Murphy: International crime readers-and also the publishing people who try to sell new books to them-are always talking about the world region poised to take off next, the way Scandinavia did for about a decade, or the way Korean thrillers have established themselves more lately. Fortunately, the rest of the world seems to like British crime so we might as well just carry merrily on with our obsession.
#Ganesh festival drawings full#
Sometimes I think every third person on the street around me is working on a crime novel, every pub is full of people discussing the latest crime TV show or true crime podcast and everyone else is a, obviously, a potential killer. And no period in history remains unmined either, from Ellis Peters’s twelfth century monk-detective Cadfael onwards. In a literary sense there is nowhere in the British Isles murder-free. Burley’s Charlie Wycliffe down in Cornwall. Literally from Ann Cleeves with Jimmy Perez up in Shetland to W. There’s a veritable true crime industry, the phenomenal amount of adaptation of books and characters to TV series, while the national obsessions with Christie and Conan Doyle continue unabated.Įvery city, town, village, and remote farming community, has at least a few crime books associated with it.
#Ganesh festival drawings serial#
British readers embrace detective-vicars, old lady snoops, gritty urban serial killers and middle class murderers in the suburbs, all in an afternoon. Britain produces the syrupiest cozies as well as some of the most hardboiled noir. Let me tell you, nobody…NOBODY…is half as strange as the British. You set out to write about the world’s crime fiction, from Uzbekistan to Buenos Aires, and plenty of places famous and obscure in between, and it turns out that the weirdest, most eccentric oddballs are your neighbours.
–Paul French, Crime and the City columnistĭwyer Murphy: Of the many crime writing cities you’ve chronicled, which one stands out as having the most eccentric collection of books? Is there one city that stays with you and makes you think, ‘oh, well there’s something a bit odd going on there…’.? I presume just about all the Scandinavian cities would qualify. We started with Amsterdam in March 2017 and from there it just snowballed.
So we thought let’s take the world country by country, city by city and see what there is to read, and to coax people out of simply reading American and UK authors and try other worlds, styles, approaches. She knew I travelled a lot, had lived in various countries, and had somewhat of a languages background that meant I’d been suggesting suitable books for translation to publishers for a long time. The series started as an idea by Lisa Levy who over the years, in various commissioning personas, had asked me to review translated crime writing from Europe and Asia.