Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival by Roger Corke

 

I reckoned it was time for my first visit to one of Europe’s biggest crime-writing festivals, held every July in Harrogate. It was only a few weeks until my debut crime thriller, Deadly Protocol, was published. Time to put myself about, meet old friends, make new contacts and drink a few pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier beer – after all, the brewery does sponsor the event.

 What I didn’t count on was asking the former director of the FBI how often he wakes up at night, wishing he hadn’t taken a fateful decision that many believe gave Donald Trump the keys to the White House. 

James Comey talks to panel
Moderator Imran Mahmood

James Comey – all six-foot-eight of him – had come across The Pond to talk to 500 people sweltering in the festival’s big tent. He was here to publicise his new novel, Westport, and appeared on a panel with four other legally-trained crime authors to discuss the continuing appeal of legal thrillers.

Fellow panellist Harriet Tyce knew her place. She practised for ten years as a barrister before becoming a best-selling author but confessed that her sitting alongside Comey was like “having a burger flipper up with Gordon Ramsey on a panel”

The audience seemed a little overawed as well. You may recall how Comey dropped a bombshell eleven days before Trump won the 2016 presidential election : he opened a new investigation into whether his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had illegally operated a private email account whilst she was America’s Secretary of State.

Many commentators believe that tipped the poll in Trump’s favour and I waited for someone in the tent to ask him the obvious question: how often do you wake up in the middle of the night, wishing you hadn’t re-opened the case, or at least left it another eleven days? No one did, so I stuck my hand.

“It’s a fair question,” he said.

It’s fitting that Comey should be one of the stars at Harrogate because it struck me that this is as much an American-style convention as an English literary festival - and a festival primarily for readers, not authors. And who do the hundreds of readers sweltering in the big tent want to see?

The big names, of course. The big names most certainly didn’t disappoint them this year.

Richard Osman talks with  Ruth Ware

Top of the bill was Richard Osman, who revealed the serendipitous birth of

The Thursday Murder Club.

“I got to 20,000 words,” he told the festival’s programming chair, Ruth Ware. “At that point, I thought I’ve gone so far that it’s more painful to stop.”

And why do we love Joyce, Ibrahim, Ron and Elizabeth so much? Richard said it was because he doesn’t treat them as pensioners. “We’ve got old knees but not old brains. No one is old in their head.”

He’s right. I still think of myself as 21. Ron is always 19, says his creator.

The appeal of psychological thrillers comes less from the characters and more from the situations they find themselves in and four masters of the genre gathered together to talk about it.

They all agreed that the psycho thriller works because you throw ordinary people into extraordinary situations. I asked if they could write a psychological thriller using extraordinary and powerful people – a king, a president, a powerful industrialist. Yes, came back the unanimous answer – as long as you go behind the wall that the rich and powerful set up for themselves and they came up with the perfect example – Succession.

Charlotte Philby with Mick Heron

Slow Horses creator Mick Herron was the big draw in the session entitled
I Spy, where the moderator was none other than Kim Philby’s granddaughter, Charlotte, now a thriller writer.

And he made a surprising admission, for an author whose books have been turned into the most successful spy TV series of recent years: he never wants to write the screenplays for Jackson Lamb and his cast of misfits.

“Think that writing screenplays is a quite different skillset,” he said. “I go inside people’s heads. That’s something you can’t do with a screenplay.”

You might if you used AI. Chat GPT can write whole books these days, can’t it? It’s only a matter of time before it leaves us authors behind, isn’t it? The four authors who came together to discuss From PI to AI – Detection in a Chat GPT World didn’t think so. They all ruled it out using AI to help them in their craft.

Jo Callaghan, who created AI detective AIDE Lock in her sensational debut, In The Blink Of An Eye, said the very nature of how such tools work – by trawling on existing work rather than creating something new – meant that she would never use them.  

Jo Callaghan and Stuart Turton both rule out using AI in their writing.
“It would constrain your thought processes,” Jo said. “You’ll never get anything innovative or creative.” 

Fellow panellist Stuart Turton was blunter. 
“It’s cheating,” he said. “I would never trust it.”

Elly Griffiths with Stig Abell

 Elly Griffiths was the big draw on the final day – and had a big surprise up her sleeve: we may not have heard the last of Dr Ruth Galloway and DCI

Harry Nelson. She’s just published a book of short stories featuring all her most-loved characters, including the unreconstructed detective and everyone’s favourite archaeologist.

“Writing that did make me miss them a bit,” she told moderator Stig Abell. “I’m not ruling out another Ruth and Nelson book.” She got a warm round of applause.

As did James Comey. He answered that question about waking up at night, by the way. No, he’d never lost a wink of sleep, he said. Re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton was the only course of action he could have taken – and that from a man vehemently opposed to everything Trump stands for. And, for what it’s worth, Comey thinks Trump is going to lose. What a story that would be.

Roger Corke is a TV journalist who has travelled the world producing and directing documentaries for flagship current affairs series like the BBC's Panorama, Channel 4's Dispatches and ITV's World in Action and Tonight. That experience was invaluable in writing his first crime thriller and it was a chance conversation with a scientist whilst on a filming trip in America that led him to devise the plot for Deadly Protocol.