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TO A SPECIAL EDITION celebrating a Belgian detective who’s bigger than ever. While David Suchet may have hung up his moustache, Hercule Poirot is back in Sophie Hannah’s novel CLOSED CASKET (Sophie writes for us about this brand new case) and Sir Kenneth Branagh’s taking on the role in a Hollywood movie of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. But we haven’t forgotten the woman who invented Poirot – our fifth edition is also dedicated to the genius of Agatha Christie. Elsewhere in this issue we’ve hung out with DCI BANKS, cross-examined Steven Avery’s lawyer from MAKING A MURDERER and had an encounter with the chilling mafia don from GOMORRAH. Talking of monsters, CRIME SCENE has a new sister magazine – HORRORVILLE. So the team and I have chosen our favourite…

CREATED BY CHRIS BRANCATO, CARLO BERNARD, DOUG MIRO STARRING WAGNER MOURA, BOYD HOLBROOK, PEDRO PASCAL (NETFLIX) SEPTEMBER Netflix has made an impact with its original series including House Of Cards, Bloodline and Narcos, an ambitious drama based on the exploits of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the DEA agents on his trail. While leading man Wagner Moura describes the first season as an epic portrayal of the drugs trade, he says there’s a shift in tone for Season 2. “It’s more focused on the characters and how a guy like Pablo, that we are used to seeing so powerful in the first season, what is the breaking point of a guy like that?” says Moura. “So we’re going to see him in situations that we never saw him in…

CREATED BY DANNY BROCKLEHURST STARRING MYANNA BURING, BEN BATT (BBC) OCTOBER 2016 With Thorne out of the picture for contractual reasons, the BBC’s turned to Mark Billingham’s other detective Helen Weeks for a series with MyAnna Buring. “She’s fantastic,” he says. “I went to the producers early on and said I wanted her. I’ve seen a lot of her performance and it’s astounding – she’s absolutely the centre of the show and mesmerising.” Billingham says writer Danny Brocklehurst has adapted two novels: “In The Dark, which is very urban, and Time Of Death, which is very rural. It’s going make a very interesting four-part series.”…

“I think they are nuts in their own way, a lot of them” I’ve really always been intrigued by homicide detectives and how they do their jobs,” Del Quentin Wilber tells Crime Scene. “I wanted to write a book that peeled back the veil on how they did their work, why they did it and I wrote it in the honest way of what I saw.” A Good Month For Murder: The Inside Story Of A Homicide Squad is a hard-hitting and unvarnished account of the detectives in the suburbs of Prince George’s County, Maryland. “I watched how they did it, and I wrote about what was going on in their heads, and I leave it to the reader to figure out why they do what they do,” says Wilber.…

1. CAPTAIN SAM WYNDHAM BY ABIR MUKHERJEE Former Scotland Yard Detective Sam Wyndham embarks on a journey to Calcutta to take up a post in the local police force. Mukherjee blends historical detail, political unrest and adept characterisation to create a fantastic new series lead. 2. DI MARNIE ROME BY SARAH HILARY A strong and troubled female lead is just one of the elements that make Sarah Hilary’s Marnie Rome series so readable. Faced with the complexities of modern social issues in the capital, her latest, Tastes Like Fear, travels deep into the heart of family networks. 3. ARI THÓR ARASON BY RAGNAR JONASSON Need someone to fill the Wallander-shaped hole in your life? Scandi-princeling Jonasson is right on the money with his Arason series – bleak, dark and beautiful.…

“I love what they come up with in the fighting scenes, and obviously Jaimie kicks ass” What did you make of Blindspot’s opening scene, where a naked, tattooed amnesiac woman (Jaimie Alexander) climbs out of duffel bag in Times Square? It drew me into the series instantly. To see them shut down Times Square and her climb out of that bag, it was phenomenal, dude. I couldn’t imagine anything like that – they went to Times Square and it was awesome. They had the square locked off for a little bit, but New Yorkers, they’re tough people. We went back to Times Square again during the series and that was awesome because people knew about it. It was nice to see that excitement and that happiness…

“Most crime writers are pretty diligent in getting their facts straight” HISTORICAL FICTION I spent over a year researching this particular case, London in the 19th century and women in the criminal justice system, but then I had to step away from that and come up with my own story. So although a lot of the real aspects of the case are still there – all of the newspaper extracts that I use are real and there are also some quotes from the actual trial – some parts of it are fictional. Part of the reason that one of the main themes of The Unseeing is truth and deception is that I myself struggled with having to move away from the truth to tell a good story. Edmund Fleetwood is…

“I have got one of the best jobs in the world, haven’t I?” says Hilary Strong, who’s surrounded in her office by the works of Agatha Christie. She took over as CEO of the author’s estate four years ago and has almost completed reading the entire body of work. “The biggest challenge is the biggest joy – it’s reading an awful lot of books,” Strong tells Crime Scene of her role at Agatha Christie Ltd. Following her first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, written in 1916 and published four years later, Agatha Christie went on to write more than 100 books over the next 60 years. While acknowledging the influence of characters like Sherlock Holmes (he’s mentioned in Styles), she set the template for…

“Are you going to write another Poirot novel?” a man asked me recently at a party. “Yes, I already have,” I told him. “It’s called Closed Casket . It’s published on 6 September this year.” “No, I mean another one after that,” he said. “Because I’ve got an idea – why don’t you kill off Catchpool halfway through? That would be bold! And unexpected!” Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard is the sidekick I invented for Poirot when I wrote my first Christie continuation novel, The Monogram Murders. Though I love Christie’s Hastings, I decided I couldn’t have him in my story. Hastings is the narrator – the voice and tone – of the novels in which he appears, and I didn’t want to risk trying to…

SERIES 1 / EPISODE 1 Having arrived in Belfast to review the murder investigation, Stella soon makes a connection with other attacks and presses her boss to link the crimes. Her role in the case draws the attention of the media. One enterprising reporter from the Belfast Chronicle tracks her down to her hotel restaurant for an off-the-record comment. When he persists, you see the steely side of Stella. “Really and truly, you should fuck off now,” she says, while sipping her wine. SERIES 1 / EPISODE 3 Stella has to conduct the first big press conference of the investigation, when she has a minor wardrobe malfunction on the buttons on her blouse. She coolly shrugs it off, though it’s a moment that isn’t forgotten as Spector later describes it…

Crime fiction and drama is defined by a sense of closure: an exploration of a murder ultimately reaches a solution that allows the characters and viewers – to move on. But Rectify, one of the most acclaimed US mysteries of recent years, does things differently. In the first episode, Daniel Holden (Aden Young) leaves jail on a technicality after 19 years on death row for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend, Hanna Dean. As it reaches its fourth and final season, the dreamy, meditative drama has loyal fans hooked but perhaps not holding out for a clear-cut resolution from writer, producer and director Ray McKinnon. His show isn’t a typical whodunit, which may explain why its audience is loyal but small. “The murder mystery, certainly it’s the backdrop…

What is Claire’s role in the story? My character is dealing with the idea of euthanasia, which is quite unique to her storyline. She’s witnessing all this death around her and then someone asks her to take [their life] away. So that’s a big theme that I’m dealing with along with the family dynamic of my parents having been divorced. What are the moral issues behind One Of Us ? Each person has a set of moral guidelines and in this extreme situation they’re tested and pushed, and you’re asked: how would I react? Hopefully, it will be a big talking point for people. How atmospheric was the location? They did a great job making it feel very remote – the locations they found are incredible. Also…

1 THE BLACK ECHO (1992) Connelly’s debut introduces us to Harry Bosch, an LAPD detective with a sceptical outsider’s perspective on authority. The earlier novels tend to be darker and denser than later ones, this one thanks to its subterranean environs. 2 THE LAST COYOTE (1995) The fourth Bosch novel is key to understanding his character: it concerns his investigation of the murder of his own mother, a prostitute strangled when he was a boy. It also shows Connelly’s growing confidence with complex plotting. 3 The Poet (1996) Connelly’s first non-Bosch book introduces the recurring characters of Jack McEvoy (a partly autobiographical journalist, who says “Death is my beat”) and FBI agent Rachel Walling, and details the hunt for a paedophile serial killer. Brutal, powerful, bleak. 4 The Lincoln Lawyer…

“AT ITS HEART A GRITTY URBAN TRAGEDY WITH A PLOT AS TIMELESS AS IT IS GRIPPING” With its ferocious and forbidding second series, Gomorrah stakes its claim to be one of the great TV gangster dramas over the course of 12 cinematic episodes from director Stefano Sollima. Set in Italy, South America and Germany, it has delivered on the anticipation of the Series 1 finale: a bloodbath that made the scruffy estates of Naples feel like the lawless Wild West. The Italian crime drama picks up the story with order being restored by an alliance of drug gangs – headed by pious mummy’s boy and elegant mobster Salvatore Conte (Marco Palvetti) – who have ousted the ruling Savastano family. But this feared and respected Camorra clan still has its true…

This three-part BBC adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent is more murky thriller than traditional period drama. Tony Marchant’s script is a tense and timely portrayal of terrorists being hunted on the streets of Victorian London. The seedy Verloc (Toby Jones) is the titular agent, though far from heroic. Paid by the Russians to act as an undercover informer on political agitators, he’s forced to stage an atrocity that will prompt a crackdown by the British authorities on anarchist exiles in London. As well as being a double agent under Chief Inspector Heat (Stephen Graham, sporting heavy sideburns), Verloc’s trying to conceal his haphazard career in subterfuge from wife Winnie (Vicky McClure). He also falls under the spell of a maniacal extremist known as The Professor (Ian…

Locked Up is a female prison melodrama that, if it were a book, would be the sort of page-turner you’d keep in the bathroom for light reading. A huge hit in its native Spain, where it’s known as Vis a Vis, it’s gritty and grim – about the only thing bright about it are the yellow overalls worn by the women in the gun-metal colours of Cruz del Sur prison. Of course, Orange Is The New Black is the obvious comparison, but Season 1 of this Spanish potboiler sacrifices that show’s dark humour for docu-style realism and cliffhanger intensity. Maggie Civantos plays Macarena Ferreiro, Locked Up’s luckless lead, a former accountant sentenced to seven years after being framed by her wealthy boss/ boyfriend for corporate fraud. Naturally, this middle-class newbie…

The journalist as protagonist in a crime drama is hardly a new concept, so a fresh entry in the “crime-solving hack” genre has to attempt something original. And that is largely what the Danish Dicte: Crime Reporter does. Admittedly it has a familiar female journo heroine with a messy private life, but the series spends a lot of its time (fruitfully) on the central character’s friends and family, and the character of Dicte herself (well played by Iben Hjejle, refreshingly unglamorous) is a fully rounded individual After a traumatic divorce, Dicte Svendsen retires from Copenhagen with her teenage daughter to lick her wounds in their hometown of Aarhus. Her two principal confidants are her drinking buddies Anne (Larke Winther Andersen) and Ida-Marie (Lene Maria Christensen). But she is soon in…

Following the death of her parents in a car accident, author Erica Falck (Claudia Galli) and her policeman husband inherit the parental home in the Swedish coastal town of Fjällbacka, described by their lawyer as “Paradise on Earth” but – as this first series of TV films based on Camilla Läckberg’s novels proves – essentially Sweden’s answer to the county of Midsomer when it comes to murders and dark secrets. It is seldom the speediest of dramas, but Falck’s investigations – a tad more muted than those encountered by that other writer-turned-detective Jessica Fletcher (Murder She Wrote) – are nevertheless big on atmosphere. Not the gloom and darkness of typical Nordic Noir, though; directors Marcus Olsson, Richard Holm and Rickard Petrelius take full advantage of Fjällbacka’s vibrant scenery, using the…

“POIROT IS AS INTUITIVE AND FINICKY AS EVER; CATCHPOOL IS ROUNDED AND RESOURCEFUL” Among that exclusive club of authors reinterpreting literary detectives, perhaps Sophie Hannah has the toughest challenge in attempting Agatha Christie’s geometrically precise plots. In her second Poirot novel commissioned by the Christie estate, she’s pulled it off in some style. The set-up is classic Christie: a country house gathering in County Cork in 1929, during which celebrated author Lady Athelinda Playford spoils dinner with a baffling announcement about her will. The beneficiary is to be her secretary, although he has a fatal illness and would presumably never inherit. Lady Playford, a writer used to orchestrating surprise plot developments, lives for her characters – to the consternation of her sharp-tongued daughter Claudia. Shrimp Seddon is the fictional author’s…

“SHE’S LOST NONE OF HER SKILL IN CREATING A GRIPPING AND ENTERTAINING PAGE-TURNER” “I don’t usually look as rough as this. It’s been a tough week and somebody tried to kill me last night.” So says Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, in the latter quarter of Val McDermid’s 30th novel. It’s a line that tells us a lot about a character and about a book that conclusively proves McDermid has lost none of her skills in creating a gripping and entertaining page-turner, which is also a genuine contemplation about how past actions and events continue to influence who we are today. Out Of Bounds – the fourth DCI Karen Pirie book in a series that also includes The Distant Echo, A Darker Domain…

“A KNOCKOUT THRILLER AS TENSE, SMART AND STYLISH AS HIS BEST BOOKS” For the 21st Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child has gone back two decades for a prequel featuring his hero as a serving major in the US Military Police, not yet the mysterious drifter and guardian angel of the rest of the bestselling series. All change? Not really – it’s a younger version of the same blank slate character, a tough, tall military man with a talent for street fighting (“he enjoyed it”), highly quotable dialogue and travelling light. It might be a different world in which analysts are still adjusting to the post-Cold War uncertainty, but it’s business as usual for Lee Child. Night School is a knockout thriller that’s as tense, smart and stylish as his best…

“THIS IS CLEEVES ON NONPAREIL FORM; EVEN THE IMPOSING LENGTH IS FULLY JUSTIFIED” Ann Cleeves may be at the top of the crime writing tree with two highly successful series to her credit, but this eminent position comes with a challenge. Can she maintain the high standards that both the Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez novel sequences have demonstrated so far? Cold Earth is her 30th book, and it’s an outing for the complicated detective Perez. A typically bruising winter has Shetland in its hold and heavy rain causes a landslide; at an old friend’s burial, Jimmy watches the displaced earth destroy a croft house. The house was considered to be empty, but Jimmy discovers a body – that of a woman wearing a red silk dress. Jimmy becomes convinced…

“CHARACTERS’ MOTIVATIONS HAVE THE (OFTEN FRIGHTENING) LOGIC OF PATHOLOGY” If pop culture is to be trusted, the crime in Boston, Massachusetts, runs deeper than the River Charles. From Dennis Lehane’s guilt-soaked street sagas, via the symbiotic cops and robbers of The Departed, to the abuse suffered by poor Will Hunting and the silenced Spotlight masses – Bostonians seem to be coping with, or concealing, historic violence. “If my bones are Chicago, my blood is Boston,” says Harvey, an Emmy- and Oscar-nominated journalist and author (The Chicago Way), who knows Faulkner, Poe and Camus as surely as the downtrodden district of Brighton where he grew up. And there’s more than a little autobiography to Harvey’s protagonist, Kevin Pearce, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter returning to his home turf years after his grandmother’s…

“INGENIOUSLY, IT IN EFFECT OFFERS TWO WHODUNITS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE” Anthony Horowitz, it’s well known, has a talent for literary pastiche. He’s so far given us two Sherlock Holmes novels (The House of Silk, Moriarty) and a James Bond (Trigger Mortis). So it should be little surprise to learn that he had an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery lined up. But what might not have been anticipated is just how ingenious the result would be. Magpie Murders in effect offers two whodunits for the price of one via a playful excursion into post-modernist metafiction. The first half takes us straight into classic Christie territory. Not that Horowitz sets out to ape the Queen of Crime’s writing style, but the plot bears all her hallmarks. The setting is an idyllically…

“IT’S AT ITS MOST FOCUSED IN SEVERAL ‘FEROCIOUSLY INTENT’ INTERROGATION SCENES” Everyone has an interview shtick, explains Detective Antoinette Conway, the whip-sharp narrator in Tana French’s sixth Dublin Murder Squad novel. That shtick cuts deeper than most in French’s tough, twisting procedural, a 469-page sprawl at its most focused in several “ferociously intent” interrogation scenes. Conway fancies she can smell blood on suspects but these encounters cut many ways: cops and suspects become entangled in a prickly atmosphere of barbed-wire ambiguity, where objective certainty falls behind charged, complex characterisation. Building a multi-stranded milieu, each Squad novel leads with a cop who was peripheral in a previous novel. The centre stage here is taken by the caustic Conway and her partner, Steve Moran. And take it Conway does, with a hunger…

“STORY THREADS SLOWLY BUT SURELY COME TOGETHER IN GRUESOME AND TRAGIC WAYS” Other crime writers might as well give up now. In her new novel, Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir has found the single most terrifying place on earth to be stuck in the middle of a murder mystery: Thridrangar lighthouse. Built in the 1930s to warn ships away from a treacherous outcrop of rock just off the southern coast of Iceland, the lighthouse isn’t much more than a hut, and the rock it’s built on is so small that just one step in the wrong direction could send an unwary visitor hurtling off the edge of a cliff. Accessible only by helicopter when the weather conditions are safe to land, it’s really not the kind of place where you would…

At 92 breathless pages, this fatalistic thriller from confessional novelist Jonathan Ames (Wake Up, Sir!, TV’s Bored To Death) will speed you through a long commute. Roaring to a start with the sort of violence that suggests both hero – and author – have broken bones before, it’s the tale of ex-FBI lone wolf Joe, who specialises in exfiltrating sex-trafficked girls when he’s not contemplating suicide: the only story where he can be sure of the ending. “Joe didn’t want any more fights,” Ames tells us, “because you didn’t win every fight.” But he still finds himself embroiled in the search for a senator’s kidnapped daughter, a mission everyone except the reader will come to regret. What follows contains no glamour (one character’s “cheap grey suit hung on him like…

Confirming the return to form that began with Bad Monkey a couple of years back, Carl Hiaasen’s latest tale of life in Florida is laugh-out-loud funny, violent and, if this is not a contradiction, deeply jaundiced at the state of the world while infused with the sheer joy of life’s absurdities. Once again it stars Andrew Yancy, disgraced cop turned roach patrol restaurant inspector. That it also features a racist reality TV star with a bogus backstory, a dodgy lawyer who’s growing penis-shaped skin-flaps, and a con artist named Merry, whose bikini-line-powered method of ensnaring her victims is far too good to give away, is an indication of how much fun there is to be had here. The plot? It’s more a dizzying collision of plots as Hiaasen seemingly sets…

There are so many psychological thrillers at the moment, it’s hard to pick a winner, but Watching Edie by Camilla Way (HarperCollins) really is outstanding. Expecting a baby and on her own, Edie tries to get rid of long-lost school friend Heather, who has reappeared. That won’t stop the dark secret they share from unravelling, though. Lovers of 1970s pulp will enjoy the latest from Max Allan Collins, Quarry In The Black (4 October, Hard Case Crime). With its hand-painted jacket and a story that sees the hitman Quarry facing tough choices as he guns for a civil rights activist, the book continues a series that Collins first started 40 years ago. You’ll get a deeper sense of the past with A Death At Fountains Abbey (Hodder & Stoughton) by…

AUCTION ROOM, DAY Lovejoy is studying antiques when he’s approached by his Rich Slimy Landlord RICH SLIMY LANDLORD: You’re paying a lot of attention to that innocuous antique that won’t play a large role in the episode, Lovejoy. I just hope you make a lot of money on it because, despite making healthy four-figure profits on dodgy deals every week since 1986, you still owe me four months’ rent, and look, here comes another of your happy customers. [Angry Man Waving A Plate arrives] ANGRY MAN WAVING A PLATE: Lovejoy! You sold me this plate as a priceless Jacobean piece then, after I’d mindlessly paid a handsome sum for it, I turned it over and it has a picture of Charles and Diana. I’m gonna flatten you! LOVEJOY: Look, look,…

Are you enjoying Harrogate? I go to a lot of festivals around the world and the thing that strikes me about Harrogate is, it’s the perfect size, it’s very accessible – I really like the ability to be accessible to my readers. You mentioned a TV version of The October List ... ITV has purchased it, so good luck to the TV people – I’m looking forward to it. I myself enjoy writing books; I’ve never interpreted one of my books or anyone else’s as a theatrical presentation. Was that book an experiment for you? Yeah, it’s a book that goes backwards – it opens with chapter 36 on Sunday evening and then goes backward in time to Friday. I wanted to create a book that had…

“I want to remain an outsider looking in. If I turned insider I’d feel a duty to be kind” Those “how to write a bestseller” books, so often the work of people who’ve never written one, frequently advise authors to “write about what you know.” I grew up in chilly Bridlington on the east coast of Yorkshire. No one ever asked me for the Great Bridlington Novel, so I made the key decision early to choose locations elsewhere. My first book, now republished as Death In Seville, was set in Andalucia and turned into a film. After that I visited the US and Spain again before setting up in Italy for a decade, mostly with the Nic Costa series set in Rome. Then came Copenhagen with The Killing and now…

“I specifically wanted to write something that was not funny” What drew you to write a relentless thriller with no obvious humour? I specifically wanted to write something that wasn’t funny. So much of what I’ve done has been entirely comedic, so I wanted to see if I could do something with a different tonality. How do you find writing violence compared to writing comedy? I had some misgivings about adding violence to the world, but justified it, I guess, by thinking that I’ve enjoyed genre books and violence is a staple of such writing. Not sure which one is easier. The challenge was the same – to write in such a way that the reader is not bored, that you provide enough description for the reader to create pictures…

THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES It’s just so clever. She got so much right from the start, a bit like Conan Doyle got so much right from the start. I suppose it kind of sprang out of nothing – there was Poirot. It was a remarkable leap to the fully formed whodunit. Just her skill at plotting is amazing. Simon Brett THE ABC MURDERS It’s so original and one of the most ingenious whodunits of all time. It’s the sheer cleverness and the fact it’s quintessential Poirot, the twists, the false ending – you think you know who it is and it turns out to be somebody else. It’s very well done – of its kind, it doesn’t get much better than that. Martin Edwards ENDLESS NIGHT You have a…

For all the longevity of TV’s Poirot, the appeal of Miss Marple in her various versions, and the ’70s extravaganza of Murder On The Orient Express, perhaps the single most successful Agatha Christie adaptation was And Then There Were None on BBC One last Christmas. It was beautifully shot, featured a strong ensemble cast (Aidan Turner, Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson) and – most importantly – it was absolutely terrifying. “I was thrilled by how people reacted to it,” Sarah Phelps tells Crime Scene. The screenwriter known for EastEnders and The Casual Vacancy admits that she came to Christie cold. “If I can be honest, I’d never read an Agatha Christie book before I got sent And Then There Were None,” she confesses. “But I thought I knew what Agatha Christie…

You were concerned about the impact in the jury room of the early press conference that the prosecutor gave in the case. In the States free speech is obviously important, but do you think there should be some kind of sub judice rule like we have here? I like the US system of putting the restraints on speakers, who appropriately can be restrained, rather than putting the restraint on the media. In the UK you have a long tradition of things like the Official Secrets Act, where it’s punishable for the press to print an official secret. In the US, we instead look at who provided the official secret to the media – and it’s the speaker who is punished, not the media outlet that happened…

Having just watched 12 disturbing episodes of Italian gangster drama Gomorrah, perhaps Crime Scene can be forgiven for feeling apprehensive about an encounter with Fortunato Cerlino. The actor immersed himself in the role of Don Pietro Savastano, the mobster from Naples who’s the dark heart of Season 2. He’s a man who inspires unwavering loyalty as the head of a Camorra clan, though his distance from power in this series only intensifies the clinical savagery of his command. During our hour-long interview, Cerlino is animated and friendly and seems a decade younger than the brooding mob boss. He even shares a long and funny anecdote about once working as a singing waiter in Harrods, where he entertained diners including Rod Stewart and Luciano Pavarotti. But then Cerlino provides a glimpse…

What role does Bill play in this story? He’s a farmer. It’s a hard life. I just think he’s a man who’s emotionally amputated. There are issues within his family, within his marriage, which become more and more evident. I think he’s just somebody who’s drifted away, but has tremendous strength and tremendous anger, buried rage and pain. How does the plot progress? There’s a double murder and both families are suffering, and then suspicion begins to encircle them. It gets more intense and the stakes get higher, and the suspicion gets more pointed and people start behaving more outrageously because they’re threatened for various reasons. Each of the characters has a bomb of some kind inside them – a secret or an issue or a problem. How important was…

Detective fiction is frequently the playing field of dicks so weathered they might as well cart round the epithet “craggy” on their slumped shoulders. Anthony Horowitz’s seriocomic, London-set buddy crimer attempts the youth-slanted, none-less-Nordic alternative, promising a freshness on which it almost delivers across a seven-episode, three-story opening run. Much of the running comes from its lead duo, who meet in a race and make winning company. Ben Tavassoli does a nice line in exasperation as Rash, a copper turned detective. Sharing the frontline is Mark Strepan’s cheeky charmer Stefan, an investigator at the Serious Fraud Office. A show starring newcomers as British-Iranian/ British-Polish leads already stands out, but Horowitz goes further. This pair aren’t fraught by marital or midlife crises: their concerns range from paying the rent to Stefan’s…

As Season 3 of the BBC’s atmospheric period crime series opens, two years have passed since we last met Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy). He’s now married to the lovely Grace (Annabelle Wallis), living the high life in a plush Warwickshire country house, and they have a little son, Charlie. All seems serene, with the grime and danger of ’20s industrial Birmingham far away. Tommy even promises Grace he’ll go legit from now on. But this being the Shelby clan, things can’t stay tranquil for long. A group of White Russian aristos, looking for help in their struggle against the Soviet government, are offering a fortune in Romanov jewellery. Meanwhile John (Joe Cole), Tommy’s volatile younger brother, resents the Shelbys’ secretary Lizzie Stark (Natasha O’Keeffe) stepping out with one of the…

Debuting on Channel 4 only a few nights prior to the EU Referendum, the arrival of Polish drama The Border could certainly be described as well timed. Not that either the Leave or the Remain camp could have seen it as a ringing endorsement of their position. Set on the border between Poland and Ukraine, it’s an unsentimental look at the grim and sometimes brutal reality of people-trafficking between the two countries. This six-part serial begins with an explosion in a remote mountain hut. A group of border guards are killed. The lone survivor is Captain Wiktor Rebrow (Leszek Lichota), who, despite his partner appearing to have perished in the blast, finds himself under suspicion from the dogged and laser-targeted Iga Dobosz (Aleksandra Poplawska) from the District Prosecutor’s Office. Is…

In Times Square, a duffel bag is left abandoned. But it doesn’t, as you might expect at the beginning of a new crime drama centred on a specialist FBI unit, contain anything so mundane or predictable as a bomb. Instead, a naked woman emerges. But why is she there? Why is she covered in tattoos? And what do the tattoos, which include the name of special agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) written across her back, represent? Suffering from drug-induced amnesia, “Jane Doe” (Jaimie Alexander) herself isn’t much help. The mystery only deepens when Jane reveals the kind of combat skills associated with a Navy SEAL, and her tattoos prove to be a kind of elaborate treasure map offering clues about crimes. If the premise for writer and producer Martin Gero’s…

Plata o plomo – silver or lead. That was the stark choice Pablo Escobar gave those who stood in his way as he rose to become one of the wealthiest criminals in history. The makers of this drama about the notorious Colombian drug lord can’t use bribes or bullets to keep the viewer hooked. With a story as addictive as this one, though, they really don’t need them. Visceral in detail, novelistic in structure and accompanied throughout by a Goodfellas-style voiceover, Narcos juxtaposes the inexorable ascent of the “king of cocaine” with the dogged attempts of two DEA agents to cut him down to size. But it also tells of the other members of Escobar’s Medellin cartel, a mean alliance of hombres who, when not seeking to execute and undermine…

Like her first two psychological thrillers, Under Your Skin and Remember Me This Way, Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me has a first-person narrator. This time, though, it’s a man – and a fairly dislikeable specimen at that. Paul Morris, a once-promising novelist whose career is on the skids, is a habitual liar and a sponger with an inflated sense of his own superiority. When he meets Alice, an attractive but vulnerable woman, he talks his way into her bed – and then into an invitation to her villa on a Greek island. Which is where the strands of a web of guilt start to twine themselves insidiously around him… The writing is taut and compelling, pulling us in. Durrant skilfully establishes character and atmosphere, imperceptibly building up the tension and…

You’ll know from the very first sentence whether you’re going to enjoy Liz Nugent’s new novel. It’s just got one of those openings: “My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.” Immediately, you know what you’re in for: murder, rage, and some truly horrifying characters. There’s no mystery surrounding poor Annie’s death, of course. Instead, Nugent explores what happens next. And though Annie’s murder is pretty grim, it’s nothing compared with the horrors that follow. Narrating duties are split between Lydia, the spoilt wife who helps her husband conceal his crime; Laurence, their coddled son; and Karen, Annie’s sister, whose inability to give up on her missing sibling leads her right to their door. The most interesting of the three, by far, is…

With The Hermit, Nordic Noir takes an unexpected swerve southwards. The debut novel of 42-year-old Danish author Thomas Rydahl, it’s set on the volcanic island of Fuerteventura in the Spanish-owned Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa. In the island’s capital city, Puerto del Rosario, 67-year-old Danish-born Erhard Jorgensen works as a taxi driver. Since he lives some way out of town, in a dilapidated house with only his two goats, Laurel and Hardy, for company, he’s mockingly known around town as “the Hermit”. Then one night on a beach, he comes across a stranded car. And on the back seat in a cardboard box is the body of a three-month-old boy who’s starved to death. The police don’t seem too concerned, but Erhard becomes determined to find out…

From Murder On The Orient Express to The Girl On The Train, the railway journey has been the setting for some memorable crime novels. The latest standalone tale by Blue Murder creator Cath Staincliffe brings together seven strangers on a train and their potential killer: an Islamic extremist with a suspicious rucksack. It’s a disquieting visual reference that deftly taps into our contemporary fears of terrorism. Within a few pages, you’ll feel like a fellow passenger on this perilous 10.35am train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. Having introduced the bomb on board, Staincliffe heightens the tension by taking us into the lives of the hapless targets, including an anxiety-prone jobseeker, a family man at odds with multi-cultural Britain, and the cheery Asian youth in charge of trolley service. As…

Life in Promise Falls, New York State, hasn’t been easy in recent years. As detailed in two previous novels, the already down-at-heel town has been beset by violence. With The Twenty Three, things get even worse when a killer targets the town’s water supply and the local emergency services are utterly overwhelmed as the population start dropping dead. In the hands of another novelist, such events might be portrayed with a grisly attention to detail. But Barclay is first and foremost a humorist and, despite the set-up here, it shows. While he doesn’t exactly skimp on gory detail, this is at root a portrait of a community. And for all that that community is in the midst of carnage, Barclay delights in showing us such characters as a narcissistic former…

Hans Olav Lahlum’s Satellite People was a beguiling homage to Agatha Christie, adding a Nordic twist to classic British crime fiction tropes. Strong characterisation, a focused plot and a growing sense of menace kept the reader guessing until the dénouement. Chameleon People is the fourth murder mystery in the series featuring Inspector Kolbein Kristiansen (known as K2) and Patricia, his wheelchair-bound associate. It maintains the momentum of its predecessors (which also include The Human Flies and The Catalyst Killing) while, inevitably, losing a smidgen of the initial freshness. Nevertheless, the narrative exerts a considerable grip. A young cyclist rings on Inspector Kristiansen’s doorbell; he is being pursued by the detective’s Oslo Police colleagues. In his pocket is a bloody knife, matching the stab wounds of a politician killed nearby. As…

“THEY HAVE TO FACE NOT JUST THE USUAL OBSTACLES, BUT RACISM AND SEGREGATION” Appropriately for book containing so much bleakness, Darktown opens with a light going out. When a car crashes into a streetlamp, it catches the attention of two black police officers and sets off a chain of events that will directly lead to the murder of a mysterious young woman – a murder those officers, Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, will risk their lives to solve. The story takes place in Atlanta in 1948, and the colour of Boggs’ and Smith’s skin is – sadly – significant. The pair don’t just have to overcome the usual obstacles in their search for the truth, but also the horrors of racism and segregation, with the majority of their greatest…

CREATED BY SIMON DONALD STARRING SOFIE GRABOL, DENNIS QUAID, PARMINDER NAGRA (SKY ATLANTIC) WINTER “Bad things come at night,” says a character in the terrifying trailer for Season 2 of Fortitude. Two years after the first series, the big, scary Sky thriller created by Simon Donald is back, and there’s a shake-up for the ensemble cast. Dennis Quaid (D.O.A., Traffic) is on board for the snowbound series set in a town in the Arctic wilderness, with new cast members Parminder Nagra, Michelle Fairley and Robert Sheehan. The good news: Sofie Grabol (Sarah Lund in The Killing) is back as the small town is hit by another murder. Prepared to be chilled this winter……

Was there a lot of pressure writing the follow-up to I Let You Go ? The pressure was enormous. No one was saying “You must write a better book,” but it was very obvious I needed to do that. I had a bit of a false start with a story I realised just wasn’t going to be strong enough. You were a police officer. Did that help with authenticity? I feel authenticity is something I really notice when I’m reading books, and so I suppose a priority for my books is that I wanted people to really immerse themselves in them and feel as though they absolutely could have happened. Did you have to do much research? With I See You, I had to do quite a…

MARTHA’S MURDER Fay [Ripley] was announced as going to Cold Feet. Then we had the idea of killing Martha [Ripley’s character]. We kept coming back to that because it means you hit the ground running – it’s really clear what the stakes are for Jack and Charlie. And it allows you to introduce the new characters in a really economical way. They are all after the same thing: to find out who killed Martha. CHILD WITNESS Lenora Crichlow will have talked to police advisors about how to handle that scene, but we don’t rehearse the show. James Murray, Perry Fitzpatrick and Lenora all started on the same day. They spent a week with our advisor, learned how to arrest people, the caution; they did some physical stuff and improvisation. It’s…

“I really like the writers who don’t do the same thing over and over again” What’s the very first crime novel you ever remember reading? James M. Cain was a huge influence. I took Mildred Pierce on a 24-hour bus ride to my first job interview. It doesn’t have a murder and the crime is really secondary to the story of maternal love gone wrong, but it is a very dark book. What’s your favourite crime novel ever and why? I could say Lolita, which is my favourite novel. The best literary writers respect crime fiction. Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels show her to be extremely respectful of the crime novel, while enlarging it and playing with it. Who has been your greatest role model? I really like the writers…

DID YOU LIKE PLAYING HASTINGS? Yes, it was very enjoyable. It happened over a period of 25 years, though I had a break in the middle when they were filming books in which Hastings didn’t appear. We really were immersed in Christie over that period. DID THE FINAL SERIES FEEL DIFFERENT? Yes, Hastings is a very different character in “Curtain”, because time had elapsed, Bella his wife had died, and his relationship with his daughter was quite difficult, so he was a more serious and troubled figure. HOW WAS IT WORKING WITH DAVID SUCHET? I don’t think I ever heard him drop a line. The summing-up scenes at the end of the episodes, very often they’d be a 20-page monologue. He set an amazing standard. We had a very good…

“What is it about violent death that so appeals to us?” Where would we be without murder? It’s said that in America, children have witnessed 8,000 murders on television before they leave elementary school. Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve killed in books and on TV: Foyle’s War, Poirot, New Blood, Midsomer Murders and so on. People often joke that nobody in their right mind would want to live in Midsomer, given the high mortality rate – but even the London-based soaps are crammed with violent deaths. We’ve had 23 of them in EastEnders alone. Great literature too – from Macbeth to Crime And Punishment – has used murder as a pivot. It’s often said that Edgar Allan Poe created the first detective novel with The…

How involved are you in the TV series? They send me the scripts and see if I have any thoughts. It’s usually small things like “Banks wouldn’t say this, he wouldn’t do this,” and quite often they will change it. Sometimes I wish the third series they did based on the novels hadn’t happened, because I don’t think they did a particularly good adaptation job. They’re doing a decent job of writing their own stories. What didn’t work with those adaptations? Well, they were difficult books to adapt. Wednesday’s Child was unrecognisable from the original, which may have been because the story was a little dated. The strangest was Piece Of My Heart, because that was about a murder at a 1969 rock concert along with a present-day case. But…

What do you feel now about the EDTA evidence and the strength of it? It was utterly without peer review at the time; there was no established protocol, let alone work that had been validated by outside researchers. I think had there been a more rigorous judicial gate-keeping role for expert opinion testimony in Wisconsin at the time, this evidence probably would not have been allowed. Basically our standard of admissibility at the time was just relevance. Four years after this trial, the Wisconsin legislature changed that and strengthened the judicial gate-keeping role on such evidence. But at the time almost anything could come in as putative expert opinion. Is that a strong point for the appeal? No, it failed on appeal because that was the standard of admissibility at…

How’s filming in Peebles? It’s a very picturesque, very quaint town in the Scottish Borders that’s quite a tourist hot spot if you’re over 70. It was just gorgeous to wake up to every morning – you’d look out your window at rolling hills and a lovely river running through. How was it filming the storm scene? For the entire shoot that night, eight hours or so, we were just wet the whole time. It was November, 2am, ridiculously cold. It served the scene really well. It’s one of the very rare times when I felt I earned the money. What do you make of your character? He was interesting to play in that he’s sort of a perfect storm of a lot of things that have happened to him…

“It’s a tough time to be a cop and I hate to say it, but that only bodes well for us,” he tells Crime Scene. “If it was an easy time to be a cop, why would we make a show about that?” The publisher imposes a strict deadline. At 8.15am Pacific Time, Crime Scene’s call to Los Angeles with Michael Connelly has to be finished. That’s because the writer has to head off for a production meeting about Season 3 of Bosch, the Amazon Prime series based on Connelly’s novels following the work of an obsessive LAPD murder detective. Considering that many production companies are suspicious of novelists taking even the slightest interest in adaptations, worried that writers can get too precious about deviations from the source material, Connelly’s…

 The benefit is a relatively small one. Only two hundred or so people and it’s not a formal sit-down dinner, but a simple cocktail hour with a rotating array of hors d’oeuvres, all chosen to reflect in some way the enchanted forest theme of the party: wild mushroom ragout, spring pea purée on crostini, diver scallops with foie gras butter, bison tartare. Manhattan socialite Zoe Whittaker has spent five years hiding her true identity, but tonight her past will collide with her present… My mouth waters, but my stomach flips in nervous protest. “Simply stunning, darling.” Henry, my husband, hovers next to the three-piece orchestra, a flute of champagne in each hand. He hands one to me and gives me one of his rare but dazzling smiles. Proud. At this…

High midsummer in Lyon, the Fête de la Musique, and pretty young Léa Morel (Camille Razat) goes out to celebrate her 17th birthday with her friends. When she doesn’t come home, her parents start to worry, then to panic. Soon Commandant Molina (François-Xavier Demaison), a Paris cop newly transferred to Lyon, is on the case. But the more he investigates this seemingly normal family, the more guilty secrets emerge… This highly popular French series (Disparue) doesn’t skirt the clichés. Léa’s father Julien (Pierre-François Martin-Laval) is a short-fused hothead who blunders into every conceivable danger. Molina is brusque, emotionally blocked, tussling with the fallout of a failed marriage. At one point he stares at the evidence board and mutters, “I feel we’re missing something” (a line so corny it’s even shown…

In the crush of British TV crime shows, there is a danger of some really interesting material getting lost. For a time, it looked as if this gritty, idiosyncratic northern-set series from the ’90s would only be appreciated by a small coterie (mostly those who discovered it on its first run), but the reputation of Liverpool 1 grew, and it has now been given a DVD release. The central character is DC Isobel de Pauli (Samantha Janus), recently transferred from the Met to work in Liverpool CID. Her colleague Mark Callaghan (Mark Womack) has useful connections in the city’s criminal underworld. With its plot lines involving a variety of edgy issues, from paedophilia to drugs and murder, the series cleverly balances its persuasive performances (Janus and Womack both exemplary) with…

Can a twist save a series? The question pops to mind on viewing Harlan Coben’s 10-part thriller, which sets up a heart-rending mystery and delivers a mostly satisfying finale but stretches plausibility and patience in between. After Thirteen and The Disappearance, Coben and co-writer Danny Brocklehurst offer another lost-child mystery, with twists. In the mid-’90s, four friends are in the woods with a five-year-old, Jesse, who they send home for being annoying. When Jesse disappears, his family are shattered; then, 20 years on, his DNA is found at a crime scene. His guilt-wracked friends – cop, social worker, lawyer, doctor – swiftly re-investigate Jesse’s mystery, which seems to involve prostitution, human captivity, sleazy record producers… Except it doesn’t, since many plot strands are red herrings and others strain belief. Cops…

The casting of Ashley Jensen as M.C. Beaton’s prickly PR-turned-detective caused many fans of the Agatha Raisin books to swear they would never watch the TV adaptation. But if they stuck to their guns, they missed out. Yes, the series smooths away Agatha’s rougher edges, but Jensen’s comedic charm proves irresistible as she throws herself into the path of one small town murderer after another. The mysteries themselves are well plotted, though the nature of the show means you can generally spot the killer by looking at which new characters have been introduced in each episode. And some of the crimes are pretty absurd – there is some competition, but the season’s silliest death involves an amateur gardener who gets buried headfirst in an ornamental plant pot. It’s not exactly…

With Romanzo Criminale and Gomorrah, director Stefano Sollima crafted top-drawer TV from blistering crime movies. With SUBURRA he reverses the process. Part gangster epic, part Netflix pilot, it sets a heady sprawl of sleazy politicians, pimps, gangsters, junkies and mad dogs on a backdrop of fiscal, religious and meteorological upheavals, then makes it all lock together with sheer force of style. Luxurious scoring (by M83) and lashing rainfall maximise the sumptuously doomy atmospherics. For a starrier, sillier take on monetary crime, try the thriller-comedy MONEY MONSTER (out 3 October), where director Jodie Foster draws satiricapital from post-credit-crunch pique. Foster struggles to square comedy with the rage of a man whose stock tip flopped. But she gets watchable turns from Jack O’Connell as a blue-collar time bomb and George Clooney as…

When Megan Abbott watched a viral video showing Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman’s parents’ intense and expressive reactions to their daughter’s qualifying routine, inspiration struck. What would it be like to live in that world, so invested in your daughter’s hobby that you twist and grimace in your seat at every small move she makes? Just how far would a similar family go to see their child become an Olympian? From that seed grew You Will Know Me, a book that will bring out your own inner obsessive, as you abandon all responsibilities, shifting in your seat at every plot turn until you land on the last page, exhilarated and exhausted in equal measures. The novel is told almost entirely from the perspective of Katie, mother of gifted gymnast Devon, as…

The Axeman’s Jazz, a historical novel featuring music and the mob in New Orleans in 1919, was one of the best debuts of recent years. The follow-up, which takes place almost a decade later and shifts the action to Chicago, is even better. Once again, Ray Celestin has drawn real-life characters into his audacious fictional narrative: Louis Armstrong is back, and the author also has the confidence to portray the erratic, cocaine-addled Al Capone in this sequel. At almost 500 pages, the book gives supporting characters room to shine alongside the protagonists. Pinkerton detectives Michael Talbot and Ida Davis, both hugely likeable heroes from the first novel, are investigating the mystery of a missing heiress and agonising over an off-the-books bonus that would change their lives. Celestin also introduces a…

With the average Haringey studio flat now costing as much as the renewal of Trident, meaning that no-one can afford a house until nana carks it, it’s a miracle that nobody has yet started a service to off elderly relatives. Parentokil, say, or Gran-Dead. The children’s author protagonist of The Eskimo Solution imagines Louis – the anti-hero of his first crime novel, presented as a book-within-a-book – doing just that, surreptitiously murdering the parents of people struggling for money like a psychopathic Secret Santa. The problem is, distracted from his Normandy writing retreat by elderly neighbours, friends in trouble and his girlfriend’s Lolita-like daughter, his life and fiction become blurred at the seams. So economical, fast-paced and fleeting as to be almost dream-like, this latest in a series of translations…

Between its latex masks, Google glasses, Kafka impersonators and “Pokertox” references (botox for poker players), John Dufresne’s second Wylie “Coyote” Melville novel taps keenly into ideas of perception and deception. Set amid a city of glittering distractions, in this largely Vegas-based follow-up to 2013’s No Regrets Coyote equips Dufresne’s appetite for digressive prose with purpose: every plot tributary, vivid detail and colourful support character gets vigorously integrated into his surreal, scathing snapshot of a nation’s self-deceit. He’s got the perfect lead for this in Wylie, a scathing, sharp-witted but secretly empathetic South Florida therapist and forensic consultant experienced in teasing out narratives from surface clues. Laying low in Vegas with his magician (sleight of hand – it’s vital here pal Bay after gangster trouble, Wylie has a tough job…

The name Camilla Grebe will be familiar to Scandinavian crime addicts, as the co-author of the Moscow Noir trilogy and the Siri Bergman thrillers. She has now branched out with her first solo project – already a smash in Sweden. It kicks off in gruesome fashion in a wintry Stockholm as the body of a decapitated woman is found at the home of Jesper Orre, controversial CEO of a clothing firm. Orre has vanished, and police have no clues as to the dead woman’s identity. Cut back two months and Emma Bohman, a shop assistant in Orre’s clothing empire who is secretly engaged to her boss, is devastated when he suddenly disappears. As the strands of past and present knit together, three narrators tell the story: the troubled Emma, socially…

Mark Hardie’s debut novel reads like an episode of The Wire set on the Essex coast. At times it can be hard to keep track of exactly what’s going on as the story jumps between characters, plotlines and timeframes. Burned And Broken features sex abuse, murder, police corruption, prostitution and child neglect all within the first few chapters. The two principal characters, DS Frank Pearson and DC Catherine “Cat” Russell, both have all the hallmarks of the classic cop hero in crime fiction. There’s the troubled home life, the familiar problems with authority and a dogged determination to do the right thing. The story is set against the backdrop of a sordid and tired Southend (described as being in “terminal decline”), and some of the characters are equally sordid –…

Already established as a horror author – his novels have beaten Stephen King to claim the genre’s prizes for best novel in 2007 and 2010 – Conrad Williams is demonstrating an equally sure touch with his modern noir series featuring jaded private eye and dedicated boozer Joel Sorrell. The opening book, Dust And Desire, introduced the grieving widower searching for his missing teenage daughter. In this follow-up, Sorrell has a lead on her but – inevitably – it draws him into another grisly serial killer case. The first victim “looks like he shaved on a trampoline with a samurai sword” – an early taste of Sorrell’s scabrous wit. The target of much of this relentlessly vicious humour is former police colleague Ian Mawker, a detective saddled with an unfortunate…

It’s four years since Craig Russell published a novel featuring the wisecracking Canadian private investigator Lennox, whose own particular mean streets are those of damp, decaying 1950s Glasgow – but it’s been well worth the wait. When supposed industrial espionage leads to the death of skilled burglar “Quiet Thomas Quaid”, Lennox – who has generally been working on the right side of the law of late – is set on a course leading to some truly heinous crimes, which, as he admits, can only be dealt with by “someone who is a little bit rotten inside. Someone who can do the right thing in the wrong way.” Russell is a lover of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett; this shows in his own sharply honed prose. He’s never one…

“CHARACTER-DRIVEN, PACY AND GENUINELY CREEPY, WITH AN ARRESTING OPENING” As well as being one of the biggest debuts of 2015 and a Theakston prize winner for novel of the year, Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go impressed seasoned authors with her facility for the killer twist. I See You doesn’t repeat that trick but in some ways it’s a better book: character-driven, pacy and genuinely creepy. Mackintosh has also mastered the arresting opening: harassed commuter Zoe Walker is reading the classifieds section of a London newspaper when she sees her own photo alongside a premium rate phone number. The photograph is blurry and Zoe begins to doubt herself; her family agree that it must be someone else. The phone number and website don’t even work – a prank, perhaps. But…