BEST OF CRIME with Louise Candlish (The Glass Bell Awards 2019 Shortlist spotlight)

Welcome to my latest BEST OF CRIME feature, looking at crime writers' top picks, from their favourite author and fictional detective to their best writing tip. 

Today I'm delighted to welcome 

LOUISE CANDLISH

to share her BEST OF CRIME ...

Our House by Louise Candlish has been shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Awards. The winner will be announced on Monday 16^th September. 

THE GOLDSBORO BOOKS GLASS BELL AWARDS

Launched in 2017, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award is awarded annually to an outstanding work of contemporary fiction, rewarding quality storytelling in any genre. The winner of the Glass Bell will receive £2,000 in prize money, and a handmade, engraved glass bell. The jury of ten consists of team members from Goldsboro Books, DHH Literary Agency and The Dome Press. There is no fee, or limit to the number of books that a publisher may submit, allowing both established and debut authors a chance to win. The inaugural winner was Chris Cleave, for his extraordinary Everyone Brave is Forgiven (Sceptre), the moving and unflinching novel about the profound effects that the Second World War had on ordinary citizens back at home in Britain. Last year, the award went to John Boyne for his sweeping, poignant and comedic odyssey of post-war Ireland, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (Transworld).

... AUTHORS

I tend to like crime fiction that isn’t too strict about the genre, like Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books. A sly, satirical edge is good for me. One of my all-time favourite thrillers is John Colapinto’s About the Author, which combines plagiarism and murder. Bliss.

... FILMS/MOVIES

Old movies win every time. I love a dangerously discontented housewife, preferably played by Barbara Stanwyck, and so I can’t not choose Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. I love the mood of doom, the clouds of cigarette smoke, the way you can’t help wanting the villains to get away with it.

... TV DRAMAS

I like TV crime with a legal element and also a series that’s inventive in its storytelling. It’s hard now to remember when TV drama wasn’t nonlinear, but for me Damages – set in a legal firm helmed by Glenn Close’s ruthless patty Hewes – was a game changer for its brilliant use of flash-forwards.

... FICTIONAL KILLERS

I’m a sucker for a killer who doesn’t recognize or remember his crime(s), like the enigmatic Mike Engleby in Engleby, a square peg in the round hole of an Oxbridge college who gets caught up in a missing persons investigation. Sebastian Faulks isn’t known for crime fiction, but this is a psychological masterpiece.

... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES 

Surely the most common answer, but Poirot has never been bettered, has he? The egg-shaped head, the eccentric use of English, the OCD habits. I love his sense of compassion, especially for the young and desperate. Death on the Nile was my first and favourite Poirot and I remember being very struck by his mercy, the way he allows the killer a way out.

... MURDER WEAPONS

Sorry to be Agatha Christie-centric, but I have to choose the infected pus from a cat’s ear used in Murder is Easy. Urgh. I also have a soft spot for the scene in Serial Mom (by John Waters), when Kathleen Turner’s character bludgeons a neighbourhood enemy to death with a leg of lamb. Now that’s domestic noir.

    

... DEATH SCENES

The one I find the most powerful is in The Talented Mr Ripley, when Tom Ripley beats Dickie Greenleaf to death with an oar. It’s such a stark, visual scene, just victim and killer in a little boat in the middle of an empty sunlit ocean. Horrific.

  

... BLOGS/WEBSITES

I admit to trawling Mailonline daily for ideas for new ways to torture my middle-class characters. 

... WRITING TIPS

When I was first asked to do a reading, I found I was editing the scene to make it more fluent, so I’m now a big believer in reading your WIP aloud. For dialogue in particular, it weeds out unnecessary words and unnatural phrasing.

... WRITING SNACKS

I’m keen on a mashup of snacks. I might mix together some walnuts and Maltesers and shards of Dime bar. As with reading, you don’t want the same texture and flavour with every mouthful.

About LOUISE CANDLISH

Sunday Times bestselling author Louise Candlish was born in Hexham, Northumberland, and grew up in the Midlands town of Northampton. She studied English at University College London and worked as an illustrated books editor and copywriter before writing fiction. She is the author of thirteen novels, including the thriller Our House, winner of the British Book Awards 2019 Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and shortlisted for several other awards. It was a #1 bestseller in paperback, ebook and audiobook and has been optioned for TV by Red Planet Pictures. Those People, a novel about the neighbours from hell, was published in hardback in June 2019.

Find Louise Candlish on her website and on Twitter - @louise_candlish

About OUR HOUSE

Publisher's description

On a bright January morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought in Trinity Avenue. Nothing strange about that. Except it is your house. And you didn’t sell it.

When Fi arrives home to find a removals van outside her house, she is completely blind-sided. Trinity Avenue has been her family’s home for years. Where are all their belongings? How could this have happened? Faced with a new family standing in their kitchen, Fi desperately calls her ex-husband, Bram, who owns the house with her. He’s disappeared… 

The more Fi uncovers, the more she realises their lives have been destroyed by a nightmare of their own making. A devastating crime has been committed, but who is the guilty party? What has Bram hidden from her – and what has she hidden from him?

Our House was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2018.

Look out for more BEST OF CRIME features coming soon.

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Working in the Music Business - a guest post by Louise Voss

Today, I am delighted to welcome Louise Voss to Off-the-Shelf Books to talk about how working in the music business has influenced her novels. The Last Stage was published by Orenda Books on 11 July 2019.

Working in the Music Business
(and how it influenced my novels)
By Louise Voss

I worked in the music business in the 90s, and it was such a profound experience that it has since featured in both my first and last novels.  The main characters in both To Be Someone and The Last Stage, Helena and Meredith respectively, were female popstars from successful 80s bands who subsequently had to come to terms with some of the less pleasant aspects of fame. 

I was originally planning to make the latter a sort of sequel to the former, a sort of ‘twenty years later’ story, since that’s almost the amount of time between publication dates, but as The Last Stage evolved, it became clear to me that the two women were very different, in both personality and appearance as well as their respective music tastes, so I made Meredith into a brand-new character instead. But the band threads remain in both novels, albeit very differing stories – The Last Stage is a crime novel, whereas To Be Someone was contemporary fiction. Unlike both Helena and Meredith, however, I was never a performer – perish the thought – but working with bands both big and small for years gave me a real insight into the joys and pitfalls of success, and how an act can go from being a bunch of kids messing around with guitars to selling out Wembley Stadium.

It was 1992, I was in my early 20s and a music nut, going to as many gigs as I could while working in a London school of architecture as an administrator during the day.  It had literally never occurred to me that I could make a career doing what I loved; not until someone told me about an employment agency specialising in jobs in music, so - in those pre-internet days - I rang them up. They told me to write in. The only problem was, the agency was (and still is) called Handle Recruitment, and I addressed my letter to Handel, after the composer. Talk about overthinking! 

Fortunately they didn’t write me off as illiterate. I got my first industry job, PA to the International MD of Virgin Records, joining right after Richard Branson sold out to EMI for a billion dollars. Whilst I was disappointed that I’d missed out on his legendary parties, I was also relieved to escape the potential fate of many female employees: being lifted up round the waist by him and chucked into a nearby swimming pool…

There were many other parties though, and the job immediately lived up to expectation. Record launches, leaving dos, album playbacks, aftershow bashes, awards ceremonies… The record business in the 90s was in my memory a strange mix of big business and quirky debauchery. Hospitality budgets were eye-wateringly huge. I remember the Christmas presents bought for some of the bigger artists – thousand-pound silk dressing-gowns from Harrods, expensive sound systems. Like they needed them! I used to think. 

People were mostly lovely, although with a few notable egos. One female exec had risen up through the ranks (helped in no small part by marrying her boss). Part of my job was organising the annual conference abroad for international executives, and once I dared query something she’d suggested. She shouted at me: ‘How DARE you question me! I’ve been running this company for twenty years!’ Not only did she not run the company, but she was 34 at the time…. 

A different boss I had at another record company famously got banned from British Airways for saying something so offensive to a stewardess that I still can’t repeat it without blushing. This was the company where the in-house drug dealer did regular Friday afternoon rounds of the office…so I won’t name that one! 

I loved working at Virgin. Not only did I make lots of friends I’m still in touch with, but I met my first husband there. Later in the 90s we relocated to New York to work for a Virgin subsidiary called Caroline Records. It was so interesting, going from working with huge bands at the top of their game, to brand-new starry-eyed acts whose first albums had just been signed. We promoted Ben Folds Five and the Chemical Brothers at the start of their careers, I also marketed Frank Sinatra’s grand-daughter’s band, and an act called The Del-Rubio Triplets, identical octogenarians in short skirts and cowboy hats…never a dull moment.  

I took it all for granted, the business flights and freebies, seeing bands every night, the backstage passes for all the Virgin and EMI acts who came to town. I went to Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Gardens, Peter Gabriel’s flat in New York, had my photo taken with Blur, dinner with the Smashing Pumpkins and a hug from Lenny Kravitz. 

After we moved back to the UK, I became a director of Sandie Shaw’s company, which was another brilliant job – Sandie was great fun to work with. 

It’s only really now I look back that I think how extraordinary it all was, what an amazing experience to have. I’m not surprised it’s cropped up more than once in my books, and more than likely will again in some guise or another.

            

About Louise Voss

Over her eighteen-year writing career, Louise Voss has had eleven novels published – five solo and six co-written with Mark Edwards: a combination of psychological thrillers, police procedurals and contemporary fiction – and sold over 350,000 books. Her most recent book, The Old You, was a number one bestseller in eBook. Louise has an MA (Dist) in Creative Writing and also works as a literary consultant and mentor for writers at www.thewritingcoach.co.uk. She lives in South-West London and is a proud member of two female crime-writing collectives, The Slice Girls and Killer Women.

Find Louise Voss on her website and on Twitter - @LouiseVoss1

About The LAST STAGE

The Last Stage

By Louise Voss

Published by Orenda Books (11 July 2019)

Publisher's description

A violent and horrific incident forces a young woman to go into hiding, at the peak of her career as lead singer of an indie pop band. Years later, strange things start to happen and it becomes clear that some know who she is…

At the peak of her career as lead singer of a legendary 1980s indie band, Meredith Vincent was driven off the international stage by a horrific incident. Now living a quiet existence in a cottage on the grounds of an old stately home, she has put her past behind her and come to terms with her new life.

When a body is found in the manicured gardens of her home, and a series of inexplicable and unsettling events begins to occur, it becomes clear that someone is watching, someone who knows who she is … Someone who wants vengeance.

And this is only the beginning…

Read a snippet of my review: 'The Last Stage contains a murder mystery to solve and secrets to reveal. There's even some history in there too. It's funny, smart and highly entertaining!'

Read my full review here.

Follow the Blog Tour

BEST OF CRIME with Karen Hamilton

Welcome to my latest BEST OF CRIME feature, looking at crime writers' top picks, from their favourite author and fictional detective to their best writing tip. 

Today I'm delighted to welcome 

KAREN HAMILTON

for her The Perfect Girlfriend blog tour

to share her BEST OF CRIME ...

... AUTHORS
Emily Barr. I love the way she combines travel and thriller writing.

... FILMS/MOVIES
Gone Girl (just loved it)!

... TV DRAMAS
The Affair. I loved the tension, the flashbacks in time and the different points of view.

... FICTIONAL KILLERS
The Bone Collector in Fiona Cummins Rattle and The Collector. Chilling and compelling.

... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES 
Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series.

... MURDER WEAPONS & DEATH SCENES
I've put these next two categories together as nearly all the murder and death scenes in Desperate Housewives were brilliantly done. And everything by Agatha Christie, my favourite being Murder on the Orient Express.

  

... BLOGS/WEBSITES
I don't have any specific go-to ones as I find my research varies. There are so many interesting ones and I try to limit my time online (as much as possible) as I'd never write otherwise!

... WRITING TIPS
Write every day (if possible) even when you don't feel like it.

... WRITING SNACKS
Tea. Chocolate. Marmite on Toast.

About KAREN HAMILTON

Karen Hamilton spent her childhood in Angola, Zimbabwe, Belgium and Italy, and developed a love of travel through moving around so much. This led her to a career as a ight attendant, and it was in the air that she thought of the idea for her debut thirller THE PERFECT GIRLFRIEND, which aims to explore not only obsession, but also the true faces behind those who go to work in uniform.

Karen is a recent graduate of the Faber Academy, and has now put down roots in Hampshire to raise her young family with her husband.

Find Karen Hamilton on her website and on Twitter - @KJHAuthor

About The Perfect Girlfriend

Publisher's description

Juliette loves Nate. The fact that he’s broken up with her doesn’t change that.

She has a plan to win him back, starting with training as a ight attendant for the airline where he works as a pilot, so she can keep a closer eye on him. Twisting the self-help books she’s read, she takes the mantra ‘in charge of you own destiny’ to new extremes.

She is the perfect girlfriend. And she'll make sure no one stops her from getting exactly what she wants - the perfect boyfriend, the perfect life, the perfect ending. 

Read a snippet of my review

'The Perfect Girlfriend is a brilliant page-turning tale of obsession - think Fatal Attraction meets Misery! There's a fine line between love and hate.'

To read the rest of my review, click here.

The Perfect Girlfriend was published by Wildfire Books on 1 March 2018.

Look out for more BEST OF CRIME features coming soon.

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BEST OF CRIME with Holly Seddon

Welcome to my latest BEST OF CRIME feature, looking at crime writers' top picks, from their favourite author and fictional detective to their best writing tip. 

Today I'm delighted to welcome 

HOLLY SEDDON

to share her BEST OF CRIME ...

... AUTHORS

Arthur Conan Doyle. I absolutely love our crop of modern crime writers but I find reading Sherlock Holmes stories so comforting as well as constantly surprising. My husband bought me a huge compendium of Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works and it’s as big as a bus. I’m working through it very slowly and savouring the hell out of it.

... FILMS/MOVIES

Rear Window. Anyone who has read my second novel will understand just how much of an influence this was. My middle son and I are obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock. We love the films but also his ingenious TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents… which ran for about a million years and featured a short twisty TV play each episode. 

... TV DRAMAS

The Killing. There have been many other Scandi crime series that I’ve loved, but this was the very first I experienced and it blew me away. I think this was the first time in our ten-year marriage that my husband and I watched a murder mystery together. It felt like an icy blast of refreshing air and, looking back, I can now see what an effect Sarah Lund had on my characters.  

... FICTIONAL KILLERS

Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. If you’ve watched this iconic series (and if you haven’t, I implore you to!) you’ll know which killing in particular made me say this. Silvio was one of my favourite characters anyway, so dry and blunt but always human. I wept watching this scene. 

... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES 

Hercules Poirot. I’m a sucker for a brilliant jerk, and Poirot is the best of the best. Even though he can be a total arse, you forgive him his pomposity because he’s always three steps ahead and because he’s such a snappy dresser. 

... MURDER WEAPONS

Spike of ice. I’m a big fan of weapons that don’t leave a trace and love this classic idea of a weapon that simply melts away. 

    

... DEATH SCENES

*spoiler alert*

Han Solo. A collective gasp rang through the cinema when I watched The Force Awakens, followed by sobbing (mostly mine). Although I lost interest in Game of Thrones after series one, I also loved how it killed off big characters early doors. It’s brave and thrilling when that happens.  

... BLOGS/WEBSITES

The British Newspaper Archive. I recently treated myself to an annual subscription and it’s an absolute treasure trove! All human life is there, in its ugliness and its joy. It’s incredibly useful for historical research, a wonderful way to see the concerns of the time as well as learn patterns of popular words, terms and names. And of course it’s a rich vein of inspiration for plots. 

... WRITING TIPS

Take a break. If you’re getting bogged down in detail, if you’re trying to write yourself out of a plot hole, if you don’t quite believe in your characters, if you’re writing words just to hit a daily target and you’re not really feeling any of them… take a break. Put it down, go for a walk, take a few days off without thinking about the book. If you’re minted, book a last minute holiday! I used to fall into the trap of over-writing and losing all perspective. Now I’m precious about time away from my manuscripts and (in terms of re-writing guff) it’s more efficient that way.   

... WRITING SNACKS

Kaas blockjes (cheese blocks). I live in the Netherlands, which is cheese mad and every supermarket plus plenty of corner grocery shops sell tubs of cheese blocks. Dutch is a wonderfully literal language and you can generally choose between ‘jong kaas blockjes’ (literally young cheese blocks – mild and deliciously rubbery) or ‘oud kaas blockjes’ (you guessed it, old cheese blocks – mature, crumbly and tangy). I dip them in mustard like a proper Dutchie. 

About HOLLY SEDDON

Holly Seddon is a full time writer, living slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam with her husband James and a house full of children and pets. Holly has written for newspapers, websites and magazines since her early 20s after growing up in the English countryside, obsessed with music and books. 
Her first novel TRY NOT TO BREATHE was published worldwide in 2016 and became a national and international bestseller. 
Her second novel DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES was published in July 2017.

Find Holly Seddon on her website, on her Facebook page and on Twitter - @hollyseddon

About DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES

Publisher's description

Robin and Sarah weren't the closest of twins. They weren't even that similar. But they loved each other dearly. Until, in the cruellest of domestic twists, they were taken from one another. 

Now, in her early 30s, Robin lives alone. Agoraphobic and suffering from panic attacks, she spends her days pacing the rooms of her house. The rest of the time she watches - watches the street, the houses, the neighbours. Until one day, she sees something she shouldn't...

And Sarah? Sarah got what she wanted - the good-looking man, the beautiful baby, the perfect home. But she's just been accused of the most terrible thing of all. She can't be around her new family until she has come to terms with something that happened a long time ago. And to do that, she needs to track down her twin sister.

But Sarah isn't the only person looking for Robin. As their paths intersect, something dangerous is set in motion, leading Robin and Sarah to fight for much more than their relationship...

Don't Close Your Eyes was published by Corvus on 6 July 2017.

Look out for more BEST OF CRIME features coming soon.

Click here to read more BEST OF CRIME features.