Andrew Taylor

The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican

4 February 2023 9:00 am

Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s thrilling mission to save the lives of 6,500 Jews and Allied soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome doesn’t quite get the memorial it deserves

Whodunits shouldn’t be dismissed as a guilty pleasure

28 May 2022 9:00 am

What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself,…

For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

22 January 2022 9:00 am

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…

Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive

9 October 2021 9:00 am

It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…

Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed

21 August 2021 9:00 am

Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…

Older and grumpier: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin, reviewed

17 October 2020 9:00 am

By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the…

Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed

25 July 2020 9:00 am

Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…

Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed

4 July 2020 9:00 am

It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…

A choice of classic crime fiction

20 June 2020 9:00 am

A guide to reading in lockdown. My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first…

Brexit has at least inspired John le Carré — his thriller on the subject is a cracker

26 October 2019 9:00 am

Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in…

Yukio Mishima posing in Tokyo in 1970. Credit: Getty Images

Capers in crime: Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, reviewed

3 August 2019 9:00 am

Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and…

Nights at the Lyceum: Shadowplay, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed

8 June 2019 9:00 am

‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He…

Murder in the basement: The Language of Birds, by Jill Dawson, reviewed

20 April 2019 9:00 am

Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the…

Philip Kerr, photographed in Paris in 2012. Credit: Getty Images

Farewell Bernie Gunther: Metropolis, by Philip Kerr, reviewed

30 March 2019 9:00 am

Philip Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, was published 30 years ago. From the start, the format was a…

Sadie Jones’s modern morality tale

9 March 2019 9:00 am

The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point.…

Credit: Getty Images

Where would we be without crime’s heavies? Muscle, by Alan Trotter, reviewed

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would…

Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…

Kett refuses the King’s pardon on Mousehold Heath. Credit: Getty Images

Kidnapped by Kett: Tombland, by C.J. Sansom, reviewed

20 October 2018 9:00 am

Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as…

Sebastian Faulks (Rex Features)

Hoping to find happiness: Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed

8 September 2018 9:00 am

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon…

Give me Shakespeare’s Macbeth over Jo Nesbo’s any day

14 April 2018 9:00 am

It must have seemed a good idea to someone: commissioning a range of well-known novelists to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for…

Corpses, clues and Kiwis in Ngaio Marsh’s posthumous novel

24 March 2018 9:00 am

Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even…

A crime novel that continues to puzzle

25 November 2017 9:00 am

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students…

Apostle of gloom

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…

A blast from the past

9 September 2017 9:00 am

If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…

Crime pursues the crime writer

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection…