Crime Time FM

Craig Sisterson chats to ATTICA LOCKE about her new novel Guide Me Home, screenwriting and TV, Crime Writers of Colour and Texas.
Guide Me Home Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has handed in his badge. A choice made three years before, which served justice if not the law, means that he may now stand trial. And his mother - an intermittent and destructive force in his life - is the cause of his fall from grace.
And yet it is his mother's reappearance that may also be his salvation. A black girl at an all-white sorority at a nearby college is missing, her belongings tossed in a dumpster. Her sorority sisters, the college police, even the girl's own family, deny that she has disappeared, but Sera Fuller is nowhere to be found. A bloodstained shirt discovered in a woodland clearing may be the last trace of her. And Darren's mother wants her son to work the case.
Disillusioned by an America forever changed by the presidency of Donald Trump, Darren reluctantly agrees. Yet as he sets out to find a girl whose family don't want her found, it is his own family's history that may be brought painfully into the light. And a reckoning with his past may finally show Darren the future he can build.
Attica Locke is the author of Bluebird, Bluebird which won the CWA Steel Dagger and an Edgar Award; Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. She worked onthe adaptation of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere andAva DuVernay's Netflix series about the Central Park Five, When They See Us. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Recommendation: Alyssa Cole When No One is Watching
Craig Sisterson is a features writer and crime fiction expert from New Zealand who writes for newspapers and magazines in several countries. In recent years he's interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at festivals on three continents. He's been a judge of the McIlvanney Prize and Ned Kelly Awards, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. He lives in London with his daughter. He is the author of SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME: The Pocket Essentials Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of Australia & New Zealand.Music courtesy of Guy Hale KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson. GUY HALE

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Crime Time
Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023
& Newcastle Noir 2023
2024 Slaughterfest, National Crime Reading Month, CWA Daggers

A round up of crime fiction for June 2024 by Paul Burke.
Westport James Comey Head of Zeus
A Killing in Paradise Elliot Sweeney Wildfire
Armistice Day John Fullerton Partisan Press
Eruption Michael Crighton & James Patterson Century
Southern Man Greg Iles Hemlock Press
The Bedlam Cadaver Robert J Lloyd Melville House Press
A Divine Fury DV BISHOP Macmillan
The Little Sparrow Murders Seícho Yokomizo trans. Bryan Karetnyk, Pushkin Vertigo
The Mercy Chair MW Craven Constable
French Windows Antoine Lourain Gallic Press
In a Place of Darkness Stuart MacBride Transworld
The Revenge of Rita Marsh Nilesha Chauvet Faber
Under Her Roof AA Chaudhuri Hera
Penguin Classics Crime & Espionage - 10 books including le Carré, Shirley Jackson, Edogawa Rampo, Cornell Woolrich, George Simenon.
Paul Burke writes for Monocle Magazine, Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network, Punk Noir Magazine (fiction contribution). He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2024. His first book An Encyclopedia of Spy Fiction will be out in 2025.
Music courtesy of Guy Hale KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson. GUY HALE

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Crime Time
Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023
& Newcastle Noir 2023
2024 Slaughterfest, National Crime Reading Month, CWA Daggers

LAURA SIMS chats to Paul about her new novel HOW CAN I HELP YOU, libraries, the discipline of poetry,
HOW CAN I HELP YOU: No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.
That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo's subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a patron's death in the library bathroom offers a hint of Margo's mysterious past, Patricia can't resist digging deeper - even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.
Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession.

Laura Sims is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Looker. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, and more. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.
Recommendations
Pet Catherine Chidgey
Our Share of Night Marina Enriquez
Paul Burke writes for Monocle Magazine, Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network, Punk Noir Magazine (fiction contribution). He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2024. His first book An Encyclopedia of Spy Fiction will be out in 2025.
Music courtesy of Guy Hale KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson. GUY HALE

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Crime Time
Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023
& Newcastle Noir 2023
2024 Slaughterfest, National Crime Reading Month, CWA Daggers

ANTONIA SENIOR, writer, critic, journalist and podcaster chats to Paul about Spymasters - the book and the podcast, the Cambridge Five, historical fiction and
Spymasters podcast Writer and journalist Antonia Senior interviews all the best writers on espionage. Each episode will bring you fascinating stories on spies, covert action and more – delving in to fact and fiction, past and present. Antonia can be found on X @Tonisenior. Do please follow us on X @SpyMastersPod and spread the word. We will be grateful for any and all support. Should you be an author, with a relevant new or backlist title, interested in appearing on the podcast do get in touch at [email protected]

Spymasters Aspects of History - the book.
Mentions (no particular order): SJ Parris, George Blake, Elizabeth Buchan, Calder Walton, the Cambridge Five, Edith Cavell, Mick Herron, David McCloskey, Merle Nygate, Patrick O'Brian, Hilary Mantel, Mary Renault.
Recommendations: Precipice Robert Harris, The CIA Hugh Wilford
Paul Burke writes for Monocle Magazine, Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network, Punk Noir Magazine (fiction contribution). He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2024. His first book An Encyclopedia of Spy Fiction will be out in 2025.
Music courtesy of Guy Hale KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson. GUY HALE

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Crime Time
Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023
& Newcastle Noir 2023
2024 Slaughterfest, National Crime Reading Month, CWA Daggers

DOMINIC NOLAN chats to Paul about WHITE CITY, character, tone, London and villains.
WHITE CITY: It's 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs.
An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy. Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.
For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery.
Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house.
Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale.
She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband's disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy 'Mother' Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill's underworld.
Drawn together through the years in the city's invisible web of crime and poverty, the fates of the broken families and violent men collide in 1958, as the West Indian community of Notting Hill's slums come under attack from thugs and Teddy Boys. For Addie, Claire, Dave and Mother, old scores will be settled and new dreams chased in the crucible of London's violent summer.
Dominic Nolan lives in London. WHITE CITY is his fourth novel, following the widely acclaimed VINE STREET, AFTER DARK and PAST LIFE.
Paul Burke writes for Monocle Magazine, Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network, Punk Noir Magazine (fiction contribution). He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2024. His first book An Encyclopedia of Spy Fiction will be out in late 2025.

Produced by Junkyard Dog
Crime Time
Crime Time FM is the official podcast of
Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023
CrimeFest 2023
CWA Daggers 2023
& Newcastle Noir 2023
2024 Slaughterfest, National Crime Reading Month, CWA Daggers