A Triple Bill of Thrills at West Barnes Library with @DereklFarrell @BarbaraNadel @vm_giambanco @MertonLibraries #WestBarnesLibrary

It was pretty cold on the evening of Monday 27th January but thankfully the rain stopped before our audience and authors arrived. The three authors thrilling us were Barbara Nadel, Derek Farrell and Valentina Giambanco.

When I go to events I usually scribble down lots of notes to remind myself what’s been said. Obviously I can’t do that when I’m asking the questions! I’ll do my best to remember!

All three authors have set their books in countries they weren’t born or raised in. Barbara is British but her Ikmen series is set in Turkey. Derek is Irish but his Danny Bird series is set in London. Valentina is Italian but Seattle is the setting for her Alice Madison books. I asked if this was a deliberate decision.

Barbara has been going to Turkey for over twenty years and Istanbul is a place she knows very well. It’s a society that’s gone through vast changes making it a great place to set a series.

Although Derek grew up in Dublin, he used to visit relatives in London every summer. So when he started to write about Danny Bird he knew exactly which area of London he wanted him to be in.

Valentina originally set her Alice Madison series in London but it just didn’t work. She moved it to the West Coast of America to Seattle and it all came together.

Careful research is needed to make these settings really work. Barbara was in Turkey at the time of the attempted coup. She witnessed first-hand the events and people’s reactions. Naturally, the changing political climate affects her storylines and in A Knife to the Heart, her main character Cetin Ikmen has had to retire. He’s one of the last good guys on the force who can’t be bought.

Derek knew he was sort of winging it a bit with his London setting until Barbara encouraged him to go and pound the streets of Southwark. In particular, as Danny Bird is a manager of a slightly dodgy pub, Derek was looking for an old pub he used to know that had become a gay bar. He couldn’t find it anywhere and feared it had been knocked down. He then discovered it was on the next street. It had been earmarked for demolition but the local community had saved it and it’s now a trendy pub. So not exactly as Derek remembered it.

Valentina has spent time in Seattle but for Sweet After Death, Alice Madison and her colleagues go out to the small town of Ludlow in Washington State. It’s a town with one main road and one full-time police officer and two part-timers. Definitely not equipped to deal with a murderer. It wasn’t until I finished the book that I realised Ludlow is fictional. I was so convinced by the reality of it. Valentina took inspiration from Banff in Canada and Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Washington State to create her small town.

I wanted to know how the authors have managed to keep their series going, especially Barbara as A Knife to the Heart is the twenty-first Ikmen book!

Valentina said that’s all about keeping the characters moving forwards. Also it’s important to think about timelines. Quite often a book may come out once a year but it might not have moved forward a year in the story. She has a couple of books that are meant to be six weeks’ apart but then the next one moves forward by eighteen months.

Derek focuses a lot on Danny’s personal life. In the first book Danny comes back home to find his partner in bed with the window cleaner. Now he’s in a complicated relationship with a police officer called Nick. This all helps to keep the stories moving on.

Turkey has been through so much dramatic change in the last ten years that Barbara has had no choice but to move with the times! This allows her to reflect the realities of Turkish life in her characters. In A Knife to the Heart, Ikmen is mourning the death of his wife who died during the coup. She wasn’t shot but died, like many actually did, in an accident out on the crowded streets of Istanbul.

There are clear themes in all of the books and I wondered if this was deliberate or if they appeared later.

In A Death of a Sinner, Derek has looked at reality TV and celebrity. This was a deliberate choice for him. He’s created Cartier Cobb, a monster of a woman, who’s the star of the show. But Derek wanted to highlight how unreal these shows really are as most are scripted. They’re also based on conflict which works perfectly for a murder.

Valentina saw a TV programme about a man in America who decided to isolate his family. The police were after him so he moved his whole family to a compound and barricaded them in. They’ve been there for years and there are children who were born there who nothing about the outside world. Valentina wanted to explore that in her story.

Just like certain parts of London, Istanbul is not immune to gentrification and regeneration. But instead of benefitting the poor, it only benefits the rich (also like London). This was something that Barbara wanted to highlight and in one instance in the book, it means tearing down a house of historical importance.

We only had time for one audience question (we talked a lot!) and it was a killer question! If the authors had to kill off their main characters, how would they do it?

Needless to say, our authors were horrified by the thought! However, Valentina thought that Alice would have to die in a very dramatic fashion and go up in flames. Derek had planned to kill off Nick, Danny’s new partner but was told no by his publisher as Nick gets fan mail from readers. Barbara had considered killing off Suleyman, Ikmen’s police partner, but was also told no by her editor. If she had to kill off Ikmen, he would probably be in bed, a bit drunk, nodding off to sleep with a fag in his hand. I think you can guess what would happen next!

We had a great evening with our authors. So a huge thank you to Valentina, Derek and Barbara for giving up their time to come and talk to us at West Barnes Library. And also to Sarah and Toby from the Friends of the Library who run these events with me.

And we’ll be back on Tuesday 17th March (St. Patrick’s Day) when we’ll be talking Scandi Noir? with Will Dean and Johana Gustawsson at 7.30pm. Keep an eye open on Twitter and Facebook (look up Friends of West Barnes Library) to find out when booking opens.

 

Blog tour – Stasi Winter @djy_writer @ZaffreBooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n #StasiWinter

I’m thrilled to be taking part in the blog tour for Stasi Winter by David Young. Thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me to take part. This is the fifth book in the Karin Müller series and she’s one of my favourite female police detectives. Before I give you my review, here’s the blurb.

 

The Blurb
In 1978 East Germany, nothing is at it seems. The state’s power is absolute, history is re-written, and the ‘truth’ is whatever the Stasi say it is.

So when a woman’s murder is officially labelled ‘accidental death’, Major Karin Müller of the People’s Police is faced with a dilemma. To solve the crime, she must disregard the official version of events. But defying the Stasi means putting her own life – and the lives of her young family – in danger.

As the worst winter in living memory holds Germany in its freeze, Müller must untangle a web of state secrets and make a choice: between truth and lies, justice and injustice, and, ultimately, life and death.

My Review

Stasi 77 (book 4) finished with Karin handing in her resignation. And for several months she enjoys being with her family but it’s time for her to find a new job. Perhaps teaching police cadets would be a good use of her skills. However, she discovers that her resignation was not accepted and she’s still a Major in the People’s Police. Moreover, she’s wanted back to investigate a suspicious death in the far north of the country on the coast. It means revisiting a place both she and Werner Tilsner (her deputy) have been to before. Although this could be read as a standalone, I would recommend you read Stasi Child first as there are some characters from that book making a return appearance.

This is epic storytelling. Although the suspicious death is the reason for Müller’s involvement, she’d drawn into something much bigger – an audacious escape from East Germany. I read this over the Christmas holidays. Thankfully our winter so far is not as cold as the one East Germany faced in 1978/9. David Young admits he’s taken a bit of poetic licence and borrowed some elements from the incredibly severe winter of 1962/63 when the Ostsee or Baltic Sea really did freeze hard enough for people to walk on and escape to the West. Just goes to show how desperate people were to leave the Communist regime. And this desperation comes across loud and clear in Stasi Winter.

The escape was my favourite section of the book. It was chilling in more ways than one and incredibly tense. It was easy to imagine even though it was a whiteout due to the weather conditions and the escapees camouflaged in white bedsheets. I could appreciate the muffled stillness; the waves rearing up, not to crash onto the beach, but frozen in huge chunks; the panic of getting lost. David Young has created an amazing atmosphere and I still get shivers just thinking about it.

Without giving anything away, the ending leaves us nicely set up for more Karin Müller tales. There’s still another decade of East German Communism to go. Please keep writing, David!

You can buy Stasi Winter and the rest in the series here.

 

The Author

East Yorkshire-born David Young began his East German-set crime series on a creative writing MA at London’s City University. His debut – Stasi Child – won the course prize. The novel went to win the 2016 CWA Historical Dagger, and both it and the 2017 follow-up, Stasi Wolf, were longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Before becoming a full-time author, David was a senior journalist with the BBC’s international radio and TV newsrooms for more than 25 years. Stasi Winter is the fifth novel in the Karin Müller series.