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‘Sizzling Summer Reads’ Promotion
It’s with some irony that I’m writing this as the rain hammers hard on the skylight above my head… but the Top Suspense Group, of which I’m a member, is running a day-to-day Summer Reads promotion and yesterday was my day in the sun. Titles featured so far include Lee Goldberg’s Watch me Die, Vicki…
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The Killing
The Seattle-set US version of Danish superdrama The Killing begins its run on Sunday. I’m tempted to go overboard and say that the original is one of the best things I’ve seen on TV, ever. But then I’d start to sound like one of those people who go on and on about The Wire. And…
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The Top Suspense Group
Exciting stuff – I’ve been invited to join the bunch of fellow-writers who have founded the groundbreaking Top Suspense Group. It’s an online resource for readers in the fast-expanding eBook market. To mark my debut with the gang I’m launching the Kindle version of my novel Valley of Lights at the rock-bottom Amazon price of…
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After Gutenberg…
I was thinking about writing a blog post on my trickiest-ever script assignment, and was scrolling through the news section of my old website trying to locate a particular item when I came across this review of The Painted Bride from The Washington Times. The Painted Bride (Subterranean Press, $40, 181 pages) is veteran thriller-writer…
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Of Girls, Swedes, and Dragon Tattoos
If you’re interested and you get the chance, try to see Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before you hear much more about the planned David Fincher remake. That first adaptation isn’t a perfect movie by any means, but as screen mysteries go it’s a very good one. A…
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The Artisan Thriller
“Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he’d said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with.” So begins Tony Kenrick’s Neon Tough, a novel published in ’88 and set against the backdrop…
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Gallic Noir (2)
Back in June of last year I blogged about the excellent French cops’n’justice show Engrenages. Slick, stylish, seedy, complex, and wonderful to look at, it had been screened in eight subtitled parts on BBC4 and did much to convince me that in the midst of UKTV’s creative meltdown there’s still one channel where you don’t…
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The Thirty-Nine Steps
I recently went back to John Buchan’s novel The Thirty Nine Steps, the template for all modern on-the-run thrillers from The Fugitive to 24 to the entire Jason Bourne trilogy. The re-reading confirmed my remembered impressions. The book has terrific narrative velocity. It also falls apart to an utterly unmemorable end, and the story doesn’t…
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Gallic Noir
I just got back from a few days in Paris (and if that doesn’t make you even a little bit jealous, then I can only suppose it’s a place you’ve never visited yet). As soon as I got to my hotel room I did what comes naturally to every visitor to a distant city. I…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
