Deadland Blog Tour: Today we have a guest post from William Shaw about his passion for books

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We are very privileged on The Crime Warp, for today we have a guest post from William Shaw author of Deadland.

As a reader and author myself I understand exactly where William is coming from in this guest post which is all about his passion for reading and the deight he takes in learning new things when reading.

Thanks so much for taking the time to visit us today, William, it's been a very real pleasure. Now over to the man himself ....









William Shaw ...

I love books where, alongside being entertained, you learn something unexpected. It’s one of the real pleasures of writing them too, that you have to learn about world you’re writing about. When I wrote The Birdwatcher, I spent a long time talking to birdwatchers about their world, about how they talk to each other, how they take notes, what they think of “twitchers”. In my new book, Deadland, I had to learn about the world of super-rich art dealers. I spoke to one firm of brokers and they confirmed pretty much everything I hoped. That fraud within the art world is not only easy, it’s commonplace. A receipt that says a painting has been sold for $10m means little. A totally different amount of money might have changed hands. The vendor’s name might be a fiction, created to disguise the identity of the real seller. It’s a rich, fascinating world.

With that in mind, here are three books I’ve loved that you leave having learned something you didn’t ever think you’d be interested in.

 

John Connolly’s A Book of Bones. The cover of the Connolly’s new bestseller is of medieval stained glass from Fairford Parish Church in Gloucestershire. Who would have thought that a crime book would tell you so much about medieval stained glass? But contained in this outrageously imagined fantasy in which the glass comes to murderous life is the true story of the church’s extraordinary windows which I found fascinating; how they were created by a Flemish glazier, and almost destroyed in a great storm in the 1700s, removed again during the Second World War. Connolly’s a great omnivore, hoovering up the obscurest facts of history and regurgitating them in fascinating ways.

M. J. McGrath’s White Heat. Better known these days as Mel McGrath, Mel wrote a non-fiction book about the Canadian Inuit, then wrote a three-part crime fiction series set in the Arctic of which White Heat is the first. Behind this great series lies the extraordinary bleak history of the Inuit people and the devastating impact of climate change on their fragile landscape. Brilliant books.

Graham Swift’s Waterland. One of the reasons I was drawn to write the DS Alexandra Cupidi series set in Romney Marsh and Dungeness, was my love of this book set in the Fens. Although it’s thought of as literary fiction, it’s also a good old murder story. And also it’s all about the extraordinary natural history of the eel, a species which spawns in the Caribbean and then undertakes a 3,700 mile journey that can take years to arrive in the ditches of Lincolnshire, even wriggling like snakes over grass to reach their feeding grounds before returning on the Gulf Stream to the warm seas where they bred.

Here's the Blurb for William Shaw's Deadland 

YOU CAN RUN

The two boys never fitted in. Seventeen, the worst age, nothing to do but smoke weed; at least they have each other. The day they speed off on a moped with a stolen mobile, they're ready to celebrate their luck at last. Until their victim comes looking for what's his – and ready to kill for it.

YOU CAN HIDE

On the other side of Kent’s wealth divide, DS Alexandra Cupidi faces the strangest murder investigation of her career. A severed limb, hidden inside a modern sculpture in Margate’s Turner Contemporary. No one takes it seriously – even the artwork’s owners, celebrity dealers who act like they’re above the law.

YOU CAN DIE

But as Cupidi’s case becomes ever more sinister, as she wrangles with police politics and personal dilemmas, she can't help worrying about those runaway boys. Seventeen, the same age as her own headstrong daughter. Alone, on the marshes, they're pawns in someone else’s game. Two worlds are about to collide.

Author bio


WILLIAM SHAW was born in Newton Abbot, Devon, grew up in Nigeria and lived for sixteen years in Hackney. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, longlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year and nominated for a Barry Award. A regular at festivals, he organises panel talks and CWA events across the country. He is the author of the Breen & Tozer crime series set in sixties London: A Song from Dead Lips, A House of Knives and A Book of Scars; and the standalone The Birdwatcher. Salt Lane and Deadland are spin-offs to The Birdwatcher. For over twenty years he has written on popular culture and sub-culture for various publications including the Observer and the New York Times. He lives in Brighton with his family.