Well that was a busy weekend ....

 ...because it was Bloody Scotland, Stirling's annual and amazing crime fiction festival. 

It amazes me, because I have read a lot of crime fiction since I started at age nine, and these days read little else, how very many authors there are of  whom I have never heard  and who pop up at Stirling and obviously have legions of devoted fans. I generally limit myself to how much I go to, partly because it's impossible to go to everything, and partly because it's easy to get overwhelmed by things like this if you do too much in a short space of time. But mainly because it could get very expensive very quickly. But I still pick up new names and occasionally of course  a favourite writer will be appearing with someone else and that leads you sometimes to exploring their work too.

Anyway this year the OH and I turned up in time to see the Friday evening parade arriving. I didn't manage any particularly good photos of that but fwiw here's the best one I got. Ian Rankin was a guest programmer this year, hence the voodoo type effigy thing. 

Like at the cinema there's a lot of on screen advertising between features, this is the one before the Friday night panel which was all about Rebus. Ian Rankin himself, plus Gray O' Brien who had been playing Rebus on stage, and James Macpherson who apparently does the Rebus audio books but who I remember mainly as DI Mike Jardine in Taggart. I don't remember O'Brien in anything, mainly it would seem because I don't watch Coronation Street or Casualty. I used to watch both but gave up on them when Corrie got a bit too shouty and Casualty got just too soap-y. As always when listening to Rankin I find myself sorry that I don't enjoy his books more, or at all even, because the man himself is clever and funny and comes across as very down to earth and likeable. 

I went to the Rebus panel with the OH and two good friends and that was Friday night. Saturday morning we reconvened, bar the OH, for Mick Herron and Nick Harkaway. NH is the son of John le Carre and writes new  Smiley books. I have never read any and now that I have encountered Mr Harkaway think it's unlikely that I'll bother. The photo shows Mick Herron reading from his new Slough House book Clown Town. He was as charming and funny and self deprecating as ever. 

(On a related note I have just finished listening to Clown Town. The quality of the audio on Audible is appalling .It's not just me, almost every review currently on Audible mentions this, and in future I'll be buying hard copies.  As far as the book goes, for me it didn't eclipse the last proper Slough House book, Bad Actors, which remains my favourite of the series by a long way. But it was still very good; very tense and very funny and at one point I got some dust in my eye.... )

The last one I went with was a case of 'and then there were two' as it was me and one remaining friend and we went to see Elly Griffiths and Belinda Bauer.  (That's EG on the left if you don't know). I'd never previously heard of Belinda Bauer but I borrowed one of her books from the  library in preparation. She doesn't write the sort of books that appeal to me particularly, judging from the flap blurbs, but the one I read was excellent. It was called The Facts of Life and Death, and told mainly from the point of view of a 10 year old girl. She captured what it's like to be a 10 year old girl exactly ( or what it was like for me at ten anyway). Beautifully written and with a real sense of place, I found that it didn't really matter that I knew from page 1 who the Bad Person was.  I would read more I think although I wouldn't buy them, just borrow them from the library. 

This was a midday event and once it was over the friend and I drove out to a local farmshop/cafe and met up with the OH and we all had a delicious lunch before a quick scoot around the shop and then home, exhausted but having had a very enjoyable weekend.