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.
The conference as in previous years kicked off with a fun quiz which
Len Tyler reports on…..
Thursday evening: 20:00-21:30
The Thursday night quiz is one of the oldest CrimeFest institutions and it was good to see it in full swing at the very last CrimeFest, expertly led, as so many times in the past, by
Peter Guttridge (see photo below right) Eight teams of (nominally) eight members took part. The first objective of all teams was of course to secure Martin Edwards as a member (my group, the Criminal Minds, tried hard but sadly failed). The second task was to think of a team name, which seemed to tax everyone, resulting in a wide range of identifiers from the factious to the definitely unpronounceable.
We began the quiz itself with Peter’s thanks to Adrian, Donna, Myles and Liz for their work over the course of many CrimeFests and a big round of applause from the quizzers.
Then it was into a slew of questions that were, as ever, much harder than we were expecting. The third problem quickly became apparent: when to play our Jokers, which doubled the points for the round. It might have been easier if we’d known in advance what subject each round would be on, but Peter kept that a closely guarded secret, and you had to declare whether you would play the Joker at short notice, after the subject was given but before you heard the first question. So, when round one (“Miscellaneous”) began, we all looked at each other but nobody waved their plastic covered sheet of card at the quizmaster. Which was a shame because it turned out to be one of the easier rounds.
After three rounds we all got to mark the answers of the table next to us and head to the bar for another drink and, yes, Martin’s table was apparently in the lead, but not by much. The Criminal Minds were quite confident at that stage, but a couple of rounds of film and TV related questions threatened to floor us (though well done Gary Stratmann for keeping our heads above water).
As the quiz progressed, two quizzers, Mike Ripley and Martin Edwards, discovered they were themselves the answer to a question, which seemed a bit unfair to the rest of us who weren’t the answer to anything. But it was all done in good humour and nobody actually got murdered on any table, as far as I could tell. The final question in the final round was to name the finest crime fiction conference ever, and we were warned we’d lose all out points if we got it wrong. (None of us did.)
And yes, Martin’s team (the Leftovers) did win and received a whole pile of books as their reward and a final big round of applause, which they fully deserved.
Friday: 11:20-12:10
Mental Health for Writers and Readers
Five excellent panelists made what might have been a very heavy subject extremely entertaining and informative.
Simon Brett, Cathy Ace, Nev Fountain and Zoë Sharp were well moderated by Barbara Nadel.
They looked first at characters with mental health problems in their own books and how they avoided the danger of slipping into stereotypes. Was there such a thing as ‘normal’ anyway? Zoë said that her character, Charlie, had been described as borderline psychotic, which she took as a great compliment. Cathy’s main character, Cait Morgan, was a psychologist herself but nevertheless was frightened of failure and felt compelled to try to fix everything. Nev said that he tried to avoid clichés by making the characters’ conditions specific to them - you needed to put something on top of the stereotype and ensure their mental state wasn’t their totality. Simon said Charles Paris was a depressive character but that he didn’t need to research depression when writing him - just to look at his own family history. He quoted Swift - ‘Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived’.
Barbara then turned the group to looking at writers’ mental health and in particular the impact of criticism in Amazon reviews. She said however that working in the NHS had hardened her to abuse and so she could take
criticism online - even one star reviews. Nev said that he felt he knew his books better than the reader did and so could ignore unjustified negative comments. Simon said that constantly looking at Amazon reviews was like constantly weighing yourself when you were on a diet. Mood swings were inevitable for writers who knew that they were only as good as their last sentence. He also quoted a review of Graham Greene that said that writing was an ideal escape, unless you were a writer, in which case you needed an escape from writing too. Zoë said that she used to get revenge on those who had annoyed her by killing them in her books but had now run out of people she wanted to kill - she was however willing to take commissions! Barbara said that she had found writing cathartic after a day on the psychiatric ward, ‘especially when there had been blood on the wall’.
Finally they offered helpful advice to us. Simon’s was to see friends regularly. Nev’s was to be objective about your work, to take walks and to go to crime writing conventions. Zoë spoke of the ’twenty-first book syndrome’, which (as somebody writing their twenty-first book) I found very comforting - it wasn’t just me, then.
So, all in all, a very worthwhile and helpful panel, though (now I think about it) they never did answer the question ‘what is normal?’ One to ponder for the future, I think.
Saturday: 10:10-11:00
Historical panel:
The room was completely packed to hear a very distinguished panel talk about writing historical crime fiction.
Donna Moore moderated a handpicked (she said) panel that consisted of
Lindsey Davis, Vaseem Khan, Tom Mead and Ovidia Yu.
They all began by introducing themselves in the style of their main protagonist, which kept the audience well-entertained. They then each justified why they had chosen the period they had. Lindsey said that she’d already written about Vespasian and never liked to waste research. She also seemed happy to self-identify as a paranoid tyrant. Vaseem was attracted to the era of change and transition at the end of British rule. Ovidia was also writing about the 1940s, but in Singapore, where the generation that could still remember the Japanese occupation is now dying out - she wanted to capture their stories while that was still possible. Tom’s latest book was set in 1939, and for the first time the shadow of war hung over the series, but for him the plot and the locked room mystery were still the real drivers of the story, not the historical background.
The discussion then turned to why they wrote historical fiction at all. Ovidia said that she could reflect things about Singapore today without upsetting the government. Vaseem was anxious to correct the imbalance in what people were taught - ‘often the history we think we know isn’t the real history’. Lindsey wanted to show how the Romans were and weren’t like us - especially emperors like Nero and Caligula, who were suddenly beginning to look quite normal. She pointed out however that bad Roman emperors tended to last only 15 years or so and were usually persuaded to commit suicide.
Lindsey said that she enjoyed research and hoped that happy feeling would be shared by the readers. She would get involved in small details, for example whether people wore green tunics - and would spend a lot of time l
looking at frescos to prove her point one way or the other. She also told a story about how getting stuck in a bath had given her an idea for killing people. Most of Ovidia’s research was talking to people. Tom was looking for the little things that brought the period to life. Vaseem said that he used only 1-3% of his research, though had clearly researched Delhi very thoroughly.
Click on the title to read the review.
Sarah Williams has been a professional writer for most of her adult life. She started writing under the name of Sarah Matthews, publishing translations from the French, as well as children’s information books, school textbooks, and school editions of authors such as Conan Doyle and Mark Twain. Most recently, she turned to crime, and has published How to Write Crime Fiction (Robinson), a second edition of which is due in Spring 2025. There are also two crime novels in the offing. 
