Matthew Richardson

Benjamin Black – aka John Banville – is back for another round of detective fun with A Death in Summer. Does the crossover magic work for a fifth outing?   In the Guardian, Mark Lawson admires the way Black’s hero, Quirke, alludes to heroes of the detective genre: "He is known only by his surname (Dexter’s Morse), is an alcoholic chainsmoker (Rankin’s Rebus), loves poetry (P.D. James’s Dalgleish), has a difficult relationship with a daughter (Mankell’s Wallander) and has difficulty in sustaining relationships (everyone’s everyone)." What such allusion amounts to, Lawson claims, is ‘a respect for the form in which he has chosen to work.

1) The Edinburgh Book Festival has begun in earnest this week. The festival is one of the lengthiest in the country, running from 13-29 of August. The festival was originally launched in 1983 and staged every two years before becoming a yearly feature in 1997. The Book festival links in with the other festivals in Edinburgh - the Jazz festival, International festival, the Art festival, the Fringe, the Film festival and the Edinburgh Mela - and is thus able to claim to be part of 'the biggest and best arts festival in the world.' 2) Many of the UK's best known authors are due on the festival stage this year. Writers already sold out include A.C. Grayling, Alexander McCall Smith, Evan Davis, Simon Callow, Wendy Cope and Ian Rankin.

1.) Colin Dexter's famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played by Shaun Evans. The airing is set to coincide with the twenty-fifty anniversary of the first ever screening of Dexter's famous sleuth, back in 1987. Evans has said that he is 'very excited' about the role and that he hopes the new outing 'can complement what's come before, by telling a great story, and telling it well.' Dexter meanwhile, in a typically artful piece of verbal play, said: 'Immortal was Endeavour Morse - End-eavour more shall be so!' 2.

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as a form: from workaday realism to postmodern artfulness, and every shade between.   It is easy to misread Drabble through the fog of reputation. Few living writers have the clout, or the DBEs to go with it, that both she and her sister (one A.S. Byatt) can boast by the bucketload. But, of course, the first stories in this collection speak without all of that.

Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work?   Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue of women’s private pains, shames and fears.’ Similarly, her use of the short story form is notable: both ‘the form’s power of ambivalence and understatement, its canny and cunning obliquities’ and her use of its ‘miniscule and transient shifts of perception’ contribute to the elegiac tone. And, for some of the stories, this delicious ambiguity emerges as the overriding theme.

1.) Last week, the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2011 was announced. The lucky authors included established writers like Sebastian Barry and Alan Hollinghurst alongside first-time novelists like Stephen Kelman. The presence of independent publishers attracted admiration in the press. For the betting man, current odds have Hollinghurst primed to nab his second Booker, though some have suggested his entry might be a tad too literary. The Omnivore blog has the best selection of reviews for all the 2011 longlisted books.  2.) The original Man Booker prize has spawned many offspring.

1) Last week, P.D. James was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculiar Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. James has been publishing for fifty years. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, appeared in 1962. Her most recent work, the non-fiction book Talking About Detective Fiction, was published in 2009. Speaking recently to the BBC, James hinted that she was working on something new: 'I am still writing, but something very different; something shorter and something which I'm keeping very secret at the moment.' She later admitted that it did not feature her long-time detective, Adam Dalgliesh.   2) P.D. James is one of the oldest writers still putting pen to paper. She turns 91 this year.

1) Last week, a Jane Austen manuscript sold for £993,250 at Sotheby's. The manuscript contains the writing of an unfinished Austen novel, The Watsons, complete with numerous revisions and amendments. It has been bought by the Bodleian library in Oxford. Speaking to the BBC, Dr Chris Fletcher claimed: 'It's worth every single penny. This was the last...fiction manuscript in private ownership. We felt...very strongly that we needed to step in, bring it into public ownership for the enjoyment of scholars, but also the nation.' Austen memorabilia commands famously high prices. In 2008, a lock of the author's hair was flogged off for £4,800.   2) Austen's work has spawned innumerable adaptations over the years.

1) The final Harry Potter film is on general release tomorrow. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Pt 2 has garnered blanket coverage in Fleet Street's cultural supplements. Reviews so far have been surprisingly promising: Kaleem Aftab, of the Independent, declares that 'the wait was worth it' and maintains the film 'is not a disappointment', while Kate Muir of the Times calls (£) it 'a moving, well-crafted end to a British cultural franchise'.   2) Recently, J.K. Rowling launched a new venture, Pottermore. The site, as she explains in a promo vid, will be 'the exclusive place to purchase digital audio books and, for the first time, e-books of the Harry Potter series.

Following our recent piece on the critical response to Aravind Adiga's Last Man In Tower, here is the Book Blog's review by Matthew Richardson. Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in Tower, is ostensibly a book about Mumbai. It feeds from the sprawl and bustle of that maturing city, meditating on the riches of commercial development but, more compellingly, articulating its human cost.   The novel concentrates on the occupants of a ramshackle complex, Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society. As part of a swathe of redevelopment, a goonish property tycoon, Dharmen Shah, offers the occupants a heady sum to vacate and allow him to mothball the place. He dreams in rhapsodic terms of transforming Mumbai into a new Shanghai.

How do you top a Booker winner? With difficulty, one imagines. But, in Last Man in Tower, has Aravind Adiga done his best with an impossible brief?   In the Guardian, Alex Clark argues that, while the novel ‘can tend slightly towards the schematic’, it has a ‘broader and more forgiving feel than The White Tiger’, though Adiga’s ‘anger at the India he describes…remains undimmed.’ The novel has ‘a gentler comic tone that finds affection as well as despair in poking fun at its characters’ pretensions and frailties.’ Overall, he presents ‘a picture that is as compelling as it is complex to decipher.

1) John le Carré recently won this year's winner of the Goethe Medal. The Medal is for writers 'who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations'. The spymaster honed his German skills while studying at the University of Berne and Lincoln College, Oxford. Traditionally, le Carré has been a reluctant recipient of prizes. Earlier this year he claimed he did 'not compete for literary prizes', asking to be taken off the Man International Booker Prize shortlist. 2) Le Carré's real name is David Cornwell. The seedbed for his early work came from his time in British Intelligence in Hamburg and Bonn.

1) The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize has a turbulent history. The prize came into being after the NCR prize fell into disrepute. Originally kept afloat courtesy of an anonymous donor, the BBC began sponsoring the prize in 2002 through its new channel BBC Four. This year, as part of the BBC's Year of Books, a special show will be aired exploring each of the six shortlisted writers for 2011 and announcing the winner. 2) The prize has the biggest victory pot of any non-fiction prize in the UK, with prize money of £20,000.

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift's ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the 'war on terror'. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss. The novel centres around the death of Tom Luxton, a soldier in Iraq, and the effect it has on his elder brother, Jack. But Tom's death is merely the trigger for a Proustian excess of memory, as Jack begins revisiting 'all the things that had once been dead and buried' including his mother's death, his father's suicide and Tom's teenage escape flight from the suffocating restrictions of 'agricultural ruin' to the army. It is an odd novel in many ways.

1.) Clive James has returned to TV criticism. He was poached out of retirement by the Telegraph who proudly billed their latest catch as the 'world's greatest TV critic'. It sees him resume where his groundbreaking Observer column, written between 1972-82, left off. Widely cited as turning TV criticism into serious art, James collected his weekly musings into three volumes of TV criticism: Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box. A compendium volume, On Television, was published in 1990. All are available here.   2.) James is a man of many genres. He has published verse (most recently Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008), four novels, five autobiographies and numerous collections of essays (including the magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia).

Our coverage of the final days of this year's Hay Festival begins today. Here's a selection of facts and myths about the world's grandest literary festival. 1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference at Hay to explain why she was stepping down from being Oxford Professor of Poetry. The year before, Gary Kasparov publicly slated Western governments for turning a blind-eye to Russian corruption. 2) The festival has glamorous friends. Former US President, Bill Clinton, famously labelled it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. In 2009, Stephen Fry was so keen to get there he avoided the traffic by arriving via helicopter.

James Bond is the great chameleon. From the velvety burr of Connery through to the tango tan of Moore and the aluminium pecs of Craig. And then, of course, there is the Bond of the books. Between covers (of the literary sort, at least), Bond transforms again: refrigerated in the black-and-white of print, he becomes clinical and orderly, disdaining the stagey theatrics of modern day spycraft. It is to this Bond that Jeffery Deaver returns in the latest addition to the 007 canon, Carte Blanche. Indeed, Deaver himself is given carte blanche. Rather than merely update Bond, as did Sebastian Faulks in his 2008 effort Devil May Care, Deaver recasts him completely.

Now Bond is really back. Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver's addition to the Bond series, is on the shelves. Publishing might be enduring hard times, but no expense was spared for 007. The official website had a clock ticking 24-style down to the novel’s midnight release. And the launch event was, as Katie Allen of the Bookseller reports, full of gizmos and blokeish chutzpah: abseiling Royal Marines, a BSA Spitfire and an authorial Bentley Continental GT – the full Bond shebang. For those yet to nab a copy, a taster excerpt can be found here. As I wrote when the project was announced, the Fleming novels currently occupy a curious space between museum pieces and film tie-ins.

The death of the book has been much exaggerated, it seems. Figures released recently by the Publishers Association show a marked increase in sales of digital books, with total consumer sales rocketing up 318 per cent since 2009. However, there's no need to dismantle the bookshelves just yet. The digital slice of the book market still stands at only 6 per cent. Kindles et al might have the upper hand storage-wise; but, on this evidence, good old print and paper has some more puff in it yet. Beryl Bainbridge, for instance, remains a publishing sensation. Her uncompleted novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, is due for release on May 23. If you can’t wait till then, you can sneak an exclusive preview here courtesy of the Telegraph.