Festival Fever
July has certainly been a busy time on the crime fiction scene with two festivals following each other in quick succession. First there was Crime Scene 2003. This is a multi-media event with films as well as literary events. There was the usual array of panels and interviews and goodly number of CWA members were involved either as individuals or in their crime groups such as Ladykillers, The Unusual Suspects and Rogues and Vagabonds. There was also the Sherlock Awards, presented by SHERLOCK magazine for excellence in crime fiction. This year Colin Dexter was the guest presenter. The winners were: Mark Billingham for the Best Detective created by a British Author (Det Insp Tom Thorne/Scaredy Cat); Ed McBain for Best Detective created by an American Author (Steve Carella/Money, Money, Money); Jasper Fforde for Best Comic Detective (Thursday Next/Lost in a Good Book); Inspector Frost for Best TV Detective (collected by Richard Bates, executive producer of the series); and Leslie Klinger for the Special Sherlock – the award for the book which best illuminated the world of Sherlock Holmes which was Leslie’s annotated version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. To find out more about the Sherlock Awards and SHERLOCK the magazine, go to www.sherlockholmes.com
It would seem that the main attraction at this year’s Crime Scene was Janet Evanovich. Maxim Jakubowski, the literary organiser and owner of Murder One bookshop, told me that for the first time ever they had filled NFT 1 for her interview with Lindsey Davis. The length of the queue for Evanovich’s book signing afterwards bore witness to her popularity.
A week later it was the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. This is a new venture with an input from CWA members Val McDermid (programming chair) and Jane Gregory. It seemed to me to be extremely well organised and well attended. Based at the enormous Majestic Hotel, which seems to lour threateningly over the genteel spa town of Harrogate, a mecca for tight perms and gold shoes, this festival had the advantage of providing social areas where one could rest, chat, read or drink between presentations - and of course if you were staying at the hotel, you could pop up to your room for a snooze or freshen up. Another plus was that there were never two presentations programmed at the same time. You could attend them all and not miss out. This is also bonus for the less famous writers who generally get neglected if there is a star name on somewhere else in the same time slot. This was one of the abiding faults of Dead on Deansgate. And there were a lot of fans at Harrogate, too. Fans who read and, more importantly, buy books. After each session there were queues at each writer’s table. To say this was the first in what, I’m sure, will now become a firm fixture in the crime writing calendar, there seemed very few gliches and a high gloss to the whole weekend.
However, it is wearying to have Crime Scene and Harrogate so close together. I’m sure in future many writers (and indeed fans) will have to make a choice between the two. As I understand it Harrogate was deliberately placed a week later than Crime Scene so that the big publishers could bring their American authors over for eight days or so and they could do both.
As Autumn approaches both writers and readers can look forward to several other crime writing festivals including that old stalwart Bouchercon, which is being held this year in Las Vegas – 16 -19 October.
David Stuart Davies on Monday, August 1st 2003 @ 03:28 PM GMT [link]