A travel, lifestyle and reviews blog by Dave Lancaster

Kidnappings and political trappings: Rediscovering Gregory Mcdonald’s Snatch via Hard Case Crime

Wonderfully adept at weaving in new characters, Mcdonald takes a simple melody and orchestrates it into a cacophony of noise. It demands your attention.

Requiem for the Detective Novel: The case for Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 masterpiece The Pledge

What really happens to a policeman who can’t solve his most important case? What becomes of a pillar of society whose foundations are crumbling?

Your ticket to an unforgiving Australian outback: The Dry by Jane Harper

Kiewarra hasn’t seen a cloud for two years but it’s been drowning in sin for generations.

Summer Before The Dark: Writing, alcohol and exile with literature’s émigrés in 1930s Belgium

They read, they write, they drink, they have affairs, they probe, they hide, they hurtle towards their own oblivion, their lives “lived out, in order to be described”.

The mystery of the missing crime novel: Sinner Man by Lawrence Block

Half a century in the making, Sinner Man is one of crime fiction’s most exhilarating rediscoveries.

Album review: The Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome

The Stones aren’t just covering these songs; they’re reliving them, getting fuelled by them and translating them into their language.

A travel, lifestyle and reviews blog by Dave Lancaster

The hardboiled Bond screenplay that never was… Donald E Westlake’s lost novel Forever and a Death lives another day

A fractured woman finds strength via sin in Dennis Lehane’s riveting Since We Fell

The Judge and His Hangman: When the reader becomes a pawn in a crime writer’s wicked game

A desert trip to cherish: Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand is an oasis of literary ideas