National Crime Reading Month - June 2016

I recently saw James Runcie at the Hay Festival talking about his Grantchester series of crime novels.

Runcie told how he had loosely based Sidney Chambers, the vicar and part time sleuth of the novels, on his own father, Robert Runcie (Archbishop of Canterbury 1980-1991) and the talk was peppered with fascinating family anecdotes.

The Grantchester Mysteries start in the 1950’s and will go up to the Silver Jubilee year, 1977. The fifth title of the planned series of six, “Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation” has just been published in hardback.

In the Q&A session afterwards Runcie dropped in some tantalising hints as to how the story might develop in the final novel of the series. As a big fan of the TV show starring the gorgeous James Norton as Sidney and Robson Green as Geordie, I am now inspired to read my way through the entire series starting at the beginning, where else?, with “Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death”.