Table of contents for Crime Scene UK 0006 in Crime Scene

Well, who else did you expect to see on the cover? Benedict Cumberbatch is set to return in SHERLOCK this New Year’s Day. During the filming of the fourth series, Crime Scene got to go behind the scenes with the fabulous Baker Street boy. Read on for an extensive (and spoiler-free) report featuring the cast and crew, who seem just as giddy about the show’s return as the rest of us. That’s just one of several huge series to invite us on set, including DEATH IN PARADISE, SILENT WITNESS, STAN LEE’S LUCKY MAN, MODUS (the big new Nordic Noir) and NO OFFENCE. This issue, Crime Scene also celebrates 20 years of JONATHAN CREEK, although he’s still got a way to go to match Holmes for longevity. So this month the…

For fans of Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston’s new autobiography, A Life In Parts, provides a revealing insight into how the co-star of family favourite Malcolm In The Middle transformed himself into a crystal meth kingpin. Not to mention how, along with ’Bad creator Vince Gilligan, he inadvertently changed how people actually watch TV. “When Vince told me he was going to take the central character from good to bad, to be honest I wondered whether audiences would go for it,” he writes. “In the end, they didn’t just go for it. They were addicted.” When it first aired in 2008, the show was a critical but not a ratings success, yet interest soon snowballed and it became a major box-set bingeing experience. It’s now one of the most eagerly devoured…

THE REALITY The first few days of a murder are manic and, depending on the role allocated to me, I may finish work after 18 hours, get four hours’ sleep and then do it all again. Interviewing prisoners is always days of work with very late finishes. The reality is 20 minutes of heart-racing, adrenalin-filled action, followed by weeks of paperwork. Mostly, I work on murders and rapes, although the department also deals with kidnaps, blackmail and large-scale, protracted investigations. It can include arresting and interviewing suspects, taking witness statements, travelling the county – or the country – to make enquiries and, of course, months of paperwork. Many of my colleagues have bought my books, some have even read them. I’ve had a great deal of support from work, although…

Who was British fiction’s first great detective? Here’s a clue: lanky bloke, some odd habits but a brilliant deductive reasoner, one with a fondness for making epigrammatic pronouncements and mysterious remarks. Well, as is so often the case in crime fiction, the obvious answer isn’t the correct one. I would claim that the first great detective was Sergeant Cuff, who appeared in Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone (1868), almost two decades before Dr John H Watson first encountered Mr Sherlock Holmes in a lab at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). The Moonstone proved popular but it wasn’t until the advent of Mr. Holmes that detective fiction became recognised as a genre, and one that the public were always going to be clamouring for…

Are you excited about the new series? There are some fabulous murders this year. We’re always trying to challenge ourselves to come up with new and exciting ways to kill people – if that doesn’t seem too macabre. How many episodes have you written? I only wrote the London-based episodes, as we knew that they were going to be quite a challenge. After all these years of having a Brit abroad in the Caribbean, I couldn’t wait to show what it would be like bringing the Caribbean to London. What has been the reaction to your novels featuring DI Richard Poole? Fans of the show are generally thrilled to discover that Richard and Camille [Bordey] get to live on in standalone novels. After all, we’re all used to Agatha Christie…

David Callan, an outcast secret agent, revisits his former department for talks. The ‘Section’ exists to deal with undesirables, people in ‘Red Files’. Its supervisor, Hunter, offers to reinstate Callan but first he must carry out a killing. He mus t do this within one week, without help and without asking why. His target is Rudolf Schneider, a German busines sman with whom he’s already acquainted; Hunter has engineered Callan’s placement in a company in the same office building. Callan suspects Hunter’s offer isn’t genuine and takes a liking to the extrovert German, as they share an interest in war gaming. Nevertheless, he orders an illicit gun from Lonely, an old criminal associate. Meres, a Section operative, keeps watch on Callan. Needing to know why Hunter wants Schneider killed, Callan…

1 KILLING FLOOR (1997) Lee Child arrived with this novel, which introduced mysterious drifter Jack Reacher. The former military cop gets off a Greyhound bus in Georgia and is soon accused of murder. Reacher’s brother is part of the plot of this stylish and essential debut. 2 PERSUADER (2003) The series’ seventh outing is memorable for being written in the first person and featuring a villain even taller and tougher than Reacher. Child’s revenge thriller involves a staged kidnapping which enables Reacher to infiltrate a criminal organisation. 3 THE AFFAIR (2011) Reacher investigates the murder of a soldier’s girlfriend near a Mississippi army base. If you’re a Child fan who’s desperate for Reacher’s backstory, this prequel is set six months before Killing Floor and explains why he left the military.…

Set in 1897, amid Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, Series 4 of Ripper Street is dominated by a familiar storyline from the previous season. ‘Long Susan’ Hart (MyAnna Buring) is in Newgate Prison, awaiting execution for her role in the Leman Street rail disaster. Writer and creator Richard Warlow is surely not about to kill off one his biggest stars right at the start? Ripper Street couldn’t manage without Matthew Macfadyen, either. His character, Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, soon returns from self-imposed exile in a seaside retreat to rejoin the police in Whitechapel, although he’s now serving under the formerly thuggish Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn). The duo’s awkward role reversal has them regularly squabbling over cases that have connections to both. As with Peaky Blinders, part of the pleasure of…

“There are layers of you, aren’t there?” says Julie Walters’ Marie, peering into the face of her comedian husband, Paul Finchley (Robbie Coltrane), in this sharp-edged Channel 4 drama. The crack casting allows those layers and more to be assiduously peeled away during writer Jack Thorne’s forensic, focused drama, based upon the sensationalist scenarios prompted by the police’s Operation Yewtree. Coltrane invests great nuance in Finchley, a much-loved stalwart of British light entertainment who’s accused of rape and sex with a minor. Conveying both threat and comfort-TV cosiness, Coltrane superbly sustains Finchley’s ambiguity, which is artfully framed by Marc Munden’s heightened direction and Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s spooked score. Thorne also scrupulously explores Finchley’s tellingly fraught family crises (aided by controlled work from Walters and Andrea Riseborough), the public/private divide,…

DCI Banks has always been a solid, satisfying procedural, which sees the brooding Yorkshire landscape accentuating the loneliness of the workaholic copper. But the stakes are even higher in this outing, featuring a simmering story arc in which the dogged detective (Stephen Tompkinson) is circling property mogul Steve Richards (Shaun Dooley). Banks, like former ITV mainstay Morse, has no time for spivvy businessmen, especially when they’ve escaped a murder rap. With cases involving teenage suicide, a murder within the Chinese community in Leeds and the inevitable, final showdown between Banks and Richards, the two-part format builds the suspense and keeps you guessing. The direction isn’t flashy, though there are several stylish sequences (including a tense ransom delivery that doesn’t go to plan) and plenty of procedural nitty-gritty, particularly from the…

Acted, directed and scored to the hilt, David Mackenzie’s neowestern heist drama, HELL OR HIGH WATER, bulges with muscle and pedigree. Mackenzie maintains the clout of his British prison movie, Starred Up, as he transfers to Texas for the tale of bank-robbing brothers and the cops tailing them. Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges – channelling Rooster Cogburn – make deeply invested work of Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan’s morally meaty script, which bristles with achingly current themes of poverty, property issues and corrupt banking practices. As doom looms, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis prove just the right men to soundtrack the way to the grimly tense climax. The amoral pleasures mount in DOG EAT DOG (out 2 January), where a customarily un-muzzled Nicolas Cage banks an atypically decent role.…

The Stahlbergs are a rich Oslo family who find their dynasty reduced when three of them are discovered dead at their home. There’s also a fourth dead body, who isn’t a family member, and it’s down to tenacious copper Hanne Wilhelmsen to delve into the Stahlbergs’ troubled past, to identify the mystery corpse and uncover who’s behind the vicious killings. She quickly discovers that there are multiple reasons why various members of the family wanted each other dead. For some time, the Norwegian crime queen’s novels have flown under the radar for many British readers, even confirmed fans of Nordic Noir, but that situation has now been remedied, and her remarkably consistent books are finally enjoying the attention they deserve. Beyond The Truth is one of her most assured outings.…

There’s something immensely likeable about Hauxwell’s private eye, Catherine Berlin, and it’s because of her imperfections rather than despite them. Berlin’s a loner with serious trust issues, a middle-aged heroin addict who’s haunted by the past and wrestles with her own demons. But this flawed yet tough and tenacious woman is free of the cliches that this scenario may suggest; the way she makes massive mistakes (and even more enemies) as she steamrollers her way through cases is all-too-human. This fourth novel in the series sees Berlin hired for a case involving an orphaned public schoolboy that takes her into the Chinese underworld via shady members of the British aristocracy and their ready supply of opium. Hauxwell writes beautifully about her surroundings, plunging us into London’s history-soaked, gentrified Wapping riverside,…

An iconic archetype through much Western fiction, especially crime noir, is the ‘femme fatale’ – the beautiful, mysterious and seductive woman who turns the heroes’ lives upside down. It isn’t an archetype that Scottish author Doug Johnstone, who explores the edges of domestic noir, has used before, but his approach herein is effective and intelligent. The ‘femme’ in question is Maddie Pierce, who steps into the life of jewellery student Finn Sullivan in the departure lounge of Orkney’s airport. “Sometimes life is dramatic,” she tells him, although neither anticipates the horrendous plane crash that follows, leaving seven dead, three — including Finn— injured and Maddie unaccounted for. Johnstone is never an author who wastes time or energy with literary throat-clearing. From the start, it’s clear to the reader, if not…

Missing children are a mainstay of crime fiction, though Fiona Cummins gives that agonising scenario a clever twist in her highly promising debut novel. The nightmarish killer is The Bone Collector, a connoisseur of human skeletons who considers his sinister hobby a family tradition. Stalking victims in South London, he singles out children suffering from conditions which, he imagines, might make good examples for his display case. The prime candidate is a six-year-old boy from Blackheath with a progressive illness known as Stone Man Syndrome, which causes muscles and joints to fuse together to form a second skeleton. Cummins captures the complex emotions between Jakey Frith’s quarrelling parents as they care for their fragile son, whose childish desire to experience life despite the health risks may put him in the…

Lost for nearly half a century, Lawrence Block’s debut crime novel is a bracing blast of early ’60s noir from an author who would go on to become one of the genre’s greats. The Sinner Man in question is Don Barshter, a bored insurance salesman in Connecticut who accidentally kills his wife during a drunken rage. After sitting out the weekend with her body in a cupboard, the remorseless Barshter empties their bank accounts and flees to Buffalo under a new identity, that of Nat Crowley, something as apparently easy as taking a concealed firearm on a plane during the 1960s. Influenced by the gangster movie he skipped work to see on the afternoon of the killing, Barshter/ Crowley also decides on a career change: organised crime. Seeking out trouble…

Anthony Horowtiz, the Foyle’s War creator and Poirot screenwriter, has been confirmed as a guest speaker at CrimeFest, which will take place at Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel on 18-21 May, 2017. In addition to interviews with guest authors, the event will feature dozens of panels and a total of 100 participating writers, including Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Mick Herron, Sarah Hilary and Ragnar Jónasson. Horowitz will discuss his latest novel, Magpie Murders, which is both a homage to Agatha Christie and a playful investigation into crime fiction. “It’s a meditation on why this genre is still so popular,” he tells Crime Scene. “And it’s also about how whodunits work. It’s not only trying to give you the whodunit, but it’s also trying to show you the way that the writer does it.”…

“If we hadn’t made it in Welsh, it would be profoundly different” How did you get involved with a film adaptation of Fflur Dafydd’s bestselling Welsh-language novel, Y Llyfrgell ? Fflur contacted me. She was thinking about turning it into a film, which I was really excited by because she had written something that was very cinematic in the first place. So we were soon trying to work out how to condense her epic, sprawling novel — with its many characters, set across a long timespan — into something as succinct as a movie. In the film, Catrin Stewart plays the twins, Ana and Nan – technically, how difficult was it to shoot that? There’s the technical challenge, especially on a tight budget, of having the same…

“They have never encountered such a horrific murder” Would you be up for a second series? It was originally sold to me as a self-contained, eight-part series. But they said that about Broadchurch. We all worked together, in the knowledge that we were making something out of the ordinary. I had an absolute ball working on Paranoid. So I’d be very happy to do it again. What first drew you to Paranoid ? It’s a real page-turner. When I read it, I didn’t necessarily know which way it would go. It starts off as one thing and becomes something very, very different. It’s very unsettling and I knew it wouldn’t be a common or garden police procedural. It’s going to make people think and want to watch…

Sherlockmania – second only in hysteria and volume to Beatlemania – is gripping the streets of north London. Crime Scene is corralled behind a crowd barrier in the vicinity of Euston Station. Night has fallen and we’re standing alongside thousands of fans, who have journeyed from as far afield as China and Japan. Since before dawn they’ve been lining up along North Gower Street which, as all card-carrying Sherlockians doubtless already know, doubles for Baker Street in BBC One’s global hit drama. We’re getting completely drenched by three massive rain machines, which are pouring down outside number 221B, in preparation for a brief scene outside the house. However, no one’s ardour appears dampened. There’s certainly no lack of enthusiasm when Benedict Cumberbatch, clad in Sherlock’s trademark Belstaff ‘Milford’ coat, magically…

He’s the former magician’s consultant with a talent for solving impossible crimes, a duffle coat as iconic as Sarah Lund’s sweater in The Killing, and a mildly grumpy demeanour that conceals a sharp, logical mind. Jonathan Creek may be a comedy creation, but he’s also one of TV’s greatest detectives. A one-off Christmas special, “Daemons’ Roost”, will mark two decades of Jonathan Creek for its star, Alan Davies, and the series’ creator, David Renwick, who’s sweated over every one of its 32 episodes. “I suppose it’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’ ‘three-pipe problem’, getting as few distractions as possible – that’s the only way I can concentrate,” Renwick explains to Crime Scene. “I then find that I tend to slip further and further out of the chair and that’s when…

David Callan : Former operative in Security, now a clerk. A basically kindly man but with a high degree of skill and security. Good pistol shot and a cunning thief. The clash of the two interests has left him bewildered as a human being. Lower middle-class background. Age 35. Hunter: Head of Security section. Regular army in manner. Hunter’s ruthless and well-mannered. Makes plans like a first-rate staff officer, which in fact he is. Age 50. Schneider: Ex-regular German Army officer, now a gun runner to the Indonesians in Malaysia. Big, bluff, charming, immensely competent. Fond of the good things in life. Age 50. Meres: Public school, Etonian manner. Fascist in outlook. An executioner who loves his job. Mid-twenties. Lonely: Small, nervous crook who suffers badly from B.O. and specialises…

Pathologist Gunilla Urst (Anu Sinisalo) tells Martin Beck (Peter Haber), “A person doesn’t have to be evil just because they do evil things”. That reflects the subtle philosophical maturity that exemplifies the approach of this Swedish detective drama. Packaged for the UK as the second volume of the Beck series, these latest four television films (episodes 31 to 34 in a run stretching back to 1997) provide ample support for the show’s continued success, even if “The Last Day” — in some respects the most predictable of the four — toys with the idea of the titular Martin Beck retiring. The main story arc across these four episodes of Beck is the effective writing-out of the show’s long-term principal sidekick, Gunvald Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt), and the establishment of his successor,…

Originally broadcast by the BBC in 1989 and 1990, the two series of The Justice Game star Denis Lawson as hard-drinking, womanising and successful Glasgow criminal lawyer Dominic Rossi, whose social conscience doesn’t exactly endear him to the city’s major players. Writer John Brown liked to run two stories in parallel, so Series 1 sees the lawyer defending an ex-soldier who’s accused of a vigilante killing, while also getting embroiled in a scam by businessmen who are involved in the city’s regeneration. The plot strands are less well linked in Series 2, which sees Rossi embroiled in another gangland killing that only marginally impinges on the matter of the beautiful Italian woman (Anita Zagaria from Under The Tuscan Sun) with whom he enjoyed a holiday fling. She shows up in…

One can only imagine the amount of spirit-sapping slop that Walter Iuzzolino, curator of the foreign-language TV drama platform Walter Presents, has to drudge through as part of his job. But then chancing across the odd pearl, like The Out-Laws, must make it all seem quite worthwhile. A major hit that guzzled awards in its native Belgium, this bruise-black comedy-cum-murder-mystery boasts one of the most memorable TV monsters ever, in the supremely hateable Jean-Claude Delcorps (Dirk Roofthooft). Described as a “despicable turtle’s fart” (presumably a devastating insult in Belgium), he’s a character so odious that his four sisters-in-law, who are otherwise among the finest, most upstanding people you could ever imagine, want to rub him out. There’s a very appealing sense of naturalism and a lightness of touch to Malin-Sarah…

“IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO THINK OF REBUS WITHOUT A PACKET OF FAGS OR A PINT” Owing to medical advice, former detective John Rebus begins his 21st outing quitting cigarettes and beer. Readers may find it almost impossible to think of him without a packet of fags or a pint of IPA in the Oxford Bar. Yet it’s police investigations which turn out to be the one habit that the officially retired Rebus can’t break. “Someone was murdered here, you know,” he tells his pathologist girlfriend, while they’re dining at Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel. Back in 1978, the adulterous wife of a banker was strangled in Room 316. It was a news story that had everything: the victim’s ‘racy’ lifestyle, her wealthy family and rock star Bruce Collier, who happened to be…

“DESIGNED TO MANOEUVRE BOSCH INTO A SPACE WHERE HIS STORY CAN CONTINUE” Canny, driven and deeply moral, Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch is one of modern crime fiction’s most compelling heroes. Bosch is a man who, during his heyday, hunted serial killers and faced down his venal, foolish senior colleagues with equal aplomb. However, that was a decade ago when Harry was experienced enough to out-think the bad guys yet young enough to chase after them. Today, Bosch, who’s lately been forced to leave the Los Angeles Police Department and is in his 60s, is starting to creak a little. For his creator, it’s posed a problem which is similar to that faced by Ian Rankin with his hero, Rebus: how do you continue to write about a central character who’s old…

“BAUER’S SHORT, SHARP SCENES COMPEL YOU TO KEEP READING…” Belinda Bauer is probably Britain’s most original crime writer. Her debut of 2009, Blacklands, saw a 12-year-old corresponding with a jailed child killer, while 2013’s Rubbernecker had an anatomy student stumbling across a murder amid the dissection room cadavers. Therefore, the expectations were high for The Beautiful Dead but it may initially disappoint: depicting a murderer who strikes in familiar London locations feels like a deliberately commercial move. As a result, Bauer’s seventh novel lacks the atmosphere of her books set in the wilds of Devon. Yet the quality of her writing, the humour she mines from humdrum lives and the detached character insights (“No-one fed his cat” is the stark summary of one victim) means that you can forgive Bauer…

“DCI KATE DANIELS REALLY IS AN OUTSTANDING CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION CHARACTER” The rise in popularity of regional crime fiction has been a welcome development over recent years, but it strikes Crime Scene that very soon there won’t be a site of historical interest in the whole of Britain that hasn’t played host to a (fictional) corpse. Thanks to Mari Hannah’s latest novel, any tour of literary crime scenes will now have to take in Winter’s Gibbet, a real-life gallows that stands as a reminder of a notorious 18th-century murder in the Northumberland village of Elsdon. The sixth novel in Hannah’s series featuring DCI Kate Daniels begins with the discovery of the body of a young man, well known as a champion amateur wrestler, who’s found hanging from the gibbet. This…

While poor writing trips over its own feet and good writing moves nimbly, great writing travels. Newcastle-born Emma Flint has successfully conjured the humid drear of 1960s New York in her heartsick debut novel. The tale of Ruth Malone, a single mother whose two young children go missing, Little Deaths dances back and forth in time, with every moment since Ruth’s first awful realisation of her loss disappearing into an endless, after-shocked now. This is less a whodunit than a howl of outrage at how women are put on trial for what they are, rather than their actions, and Little Deaths is particularly good at getting under Ruth’s itching skin. A brittle, bird-like lady with more admirers than common decency decrees, Ruth wraps herself in self-disgust to “keep the wrong…

Since making her prize-winning debut with Post Mortem in 1991, Cornwell’s 23 novels starring Kay Scarpetta, the brilliant forensic pathologist, have put the writer firmly at the top of the crime fiction tree, with her heroine laying open human malfeasance as unflinchingly as she examines the innards of murder victims. Needless to say, with such a prolific output, Cornwell has made the occasional misstep, and there may be those readers who feel that Chaos finds the author not quite at her most involving. Nevertheless, the ticking clock scenario here maintains a grip. Scarpetta and her partner, Pete Marino, become involved in the case of a dead cyclist – a young woman who has been brutalised with unprecedented savagery. Puzzling calls suggest that Interpol is involved, but Scarpetta suspects a cyber…

“ The hero of the tale is stoned out of his mind for most of the time ” “This doesn’t mean we’re back together” INHERENT VICE (2014) One of the best cult crime movies in recent years is also among the most baffling. Based on a psychedelic detective novel by US author Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice even had its own director suggesting that critics may well dub the film “Incoherent Vice”. But that’s probably to be expected when the hero of the tale is stoned out of his mind for most of the time. Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is not your typical detective. It’s 1970 and the mutton-chopped private eye is working the mean streets of Gordita Beach, Los Angeles, where he is despised as “hippy scum” by the…

1. DISSOLUTION BY C.J. SANSOM The Shardlake series is set during the reign of Henry VIII. When Thomas Cromwell’s Commissioner is found dead, lawyer Matthew Shardlake is sent to investigate. Fascinating historical detail, a gripping plot and believable characters make for a thrilling read. 2. THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ BY RAY CELESTIN A gripping thriller set against the backdrop of jazz-filled, mob-ruled New Orleans in 1919. A serial killer is stalking the city and an unlikely trio set out to catch him: cop Michael Talbot, ex-detective Luca d’Andrea and Ida, a secretary at the Pinkerton Agency. 3. THE STRANGLER VINE BY M.J. CARTER If you’re a fan of Ripper Street, then this pulse-racing novel is for you. You’ll be totally captivated as you accompany Carter’s detective duo on their investigation –…

“ He’s so adept at taking life and also helping people through the grief of losing someone ” What can you tell us about serial killer Paul Spector in the third series of The Fall ? He’s such a complex character, from top to tail, and those complexities get revealed more and more over the three series. In Series 3, particularly, we get an insight into the mind of Spector. Questions are answered about why he is the way he is and the events of his life that have led him to the position that he’s in now. It’s such a treat to get to play someone who’s so layered – even after four years of playing him, I am still finding out more about the character.…

What is the very first crime story you can ever remember reading? It was probably Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, because that’s how people were introduced to the idea of the detective. He’s really good, and to think that he didn’t have predecessors makes him even more worthy of credit. What is your all-time favourite crime novel and why? Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement In Stone is genius from the first to the last sentence. It’s super creepy. I’ve taught it a number of times and people have a love-hate relationship [with it]. They love it because it’s so beautifully plotted and written, but they hate it because of their helplessness. This is the genius of the book – I’ve read it four or five…

How did you enjoy working on this Christie adaptation? Agatha Christie’s stuff is often very plot-driven. This feels slightly different. Sarah [Phelps] has taken onboard the fact that the First World War had finished five years before, what that had done to a recovering England and how that might play out, in a response to what you might call just another death after millions. Why do you think Agatha Christie’s work endures? It’s kind of ingenious and sometimes even absurd the game that is being played with you. But having said that, you know, this one is not like that. That’s what I was expecting to read but it is very unfamiliar territory. Is your solicitor character, John Mayhew, essentially the investigator in The Witness For The Prosecution…

“It was a very exciting time in television,” Edward woodward recalled in 1987, of his casting as David Callan in the TV play “A Magnum For Schneider”, which aired on the ITV network in February 1967. “It really was the first of the anti-heroes, non-heroes, whatever you want to call it, and it really kind of led the way, as Armchair Theatre did many times. The thing that appealed to me about the character was that he had a chip on his shoulder, he was a hero with feet of clay and he was a prickly kind of person. I was very much looking for that kind of character to play: this man went right down the middle, you couldn’t make up your mind what he was… It was quite…

“You could say one of the big models for Reacher would be Sherlock Holmes,” he tells Crime Scene. “He’s very thoughtful, he’s very evidence-based, he is logical in that same way that Sherlock Holmes is logical.” As well as being by far the most successful author in the room, with book sales topping 100 million, Lee Child also tends to be the tallest. At 6ft 4in, he’s just a shade shorter than his literary hero, former US military policeman Jack Reacher, which makes him easy for fans to spot. So when Child ambles into a book launch just off London’s Leicester Square, Crime Scene seizes the moment. This leather jacket-clad, superstar thriller writer is supremely laidback – surprisingly so for an author who’s expected to deliver another bestseller…

This series has always excelled at tension and stealth – those moments where Gillian Anderson’s measured delivery sets the pace or when Jamie Dornan’s stare speaks volumes. So if the third (final?) series of Allan Cubitt’s cop versus killer drama seems to jump the shark so often that it needs water skis, it also succeeds as a sustained mystery and a character piece, one which leaves room for self-interrogation while making palms sweat. Series 2’s climax saw killer Paul Spector (Dornan) shot and being cradled by Anderson’s DSI Stella Gibson while she ignored a wounded colleague (and lover) nearby. Some Fonz-grade shark-jumping follows, as Spector survives, with amnesia blotting his crimes from memory. This can seem like forced plotting or worse, as old murders are revisited for the amnesiac Spector’s…

HBO’s The Night Of was one of the most talked about shows of 2016. Improbably, the series is a US remake of a 2008 BBC drama, Criminal Justice, written by Peter Moffat. The action has been moved to New York City, but it’s heartening to see British breakout star Riz Ahmed (Rogue One, Jason Bourne) in the lead role of Nasir ‘Naz’ Khan, an easygoing student who is suspected of murder. Naz’s fate seems to have been sealed the moment he secretly borrows his father’s taxi for a night on the town. When a young woman, Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black-D’Elia), gets into the cab, he accepts the fare. One thing leads to another and they end up at her Upper West Side brownstone, high on drugs and booze, playing with…

Brothers Harry and Jack Williams have form. Among a good deal else, they’re the writers of The Missing, the first series of which featured an increasingly out-of-control James Nesbitt scouring Northern France, in search of his abducted son. What began as a rational response to grief gradually took on the aspect of a dangerous obsession. Family ties and the passions they can harbour also lie at the heart of the Williams’ latest TV thriller, the four-part, Scottish-set One Of Us, which aired on BBC One. The show starts idyllically: Adam and Grace are childhood sweethearts, growing up as neighbours in the countryside north of Edinburgh. As in a fairytale they marry – we even see clips from their wedding video – and then Grace falls pregnant. But barely a few…

Perhaps the element most often lacking in Nordic Noir is the one that you might reasonably expect: snow. But that isn’t a complaint which can be levelled at Modus, a chilling series that’s set in an irrefutably icy Sweden over the Christmas period. Based on Anne Holt’s novel, this snowbound series boasts a smart and very believable main protagonist, Inger Johanne Vik (Melinda Kinnaman), a psychologist and profiler who’s drawn into an investigation – alongside grieving detective Ingvar Nyman (Henrik Norlén) – that soon feels uncomfortably close to home. During a family wedding at a Stockholm hotel, Vik’s autistic daughter, Stina (Esmeralda Struwe), witnesses the aftermath of the murder of a celebrity chef. Petrified, the child wanders off into the street with the cold-eyed killer in pursuit. But what happens…

Back in 2006, May’s novel Extraordinary People introduced Enzo Macleod, a lion-maned, Italian-Scottish hippy and serial ladykiller who’s also a brilliant forensic scientist and lecturer at a French university. That novel saw Macleod make a drunken bet with a journalist who had published a book about unsolved Gallic murders, vowing to get to the bottom of all of these baffling cases. After five novels, May put the Enzo Macleod novels on the back burner, as he emerged from the publishing mid-list with his hugely successful Lewis Trilogy, which is set in the Outer Hebrides. May now takes us back to France for the sixth and final outing for Macleod, wherein we finally get to discover whether he’ll win that bet — although Enzo’s more worried about tracking down whoever’s trying…

Reeva O’Hara is quite a character – the matriarch of Martina Cole’s 23rd novel is a drunken, unmarried mother who’s about to have to her fifth child, which is scandalous behaviour for 1981. When O’Hara smokes dope during the birth, she could be straight out of a cartoon in Viz. Cole sketches O’Hara’s character with clarity and compassion – her aggressive persona is actually a bit of a front. As O’Hara’s children despair of her antics, eldest son Aiden makes his way in London’s organised crime scene. The first 150 pages fly by as he rises through the ranks, forms a gangland power couple with a former prostitute and recruits his younger brothers. The problem is Aiden, a womanising psychopath, is never as interesting as his mother. In fact, several…

All teenage girls have their secrets, but 15-year-old Milly’s is diabolical. Her mother is a serial killer who’s dubbed the ‘Peter Pan Killer’ by an excited media – the victims were nine small children. Milly turned her mother in to the police herself and, her true identity concealed, has been fostered by an affluent West London family. However, Milly’s new home isn’t quite the safe haven she’d hoped for. The motivation of the father, Mike, a psychotherapist, isn’t as clear-cut as pure altruism, while matriarch Saskia is a booze-addled mess, and their daughter, Phoebe, is a vicious bully, one whose calculated cruelties towards the incomer are brilliantly drawn. As her mother’s trial approaches, Milly attempts to assimilate into her new family and school are hampered by the scarring reality of…

“THIS IS A NOVEL THAT EXERTS A CHILLY GRIP RIGHT FROM THE START” As the old saying goes, ‘just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you’. Christine Steinmeyer is evidently paranoid in the extreme – at least according to her fiancé, her colleagues, the neighbours and the police – but it turns out that she’s got good reason to be. An attractive young woman who is a popular and successful breakfast show presenter at a Toulouse radio station, Steinmeyer heads out to meet her fiancé’s parents on Christmas Eve but discovers an anonymous letter in her mailbox. It’s from a woman who announces that she’s about to commit suicide and accuses Steinmeyer of being the reason why. From there on in, her successful life…

“A MANCHESTER-SET NOIR THAT’S HARD-HITTING AND IMMENSELY READABLE” While many contemporary crime authors aspire to write noir, few manage to capture its bleak essence and dark poetry. With his debut novel, Joseph Knox has achieved something remarkable – a totally modern, Manchester-set noir that’s atmospheric, hard-hitting and immensely readable. Sirens signals the arrival of a major new talent. The novel’s opening page finds disgraced detective Aidan Waits having received a blow to the head and his life about to unravel. It may be a familiar scenario – the compromised cop taking a walk on the wild side – but Sirens is unusual for a British novel, as it possesses literary heft comparable to the US fiction that shines a light on the drug trade. In Knox’s case, it’s an illegal…

“SWANSON EXPLORES HOW FEAR CAN COLOUR A PERSON’S PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD” Kate Priddy is suspicious of everyone. She’s always been the anxious type, and after her abusive former boyfriend left her locked in a cupboard for days, she’s developed a whole new set of phobias. Priddy’s default response to any unfamiliar situation is terror, and who could blame her? But when she finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation, it looks like her tendency to imagine the worst may finally prove useful. Swanson’s latest thriller (his previous bestsellers are The Girl With A Clock For A Heart and The Kind Worth Killing), finds him painting a queasily accurate portrayal of what it’s like to live with anxiety every day. However, Priddy isn’t positioned as a helpless victim,…