Having been to (and had a great time at) the Chiltern Kills crime festival over the last couple of years, I was really looking forward to this year’s event. Tickets were bought months ago in anticipation. I’d even been talking to one of the organisers, Paul Waters, about it when he and I spent time together at the Harrogate Crime Festival.
It was probably only a week or so later that I got a phone call from him to say it was off. And it was clear from his tone that he was more gutted about it than I could have any claim to be. Maybe it’s a measure of his concern about letting both authors and readers down that, by the time he spoke to me, he was already in the process of helping to put together an alternative event, together with Chorleywood Bookshop.
Global Noir is taking place on the same day that Chiltern Kills would have done (3rd October 2026), and the venue will be in the same neck of the woods – Chorleywood rather than Gerrards Cross. By its title, you can probably guess that the emphasis will be slightly different. The line up is more limited in numbers, but the range is enticing enough, with authors including Vaseem Khan, Tim Sullivan, Anna Mazzola and Felix Francis. So I have tickets for this event, and am looking forward to listening to the speakers/panellists and hopefully catching up with friends in this wonderful crime writing community.
If you’re going to be there, please do come and have a chat with me. Obviously, there’ll be other people for you to talk to as well, but I’m the important one, so just form an orderly queue!
If you’re not already going, but are curious, check out the Eventbrite page for it, which provides all the information you’ll need – including how cheap the tickets are.
I hope to see you there.
Iām glad there is an alternative event for you to attend. There is very little like this in Southern Africa. Reading and books is sadly not a priority here. This post also serves as a reminder to me that I have your latest book on my TBR.
We’d made arrangements to travel down south for that and another event (watch this space) on the same weekend. As it happens, there are at least two others we could have gone to that were closer to home, though they were more broadly based book events rather than crime focused. In recent years, I’ve found we’re pretty much spoiled for choice. If budgets and time constraints allowed, we could probably attend something most weekends. So to hear that you don’t have many such events seems like such a shame. Maybe next time you come to the UK, you can look out for a book festival of some kind.
As for my book, I hate to break it to you, but the third one is due out in two months, so you’ve got some catching up to do! š