Christmas titles and novelty books are on offer as ‘that’ season approaches, but fortunately there is also a welcome abundance of crime and thrills with fully reliable authors like Michael Connelly, Antti Tuomainen and Sarah Ward to the fore, assorted domestic mysteries and, at long last, the UK release of a much-lauded and award-winning US spy thriller from the top ranks ..read more

Based on a true story? Fictional crime novels inspired by real-life crimes; Annie Taylor, author of If you Didn't Kill Her (Penguin Random House) writes ..read more

While it has become something of a cliché for crime writers to enlist real-life historical figures as unlikely avant la lettre sleuths -- everyone from Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria -- there are some such ventures which rise above the norm. And as the writer Ross Davies eloquently points out in The Johnsonian Detections of Lillian de la Torre (in Six Essays on Samuel Johnson) de la Torre was undoubtedly in the upper echelons of such ventures ..read more

THE THIRD MAN, Carol Reed, director/StudioCanal; SLAP THE MONSTER ON PAGE ONE, Marco Bellocchio, director/Radiance Films; JAPAN ORGANISED CRIME BOSS, Kinji Fukasaku, director/Eureka; LOUIS FEUILLADE: THE COMPLETE CRIME SERIALS (1913-1918)/Eureka THE THIRD MAN 4k Collector’s Edition, Carol Reed, director/StudioCanal The Third Man is a film that remains absolutely iconic – for its stylish, unsettling direction ..read more

A variety of backgrounds for crime thrillers have been thoroughly explored over the years, but Stephen Laine's entertaining outing unquestionably moves into unexplored terrain. The author is a wine expert himself, and channels that expertise into his tale of American wine specialist Dante Lombardi who has been thrown for a loop by his best friends taking his own life ..read more

It's rare that a handful of historical crime fiction titles from independent publishers should drop on my desk around the same time but that's what happened last month. From cosy to darkest noir, with more than a hint of intrigue here they are ..read more

It’s 2011, a rainy October morning in south east London. Former undercover officer, DS Max Lomax, is assigned to the murder investigation of community activist, Fraser Neal, found dead in an alley a stone’s throw from New Cross Station. Figurehead of a campaign to halt the sale of publicly-owned housing to private developers and a thorn in the side of the Metropolitan Police, evidence emerges that Neal may also have been DS Lomax’s informant, digging dirt on the dark money entering London in the run up to the Olympic Games ..read more

Our seasonal anthology, Death Comes at Christmas – a book we see as being the perfect festive gift for the crime lover in your life – actually began life as a more generic homage to Golden Age crime fiction. A very different beast to our previous, harder-edged crime anthology for Titan Books Exit Wounds ..read more

My eighteenth mystery, Syndicate, is published this week and, like all the other Dick Francis Novels, it is set amidst the high-octane world of Thoroughbred horseracing, not that you need to know anything about horses or racing to enjoy it. As with my other novels, it is not so much about the horses as the people ..read more

Murder they write and as readers we love it. We thrill at fictional tales of the darker human urges. This may be a strange fascination but crime fiction is Britain's favourite genre. Our intellectual and emotional responses to fictional crime are complex. In broad strokes, some people favour dark fiction ..read more