The ME team go to the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2023
Last week the Mushens Entertainment team travelled up to Harrogate to attend the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. We had a lovely time catching up with our authors and attending panels hosted by some of the most exciting voices in the crime genre today.
As ever, the weather was overcast and rainy, but we didn’t let that spoil our fun! We began our weekend with a trip to the festival’s Waterstones pop-up shop where we spotted copies of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series, Claire Douglas’ The Girls Who Disappeared and The Woman Who Lied, Kate Gray’s The Honeymoon, James Oswald’s All That Lives, Fiona’s Erskine’s Jaq Silver Adventures series, and Anna Mazzola’s The House of Whispers. We then headed to the main tent to watch the presentation of the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award.
On the Friday we attended the ‘Literary Crime’ panel chaired by SJ Parris with Will Dean, Laura Shepherd- Robinson, Abir Mukherjee and Jacob Ross. It was a really interesting discussion surrounding the term ‘literary’, what that means in the crime genre and whether it’s useful or divisive to categorise books in this way. That evening was our drinks and nibbles reception for Mushens Entertainment authors which we thoroughly enjoyed!
On Saturday, we headed to Kate Gray’s brunch event for The Honeymoon which featured some very delicious peach bellinis and proofs of Kate’s debut thriller.
After lunch, we attended Penguin and Richard Osman’s drinks event where we saw lots of familiar faces and were able to catch up with some of our authors, as well as fellow publishing friends. Richard was presented a Nielsen Platinum Bestseller Award for selling more than one million copies of The Bullet That Missed, which comes after last week’s announcement that The Thursday Murder Club series has spent 150 weeks as a bestseller!
We finished off the trip with the ‘When Sally Killed Harry’ panel chaired by T.M. Logan and featuring our very own Claire Douglas, alongside Louise Candlish, C.L. Taylor and Shari Lapena.
The talk centred around the domestic noir novel and the reasons why books showing the darker sides of love and friendship are so popular with readers. Claire spoke about her latest thriller, The Woman Who Lied, and her fascination with writing about situations where characters first appear to have perfect lives, but underneath the surface they harbour secrets and discontentment.
As Harrogate regulars, we always have a great time at the crime writing festival and look forward to coming back again next year!