The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August 2008. I had a written a novel, Typhoon, in which disenfranchised Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province riot against the Han government. By coincidence, a few days before publication, large numbers of Uighurs started doing
What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of
Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in
Talk about timing. Just as Robert Harris’s cautionary tale about the perils of meddling with the financial markets was hitting the shelves, Greece was teetering on the edge of default and Swiss Bank UBS announced that unauthorised trading by one of the company’s investment bankers had led to $2.3 billion worth of losses. Harris has
Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of
Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders
On a damp spring evening in 1955, Ian Fleming returned home to find his wife, Ann, hosting a salon at their house in Victoria Square. Raucous laughter was emanating from the drawing-room downstairs. One by one, the cream of London’s literati — Cyril Connolly among them — were reading aloud passages from the Bond novels