We love our crime fiction at Kirkcudbright Book Week and there will be plenty to appeal to fans of the genre when the event runs between Monday March 4-Sunday March 10.
Crime writers due to appear include:
Monday March 4 Ryan Stark Selkirk Arms High Street 2pm Tickets £6
Ryan Stark is a Midlands-based thriller writer and publisher. His Aidan Beckett and Daley & Whetstone series of crime novels have sold worldwide. The talk focuses on the process of fiction writing. Using The Farm, his successful detective crime thriller, Ryan will discuss tweaking an original idea to create an engaging synopsis and using story and character arcs to give it colour and interest. Finally, he will look at the mechanics of expanding it into a winning outline that will engage the writer and captivate readers.
Wednesday March 6 In Conversation with the Book Folks Crime Writers Selkirk Arms High Street Tickets £8 7pm in 1994.
Publisher The Book Folks presents an evening with its best-selling crime writers Traude Ailinger, Ian Robinson and James Davidson, with the event chaired by fellow best-selling Book Folks crime writer John Dean.
Born in Reutlingen, Germany, Traude Ailinger fell in love with Perthshire during a visit to Scotland and returned to the area to settle and bring up her children in 1994. Since 2003, she has been teaching English as an Additional Language at Strathallan School in Perthshire and in her spare time became a crime writer. In 2020, The Edinburgh Murders series was created, relating the adventures of DI Russell McCord and journalist Amy Thornton.
Ian Robinson spent twenty-seven years in the Metropolitan police, the majority as a Detective Sergeant within the Specialist Operations Command. He specialised in Child Protection and was part of a Major Investigation Team that targeted abusers and investigated the murder of children. His last seven years were spent in the Covert Policing Command where he managed a specialist covert unit dedicated to the detection and disruption of organised criminal networks across London and the UK. Today, he concentrates on his popular crime novels.
James Davidson is a novelist based in Liverpool, who previously spent a decade teaching in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. He won the First Novel Prize in 2019. In 2022, he completed a master’s degree in creative writing at LJMU. His debut crime novel Outcast Sister was published by The Book Folks in 2023.
Former journalist John Dean, pictured below, has had twenty three crime novels published and is the creator of the DCI John Blizzard and DCI Jack Harris series.
It is with great sadness that Kirkcudbright Book Week Society learned of the death of crime writer James Andrew at the age of 71. James’ novels were published by The Book Folks and he was one of the authors selected to appear at the publisher’s ‘in conversation’ event. Condolences go to his family and friends.
Thursday March 7 An evening with Simpson Grears Selkirk Arms High Street 7pm £5 Supported by Scottish Book Trust through its Live Literature programme
The crime writer talks about his latest book The Counterfeit Detective, published by Rymour, an epic Gothic literary crime thriller set mostly in Victorian London in 1900 but also in 1970s England, Scotland and the United States. The book tells how an American professor discovers the diaries of John Ledbury, known as the counterfeit detective, a minor poet who in Victorian London is employed to reply to the mail that comes addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street. Through the diaries he unearths a series of murders which he solves. Simpson Grears was longlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association Daggers award for his first volume of detective stories, The Foot of the Walk Murders.
How to acquire tickets
Tickets, including for free events which require them, can be acquired via Eventbrite at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk or you can follow the link https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/kirkcudbright-book-week-2024-2757849
Kirkcudbright Book Week 