Will Frears

Iam​ an Arsenal fan. I’ve lived in New York for 25 years and still have my season ticket. I have an Arsenal tattoo. On the morning Arsène Wenger announced his retirement, my wife came into the kitchen and asked if I’d booked my flight yet. I’m not a huge reader of football autobiographies, though, and I’m not sure why anyone who isn’t a fan would read one...

Charles Willeford​ is in a category all of his own in the annals of American crime writing. He is neither glamorous nor pulpy; he didn’t write airport fiction and he didn’t write bestsellers with aspirations to literature. He simply wrote crime fiction as though reporting real life. Hoke, a TV series based on the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been...

A teenage boy watches three of his friends rape a 15-year-old girl. The boy does not participate in the rape but neither does he do anything to stop it. Later he telephones the victim and begs her to forgive him; she tells him she never will. The girl’s name: Lisbeth. This, according to Kurdo Baksi, happened to Stieg Larsson, and was the event that led to Larsson’s lifelong...

There is a fireplace in the apartment where I live. On 11 September, I was at home waiting for the man to come and sweep the chimney, some time between nine and twelve. Around nine o’clock, my cellphone rang; half-asleep I answered it. It was the chimney-sweep’s office calling to tell me that he wouldn’t be coming because of a crash. I assumed they meant a car crash, rolled...

Leaving for Glastonbury calls for the same last-minute purchases and elicits the same foul tempers that going on holiday always does. Only it’s not tablets for Montezuma’s revenge (though that would help you to avoid the toilets so it might be a good idea for next year) and did you arrange with the Joneses to feed the cat, but bottles of vodka and Rizlas and arguments about who was supposed to buy the toilet paper.