Harrogate's annual crime writing festival is a bit like those Cluedo-style murder mystery weekends. A crime wave hits the distinctly upper-crust spa town as hordes of authors, publishers and genre fans flood into town and hole up at a hotel for a busy lineup of seminars, onstage interviews, signings and a now infamous late-night crime quiz.
I pitched up in Harrogate this morning with a bag stuffed full of reading material for the weekend, including such titles as Severed, Ash & Bone and Cold Granite - oh, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a gift for my niece who lives nearby.
It's the fifth year for the festival, which is sponsored by a Theakston's ale that's rather perfectly named Old Peculier. (The festival crew have t-shirts sporting the slogan "I could murder an Old Peculier!" Nice.) Yesterday there was a creative writing masterclass for aspiring crime scribes,followed by a bash in the evening for the crime novel of the year - which is billed as the only prize for the genre that's chosen by readers rather than critics. This year, the award went to Scottish author Allan Guthrie's visceral, tightly wound thriller Two Way Split - actually published quite a while back by a small American press. It's a pretty worthy winner, although I preferred Guthrie's second novel Kiss Her Goodbye - a whirlwind account of baseball bat-wielding Glaswegian hard nuts that I couldn't put down and haven't forgotten since.
One of this morning's panels brought up a well-worn genre debate: does the city or the countryside make a better location for crime? Although it was suggested that there's a shortage of plausible crimes in the countryside, author Aline Templeton made the point that violent acts reverberate more loudly in the tranquillity of the countryside - and that rural settings aren't limited to leafy, chocolate-box idylls. The argument was made that in an enclosed rural community you can concentrate on a more closely linked web of characters, although I fear that suggests that the rural setting suits a conventional style of "whodunnit?" rather than a more realistic approach.
I must confess I've always been something of a city snob. Crime fiction, to me, means Ellroy's Los Angeles, Pelecanos's DC or Willeford's Miami. As they're all American, I'll add Simenon's Paris and Rankin's Edinburgh. Similarly, crime TV will always mean The Wire's Baltimore (it's called Bodymore for a reason) and The Sopranos' New Jersey - I haven't got time for those traditional tweed-jacketed, Sunday night sleuths.
But panellists Jim Kelly and Ann Cleeves spoke vividly of the settings of their novels - the desolate Fens and the bleak Shetlands, respectively - and I'm keen to try out their books. I think my reading list is going to grow out of control this weekend.
More later ... first things first: I could murder an Old Peculier.
