Sunday, August 1, 2010

Weekly Round-up and PD James special

There's been some more great crime fiction stories on the Web this past week - from newspapers, magazines, and fellow bloggers. Hopefully you will all like finding an interesting article or two linked here, that you enjoy reading.

But before we get into that, the incomparable Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL turns NINETY this coming week. I was fortunate enough to interview her recently (apparently the only Australian or New Zealand interview she did in the lead-up to her birthday this year), and will share the PD James 9mm interview (which I wove into a larger interview for a feature in the upcoming issue of Good Reading) on Tuesday, her birthday.

In the meantime, I thought I would make this weekly round-up a bit of a PD James special as well, in honour of the Baroness, so I've included several stories (many of them very well-written) about her that have been in the news the past couple of weeks or so, before we get onto a shorter version of the standard weekly round-up...

Crime Watch Round-Up: PD James in the News and on the 'Net

Crime Watch Weekly Round-Up: In the News and on the 'Net


What do you think of the round-up? Which articles do you find interesting? What are your thoughts on PD James turning 90, and her impact on crime writing? Have you read any of her books? What do you think? Is India going to take over crime writing? I'd love to read what you think.

4 comments:

  1. n a review of one of her recent novels the critic Mark Lawson wrote: ‘When reading PD James you do become nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other mutha.’

    That says more about Lawson than it does about PD James. I love living where freedom of speech is protected, for it gives the fools the opportunity to reveal their foolishness.

    It's the other way around for me. When I read what passes for contemporary fiction, I become nostalgic for real characters who have interests that go far beyond "crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other mutha." Mark Lawson has a very limited range of interests.

    My favorites, obviously, are the four articles about PD James. I have read all of her Dalgliesh novels, the standalone accidental detective mystery, and her two novels featuring a female private investigator, Cordelia Gray. It's too bad she didn't write more of those.

    I am curious about the novel she's working on now.

    While I would like to see another Dalgliesh novel, I agree with her reluctance to do another if she feels she's not up to it, although, even a less than average PD James' novel is superior to 90% of the stuff that's published today.

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  2. Oh, I forgot.

    I found the article regarding Vikram Chandra's _Sacred Games_ intriguing. I may dip into that to see what it's like.

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  3. is there any chance Lawson might have said that tongue-in-cheek? It seems a ludicrous comment otherwise...

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  4. kiwicraig,

    The following quote comes from the wikipedia article about Mark Lawson:

    "In 2002, Viz ran a spoof of his Newsnight Review programme, featuring Mr Lawson engaged in a desperate search for hard-core pornography, entitled "The Artful Podger"."

    Viz is a British comic magazine.

    I don't know whether it was tongue-in-cheek, but, if it was, the writer of the article did him a disservice.

    It is a ludicrous comment, but some of the comments about him suggest that he isn't the most popular person around.

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