Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail and Viper Books)

 July 2023

Sanderson's Isle is by James Clarke. 1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District. Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.

Elliott has never thought of himself as a hero. Until one dark night he meets Rebecca, a scared and vulnerable young woman who needs his help. There's a man harassing her, following her; would he mind pretending to be her boyfriend, just while she walks home, to put him off? And that is that - just a favour for a stranger - until there is a knock at Elliott's door. It's the man who was following Rebecca. He claims he's her ex-boyfriend, but it's clear that he's been stalking her. He's obsessed, dangerously so. He wants Rebecca, and will do anything to have her. When Elliott eventually tries to tell him the truth, the man doesn't believe him. The only way to save himself is to get Rebecca to explain. There's just one problem: Rebecca is nowhere to be found. And now it looks like one good deed will cost Elliott everything. One Good Deed is by David Jackson.

August 2023

When hate runs deep the innocent suffer. Constable Paul Hirschausen's rural beat in the low hills of South Australia is wide. Daybreak to day's end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. But now, just as Hirsch has begun to feel he knows the fragile communities under his care, the isolation and fear of the pandemic have warped them into something angry and unrecognisable. Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he's driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They're checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don't quite add up. Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much - a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight - but two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son's. Day's End is by Garry Disher.

I have a gift. I see people as ghosts before they die. Of course, it helps that I'm the one killing them. The night after her father's funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn't know it, but it's not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink, even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces, something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby. The thing is, it's not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Let the games begin... You'd Look Better as a Ghost is by Joanna Wallace. 

October 2023

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carre, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. 'Now that he is dead,' Sisman writes, 'we can know him better.'

Scarlet Town is by Leonora Nattrass. A rigged election. A feuding Cornish town. A suspicious death. And a perspicacious pig. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's many creditors - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston in Cornwall in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands... 

One dead Santa. A town full of suspects. Will you discover the truth? Christmas in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, to raise money for the church roof appeal. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking amongst the amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course there's also the matter of the dead body. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they read the round robins, examine the emails and pore over the police transcripts. Will the show go on? The Christmas Appeal is by Janice Hallett.

November 2023

No Exit is by Simon Lewis. Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

Robin Jarossi's CRIMINAL ACTS

SHERLOCK

Regulars at Sherlock Holmes Society get-togethers may have thrown their deerstalkers on the ground and cursed loudly at news of the BBC modernising their hero.

But having seen a preview of Sherlock at a screening this week, I can assure them that storming Television Centre with Holmes’ favourite weapons of canes, swords and riding crops won’t be necessary.

Sherlock is really very good, and co-creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have done a brilliant job.

Their 21st-century reboot is faithful to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, it’s thrilling, laugh out loud funny and has fiendishly clever twists.

Benedict Cumberbatch as action hero
The casting is even Holmesian in its astuteness. Benedict Cumberbatch has heavy dramatic roles on his CV – Hawking, Stuart: A Life Backwards – but here he’s a fine action hero, with the required disdain, charisma and energy.

Meanwhile, Martin Freeman leaves The Office firmly behind as Dr Watson. He is by turns touching and funny playing second fiddle to the famous violinist cum ‘consulting detective’. He steals quite a few scenes as the nonplussed companion, often irked by Holmes’ bloody annoying smart-alecness. Una Stubbs is irresistible as the mumsy landlady Mrs Hudson.

A Study in Pink is the first of three 90-minute films. This opener, written by Steven Moffat (moonlighting from his day job as showrunner for Doctor Who), echoes Holmes’ first adventure, published in 1887, A Study in Scarlet.

Rupert Graves as Lestrade
So we see Watson returning home broken by soldierly duty in Afghanistan, as in the original, and being introduced to the friendless genius Holmes, who is looking for a flatmate.

Watson is of course irritated and dazzled by his new chum’s presumptuousness, but they bond when Holmes is called upon by DI Lestrade (Rupert Graves), who is stumped – ‘The police are always out of their depth,’ says our hero – by three serial suicides.

Of the crime’s unravelling I can reveal nothing for fear of ruining the fun for viewers (and fear of being slipped Devil’s-Foot Root poison by someone from the Society).

Holmes’ website – The Science of Deduction
But of the update it’s safe to say Moffat and Gatiss (a star and writer of Doctor Who and The League of Gentlemen) were right to think that Holmes could survive without Hansom carriages and London fog if the essential dash of the stories and characters was preserved.

What they’ve cut is the deerstalker, the pipe smoking and the drug taking, which Gatiss points out was always less important than the sheer humour in the adventures. Updates include Holmes having his own website, logically enough The Science of Deduction.

So it’s safe to deduce that Conan Doyles’ detective was always too good to be tied down by period features. He’s survived German versions, Second World War escapades (Sherlock Holmes in Washington, 1943), and most recently Guy Ritchie (not too shabby an effort by the mockney director, as it happens).

007-influenced Score
And of course the creators had the example of other recent and very successful updates of classics such as Clueless and Casino Royale. With inspired direction by Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin, Gangster No.1) and a sweeping acoustic score (I spotted 007 composer David Arnold on the credits), Sherlock can now join the club.

After the screening, I nabbed 10 minutes with Steven Moffat and asked him how big a challenge it is to be putting brilliant words into the mouth of a genius who never says a dull thing.

‘Is it a challenge,’ he told me, ‘although I’ve got more notice than Sherlock has. He has to do it in real time and I can take several days. That’s where I make up the shortfall between my intelligence and his.

Holmes’ Deductions
‘Yes, he must always be clever and that’s one of things we’ve set ourselves, Mark and I. We’re very strict about this. In the original stories Doyle does start to get a wee bit lazy about the deductions, and later on he hardly makes any. And we’ve said, look we’re just going to have to think and think and think of stuff you can credibly do. When I was a kid that was the element that absolutely transfixed me. And I got disappointed – “I see you’ve come from Bristol, you’ve got a train ticket.” Come on, Sir Arthur, we want better than that.

‘So we all go around suggesting deductions to each other, Steve Thompson as well [Thompson has written episode three; Gatiss episode two]. My wife even came up with a brilliant one about how to deduce that someone is left-handed. So we’ve got a bank of deductions and if we get stuck we say, here have this one. We did lift some from the books. The one about the mobile phone [in Study in Pink] is quite close to the deductions about the pocket watch in The Sign of Four. I always thought that was an incredibly beautifully written sequence, so I borrowed that one blatantly and with great joy.’

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who
Moffat made some interesting points about the connections between Holmes and Doctor Who. ‘They get it wrong at the very, very beginning of Doctor Who. The Doctor isn’t the hero, he’s a senile old man, a git, he’s not very nice. And [story editor] David Whitaker says, Look, this isn’t working. And I believe there’s a memo where he says let’s make him make him more like Sherlock Holmes, let’s make him a genius, difficult but a genius.

‘So Doctor Who is deliberately patterned on Sherlock Holmes. When people ask me for a comparison I always find myself saying a very odd thing, which is that the Doctor is more human. By which I mean that he is like an angle who aspires to be human, whereas Holmes is a human who aspires to be a god. So the very things the Doctor admires and embraces, the silliness, lovability and huge emotions, are exactly the things Holmes is running away from.’

‘So Long as It Doesn’t Kill Me’
Of his workload writing six Doctor Whos, including the Christmas special, and working on Sherlock, Moffat said, ‘There is no way of balancing this. The last year has been extraordinary. I’ve had about four days off since Christmas. I work every weekend, get up early in the morning, go to bed late at night. It’s extraordinary, but it’s great fun too – so long as it doesn’t kill me.’

For pizzazz and verve, Sherlock will surely be one of the best TV crime-dramas of the year, if not the best. Who needs the CSI professional army of experts when you’ve got a British amateur genius like the man at 221b Baker Street? The game is afoot (or ‘on,’ as Holmes says in 2010).

Photos © BBC TV

Sherlock, BBC1 Sunday July 25 9-10.30pm

7 Heaven

Crime hounds who haven’t sniffed out BBC Radio 7 yet should investigate the channel immediately.

It’s a fascinating realm of great detective dramas and classic crime shows. Recently there’s been a pretty good serialisation of John Harvey’s Inspector Resnick: Wasted Years. Coming up in August is Ruth Rendell’s The Fever Tree and Other Stories (Saturday, 7 August, 11.30pm) and a whole week of PD James’ stories to mark the author’s 90th birthday, including Adam Dalgliesh – Devices and Desires (Saturday, 7 August, 11pm) and A Taste for Death (Monday, 9 August, 11am). The highlight of this week is an exclusive interview with the grande dame of detective fiction (keep an eye out for its broadcast time).

With podcasts and iPlayer it’s easier than ever to dip in at your convenience. Give the channel the once over here.


Forewarned is forearmed

Lewis recently did so well for ITV1 that they’ve just commissioned another four episodes with Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox. It’s hard to argue with nine-million viewers for the last series, but it still leaves me cold, having a bland, primetime cop-show-by-numbers feel to it.

Author Colin Dexter, who created the Bafta-winning Inspector Morse, from which this was spun, will still be consulted for the Lewis episodes, but the new shows lack the original’s depth and air of remorse (sorry about the pun).

Garrow’s Law
The Beeb has just started filming a second series of Garrow’s Law, the intriguing drama based on real legal cases from the late 18th century. It stars Andrew Buchan, Alun Armstrong and Rupert Graves and was a fascinating look at the life and times of pioneering barrister William Garrow and some very dodgy legal practices at a time when the Old Bailey was something of a judicial circus.

The Shadow Line
Christopher Eccleston has also started filming The Shadow Line for Auntie on the Isle of Man, in which he plays a drug baron. This is a six-part ‘noir thriller’ charting the impact of an underworld figure on a variety of characters. Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sir Antony Sher, Stephen Rea, Rafe Spall, Kierston Wareing and Lesley Sharp.

Written, produced and directed by Hugo Blick (Marion & Geoff). So no pressure on him, then.

Top Boy
C4 is also riding the crime wave with Top Boy, written by Ronan Bennett (who penned the film Public Enemies), about young gang members in East London. This four-parter follows Dushane, a 19-year-old street thug with ambitions of becoming a dealer, and is based on first-hand research by Bennett and story consultant Gerry Jackson, both Hackney residents. Cast yet to be confirmed, but it sounds like one to watch out for.

Spread the Word

Spread the Word: books to talk about have drawn up their short list of 10 from 50 nominated books in their search to find the best book to talk about this year. Votes cast on their website will decide the winner with the announcement being made on World Book Day 2009, Thursday 5 March. Amongst the short list are two crime novels – Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis and Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert.

Bad Traffic is the first in a series of crime novels to feature Chinese detective Inspector Jian. It began life as a response to two real life crimes: the death by suffocation of more than fifty illegal Chinese immigrants in a lorry container, and the drowning of the cockle pickers on Morecombe Bay. Lewis combines a unique and moving thriller with the vicious and topical issue of people trafficking. He finds himself not only having to deal with persuasive and nasty killers but in a situation where he is not able to make himself understood properly because of the language barrier.

In Season of the Witch, Gabriel Blackstone is a cool, hip, thoroughly twenty-first century Londoner with a remarkable gift. A computer hacker by trade, he is also by inclination - a remote viewer; someone whose unique gifts enable him to 'slam rides' through the thought processes of others.

But reading people’s minds is something he does only with the greatest lack of enthusiasm that is until he is contacted by an ex-lover who begs him to use his gift to find her stepson, last seen months earlier in the company of two sisters. He soon gets drawn into the lives of two beautiful sisters who are practising witches.

The only other crime novel to make it on to the longlist is Adrian McKinty's excellent book The Bloomsday Dead. The Bloomsday Dead is the final book in the trilogy and follows on from Dead I May Well Be (which was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award) and The Dead Yard which won the award for won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller in 2006. In The Bloomsday Dead Michael Forsythe finds himself once more drawn back to Ireland to find a missing girl. It is the only opportunity that he will have to save his own skin.