Granite Noir

 

Granite Noir is the annual crime writing festival held in Aberdeen. I've often thought vaguely about going to it, as I've thought about going to its sister festival Bloody Scotland in Stirling without ever quite getting around to it. This year it was digital, and all the sessions were streamed free. As a result  I had no excuse not to 'go', so I had a look through the brochure and settled on three sessions to watch. It was coincidental that that meant one each day, but I was pleased it worked out that way because I find these on-line things can be quite tiring if you do too much at once. 

As far as I am aware most if not all of the sessions are available to watch on YouTube,  I haven't checked but sticking Granite Noir 2021 in the YouTube search box should throw them up if they are there. 

I had two hits and a miss which isn't a bad strike rate and the miss was on Sunday so it didn't put me off going to the other two. Friday evening was a discussion with Ian Rankin and Stuart McBride called 'The police procedural is dead; long live the police procedural'. I enjoyed this very much. Rankin and McBride obviously know one another well and there was lots of banter - this perhaps underlined the weakness of digital events since this would have been easier had they - and the audience - been sharing the same space. Oddly enough I don't read either of these writers much; I gave up on McBride because he was too gory for my taste and I've never really 'got' Rankin. They both seem very nice people though, and very funny.

Saturday was Val McDermid and a publisher who specialises in reprinting classic crime novels discussing Josephine Tey with particular reference to her book Miss Pym Disposes. MPD was always my favourite Tey book, and my battered Penguin green crime edition has survived various ruthless culls of my crime fiction collection, so I was pleased to see my judgement confirmed by the 'Queen of Crime'. I already knew quite a bit about Tey but I learned lots more from this session and came away wanting to make time to reread some of her books so that's a good thing. 

Sunday promised more than it delivered; it was a discussion panel of three women writers, two of them writing books set in Scandinavia. I'd chosen it for the scandi-noir vibe but didn't get much out of it. All of their books it seemed were psychological thrillers, which is fine if that's what you like, but I don't much. The discussion was dominated by the one English writer who was keen to jump on any question directed at all three and get her contribution in first, and at great length.  I'll be giving her books a wide berth simply because I took against her which is horribly unfair and unjust, but then so is life. 

I'm sort of glad I didn't have to travel to Aberdeen and spend money on travel and accommodation for this, but equally if it had been a live event I would have gone to more sessions and there would have been a lot of scope for meeting people and discussing things. So I haven't ruled out going in person when these things are allowed and safe again. Meanwhile, the internet was my friend!