Four days of CrimeFest begin in Bristol

Over four days, some of the world’s scariest writers and their readers and reviewers will be congregating in the centre of Bristol as part of the city’s annual crime fiction convention, CrimeFest. While their published pages are riddled with bodies and evil of the most gruesome kind, the writers themselves will be on panels talking about their craft rather than the fictional corpses they leave behind. 

Co-hosts Myles Allfrey, Donna Moore and Adrian Muller have been involved with CrimeFest since organising the one-off visit of US convention Left Coast Crime (LCC) in Bristol in 2006. The convention has grown to become not only one of the biggest crime fiction events in Europe, but also one of the most popular dates in the international crime fiction calendar.

“The biggest challenge every year is building an itinerary of 50 plus panels, interviews, etc. for more than 130 authors,” Muller tells Bristol24/7. “Rather than shoehorning them into pre-conceived panels, we build panels around the authors after looking for common themes.”

2015’s event will bring together publishers, editors and agents in sessions like Pitch an Agent, a Dragon’s Den-styled show where unpublished authors pitch their novels to literary agents.

Elsewhere, one of the festival’s biggest selling points is the Crime Writing Day, which takes place mainly on the Friday with an additional session on the Saturday. The sessions cover topics ranging from plot and character creation in writing via routes to publication to one-on-one manuscript assessments.

Bristol’s own crime fiction scene is well represented at this year’s CrimeFest, with MR Hall, creator of fictional coroner Jenny Cooper, moderating the session ‘A Woman In A Man’s World?’ on the Thursday; Fergus McNeill, who has spread dead bodies all over the city from Stokes Croft to Clifton, discussing protagonists on various panels; and MP Wright, author of Heartman, leading discussions on the art of crime fiction.

“We’ve always been surprised that Bristol isn’t the setting for more crime novels and dramas,” says Muller. “It has the feel and to some extent the look of one of crime fiction’s great locations, San Francisco: the hills, Cabot Tower (Coit Tower),  the Suspension Bridge (the Golden Gate Bridge), and so forth. And I also feel both cities are places where people come to reinvent themselves.”

Other attendees at this year’s festival include Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, who will be speaking on two panels. His visit coincides with the publication of The Star of Istanbul, which forms the second in the Christopher Marlowe Cobb historical thriller series.

Bestselling author Lee Child will be interviewing Swedish crime writer Maj Sjöwall, who in tandem with writing partner Per Wahlöö is seen as the originator of ‘Scandi-fiction’, via the duo’s Martin Beck series from the 1960s.

Sjöwall has been called the Queen of Crime – but the real holder of the title is Agatha Christie, whose books are second only to the Bible in terms of sales. Christie is represented at the convention by Sophie Hannah, who revived Poirot for the first time since Christie’s death, in her novel The Monogram Murders.

To celebrate 125 years of Agatha Christie, Hannah and Mathew Pritchard, Christie’s grandson and chairman of Agatha Christie Limited, will be in conversation with John Curran.

CrimeFest takes place from Thursday, May 14 to Sunday, May 17 at the Marriott Royal Hotel on College Green. 

For more information, visit www.crimefest.com