Ink and Daggers

NEIL GAIMAN was awarded the Newbery and Carnegie Medals for The Graveyard Book. His other books for younger readers include Coraline (which was made into an Academy-Award-nominated film) and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (which wasn’t). Born in England, he has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. You can learn more at www.mousecircus.com.

Ann Cleeves is the author of forty critically acclaimed novels, and in 2017 was awarded the highest accolade in crime writing, the CWA Diamond Dagger. She is the creator of popular detectives Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez and Matthew Venn, who can be found on television in ITV’s Vera, BBC One’s Shetland and ITV’s The Long Call respectively. The TV series and the books they are based on have become international sensations, capturing the minds of millions worldwide.

Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She also spends her time advocating for reading to improve health and wellbeing and supporting access to books. In 2021, her Reading for Wellbeing project launched with local authorities across the North East. In 2022, she was awarded an OBE for her services to reading and libraries. She lives in Northumberland.

Christopher Fowler was the multi award-winning author of over fifty books and short story collections, including the acclaimed Bryant & May mysteries. His novels include Roofworld, Spanky, The Sand Men, and Hell Train, plus two volumes of memoirs, Paperboy—winner of the Green Carnation Prize—and Film Freak, and The Book of Forgotten Authors. In 2015, he won the CWA Dagger In The Library for his body of work. His most recent novel was Hot Water. Fowler died in 2023.

James Sallis (1944-2026) was an American author of crime novels, science fiction, biography, and poetry. He is best know for his novels featuring Lew Griffin, an African American amateur detective. He won the Bouchercon lifetime achieve award, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière for The Killer is Dying. The film version of his novel Drive won the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Conrad Williams is the author of over ten novels (most recently One Who Was With Me), four novellas, and three collections of short stories. He edited the anthologies Dead Letters and Gutshot. He has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Littlewood Arc Prize. He has taught creative writing at a number of universities around the United Kingdom, and has also worked in the video game industry. He lives in Manchester.

Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York City, Mickey Spillane started writing while at high school. During the Second World War, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a fighter pilot and instructor. After the war, he moved to South Carolina. He was married three times, the third time to Jane Rogers Johnson, and had four children and two stepchildren. He wrote his first novel, I, the Jury (1947), in order to raise the money to buy a house for himself and his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce. The novel sold six and a half million copies in the United States, and introduced Spillane's most famous character, the hardboiled PI Mike Hammer. The many novels that followed became instant bestsellers, until in 1980 the US all-time fiction bestseller list of fifteen titles boasted seven by Mickey Spillane. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. He was uniformly disliked by critics, owing to the high content of sex and violence in his books. However, he was later praised by American mystery writers Max Alan Collins and William L. DeAndrea, as well as artist Markus Lüpertz. The novelist Ayn Rand, a friend of Spillane's, appreciated the black-and-white morality of his books. Spillane was an active Jehovah's Witness. He died in 2006.

Max Allan Collins is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. He is the author of the Shamus Award-winning Nathan Heller thrillers and the graphic novel Road to Perdition, basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks. His innovative Quarry novels led to a 2016 Cinemax series. He has completed a dozen posthumous Mickey Spillane mysteries, and wrote the syndicated Dick Tracy series for more than fifteen years. His one-man show, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, was an Edgar Award finalist. He lives in Iowa.