"A novel like a few handcuffs"

Maxim Jakubowski tells Crime Time about what's coming up from MaXcrime. It made me jump up and down and giggle and hug myself. I've now been banned from Tesco. It feels lovely, but very weird, to read stuff like that about myself. Maxim is a star.

Don't crime fiction authors get around? Here's Alexander McCall Smith on video in Canberra. And Irvine Welsh will appear in Perth on February 27th. That's Perth, Australia, while Philip Kerr goes to Adelaide. Russel McLean, on the other hand, travels all the way to Kirkcaldy on March 15th.

And, here in Glasgow, lots of Aye Write events. Allan Guthrie and Denise Mina on Saturday 13th March, Louise Welsh on Wednesday 10th, Manda Scott on Saturday 6th, and Christopher Brookmyre on Sunday 7th.

Alexander McCall Smith interviewed in The Age and says he will never employ a ghost-writer. And here, an interview from SOS Children's Villages for World Orphan Week.

Iain Banks discusses TRANSITION.

Excellent, I get to use Babelfish again. Helen Fitzgerald's DEAD LOVELY in Germany. "A novel like a few handcuffs - hard, sexy and binding. Helen FitzGerald was social female worker in the execution of sentences. Then it began to write: uncompromisingly, amusingly, badly, fast." Don't worry Helen, that word doesn't really mean badly :o) And isn't this description of the plot most intriguing? "But their verb eatingness makes their marriage a purgatory from grind and generation inability. As the three friends on a tent route by the Scottish Highlands to times correctly switch off want, go everything inclined. Krissie and Kyle fall themselves neck over head into an affair and Sarah of rock. But that is only at the beginning of the Höllentrips, with which nothing remains in such a way, as it was." Sadly, I do believe that Verbissenheit means 'determinedly' rather than 'verb eatingness'. Shame. And the verb eatingness goes so well with Helen's previous profession which is, if you remember, " social female worker in the execution of sentences." Well, I've heard her after a couple of glasses of wine and can confirm that, after being too social, Helen's sentences can sometimes be most improperly executed.