From Crimespree 21 BACK TO THE STREETS An interview with Steven Torres By Russel D McLean Steven Torres made his name writing about Puerto Rico, but his new novel, The Concrete Maze, moves into the more definitively hardboiled territory of New York in the early 90’s and packs one hell of a punch into the bargain. Your intrepid Crime Spree Correspondent (Scots division) caught up with Torres in cyberspace to discuss Hardboiled cozies, the difficulty of settings and the meaning of noir in relation to the real world. Russel: The Concrete Maze is a very different beast from your previous novels. What made you decide to move away from the Puerto...

From Crimespree 21 (Nov/Dec 2007) Alex Barclay & Michael Marshall INTERVIEW Michael Marshall: Let’s kick off with place. Location is often cited as being crucial to crime fiction, and many of the genre’s novels and series derive a lot of their appeal from the veracity and depth of their local colour – from James Lee Burke’s lyrical Louisiana to Stuart MacBride’s hard-as-rock Aberdeen. You’re Irish, and have lived your life mainly in that country – yet your novels are situated either partly or wholly in the United States, as are mine. Everyone generally assumes this is a commercial decision – but is it? Alex...

From Crimespree 21 THERESA SCHWEGEL INTERVIEWED BY BLAKE CROUCH Blake: You won the Edgar for best first novel for OFFICER DOWN…tell me about that night, that moment, and how your life has changed since then.   Theresa: That night–honestly? I felt like I’d been called up from the farm team. When I arrived at the reception, one of the first writers I spotted was Michael Connelly. I couldn’t believe it  Michael Connelly, in the same room? I was terrified to meet him  I actually snuck off to the bathroom when a friend offered to introduce us. There were all kinds of big leaguers there, and at dinner the weight of the...

From Issue 20( Sept/Oct 2007) By Jason Starr In 2005 Alison Gaylin vaulted on to the mystery scene with the smash hit HIDE YOUR EYES, which had 225,000 copies in print and was an Edgar Award finalist. She followed that up with her second Samantha Leiffer novel, YOU KILL ME, and now NAL is launching a major new imprint called Obsidian with Gaylin’s debut hardcover, the wickedly suspenseful TRASHED, a murder mystery set in the world of tabloid journalism. It’s a milieu Gaylin knows well, having worked for over ten years as a journalist covering the entertainment business (she’s currently an articles editor for In Touch). ...

Originally published in issue 19 (July/August 2007) Warren Ellis is one of the big guns in the comics biz. He is known for strange and intense comics such as Transmetropoliton and Hellblazer and The Authority. His forst novel, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN in coming out this summer. He’s been heard to say he writes 16 hours a day. Believe it. Neal Bohl: You’re a big name comic book writer, but this is your first novel. Does it feel like starting out all over again or is it more of a natural progression? Warren Ellis: Starting out all over again, definitely. I sell tens of thousands of comics and graphic novels a month, but remain largely...

From Issue 17 Shawn Ryan interviewed by Ben LeRoy I’ve been working on a theory lately. It goes something like this: if you take the area from Cleveland to Milwaukee that includes Dayton, Cincinnati, Akron, Gary, Flint, Detroit, and Chicago, you’ve got the real guts of the country. It’s the gritty belt that keeps industry—and by extension the whole country—moving. It isn’t big money. It isn’t palm trees and silicone. But it has a certain realness that can’t be found anywhere else. Shawn Ryan is from this belt—Rockford, Illinois to be specific. Rockford is a blue collar town of 150,000 that was built on the strength of the machine tools,...