Nick Gadd's Page

He may not be a crime writer, but ...

I've recently reread Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, which overall is a grim, depressing and tiresome novel. But one scene that impressed me was the pig-killing episode early in the book. Hardy isn't really noted as a writer about violence but I found this more powerful than many supposedly shocking scenes in novels of our own day. It occurs early in the novel when Jude and his wife Arabell… Continue

I first came across Marshall Browne a few years ago when I read The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, about a one-legged detective investigating the Mafia in the south of Italy. Having once lived in a southern Italian town I was impressed by Browne's ability to portray that society, and I liked his investigator, Anders - an eccentric, introspective elderly cop with a false leg. A few years later Browne created Franz Schmidt, a German investigator with some similarities to Anders - he's a ve… Continue

This object is a Ned Kelly Award - memorably described by Shane Maloney as looking like "a sawn-off anthracite dildo" - now one of my most prized possessions since Ghostlines won the award for best first novel last night at the Ned Kelly Awards - the annual awards for Australian crime writing. On the un… Continue

Fred Vargas is a French crime writer who fits perfectly the image of the chain-smoking, cafe-haunting intellectual. Her novels (yes, Fred is a woman - real name Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) have won the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger in three of the last four years. She just won it again, for her novel The Chalk Circle Man, published in France in 1996 but only n… Continue