CrimeFest 2022: Suspect Everyone: Tight Knit Communities, Small Towns and Locked Rooms

 Friday 13 May 2022
10:10 - 11:00

The Panel are: Rachel Blok, James Delargy, Victoria Dowd,
David Hewson, 
and the participating Moderator is Martin Edwards

Rachael Blok grew up in Durham and studied Literature at Warwick University. She taught English at a London comprehensive and is now a full-time writer.  Her crime series is set in the cathedral city of St Albans where Maarten Jansen struggles against his plain-speaking Dutch upbringing, when faced with the seemingly polite world of the picturesque city. Under the Ice was her first novel published in 2018. She has now written three further books in the series featuring DCI Janson.  The latest is The Fall published 14 April 2022. She lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and children.  

 www.rachaelblok.com

James Delargy was born and raised in Ireland and lived in South Africa, Australia and Scotland, before ending up in semi-rural England where he now lives and calls home. He incorporates his diverse knowledge of towns, cities, landscape and culture picked up on his travels into his writing. His debut thriller 55 set in Australia, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2019.  His second book Vanished was published 15 April 2021.

www.jamesdelargy.com

Victoria Dowd is the award-winning author of the bestselling Smart Woman’s Mystery series. Her debut novel, The Smart Woman’s Guide to Murder, won The People’s Book Prize for fiction 2021 and was named In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel’s Book of the Year 2020. Victoria was awarded the Gothic Fiction prize for her short fiction and her work has been published in many literary journals. She is also the author of the Adapting Agatha series which has seen her speak at The International Agatha Christie Festival. Originally from Yorkshire, she was a criminal defence barrister for many years and is now head of the London Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association. Her latest book is  The Supper Club Murders published 7 September 2021.

https://victoriadowd.com/

David Hewson was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction. His novels have been translated into a wide range of languages.His book  Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996. He writes three series and has also written fifteen stand alone novels.  In all thirty five books. The most recent is The Garden of Angels, published 29 January 2021.

davidhewson.com

Martin Edwards was born 7 July 1955 at Knutsford, Cheshire and educated in Northwich and at Balliol College, Oxford University, taking a first-class honours degree in law. He trained as a solicitor in Leeds and moved to Liverpool on qualifying in 1980. He received the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in UK crime writing, in 2020. He has been described by Otto Penzler as ‘the best living practitioner of the classic detective story’ and by the British Library as ‘the leading expert on classic crime’. He is the author of twenty-one novels, including Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall. His latest book is The Life of Crime, a history of the crime genre, and he also conceived and edited Howdunit, an award-winning masterclass in crime writing by members of the legendary Detection Club. He has received the Edgar, Agatha, and Poirot awards, two H.R.F. Keating awards, two Macavity awards, the CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Prize, the CWA Short Story Dagger, and the CWA Dagger in the Library. He has been nominated for CWA Gold Daggers three times and once for the Historical Dagger; he has also been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize for best crime novel of the year for The Coffin Trail. He has created the Golden Age detection mystery map This Deadly Isle and an online course for crime writers: www. craftingcrime.com  As consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics series, archivist for the CWA and Detection Club, and well-known blogger, he has been responsible for the rediscovery of many long-forgotten Golden Age authors and novels. A former chair of the CWA, he has since 2015 been President of the Detection Club. His novels include the Harry Devlin series (the first of which, All the Lonely People, was nominated for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger) and the Lake District Mysteries. He has published nine non-fiction books and seventy short stories, and edited more than forty anthologies of crime writing which have yielded many award-winning stories.  

www.martinedwardsbooks.com    
www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com