A Serpent Uncoiled

Headline 2012, Paperback, 480 pages, £8.99

A missing mobster. A bizarre spiritualist society. And three deaths, linked by a chilling forensic detail.

Working as an enforcer in London’s criminal underworld brought Dan Shaper to the edge of a breakdown. Now he’s a private investigator, kept perilously afloat by a growing cocktail of drugs. He needs to straighten-up and rebuild his life, but instead gets the attention of his old gangland masters and a job-offer from Mr George Glass. The elderly eccentric claims to be a New Age Messiah, but now needs a saviour of his own. He’s been marked for murder.

Adrift amidst liars and thugs, Shaper must push his capsizing mind to its limits: stalked not only by a unique and terrifying killer, but by the ghosts of his own brutal past.

• Now read this!

The Lewis Man

Quercus Publishing Plc 2012, Hardcover, 443 pages, £12.99

A MAN WITH NO NAME
An unidentified corpse is recovered from a Lewis peat bog; the only clue to its identity being a DNA sibling match to a local farmer.

A MAN WITH NO MEMORY
But this islander, Tormod Macdonald – now an elderly man suffering from dementia – has always claimed to be an only child.

A MAN WITH NO CHOICE
When Tormod’s family approach Fin Macleod for help, Fin feels duty-bound to solve the mystery.

The Lewis Man sees the return of Finn Macleod who is investigating an unidentified corpse, covered in stab wounds and recovered from a peat bog on the isle of Lewis; the only clue to its identity being a DNA sibling match to a local farmer. But this islander, Tormod Macdonald – now an elderly man suffering from dementia – has always claimed to be an only child. A lie, Fin will soon discover, Tormod has had very good reason to hide behind.

The video is directed by The Forest of Black (Belle & Sebastian, Sons & Daughters, Franz Ferdinand).

• Visit the author’s website and read an extract from The Lewis Man

Commemorating the bicentenary of the murders this Christmas, Spitalfields Life is delighted to collaborate with Faber, publishing reports of these terrible crimes throughout December on the exact anniversaries of their occurrence.

The first sensational crime drama to grip the nation at the beginning of the British press, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders became an early example of ‘tabloid justice’, creating a public hysteria that led to the formation of the Metropolitan Police. Happening seventy years before the more widely known Whitechapel Murders of the the 1980s, the grim events of December 1811 in Wapping remain the most compelling East End murder story of all time.”

– The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life

• Read an extract from The Maul and the Pear Tree

Mapping the Murders at Spitalfields Life

December 1811, a young linen draper and his family were cruelly murdered at night in their home at 29 Ratcliffe Highway in Wapping. Twelve days later, a publican and members of his household were slaughtered in similar fashion, just half a mile away. Click on the links to catch-up on the murderous events of two hundred years ago this month…

• 7th December – Murder of the Marr Family
• 10th December – Inquest at pub across the Highway plus crowds of sightseers visit crime scene to see bodies
• 15th December – Funeral of the Marrs at St George’s-in-the-East
• 19th December – Murder of Williamson Family at Kings Arms
• 22nd December – Widespread hysteria as this become first national crime sensation in the papers. (A Newspaper seller runs through streets)
• 24th December – Arrest of John Williams, prime suspect , resident of the Pear Tree.
• 26th December – Interrogation at Shadwell Court House (Off the Map)
• 27th December – Williams hangs himself at Coldbath Sq and is presumed guilty.

Gallic Books will publish three novels by Pascal Garnier in 2012: The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain? andThe A26. In an article for his French publisher, Zulma, Garnier described what led him to become a writer:

According to my birth certificate, I was born on 4^th July 1949 in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris. I can’t say I remember the event, but let’s assume that’s how it happened. Afterwards came a normal childhood in what you’d call the average French family – which felt more and more average the more it dawned on me that I’d been sold a world with no user’s manual, lured in by false advertising. When I was about fifteen, the state education system and I agreed to go our separate ways. I’d had enough, I was suffocating, convinced that real life was going on somewhere else. So off I went in search of it. In those days you could still travel freely through North Africa, the Middle and Far East. With my head in the clouds, I roamed about for a decade or so until I came to see that it really is a very small world and, being round, you always end up back where you started.

That’s when the wife and baby came along. All around me, the faithful companions I’d met along the way were nestling back into their kennels, burying their dreams and delusions like bones to gnaw at in years to come when they were old and toothless. Rebelling against such mass surrender, I threw myself into rock and roll – and landed with a resounding thud. I was no better at being a pop star than I was at being a dad. Still, it was writing my pitiful ditties that gave me a taste for words. Deep down, I harboured a wild dream of writing something longer, something like a book. But my limited vocabulary, terrible spelling and hopeless grammar seemed like insurmountable obstacles. So I got divorced, remarried, dabbled in design for women’s magazines, took on odd jobs, got up to the occasional bit of mischief. In short, I was killing time, frittering my life away. The boredom of my childhood numbed me once again with the sweetness of a drug. I was thirty-five.

You can only escape if you’re imprisoned, which to some extent I was. I had no choice: my only way out was through a blank page. Slowly scraping along, I dug myself out through a corner of the kitchen table, and as I tunnelled my way up to the surface, I filled the hole within myself. One short story, then two, then three… And then one day I had a publisher on the phone, and not just any publisher, but POL. A collection of twelve short stories was published under the title ‘L’année sabbatique’, ‘A year’s sabbatical’. After that, another sixty-odd books were brought out by several other publishers: books for children, books for adults, books labelled as noir or white, whatever – I’ve never been interested in that particular apartheid. So there it is, a bit muddled I’ll admit. I write because, as Pessoa said: ‘Literature is proof that life is not enough’.

Pascal Garnier

The slaying of these innocent families created public hysteria amongst Londoners – whipped up by newspapers revelling in the gruesome details of the atrocities. Ill-equipped to investigate, on Christmas Eve the police hastily arrested the first suspect they could find, John Williams, and when he hung himself in prison on Boxing Day, it was taken as confirmation of his guilt.

180,000 people turned out to see Williams’ body paraded through Wapping, before he was buried with a stake through his heart at the crossroads of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road on New Year’s Eve. Yet it is now acknowledged that he was – in all likelihood – an innocent man.

At the birth of the British press, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders case was both the first national crime sensation and an early example of “tabloid justice” – engendering a widespread terror that led subsequently to the formation of the Metropolitan Police.

www.spitalfieldslife.com and Faber and Faber have commissioned illustrator, Paul Bommer, to create a map of the murders that will update, revealing key events in the case on the exact anniversaries of their occurrence. This beautiful creation can be used as a handy guide to set out through the streets of Wapping yourself…

Murder of the Marr Family…

Inquest at pub across the Highway…

Funeral of the Marrs at St Georges in East…

Murder of Williamson Family at Kings Arms…

Widespread hysteria as this become first national crime sensation in the papers…

Commemorating the bicentenary of the murders this Christmas, Spitalfields Life is delighted to collaborate with Faber, publishing reports of these terrible crimes throughout December on the exact anniversaries of their occurrence.

The first sensational crime drama to grip the nation at the beginning of the British press, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders became an early example of ‘tabloid justice’, creating a public hysteria that led to the formation of the Metropolitan Police. Happening seventy years before the more widely known Whitechapel Murders of the the 1980s, the grim events of December 1811 in Wapping remain the most compelling East End murder story of all time.”

– The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life

• Read an extract from The Maul and the Pear Tree

Mapping the Murders at Spitalfields Life

December 1811, a young linen draper and his family were cruelly murdered at night in their home at 29 Ratcliffe Highway in Wapping. Twelve days later, a publican and members of his household were slaughtered in similar fashion, just half a mile away. Click on the links to catch-up on the murderous events of two hundred years ago this month…

• 7th December – Murder of the Marr Family
• 10th December – Inquest at pub across the Highway plus crowds of sightseers visit crime scene to see bodies
• 15th December – Funeral of the Marrs at St George’s-in-the-East
• 19th December – Murder of Williamson Family at Kings Arms

Ratcliffe Highway Murder Walk

Spitalfields Life will be hosting a dusk walk on Wednesday 28th December at 3pm from St Georges in the East, visiting all the key locations and telling the bone-chilling story of Britain’s first crime sensation. The walk will take approximately an hour and a half and conclude at the historic riverside pub, The Prospect of Whitby.  Please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to sign up. Tickets are £10.

The number of French writers on the list grew, but the influence of the US remained strong; many authors translated American crime novels alongside their own work, or wrote under American-sounding pseudonyms. The US is still a source of fascination for many French crime writers; we’ll be publishing a short, shocking story of high school massacres, Carnage by Maxime Chattam, next year.

The 1970s saw the birth of the ‘néopolar’ (the new crime novel), with writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette using the form to critique French society and explore existential questions. His tale of a hitwoman working her way into small-town life, Fatale, was published by New York Review Books this year.

Thierry Jonquet took a similarly political, darkly satirical approach. Serpent’s Tail have reissued his twisted revenge tale, Mygale, under the title Tarantula: The Skin I Live In, to coincide with the release of Almodóvar’s film adaptation.

There’s an overlap with cinema in the work of many French noir writers. The novels of Tonino Benacquista, award-winning screenwriter of gritty 2005 film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, are published by foreign crime specialists, Bitter Lemon Press. The English title of his most recently translated novel, Badfellas, plays on the Scorsese film, and the story transports a Sopranos-esque American crime family to a witness protection programme in Normandy, cleverly tying together the tropes of the genre with an unconventional setting.

Benacquista’s darkly comic observations of crime in everyday, unglamorous settings (far from the smoky LA nightclubs we’re used to seeing) have much in common with one of our own noir writers, Pascal Garnier. Next year, we’re excited to be bringing out three of his novels, The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain Today? and The A26. The plots may revolve around hitmen and road trips, but the settings are supermarkets, service stations and campsites in provincial France, the cultural references decidedly Gallic.

Like Manchette and Benacquista, Garnier drops his criminal protagonists (charming sociopaths in the Ripley vein) into unfamiliar places, outsiders looking in. In How’s the Pain Today? hitman Simon breaks his journey in the spa town of Vals-les-Bains, where he meets Bernard, the naive drifter who becomes his accidental accomplice. We see the town and its people through Simon’s ironic gaze. The cast of unremarkable characters are plunged into extraordinary situations, whose incongruity can be very amusing.

It’s this shifting tone, conveyed with beautifully pared-back prose, that’s Garnier’s hallmark. With their stark violence and tendency towards the surreal, his novels have echoes of Tarantino or the black comedy of the Coen brothers. You often don’t know whether to laugh or cry, leading some to label his genre the roman gris, with touches of brightness lightening the grim outlook of noir.

With Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries and Dominique Manotti’s studies of corruption regularly shortlisted for (and winning) the CWA International Dagger Awards for crime fiction, French noir writers are taking centre stage. While prolific Belgian writer, Georges Simenon, whose work spanned several decades of the twentieth century, remains the best-known Francophone exponent of noir (and provided its most famous detective character in Maigret), his literary inheritors are proving it’s not just the Scandinavians who can do dark.

Emily Boyce

Before I Go To Sleep

Doubleday 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £12.99

Before I Go To Sleep, by S J Watson (Winner)

‘As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me …’

Welcome to Christine’s life.

• Read the extract

Heartstone (Matthew Shardlake 5)

Pan 2011, Paperback, 592 pages, £8.99

Heartstone, by CJ Sansom

Summer 1545: England is at war. At the bidding of Queen Catherine Parr, Shardlake travels to Portsmouth to investigate claims of monstrous wrongs against a young man – as well as the mysterious past of a young woman incarcerated in the Bedlam. Events will converge on one of the King’s great warships, primed to confront the approaching French fleet…

• Read the extract

The Impossible Dead

Orion 2011, Hardcover, 384 pages, £18.99

The Impossible Dead, by Ian Rankin

Malcolm Fox and his team from Internal Affairs are back. They’ve been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, Detective Paul Carter. Carter has been found guilty of misconduct with his own uncle, also in the force, having proved to be his nephew’s nemesis. But what should be a simple job is soon complicated by intimations of conspiracy and cover-up – and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon that should not even exist. The spiralling investigation takes Fox back in time to 1985, a year of turmoil in British political life. Terrorists intent on a split between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom were becoming more brazen and ruthless, sending letter-bombs and poisonous spores to government offices, plotting kidnaps and murder, and trying to stay one step ahead of the spies sent to flush them out. Fox has a duty to get at the truth, while the body count rises, the clock starts ticking, and he fights for his professional and personal life.

• Read the extract

The Family

Headline 2011, Paperback, 592 pages, £7.99

The Family, by Martina Cole

The Family is the devastatingly powerful and utterly unforgettable novel from the phenomenal No. 1 bestseller Martina Cole. To Phillip Murphy, family is everything and he loves his wife Christine with a vengeance. But there is another side to Phillip, one he never wanted Christine to see. Though, even if she did, could she do anything but stand by him? Because once you’re in the family, you’re in it for life…

• Read the extract

The Fear Index

Hutchinson 2011, Hardcover, 336 pages, £18.99

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

His name is carefully guarded from the general public but within the secretive inner circles of the ultra-rich Dr Alex Hoffmann is a legend – a visionary scientist whose computer software turns everything it touches into gold.

Together with his partner, an investment banker, Hoffmann has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling it to predict movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions.

But then in the early hours of the morning, while he lies asleep with his wife, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of their lakeside house. So begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.

His quest forces him to confront the deepest questions of what it is to be human. By the time night falls over Geneva, the financial markets will be in turmoil and Hoffmann’s world – and ours – transformed forever.

• Read the extract

Trick Of The Dark

Sphere 2011, Paperback, 544 pages, £7.99

Trick of the Dark, by Val Mcdermid

When Charlie Flint is sent a mysterious package of cuttings about a brutal murder, it instantly grabs her attention. The murder occurred in the grounds of her old Oxford college ? a groom battered to death just hours after his wedding. As his bride and wedding guests sipped champagne, his alleged killers were slipping his bloodstained body into the river. Charlie doesn’t know who sent the package, or why, yet she can’t get the crime out of her head. But as she delves deeper, and steps back into the mysterious world of Oxford colleges, she realises that there is much more to this crime than meets the eye…

• Read the extract

About the Galaxy National Book Awards

The gala ceremony, recorded at the Mandarin Oriental was hosted by comedian (and author of Tickling the English in 2010) Dara O Briain and actress Helen Baxendale. The Awards showcase the best of British publishing and celebrate titles that boast both wide popular appeal and critical acclaim. Produced by Cactus TV, the Awards are to be broadcast over six weeks of national TV programming, BOOKED – Stars of the Galaxy National Book Awards will air on 13th November and run until 18th December on More4. Each show will include features on each of the winners and in-depth interviews with the season’s biggest celebrity authors, including Katie Price, Rob Brydon and Jason Manford.

From Saturday 5th November, the public are invited to vote online for the Galaxy Book of the Year, the nominees of which comprise winners of all eleven categories. Last year’s winner of the overall accolade, One Day, by David Nicholls recorded over 300% sales growth during December 2010, going on to become the biggest selling paperback of 2011 along with a Hollywood film release. Who will triumph this year?

• Vote for your favourite book here!

Sole Agent (A Peter Craig spy thriller)

2011, Kindle Edition,

Overseas police adviser Peter Craig’s stopover in Lisbon was supposed to be a social call to see an old friend, the head of the Portuguese CID. Calling in at the British Embassy to declare his visit, Craig is talked into investigating the disappearance of the Defence Attaché’s maverick socialite daughter, a seemingly simple case that quickly spirals into a web of murder and espionage. Will Craig live to regret helping the Embassy save face?

“Mr Benton’s Peter Craig is as resourceful as he is likeable and tough…lots of action and some nice, crisp talk.” — Oxford Times, 30.10.1970.

“International indiscretions in Lisbon, with an intriguing mixture of Russian spies, Portuguese secret police and ingenuous revolutionary groups.” — Glasgow Herald, 17.1.1971.

++++

I rediscovered my grandfather’s books this summer, along with a box of contemporary press clippings and assorted manuscripts. Kenneth Benton was a contemporary of John le Carré in MI6, and similarly drew on his experiences when he later became a novelist, and while there are some similarities, the differences are more striking: Le Carré published a dozen novels that underpin the canon of Cold War British spy thrillers, with characters who are by and large conspicuously flawed men, burned out by their responsibilities and wary of even their allies, and continues to evolve his stories in the post-Soviet era; while Kenneth wrote well-received novels in a range of genres spanning crime, espionage and historical fiction, and his recurring hero, Peter Craig, is a bluff, canny Scot with little back story, fond of a drink but not an alcoholic, often casually sexist but not a womaniser, pragmatic and thoughtful but not stricken with doubt or remorse.

Craig is on the fringes of counterintelligence – and indeed often reluctant to get involved in skulduggery – a somewhat academic, book-learned security professional, more gifted amateur than a highly trained agent. He is as competent making small-talk with Embassy guests as he is infiltrating a safehouse, and with a range of tactics for escaping from either situation. Craig’s world is one of endless travel for lectures and briefings, guest receptions, formal dress, gin & tonic at sundown – the trappings of British colonial sophistication in otherwise hostile climates at the twilight of the Empire. It’s an easily parodied set-up, after Bond, and none of the novels is entirely unscathed by the three decades since they were written, but nonetheless there are ripples of current affairs – instability and popular unrest in South America, North Africa, Portugal, Greece – no less interesting in my view because the protagonist’s job is generally to help maintain order and save face, and the causes and conclusions are seldom clear or wholly satisfactory.

Kenneth died in 1999, and for a long time his novels had been out of print; but coming across a final, unpublished Peter Craig thriller amongst Kenneth’s papers, with a KGB SMERSH-type group of assassins plotting to end Craig’s interference once and for all, and Craig having finally met his romantic match, it seemed a shame not to publish. Clearly, though, putting out a series finale after so long, and with the rest of the series only available second-hand, would have been a hiding to nothing… so I dusted off my laptop, made a strong pot of coffee, and some months later republished the rest of the series for Kindle.

Would this have been practical without the rise of ereaders? For me, almost certainly not, at least without a sizeable outlay, either of money in conventional self-publishing or dignity in pitching to publishing houses who wouldn’t want to take a risk on reprinting half a dozen titles. But digital publishing has turned that on its head, taking the guilt and waste out of ‘vanity’ print runs at a time when even professional booksellers are struggling to accurately estimate sales. Ebooks are now almost fully integrated into mainstream publishing (and thankfully provide my day job) but away from the strictures and structures of publishing houses – schedules, budgets, meetings and marketing – the self-publishing ebook market has become a way for otherwise forgotten works to find a second life, a new generation of readers, and in perpetuity.

Dan Benton

Seven of Kenneth Benton’s novels are now available as ebooks. The last book in the Peter Craig series, ‘Vengeance in Venice’, will publish in late 2011. Find out more at www.craig-thrillers.com.

The Twelve

Harvill Secker 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £12.99

“The Twelve is not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but is also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times. It grips from the first page to the last, and heralds the arrival of a major new voice in Irish writing.”

The Twelve:

Sooner or later, everybody pays – and the dead will set the price…

Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price.

When Fegan’s vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland’s peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not.

Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, The Twelve takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country’s darkest heart. Stuart Neville’s gripping thriller marks the emergence of a brilliant new voice.

++++

Heaven

If you asked what my book heaven was at various stages in my life, you’d likely get some very different answers. At ten years old, it would have been any of Willard Price’s Adventure books, at sixteen something good and scary by Stephen King, and twenty five, probably one of Thomas Harris’s first two Lecter books. At thirty, James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, or Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Now I’m kicking the arse of forty, it might be Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter or Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep.

Is there a trend to this? I don’t know. Perhaps my tastes have gotten a little more sophisticated as I’ve eased into middle age, but the only common factor is great storytelling. These days, I’m a more demanding reader in terms of the quality of prose; I want great plots that are beautifully written, and that’s not often an easy combination to find. But not impossible – check out Eoin McNamee’s Orchid Blue for one example.  When I pick up a book now, I’m more likely to wind up putting it down than finishing it. So if I do get to that last page as a satisfied reader, that’s my book heaven.

Hell

Lazy writing.  More than anything else, what I hate to see is a good author delivering something that’s below par, when they’ve phoned it in, so to speak. The one example that sticks out for me is Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris. When you know he wrote two of the greatest suspense novels of modern times (Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs), it makes it all the more painful to wade through such a clumsy, half-baked book. I don’t like to be so critical of any writer, least of all one I admire, but I’m sure he won’t be too hurt by my comments while those royalties keep rolling in.

++++

About Stuart

Stuart Neville has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well-known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. His debut novel The Twelve was published to great acclaim in 2009.