Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 7

Where's the ice? Background reading on Iceland

I began to read. At this stage I was just trying to get a general idea of the country, its society and its people. Wide was good; serendipity ruled. I had done this before: I had set books in Brazil and South Africa, and Iceland is much smaller than those two countries, and therefore less daunting.

The first book I picked up was Dreaming of Iceland by Sally Magnusson, a charming description of a one-week holiday the author took with her famous father Magnus back to his homeland.

Then I read Ring of Seasons, by Terry Lacy, an American who has lived in Iceland for many years and The Killer’s Guide to Iceland by Zane Radcliffe, an excellent novel about an Englishman visiting the country and getting himself into deep trouble. Radcliffe has a way with food similes: lava-like digestive biscuits, glaciers like icing on a cake. It sounds corny, but it’s actually rather good.

I assumed that there were no crime writers of note in Iceland, which was unforgivably naïve. In fact, Arnaldur Indridason had written several novels translated into English, one of which, Silence of the Grave, had won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005. Crime writers like to claim that their novels shine a powerful light on the societies in which they are set, and I think they are correct. Arnaldur and his detective Erlendur introduced me to a useful range of fictional Icelanders.

On a more mundane level, the ‘Contexts’ sections of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides were excellent. I find the authors of these guides in particular are diligent and careful and their books are packed full of useful detail.

W.H. Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice produced a whimsical collection of poems and diary entries as payment to Faber for a holiday in Iceland in the 1930s, when the country was the poorest in Europe. This was updated imaginatively by the modern British poets Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, chronicling their own Icelandic travels in Moon Country.

I soon encountered the Iceland Review, a quarterly magazine with stunning photographs and interesting articles about all aspects of Icelandic life. The magazine is online, of course, but it’s better in its physical version.

The Iceland Weather Report was a blog by the Icelandic-Canadian Alda Sigmundsdóttir. The blog no longer exists, but Alda is well worth following on Facebook and elsewhere: over the years, she has given me all sorts of information and ideas.

The Reykjavík Grapevine is a weekly English-language newspaper with a good web presence.

I bought DVDs; I wanted to see what the country actually looked like. 101 Reykjavík, a film of the book by Hallgrímur Helgason, is an enjoyable story of Reykjavík’s nightlife. Nói Albinói is a bleak tale of the bleak life of a bleak teenager in a small isolated town in the middle of winter. Seagull’s Laughter is a sweet film set in a fishing village in Iceland in the 1950s.

I was beginning to get some idea of what Iceland was like. These are the sources I used at the very beginning: I will give much fuller lists of books, websites and films about Iceland in a future post.

I studied history at university, and I like to know the history of any country I write about. Given my intended plot for the first book in the series, this was especially necessary.

There are, of course, many histories of Iceland, but the one I stumbled across was Iceland Saga by Magnus Magnusson. This is more than a history. Magnusson takes his reader on a journey around Iceland to the locations where the major events in the country’s early history took place. The book really fired my imagination.

More about Iceland’s history in my next post.

The problem: an author in search of a book

In the Autumn of 2007 I had a problem. I hoped – I prayed – that Iceland was the solution.

Every successful author has a moment of good fortune. For me, it was right at the very beginning of my career. In 1993 Carole Blake, the ‘Blake’ of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, fell while on holiday in the South of France and broke her leg.

I was working in the City at the time, as a bond trader. I had decided to write a novel, a thriller. On the strength of the excellent advice to write what you know, I wrote a thriller about a bond trader. It was called Free to Trade.





After years of writing and rewriting, I bought a pretty box with flowers on it from the department store John Lewis, printed off the manuscript, put the manuscript into the box and sent it off to agents. Actually, I initially sent them the first two chapters plus the synopsis.

All agents and publishers have a ‘slush pile’. Nowadays, it is a virtual pile of zeroes and noughts stored in servers around the world; then it was an actual pile several feet high of manuscripts sent in from would-be authors. Since Carole had broken her leg, she decided to go through her slush pile with more care than she could usually give it, and she found Free To Trade.

Little did I know, but my timing was perfect.

In 1993 the world was coming out of an unpleasant recession and the Cold War had finished. Publishers had retrenched, sticking to tried-and-trusted authors like Frederick Forsyth, John Le Carré and Dick Francis.

But then John Grisham’s The Firm was published, a legal thriller written by a youngish American author, and things changed. White-collar crime was the successor to the spy thriller. The hunt was on for ‘the British John Grisham’. And then Free To Trade popped up.

Carole was no slouch. She applied her considerable enthusiasm to securing me publishers in Britain, America and over thirty other countries, including Iceland.

Despite my publishers proclaiming otherwise, I never was ‘the British John Grisham’, but Free To Trade was successful when it was published in 1995, reaching number two in the British bestseller lists, and staying in the top ten for three months.

Over the next ten years, I wrote seven more financial thrillers. The first three or four reached the top ten, but sales slowly, inexorably declined. There were a number of possible reasons for this: people preferred to read about courtrooms than about trading rooms, legal thrillers themselves were beginning to decline in popularity, there was a screw-up at my publisher's warehouse which meant bookshops couldn’t get my books. But during these ten years, I was learning my craft and my writing was improving.

I was a big fish in a tiny pool, the puddle that was financial thrillers, and I began to wonder how I would measure up against the Frederick Forsyths and John le Carrés at their own game. So, when my publisher decided to drop my books, I decided to try my hand at a spy thriller.


Plan B - spies
I settled on Berlin in 1938 and spent two years researching, plotting and writing a novel involving a young German and a young Briton who were friends and who wanted to overthrow Hitler.

Carole read it and suggested some rewriting: there was too much research and not enough pace. After the rewriting, it was too predictable and lacked texture. Finally, we had something we were both happy with and we sent it out to twelve publishers.

Who declined it. All of them.

Now I was in trouble. Advances continue to roll in from individual books for a couple of years after you have written them, so I had had a breathing space to write my spy thriller, but now the income was drying up fast.

Plan B had failed. I needed a Plan C. I needed it quickly and it had to work.



Plan C - Iceland
This time, I wanted to make sure that whatever book I wrote, someone would publish it.

And they would publish it because it would sell. I needed to write a book that might end up on the shelves of a small branch of Smith’s.

So I checked out my local WH Smith’s in Temple Fortune in North London. I was looking for six-inch sections of bookshelves given over to individual authors of the type I could aspire to be. Aside from the old traditional favourites – the Frederick Forsyths and the Dick Francises – there seemed to be two distinct categories of novel that I might plausibly write: Dan Brown-type stories featuring an international conspiracy, and crime novels featuring distinctive detectives. I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories, so I needed to get myself a distinctive detective.

Crime fiction is perennially popular, but that means there are hundreds of detectives out there. How could mine be different?

One approach would be to give him (or her) a distinctive job, or a disability mental or physical, or place him in an interesting part of Britain. But I had written eight novels set all over the world. I didn’t want to confine myself to my own place of birth. I needed a distinctive country.

At that moment, Iceland popped into my head. I remembered that book tour twelve years before and that conversation in the car in Germany. I should have just stopped then, gone home and started researching, but I am an analytical type, sometimes too analytical. I went home and started thinking, scribbling in notebooks, umming and ahhing.

Eventually I came up with an idea involving a policeman in Saudi Arabia. It was quite a clever idea: I won’t tell you too much about it because I might yet use it. I was tempted.

But this idea, whatever it was, had to work. Fortunately, I decided to try the idea out on friends and acquaintances. ‘Which would you rather buy, a book featuring an Icelandic detective, or a Saudi detective?’

Almost everyone preferred Iceland. They didn’t know much about the country, but they thought it was intriguing and they would like to find out more. Saudi Arabia, not so much.

So, Iceland it was.

Next, I needed a detective, and I needed a plot. More on the detective later. The plot for my first book in the series needed to be distinctive too.


A Plot
Most plots of crime novels, and most crime in real life, involve families, local communities, people who know and live close to each other. My financial thrillers had been international in nature, involving people from many different nationalities and often taking place in several different countries in one book. My first case needed to take place in Iceland. But I liked the idea of an international backdrop, something with a global impact.

Stumped.

I remember exactly where I was when I solved this particular problem. My daughter and I were on a ‘College Tour’ of US universities that she was considering applying to, and I was sitting on a bench outside a classroom at Tufts University in Boston, as she listened in to a class.

I cast my mind back to that local branch of WH Smith’s and that other category of books taking up shelf space. Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code had been published four years before with great success: it was the story of how certain facts about Jesus had been hidden for centuries. Was there a story or myth with as global a reach as Christianity that might involve Iceland?

What a stupid question.

But it was a stupid question with an answer. The Lord of the Rings.

OK, The Lord of the Rings doesn’t quite have the global impact of Christianity. But it is a story that is known throughout the world. The book was voted the most popular published in the twentieth century by British readers. The films of the book had been seen by tens of millions of people around the world. And Middle Earth sounded a lot like Iceland.

What if Tolkien had been inspired by an Icelandic saga? He probably had been inspired by an Icelandic saga. So what if he had been inspired by a lost Icelandic saga that someone had found? And that someone had been murdered. And my detective had to sort it out.

I liked the idea. I loved the idea. And at this stage, the very beginning of the process of writing a novel, the most important thing is that the author loves the idea. Readers come later.

Now all I had to do was find out about Iceland.

Dinner, elves and Björk

Last week, I told you how I visited Iceland on a book tour in 1995. I had dinner the first evening with my publishers Ólafur, Pétur and three of their colleagues.

On the way, I spotted my first tree! It was, squat, no more than ten feet high, its naked, twisted branches shivering in the front garden of a small house. The house itself seemed to be constructed of white-painted corrugated iron with a red-painted iron roof. Indeed the hill in the centre of Reykjavík seemed to be covered in these brightly painted toy metal houses, gleaming in the evening sunshine. It was all rather jolly.

We went to a crowded restaurant and ate delicious fish. By this time, I was becoming used to dinners with publishers. Publishers are by and large well-read, friendly, interesting people. The talk often revolves around books, new and old, and people. Despite the bad press they sometimes get, people in book marketing love books as much as editors do.

The person in charge of marketing my book was Helga, a lively blonde woman. She asked me whether I had heard of the hidden people.

‘No,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Who are they?’ I wondered if they were some especially hard-to-reach target market.

‘They are all around us, here in Iceland,’ she said.

‘OK,’ I said, looking around. ‘Can I see them?’

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘They are hidden people. You can’t see them.’

‘I see,’ I said. A lie in so many ways. ‘So how do you know they exist?’

Helga went on to explain that some people could in fact see these hidden people at least occasionally, people like her grandmother who had had a number of dealings with them. They were similar to elves. They lived in rocks all over Iceland, and occasionally imparted their wisdom to the more conventional human inhabitants.

I checked the others around the table. They were listening seriously. I detected a hint of amusement in one of Helga’s sales colleagues.

‘Do you believe in these hidden people?’ I asked Helga.

‘Absolutely. Ólafur is an expert on them.’

I checked the sophisticated publisher who smiled benignly.

‘Pétur?’ I said. While Helga seemed a little touchy-feely, I thought I could rely on Pétur for some healthy cynicism. ‘Do you believe in these elves?’

‘Of course I do,’ he said, his face granite. I searched for a twinkle, but his blue eyes were dead serious.

I had absolutely no idea. It occurred to me that the entire Icelandic publishing industry might be crazy. Or were they just having me on?

That’s the kind of feeling I have often experienced in Iceland

The conversation shifted, as it often does in Iceland, to the small size of the population and how as a result everyone knows everyone else. Icelanders claim that in a country of only a couple of hundred thousand people everyone is bound to know everyone else. This is patently not true. The population is similar to the London borough of Barnet, yet most people in Barnet don’t know each other. I don’t even know most of the people in the block of flats in which I live.

Yet Icelanders do seem to know each other, and if they don’t, there is only one degree of separation: they will know someone who knows someone. This is partly because Icelandic extended families are seriously large – a generation back, eight or nine children was not uncommon, which soon leads to dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins. But it’s mostly because Icelanders are furious networkers. If they happen to meet a stranger, the first five minutes of conversation is spent triangulating whom they know in common.

There really were very few famous Icelanders in the 1990s. In fact there was just one: the singer, Björk. Ólafur was pointing out how even the most famous Icelanders were down to earth, how a postman would address the president by her first name – the president was a woman at that time – and how you might come across a celebrity acting like a normal person in a bar.

‘Like Björk,’ said Helga. ‘Have you heard of Björk, the singer?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Well, she is sitting just over there. Right behind you.’

I wasn’t going to be made a fool of twice in one evening. I glanced at Pétur, who almost smiled, and refused to turn around.

But when we left the restaurant, I glanced back at the noisy group in the corner behind me, in the middle of which was a small woman with short black hair and very pale high cheekbones, laughing.

Björk.

A couple of years later, I went on a book tour to Germany. It was here I learned that despite British rumours to the contrary, Germans do actually have a sense of humour. At any rate, they laughed at me several times, and they were set off into hysterics by a small Swedish lady named Maj Sjöwall, who read to them something about the police surrounding a dog. I was leaving the event when one of my fellow authors, a German crime novelist, mentioned she had once visited Iceland.

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘It’s a seriously weird country.’

‘But wouldn’t it be a great place to set a novel?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Why don’t you write one?’ she asked.

‘I write financial thrillers,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how I could possibly write one of those set in Iceland. The country is too small; their banks are tiny. I doubt there is any financial crime there.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’

And I thought no more about the country for ten years.

This is the third entry for my blog www.writinginice.com . I'll continue to post here as well, at least for a bit.

If you have any ideas for subjects you would like me to cover in future posts, please suggest them in the comments section below.

A book tour in the land of lava and tin houses

If you ever fly to Iceland from Europe, be sure to book yourself into a window seat on the right-hand side of the aeroplane. Your first view of Iceland will be unforgettable.

My first landing at Keflavík airport was in the autumn of 1995. My debut novel, a financial thriller entitled Free To Trade, had been published in January that year to an acclaim which was both satisfying and bewildering. I was lucky: it was the right book at the right time for the publishing world, and the following twelve months exploded in the competing demands of a frenzy of publicity and a contractual requirement to sit down and write a second book. I received invitations from foreign publishers to travel to Australia, the United States, France, Norway, Denmark, Holland. And Iceland.

I was urged by my agent to accept most of these invitations, but I didn’t really have to go to Iceland. Although its population are avid readers, there are only three hundred thousand of them; it’s scarcely an important market in the global scale of things. I knew nothing about the place, but I thought what the hell? It’s only three days.

Peering out of the window, the clouds beneath me shredded to reveal the thick finger of black rock that is the Reykjanes Peninsula at the south-west tip of Iceland, pointing towards me. In the distance, bulges of larger, firmer rock covered in snow, rippled and flexed. A tall plume of smoke, or was it steam, rose upwards from a spot just inland from a small town clinging to the shore.

As the plane descended the rock became rockier, a prairie of stone, gashed and scarred. Browns and yellows and golds emerged from the black, illuminated by an unlikely soft yellow sunshine slinking beneath the clouds prowling out to sea. A single white house sat in a puddle of rich green grass by the shore, where white caps nibbled at its boundaries. A windsock stretched out horizontally.

People, there were no trees. Not a one.

The aircraft touched down on a strip of smooth tarmac several miles long miraculously brushed on to this jagged wilderness. We taxied alongside giant camouflaged golf balls, tennis balls, radio masts and radar dishes, passing two enormous US transport planes. We had arrived at one of NATO’s most important airbases of the Cold War.

I remembered reading a colleague’s country study on Iceland during my days working for an international bank. Mark had pointed out that from the US government’s point of view, supporting Iceland was cheaper than building an aircraft carrier and it was a lot less likely to sink. From Keflavík, American aircraft could patrol the ‘Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap’, searching for the Soviet Navy, keeping it out of the North Atlantic seaways to Europe.

At that time, Iceland’s international airport took up a small corner of the airbase. I went through passport control and stood by the baggage carousel, where I was met by Ólafur, my Icelandic publisher. After a warm greeting a thought occurred to me.

‘How did you get in here?’ I asked. We were, after all, on the air side of the customs barrier.

‘No problem,’ said Ólafur. ‘I’m the consul in Iceland for the Dutch government.’

‘That’s handy.’

It was the first inkling of something that was going to become increasingly obvious over the following couple of days. Icelanders never have only one job. It is a matter of pride that their nation should have all the trappings of a fully functioning country: diplomats, civil servants, authors, musicians, poets, artists, dancers, footballers. You name it, the Icelanders want to do it.

But with only three hundred thousand people, there are not enough bodies to fill all these posts full-time, which is why Ólafur doubled up as Dutch consul. In the coming days I met journalists and publishers who played in the national football league and sang in the national opera.

A year later, Ólafur was the hot favourite in the Reykjavík press for the ultimate Saturday job: president of the country. Sadly, he decided not to run.

Once through customs, I met Pétur, Ólafur’s sidekick. Ólafur was the boss: a smooth, sophisticated intellectual in his fifties. Pétur was about my age, that is in his thirties, tall, blond and austere looking, with a biting humour delivered in the most Icelandic deadpan.

Icelanders have a profound sense of irony, which combines dangerously with a rock-like reserve. You can be speaking to one for several minutes, have decided that they are shy and a little simple, before you realize that they have been gently but effectively taking the piss out of you the whole time without you realizing it. Pétur can still do that to me.

Iceland’s international airport is actually forty kilometres outside Reykjavík. The road is a long straight black ribbon pulled taught across a lava field.

After a short distance, we turned off on to a rough track and stopped by a series of a dozen or so wooden racks, about eight feet high, on which were dangling what looked like grey-brown rags. These were cod, salted and left out to dry in the wind and occasional sunshine. The resultant stockfish will keep for months, possibly years, and is a delicacy in Portugal and West Africa. Icelanders have been doing this to fish for centuries.

It was a lonely, bleak spot. I looked out over the sea of stone surrounding me. A lonely mountain, in an almost perfect cone, sprouted up a few kilometres away.

‘You see all those crevasses?’ said Pétur. I looked at the deep gashes on the rolling landscape. ‘It’s the perfect place to hide a body.’

The thriller writer in me appreciated the point. The soft English desk-worker shivered.

Pétur showed me the frozen lava. It seemed ancient, but was in geological terms brand spanking new. It had been spewed out of a volcano only a few thousand years ago.

Then mosses and lichens had grown on it and begun to nibble. They were in brilliant but unlikely colours: bright yellow, lime green, soft orange, glowing brown, a shimmering grey. Eventually the lava crumbles and creates a thin layer of soil to which grasses cling. There were a few clumps of these, already yellow at this time of year.

Later, a little further towards Reykjavík, we passed a fresher lava spew, black as a coal hole, where the lichen was only just beginning to establish itself.

Still no trees.

Next stop was a power station, the source of the plume of steam that I had seen reaching up towards our aeroplane as we had landed. The plant took the hot water bubbling out of the earth and converted it to electricity which coursed along power lines to Reykjavík. The process produced hot water, and someone had recently had the bright idea of creating a large swimming pool in the rock to hold the stuff.

October in Iceland is cold, the air was fresh and a stiff breeze bit my cheeks. Ólafur, Pétur and I were wearing coats, but yards away Icelanders were cavorting in the hot water in swimming trunks. The water there is an unreal shade of bright light blue. The Icelanders' skin was a pale pink.

This, of course, was the ‘Blue Lagoon’, images of which now daub the walls of London Underground stations and bring hordes of tourists flocking to its warmth. I had never heard of it.

We reached Reykjavík. The outskirts of the city reminded me of the outskirts of Warsaw: grey, dull, soulless.

Ólafur and Pétur took me to my hotel in Reykjavík, which was very comfortable, but housed in an unprepossessing block of grey. I had a shower. Ólafur had told me that almost all Reykjavík energy came from the magma bubbling beneath the earth, and I could believe it. I emerged from the shower smelling faintly of sulphur, ready for whatever an evening in Reykjavík held for me.

This is the second post for my blog www.writinginice.com . For now I will continue posting a copy here as well.

Writing in Ice: A new blog

Yesterday, I wrote the first post for my new blog: Writing in Ice.

Over the last ten years or so I have undertaken a ton of research on Iceland for my Magnus crime series: reading books, meeting people, and of course visiting the country many times. If you have ever been to Iceland you will know it’s a weird and exciting place, where strange things happen. Much of this I have been able to show in my Magnus series, but not all of it. The time has come to write it down.

Writing in Ice will be the story of how I fell in love with Iceland: a memoir of researching and writing a detective series set in the Land of Fire and Ice.

The blog will describe the landscape, society, history and people of Iceland as seen through the eyes of a writer researching a crime novel.

There will be posts on crime and the police, language, the sagas, volcanoes, the financial crash and the pots and pans revolution, folklore and elves, the sagas, the rapid modernisation of the country in the twentieth century, sheep farming, fishing and the Viking discovery of America. All these will relate to researching the characters, settings and plots of my Magnus novels.

I intend to show what is involved in writing a crime series set in a foreign country: how to come up with a detective, how to describe landscape, how to invent characters, how to plot and how to revise. It will be the story of how I set about discovering Iceland, of getting to know the place well enough that I could convincingly set a series of mysteries there.

I hope anyone who has visited Iceland or plans to travel to the country will find something of interest here, as will readers of my Magnus series. I will include posts on my favourite places in Iceland, a few well known, most less so.

If you would like to take a look at my Writing in Ice blog www.writinginice.com , please do. And if you click on the little white “subscribe” button at the top of the blog, you should get the posts whenever they come out; my plan is to post every week to begin with, and then every couple of weeks thereafter.

Launch Code launched

My new novel Launch Code is launched today!

What would you do if you were ordered to press the nuclear button?



When Lieutenant Bill Guth and his fellow submariners were ordered to launch their nuclear missiles in 1983, there was an argument, there was a struggle, someone died, the missiles were not fired, and the world did not end.

Years later, in 2019, a historian asks Bill, now retired and celebrating Thanksgiving with his four daughters in England, what happened. Bill won’t say. That night, the historian is murdered. Who killed him? And what happened on that submarine all those years ago?

I’ve already received some encouraging comments. Here are two:

'Deadly state secrets and deadlier family secrets - perfectly crafted, scrupulously researched Launch Code weaves an ingeniously dark and tangled web that will keep you gripped and guessing to the very end. Ridpath is one of the best thriller writers around.' - Craig Russell, author of The Devil Aspect

'Hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking, Launch Code brings to mind the classic thrillers of Alister Maclean and Jack Higgins. A well-crafted ingenious mystery, tightly plotted, compelling and contemporary, this could well be Michael Ridpath's best novel yet.' - Stav Sherez, author of the Carrigan & Miller series

Launch Code is available on Kindle everywhere. Just click this link to go to the Kindle page for your country.

Physical books are available in trade paperback in the UK, but not the US yet. I’m not sure whether the books have yet reached Australia. If you want a signed copy, get in touch with my local London bookshop, Lutyens and Rubinstein, and they can post one to you anywhere in the world. Their website is here.

I intend to publish a paperback version in the US in the next couple of months. I will let you know when it is ready.

Please get in touch if you have any questions. I hope you like it!

Amnesia published

He woke up to discover he had killed the only woman he had ever loved. She discovered it was her grandmother.



I have always been fascinated to imagine what it would be like to lose your memory. To wake up and not know who you really are. Don’t get me wrong, this is not something I would ever want to happen to me. It would be scary. What if you turn out to be a murderer? What if you turned out to have murdered the only woman you ever loved?

There is something else I have always wanted to do: write a fictional memoir covering the whole of a character’s life. Get to know a character from the inside, as his life is unfolding around him. The author William Boyd has done this brilliantly a couple of times, notably in his novel “Any Human Heart”. But i write crime novels and thrillers. How can I combine a memoir with a thriller?

I mulled over these questions for several months, but eventually came up with an answer. Alastair is a doctor in his eighties, living alone by a loch in Scotland. He falls and hits his head, forgetting everything before the age of 18. He has no relatives left in England, so Clemence, a stduent from St Andrews University and the niece of a friend, looks after him at his cottage. While there she discovers a hand-written memoir, clearly by the old doctor which starts withe the words: "It was a warm, still night and the cry of a tawny owl swirled through the birch trees by the loch, when I killed the only woman I have ever loved.” Then Clemence realises the woman was her French grandmother Sophie.

She decides to read the memoir to Alastair from when he visited Paris in 1935 and first met Sophie. As they read, they learn more about Alastair’s past, and about each other.

And so I wrote Amnesia. The idea seems to have worked.

Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger winner Peter Lovesey said: "Highly ingenious and engaging: a mystery within a mystery within a mystery, like one of those Russian dolls. I was gripped. The irony in all this is that Amnesia will lodge in my memory for years to come.”

And Gold Dagger winner Frances Fyfield said: "Scenically breath-taking, ingeniously plotted...The best thriller you'll read all year.”

Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger said: "Impossible to put down - a great read. Loved the ending.”

The initial response from the press is good too.

The Literary Review said “This is a pleasingly convoluted story with numerous twists and turns, and time shifts between the recent past and the frightening present.”

And the Daily Mail said: "Atmospheric, sinuous and elegant, this demonstrates Ridpath’s special talent.”

Because I am self-publishing Amnesia in the US, it will be available at 99c in the US and Canada until about June 7 2017. Unfortunately it will be full price elsewhere.

To find out more, click here: Amnesia

Publish and be damned. But how?

In the good old days, any writer worth his or her salt wanted to be published by a proper publisher. Publishing books yourself was possible, but you had to pay for the privilege, which is why self publishing was often known as "vanity publishing". So if you published a book yourself, you were not just a loser, you were a vain loser.

As you will no doubt have noticed, the publishing world has been thrown into turmoil over the last ten years by the digital revolution. This has mostly been very good for readers: not only do you have the choice of buying a book in either digital or physical form, but there are many more books out there to choose from, and most of them cost less than they used to.

The world has changed for the writer too, especially those, like me, who write commercial fiction. Increasingly writers are publishing books themselves, mostly on Amazon Kindle. And increasingly these self-published authors are selling more copies than their traditionally published colleagues. This is especially true of British thriller writers selling their books into the United States: Rachel Abbott, Mark Dawson, Adam Croft, Nick Stephenson, Dean Crawford, Harry Bingham and JF Penn have all done very well in the last three or four years.

Self publishing has its advantages. It allows you much more control over the publishing process. It allows you to develop a direct rapport with your readers through mechanisms like this email, or Facebook. It gives you much more flexibility in marketing and pricing. That’s fine for digital books, but although you can make print-on-demand books available, you don’t have the connections and marketing budget that a traditional publisher does to get physical books into real bookshops.

I like my British publisher, Corvus. And while I suspect that self-publishing might be the future, I’m not sure. So what should I do?

After much thought, I have decided to publish my books in the UK through Corvus (which is an imprint of Atlantic Books) and to publish in the US myself.

I am trying this out for the first time with my stand alone thriller Amnesia. This was published in the UK by Corvus on 4 May. I will be publishing it in the US myself at the end of May.

For most US readers this is good news. You see, I am able to launch Amnesia at a price of 99 cents for its first week, and to warn loyal readers (that’s you) that it’s available at the lower price. Then I will raise the price to $3.99 for everyone else.

Unfortunately, I can’t extend this offer to readers outside the US, but it should be easier for readers in Britain and Australia to get hold of physical books in bookshops.

So, if you are in the United States, look out for a blog post from me in the next week or so that Amnesia is available at the low price.

Free Book - The Partnership Track

I have finished a new novella, The Partnership Track, and I would like to give it away for free to loyal readers. It's about 70 pages.

Six candidates. One partner. One death.

It is deep midwinter. Six ambitious vice presidents of Labouchere Associates are gathered together at an isolated mountain lodge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains for a weekend of corporate mind games. By Monday, one of them will become a Partner and earn at least a million a year. And one of them will be dead.

To claim the book just click this link:
http://lsbzaz.bookhip.com/

You will also receive occasional news about my books, including new publications.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Polar Bear Killing

The Polar Bear Killing is released today. It is a novella about 60 pages long featuring my Icelandic detective Magnus Jonson and his colleague Vigdís.
A polar bear is spotted in a sleepy Icelandic fishing village, and then shot dead through the eye by the local police constable. Days later, the constable is found at the Arctic Henge above the village, shot through the eye himself. Vigdís investigates.
The story was prompted by the annual summer invasion of Iceland by one or two starving polar bears who have drifted across the Atlantic on ice floes from Greenland. They are hungry and dangerous, and are usually shot by the local policemen to protect gawping onlookers, to the fury of half the population. What would it be like to be that policeman? Or that policeman's animal rights loving daughter?
I explained the plot to my own daughter, who described it as a "polar bear justice novel".
I'm afraid The Polar Bear Killing is only available on Kindle. You may purchase The Polar Bear Killing from Kindle (UK) or Kindle US.