Indiana’s Festival Round-Up, part 2

Think Forensic

Lots of new interesting happenings at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate this year. One of my favourite’s was the CSI workshop by Think Forensic. The library room at the Old Swan became a gory crime scene. Ex detective Supt Wallace led a briefing on a murder that had been committed and with her colleagues CSI Jo Mallard and forensic scientist Leisa Nichols – Drew, ex police officer Sue Procter and forensic linguist Diane Hall brought to life and analysed the crime scene. Male body, blood spatter, potential murder weapons, hair and fibres, shoe print and DNA… it was all there.

Think Forensic workshops are always very popular, in fact they have done them as far away as Austria. It was a super opportunity for aspiring crime writers to ask lots of technical questions.

Sometimes the people in the audience are just as interesting as the ones on stage. I got to talking puppies with the nice lady who sat beside me (she’s an expert in dog behaviour) and eventually we got around to talking crime. Her name is Roz Watkins and she has just gotten her first publishing contract with her book, The Devil’s Dice (HQ , Harper Collins). The Devil’s Dice follows thirtysomething Detective Inspector Meg Dalton who is determined to prove herself in the Derbyshire police force. The novel has already been longlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award, and will be published on 18th August 2018 in hardback, e-book and audiobook. By then there will be three in the series and it’s bound to be a corker seeing as the television rights have been snapped up by ITV even prior to publication! So watch this space….

I also managed to catch up with my friend Liz Mistry, whose thriller Unquiet Souls has just been released by Bloodhound Books. DI Gus McGuire is the new hotty on the block, although the subject matter is dark and disturbing. It’s a great read, check it out!

A great crime writer who is very supportive of new talent and super charming is N.J. Cooper. When I caught up with her in the audience for the Gerald Seymour interview, she shared some of her earlier writing background with me. When she heard that I liked historical crime fiction, she told me about her earlier incarnation as Daphne Wright, author of historical novels. I have now downloaded on my Kindle her novel set in the 19^th century during the Afghan War and can’t wait to get around to reading it.

N.J. Cooper also chaired the panel on ‘Murder out of Africa’ which was fascinating. Panellists included Leye Adente who sets his books in Lagos, the co-authors Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip who publish their books set in Botswana under the name Michael Stanley, and Deon Meyer and Paul Mendelson who write about crime in South Africa - no shortage of inspiration there I reckon. I found the anecdotes about witch doctors in Botswana particularly fascinating. These witch doctors literally get away with murder because the police are afraid to investigate as they might be on the receiving end of a curse. The use and protection of witch doctors supposedly reaches to the top of society. What happens is that random people are targeted and murdered to provide suitable body parts for magic. This is taking crime and evil to another level altogether.

N.J.Cooper and Crime out of Africa panel

That’s about it for now, I could of course go on and on and on, but I won’t. I already look forward to next year’s festival, by then I may have just caught up with my reading.

Indiana Brown