Your name: Keith B Walters.
Your blog’s name: Keith B Walters : Books and Writers
Blog’s URL http://www.keithbwalters.com
Which types of books do you review? Mainly crime and horror, with a little Sci-Fi thrown in sometimes.
What do you like about crime fiction? The fact that it confronts issues and fears, whilst being such a broad arena for stories of all types, set in all places and featuring some of fiction’s greatest characters.
For anyone starting out, can you recommend 5 essential crime books to read?
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham
- Every Dead Thing by John Connolly
- Drive by James Sallis
- The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.
Do you have 1 or 2 personal favourites? I am continually impressed by John Connolly’s books, and have yet to be disappointed by anything by John Harvey.
New crime fiction author you are most excited by? I’m going to be greedy here and name a few if I may? Luca Veste, Sarah Hilary, SJI Holliday, Rebecca Bradley and James Oswald are all great new kids on the block.
Greatest fictional criminal? I’m going to be cheeky and go for a movie character rather than one in a book here and say John Doe (played by Kevin Spacey) in Se7en, but I guess we’d not have had him had it not been for classic serial killers in modern crime books such as Hannibal Lecter in the Thomas Harris novels.
Greatest fictional detective? I think I’d go with Ian Rankin’s John Rebus here – he pretty much defined Police procedural characters for generations of writers who followed.
Are you on social media? Yes, I’m often lurking on twitter as @keithbwalters (aka ‘The Walking Dad’)
How can authors and publishers encourage you to review their books? There are so many great new books coming along all the time, so I do struggle to keep up as I have a very busy day job and not as much free time as I’d like these days – and when I do get the time, I like to be writing my own things as well. But my interest in writing and author’s work means that I do try to catch up if I’m seeing an author at a talk or an event – I do like attending those as I like to hear about how the author came up with the book and their anecdotes. It’s one of the best and most rewarding things about book reviewing – getting a good overview of the person behind the book via an event, an interview or a guest post for the blog.
How do you like people to contact you? Via my website is fine, or twitter’s also good for me. If I’m stuck in my office it can be later in the evening or the next day before I can respond, but I do try to get back to people and keep in touch as much as time permits.
