The Plot Thickens: An evening of all things crime with Tim Sullivan, Guy Jenkin and M.R.G. Davies

Four Ways to Plot a Murder

St Edmund's swaps its usual quiet for an evening of fictional bodies, as Shipston Bookfest brings three current crime writers into the same room to compare notes on murder.

Tim Sullivan writes the DS George Cross procedurals, a series running since 2020 and now up to The Tailor, his latest. Guy Jenkin took the long way round: decades writing television comedy, co-creating Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered with Andy Hamilton and picking up a BAFTA and two International Emmys along the way, before turning to crime fiction with Murder Most Foul, a reimagining of Christopher Marlowe's killing that was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His follow-up, The Fatal Bellman, casts Shakespeare as a reluctant sleuth in Jacobean London. M.R.G. Davies takes the gentler route, with a series following four book club members who test their favourite fictional detectives' methods on a real case. Chairing is GJ Williams, herself a historical crime novelist, whose Tudor Rose Murders and new Gawain series dig into the same unquiet corners of English history.

Three writers, three completely different ideas of what makes a good murder, arguing it out under one roof.

Friday 25 September 2026 · St Edmund's Church, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire CV36 4AT · Starts 7:30pm