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news, events, rants
14/07/10: Henning Mankell took part in the Gaza Aid Flotilla. His diary of what happened before, during and after the ships were boarded by the Israeli military is the most important piece of writing that any crime novelist will produce this year. If you haven't read the published extracts yet, you can access an English-language version here ....
16/04/10: LIVE EVENTS IN MAY AND JUNE
Monday 17th May, 5.45pm, Bilston Library, Wolverhampton (tel 01902 556253)
Monday 24th May, 6pm, Coventry Central Library (tel 0247 683 2314)
Wednesday June 9th, 7.30pm, Rushden Library, Northants (tel 01933 312754)
Admission is free but contact the venues if you want to reserve seats in advance.
I'll be talking about Crowby, Jacobson and Kerr, Envy The Dead, crime fiction versus 'literature', why all good books are political, why The Wire is better than the collected works of Martin Amis / Ian McEwan / AS Byatt stacked together - to name only a few possiblities. Plus - mainly - whatever you want to ask. It won't be the same without you ...
08/02/10: Elmore Leonard's rules for crime fiction include never opening with the weather. He isn't British so it's not his fault that he doesn't understand the transcendental importance of weather. After the snow and the ice we're now into the traditional cold, grey Crowby February. A smart time of the year to be a writer of course: indoor work - and a nice, easy commute.
07/12/09: Nearly 2010 – and so time for the official Iain McDowall Annual Book Awards, 2009. None of them are crime novels - since I didn’t read any this year. That’s not too unusual for me and no reflection whatsoever on many fine books which, I’m sure, other crime authors have been writing and publishing. When you spend hours a day wrapped up with your own crime scenarios, you don't always want to spend your leisure investing in someone else's. None are brand-new books either (in fact three were first published last century). Make of that what you will but these are the books I’ve got the most out of in the last twelve months. And the results are :-
1) Cormac McCarthy The Road
2) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian
(conventionally, critics still rate Blood Meridian as McCarthy’s ‘masterpiece’. It’s a terrific book but The Road, produced twenty years later, is even better. The same breath-taking techniques are all in evidence – but distilled down to their essence and honed to perfection)
3) John Christopher The Death of Grass
(a thoroughly dark novel that was a bestseller in the 1950s – and made me reconsider some assumptions about public taste in that era)
4) John Prebble Culloden
(still the definitive account of the British state’s original ‘war on terror’ )
5) Iain Sinclair London Orbital
(Sinclair shows that the 'ordinary' is always anything but)
My gig of the year - by a wide margin - was the last night of the Fall tour at the Assembly in Leamington, definitely one of the UK's cooler venues.
See you in the new decade ...
19/10/09: Quite a few readers have been in touch to ask me about the 'battle of the beanfield' which gets a brief mention in Envy The Dead. In answer to the basic recurrent question, yes, the Wiltshire 'battle' really happened. In fact some of the incidents which I put into the fictional disturbance at the old Crowby airbase in the book have their origins in eyewitness reports of what took place in reality at the 'beanfield'. If you're interested to know more, there's a Wikipedia entry - and links there to further sources of information on this topic. As I've said before, I became very aware in writing Envy The Dead of the many connections between the history of the UK in the 1980s and the history of the UK right now. The G20 protestors in London back in April this year weren't the first UK citizens to experience police 'kettling' and worse - and you'd have to be naïve in the extreme to believe that they're likely to be the last. Meantime, in my hometown, still no news of a successful outcome to the David and Goliath struggle against the multinational fat cats who now own the Johnnie Walker brand name.
07/09/09: La rentrée, as they say in France - where I spent a nice, warm chunk of the summer. But now it's September and back to business in the UK (where I note neither the weather nor the politics has improved in my absence). The 7th book is up and running at any rate - although still without a title. I wrote a piece on the origins of Envy The Dead for Crime Time magazine recently - if you want to read it click here. I also gave an interview to Shots magazine - though (possibly mysteriously) it hasn't surfaced yet on their website. Meantime, in Germany, DTV have just brought out their translation of Cut Her Dead (Gleich Bist Du Tot) and made it their crime book of the month. It's nice to be loved somewhere ...
27/07/09: Envy The Dead, the brand-new, sixth case for Inspector Jacobson and his team was published in UK hardback on 5th March. If it seems like a relatively long time since my last book, Cut Her Dead, came out, then that's because it is: twenty-two months between the two titles to be precise. But there's other stuff to do in this world: travel, think, live. So no genuine apologies from me for the time-gap (you're welcome to some non-genuine ones if you want them). The UK paperback is released on 6th August making it an ideal summer read (unless of course you planned your summer break for June or July... ).
Envy The Dead is partially set in the 1980s. Writing it, I was struck by how much of what was going on in Britain back then continues to reverberate (and illuminate) into the present day. I've also revealed a bit more of Jacobson's back-story this time than I've given you before.
Sincerely Iain
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