Author R&R with Simon Marlowe

 Simon Marlowe is an up-and-coming British crime thriller author, and was a selected author at the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival 2024 (Harrogate International Festivals). A consummate wordsmith, he has excelled as a darkly comic crime author, with his fast paced and action-packed Mason Made trilogy. Like reading a Guy Ritchie movie with a Ken Loach conscience, Simon skillfully blends social and political issues to create a compellingly relevant narrative, on a par with the best in modern crime fiction today. Simon spent his formative years living in South London, indulging in political activism and music, graduating from a number of universities in politics, education and management. He eventually moved back to his home city in Essex, and after studying for a creative writing MA, settled down to developing as a writer. Since 2017, he has been successfully publishing, making people laugh, cry and scream!

In Marlowe's latest darkly-comic-crime-meets-spy-thriller, The Heart Is A Cruel Hunter, Steven Mason has an axe to grind and just needs to work out who deserves it. Falling fully into the darkness of Hell, Steven lives a crude, rude, cruel, and heartless life in the streets of Amsterdam, cutting himself off from his old life to indulge in drug-fuelled debauchery. In an attempt to reestablish his criminal career during the coronavirus pandemic, he immerses himself into the blood and guts of conspiracy and Far-Right politics, war crimes, and war criminals. But nothing is as it seems, as Steven is propelled by covert love into festering darkness. When faced with an ultimatum, in the form of becoming a member of the ruthless Bloodaxe gang—knee-deep in dealing and drug trafficking— will he pull himself out of the darkness he’s become so accustomed to? Or will he sink even further down?

Simon Marlowe stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing the book and series:

The Heart Is A Cruel Hunter, is the final installment in my darkly comic crime thriller trilogy Mason Made (so check out, The Dead Hand of Dominique – Book One, and Medusa And The Devil – Book Two). And for my protagonists next little adventure, I have Steven Mason, now a jaded drug-fueled criminal, indulging in extremes: personally, professionally (i.e. illegally) and politically.

It may be bold of me to claim the ‘Cruel Hunter’ has captured the zeitgeist of our time, but with Far Right riots, Far Right parties democratically elected in Europe, and Far Right ultra nationalist wars (I’ll leave you to speculate where you think that might be), I felt I would be failing in my thematic duty if I didn’t integrate the political contemporary issue into a bit of crime, murder and mayhem.

Hopefully, if you indulge in purchasing the ebook or paperback (available online from all major retailers!) and you take the obvious next step to read it, you may be surprised to learn that about 90% of the novel is based on fact. Not that I want to stray into Baby Reindeer territory here, because I will say explicitly that the ‘Cruel Hunter’  is a dramatization of Far Right politics, and the ‘facts’ have been integrated to fit into the narrative.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time where nationalism, power, and propaganda are dominant forces, perhaps pushing the world ever closer to some rather unpalatable governing systems. But you’ll be glad to know all is not lost, not if art and literature can be used to laugh at the thugs, tyrants and demagogues.

Mercifully, my anti-hero, Steven Mason, has sufficient moral ambiguity to indulge in criminality whilst retaining a sense of what is right and wrong. Murder, for Steven, is necessary to survive, crime is a way of life (and also happens to pay his bills), but that is nothing compared to the Far Right characters he encounters on a journey that has an underlying purpose which is gradually revealed. Steven may start off unhinged, but that is nothing compared to the bonkers antics of the Far Right criminals and politicians he needs to pander to, characters who are ideologically maladjusted with one thing in common: they think anything that is different should be systematically exterminated.

Perhaps, if we were not living in such strange times, and we considered the Far Right as a poorly psychiatric patient, we would be able to treat them successfully, integrate them back into the community, following a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and grandiose delusions. However, talking therapies in such cases would be ineffective, and any rational doctor would probably recommend large doses of anti-psychotics, a regime of electroconvulsive therapy followed by an irreversible lobotomy. Although I would still worry, that dulled and subdued, the radical conspiracy supremacist, would still be a danger to themselves and others.

But rest assured, Steven Mason has no liberal constraints holding him back. He knows that if he were to ever find himself reading a book called The Heart Is  A Cruel Hunter, and a rabid dog is running towards him, he will throw the book at it to stop it in its tracks.

 

You can learn more about Simon Marlowe and his books by visiting his website and can follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The Heart is a Cruel Hunter (Mason Made Trilogy Book 3) is now available from the publisher, Cranthorpe Millner, and all major bookstores.

Author R&R with Michael Wolk

 Michael Wolk has written screenplays (Innocent Blood, directed by John Landis), theatrical plays and music (Ghostlight 9), and is also a theatrical producer for Broadway (Pacific Overtures, Karate Kid), Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and more. He founded the nonprofit All For One Theater, which has staged over 50 solo shows off-Broadway since 2011, and he directed the award-winning documentary, You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story. He also found time to write the mystery novels, The Beast on Broadway, The Big Picture, and Signet.

His latest project is the cyber thriller, "DevilsGame," which launches today. He didn't want to just write a thriller, he wanted to immerse readers in a story the same way he captures audiences with the stage. So he created something unique: an interactive, multimedia "cyberthriller" that's meant to be read entirely online, blending action, satire, and clickable clues. The story opens with a virtual Blackberry text conversation: a cross-platform virus has swept the globe, turning smartphones into mobile IEDs and causing explosions worldwide. Claire Bodine, a fiery televangelist, and Nathan Rifkin, the cunning mastermind behind the world's most addictive video games, form an unlikely duo as the last line of defense against digital Armageddon. Claire sees the hand of Satan behind the chaos, while Nathan smells a geopolitical conspiracy. Either way, time is running out to get to the bottom of it.

Michael Wolk stops by In Reference to Murder to discuss his innovative creation:

 

It's going to sound strange, but the creation of DevilsGame all began with the realization that I was reading with my thumb. Instead of reading the books piled up by my bedside, I was gazing raptly into my smartphone, scrolling through the events of the day and clicking hyperlinks that added context to the stories I was reading.

I thought: why not write a novel that meets readers like me where they are: on their phones? And why not write a story that employs the “superpower” of hyperlinks to enhance and expand the story?

And it seemed to me the story had to be about an Internet Armageddon that readers would experience the same way we experience REAL crises these days: on our phones, scrolling for the latest developments, then surfing between news sites and social media to get more information—often weaving between fact and fiction without even noticing the boundaries between them!

So DevilsGame became a story about our smartphones going haywire, told on your phone, unfolding “in real-time” through your exploration of the contents of the hero’s smartphone.

I knew I wanted DevilsGame to be a cyber thriller, but it is based on facts that are beyond thrilling – they are terrifying!

In the 24-hour clock of DevilsGame, there is a cascade of hacks that rock the world. Each of the hacks in the book is modeled on an actual, documented attack that was carried out in the past. Each of these attacks were considered “zero day” exploits at the time – meaning hacks that had never occurred before and against which there was no ready defense.

The wrinkle that DevilsGame presents is that all these "greatest hits of hacking" are sequenced one right after the other, with cumulative and catastrophic consequences. My research quickly discovered an internet ecosystem that is astonishingly frail and in deathly peril from bad (state) actors who have already proven they can burrow deeply and often invisibly into its infrastructure.

As I result, I want to share this simple but harrowing maxim:

º Anything connected to the internet can be hacked

º Everything is becoming connected to the internet

º Everything – and everyone – on the Internet is potentially an open book

So please! Protect your data! And don’t entrust your digital life to the “cloud” – keep hard or hard drive copies of your vital information in multiple safe locations! Our entire lives our on the web. Remember the web can easily become a trap that ensnares.

 

You can learn more about Michael and his various projects through his website and also his personal website and follow him on Facebook and LinkedIn. The DevilsGame is live as of today, and you can check it out via this link.

Author R&R with David Finkle

 David Finkle has covered the arts and politics for The New York Times, The New York Post, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The Huffington Post, among others. He is author of the story collections, People Tell Me Things and Great Dates With Some Late Greats, as well as the mystery novel, The Man With the Overcoat, called one of the ten best novels of the year by Foreword magazine. His latest mystery, released today, is The Great Gatsby Murder Case.

On a beautiful spring day in New York City, writer Daniel Freund finds a long-sought-after 1953 edition of The Great Gatsby, free for the taking on the steps of a brownstone down the block. But when he brings home his treasure, the words on the page begin to glow, and a hand appears out of the pages sending Daniel secret messages. Prompted by The Great Gatsby itself, Daniel begins his own investigation. Accompanied by a hardheaded retired police detective and a nosy-body neighbor, he works to unfold the pieces of this supposedly solved case. He knows a murder took place, the book told him so, so why is everyone else convinced it was suicide?

David Finkle stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the book:

 

How did I come up with the idea for The Great Gatsby Murder Case and then follow-up with any research? Beats me. Well, almost beats me.

There I was walking down my street one day, thinking about I don’t know what. Maybe wondering whether I’d remembered to pick up everything I needed at Gristede’s or some household notion along those lines. And that’s when suddenly—just like that—a random idea popped full-blown into my head: Why not write a mystery set on this street?

It's not that I’d ever written a  mystery before. I’ve read them, of course. I love mysteries and respect the authors like crazy. From teenagery I’ve been obsessed with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and mystery writers right up to today. As a one-time regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, I’ve even interviewed Patricia Cornwell, a terrific interviewee.

But writing one? It’s crossed my mind but never more than fleetingly, usually because, as I analyze it, mysteries are the one genre where writing isn’t ready to begin until the complete plot has been worked out down to every last detail and clue. Am I wrong about that?

When, however, that write-a-mystery thunder bolt jolted me, it didn’t come outfitted with a plot. Just the cute go-ahead-and-write-one prompt. The subsequent mental monologue started, as I recall, with a celebratory, “Why not?” and was succeeded by, “I know I’ll need a tight plot, but so what?”

I’d just published my last novel—Keys to an Empty House (Plum Bay), having to do with family, father-son stuff—and wasn’t at work on the next one.  I say “at work,” whereas I often regard writing as “at play.” Why shouldn’t writing be play, depending on the content intent?

Authors are often described as at work, but often, when I’m writing, I’m having fun. What I’m doing seems more like play than work. Mightn’t writing a mystery feel like play? I was, right then, prepared to play.

That settled within those first fast-paced seconds on the street, I was percolating. (I grew up when coffee was still brewed in percolators.) And I was still ambling—but more slowly—towards my building and second-floor apartment when something else grabbed me.  If I set the mystery on my block, why not make the detective an amateur like myself? And had I ever learned there had been a mystery on my block, and had I ever furthermore learned there’d been a murder and/or murderer on the block, how would I go about solving it?

Then, the pressing query became, “How would I learn about  the murder or murderer?” Perhaps the obvious answer is that someone on the block mentioned it to me, but one of my quirks is: I’m not generally happy with the obvious. I try to avoid it. My mind goes farther afield. What occurred to me about the origins of my murder/murderer information that wouldn’t be obvious: A book.

A book!? Yes, again out of nowhere I thought a book was clearly the thing. But what book? Millions were available to me. But one pressed forward urgently: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. Why so suddenly, so completely right? Many of us know its history. Published in 1925, some years after Fitzgerald  left Princeton—where he surely knew Jay Gatsby-Nick Carraway-Tom Buchanan types—the novel was not an immediate success. His first, This Side of Paradise, was. Nonetheless, the initial movie adaptation was 1926. (Scott and Zelda walked out of a screening.) To date there have been three more. By the 1930s, book sales faded more precipitantly but were revived in the 1950s and remain staggering today.

But more than any of that, The Great Gatsby is, in my opinion, the best American novel of the twentieth century. It’s the word-perfect obvious choice. (Here, I broke my rule and did reach for the obvious.) I figured if I settle on this one for the book in my forthcoming mystery, I get to re-read it, a pastime I indulge every couple of years.

I now hurried home, immediately sat down with the 1953 paperback edition from my collection and started perusing. Don’t you know that on the very first page the words “victim” and “detect” leaped out? What more did I need to convince me I was on the right mystery track? All I had to do next was start writing. The plot would come to me.

As would any necessary research. And now a confession: I’m not an inveterate researcher. I kept it to a minimum, which isn’t easy where a mystery is concerned. One helpful aspect: Poison wouldn’t be involved, as it so often is with Christie. Guns were. I had to find out about, for instance, Glocks and Magnums. I did. I had to check out police procedure. Luckily, there’s a precinct half a block from me, where officers are often seen walking to or from or standing around the entrance. I quizzed one or two of them. More? Part of the New York City story branches out to Dayton, Ohio, about which I know some but not all. I pegged answers by calling the Dayton Daily News.  

But enough of that. It all paid off, and now as The Great Gatsby Murder Case—with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece accounting for some of its solution—is here.

 

You can learn more about David Finkle and his writing via his website, enjoy his podcasts on The Hour of Lateral Thinking, and follow him on Facebook and Goodreads. The Great Gatsby Murder Case is now available via all major booksellers.

Petrona Award Winner Announced

 

The Petrona Award was established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction, but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries. This year's winner of best translated Scandinavian crime novel is Dead Men Dancing by Jógvan Isaksen translated from the Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Norvik Press. This is only Isaksen’s second novel to be translated into English following Walpurgis Tide. 

Other titles on the 2024 shortlist included:

• Anne Mette Hancock - The Collector tr. Tara F Chace (Denmark, Swift Press)
  
  
• Jørn Lier Horst - Snow Fall tr. Anne Bruce (Norway, Michael Joseph)
  
  
• Arnaldur Indriðason - The Girl by the Bridge tr. Philip Roughton (Iceland, Harvill Secker)
  
  
• Åsa Larsson - The Sins of our Fathers tr. Frank Perry (Sweden, MacLehose Press)
  
  
• Yrsa Sigurðardottir - The Prey tr. Victoria Cribb (Iceland, Hodder & Stoughton)