Vaseem Khan is a former Chair of the UK Crime Writers’ Association and the author of several award-winning crime series including the Baby Ganesh Agency novels, set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime series, set in 1950s Bombay. His debut, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published in 2015-2020, and has been translated into 17 languages. Midnight at Malabar House, the first in the Malabar House series, won the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger. Vaseem is also the author of The Girl in Cell A, a psychological thriller set in small town America, and, most recently, Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q from the world of James Bond.
David Fairer
The CHOCOLATE HOUSE MYSTERIES, set in the London of Queen Anne (1702-14), represent a new departure for David after a career of researching and writing about that period and bringing it alive for students. Born in Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorkshire, he studied in Oxford for ten years before taking up a post at the University of Leeds, where since 1999 he has been Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature. He has published three books on Alexander Pope and many other studies of the poetry of the period, notably English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2004) and Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle (2009). He now finds himself on the other side of the creative fence, writing from inside a world he has inhabited imaginatively for fifty years.
His three ‘Chocolate House’ novels, CHOCOLATE HOUSE TREASON, THE DEVIL’S CATHEDRAL, and CAPTAIN HAZARD’S GAME are all set in the year 1708 in the months following the Act of Union when ‘Great Britain’ was finding its new identity. The books interweave their murder plots with the actual events of that year. Historical and fictional characters intermingle.
At this time Londoners sensed that with the turn of the century a new age was inaugurated and a recognisably ‘modern’ nation was taking shape. Party politics as we know them were beginning, and a ruthless business world, a liberated press, and a lively culture were transforming the shape of society.
It was a time when debate and controversy were in the air, and the London coffee houses were the social media hubs of their time, gathering-places for news and intrigue, for circulating rumours and hatching plots – and therefore ideal for a writer of historical mysteries! The beating heart of these books is the Bay-Tree Chocolate House, Covent Garden, where Widow Trotter presides over a world of ideas and debate, of wit and good conversation. She and her young friends Tom (a poet) and Will (a law student) form a resolute detective trio, righting wrongs, confronting villainous conspiracies, and solving murders. In the process the three of them become caught up in the national drama.
In these three mysteries a system of power finds itself challenged by a substratum of local sociability, good humour and quiet determination – that other side of the period’s character exemplified by Widow Trotter’s little kingdom of the Bay-Tree. This clash of worlds forms the novels’ social comedy and drives their plots in a combination of whodunit and conspiracy thriller.
Jill Culiner
Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner, writer, social critical artist, and photographer has spent most of her life in France, England, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Holland, and North Africa. Her photographic exhibition about the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. Her non-fiction, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Award. Her biography of a nineteenth-century rebel Yiddish poet and singer, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, was published by Claret Press in 2022, and Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain, a portrait of Hungarian village life and investigation into a pogrom was published by Claret Press in 2024.
She presently lives in a 400-year-old inn in France that is so chaotic and strange, it has been classified as a museum. (http://www.jill-culiner.com)
Author links: https://linktr.ee/jillculiner
Web site: https://www.jillculiner-writer.com
Elodie Harper
Tim Hodkinson
Tim Hodkinson grew up in Northern Ireland, where the rugged coast and call of the Atlantic ocean led to a lifelong fascination with vikings and a degree in Medieval English and Old Norse Literature. Tim’s more recent writing heroes include Ben Kane, Giles Kristian, Bernard Cornwell, George R.R. Martin and Lee Child. After several years living in the USA, Tim has returned to Northern Ireland, where he lives with his wife and children.
Tim writes a series of novels called The Whale Road Chronicles, following the adventures of a company of úlfhéðnar, wolf-skin clad viking warriors in the murky and often violent world of the early 10th Century.
Beyond vikings, Tim writes the Richard Savage, Knight Templar series, which is set in Fourteenth Century Ireland, during a war where “everyone seemed to be on the wrong side.”
His latest book is set in Fifth Century Europe, when the crumbling Roman Empire fought its last great battle against the forces of Atilla the Hun.
Fiona Forsyth
Fiona Forsyth taught Classics at The Manchester Grammar School for twenty-five years before a family relocation to the Middle East gave her the time to write.
She is author of the Lucius Sestius books, and a stand-alone The Third Daughter, published by Sharpe Books in 2022. She is particularly fascinated by the years of tumult that took the Romans from Republic to Empire, and loathes the Emperor Augustus.
Living in Qatar for several years has encouraged an interest in poetry which culminated in her winning the Diwan Al-Arab English language Natha prize. It also cultivated gourmet tastes which, alas, she had to let go when the family returned to the UK in summer 2022.
She is especially interested in school visits and has presented poetry workshops, readings and writing sessions to primary and secondary school pupils in Qatar.