A “boundary-pushing take on the police procedural” which features a human detective working with an AI sleuth in order to solve a missing persons case has won the coveted Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award.
In the Blink of an Eye, the debut novel from author Jo Callaghan, was announced on Thursday night as the winner at the annual crime writing festival in Harrogate.
Midlands-born Callaghan, 54, said she was “genuinely shocked” to scoop the honour from a selection voted on by both a panel of experts and members of the public. Shortlisted authors included Mark Billingham, Lisa Jewell, Liz Nugent, William Hussey and Mick Herron.
In the Blink of an Eye follows recently bereaved police detective Kat Frank, who is partnered with an AI colleague named AIDE Lock, showing how the cold logic of computers can work with human intuition to crack cases. AIDE stands for “Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity”.
Callaghan drew on both her professional and personal life to write the book. In her day job as a strategist, she considers what the workforce might look like in 10 to 15 years, and how AI will affect it.
More personally, in 2019, she lost her husband Steve to lung cancer, which helped her explore the bereavement experienced by her main character.
Callaghan began writing when her husband bought her a laptop on her 40th birthday and finally published In the Blink of an Eye when she was 53. She had written five books over the preceding 13 years, ranging from children’s to young adult to fantasy, but none were published.
She told the Guardian she had the idea for the AI detective story in 2017 but, after Steve’s diagnosis, had no time to write it. “What I did do was start writing a blog about what it felt like for him and me going through that experience, and a lot of people said, oh that’s so beautiful, so powerful.
“I was just writing what I was feeling and thinking and … I realised I was writing better because I was writing from the heart,” she said. “When I wrote this book – which was literally just to distract myself because I needed to keep busy for my two children, I needed to do something at night – I think I just carried on writing in that vein, from the heart, whereas I think before I’d been writing with my telephone voice.”
Even with her job predicting long-term trends involving AI, she was unprepared for just how topical the book would become. “I had no idea when I started writing that AI would enter the mainstream so quickly,” she said. “I think everyone’s been surprised by the speed at which things have developed in the last two years.
“I didn’t even know if I wanted to get the book published when I finished it, after all the rejections with my earlier work. It had served its purpose, it had kept me alive, kept me going, so I thought anything else that happens is a bonus”.
She reckoned the book might be too niche, “falling somewhere between crime and science fiction”. In the end, it was bought by Simon & Schuster and published in January 2023, just as the AI tool ChatGPT was gaining prominence.
That March the book was selected for the Sara Cox-fronted BBC books show Between the Covers, and featured on the New Blood panel at the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival this time last year. “I had a little bit of luck,” said Callaghan. “I just kept getting all these lifts, these little gusts of wind that kept it up.”
This year Callaghan published Leave No Trace, the second book featuring Kat Frank and her AI partner. Callaghan anticipates a four-book series featuring the pair, and is currently working on edits to book three.
“I don’t see it as a 26-book crime series or something like that,” she said. “The story arc is between Kat and Lock and asks the question: What are the limits to what can AI learn and what happens when it reaches that point? I think there has to be an answer to that, and a resolution, and that’s what I’m aiming for.”
At the awards ceremony on Thursday night, hosted by broadcaster Mark Lawson, Callaghan received a £3,000 prize and an engraved beer cask made by one of Britain’s last coopers.
Earlier this year, the awards were criticised because the longlist for best novel did not feature any books by writers of colour. “Given that the festival had to issue an apology in 2021 for failing somehow to invite any female author of colour to participate on any panel, one might have thought they would have been more mindful,” said barrister and crime novelist Harriet Tyce, who wrote to the prize’s organisers to express her concerns. “There’s just no excuse for it.”
A spokesperson for the festival said at the time the organisers “actively seek to provide a platform for writers from all communities and encourage publishers to consider diversity in all our interactions, from submitting authors for the festival programme to entering them for the awards.”
Also announced this week were the winners of the inaugural Val McDermid Debut award, named after the Scottish writer who co-founded the festival in 2003. It went to Marie Tierney for Deadly Animals, about a 13-year-old girl on the hunt for a serial killer. The outstanding achievement award was given to Martina Cole, famous for her gritty, female-centred books about London’s underworld.
Simon Theakston, chairman of Theakston, said that In the Blink of An Eye is a “boundary-pushing take on the police procedural genre, told with heart and humour”. Sharon Canavar, chief executive of Harrogate International Festivals, added that the debut is a “truly ground-breaking novel that changes the way we think about policing forever”.