Coffee and Crime

An excellent day at Cardiff Libraries Coffee and Crime Festival with a number of the UK's top crime authors.  I attended 3 sessions during the day and loved everyone.

The first session was authors Kate Hamer and Sarah Hilary, expertly chaired by author Matt Johnson.  I've not read any of their work previously so have purchased their books to read.  As a new writer it was interesting to hear how they developed their work.

The second session was a debate about Modern crime versus Historical crime.  The authors were Cal Smyth, Leslie Scase and Gwen Parrott, again I've purchased their work to discover them.  Completely different approaches to writing from the first session, and it was interesting to hear Leslie and Gwen comment of their historical work, they had deliberately set it in times where there was less forensic processes and it had to be purely solving the case.  Really enjoyed it, I'm particularly looking forward to reading Leslie's book which is set in Pontypridd in the 1890s.

The last session was my favourite, with authors Heidi Perks and Jasper Fforde, I've just started getting into Jasper's work and I love it, quirky, off the wall and funny.  You can see why now because Jasper was very funny and I really want to discover more of his work.  Again completely different ways of working from the other sessions, with both Heidi and Jasper just writing and seeing where it leads them, sometimes things happen and the plot and the characters start to fully develop.  I was lucky enough to get my photo taking with Jasper, who is in this blip as well.

An excellent day!