After its Canadian release, Peter’s latest book, a collection of short stories, is now available in the UK.

Banks fans shouldn’t be too disheartened, as the centrepiece is a new Banks novella called “Like a Virgin,” which I hope will delight both regular fans and newcomers alike. I know it’s not a novel, but it’s about as long as any Simenon’s Maigret novels were!

The other stories in the book, two of them also featuring Banks, are “Cornelius Jubb,” “The Magic of Your Touch,” “The Eastvale Ladies’ Poker Circle,” “The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter,” “Walking the Dog,” “Blue Christmas,” “Shadows on the Water,” “The Cherub Affair,” “The Price of Love” and “Birthday Dance.”

The Price of Love will be published by Hodder in the UK on August 6, and in the US by Morrow later in the year. The US edition will also include an extra Banks novella, “Going Back,” previousy published in the UK and Canadian editions of Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories, but never publshed in the US before.”

Read more about The Price of Love.

This spring/summer stay in England began in late May with a few gorgeous days in London followed by an overnight visit to Staithes, a tiny fishing village on the Yorkshire coast. The reason for the visit was a concert by Martin and Eliza Carthy, performing with the the local men’s choir. It was held in held in a tiny seaman’s mission, no more than about fifty people crammed into hard pews, and very hot. Between the songs, we could hear the waves breaking on the rocks and the squalling of seagulls through the open windows as the sun went down. All in all, it was a lovely evening, the kind of experience you remember for a long time.

Soon after that, in early June, I visited Oslo for the first time at the request of my Norwegian publishers, Forlaget Press. The weather was fine for the most part, and I managed to take couple of hours to stroll around the downtown and harbour areas and to pay homage to the statue of Ibsen outside the National Theatre. Oslo is a lovely city, open, bright and clean, scattered with interesting statues, and I would like to have seen more. No time, though. After a day of press interviews, the evening’s event took place in the large downtown bookshop, Tanum, where I was interviewed on stage by the knowledgable and engaging Marianne. Afterwards we all had a fine seafood dinner by the harbour–Thor Arvid and Thomas from Forlaget, and Marianne and Arild from Tanum. A lot of our talk revolved around music, and I came away determined to check out the Tord Gustavsen Trio and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra as soon as I got the chance. I managed to track down some of their music on Spotify and enjoyed it tremendously.

At Tanum’s bookshop in Oslo

Not long after Oslo came the Beverley Folk Festival, where I had several events, the main one being a performance with Eliza Carthy. We picked “The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter,” which takes about fifty minutes to read, and this time instead of stopping the reading for occasional thematically-related songs, I simply read on as Eliza played, interweaving themes and variations with the words. At the end she sang some murder ballads, and I think everyone went away quite satisfied. One of the perks of being a performer was that I got to see as many of the other acts as I wanted, and I managed to catch some of Billy Bragg before my interview with the local radion station, and on the next night Peter Donegan (son of Lonnie) and the Lonnie Donegan Band. Over the weekend, though unfortunately I missed Eric Bogle and Tanglefoot, I saw performances by the Anna Massie Band, Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow, Peatbog Fairies and Seth Lakeman. I also caught a song or two by numerous performers in the various tents dotted around outside the Leisure Complex and met Jon Brindley and Miles Cain, who kindly gave me their CDs. On the Saturday of the festival, Beverley was oficially the wettest place in England!

With Aidan, Eliza and baby Florence at Beverley Folk Festival

The main reason for extending the trip well into July was that the University of Leeds awarded me an honorary Doctorate of Letters at a degree ceremony on July 17. My connection with the university is a long one–and was not always academic, though I did get my BA in English Literature there. In the late sixties and early seventies I saw Cream, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Soft Machine, Roy Harper, Wings, Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band there, among others–all in the refectory, which holds about two thousand people. So on July 17, I dressed in my finery and accepted the degree from Lord Bragg of Wigton, better known as Melvyn Bragg, the celebrated novelist and presenter of The South Bank Show. Also receiving an honorary degree at the ceremony was Bekele Geleta, secretary general of the International Red Cross. Bekele has lived a fascinating and varied life, from the prisons of Ethiopia to refugee status in Canada, and now to heading the Red Cross, and it was a great honour to share the ceremony with him.

Receiving the degree from Lord Bragg

Now it’s almost time to return to Toronto–after the Harrogate Crime Festival and the Old Peculier Awards on Thursday, July 23. The Price of Love, the new short story collection, reached No. 2 in the Macleans bestseller list in Canada last week, and on August 6 it is due out from Hodder in the UK, where it is to be a Waterstone’s Offer of the Week. It will be published by Morrow in the USA on September 29. Back in Canada, I have an event on Saturday, August 15, at the Scene of the Crime Festival on Wolfe Island, Ontario, where I am to receive the Grant Allen Award and be interviewed on stage by Therese Greenwood. There are a number of exciting events on the horizon back in the UK this autumn, including the Richmond Walking and Books Festival, where I will be interviewing Ruth Rendell, chatting with Ian Rankin and performing with Eliza Carthy again, in addition to leading a walk from Reeth. Check it out: www.richmondbooksandboots.org.uk.

For those who are interested in playlists of the Inspector Banks books, Peter has compiled the playlists for two additional books:

The Price of Love

Strange Affair

More to come, so check the Playlists page from time to time.

Just got back from a wonderful holiday in Japan, mostly traveling by bullet-train (Shinkansen), and I’m still recovering from the jet-lag. Given the eleven-hour flight and the thirteen-hour time difference, I arrived before I left, so to speak. Still trying to process it all. Walked under the falling cherry blossoms in Tokyo and Kyoto, saw a Geisha (or, more accurately in Kyoto, a Geiko) in full kimono stepping into a house in the Gion district, stood on the edge of an active volcano’s crater at Mt. Aso National Park and looked into the seething green mass, visited the wonderful peace memorials and gardens at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw a million Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, including the Temple of the Golden Pavillion that Mishima wrote about, and the Great Buddha at Todai-ji, in Nara, and the beautiful temple Daisho-in, on the holy island of Miyajima. Spent a lot of time on Kyushu, the island to the southwest of Honshu, a place of magnificent wooded mountains, volcanoes, ocean vistas and surprising and interesting cities, such as Kagoshima, Nagasaki and Kumamoto, and the cosmopolitan Fukuoka. The people were wonderful, the language impenetrable, the beer and sake plentiful, the food excellent (if you like raw fish, rice and miso soup, which I do) and the weather gorgeous. Only two rainy days in three weeks. I even tried a new drink (for me) called shochu, made from sweet potatoes. It’s not exactly up there with Laphroaig.

The Great Buddha at Kamakura

Into the Volcano

In Tokyo, I also had drinks with Etsuko Moriyama and Hitoshi Ayaki, from my Japanese publisher, Kodansha, and an excellent dinner with my agents there, Junzo and Hamish. Kodansha plan to publish Aftermath in July, and we all hope that it will sell enough copies to persuade them to publish more.

Continue reading “April Notes” →

Coming in at number 15 (with a bullet), All the Colors of Darkness has made the LA Times besteller list. The latest Inspector Banks novel is proving incredibly popular in the United States. If you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for?

If you’re a member of Facebook, why not join the unofficial Peter Robinson group, recently set up on Facebook? You can interact with other Inspector Banks fans and post comments. To join the group, go to this page or search for Peter Robinson on Facebook.

I don’t blog, OK? And I certainly don’t twitter. But my Administrator keeps bugging me for something about the tour, so here it is. The U.S. tour ended officially in Grand Cayman on March 8, but with hardly time to catch my breath for a couple of days in Toronto, I then had to head out to give a talk at a fundraising luncheon for the Brandeis National Committee in Tucson, AZ. The travel was far worse than the event, which was delightful. In the first place, I have to thank Sharyn and Nicole at Morrow for realising that it’s a good idea to arrange for most of an author’s February/March tour to take place in the southern parts of the U.S.A. Apart from stops in New York and Michigan, I was able to enjoy a bit of warm weather.

It was great to revisit some of my regular stops, where I found the audiences as welcoming, lively and intelligent as ever, and the owners and staff most accommodating and enthusiastic. It was therefore a great pleasure to be back at M is for Mystery, Stacey’s, The Mystery Bookstore, Book ‘Em, Vroman’s, Mysteries to Die For, Book Carnival and Poisoned Pen. It was also great to revisist, after a lengthier absence, Partners& Crime, Mysterious Galaxy, Murder by the Book and Murder on the Beach. Thanks, everyone!

It’s always interesting to visit a store I’ve never been to before, and in this I was especially blessed. First was Aunt Agatha’s, in Ann Arbor, where I got a far bigger crowd then I had expected, not to mention a cup of green tea and a cheese roll. A few days later, it was a bit of drive from San Francisco to Rakestraw Books, in Danville, but well worth it. The town itself is gorgeous, and the audience was terrific. Next I went to Salt Lake City for the first time, where Betsy Burton of the King’s English bookstore took great care of me, and the wait-staff at Squatter’s brewpub proved that you really can get a decent pint in Utah. I also had the honour of having dinner after the event with George Easter, of Deadly Pleasures magazine, a gentleman and a scholar. And last but not least, what can I say about Grand Cayman? Well, it’s not part of the U.S.A., for a start, but Books & Books has recently opened a beautiful store there in Camana Bay and they were kind enough to fly me out from Miami to do an event. Susanna De Saram and her husband Al took good care of me while I was there, and we had one of the best seafood meals I’ve ever eaten in my life. The beach was only about a hundred yards from the hotel, and I’m sure you can imagine the colours of the ocean and the sand. In case you can’t, I’m including a photograph. All in all, it was bloody hard work–especially the early mornings and the almost daily airport hassles–but more than worthwhile. Now all I need is a two week holiday on Grand Cayman to recover, but I’m not going to get it!

Peter is doing an event this evening from the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, which will be webcast live at 7pm Arizona time. That’s 9m Eastern Time, 6pm Pacific Time and the middle of the night in Europe. You can view the event on the Poisoned Pen bookstore’s website. It should also be available on the site’s archives afterward; we’ll post a link to it then.

Some random notes from Peter as he goes from city to city on his book tour…

It was wonderful being a guest at Janet Rudolph’s beautiful home and being provided with such a large glass of fine wine. The company was most stmulating. California went well on the whole, and it was a real joy to get away from the cold and snow for a while and meet up with fans at M is for Mystery Rakestraw Books, in the Bay Area, then the Mystery Bookstore, Book ‘Em, Vroman’s, Mysteries to Die For and Book Carnival in L.A. and Ornage Country.

It was almost too lovely a day to spend in a bookstore on Sunday afternoon in San Diego, but the people at Mysterious Galaxy made it more than worthwhile, and it was great to see Bob and Fred again. The one sad note among all of it was to find out that Stacey’s, on Market Strret in San Francisco, is closing down. I have been there more times than I can remember and was honoured to appear at their lunchtime session. It’s a pity there will be no more.

Flights and airports are as miserable as ever, and I’m never quite sure when the next meal is coming. But that’s par for the course. Right now I’m in chilly Salt Lake City looking forward to an event promoted by the King’s English bookstore to be held at the central public library at 7pm tonight. Tomorrow, it’s the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ, and that interbiew and Q and A will be webcast very soon.

The US edition of All the Colors of Darkness is now available. As you can see in the post below, Peter is planning a major US book tour to meet readers across the country. You can find out more about the book on this page.