‘I was beginning to regret choosing crime as the subject for my mold-breaking bestseller – the red tape was fierce.’ Today I am delighted to host an extract from The Awful Truth About the Herbert Quarry Affair, a book purportedly written by the main character in real time… How does that work? Denis Shaughnessy is […]
I think Denis Shaughnessy just invented a new genre. This is crime fiction, but it’s also a wickedly funny send-up of crime novels. It’s a wonderfully self-aware text, in which a completely not self-aware author creates chaos by writing literally whatever comes into his head and hoping the reader will let him get away with […]
‘Northanger Abbey’ reimagined: could this stately family pile really be home to Twilight-style vampires? * Perhaps the least popular of Austen’s six completed novels, ‘Northanger Abbey’ is, nonetheless, a clever and entertaining parody of contemporary Gothic and Romantic novels. This makes seasoned crime writer Val McDermid an interesting choice to ‘update’ the novel, since she […]
Remember how awful Nick and Amy Dunne were in ‘Gone Girl’? They just got worse. ‘Gone Bitch’ – one of two parodies of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling ‘Gone Girl’ – is a cruder take on the original with even more unlikeable characters. N.B. If you’ve not yet read ‘Gone Girl’ but intend to do so then […]