Weekend, 31 July-1 August 2010

Last weekend I went to the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, which is always an intense event, not least because of the late hours spent in the bar at The Crown Hotel, chatting with fellow writers, readers, editors and agents.

This year I was lucky enough to be involved in two events, one of which was the Readers’ Book Group on Saturday afternoon, where Second Shot was being discussed, along with Charlie Williams’s novel 'King of the Road'. Martyn Waites ably chaired the discussion, although seeing that Martyn came out at Harrogate about his other writing identity, perhaps I should refer to him as Tania Carver instead.

The other event was on Sunday morning, which can be an interesting slot after much late-night revelry following the quiz on Saturday evening. In fact, owing entirely to the fact that we snaffled the talented Martin Edwards for our quiz team, as well as LC Tyler, Russel McLean, Chris Ewan and my other half, Andy (who turned out to be a whiz on the TV cop show theme tunes) we were a gallant second. This came as a complete surprise to me, as with low expectations of our performance, I suggested the team name of ‘BP Complaints Department’.

The Sunday panel, ably hosted by Meg Gardiner, was entitled ‘James Bond, Eat Your Heart Out’ and discussed the current state of the thriller. As well as Meg, I was delighted to be in the company of Jo Nesbø, Sean Black and Jeremy Duns.

Something about a TV deal?

But Harrogate will be memorable for me for other reasons. On Saturday evening I happened to be introducing a US publisher I knew to one of his UK authors, whom he hadn’t met, when the publisher suddenly looked at me and said, "Haven’t I just had an email about you? Something about a TV deal?"

And that’s how I knew the news was official.

The Charlie Fox series has been optioned by Twentieth Century Fox TV. Of course, it’s a long way from page to screen, large or small, but it’s half an inch up towards the first rung on the ladder, and I’m chuffed to little mintballs about the whole thing, to coin a phrase.

It’s been a long haul behind the scenes to get even this far, and now it’s just a case of waiting to see what happens at the next stage. And if I was looking a little nonplussed about the whole thing on Saturday evening at Harrogate, that’s only because the news had yet to really sink in.

Since then, of course, I’ve been grinning so widely I think I have a flip-top head.

This week’s Word of the Week is pleonasm, which simply means redundancy, especially of words. And from that we get pleonast − someone given to pleonasm, whereas pleonexia means greed or avarice.