Table of contents for Crime Scene UK 0001 in Crime Scene

Welcome to the very first issue of new quarterly magazine Crime Scene. Inside these pages you’ll find a celebration of crime drama in TV, books and film. Our front section, Case Notes, is packed with interviews, previews and regulars – it’s your need to know for everything new in the world of crime drama. Post Mortem is our reviews section, filled with in-depth analysis of books and whole seasons of shows, while our features section delves deeper, behind the scenes. This issue is dedicated to Sherlock. We look forward to the Christmas special and Season 4 and revisit the previous three, then investigate the wider world of Conan Doyle’s fascinating hero. We also talk to author Jeff Lindsay about his creation, Dexter, and to director Brian Helgeland about directing two…

THE REALITY “I always wanted to be a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper! When I was growing up and reading Clark Kent Superman stories and later seeing [Watergate investigators] Woodward and Bernstein and all the good they did, that’s what I thought I was going to be doing. I spent 36 years going to crime scenes and trials, working the neighbourhoods, talking to cops and interviewing killers. “My hobby was finding evidence that the NYPD missed. I actually located blood-stained clothing, and of course a lot of ‘fallen brass’: bullets and shells. I found a murder weapon once! I used to start at 6am, which is why my blog is called Murder Before Breakfast (kierancrowley.com/blog). I would go to the murder du jour – this one was in…

My latest novel, The Taxidermist’s Daughter, is a Gothic thriller. With revenge, dark secrets and violence, taking place in 1912 in a decaying museum of taxidermy as the sins of the past come back to haunt the present, it’s as far from the mighty Agatha Christie as could be imagined between the pages of a paperback book. And yet... The power of landscape, the sense of a small and enclosed community, the idea that within a tiny village all the most appalling and dangerous of crimes might be discovered and a female protagonist who will put herself at risk to save others, all this is staple Christie. I first ‘discovered’ Christie in the August of 1971. Or, maybe, it was 1972. Childhood memories have a habit of being wise after…

1. MISS SMILLA’S FEELING FOR SNOW By PETER HOEG Smilla is half Kalaallit and half Dane, a quiet woman who opens her heart to neighbour Isaiah. After he suffers a tragic accident, she’s compelled to discover the truth behind his death. This book is an excellent place to start if you are new to Scandinavian crime. 2. BURIAL RITES By HANNAH KENT The debut novel from Hannah Kent – once you’ve read it you’ll be craving more. Based on a true story and featuring beautiful, atmospheric descriptions of the bleak Icelandic landscape, this is a moving novel about what we think we know and ways in which we interpret what we’re told. 3. DARK CORNERS By RUTH RENDELL Rendell’s final novel is an atmospheric tale of mistaken identity, kidnap, blackmail…

I almost feel sorry for Moriarty. He is often spoken of as the greatest villain in literature and certainly Sherlock Holmes was impressed: “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker…” In fact, he appears in only one Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Final Problem’. Conan Doyle created him expressly to rid the world of a hero of whom he had grown bored. That was all he had to do: meet Holmes at a large waterfall in Switzerland, allow him to write a quick note to Watson and then thrown him off. And he failed. Sherlock Holmes reappeared three years later in ‘The…

SHERLOCK HOLMES PLAYED BY Jonny Lee Miller BASED ON Sherlock Holmes Miller’s version of the famous sleuth is a recovering drug addict initially cared for by a “sober companion” (a full-time assistant who helps him through rehab) in the form of Dr Joan Watson. He passes the time by assisting his old friends at the NYPD with their toughest cases. JOAN WATSON PLAYED BY Lucy Liu BASED ON John Watson Holmes’ sidekick is reimagined as a woman, an ambitious surgeon who quits to care for addicts after losing a patient. She discovers a knack for solving crimes and becomes Holmes’ friend and fellow PI. The house they share is cleaned by Ms Hudson (Candis Cayne) in another nod to the original set-up. THOMAS GREGSON PLAYED BY Aidan Quinn BASED ON…

There’s a scene at the very start of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds which centres on the most terrifying interrogation you will ever witness – and if you haven’t seen it, and only know Tarantino by reputation, it’s almost certainly not what you think. The set up is this: German occupied France; a brave and decent dairy farmer is hiding a Jewish family beneath his floorboards; Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, who is beyond amazing), the “Jew Hunter” of the SS drops by to ask a few questions. There are, very specifically, no threats. The men with guns are left outside. Hans produces nothing more threatening than a comedy Sherlock Holmes pipe and his manners are so exquisite, so militantly fastidious, that you start reviewing your own behaviour when you drop…

Nobody understands LA’s dark past like James Ellroy. The “premier lunatic of American letters” was born in the City Of Angels in 1948, lost his mother, Jean Hilliker, to an as-yet-uncaught murderer in nearby El Monte, in 1958 and his sprawling detective novels, from Brown’s Requiem (1981) to Perfidia (2014), are steeped in its sullied glamour. Ellroy’s latest publication is LAPD ’53, written in conjunction with retired officer Glynn Martin of the Los Angeles Police Museum (laphs.org), a collection of vintage crime-scene photographs from the archives accompanied by Ellroy’s characteristically amphetamised text to shade in the backstory. After huge door-stoppers such as the 650-page Blood’s A Rover (2009), LAPD ’53 is a mere stocking filler, but the chilly candour of the pictures combined with Ellroy’s noir-inflected not-quite-fiction, makes for a…

THE AUTHOR Kieran Crowley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Surgeon’s Wife, Sleep My Little Dead and Burned Alive. He is also an award-winning investigative reporter who has covered hundreds of trials and thousands of murders, including the assassination of John Lennon, as well as the cases of Amy Fisher, Katie Beers, the Long Island Railroad Massacre, and serial killer Joel Rifkin. He is now writing Shoot, the sequel to Hack, which will be published by Titan Books in 2016. Kieran lives in New York. F.X. Shepherd is accidentally sent to a crime scene where a husky called Skippy is guarding the body of his master, the husband of food critic Aubrey Forsythe. I entered the kitchen with silent, baby steps. It was a large square room…

Over the last decade, Sheridan Smith has transformed herself from That Lass on Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps to one of the UK’s best and most versatile actresses. In Black Work she stars as Jo Gillespie, a PC whose life comes tumbling down when her policeman husband is killed while working undercover. Infidelity and marital unravelling, the fear of being watched during life’s most vulnerable moments and a good old-fashioned whodunit make for textbook Sunday night television. But it’s no classic, despite a nuanced performance from Smith and a ballsy one from Geraldine James as her guv’nor. Characters act in inexplicable ways, whether it’s Jo’s mother gabbing away to the press or affairs being uncovered in the most unlikely and public ways possible, just to shove…

Catching little fish – a kilo here, a kilo there – isn’t enough for ambitious Ash (OT Fagbenle), who leaves HM Customs to join UNIT, the (fictional) Undercover Narcotics Intelligence Team. Soon enough, his team has a big fish on the line: Roach (Trevor Eve), a drug lord passing as a legitimate businessman. Collateral damage is, of course, inevitable but just how far will Ash go, and what will he sacrifice, as he confronts heroin smugglers, pill pushers, gun runners, hitmen and ruthless gangland climbers to get to Roach? There’s action aplenty as stakes are raised with each episode and while the producers have given the series an all-pervading brown/grey/green palette to augment its gritty atmosphere, they couldn’t similarly gussy up some wooden performances and two-dimensional characters, particularly in earlier…

Post-Deadwood, it seemed that Timothy Olyphant’s Eastwood swagger and knack for pulling off a Stetson would go to waste – until he reappeared as US Marshal Raylan Givens, a lawman with one hand on his holster and one foot over the line. Givens is an Elmore Leonard creation and this final 13-episode arc pulls heavily on the poignant plausibility of Leonard’s work: criminals, the law and everyone in between are, above all else, people, their stories full of heart and hard-headedness. Season 6 rigs another network of crossed interests and submerged backstories, one featuring Mary Steenburgen and Sam Elliott and that’s close to matching the heights of Season 2, but it also delivers on the promise the show made as long ago as its pilot episode – that Justified is…

There are endings and then there are happy endings. While few Mentalist devotees would argue that the series effectively finished midway through Season 6 (following the false finale of Season 3’s heart-stopping food-court assassination) – when self-confessed pseudo-psychic Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) finally defeated the many-tentacled Red John, whose followers had slaughtered his wife and daughter – fewer yet would have denied him the ensuing 27-episode coda that saw him rebuilding a life with boss-turned-lover Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney). Switching the story-of-the-week action from the fictional CBI to the actual FBI made for a smooth if superfluous transition, with peppy new additions Wylie and Vega endearing but no replacement for the married-off Rigsby and Van Pelt, but the absence of a running core story – the from-nowhere Jane-Lisbon romance resolving…

With an opening so indebted to JJ Abrams that you’ll feel you have taken a wrong turn and stumbled into the first episode of Lost, Wayward Pines is practically a shot-for-shot wink at that sequence, where a closeup of Jack’s eye widens to show our lead waking up on an unfamiliar island. Here, our hero’s Matt Dillon and he isn’t on an island, he’s imprisoned in a small town populated by twitchy paranoids. Director M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has warned the audience to brace for weirdness and no sooner is Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Dillon) looking for a missing colleague than he immediately encounters some potentially supernatural elements and oppressively cheery passive-aggression from Wayward Pines’ townsfolk. Finding himself trapped in a nightmare like David Lynch directing The…

The Danes can make drama out of any manner of crisis, whether killings, politics or long-lost relatives, hence THE LEGACY S2 (Arrow Films, out now), in which the photogenic Grønnegaard siblings (the series is called ‘The Heirs’ in Denmark) continue to bicker about their inheritance in an unexpectedly compelling manner. Brothers in arms Callen (Chris O’Donnell) and Hanna (LL Cool J) continue their high-octane assignments in NCIS: LA S6 (Paramount, out now), with terrorists, drones and anthrax all in a day’s work for the Office of Special Projects, while back across the Atlantic Ray Winstone reteams with Sexy Beast screen wife Amanda Redman for THE TRIALS OF JIMMY ROSE (ITV Studios, out now), in which he’s fresh from prison after a lengthy stint for armed robbery and trying to both…

It looked like LONGMIRE had ridden off into the sunset last year when A&E cancelled the series, based on the novels by Craig Johnson. The modern-day sheriff stories were attracting audiences (averaging 5.6m) but not advertisers. That’s not an issue for Netflix, who rode in like the cavalry and picked up the series for a fourth season. The 10 episodes kick off immediately after Season 3’s cliffhanger, and are now available on Netflix US. Season 2 of GOTHAM, the cop show set in the city famous from the Batman stories, will be subtitled ‘The Rise Of The Villains’ says executive producer Bruno ‘The Mentalist’ Heller, and will give young Commissioner-to-be Gordon “more grand-scale and theatrical” crimes to solve. It airs on Channel 5 in the UK later this year; in…

Created by: Martin Gero Starring: Jaimie Alexander, Sullivan Stapleton, Michael Gaston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (NBC) September Sharing DNA with both Prison Break and the Bourne movies, Blindspot is likely to be the highest concept crime show of the year. It kicks off with an amnesiac woman (Jane Doe, played by Thor’s Jaimie Alexander) being found naked in New York City’s Times Square, her body covered in tattoos that serve as a calling card to the FBI. “I just had this image of a bomb in the middle of Times Square, someone going to dismantle it and this bag opens up and a naked tattooed woman jumps out,” admits Blindspot creator Martin Gero. “I wish there was a better explanation [for the show’s genesis]. I knew it was definitely a great opening…

It’s impossible not to judge a book by its cover when they’re adorned with the artwork of the late Glen Orbik, the California Art Institute-trained illustrator who worked on everything from DC Comics to these stunning Hard Case Crime titles. A lasting legacy for an exceptional talent. The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes (Titan Books) by Lawrence Block, the latest Hard Case Crime book and the last to carry Glen Orbik artwork, is out on 25 September. See more of Glen’s work at orbikart.com…

MASTERMINDS Bizarre comedy heist film based, surprisingly, on the true case of a hapless security guard who pulls off one of the biggest bank robberies in American history, spurred on by the love of a woman. Stars Zach Galifianakis and Kristen Wiig in full-on slapstick comedy mode. OUT 2016 SICARIO An unflinching crime thriller focusing on the US/Mexian drug war. Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent involved in a raid on a Mexican cartel safe house, with Josh Brolin and Benecio Del Toro as the officials she’s charged with working with when the situation escalates. OUT 9 OCTOBER KILL YOUR FRIENDS This adaptation of John Niven’s novel crosses American Psycho with Trainspotting, as Nicholas Hoult’s cynical, amoral A&R man snorts, cheats, connives and kills his way to the top during…

1 IT’S A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL Described by producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff as “the biggest, scariest story yet”, Season 4 is a two-part mini-series in which DCI John Luther (Idris Elba) is targeted by ghosts from his past and drawn into one of his most complicated cases yet. Luther does Dickens? 2 IT’S ALREADY IN THE CAN Filming kicked off in March 2015, with cameras rolling in Luther’s East London stomping ground. “The fans won’t be disappointed – it’s explosive and definitely goes up a gear!” Elba promised. He celebrated wrapping filming by stripping out of his Luther costume for a promo video [see below]. 3 THERE ARE SOME NEW FACES Game Of Thrones fans, rejoice: Ygritte lives! Well, sort of, as Rose Leslie has joined the new series, alongside other newcomers…

1. THE VALLEY OF FEAR (1915) Written after but set before ‘The Final Problem’, it’s the first mention of Moriarty in the Holmes chronology, and the only Conan Doyle novel not yet adapted in Sherlock. Enlisted to solve a murder in a sleepy village, Holmes vows to bring down Moriarty after finding he’s responsible. (NB He’s alluded to but doesn’t appear.) 2. THE DYING DETECTIVE (1913) Watson arrives at 221B to find Holmes apparently dying from a rare Asian ailment but Holmes won’t allow himself to be treated, instead calling in a tropical-disease expert and forcing Watson to sit by and watch. It’s all a ploy, of course, and this callous move feels just right for Cumberbatch’s chilly Sherlock. 3. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX (1911) Watson takes centre-stage…

What attracted you to Mycroft Holmes? He’s described in the Conan Doyle stories as being smarter than Sherlock but less obsessive. I’ve always loved the sharp mind of Sherlock but he’s been written about by so many other writers that I wanted to try a whole new approach, through Mycroft. Mycroft has been the protagonist of a few other novelists but I think my take on him and the exciting plot give it a fresh feel. So how does he compare to Sherlock? Sherlock uses his abilities to quench his own intellectual thirst. If someone else benefits, that’s just a happy byproduct. Mycroft, on the other hand, uses his abilities to further justice and to benefit society. Sherlock is more like the amoral Sam Spade in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon,…

What is it about Elementary that makes it special? It’s definitely my favourite modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. It’s got that network ‘mystery of the week’-type format but then it can do great things with story arcs. They’ll take names and plot ideas from classic canon but turn them into something new. For instance, how they dealt with Moriarty and Irene Adler blew my mind! And casting Watson as a woman... It sounds like an obvious thing to do but it really hasn’t been done that often. How much freedom do you have about what you write? Do the producers check everything? It’s CBS, one of the major TV networks, so there are approvals and approvals... The showrunner, Robert Doherty, has the ultimate say especially on…

SOMETHING BOTHERING ME “I think part of the reason why Columbo has been so popular and continues to endure is that there’s never really been another detective show quite like it. The format was so different from anything else that was on television. Even today, if we were to bring Columbo back in that format, it’d still be unlike anything that’s been seen before or since. “Josh Trank contacted me on Facebook and sent me this really long essay. He’s very much a Columbo purist and when he first heard about this reboot idea, the gist of this message was he was really very anti-reboot. I was kind of on a similar path for a long time. I felt that Columbo was Peter Falk, and Peter Falk was Columbo. When…

Walking tours of London’s criminal past abound, whether Krays or Ripper crime scenes or Holmesian locations, but from October members of the public can follow in Arthur Conan Doyle’s footsteps by visiting The Met’s closely guarded, somewhat mythic Crime Museum (aka ‘the Black Museum’) for the first time, when around a third of its exhibits go on show at the Museum of London. Conan Doyle, Houdini and Gilbert and Sullivan were just some of the Victorian VIPs whose famous names – which will be on show in vintage visitors’ books – gained them access in the early days, along with royals and members of law enforcement. “It evolved out of legal changes made to protect the property of criminals,” explains The Crime Museum Uncovered co-curator Jackie Keily. “The police were…

CLANDESTINE (1982) Nominated for an Edgar Award, Ellroy’s second novel – which, with its tale of a strangled young secretary, was surely inspired in part by his mother’s murder – lays the groundwork for his LA Quartet to come, by introducing the characters of Dudley Smith, Michael Breuning and Richard Carlisle. THE BLACK DAHLIA (1987) Both inspired by and incorporating the unsolved real-life murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short in 1947 (and dedicated, darkly, to Ellroy’s mother as ‘this valediction in blood’), the first part of the LA Quartet is a heady mix of noir and historical detail, with hardboiled LAPD cops and bad-time gals. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1990) The book that brought Ellroy firmly into the mainstream, not least when adapted into a movie by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, this…

By not picking up where Season 1 left off, True Detective’s second run proves a struggle. Perhaps it was always going to be. Writer-creator Nic Pizzolatto set the bar perilously high in the first season of the HBO show, eliciting career-best turns from Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey amid the sweaty bayous of Louisiana, with a storyline that was pulp fiction via the arthouse cinema. The very fact Pizzolatto designed it to be a single-season, eight-episode narrative meant he was always letting the noose brush dangerously close to his neck when it came to fashioning a follow-up. Switching focus to LA County and the fictional, industrial smoke-belching sprawl that is Vinci, True Detective S2 brings a whole new set of characters and plotlines but very little of it feels fresh.…

Every time you do something that makes me think you really care, you do something else that reminds me that you simply aren’t capable of it...” So says FBI profiler Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) to turncoat master criminal Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington (James Spader). It’s a sign of how far their relationship develops during this second season of the crime drama, and the extent to which Keen is no longer willing to be pushed around by the men in her life. Admittedly, the underlying threat – an international conspiracy of government and private-sector leaders going by the name of The Cabal – remains pure James Bond. Yet it’s generally presented with sufficient confidence and style, as personified in Spader’s seemingly unflappable anti-hero. Although guest stars like Ron Perlman and Reed Birney…

Two lovers sneak off to a secluded cabin in the woods but their tryst is interrupted by a gangland execution that goes terribly wrong when the intended victim gets free and massacres his captors. The twist in this Norwegian thriller is that the lovers in question are teenage boys, who can’t come forward with what they saw without coming out of the closet. It’s a rich and compelling hook for a drama but Eyewitness quickly allows its plot to fragment in different directions, with two biker gangs, Balkan mobsters, a runaway girl, various police departments all vying for control of the case and the soapy personal lives of multiple characters to take into account. With only six episodes in which to spin its yarn, the show gives short shrift to…

Of Raymond Burr’s two career-defining TV shows, Ironside comes a distinct second to the mighty Perry Mason but, after all that dramatic courtroom-pacing in his more iconic role, it must have been a blessed relief to spend the next eight years sitting down. NBC should be rightly applauded for screening TV’s first primetime lead with a disability (Robert Ironside is an ex-cop left paraplegic by a bullet) but the show is rarely sure what to do with the concept. These 26 episodes from the second season are mostly so-so story-of-the-week plots that could have fit easily into any network crime show of the time, bar the brilliant Columbo. The only story to really buck the formula is two-parter ‘Split Second to an Epitaph’, which has Ironside undergoing a kill-or-cure operation…

It’s often said that cleaners know everything, which is certainly the case with Charlie (Shaun Micallef ) and Nicola Buchanan (Kat Stewart). Ostensibly a crime-scene clean-up team, the Buchanans put in overtime investigating a series of violent but whimsically murders. While the killings are brutal, the investigations come together rather like lovely knitting patterns – they’re satisfying to solve, if somewhat cosy – the Buchanans quite happy to mop up after Detective Vinetti, the local Lestrade of this piece, who routinely neglects to carry out his duties. Mr & Mrs Murder’s sense of humour is much gentler than the noir-esque theme tune and comic-book credits suggest. Indeed, there’s a sense of real sweetness in the warm relationship between husband and wife as they consistently engage in good-natured banner: “You’re doing…

Given that Taraji P Henson is now gathering plaudits galore in hip-hop drama Empire, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that her character doesn’t make it beyond Season 3 of Person Of Interest. The question is, does the absence of NYPD detective Joss Carter spoil the series itself? The answer depends on how compelling you find the pairing of Reese and Finch, Jim Caviezel’s sharp-suited ex-CIA killbot and Michael Emerson’s guilt-ridden tech genius. Because as inspired as the format of the show is – week-in, week-out, Reese tries to save people whose numbers have literally come up on Finch’s surveillance supercomputer – it inevitably gets samey. Yet, mindful of Henson moving on, the producers (who include creator Jonathan Nolan and JJ Abrams) not only introduce a new Big Bad this…

With its grey skies and brooding Normandy landscapes, Witnesses (broadcast on Channel 4) is a six-part French drama that feels closer in tone to the Nordic noir of The Bridge and The Killing. Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) is juggling motherhood and detective work when a baffling case brings an unwelcome face from her past. Retired investigator Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte), who gave her a hard time as a trainee, is being targeted with macabre messages: corpses dug up and displayed in show homes alongside clues relating to his family. Sandra suspects this troubled ex-detective knows more than he admits, especially when – in one of several stylish set pieces – someone starts shooting at him on a funicular. Gradually, mutual respect develops as their investigation grows even more sinister. The…

So how much do you know about Jane Doe? I’ve been told a few things but I haven’t been told exactly who she was. That’s going to happen over the course of the season. I don’t really need to know yet... Doesn’t that make her harder to play? It’s challenging. She’s such a blank slate. But when she hears a woman being hurt, her first instinct isn’t ‘Meh’ it’s ‘Oh god, I have to do something!’ That’s the first clue in my book that she is a good person, deep down. If she wasn’t in her past, she is now – as a blank slate she is a good human being. But she just happens to have these reflexes. She doesn’t want to hurt people, but she has no other…

Created by: Craig Sweeny, Bradley Cooper, Marc Webb Starring: Jake McDorman, Jennifer Carpenter, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Hill Harper (CBS) 22 September Limitless the series is one of the more unlikely film-to-TV transitions, if only because the 2011 Bradley Cooper movie of the same name felt so self-contained. But Cooper, producer Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man) and writer/producer Craig Sweeny obviously maxed their brainpower when imagining the show’s potential. “It’s not quite right to call it a sequel or remake,” Sweeny clarifies. “It’s a hybrid of all of those things.” “What was appealing about Limitless,” Sweeny says, “was that the McGuffin that drives the series, the drug NZT – a pill that can by definition be given to anybody – suggested a structure that we all really liked a lot. We’re…

Created by: Todd Harthan Starring: Morris Chestnut, Jaina Lee Ortiz, Gabrielle Dennis, Clancy Brown (Fox) Autumn If you like your crime shows to err on the brighter side of life, Rosewood is here to help. Starring Morris Chestnut (Boyz N The Hood, Ladder 49), the series follows his private pathologist Dr Beaumont Rosewood Jr, who helps the authorities solve crimes in sunny Miami, Florida. “I want our show to be fun and light,” says Chestnut, whose smooth operator is thrown for a loop when he meets hard-nosed, by-the-book Detective Villa (Jaina Lee Ortiz). “She has a brain that works as fast as his does,” reveals exec producer Todd Harthan, promising that the pair’s combustive relationship fuels a show that’s “lightning fast”. With its sun-soaked locations giving Chestnut more than a…

BLOODY SCOTLAND Stirling (September) A weekend of masterclasses, panel discussions, Q&As and events (pitching! politics! football!) centred on writers based in and inspired by Scotland. bloodyscotland.com SHETLAND NOIR Lerwick (November) Programmed by Ann Cleeves, the inaugural event will combine panels, readings and book launches with a tour of the locations from Shetland. shetlandnoir.com CRIMEFEST Bristol (May) The international event welcomes writers from around the world, casual readers and genre obsessives alike to its interviews, panels and annual awards gala. crimefest.com NORDICANA London (June) Interviews, sneak-peeks and signings with a strong Nordic flavour. Recent attendees included The Killing’s Sofie Gråbøl andThe Bridgestar Sofia Helin. nordicnoir.tv THEAKSTONS OLD PECULIER CRIME WRITING FESTIVAL Harrogate (July) The starriest of the festivals is held at…

ADAM ROTHENBERG Meet bad boy Captain Homer Jackson, Pinkerton agent-turned-police doctor. Is it fun to play a drinker and a gambler? It’s a blast. Homer reads like a pastiche of every little boy’s fantasy: he’s a cowboy, a womaniser, a gambler, a sharpshooter. It’s fun to play because the ballast of Homer is he’s actually not these things at all! You know somewhere he’s weighted by a code, and by a deep love which is from Susan. They have a different relationship now, though? It had to happen. By the end of Series 1 they ostensibly had it all sorted out – which is great for them, but boring as hell for anyone tuning in! Susan became a business woman, she became empowered. But Jackson is someone who feels most…

What’s the very first crime novel you ever remember reading? The first crime novel would probably have been Shaft by Ernest Tidyman. I was about 12 when the film came out. I was obsessed with the theme tune but was way too young to see the film. So I bought the paperback. That was what I’d do back then - buy the books of films they wouldn’t let me see! So my second crime novel might have been The Godfather. What’s your favourite crime novel ever and why? Favourite crime novel is tough, really tough. Ruth Rendell’s Live Flesh was great, and spurred me on when I was starting out as a crime writer. James Ellroy’s White Jazz got me thinking more expansively about crime fiction. But Robert Louis Stevenson’s…

SERIES ONE EPISODE ONE: A STUDY IN PINK Sherlock Holmes and John Watson’s first meeting had, surprisingly, seldom been adapted on screen until this near-wholesale version from Steven Moffat based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s chronologically first Holmes novel, A Study In Scarlet. The novel’s sprawling, outlandish revenge plot about a murderous cabal of Mormons is largely excised in favour of a bleak London-centric murder mystery, in which a sadistic cabbie lures his victims into voluntary suicide. Steven Moffat is masterfully economical in his introductions of our two heroes and the reasons why they need one another, painting John as a lonely, damaged war veteran and Sherlock as a deranged genius in need of a stabilising force. There’s a substantial number of seeds planted for future payoffs – the first mention…

Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock) Perfect. The BBC entirely modernises the premise without losing any of the spirit, and the onscreen text effects are a wonderful hook for Holmes’s analytical abilities, making it an inner Google to the original hero’s inner library. Cumberbatch dances a knife-edge between utterly relatable and utterly alienating, with his frantic, arrogant, flawed, condescending, distractible hero; and his relationship with Watson, by turns warm (or as warm as the unfeeling detective gets) and caring, violently tempestuous and breathtakingly dismissive, is among the richest and most intense on television. I don’t mind saying I got a little teary during the best man’s speech in ‘The Sign of Three’. BONUS: Benedict Cumberbatch is so beautiful I want to weep. You could cut glass with those cheekbones. Sherlock Holmes (A Study…

TOM BARNABY MIDSOMER MURDERS Old-fashioned (but not as old as Marple) and good-humoured (though not as humorous as Poirot), DCI Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) is that rarest of detectives – honest and disarmingly ‘normal’. Unlike many of his gritty TV contemporaries, Barnaby is the opposite of a tortured soul, solving crimes in the English countryside without even a whiff of malaise. Over 14 years, he cracked 185 murder cases, plus 10 suicides and 12 accidental deaths, all with the geniality of an English gent who’s looking forward to a cup of tea at the end of the day. “Barnaby has always been a very down-the-line career cop,” sums up Nettles. RAYLAN GIVENS JUSTIFIED Whether chewing out vitriol or simmering beneath his Stetson, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is everything you’d expect…

4 MARCH 1948 Lee Earle Ellroy is born in Los Angeles to nurse Geneva ‘Jean’ Hilliker and accountant Armand Ellroy. When his parents divorce, James moves to El Monte. 22 JUNE 1958 The body of Jean Hilliker is discovered on a Sunday morning, dumped near a high-school playing ground. She’d been raped and strangled. 1981 After a misspent youth, Ellroy publishes his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, written between stints of golf caddying. He caddies for years to come. JANUARY 1988 The first movie adaptation of one of Ellroy’s books (1984’s Blood On The Moon), Cop, starring James Woods as Lloyd Hopkins, is released to lukewarm reviews. 23 MARCH 1998 LA Confidential, the hit movie based on Ellroy’s 1990 novel, wins two of the nine Academy Awards it was nominated for.…

Next to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have hitherto been rather neglected by British film and TV makers. There was the ’80s ITV series co-starring James Warwick and Francesca Annis and the 2006 episode of Marple (‘By the Pricking of My Thumbs’) in which they were played by Anthony Andrews and Greta Scacchi but, overall, Agatha Christie’s married sleuths have strangely failed to catch on at home. It’s a curiosity capitalised on in France, where their exploits have spawned a trio of sprightly capers starring André Dussollier and Catherine Frot as the more Gallic-sounding Prudence and Bélisaire. This new BBC adaptation therefore appears both overdue and ideally placed to reclaim a duo whose lovingly combative interplay, on the page at least, recalls the sparkling Golden Age…

It’s essential to clear your schedule before starting The Jinx. From the opening title sequence onwards, you’ll be consumed by it, compelled to hit play on the next episode and the next and the next, until you finally reach a concluding sequence so tense, mesmerising and surprising it’ll make you want to start the series all over again. Indeed The Jinx is so satisfyingly shot, edited and scored, and with a resolution so sweet, it’s a loop that could technically last forever. If the high concept sounds strange – wealthy property developer turned cold-case murder suspect asks documentarian to record a series of interviews allowing him to put across ‘his side of the story’ (against the advice of his very expensive team of lawyers) – then you haven’t yet met…

Think you know what to expect from Nordic noir? Jordskott may make you think again. True, it starts off like standard police procedural: a child has vanished, probably abducted, and the case reminds police investigator Eva Thörnblad, returning to her home town, of the disappearance of her own daughter seven years earlier. But already the setting hints at something different: not the usual urban mean streets but a small rural community hidden deep in the vast expanses of the Swedish forests. From straight crime-drama Jordskott rapidly starts mutating into something altogether stranger, bringing in elements of fantasy, folklore, legend and even horror. As it progresses, the 10-part Swedish series grows ever more bizarre and unsettling. Characters who at first seemed trustworthy shift their loyalties until we’re no longer sure who,…

Available for the first time on DVD in the UK, Maelstrom is a six-part mystery set amid the Norwegian fjords, though it would be a stretch to claim it as early Nordic noir. Created by TV writer Michael J Bird, this 1985 series was the last of his escapist BBC dramas in exotic locations. It begins in London with Catherine Durrell (Tusse Silberg) learning of a surprise inheritance – two isolated properties and a fish-processing factory! – from a Norwegian industrialist who died in a boating accident. Although she had never heard of Hjalmar Jordahl before being named in his will, Catherine receives an unexpectedly warm welcome in Alesund from his daughters, Ingrid (Edita Brychta) and the slyly accommodating Anna Marie (Susan Gilmore). But the bequest takes a sinister turn…

The pitch-black, no-holds-barred humour of writer Paul Abbott (Shameless, State of Play) pervades No Offence, an eight-part drama set in and around a Manchester copshop where most of the detective squad – or at least the only ones that seem to get anything done – are female. Heading up the team, effortlessly stealing every scene she’s in, is Joanna Scanlan as DS Vivienne Deering, outspoken, gloriously foul-mouthed and no respecter of anybody, even if (or especially if ) they’re senior to her. Less than impressed by a bunch of colleagues, she comments, “They couldn’t find a clit without a search engine”, which pretty much sets the tone for the dialogue. The tone for the action is set even earlier, indeed in the very opening sequence, when DC Dinah Kowalska (Elaine…

When the BBC axed Ripper Street after two series, fans of the 19th Century-set detective show were dismayed. Thankfully, Amazon swooped in to cover the costs, enabling a third series (and now-shooting announced fourth and fifth) to be produced. Whether the brush with death has given creator Richard Warlow a sense of nothing-to-lose bravado or the shift to a streaming audience has encouraged a change in the way the series tells its stories, this is a bolder, bloodier and more complex Ripper Street than seen previously. Picking up four years on, we join stuffy yet stoic Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), pugnacious second-in-command Drake (Jerome Flynn) and louche American protoforensics man Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) as their world is changed forever. The first episode features a spectacular train crash as an armed…