I've heard from the good folks at Bitter Lemon Press, that if all goes to plan, Gianrico Carofiglio's third title in English, 'Reasonable Doubt' will come out in July."What could be more fun on a winter Sunday afternoon than to gather round the wireless with the family to listen to the BBC? Especially when it's Radio 4 Book Club featuring our very own Val McDermid? Yes, at 4pm on Sunday February 4th (repeated on Thursday February 6th at 4pm) Val will be talking to host Jim Naughtie and an audience in Manchester about her landmark Gold Dagger-winning novel, The Mermaids Singing. If you can't pick up Radio 4, you can listen live at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/. And if you want to listen to it at a later date, it's available for a month via the Listen Again facility at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/bookclub/.
Val said, 'I was thrilled to be asked to take part in Book Club. I'm a great admirer of the show and of James Naughtie as an interviewer. I was a bit nervous beforehand, because you never know what sort of questions a live audience will throw at you. But we had great fun on the day, and I found it very interesting to revisit a book I wrote a dozen years ago. I hope you get the chance to listen to it, and that you will enjoy it."
The last film from Dutch director Theo van Gogh came out on R1 DVD a few days ago. The film is based upon the book 'The Sixth of May' by Tomas Ross.From The Independent:
On Her Majesty's civil service
Whispers of excitement among Whitehall's calculator carriers following the publication of a civil service thriller. (A new sub-genre and not, on this occasion, an oxymoron.)
John Nightingale, a financial fraud bod in the Department for Work and Pensions, has spent sandwich breaks daydreaming his debut novel, The Sky Blue Parcel.
As expected from a man married to Caroline Slocock, the head of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Nightingale ensures his female sleuth is not confined to holding the evidence bags for a testosterone-charged protagonist.
Indeed, his Jane Charles bears a canny resemblance to James Bond's latest companion, the gutsy Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), in Casino Royale) - a female Treasury official charged with keeping tabs on the investigators, who subsequently becomes embroiled in espionage and extra-curricular intimacy.
Synopsis from amazon.co.uk: "In a sensual region of France, a crime detective like no other...Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot of the Cavaillon Regional Crime Squad is called to an artist's retreat in Provence, a luxury hill-top hotel where a young woman, it seems, has been murdered. There are bloodstains, but no body. The mystery deepens as Jacquot begins his investigation. Among the guests are those who have both means and motive, with personal secrets, hidden agendas and their own dangerous liaisons to conceal. Some of these people are very powerful indeed, and none of them take kindly to Jacquot's probing questions. Looming over them all is a celebrated and reclusive artist whose masterworks are priceless, a monster who torments all those who seek to bask in his glory. When a summer storm isolates the hotel, and not one but two bodies are found, passions start to run high!"
According to the classic crime Granta diary, Arnaldur Indridason was born in Reykjavik on 28 January 1961."This portrayal is lifted from the Da Vinci Code, a book and film which claimed - against all evidence - to be based on fact. Despite strenuous and well-publicised objections at the time by the Catholic Church, and despite countless press reports into Opus Dei which found the organisation innocent of Dan Brown's depiction, the BBC chose to exploit this portrayal as if it were commonplace fact."
The chap on Volume 2 is none other than recent Bond villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).Operation Whooooo!
Friday 26 January 2007 11:30-12:00 (Radio 4 FM)
By Lynne Truss.
When a headless corpse is found on the ghost train on the Palace Pier, Steine puts the death down to natural causes. But can new policeman Twitten help Brunswick prove otherwise?
Inspector Steine ...... Michael Fenton Stevens
Mrs Groynes ...... Jan Ravens
A 20-second spoof of Camberwick Green has been made by the BBC to promote series 2 of Life on Mars, and is being distributed virally for maximum exposure. In an inventive twist, the sequence will also be used in the show itself as part of a dream Sam has following drug treatment, used in the present to try to bring him out of his coma.
The show's marketing, which includes blanket coverage of all media outlets, maintains the retro theme by using the 1970s' BBC branding. At the end of the campaign the Ford Cortina Mark III used in the show will be auctioned, and proceeds donated to Comic Relief.
The biggest thrillers of all time - The Day of the Jackal and The Da Vinci Code - built their conspiracy plots around real historical events. So it was inevitable that the death of Princess Diana would get the same treatment. In July, the month before the 10th anniversary of the Paris crash, Transworld will publish The Accident Man by Tom Cain (the pseudonym of a "well-known investigative journalist"). The book stars an assassin who ordinarily targets "bad people", but who realises, after engineering a car accident, that he has been set up to murder the royal. The branch of Waterstone's at Harrods - the store owned by Dodi Fayed's father, Mohamed Al Fayed - has not yet decided whether to stock the book.The Telegraph calls it a bad idea
If you scandalously missed the superb mini-series, The State Within, a few weeks back, now's the chance to remedy that error as the DVD is out today. Blurb: "A flight explodes in mid-air during take off near Washington DC. Later that day, as a shocked capital struggles to come to terms with the disaster, a diplomatic catastrophe envelops the British Embassy. A cat's cradle of tangled affinities and conflicting interests told through interlinking stories unfold as British Ambassador Mark Brydon slowly realises that he is being played by an invisible puppeteer with great power. A tightly plotted conspiracy thriller about the limits of diplomacy in a world where government has abdicated responsibility for war."Shown as a six parter on BBC1 last year, it's extremely complicated in a '24' way with Lucius Malfoy, I mean Jason Isaacs, as the British Ambassador. I had heard there might be a follow-up, I do hope so as there's so little homegrown quality drama made these days.
Britain, 1964: a time when the line between the police and criminals has become increasingly blurred; when the proliferation of drugs is about to change the face of policing forever; when Britain's youth stand on the brink of a social and sexual revolution.Expect it on BBC1 in the Spring.
Inspector George Gently is one of the few good men at Scotland Yard, his sense of public duty an increasingly rare commodity in a police force where corruption is rife and unchecked.
But his relentless pursuit of notorious gangsters such as Joe Webster (Phil Davis, Bleak House) leads to the murder of Gently's beloved wife Isabella, a killing arranged by Webster himself in an act of revenge upon Gently.
When a grieving Gently learns of the murder of a young biker, Johnny Lister (Christian Cooke, Where The Heart Is), who was part of a Northumberland drugs ring, it has all the hallmarks of a Webster operation and he insists on being given the case, deciding it will be his last...
In Northumberland, George takes on the headstrong young Detective Sergeant Bacchus (Lee Ingleby, The Street) who is convinced that the prime suspect for Johnny Lister's murder is Ricky Deeming (Richard Armitage, Robin Hood), the charismatic leader of the Defenders biker gang.
But as the case grows ever more complex, Gently must decide if Bacchus can be trusted – hot-tempered and ambitious, could he too be drawn to the corrupt road taken by so many of his contemporaries? Or can Gently keep Bacchus's integrity intact?
As the case reaches its violent climax, Gently begins to feel that his brand of policing is needed now more than ever – and perhaps he is not ready to call this his last case after all...
Fred Vargas is another original. In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (Harvill Secker £11.99, pp400), first published in France three years ago, her doughty policeman, Commissaire Adamsberg, is sent to Quebec for training and discovers a serial killer has followed him. Before long, Adamsberg is on the run from the Canadian police, accused of murdering a young woman he has only just met. He believes he knows the true murderer, the fearsome Judge Fulgence, who may be responsible for nine other murders over a 60-year period and whose unusual weapon of choice is the trident. Vargas, who won last year's inaugural Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, has a wonderfully offbeat imagination that makes each of her novels a refreshing delight.
