London Book Fair here we come

The industry's UK event of the year. It's a few years since I was there; last year's plans were scuppered by family bereavement, so I'm extra-excited. I'm especially looking forward to seeing several people whom I email regularly, but have never actually met. In one or two cases, I know them so well this state of affairs is very strange.

Despite email, texting, Twitter and blogs, you can't beat a good old-fashioned face-to-face, so vive London Book Fair.

New way to avoid work

I’ve been so busy editing recently I’ve missed the time to blog. To anyone visiting, apologies.

I’ve also been occupied learning the art of tweeting, thanks to a friend of mine, Amanda at Tigerfish PR. (@AmandaTigerfish.) I can see it’s going to become addictive for me in much the same way as email. Less time to spend on writing, critiquing and editing perhaps, but it’s great to belong to a network of people with related interests, isn’t it. I’ve already learnt lots of useful stuff that I’d have otherwise missed; about a fire in a local restaurant I might have been patronising this weekend – not now, sadly ­– a link to a surprising if enjoyably vicious blog from a writer I know, news from a colleague and a very good in-joke for tennis fans.

Yes, there are some rubbishy tweets, the status reporters ‘just had breakfast’ and ‘went to the shops today’ that non-devotees scoff about. Some from intelligent people you wouldn’t expect it of, too, who are obviously addicted to sharing their every thought with their followers. Then there are others who series-tweet, that’s annoying; never mind the tweets that are so full of links it’s impossible to tell what they’re actually about. Oh rats, this has turned into a grumble, not what I intended. But the good stuff outweighs the bad by far, and if certain twitterers get on the nerves, that’s what the ‘Unfollow’ button’s for. By the way, I do like HooteSuite as a format for managing Twitter, it’s much easier to work with than Twitter itself and you can feed in streams from other social media networks too, for extra convenience.

To aid me in both my email and Twitter addiction, I’m going to bite the bullet and get a smartphone. But which one? Given my main use will be email, and I use POP3 accounts on my PC, I’ve been told the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 has my kind of smarts. It is super-fast for email, apparently, and condenses attachments to allow me to download them quickly. But loads of people recommend iPhone too. And you can play SkyGo on it, meaning I can watch tennis on the move…tempting. But apparently I’d have to install iTunes on my PC to get synchronicity, and I already have minor incompatibility problems with emails from Mac and iPhone users, so that’s a bit off-putting. Advice anyone?

Meanwhile, back to the editing. I’ll just check HootSuite first… @deawriter

Farewell to the creme de la crime

When I heard that Reginald Hill, one of my very favourite crime writers, had died back in January I felt keen regret that there wouldn’t be any more novels coming from that particular pen.

By all accounts he was a great guy – I only met him once, at a crime-writers convention, where he was very jovial and friendly to a rather awestruck fan – and Martin Edwards, another favourite crime writer of mine, who knew him well writes rather movingly of him as a generous man, loyal to his friends and family and a great personal inspiration.

Over the years I’ve read a lot of Hill’s books, though by no means all, and of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels my favourite is Dialogues of the Dead. To my mind, this took the detective duo to an altogether different level and one I found exciting and fascinating. Anyone who’s read it will know what I mean; the atmosphere and characters transcend the more prosaic pace of the earlier novels and the wordplay it contains is astounding. Erudite, yes. Un-putdownable, also yes.

I read The Stranger House a couple of years ago, which radiates the sinister spookiness of the later Dalziel and Pascoe novels but is a standalone story. It’s a complex historical whodunit, despite being set in present day Cumbria, and in subtle menace and the impact of the past on the present has something in common with Martin Edwards’ own Lake District cold-case detective series. Loved it.

Another favourite is On Beulah Height. The story is intriguing and I especially liked the way it was interleaved with Pascoe’s daughter’s illness and how this plays out in her mind. Given that the main story is themed around a threat to children, with water a constant leitmotif, threading through the parallel viewpoint the tale of a little girl who is trapped by a nix, a malevolent water sprite, is genius.

I enjoyed Hill’s Joe Sixsmith series of novels, too. Private eye Joe sings in a choir, defers to his scary Aunt Mirabelle, lives in Luton and has a cat called Whitey. Joe himself is black, and Reginald Hill has no problem conveying this sardonic, self-deprecating and very appealing character, and taking one or two sly kicks at casual racism and modern injustice on the way. I love the humour and I’m sure many others do, too; I know my crime-mad dad does. A great shame Hill only wrote five and now there’ll be no more! Wah!

So, when I was looking for something else on the shelves of my local WH Smith last week and came across Hill’s last-published novel The Woodcutter, I was happy to buy it and put the biography of Roger Federer I’m reading on hold, fascinating though it is. I’m now some way in and was delighted to see that the first few chapters actually form part of a prologue. Who says prologues are bad style and not to be encouraged in new writers? Some of our reviewers hold this view, and no doubt for good reasons, but if Reginald Hill can do it, well, that’s an example to aspire to, by my reckoning.

A postscript here. I decided at the weekend to lend my copy of On Beulah Height to my friend, a crime fiction fan. I flicked to the title page to check it had my name in and discovered it did indeed: it had a hand-written dedication from the great man himself, garnered at that convention, no doubt. Needless to say, I found something else for my friend, and that particular book remains firmly on my bookshelf.