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31 BOND STREET by Ellen Horan: The Story Behind the Book
I discovered the idea for this book one Saturday afternoon, years ago, while idly flipping through the bins in a print shop. I found a yellowed newspaper page with an etching of townhouses on a tree-lined street in New York City. At closer look, a crowd was assembled on the cobblestones before one of the homes. The caption said the address was 31 Bond Street and the date was 1857.
The print shop was on Houston Street, just blocks away from Bond Street, which is a short street nestled between Soho and the Bowery. It was puzzling, because I knew of no townhouses on that single block. Not yet trendy or gentrified, there were only warehouses, car parks and the type of business that sells rusting scrap metal. Examining the page further, the story mentioned a crime at 31 Bond Street — a wealthy dentist had been brutally murdered inside his home.
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Meg Gardiner talks Jo Beckett
JO BECKETT:
FIGHTING THROUGH CHAOS IN THE REAL WORLD
I wanted to turn CSI inside out.
Forensic pathology and crime scene investigation can tell us a lot, but often they come up short—the evidence may be inadequate or inconclusive. And while blood spatter, DNA and gunshot wound analysis might tell us how a victim has died, for closure we still need to know why.
So I wanted to write a thriller series set in a messy, uncertain, dangerous world where lab technology can’t solve all problems. Yeah, I wanted to write about the world we actually live in. Read the rest of this entry »
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Daniel Blake on Soul Murder: The Inside Story
PITTSBURGH
Pittsburgh is not a famous city, at least by the standards of the north-eastern United States. I can think of half a dozen bigger places I could have set Soul Murder: New York, Boston, Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia.
Which is, of course, why I chose Pittsburgh.
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Daniel Blake; From one author to another…
Daniel Blake’s 10 favourite writers, in alphabetical order:
Harlan Coben.
In Cobenland, the suburbs are not white and shiny behind their picket fences; they’re dark, scary places where everyone carries secrets, and danger occurs when those secrets collide. The familiarity of the settings and the characters seduce the reader; these are people like you, Coben says, barely pausing to strap you in before starting the rollercoaster. His writing is pacy, vivid and often laugh-out-loud funny, almost physically impelling you to turn the page. Plot twists come thick and fast – Coben puts a rug under your feet with the express intention of pulling it out again when you least expect it – but rarely do they feel contrived or overdone.
Martin Cruz Smith.
The Arkady Renko series tick all the boxes of superior crime fiction. Expert characterisation? Check. Tack-sharp dialogue? Check. Sense of place? Check. Deft prose style? Check. Not since Greene has a writer managed to combine character and thrills so seamlessly. Renko is a man we root for, simple as that. He is moral without being a prig, humble and compassionate without being a saint, smart without being pedantic, loyal without being blind, wryly cynical without being bitter, and optimistic without being gullible. A good man, in other words; one with flaws which make us empathise with him, and with qualities which make us aspire to be him.
Charles Cumming.
The search for the ‘new Le Carre’ is one of the publishing industry’s most perennial exercises, and there’s no shortage of contenders. Cumming is arguably the frontrunner. His writing is sharp and deft, and he has the confidence to let his characters drive the story rather than throw in otiose plot twists for the sake of it. He also gets better with every book; his most recent, the China-set Typhoon, is his most ambitious and accomplished work yet. The apprentice may one day overtake the master.
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Professor Plum, in the library, with the candlestick: Memorable Deaths in Fiction
Inspired by Soul Murder, guest blogger Adele from Un:Bound takes a look at the most Memorable Deaths in Fiction.
Playing Cluedo as a child I always felt certain people should use certain weapons, I
felt the game lacked verisimilitude otherwise. Professor Plum clearly would have to use the candlestick. Miss Scarlett should use the revolver like any self respecting femme fatale, Mrs Peacock, portrayed on her card as older and wealthy seemed a shoo in for the dagger since poison wasn’t an option, Colonel Mustard as an army sort ought to have the strength to use the rope and so on. I was possibly putting too much thought into the game, but a steady diet of Morse, Poirot, and Miss Marple will do that to a child.
So the trend was set, it matters to me how you kill people. That’s only reasonable though; there should be method to the madness and meaning to be found behind the method. In Soul Murder (Daniel Blake) the victims are burned alive. This is not only grotesque enough to be memorable, but also raises questions for both the detectives and the reader, the most fundamental of which is: why didn’t the killer take Scott Evil’s advice? “Just shoot him now … I’ll go get a gun and we’ll shoot him together …”
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We get up close and personal in an interview with Tom Knox!
Q: Your first thriller, The Genesis Secret, was set around an ancient temple in southern Turkey, and The Marks of Cain takes us to the Pyrenees and the Namibian Desert. Do you travel to these places as part of your research?
A: I try and visit all the locations in my thrillers – I like to think of it as a Tom Knox hallmark. About the only place I didn’t go to see for The Genesis Secret was the Isle of Man (I ran out of time) and Lalesh in Iraq (too dangerous). But everywhere else, from Dublin to Dorset to northern France – to Kurdistan, Istanbul and Tel Aviv – I visited them all.
The same goes for Marks of Cain – I went to (or had already visited) the Basque country, Namibia, Arizona, the Monastery of Tourette, etc.
There is nothing like actually going to a place to get those telling details that make a location come alive. For instance I recently visited an old Khmer Rouge lair in Cambodia for my third book. The house of the Khmer Dictator Pol Pot turned out to be situated right next to a dead lake. None of the guide books told me this (most don’t even mention the house). But a dead lake was perfect for my thriller, and I wouldn’t have known it existed without visiting the locale.
Q: Do you prefer the research or the writing part of the process?
A: The research and the rewriting are by far the most fun. The research is great because – let’s be honest – I get to travel to exotic locations, hopefully nice and sunny when it’s cold and rainy in England! And I am paid to do it – what could be better than that? Also I just like travelling.
Read an extract from Tom’s first novel The Genesis Secret
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Tom Knox reveals the inspiration behind his new novel, ‘The Marks of Cain’
How do you write a blogpost about a thriller? I’ve been thinking about this for a few days. In the end I decided I couldn’t do better than show you the True Story which first inspired The Marks of Cain.
Europe’s Forgotten Untouchables
Sitting in her little house near Tarbes in the Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. For most people this would be easy enough, perhaps even pleasurable. For the forty-something mother-of-three Marie, the truth about her bloodline is tinged with great sadness: she belongs to a strange tribe of supposed cannibals, apparently descended from Saracens. A tribe that has been repressed in Pyrenean France for a thousand years.
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The Ponderings of a Heretic…Part 3
After the - apparently - bloodthirsty nature not only of my last couple of blogs, but also of my recent conversations with friends, I have decided that it is probably in the best interests of my immortal soul to try to avoid talking about torture or execution.
Thus I shall pull on my metaphorical tweed jacket with the natty leather elbow patches that seemed to be the obligatory uniform of my history teachers at school and hopefully impart some of my newly found ‘knowledge’.
The Roman Inquisition [which was officially known as the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition - a mouthful of a name if ever there was one] was one of three inquisitions that ran almost contemporaneously from the late fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The other two were the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions - both of which were run under the authority of their respective monarchs, unlike the Roman Inquisition which was directly controlled by the Vatican.
In S.J. Parris’s novel Heresy it is this Roman Inquisition that the main character Giordano Bruno is trying to escape from after being accused of heresy. Ironically, the Dominican Order that Bruno belongs to were renowned for their anti-heresy stance and many of the inquisitors were taken from their ranks, making Bruno’s views [I am not scientifically gifted but he seems to have been in favour of the Copernican model of the cosmos] even more shocking.
It remains a mystery as to whether these inquisitors were chosen or volunteered [because I couldn't find anything about it on the internet, rather than because it is an actual mystery - I'm sure that there are many enthralling historical books devoted to the topic], and also how they reconciled their faith with the brutal physical and mental suffering that they caused to those accused of heresy.
Lucky I didn’t become a teacher is all I can say; although, if I had then it would probably have made a dent in the league table!
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The Ponderings of a Heretic…Part 2
Thomas continues with series of blogs inspired by this month’s publication of S.J. Parris’ debut Heresy.
Sometimes you read something that just makes you squirm and which you fervently hope never happened to anyone. So it was when early on in S.J. Parris’s Heresy when it is mentioned that one of the Inquisition’s torture techniques is to place a burning poker up the victim’s rectum. Actually, I must admit that this is something that I have heard of before. During a history lesson when my class were learning about the Mediaeval monarchs of England [it's slightly strange how all that I remember of the years of history lessons that I sat through are a few tortures and odd deaths], the teacher informed us of the demise of Edward II.
Read the rest of this entry »
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