No, I haven’t gone all hard-boiled; those are the works which you have to use as a first line if you decide to enter Alibi’s search for a new crime writer competition.

The first line is supplied by Stuart MacBride, and then it’s up to you to complete the story (between 2000 and 5000 words in all) and get it to them by noon on Saturday 16 May.

The prizes are pretty decent, I feel – they’ll pay for you to go to the Crime Writing Festival, and you get 100 crime books (though as one of the other prizes is an e-reader, these might be eBooks, I suppose), and they make your story into a downloadable e-edition. I’ve certainly seen worse prizes, and entry is free.

Full details are available here. I’m planning to give it a go, let me know if you decide to.

Actually, thinking about it, I might go for something a bit hard-boiled, or noirish, might be interesting to try writing in a very different voice from the usual…