

Last night I again found myself climbing the grand staircase inside Brown’s restaurant, St Martin’s Lane, to the magnificent Judge’s Court, formally the main courtroom of Westminster County Court, from which convicted felons were sent down to the cells below (now the wine cellars). The room even has the original Judge’s bench, a fitting venue for the latest First Monday crime event and their one year anniversary. As I waited for the four writers: Denise Mina, Liz Nugent, Sabine Durrant and Mick Herron, with Barry Forshaw- aka `Mister Noir’- as chair, to arrive, I cast my eye over the old black and white photos of London, adorning the walls of this splendid, wood-panelled room.

Suddenly I heard the most terrible scraping whine. Everyone looked around and clutched their ears, as if we'd just been locked in a room with a particularly sadistic serial killer. Fortunately, it was just the mikes on a feedback loop and the torture soon ended.

The proceedings opened with the promotion of St Hilda's, Oxford, Mystery and Crime Conference 2017 in August (`a crime festival in the garden of Eden') with authors such as Mark Billingham, MJ Carter, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and, of course, Val McDermid.
(For more details, 
see www.mysteryandcrime2017.eventbrite.co.uk.)

We were then introduced to the four writers:

The first was Liz Nugent, whose debut novel, `Unravelling Oliver', was the winner of the IBA Crime Fiction Book of the Year in 2014. She's been hailed as Ireland's answer to Gillian Flynn. Her latest book is called `Lying in Wait' and is a Richard and Judy Spring pick for 2017. In a former life she described herself as a `really bad actress'. She had a brain haemorrhage in the past, as a result of which she can only type with one hand, which means she doesn't like to waste words, she declared with a smile: `It's such an effort to write!'

Sabine Durrant's new book is called `Lie with Me', so there was much amusement that `Lying' or `Lie' is the new `Girl' in crime titles. Sabine Durrant's first psychological thriller `Under Your Skin' was published in 2013. She described herself as having been a journalist, which was good training for meeting deadlines and `getting the story down'. She's also extremely modest, since she was actually the assistant editor of the Guardian and the literary editor of the Sunday Times. Her important advice to fellow writers was: `Don't read reviews. That way madness lies.'

Denise Mina won the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year twice in a row. Her latest book, `The Long Drop' she describes as `making sense of the nonsense of life'. `William Watt wants answers about his family's murder. Peter Manuel has them. But Peter Manuel is a liar. One December night in 1957, Watt meets Manuel in a Glasgow bar to find out what he knows.' The book is based on real life murders. Denise Mina wrote a play about them and the book, she said, is `the story the pensioners told me after they saw the play'.

Denise did a law degree although she found lawyers very stuffy and wasn't sure she wanted to practice, so went on to start a PhD. `I was a rubbish academic, I was just having a laugh'. She `misused' her PhD grant to write her first book and the rest is history: `I was shite at everything except this.'

Mick Herron's spy novels have won the CWA's Gold Dagger and apparently he has a cult following. His novels have been ingeniously described as John le Carre meets Joseph Heller, although Barry Forshaw thought he was perhaps closest to Len Deighton and described them as `off-kilter espionage'. He replied, drily: `I just write the books I can write'.

Part 2, tomorrow