Today I'm delighted to welcome
JONATHAN PINNOCK
to share his BEST OF CRIME ...
... AUTHORS
I’m very much looking forward to whatever Gillian Flynn comes up with next, because Gone Girl was such a wild, mad ride. But in the meantime – and this might be cheating slightly, because they’re strictly speaking spy stories, but then again I don’t have a lot of time for genre boundaries – I’m currently working my way through Mick Herron’s Slough House series, and they are an absolutely marvel. Imagine looking at Le Carré and thinking “Nah, way too upbeat.”
If I can be ever so slightly pretentious for a moment, I’d also like to chuck in a third preference vote for Jorge Luis Borges, if only for Death and the Compass, which is possibly the single greatest crime short story ever written. As I’m sure everyone knows, the central conceit was borrowed by Umberto Eco for The Name of the Rose, which is why one of the key characters is called Jorge de Burgos. As slightly fewer people know, I also nicked it for The Truth About Archie and Pye, which is why one of my characters has the name George Burgess.
OK, OK, I’ll try and keep the answers shorter from now on.
... FILMS/MOVIES
I’m a massive fan of Raymond Chandler, so it’s got to be The Big Sleep – nothing comes close. But for God’s sake, make sure it’s the original 1946 Howard Hawks version with Bogart and Bacall at the top of their game, not the execrable 1978 Michael Winner remake. I actually paid real money to see this in the cinema when it came out and I’m still angry, over forty years later.
... TV DRAMAS
Ooh, this is tricky. Giri/Haji and the first series of Killing Eve are strong contenders, but in the end, it’s got to be The Bridge, or Bron | Broen, as we call it in our household, where we now speak fluent Scandinavian. The first two seasons in particular are wonderful, mainly because of the weird chemistry between Saga Norén and Martin Rohde. Oh, and that theme tune by Choir of Young Believers is just perfect.
... FICTIONAL KILLERS
Well, I guess Hannibal Lecter is a bit of an obvious choice, so let’s go with Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Mysterons, mainly because they were so endearingly useless. At the start of every single episode, they would announce that they were going to kill someone or cause some kind of disaster, and every single time they were thwarted by bloody Captain Scarlet. Hopeless.
... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES
I think it would have to be Louie Knight, from Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Noir series. On the face of it, he’s a pastiche of Philip Marlowe, but there’s so much more going on there. Pryce’s Aberystwyth is a masterpiece of world-building.
... MURDER WEAPONS
I’m guessing that someone must have mentioned it before in this series, because it’s just so neat, but there’s Roald Dahl’s frozen leg of lamb that a woman uses to bludgeon her husband before serving it to the investigating detective. I also quite like the serial killer in one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, The Visitor, who goes around drowning their victims in their own bathtubs in camouflage paint. Not only is it downright weird, but it’s also preposterously inefficient.
... DEATH SCENES
Might need to put a mild spoiler alert on this – and possibly a Lionel Shriver alert too – but the conclusion of We Need to Talk About Kevin shocked me much more than I was expecting it to.
... BLOGS/WEBSITES
I’m afraid that I’m not a particularly faithful web surfer, and if I’m about to do any research I tend to just start with Google and see where it leads me. My search history can make for interesting reading in itself.
... WRITING TIPS
Most of all, I’d recommend that you avoid taking advice from strangers on the internet. But if you insist, read widely and outside your genre, make sure all your characters have agency and for God’s sake, listen to how people talk.
... WRITING SNACKS
I share my life with someone who, if given a two-finger Kit-Kat, will break it in two, eat one finger and carefully re-wrap the remaining one to keep for some future occasion. Maybe next week, or some time the other side of Christmas. I, on the other hand, see a packet of chocolate digestives as an atomic entity, intended to be eaten all in one go if I think I can get away with it. So what I’m basically saying is that I don’t do snacks while writing. They’re far too dangerous.
About JONATHAN PINNOCK
Jonathan Pinnock first came to notoriety as the author of Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens, of which he should probably be more ashamed than he actually is. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, a slim volume of poetry and an uncategorisable (and – frankly – largely unsaleable) musical memoir. More recently, he is the author of Farrago Books’ Mathematical Mystery series, the third of which, The Riddle of the Fractal Monks, was published on 16 April 2020.
Find Jonathan Pinnock on Twitter - @jonpinnock
About THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS
Publisher's description
A mystery lands – literally – at Tom Winscombe’s feet, and another riotous mathematical adventure begins…
Tom Winscombe and Dorothy Chan haven’t managed to go on a date for some time, so it’s a shame that their outing to a Promenade Concert is cut short when a mysterious cowled figure plummets from the gallery to the floor of the arena close to where they are standing. But when they find out who he was, all thoughts of romance fly out of the window.
Just who are the Fractal Monks, and what does Isaac, last of the Vavasors and custodian of the papers of famed dead mathematical geniuses Archie and Pye, want with them? How will other figures from the past also demand a slice of the action? And what other mysteries are there lurking at the bottom of the sea and at the top of mountains? The answers lie in The Riddle of Fractal Monks.
The Riddle of the Fractal Monks is published by Farrago Books.
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