British crime series by creative writing lecturer snapped up

Corsair has acquired a new three-book British crime series by Harry Brett, former literary editor of Esquire magazine and former books editor at the Daily Mirror.

The new series, pitched as "Raymond Chandler meets The Sopranos set in Great Yarmouth", will launch in hardback in April 2017 with first in the series, Time to Win, ready in time for the summer crime writing festivals.

Dominic Wakeford, commissioning editor at Little, Brown, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Caroline Wood at Felicity Bryan Associates. 

Harry Brett is a pseudonym for Henry Sutton, who is the author of nine previous novels including My Criminal World and Get Me Out Of Here (Vintage). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he is a senior lecturer and the co-director of the MA Prose Fiction course. He is also the director of the new Creative Writing MA Crime Fiction at UEA.

Sutton said: "I’ve always wanted to write a crime series – and feel I’ve found the perfect people, place and publisher. Little, Brown and Dom are the business. Crime, and in particular organised crime, told from the perspective of the perpetrators has always fascinated me, as too the British seaside."

Wood said: "I’m thrilled to have found such a committed and enthusiastic editor at Little, Brown for what is sure to be Henry Sutton’s breakout crime series, ripe for TV adaptation."

Wakeford said: "Time to Win is a compelling, muscular novel with characters that transcend the genre and fix themselves indelibly in the reader’s mind – think Raymond Chandler meets The Sopranos set in Great Yarmouth. I’m tremendously excited and proud to be publishing this book and can’t wait to see how the series progresses."