Book Launch

Our friends in Kirkwall are getting ready for an exciting event on Friday when the Orkney Library and Archive hosts the launch of a new novel by local writer Helen Davis. 

Published by ThunderPoint Publishing A Good Death is described as:

 a darkly humorous novel that follows four young women as they experience the strictures and freedoms of university life, becoming lifelong friends, despite their disparate backgrounds.

Davis deftly weaves the 1980's readjustment of British social boundaries into her novel as she transports the reader from coming of age student life in England, through adventure, death and life changing experiences in Peru, to a disastrous attempt at rediscovering lost youth and innocence, nearly thirty years too late.

Formerly an academic and lecturer at the University of Sunderland, Helen Davis is the author of Understanding Stuart Hall (the Sociologist and former editor of New Left Review who famously coined the term 'Thatcherism', and sadly died in February this year). A change of direction in 2003 led Helen to retrain as a complementary therapist and move to Orkney, where she lives on Shapinsay. During the ten years she has been in Orkney Helen has moved from academic writing to concentrating on writing fiction, and her short story 'A Kind of Justice' made the short-list for the 2012 Crime Writing Competition of the OrkCrime Festival, judged by bestselling crime writer Ann Cleeves. 

A regular member of the Saturday Slaughters crime fiction reading group in the Kirkwall Library, Helen has chosen the library to launch her debut novel on Friday 7th March at 7pm, when she will read from A Good Death and will sign copies of the book which will be available to buy on the night. 

The Launch event is free and there is no need to book in advance, just turn up on the night (we heard a rumour there may even be wine). Please note that the Kirkwall Library will be open from 10am until 7pm on Friday 7th to allow you to stock up on library books before Helen's reading starts at 7pm. 

Orcrime 2012

Time to get out your magnifying glass, and put on your deerstalker hat, scruffy mac, woolly jumper, sensible shoes, handlebar moustache - or whatever fictional detectives might be wearing these days - and get along to the library for the start of Orkney's first crime writing festival which starts tomorrow. 

Orcrime 2012 will run from 11th to 13th October, and is organised by Orkney Library and Archive and sponsored by the Orcadian Bookshop, and will feature a range of events and promotions -  from appearances by leading crime novelists Lin Anderson, Ann Cleeves and Denise Mina, to free DVD and CD loans. 

A full programme of events can be found on the Orcrime 2012 page of the Orkney Library website, but we can tell you that tomorrows events start with Broth and Breid - a chance to have lunch at the Kirkwall library     between 12-2pm with a suitably themed menu including Lawless Lentil soup served with a selection of bread, oatcakes and cheese. 

Then at 2pm the winners of the Orkney Library and Archive and George Mackay Brown Fellowship crime short story competition will be announced and at 7pm there will be a talk from Ann Cleeves. 

While the majority of events will take place in Kirkwall, here in Stromness you can borrow from a selection of new crime titles, enjoy free CD loans and even take part in our name the crime show quiz. 

Keep an eye on the Orkney Library Facebook Page and Twitter account for all the latest news on the events. 

Orcrime 2012 - Crime Fiction Competition

This year Orkney will add a new festival to its calendar when the first Orkney crime writing festival - Orcrime 2012 - will run from October 11-13. Organised by Orkney Library and Archive and sponsored by the Orcadian Bookshop the festival will feature appearances from renowned crime novelists Lin Anderson, Ann Cleeves and Denise Mina, as well as crime historian and true crime author Paul Harrison, and Orkney storyteller Tom Muir.

We will bring you more details of the events nearer to the time but something you need to know about now is the chance to enter the first Orkney Crime Fiction Short Story Competition!

The competition will form part of  Orcrime 2012 and is being run by Orkney Library and Archive and the George Mackay Brown Fellowship.

Library assistant Stewart Bain explains the motivation behind the new competition: “Crime fiction has always been popular with our readers, but other than Allan Guthrie and J Storer Clouston, there haven’t been many Orcadian authors known for writing crime fiction. We hope this competition might change that and that one day we might be lending books by the winning author.”

Lucy Gibbon, of the George Mackay Brown Fellowship, is also hoping the competition will tap into the rich vein of creative writing talent in the islands:  “We are very pleased to launch this competition in partnership with the Orkney Library and Archive. We hope that it will encourage people to put pen to paper and come up with fresh angles on the theme of crime.”

The competition is open to anyone over the age of 16 and the judges are looking for a fictional story of no more than 2000 words which has not been published before. There is an entry fee of £2 per story.

A shortlist of five entries will be decided by a panel of local judges, representing the George Mackay Brown Fellowship, the Orkney Library and Archive, and Living Orkney, from which the winners will be chosen by award winning crime writer Ann Cleeves, author of the popular Shetland Quartet. There are cash prizes of £100, £50 and £25 for the top three entries and the first prize winner will have their story published in a future edition of Living Orkney magazine.

The closing date for entries is 20th September  and the winner will be announced during the Orcrime Festival. For more information on how to enter you can download the entry guidelines as a pdf.

Author of the Month for May - Fred Vargas

Spring may be here, and today the sun is indeed shining, but our author of the month is guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine.

French historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, writing as Fred Vargas (she has adopted the same nom de plume - the name of the Ava Gardner character in The Barefoot Contessa - as her twin sister Jo Vargas, a successful artist) says she began writing as a way to relax from her day job and chose crime " because crime novels, by resolving the problems they set themselves, seem to resolve life's problems ".  Her work often influences and informs her writing, particularly her research into the  epidemiology of the Black Death and bubonic plague which is evident in the novel Have Mercy on Us All.

Although Vargas is modest about her novels saying "I'm not a writer. I'm telling stories, that's all. I'm unable to feel like a writer, it's too big for me," , and even describing her books as "silly" stories, she also seems to recognise the place of crime writing within the literary tradition, and suggests why such works remain popular and relevant in modern times - "Detective stories are like legends and fairy tales. Big stories, animal stories, not intellectual stories, never. They are about the danger of life."


Three times winner of Crime Writers Association International Dagger award (along with her translator Sîan Reynolds), Vargas has created an intriguing and engaging character in Superintendent Adamsberg, a policeman who works by intuition, not intellect. Adamsberg's contemplative and self-contained style of detection may seem at odds with other rather more  high-octane crime fiction but it clearly strikes a chord with Vargas's readers, and indeed the author herself, who says of her central character, "He's the opposite of me.  Me, I wear myself out trying to get everything done, to resolve everything in my life. Sometimes I try do do things slowly, indifferently, like he does. It infuriates me. Writing Adamsberg calms me down."

What better way to spend an afternoon than sitting in the sun engrossed in an intriguing tale of murder and mystery? Unfortunately we can't guarantee the sun, but whatever the weather we can lend you some gripping crime writing courtesy of Fred Vargas.