Dark mysteries on Gothic shores
I grew up on the island of Guernsey, in a house perched high on a cliff, and much as I’ve always loved the sea, I know to be afraid of it. I’ve watched how quickly a calm, clear morning can be swallowed by a storm, how a rogue wave or rip tide will catch you...
A lady falls
She let out a sigh as she fell, an exhalation so sweet and soft that not a soul heard it, not even the cop who’d passed by the building not two seconds before; it was the smashing of china and the subsequent thud of her body landing hard against the stone steps three storeys down...
A Tartan Noir original
I first encountered Bill Knox in a second-hand bookshop in Inverness, twenty-odd years after his death. I was browsing the shelves while hiding from the inevitable Autumn Highland rain, idly looking for nothing in particular. Randomly, I pulled out a battered old hardback and read the title: Death Department. Intrigued, I flicked through a few...
A sitting duck
The plan… It had first taken shape in Renfield’s mind one morning over a month before when the 29-year-old reporter, on the staff of the Evening View, had been having a casual 10a.m. cup of tea in the canteen at Glasgow police headquarters. The big room, reserved for sergeants and constables, with pressmen having an...
Elsa Drucaroff, Rodolfo Walsh and Argentina
The years of the military Junta cast a very long shadow in Argentina, and it’s thoroughly poignant that Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case appears in English just as the country has taken a swerve in a desperate new direction. I had never heard of Rodolfo Walsh. That was put right by Slava Faybysh when he brought...
A kind of truce
It’s the middle of the night on a residential street. Rodolfo Walsh leaves his house and heads to a nearby bar located at the last stop of one of the city bus lines. At this hour, it’s full of regulars: cabbies and bus drivers. Since the payphone is all the way in back – right...
Kate Brody: Missing people, muddled lives
Kate Brody’s pacy debut thriller is a novel of our times. A missing woman, social media conspiracy theories, mental health issues, suspicion, trust, self-harm and family trauma are woven together to give us a troubling, riveting and sharply written noir set on America’s East Coast. What’s the worst that can happen when you’ve already lost...
Liminal spaces and impossible things
I’ve been obsessed with and seduced by the notion of liminal space since childhood. It began with The Chronicles of Narnia. As an eight-year-old I devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, long after the story started to fade the obsession with wardrobes remained. My paternal grandmother lived in a large, spooky Victorian...
Spooky houses with eerily lit windows
The image is instantly recognisable to horror fans: a foreboding house, a darkened sky, a single illuminated window. Maybe a figure stands silhouetted against the window’s yellow glow. Maybe the house is in a state of disrepair – forked cracks at the foundation and creeping vines strangling the porch rails. To me, a lifelong lover...
Kate Simants: Extreme reality
Reality TV is dead! Long live reality TV! And so it goes. Just when we think audiences have had enough, and production companies are scraping the barrel for ideas, along comes another surprise that grips the nation. This winter, it was The Traitors that got the whole nation talking – and not just about how Claudia Winkelman...
Murder, mystery and mind games
The time when writers regarded television sceptically – either as a threat to the storytelling dominance of novels or even, in some cases, as a form of lowbrow entertainment – seems far away now. It’s hard to believe that as recently as David Foster Wallace, writers were expressing anxiety about the relationship between fiction and...
Starting small
Lord knows why, but starting my own small press has been a dream as long as I can remember. Guess I’m allergic to money. When I was child, I used to make little books out of typing paper and staples; in my twenties, when no one wanted to publish me, I made pamphlets out of...
