The Crime Warp

It's that time of year when after the excitement of Christmas things feel a bit flat.  Combine that with the dark nights and drab weather and January could be the worst month. However, don't despair because there are some brilliant crime drama to curl up and watch and the bonus is they all have strong female protagonists.

Hello and welcome to my monthly post, highlighting crime and thriller fiction worth looking out for. I’ve previously concentrated exclusively on novels, but this month I wanted to highlight a couple of other things I believe are worth looking out for.   Six Degrees of Assassination is an exciting five hour political thriller series by Audible. It starts on a sullen, cloudy July day ten years since 7/7. The happy, confident and optimistic British Prime Minister is visiting a charity in East London. Just two months after the general election which saw his government returned to power with a clear majority, the economy is on the mend and the coalition is fast becoming a bad memory. Suddenly, a man appears out of the crowd and shoots him three times in the chest. Alex Cartwright, MI5 Chief Counter Terrorism Officer (Andrew Scott) must find out the truth and the action follows Cartwright’s investigation into the assassination. Six people, from assassin to mastermind, are unrave...

http://youtu.be/s9IWvbbZPZc For those Broadchurch Fans who are impatiently awaiting the new Broadchurch which will be released early 2015,  here is the trailer for the US version of BROADCHURCH - It's called GRACEPOINT and from the trailer seems to adhere to the original  storyline.  It's already been shown in the states and you can now view this 10 part series on Youtube.  I'm certainly going to view it with a critical eye to see how the American version measures up to our lovely British one

If you didn't read SJ Watson's psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep you missed a treat.  It's bad enough that she wakes up every morning to a completely erased memory, but add in the intrigue and you'll be petrified.  This book was really scary and atmospheric.  My advice is to read it before the film is released in September, then go and watch the film. If the film is half as good as the book (and with two great well -cast actors Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth in the leading roles) I have high hopes for it.  Trailer of Before I Go To Sleep

I was sent the link to a post by David Hewson where he talks about how he adapted the TV series “The Killing” into books.   I was quite curious and before I clicked on the link was thinking about the idea of taking a TV series and turning it into a book – this is the opposite of what usually happens when books are adapted for screen.   For me, a book leaves a huge amount to the reader’s imagination, whereas in TV and film you see so much on the screen. My initial thoughts were that “bookifying” a series would be pretty easy – perhaps taking the script, mapping out the action and dialogue, then just adding a few bits of description.    When I read Hewson’s post, it was pretty obvious that really I’d not appreciated the level of skill and craft that goes into making this kind of adaptation successful.   Far from this being a bit of jobbing writing, just filling in gaps here and there, Hewson started from scratch, by thinking carefully about the...

The Fall BBC 2 Serial Killer drama Jamie Dornan as Paul Spector, Gillian Anderson as DSI Gibson in The Fall I know it’s been a fair few weeks since the Fall was televised and watched consistently over the five weeks by over 3 million viewers, but I found it so intriguing that every so often since the end of series one I’ve ruminated about it and am pleased that the BBC have opted for a second series. Despite the extremely good filming and excellent story lines linking the day to day Belfast with the horror of a serial killer my ruminations centred on the two main characters: DSI Gibson played by Gillian Anderson ( Scully from the X-Files) and the serial Killer Paul Spector played by Irish actor Jamie Dornan.  Gillian Anderson as DSI Gibson What fascinated me about these two characters was their similarities.   DSI Gibson has a unique sexual confidence that, early on has her approaching a stranger (albeit a fellow Police Officer) for sex.   She is portray...

Cath Staincliffe has a solid writing pedigree - Sal Kilkenny, Blue Murder and now Scott & Bailey, whose TV series characters appear in the book Dead to me. Dead to me is a prequel to the TV series – the first case where Janet Scott and Rachel Bailey work together.  The book starts with Bailey “freezing her tits off” at a crime scene faced with a no win situation – does she stop a stroppy DCI without ID entering a crime scene or does she get a bollocking from the crime scene manager for allowing access to someone with no ID?  For Bailey, the answer’s obvious – no access without ID and piss off the DCI! The aggrieved DCI, Gill Murray, sees some worthwhile trait or talent in Bailey, who is transferred into the DCIs syndicate and teamed up with Scott to solve the case of the murder of a teenage girl found dead in a grubby flat.  The detectives follow a series of trails through the seedier side of Manchester, places and people as far away from the city’s shiny glass f...

A s part of the Saturday Drama series, Radio 4 have dramatised the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.  The authors co-wrote ten books in the series, sitting opposite each other in their flat and writing alternate chapters of the book.    I read these a long time ago and my favourites were Roseanna, The Man on the Balcony and The Laughing Policeman.  The books were re issued in 2011 by Fourth Estate and are also available as e-books. They are great crime/procedural novels and the radio dramatisation I heard was excellent, with Steven Mackintosh as Beck and Neil Pearson as his sidekick Kollberg.   If you've missed the first few on the radio, they're on iPlayer and should be available for up to a year - worth a listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mnxnc Romancrimeblogger