Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for Crime Novel of the Year, and has also won a Sherlock Award for the Best Detective created by a British writer.

Each of the novels featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne has been a Sunday Times bestseller.

Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat were made into a hit TV series on Sky 1 starring David Morrissey as Thorne, and a new series based on the novels In the Dark and Time of Death will be broadcast on BBC1 in 2017.

Mark lives in north London with his wife and two children.

Christopher Fowler is the creative director of a film promotion company and lives in London.

He is the author of the novels Roofworld, Rune, Red Bride, Darkest Day, Spanky, Psychoville and Disturbia and of the short story collections City Jitters, The Bureau of Lost Souls, Sharper Knives and Flesh Wounds.

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, Hit Me, and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film "A Walk Among The Tombstones."

He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and he has recently published The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners.

He has also written episodic television ("Tilt!") and the Wong Kar-wai film "My Blueberry Nights." His dozen previous anthologies include Manhattan Noir, Manhattan Noir 2, and Dark City Lights. He lives in New York.