Fabulous Steampunk Mechanical Cheetah, by Andrew Chase.

This superb and inspirational mechanical cheetah measures 24″ high and 50″ nose to tail.

She was created by Andrew Chase – http://www.andrewchase.com.

Apparently, she took about 60 hours to build and is constructed from electrical conduit, transmission parts and 20 gauge steel.

The short story ‘A Christmas Crisis’ was posted on the JustGiving site for December 2009 and January 2010 in order to raise money for the sick children of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The story raised £350, which far exceeded my expectations for such a modest fund raising project.

For all those who were kind enough to donate and leave such wonderful and heart warming messages, I send my love and deepest thanks. May your new decade be filled with good health, sufficient wealth, warm laughter and love.

Today, crime writing is like a city that has grown into a huge international metropolis.  World famous edifices, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976), who gave us Miss Marple and HerculePoirot, still stand tall alongside dozens of more contemporary, well-known authors like Ian Rankin and P D James.  In addition, hundreds of crime books are published each year from the sprawling suburbs of newbie writers.  It is an exciting and thriving genre feeding an insatiable readership.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

‘Crime writing’ is, of course, a euphemism.  Stealing a packet of sweets from the corner shop is technically a crime, but as a plot the theft would no doubt leave readers feeling somewhat shortchanged (no pun intended).  But stealing a packet of sweets then gunning down the shop owner and going on to slaughter every other corner shop owner in the area.  Now we have crime.  Make no mistake, most crime writing is about murder, whether it’s packaged as a whodunnit, legal, forensic or police procedural, spy novel or psychological suspense thriller.  Whatever the category, somebody usually has to die.

But the murder is only half the story.  A good crime needs to be solved and whether it is a book, film or television series, it is the puzzle within the plot that hooks, enthralls and keeps us guessing.  Even if it is an ‘open crime’ in that we are privy to the identity of the murderer, we are still happy to watch the clues unfold.  We might know what the picture looks like, but watching the jigsaw being assembled by our favourite detectives continues to fascinate.  Readers and viewers are keen for new twists and turns as writers create an endless variety of murderous motives and opportunities for their villians in the quest to portray the ‘perfect crime’. But in the end the resolution by our hero detectives of even the most violent and heinous crimes completes the arc and we go away comforted that, from disturbing chaos, order has once again been restored and good has conquered evil.

Dame Agatha Christie

All new crime writers stand on the shoulders of giants, even Conan Doyle’s immortal character of Sherlock Holmes was influenced by Edgar Allen Poe’s original gentleman detective ‘C Auguste Dupin’. And it is the strength and depth of these remarkable characters that provides the corner stone of the success of the genre.  Whether it is Holmes, Marple, Poirot, Rebus,Morse, Wexford, Dalgliesh or Dalziel and Pascoe, to name just a high profile few, we learn to love them, even with all their idiosyncrasies and weaknesses.  We want them to succeed, solve the plot and vanquish the bad guy.

Reading great detective fiction inspires, generates and sparks ideas that constantly lead to new and topical generations of the genre.  My own, yet to be published, crime novel, ‘The SCAPEGOAT’ offers a rich variety of plots woven within the central plot ~ the reader alone witnesses the secret lives and dark deeds of the characters featured.  ‘The SCAPEGOAT’, which is the first in the series, also introduces a contemporary new detective.  Meet Professor Robert Darwin, a geneticist, evolutionist and atheist.  Darwin, who really only wants to live the quiet life as a ‘lab rat’ in a white coat, adapts his practiced analytical thought processes, usually reserved for his (highly classified) scientific research.  At the same time he is forced to embark on a difficult and emotional journey, in an attempt to rescue his son from a murder charge.

Over the years, our hero detectives, though so often flawed, become cherished family friends that are recreated and reinvented every decade or so.  Already in the Guinness Book of Records as the ‘most portrayed movie character’, with over 70 actors playing the part in over 200 films, a recent great detective reincarnation is yet another new Sherlock Holmes.  In this latest, and no doubt controversial, reinterpretation Holmes is played by the talented Robert Downey Jr. with Jude Law as his Dr. Watson.  I wonder what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have thought?  Personally, I can hardly wait.

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Death Wore White by Jim Kelly.

Penguin £7.99  390 pages.

At 5.15 p.m. Harvey Ellis was trapped – stranded in a line of eight cars by a blizzard on a Norfolk coast road.

At 8.15 p.m. Harvey Ellis was dead – viciously stabbed at the wheel of his truck.

And his killer has achieved the impossible: striking without being seen, and without leaving a single footprint in the snow . . .

For DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine it’s only the start of an infuriating investigation.  The crime scene is melting, the murderer has vanished, the witnesses are dropping like flies.  And the body count is on the rise . . .

A blizzard rages on the Norfolk coast and eight cars are trapped in deep snow on a country road.  In the lead vehicle the driver has been brutally murdered, there are no footprints in the snow and at the same time within half a mile of the stranded vehicles another dead man is washed ashore.

It is bitter cold, but that’s not the only bitterness in the air.  Detective Inspector Peter Shaw, a ‘whiz-kid with the fancy degree’ and veteran copper Detective Sergeant George Valentine are ‘West Norfolk Constabulary’s latest investigative duo’.  They have been paired up for just one week by ‘some joker in admin. …who knew the past and didn’t care about the future.’

Trouble is, Shaw and Valentine share a history; there’s a ten-year-old cold case that resulted in the disgrace of Shaw’s father and the demotion of Valentine ‘a man whose career trajectory looked like a brick falling to earth.’  Now Valentine has to come to terms with the younger man giving the orders.

Many questions arise from the two deaths, not least of all is whether there is a link between the two victims, and Shaw and Valentine have to battle against more than the Norfolk winter to find the answers.  There is a complex cast of characters, each with their own agenda.  Subtle clues are thrown up in a steady and accomplished way as the ingenious plot unfolds and all the while the cold case festers in the background.

Death Wore White is a traditional ‘whodunnit’ but with a contemporary update to the ‘locked room mystery’.  The crime scene of the trapped cars means that the murder has been committed under apparently impossible circumstances and the murderer seems to have vanished into thin air. Suspects, motives and opportunities ebb and flow throughout the narrative like the Norfolk tides.

Written with a keen eye for detail the central characters are well defined, as is the bleak backdrop of an icy winter in Kings Lynn.  The plot has plenty of twists and turns, not to mention more bodies, along the way.   Unlike many fast and furious mystery novels, the style of writing has more depth and breadth and flickers with descriptive passages, similes and metaphors, occasionally at a slight cost of pace.  It is thoroughly researched, well written and with enough puzzles to demand the attention of the reader.

Jim Kelly’s earlier Philip Dryden series was awarded the 2006 CWA Dagger in the Library Award for producing a body of work greatly enjoyed by fans of the genre.

Death Wore White, about which Kelly says ‘I hope that I have captured the genuine spirit of detection,’ is the first in a new series featuring DI Peter Shaw (who was first introduced in Kelly’s previous Dryden book ‘The Skeleton Man’) and DS George Valentine.  Fear not, with writers like Jim Kelly around the ‘spirit of detection’ is in safe hands.