Dr Forrest at Stoke Newington LitFest 05.06.2011

I’m delighted to say I will be appearing at an event as part of the 2nd annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Sunday June 5, details of which are now available at the festival website but which I reproduce below. I’ll have the special pleasure of being part of a panel of fine practitioners in fiction and non-fiction, with whom I daresay I have a good few things in common. Doctor Forrest obviously belongs more to the genre of Horror than to Crime but without doubt it partakes of crime/procedural elements that were the product of research on my part, just as Crusaders, ostensibly a social-realist or state-of-the-nation novel, also included criminal acts and their investigation in a drawn-from-life fashion. So I’m looking forward to chipping in to what I hope will be a lively conversation, with the added marquee value of the terrific recent TV adaptation of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The Serious Crime Squad
Sunday June 5 @ 6pm
Abney Public Hall, 73a Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0AS
Tickets £6. Click here to book online.
Of all genre writing, crime – both true crime and fiction – hold an enduring fascination for millions of readers, male and female, young and old. So much so that crime writing has grown much bigger than ‘genre’ can contain, making considerable inroads into ‘serious’ literature and historical research. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (recently dramatised on ITV), Kate Colquhon’s Mr Briggs’ Hat: The Sensational Account of the First Railway Murder (set in Hackney), Chris Paling’s Nimrod’s Shadow and Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, are all stunning examples. Together, this is an astonishing panel of some of crime’s most exciting writers. The Guardian’s Alex Clark chairs.