Locked-room mysteries
Back in the day, a ‘locked-room mystery’ meant exactly that – a murder behind not only closed, but locked doors, ostensibly impossible to commit, and thus a mechanical conundrum to unpick. Think Gaston Leroux’s Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907), or even Arthur Conan Doyle’s personal favourite of all his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Adventure...
Orlando Ortega-Medina: Love without borders
Orlando Ortega-Medina’s riveting novel The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants wears its politics on its sleeve. Beyond the inclusion of the perennially hot-button word Immigrants in its title, one needs only to peel back the front cover and read the dedication to find the first direct iteration of its author’s message: “To the countless multinational same-sex...
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...
Capital Crime 2022
When bookseller and literary agent David Headley and his team launched a new London-based literary festival in September 2019, they couldn’t have foreseen the pandemic’s arrival the following spring. Covid’s toll on the capital was particularly harsh. There were days when the only sound you heard outside your windows was ambulance sirens. Going in and...
The closeted and the curious
Having previously published The Last Ballad (2018) and When Ghosts Come Home (February 2022), Faber has now released Wiley Cash’s early novels A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy for the first time in the UK. A Land More Kind Than Home is a Southern Gothic thriller about the charismatic...
The best time
Catriona Ward’s Sundial pushes the boundaries of psychological horror in pleasing ways. The prose is intelligent, highly observed and exquisitely toxic. Nothing is taboo. Children are slapped, dogs shot, the illusion of the perfect family shattered, and sisterly bonds broken. The writing is austere but substantial, the characters extreme but believable, and the settings beautiful...
Ned Beauman: Intelligent life
Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is a dazzling satire of a near-future Europe in which global warming-led species decline has become accepted as an unfortunate by-product of economic growth. A system of ‘extinction credits’ means that any company set to gain financially from operations that happen to wipe out an endangered species simply has to purchase...
David Heska Wanbli Weiden: See everything
The rolling hills of South Dakota’s vast Lakota tribal lands provide a stunning backdrop for David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s explosive debut novel Winter Counts. The opening scene is uncompromisingly violent. Virgil Wounded Horse is a vigilante for hire. Delivering justice for crime victims with his fists, he earns one hundred dollars for every injury he...
Alex North: An intriguing game
It was just a silly game to start with. Paul never dreamed that Charlie would take it so far. Never thought it would end in murder… Twenty years later, Paul is trying to put his past behind him. But now his mother is dying, and he can’t run any longer. But home isn’t just full...
Mark Edwards: Proverbial needle, proverbial haystack
In No Place to Run’s opening sequence, Francesca Gilbert is seventy-five years old, mourning the recent loss of a husband, and six hundred miles into her train journey home. Dawn is breaking across a clearing in a Northern California forest when Francesca sees a young woman with “vivid auburn hair” being chased by a man....
Imagining an island
While fine-tuning my fourth novel, Missing, I started thinking about my fifth. In the Scottish Borders, fact-checking my references to Hawick, I mentioned to the friend with whom we were staying that I was thinking of setting my next novel somewhere totally fictional, somewhere superficially familiar but with local customs and minor rules that would...
