Celebrating the world of words

Deadly Landscapes

Three leading crime writers explore the power of place in their work, in a conversation about Deadly Landscapes in literature.

Gary Wright joined Kent Police at the age of 18 and worked in a variety of uniformed roles. At the age of 29, and completely out of the blue, he suffered two cardiac arrests that led to the diagnosis of a life limiting and incurable disease of the heart. Following the implantation of an internal defibillator into his heart, he was unable to continue policing and retired at the age of 30. He bought a coffee shop in Ramsgate Harbour, and spent years looking out over the sea and dreaming up stories. He now writes full time, committing those very stories to paper.

Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children's book - Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. The Waiter (Sunday Time Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series and Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures. The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series - The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) - is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

Matthew J. Arlidge is an English author of crime novels starring DI Helen Grace. In between school and university, he travelled, teaching in a school in southern India, as well as visiting Singapore and Australia. On his return to the UK, he studied for an English Literature degree at St John's College, Cambridge. During this period he won the Douglas Chivers prize for outstanding Shakespeare scholarship. He subsequently spent a year studying Film and Television Production at Bristol University. Arlidge's early career was in television production, starting at EastEnders. And in 2014 his first novel, Eeny Meeny, was published, that introduced British police officer Detective Inspector Helen Grace. Other Helen Grace novels followed, including Pop Goes the Weasel and The Doll's House.