A British Feast

Things I didn’t know before reading Mike Ripley’s new “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots: Alison Bruce (Cambridge Blue) has penned a non-fiction book, Billington: Victorian Executioner, about one of England’s more notorious hangmen; that John le Carré’s model for his spy character George Smiley, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, was also a writer of detective and spy fiction; and that Henry Porter, the British editor of Vanity Fair, has a new novel due out in August, this one called Dying Light (or is it The Watchers)? Oh, and The Ripster has published a list of novels he thinks ought to win Dagger Awards this year ... which, by his own testament, almost surely dooms them to the slush pile of also-rans.