Ripley Readies His Departure

How did I miss this news? British crime fiction critic and raconteur Mike Ripley is preparing to retire from penning his “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots this coming August. That month’s submission will be his 200th.

The news was actually stuffed in at the close of Ripley’s April edition of GAWM, so perhaps I was not the only person to glance by it. As he states in his May column, others were more attentive:

The announcement of my impending retirement in August produced a slew of responses from readers. They ranged from the disbelieving—‘I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to’ (Jake Kerridge); ‘You’re having a laugh!’ (Peter Buckman); ‘Tell me it isn’t so!’ (Antoni Deighton)—to the downright threatening: ‘You are absolutely not allowed to retire’ (Vaseem Khan); ‘Retire? You mustn’t and I say it with more force then many. I know where you live. Just saying’ (David Brierley).

Sadly not one single message was accompanied by a cheque, postal order or Bitcoin promissory note and I understand that the ‘Bribe the Ripster’ page has been taken down from the GoFundMe site for legal reasons.

According to Shots’ Web site, Ripley began writing “Getting Away with Murder” for the online version of that publication back in June 2006. Many of the early columns seem to not be available any longer for study, but the majority can be accessed here.

I’ve always enjoyed Ripley’s convivial and oft-comic surveys of the current mystery-fiction scene. His May column is typical, including his remarks of CrimeFest 2023, the centenary of author Desmond Bagley, publisher Penguin’s revival of its green-cover editions, and new or forthcoming novels by John Lawton, Alan Parks, Taylor Adams, and the ever-mysterious Icelandic fictionist Stella Blómkvist.

It will be sad to lose Ripley’s voice from Shots, but his reasoning behind this retirement seems sound. “I am not getting any younger and I have an awful lot of books stacked up which I want to, rather than feel I have to, read. I have been reviewing crime fiction for 34 years now, making some good friends and discovering many fine writers along the way, but [am] surely due for some time off for good behaviour …” Thank you, Mike, for all the insights and entertainment you’ve brought us over the decades!