The seventeenth CrimeFest conference, opened on the 15 May 2025.
At the Grand Mercure Hotel in Bristol.
The conference was spread over 4 days and there were 60 panels
included several interviews.
For those of you who were unable to attend this year, several
Mystery People members have contributed short write-ups on one or two of the events and panels that they particularly enjoyed.
Friday 16:00-16:50
Roger Corke reports on two panels, the first discussing:
The Modern Thriller: High Concept, High Stakes
L-R: Felix Francis, Heather Critchlow, Antony Johnston,
Roger Corke, and Moderator Zoe Sharp
As a debut author, I was in very august company with three titans of the thriller world – Heather Critchlow, Antony Johnston and Felix Francis. We all agreed that the modern thriller had moved on a long way from the classics of the fifties and sixties written by the likes Ian Fleming and Alasdair MacLean – but for different reasons.
For me, the key to a modern thriller for me is its page-turning ability. People look down on thriller writing, in comparison with literary fiction, but if I get a book that’s so exciting that when, I turn a page, I have to put my hand on the right hand side so that I don’t glance ahead, I know that is really good writing.
Heather wanted exactly the opposite. She occasionally flicks ahead in a thriller to make sure that a person in which she is so invested is still OK!
“That for me is a sign that someone’s really got the tension right,” she told the audience.
Antony thought the main difference from thrillers of old is that the readers are much more savvy.
“A lot of the classic thrillers are great books but their plots don’t all hold up that well to scrutiny and you can’t get away with that these days,” he said.
And Antony has helped moved thrillers along from the time when every protagonist was a square-jawed white man.
“Twenty years ago, female lead characters were incredibly rare and I, along with several other writers, wanted to redress the balance a little bit,” he said. “I find that a very useful device within the thriller. It’s easy for a female lead character to be underestimated by the enemy. She can’t be a spy because she’s a woman. She can’t be a serious physical threat because she’s a woman.”For Felix, it’s all about getting the readers to care about the character. His books are always set around horse racing, but he emphasised that they weren’t about horses, they were about people.
“They don’t have to like the character, but they have to be engaged and care about what happens to them,” he said.
“There’s nothing so gratifying for an author than for someone to come up with you and say I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I was up to 4.30 in the morning because I had to know who did it.”
If you add high stakes or a high concept, so much the better- but they can all be very different. In Heather’s most recent book, The Tomorrow Project, a pandemic far worse than Covid takes over the world. In Syndicate, Felix weaves a web of money and corruption so vividly. In The Patrios Network, Antony presents us with a deep fake American president whose rants will sound eerily close to home. In my thriller, Deadly Protocol, a scientist who is researching a cure for cancer is brutally murdered: who killed him and why?
Four very different thrillers but all have the same fundamentals that makes the modern thriller what it is.
Debut authors: An Infusion of New Blood
Well, the show isn’t over until the fat lady sings, is it? The one question everyone had on their lips coming into the very last Crimefest is why is it the last CrimeFest?
Well, you can’t expect an investigative journalist not to investigate, can you? My first crime thriller, Deadly Protocol, was published last September and I was invited onto the Saturday morning panel Debut Authors: An Infusion of Fresh Blood. As the moderator was the one and only Donna Moore, who as well as being an outstanding writer was the joint organiser of CrimeFest, I had to ask her when the panel members got together in the green room just before a session starts.
Donna gave various reasons why this was the last CrimeFest…except I had the sneaking suspicion that it might not be. She didn’t give away any secrets but she wasn’t quite as unequivocal as I would have expected.
Twelve hours later we knew why, when CrimeFest’s most closely guarded secret was revealed at the gala dinner. CrimeFest might be back after all. And so it should, because it allows new authors a platform they would never be given at other festivals, as four of us found out in what I had assumed would my last-ever CrimeFest panel.
The four books could not be more different.
In A Very Vexing Murder, Lucy Andrew has written a brilliant homage to Jane Austen’s Emma, weaving crime and con-trickery around a delightful anti-hero, Harriet Smith.
In Flat 401, Kingsley Pearson has also created something of an anti-hero, is Jay, a man who went to jail for a crime he confessed to but didn’t commit who conceals a much darker crime that he did commit.
Lynn Marie Taylor is inspired in her choice of Malta as the backdrop for her 1880s historical whodunnit, Death in Valletta.
Mine is a fast-paced high concept thriller about the murder of a scientist who is researching the Holy Grail of medicine, a cure for cancer: who killed him and why?
The advice is write what you know and all of the newby authors told the audience they took it.
Kingsley is a clinical psychologist and his book has a deep psychological insight into his characters.
“What I knew was staring out of the window of my London flat during the pandemic and that give me the idea for a story a bit like Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, where Miss Marple’s friend sees what she sees is a
murder through the window of two trains passing each other.”
Lucy is a crime fiction scholar who admits to having an “unhealthy fixation” with Jane Austen. “Emma is my favourite book so I know it really well,” she told the audience, so the idea of a crime novel set around the places and characters was the perfect fit.
Lynne was born in in Malta and gravitated back to her birthplace for many days of detailed historical research. But she introduced a character way outside her comfort zone –Edinburgh detective DI Sam McQueen.
“The idea the Edinburgh detective was just that idea of the complete opposite – the grey, damp streets of
Edinburgh,” she said. “It’s so hot in Malta and he’s got his tweed suit. It all came from that.”
I’ve been a TV journalist, making investigative documentaries for series like the BBC’s Panorama and ITV’s World In Action for more years than I care to remember and it was thanks to one of the scariest conversations I’ve ever had that Deadly Protocol was written. I was once filming with a cancer researcher and asked him if a cure for this terrible disease was near.
“Well, some people say they’ve already found a cure but too many people have got too much to lose for the cure to see the light of day.”
The plot for a high-concept crime thriller flooded into my brain in a moment.
The good news is that all four authors are working on, or have finished, a second novel. The even better news is that now there’s a chance that they can come back to CrimeFest and tell crime thriller fans all about them.
Roger Corke’s debut book is Deadly Protocol,
Click on the title to read the review
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